The Run For Cover Shoegaze Canon

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We’ve all heard about the Heavy Music to Shoegaze Pineline, and the math checks out there, but there’s another, just-as-important shoegaze repository that we don’t talk about often enough: The Emo Music to Shoegaze Pipeline. Okay, I promise I’m going to stop saying “pipeline” now, but this is a very real phenomenon with one highly-influential label at the center. But first? Let me take you back in time.

It’s spring term 2014, and you’re just at the onset of your emo phase. You found this cool label from Boston named Run For Cover. They had just released this album called “You’re Gonna Miss It All” by Modern Baseball, and you were digging it quite a bit. Through forums, message boards, and various online chatter, you discovered this other album with a pizza on the cover by a band named Tigers Jaw and found out that the same label put it out. Damn, two for two. You decide to check out a few more albums the label has released, and soon enough, you have a pretty solid foundation for decades of dorky emo admiration. If you couldn’t figure it out, that person was ME.

In retrospect, Run For Cover has always been my favorite record label for a reason. They put out (conservative estimate) a few dozen highly influential, respected, and revered albums since their humble beginnings in 2004. A decade into their existence, they’d already brought us Title Fight, Fireworks, The Wonder Years, Tigers Jaw, Man Overboard, Koji, and Seahaven. If you have any affinity for this specific sound or era of indie rock, that list probably got your heart rate up. 

At this point in 2014, I was just beginning to find my footing in school. I was halfway through college, settling into my major, and discovering a host of music that felt unique and uninformed by my peers or friends. This felt like music that was speaking directly to me and that I could fully own. Run For Cover was offering music from some of the most exciting and important bands in my life, and pretty soon, seeing that Run For Cover Triangle Logo was as good as a stamp of approval in my eyes. 

In 2014 specifically, we were post-Youth, but pre-Peripheral Vision. This was a time when many of these bands were either revving up or actively dropping their best material. Seahaven had just released Reverie Lagoon, and Tigers Jaw were just beginning to roll out singles to their much-awaited Charmer… Sorry that this has been a lot of “remembering guys” up to this point, but I’m just trying to paint a picture here. If these names mean anything to you, then I promise I’m building to something. 

Just over the horizon was a little band from Indiana called Cloakroom. They were about to drop their debut album, Further Out, and cement themselves as Run For Cover’s first earnest foray into overtly heavier music. At some point in an early part of their career, the band openly described themselves as “stoner emo,” which sounds exactly how you would expect it to. On Further Out, the trio fully realized their powerful potential, combining the heaviest parts of Hum with the shreddiest parts of Earth. That Hum worship also materialized in a very real way after an album delay led to an apology 7” with a song featuring Matt Talbott of Hum. 

One month after Cloakroom’s ferocious first album came another debut from a Pittsburg band called Adventures. Much like Further Out, the first record from Adventures was a shockingly developed realization of the band’s sound. Titled Supersonic Home, this album was the payoff to two EPs and two splits; it was a fresh batch of ten new songs, all without flaw. For just over 31 minutes, the band hits you with one lightly distorted hook after the next. “Dream Blue Haze,” “Your Sweetness,” and “My Marble Hole,” one by one, the band unleashed these incredibly simple yet endlessly addictive tracks. The end result is an uplifting collection of songs that sit somewhere between Sunny Day Real Estate and the Brianna-led side of Tigers Jaw. It’s also an album that I only checked out because Run For Cover was releasing it. 

While it’s hard to call Adventures a shoegaze band in the classic definition, they were certainly indebted to a specific style of fuzzy 90s/early-2000s alt-rock. Regardless of what you’d label them, Supersonic Home was one of the coolest things I’d ever heard in my life. The crazy part is how much that record still holds up almost a decade later. The magic is still there, and its status as a one-off side project makes that perfection sting all the more. Oh, that’s right. Did I not mention that Adventures was comprised primarily of members from the metalcore band Code Orange? Because that’s a crazy fun fact that I decided to bury at the very end of this paragraph. That almost makes them a prototypical member of the heavy music to shoegaze pipeline. 

One year later, I would stumble ass-backward into Psychopomp by Japanese Breakfast, thanks to a transcription of an absolutely manic and hilarious string of text messages posted to the /r/indieheads subreddit. That album would go on to become one of my favorites of all time and soon lead me to Little Big League, a gritty Run For Cover band that Michelle Zauner sang and played guitar in. This was before becoming the published author, Dead Oceans-signed, music video and movie directing Michelle Zauner that we all know today, but the music was just as good.

