What does it mean to perform? I was onstage, and yet I wasn’t; I was playing to someone, and I was alone.
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Margo Price Macro Doses by Joe Bonomo
Price is a difficult artist to box-up, for those so inclined. She’s lived in Nashville, Tennessee for decades, and has both courted and been denied Music City’s trappings. A dynamic study in contrasts, she grew up in rural Illinois but sings with a southern accent; her debut album was released on maverick Jack White’s Third Man Records, hardly a Nashville industry staple (though it may be on its way); she cut a live album at historic and revered Ryman Auditorium, waltzing (and rocking) within a storied tradition.
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Dispatches from the Past Present, or Dick Clark's Face by Joe Bonomo
Dick Clark’s face revolving, revolving. This is no fever dream. 20 Years of Rock n’ Roll came packaged with a 'special bonus record,' a cardboard flexi disc emblazoned with, naturally, Clark’s cheery face. The record plays at 33 1/3 rpm, and in an unnerving design bug the spindle hole nailed Clark right between his eyes.
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A Groovy Way to Grab a Musical Bag that Turns On the Sounds of Today by Joe Bonomo
The voice to which I’m only half-listening sounds familiar, but something’s off, also. I look up blankly from the records I’m riffling through and realize that I’m hearing Elton John, one of his well-known hits from the early seventies, but I haven’t heard this version before.
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King and Lionheart by Sarah Gorham
The best way to cradle an infant is skin to skin. Rocking imitates the motion of amniotic fluid. It’s common knowledge that a lullaby coaxes a baby to sleep, slowing the child’s heartbeat and breath.
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Home by Joe Bonomo
If there are an infinite number of ways to define home, there are also an infinite number of ways to return to it.
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The Sadnesses of March: In Search of Extreme Emotion by Ander Monson
“Why listen to sad music if it makes one feel sad?” asks Stephen Davies, a professor of psychology at the University of Auckland, in 1997. I ask myself this not for the first time as I’m neck-deep into the Joy Division discography on the way to a job I do not dread, mourn, or fear. The singer sings “Don’t turn away / in silence” and I do not turn away, not as I drive past sunblasted car dealerships and burrito shops on Tucson, Arizona’s, Speedway Boulevard, a street Life magazine once called the “ugliest street in America.” I turn away in song, if not in silence.
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Hunting Larry Hunting Hank by Joe Bonomo
At the age of twenty-nine, Larry Brown started writing fiction in earnest. At the age of twenty-nine, Hank Williams drank himself to death.
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In Which I’m Skeptical Of Edward Hopper, who said “The Only Real Influence I’ve Ever Had Was Myself” by Joe Bonomo
The history created by my four brothers, my sister, and me is rich and, as in every family, paradoxically commonplace and unprecedented: I am Me in large part because of Them, a random generation of closely-related DNA gathering under the same roof.
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How to be Powerful and Triumphant and Lonely All at the Same Time: The Many Changes of Greg Cartwright by Joe Bonomo
Cartwright’s history in bands is vast and eclectic, a testament to his tireless energy, his craftsman’s work ethic, and his love of playing live and with others.
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Between 4’52” by Ashon Crawley
It’s all about agitational roughness. The roughness of sandpaper makes itself experienced, known, through difference. Those tiny grains of sand, each grain announcing itself as but so many irregularities across surface, giving miniscule – but no less felt – depth. Your hand touches it. Scratchy. You hear the sound it makes as agitational technology. Grating. You hear it because it makes dialogue with objects – of resistance, of refusal, of rejection. You feel it because its force resonates, because its vibration on and against other objects, is sent into the world.
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Don’t You Know That It’s So? By Joe Bonomo
And yet this is how memory, song, and story conspire: I will eternally shame myself with this small incident, and two unrelated cultural moments—a graphic catastrophe, a silly song—will be forever entwined in my mind.
Read MoreIn the Morning I’ll Rise Above by Joe Bonomo
Saturday night brings both pledges and lies of limitlessness, of a night never ending, a jukebox always playing, dance partners always spinning, car wheels revolving on roads that never end in daylight.
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Hold Your Phone to this Essay and Select Tag Now by Joe Bonomo
I left the bar humming bare traces, the final moments of the song like excavated bones, already fading in the daylight, in the archeology of my head.
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Mama Loved the Ways of the World by Joe Bonomo
Genuine? It’s hard to tell. What does the kid singer know? Does he really understand the burden about which he sings, that his mother’s naked shame buys him his clothes, the complications at that intersection?
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