I’ve never been much of a fan of Halloween. Or at least not beyond my days of extreme candy greed. I have a hard time thinking of a costume, it’s usually really terrible when I finally decide on one, and then I spend the rest of the night having everyone tell me how lame my [...]

There’s no shortage of terrible covers out there, and the vast majority of them usually fall into one of two categories: Overly faithful and vastly inferior to the original and totally pointless, making you just want to hear the original Overly experimental, wrecking the original, and just as pointless as the first kind of bad [...]

Valentine’s day is a test for those of us who are both cynics and romantics. The cynic in us wants nothing to do with the day, knowing that it’s a purely commercial holiday that so many folks feel forced into celebrating. But the romantic in us loves it: it’s a day when you get free [...]

People, my January is going to be batshit crazy insane. It’s the best kind of batshit, though, like the guano that they make really high quality stuff out of. You know what I’m talking about? Like they make perfume and car wax and Taco Bell meat out of it. That shit. Point being that, between [...]

Fellow NH writer xtiandc and I have a minor disagreement about the seasonal place of Pet Sounds. I think it’s the perfect summer record…he thinks it’s a soundtrack best in winter. So if two people can hear the same album with complete opposite feelings of season, then it seems kind of dumb to try and [...]

Summer mixes are VERY IMPORTANT. They have to be a bunch of great songs like any other mix, but they also have to match the weather outdoors and be the kind of song that’s a good vessel for nostalgia. It’s a lot of pressure to put on a group of songs. But we don’t shy [...]

We’ve gotten walloped hard with the Spring stick here in DC, and the songs that I’ve obsessed over for the last few months that haven’t quite made it to this blog find themselves winding their way into this mix, like so much stormwater draining into the Potomac, only sparkling clear instead of clogged with pollen [...]

I saw An Education last night. A good watch with some great acting, if maybe a movie that the talk afterwards shifted a little too much with what was wrong with it. But that’s beside the point. This movie is about the sixties. While it’s a true story and a story worth telling, it exists [...]

In 1992, I co-hosted an early-80′s show at my college’s radio station, and 80′s dance nights were starting to spring up. At the time, I figured it was a fun novelty and that we’d all move on eventually. But here we are, almost two decades from the end of the 80′s, and every club seems [...]

The romance of the summer song is too great to ever let go, even though I’m not often in the kind of places where ordinary songs turn into definitions of one season of one year. But it’s still in me to look for those shared experiences and cultural touchstones, even if I’m not sharing or [...]