I wouldn’t personally discover them until years later, but around this same time, Pity Sex was releasing their iconic one-two punch of Dark World and Feast of Love, rounding out a dreamier side of Run For Cover’s gazey lineup. Similarly, Superheaven was rocking the 90s grunge worship years before anyone else would get there. The fact that one label was at the epicenter of all this music is, quite frankly, mind-blowing.

To this day, a Run For Cover co-sign is still a seal of approval. Seeing this label involved means a guaranteed listen from me. Sometimes it’s not my shit, but more often than not, I’ll discover a new obsession or favorite artist.

In recent years, the label has brought us Anxious, Sadurn, One Step Closer, and Glass Beach. Run For Cover’s involvement got me in early on bands like Camp Cope, Field Medic, and Pinegrove, in addition to everything listed above. This label has ushered me into the sprawling discographies of artists like Advance Base and Alex G, and they’ve even released one of my favorite albums of the last decade with Fiddlehead’s Springtime and Blind. 

Last week, Run For Cover dropped Narrow Head’s third album, Moments of Clarity. It wasn’t until I was listening to this record that I put all this together. At first, my reaction was “another great record from Run For Cover,” which is a relatively predictable response from me. Then I started looking through my music library and realized this label’s pedigree with these shoegaze-adjacent albums. Run For Cover was instrumental not just in my emo music fandom but also acted as my introduction to this specific heavier scene of music. 

From the dreamy wisps of “Dogwalk” and saccharine sweetness of Adventures to the stoner crush of Cloakroom and grungy blaze of Narrow Head, Run For Cover has always been there.

There are a ton of bands playing at this “grungegaze” intersection right now; Fleshwater, Soul Blind, Glitterer, Dosser, Drug Church, and Prize Horse, just to name a handful. Each of these bands are carving out distinct corners of hardcore and heavy music, pulling from the grunge, nu-metal, and the 2000s alternative rock I heard all the time growing up. This sound feels extra crystalized on Moments of Clarity, but to some extent, is just the latest in a long string of Run For Cover Records knowing what I need to hear exactly when I need to hear it.

All Hail Oso Oso: The King of Bridges

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I think I spent the first 25 years of my life not knowing what a bridge is. This is particularly embarrassing because I spent three of those years running a music blog. Obviously I had heard of bridges; I knew vaguely what a chorus and a verse were (the chorus was the repetitive singy part, the verse was the “story” part), but “bridge” was just one step deeper into music theory than I was able to comprehend. Turns out the bridge is the part at the end of the song where the instrumental changed and the artist essentially sings a new verse that doesn’t fit into the format of what came before. Oftentimes the bridge will throw to one more chorus before the end of the song and acts as a way for the artist to keep the track interesting while still giving you that sweet, catchy singalong part one last time. 

That’s a pretty elementary explanation, but song structure is something that I didn’t even begin to comprehend until a quarter through my life, so I guess you get what you pay for. I open with this embarrassing anecdote not to flex my middle-school-choir-level of music theory knowledge but to acknowledge that music writing often has a bad tendency to throw around lots of technical terms assuming its reader knows what’s up. Sure, sometimes a concept is widespread enough that an explanation isn’t needed, and other times you can pick things up via context clues, but I’m specifically explaining the idea of a bridge upfront because I’d like to talk about one of the best bridge writers in the game: Oso Oso.

Jade Lilitri has been an entity within the emo music scene for over a decade at this point. Initially making a name for himself as the guitarist and front person for the cult pop-punk act State Lines back in the early 2010s, Jade’s musical ideas quickly spilled out into a solo project by 2014. Initially named osoosooso, this act soon bloomed from a side project to a fully-fledged band with the release of Real Stories of True People Who Kind of Looked Like Monsters in 2015. Now bearing a subtle yet confusing name change to “Oso Oso” along with more produced sound, Real Stories put Lilitri on the emo map, instantly solidifying himself as a standalone force within the scene with songs like “Track 1, Side A” and “This Must Be My Exit.” This popularity only grew with the release of the yunahon mixtape in 2017 and basking in the glow in 2019, both of which brought increasingly impressive tours and critical acclaim.

Each Oso Oso release features a barebones lineup with Lilitri on vocals, guitars, and bass, while Aaron Masih handles the drums. The touring musicians supporting Oso Oso have always been a rotating cast of friends and collaborators, but the project has primarily been a one-man operation helmed by Jade himself. It’s his band, his ideas, his vision, and his creativity that has led to a project with one of the most uniquely defined sounds in the entirety of the emo scene. 

I’ll admit I got to Oso Oso late… like really late. I don’t know why I feel like I need to preface that when discussing my history with a band, but in this case, I feel it provides important context. Sometime in August of 2018, my life was on the verge of massive change. I was about to move from Portland, Oregon, to Detroit, Michigan, for a new job. I was not only moving away from home for the first time in earnest, but I was also moving all the way across the damn country to a state I’d never even set foot in. I was in a weird liminal space and feeling extra sentimental, to say the least. I was experiencing everyday life from a hyper-sentimental vantage point, thinking about how long I was about to go without seeing my family or petting my childhood dog. Every meal I ate and street I walked down felt like a bittersweet reminder that it might be the last time I experienced those things in months or even years. I was living from the perspective of someone whose life was about to be drastically different in a matter of weeks. That’s both a scary and exciting thing to have looming over your head.

Amongst all this weird in-my-feelings self-reflection, I was having an emo renaissance spurred by Gulfer’s Dog Bless and Mom Jeans’ Puppy Love. Those albums brought me back to the mathy emo shit of my high school and college years like Minus The Bear, Modern Baseball, and Into It. Over It. At this point, it was still summer, and the weather was beautiful in Oregon, if not waning just a little bit to the fall chill. I distinctly remember an evening mid-august doing dishes by myself after one of the last homecooked meals I would enjoy that year. I was scrubbing a pot free of the seasonal zest left behind from one of my Mom's world-famous Mexican dishes. Behind me, my MacBook Air sat on our kitchen island, Spotify pouring from the speakers. I had probably just finished listening to an album from some Counter Intuitive band, and Spotify had switched over to the usual auto-generated suspects of mildly-popular emo rock bands. 

I shuffled from Mom Jeans to Retirement Party to Pet Symmetry at the whim of the algorithm. I didn’t hate it, but my hands were wet and soapy, so the queue was out of my control. Then it happened; I heard the energetic opening chords of “gb/ol h/nf” and was utterly transfixed. 

I’d been listening to emo music for years at that point, yet I had never heard anything quite like this song before. I loved the laid-back, surfy tone, the borderline-stake punk tempo, the crisp emo-flavored guitars, and the even-keel singing. I enjoyed putting the puzzle together of what the song title stood for, and on top of all that, I was absolutely transfixed by the album cover of a dude wearing a shark head costume skateboarding through what looked like a restaurant kitchen or the underside of a music venue. Maybe I was just in a particularly-receptive mood, but the song struck a chord within seconds and made a case for itself over the remainder of its four and a half minute running time.

What really sealed the deal came midway through the song at two minutes and 33 seconds, where the instrumental bottoms out to just guitar for a moment as Jade repeats, “I love it, yes I do… oh no, I think I love them more.” Eventually, the bass and drums join in, gradually picking up the pace as the lyrics continue, “and I love you yes I do… uh no, no I’m not really sure.” Just as Jake croons the word ‘sure’ in about as high as his voice ever goes, the instrumental drops out, making way for a jagged barrage of emo instrumentation that’s synchronized but just a little too off-tempo to dance to. As this unpredictable section of the song jostles the listener around, it breaks just long enough for Jade to get out one more half-thought as he trails off with “don’t know…” before throwing back to the whiplash-inducing riffage.

This seemed like a fitting (if not slightly jarring) way to end the song, but much to my surprise, the track was only halfway over. After this skillful bout of jazzy emo instrumentation, the instrumental clears out once again, this time letting everything breathe and giving enough space for Jade to appear with his guitar and continue the story. Almost as if a cable was knocked loose during a violent mosh, the song continues with Jade strumming what sounds to be an unplugged electric guitar. As he brushes his pick over the chords, he sings, 

Well, that rain cloud in your head
(it’s still raining)
The monkey on your back
(he’s still hanging)
And I’m stuck here, a waste, complaining to you
(always complaining)

Then, as if by some miracle, the power has been restored, the bass and drums re-emerge, joining the guitar in this new laid-back instrumental. Here’s where the song’s title is revealed as Jade sings, “so goodbye old love, hello new friend. This is where it ends and then begins again.” Soon the track incorrigibly picks back up steam once again, expending all its remaining energy on a bouncy outro and cleanly-executed guitar solo. 

This mid-song fake out was a beautiful surprise, and unlike anything I was listening to at the time, especially in the emo space. I discovered “gb/ol h/nf” was a single with an accompanying song titled “subside,” which I immediately queued up, and I quickly grew just as infatuated with. While it was slightly less energetic and didn’t have a crazy fake-out ending, “subside” felt like a more downtrodden follow-up to its accompanying A-side. It was the emotional chaser to the youthful energy that preceded it. It was the mid-set catch-your-breath-moment before the band launched into another banger. The crazy part was, as stylistically different as these two tracks were, “subside” still bore a precise emo instrumental and mesmerizing melody wrapped inside of its deeply-feeling chorus. Where had Oso Oso been all my life?

I spent the remainder of that year and the next slowly absorbing the rest of the band’s oeuvre, focusing primarily on the yunahon mixtape with a chaser of gb/ol h/nf / subside for good measure. This eventually spread to the band’s debut and culminated in fully appreciating the rollout of basking in the glow, which worked its way up to #4 on my 2019 Album of the Year list. What I discovered over the course of my yearlong flirtation with Oso Oso’s impeccable discography is that Jade Lilitri has a knack for writing incredible, engaging, and creative bridges. 

So often, bridges can feel like an extra idea thrown in because it didn’t fit anywhere else on the album or, worse, a stopgap meant to lazily withhold one more chorus from you for just a few moments longer. In Oso Oso songs, the bridges feel necessary and reveal an additional layer of consideration to the core musical idea. The songs themselves are already catchy and engaging enough on their own, but the bridges that Jade writes often feel like an essential idea that’s both self-contained and fits within the world of the song.

Oso Oso songs are like ice cream. Sure, ice cream on its own is good, but you throw a great bridge in there, and it’s like getting a fully-loaded ice cream cone with all the fixings. It’s the difference between a good snack and a great dessert. The songs would work without them, but Jade’s bridges act as a cherry on top containing their own ideas, phrases, and instrumentals that all get stuck in your head just as much as the “core” song itself. It’s like a song on top of a fucking song. 

Outside of “gb/ol h/nf,” the next time I took note of Jade’s superior bridge writing was with “Great Big Beaches.” Anyone reading this that’s already an Oso Oso fan probably sees that song title and can immediately call to mind both the song’s melody and bridge. That is the other brilliant secret of Lilitri’s songwriting: he often saves the song’s title for the bridge. That means the bridges not only stand on their own, but they’re often the most catchy and memorable part of the song. Once you’ve listened enough, this also means that you spend the entire song waiting for that cathartic, catchy release that comes in the final minutes. 

In the case of “Great Big Beaches,” the track begins innocently enough with a handful of reverbed guitar strums, which lead to a cresting instrumental that rises and falls like ocean waves. The song builds and mounts until hitting its stride around the two-and-a-half-minute mark. As the guitars fall into this bouncy sway, multiple different vocal melodies soar over the top until everything clicks into place within the last 30 seconds where Jade busts out the song’s name over one of the most hard-hitting riffs on the album. It’s still bright and sunny and in line with what came before, but at a certain point, you know this instrumental offramp is coming, and you spend the first half of the song just looking forward to its arrival. 

These same qualities can also be found in “The Walk,” which starts out with a minimal drum beat that establishes the song’s marching band-like cadence. Things pick up halfway through as the guitars overpower this sensible drum beat. Much like “Great Big Beaches,” things die down right around the three-minute mark before launching into a series of peppy pop-punk power chords. Aside from making me want to single-handledly start a pit every time I hear this energetic burst, it’s also accompanied by a lyrical catharsis as Jade belts, “I misinterpreted everything you saaaaid.” It genuinely feels like there’s something here for everybody, and this last little passage is basically less than a minute.

Going even further back into Oso Oso’s discography, you can find even more examples of this impactful bridge writing. On LP1, you’ve got “Where You’ve Been Hiding” and “Josephine,” and even on Osoosooso there’s “Para ’effin dise, Baby!” In almost all of these instances, Jade reserves the punchiest, most energetic burst of energy for the song’s final minutes. It’s like a long-distance runner who can finally see the endpoint off and knows they don’t have to sustain their power for much longer. Jade lets every instrument loose at once and allows the songs to expend all of their remaining drive in one final push.

Oso Oso already has one of the best, most recognizable discographies in emo/diy/pop-punk/whatever you want to call it. Nobody is making songs that sound like this, blending clean guitar work, catchy choruses, impeccable melodies, and energetic pop-punk instrumentals. You throw bridges into consideration, and it feels totally non-hyperbolic to say that Jade Lilitri is one of the most indispensable songwriters working right now. All I can say is thank you, Oso Oso, for teaching me not just what a bridge is but what a great bridge can be. 

McMenamins and the Rustic Charm of Band Of Horses

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I never write about my hometown, partially because it’s trite, and partially because I’ve only recently begun to realize the things that make it unique. In the time since I moved away from Oregon in 2018, I’ve gained a new perspective on the place where I spent the first 25 years of my life. 

For starters, where my family lives in Portland is far enough out in the suburbs that it shouldn’t even legally be considered “Portland” on the postal code. My childhood home is about ten miles away from downtown Portland proper; too far for any sense of culture or nightlife, but just close enough to reap the benefits of Portlandia if you really wanted to make the effort.

I have plenty of favorite bars, restaurants, and attractions in Portland that I’d recommend to someone visiting from out of town, but I also have an equally long list of lowkey personal faves. When I get homesick for Portland, I’m typically missing my friends, family, and childhood home, but when I think about the creature comforts that lie 1,257 west of me, I often think specifically of McMenamins Rock Creek Tavern. 

For those not from the Pacific Northwest, McMenamins is a chain of local, family-owned brewpubs that are primarily located in rehabilitated historical properties. They own restaurants, music venues, hotels, theaters, and more. Each location is decked out in a distinct handpainted style that artists have dubbed "historical surrealism." They also brew their own beers, ciders, wines, and coffees. The food itself is good-to-great pub fare, but usually the experience itself is worth the price of admission. 

While some Mcmenamins are in highly populated downtown areas or attractions all their own, many are found in slightly off-the-beaten-path locations, and Rock Creek Tavern might be the best example of this. 

Described as a “secluded outpost” of the McMenamins chain, the Rock Creek location is hidden away in the countryside of Hillsboro. It initially used to be an old repurposed barn house, but that location burned down in 2002. A new building was erected years later in the image of its predecessor, even going so far as to use timber from two local barns in the rebuild (one of which dates all the way back to the late 1800s). 

The Mcmenamins’ website accurately describes this location as a “rustic lair,” and honestly, I’m having a hard time thinking of a better two-word descriptor for it. The building is creaky, dark, and has a deep smell of cedar. The outside is covered in moss and surrounded by local fauna for an authentic tucked-away-in-the-forest pub feel. There’s a pool table, shuffleboard, and even giant wooden mushrooms that glow softly for the perfect woodland ambiance. 

When I picture Rock Creek Tavern in my mind, it instantly conjures up a perplexing mixture of comfort and nostalgia, which is how I imagine lots of people feel about a random bar or restaurant from their hometown. The big difference is that Mcmenamins often feels cool enough to warrant those rose-tinted goggles. I visit almost every time I return home, and it always lives up to my memory. 

The kicker about this location, and what’s most pertinent to this site as a music blog, is that McMenamins Rock Creek Tavern also features live music performances every night around 8 PM. This means that sometimes you’d be wrapping up your dinner or just sitting down right as a group of dudes sauntered in, hunkered down, and started busting out instruments. It’s honestly very DIY, a modest setup with an amp or two tucked away in a corner near the entryway of the building. 

Music would flow through the place each night, and you never knew what you were going to get. Some evenings it would be a suitably-folksy banjo-led stompfest; other times, it would be a group of four dads laying down one seemingly never-ending twelve-bar blues lick. No matter the genre or arrangement, it was always an experience, and the live music is a real wild card benefit that came with dining there. 

This location is about 15 miles outside of downtown Portland, so it’s out of the way for most people but only a stone’s throw away for my family and me. The Grimes Clan would often venture to this location for a burger and a brew a handful of times each year for most of my young adulthood. It took us far enough out in the country that our phones didn’t work and (especially before the advent of smartphones) always felt like we were being transported into another world. 

If you’re curious what the place looks like, you can scroll back in my Instagram a few years to see a picture I snapped while looking down on the band’s setup from our table in the upper balcony. You can really tell the vibe, from the low-light stained glass to the two dudes in suede hats setting up instruments. Maybe it’s just because I’ve been there, but looking at that picture, I can practically taste the Cajun Tater Tot seasoning and dark, chocolaty Terminator Stout. 

This combination of senses isn’t something I’ve been able to replicate anywhere else. Rock Creek Tavern is a one-of-a-kind combination of sights, smells, flavors, and sounds that can only happen in a Mcmenamins. That’s why I get homesick for this specific restaurant; it’s a feeling I’ve spent a good chunk of my life fortifying, replicating, and memorizing. While I haven’t been able to visit McMenamins Rock Creek Tavern lately, one thing I have been able to do is listen to Band of Horses.

It’s not like I’ve seen Band of Horses play at ​​McMenamins Rock Creek Tavern (they’ve almost always been far too big of a band for that sort of gig), but the group’s first two albums are incredibly nostalgic and personal to me in the same way that ​​McMenamins is. Maybe it’s just a byproduct of when I uncovered their music (and how powerfully “The Funeral” has been used in countless movies and TV shows), but I would consider both Cease To Begin and Everything All The Time to be some of the best alternative records of the 2000s. On some level, this feels like a bold claim for a decade whose alternative music is primarily defined by groups like The Strokes and The White Stripes. Band of Horses came at the tail end of that era and just barely preceded the overbearing folk twee of groups like Mumford and Sons and Lumineers. 

I couldn’t stand that “Hey-Ho” bullshit, and not just because those songs so quickly became synonymous with Subaru commercials and the overall “hipster” movement of the 2010s, but because of how well Band of Horses perfected the same formula just years before. After all, why would you listen to a watered-down approximation when you had the real thing right there? 

There’s an underlying earnestness to those first two Band of Horses albums that makes them feel like something more than just standard “alt-country” fare. Sure they jangled, had some twang, and were known to use a banjo here and there, but that by no means should put them on the same playlists as groups like Of Monsters and Men. And no slight to any of those bands, if you like em, you like em, but I simply object to the fact that Band of Horses often gets unfairly lumped into the same category retroactively. 

In the time since their newest single, “Crutch,” I’ve found myself revising the Band of Horses Discography. I’ve found a renewed love for the grungy Why Are You OK, I’ve reveled in the warm shores of Cease To Begin, but most of all, I’ve found myself gravitating towards the band’s debut album Everything All The Time. 

The group’s first LP is a modest ten-track collection of songs released on Sub Pop Records in 2006. This was the first and last album to feature three of the band’s founding members and saw the group recording new versions of five songs off their Tour EP from the year prior. To this day, Everything All The Time is a downright stunning debut. It suffers from a bit of “Mario 64 Syndrome” in that it came first and contains what’s far-and-away the band’s most popular song, but that doesn’t mean the deeper cuts are worthless, in fact, far from it. 

What’s most impressive about this album is how well it acts as an introduction to this band and their world. It isn’t front-loaded, and it isn’t over-produced; it’s just 36 minutes of beautiful, rustic, folk-flavored indie rock. 

“The First Song” kicks the record off with a beautiful sway and ascendant melody that warms the body and soul. The lyrics are Christmas-adjacent (a huge plus for someone like me) and counter this sense of seasonal wonder with a more profound melancholy that often comes part and parcel with the holidays. This leads directly into the snappy one-two-punch “Wicked Gil” and “Our Swords,” the former of which is a vibrant drum-led track and the latter of which possesses a bouncy bassline that is counterbalanced by violent imagery.

At a certain point, these first three songs all feel like an onramp to the main attraction of Side A: breakaway single “The Funeral.” As mentioned above, this track has been used in everything from skateboarding video games to the 2012 Rihanna vehicle Battleship. You’ve probably heard this song at least a dozen times without even seeking it out. To this day, it’s still the group’s biggest hit, racking up about 200 million more plays than their second-most-popular song on Spotify. “The Funeral” may be a little tired, but does that make it any less impactful? Absolutely not. The song begins with a downright iconic guitar riff and solitary vocal delivery. It then beautifully layers elements on until the entire thing becomes a pressure cooker of remorse and sorrow. The track explodes into an outpouring of catharsis with the first chorus as the full band joins in, masterfully turning the intensity up and down as the song calls for it. It’s undoubtedly the band’s masterpiece; my only dig against this song is that it’s most people’s sole experience with the band. “The Funeral” is a certified hit; it’s Band of Horses’ “Fade Into You,” the exact kind of big alt-pop crossover that groups like this needs to achieve success and name recognition early on.

After the grandiose pinnacle that is “The Funeral,” the group winds down the first half of the record with “Part One,” and here is where Everything All The Time gets truly fascinating to me. “Part One” is a gorgeous and aching love song featuring velveteen guitar and some of the most gentle drumming on the entire record. It’s precious, confessional, and reserved, especially coming in the wake of a big swing like “The Funeral.”

Flip the record over, and you’re immediately greeted with a stomping barnburner in “The Great Salt Lake,” an ode to the largest inland body of saltwater in the Western Hemisphere. This leads to a downright hootenanny on “Weed Party,” a bluegrass banger that’s about exactly what you would expect from the song title. Kicking off with a titular declaration of “Weed party!” followed by a hearty “YEE-HAW,” it’s hard not to instantly absorb the infectious enthusiasm of what could easily be the album’s most high-energy cut.

The final three tracks are something of a depressive comedown that’s guaranteed to follow in the wake of staying up late the night before spending all your endorphins having a good ol’ fashioned barn hang with all your buddies. While this run of songs is a little slower and sadder, I love it for the pensive contrast that it provides to everything that came before.

Specifically, “I Go To The Barn Because I Like The” is one of my favorite songs on the record, second only to “The Funeral” or “The First Song,” depending on the day. This cut begins with the same reserved acoustic guitar found in “Part One” and finds lead singer Ben Bridwell accompanied by whisper-quiet harmonies courtesy of guitarist Mat Brooke. As the narrator brokenheartedly explains, “Well I'd like to think I'm the mess you'd wear with pride” the track begins to sprawl outward with a gorgeous pedal steel twang by the second verse. The narrator eventually concedes “you were right” over a bed of lonesome hums. The drums, bass, and second guitar all jump in for the hook where single words and phrases are uttered with patience, weaving together a story of forgiveness and redemption.

Outside
By your doorstep
In a worn out
Suit and tie
I'll wait
For you to come down
Where you'll find me
Where we'll shine

It should be clear now that I love this song quite a bit. “I Go To The Barn Because I Like The” really feels like it’s a hidden gem tucked away in the back half of the tracklist, much like McMenamins Rock Creek Taven. In fact, this song has always strongly evoked that sense of place in my head whenever I listen to it. The fact that it’s so beautifully written and deploys one of my favorite instruments of all time is just a bonus.

From here, the band crafts a five-minute banjo-led slow build in “Monsters” and wraps things up with a minimalist campfire tune on “St. Augustine.” Just like that, a mere 36 minutes and seven seconds later, you find yourself on the other side of Everything All The Time. You’ve journeyed from the estranged holiday season of “The First Song,” been swept up in grief on “The Funeral,” eased your mind with the natural wonder of “The Great Salt Lake,” and gotten stoned in the countryside with “Weed Party.” You hit the comedown and found some sense of inner peace with the final three tracks and now find yourself rolling back to civilization… at least until you start it all over again from the top.

Welcome To The Final Year of A Very Sufjan Christmas

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The following is a  post from our sister site A Very Sufjan Christmas.
Follow us on Twitter at @SufjanChristmas or on Instagram at @SufjanChristmas to enjoy daily song write-ups this December!

As I write this, we stand on the precipice of what could very well be our final year of A Very Sufjan Christmas. 

When my friend Kyle Meyers and I first came up with the idea for this site back in 2018, it all started as a joke. A Sufjan Stevens Advent calendar, how novel! It was such a goofy idea, and so Sufjan. While my initial reaction was nothing more than a mere laugh, it quickly dawned on me that with 100 total songs at our disposal and 25 days on an advent calendar, we could conceivably write about every single Sufjan Christmas song over the course of four years. At that point, my reaction suddenly shifted from “that’s funny” to “we must do this.” I sprinted off to lock down usernames and a domain in our name, and the rest is history. 

That first year of the website almost felt like an exercise in finding out how Sufjan Stevens fans we knew. Over the years, we’ve sourced writers from places like /r/indieheads and /r/sufjan, as well as our personal Rolodexes of music nerd friends and random Twitter mutuals alike. In the second and third years, I ran this site by myself, sourcing 25 writers each year, editing every article, running all the social media, and keeping the Christmas spirit alive thanks to a constantly rotating crew of talented writers. 

As you would expect, many of the biggest songs within Sufjan’s Christmas oeuvre were covered in our first year. Then the remaining “most popular” songs were the next to go within the second year, and so on. We now find ourselves at the onset of the fourth year of this site, which means we are down to our final 25 songs. 

Over a four-year-long process of elimination, we now find ourselves whittled down to 25 of the weirdest, shortest, most obscure Sufjan Christmas songs. This is the island of misfit toys. The songs that have been passed over for three years. The songs that nobody wanted to write about until there was nothing left. That’s an interesting challenge — one that I’m sure will result in our most fascinating collection of write-ups yet. 

If this sounds like something that you’d be interested in participating in, please visit our writer application page here to toss your hat in the ring. Just be warned that the song you’re looking for probably isn’t there. 

On the Sufjan Front, this year our boy released a five-part two-and-a-half-hour electronic album as well as a fantastic collaborative concept album with labelmate Angelo De Augustine. He’s an unstoppable folk machine, and that’s why we love him.

Much like Mr. Steven’s discography, each year of this site has brought unique challenges and allowed us to tell different stories. I’ve run this site from three different states, and as a result, each year of a Very Sufjan Christmas feels hyper-distinct in my mind. It’s always easier to see those things in hindsight, but this project has been an exciting, tiring, inspiring tradition over the last few years, and I’m excited to finally “complete” it this year.

While I’m talking about exciting things, I’d also like to formally welcome Bethany Clancy and Wes Muilenburg to the Sufjan Christmas team. Bethany Clancy is a writer from Buffalo whose work you can find all over the music blog Unsigned Spotlight. Wes Muilenburg is a Minneapolis-based writer, primarily contributing to Ear Coffee, the blog and podcast that they co-founded in 2017. They also play in the band NATL PARK SRVC who released an excellent album earlier this year. They are both joining me this year as editors, and I can’t thank them enough for taking that weight off my shoulders. Aside from the help editing, having these two by my side checking over our submissions will be an absolute joy and will help ensure we finish out this project on a strong note. It’s probably obvious, but I couldn’t be happier to have them on board. 

So that’s where we’re at; three editors, a bunch of writers, and 25 of the weirdest Sufjan Christmas songs possible. It’s going to be a fun year, and I’m genuinely excited to share another holiday season with you all. 

Tiring and time-consuming as running this site may be, it’s one of the most rewarding parts of my holiday season, and I relish being able to share these stories with the world. As always, thank you for reading along, thank you for being here, and thank you for sharing your holiday spirit with us. We’ll see you all on December 1st. 

Love Taylor, Bethany, and Wes.

Maybe Our Nostalgia is Wrong

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The cool thing about having Last.fm is that you get to see your music listening habits form in real-time. What’s even more remarkable is the longer you have Last.fm, the more history you build about yourself. I’m not even talking about “history” in some platitudinal sense; I’m talking deep lore. 

For those unfamiliar, Last.fm is a music-based social media platform that allows its users to record what songs they’re listening to as they’re listening to them. This results in lots of stats like how many times you’ve listened to specific artists, albums, or songs over the course of your account’s history. It also keeps track of what songs you listen to when. And things get specific. I’m talking down to the week specific. I’m talking see-what-you-were-listening-to-at-precise-times-on-certain-days specific. 

This means that, through Last.fm, you can see every regrettable phase, every questionable album, and every unfortunate musical decision you’ve ever made. It’s less a social media site and more of a personal catalog. It’s a place to see your listening habits laid bare. In my specific case, that means I have data on basically every song I’ve listened to since my senior year of high school. That means I can look back and see my metalcore phase, my indie rock phase, my hip-hop phase, my emo phase, and even that time I tried to “get into” Bach, all of which are mapped out and available for anyone to dig through. I’m not naming names, but I’m not going to pretend all of that was pure gold. 

Thanks to Last.fm, I can flip back in time and see what albums soundtracked my last high school summer. I have the ability to drill down and see exactly what I listened to on my birthday in 2014. I can find out exactly what song I was listening to at 2:15 pm on February 19th, 2018, an unremarkable Monday (it was “Brown Paper Bag” by Migos, in case you were wondering). Last.fm is that specific. 

What I don’t need Last.fm for, however, is to help me remember those phases. As detailed above, I’ve spent the last decade-plus listening to everything from A.G. Cook to ZZ Top. I don’t regret any of my musical phases, but I’m not going to pretend all of the music was objectively great. I don’t need a website to tell me I had a metalcore phase, but, luckily(?) it’s all detailed, timestamped, and dated out from April 19th of 2010 onward. 

I don’t need Last.fm to know I had a metalcore phase because I remember it quite well all on my own. I also don’t need a website to tell me I listened to copious amounts of shitty screaming white dudes in high school because I have playlists, merch, and articles on this very site that will all tell you the same thing. 

I’ll still go to bat for many of the heavily-tatted, swoopy-haired, v-neck-clad music of my youth, but it’s near impossible to separate my nostalgia for that period from the music itself. I’m not going to sit here and tell you that Blessthefall is a great band, but what I will say is that “Black Rose Dying” still goes hard as fuck when I listen to it in 2021. Does it go hard because it’s a well-made song, or does it go hard because it takes me back to a pleasant time in my life? That’s impossible for me to say. 

I’m not going to sit here and tell you that Broadway’s Kingdoms is a genre-defying classic. I’m not going to tell you that Someday Came Suddenly is an innovative, ground-breaking work of high art. I’m definitely not going to say that As If Everything Was Held In Place will be getting a wealth of brand new listeners in 2021. Those albums all have redeeming qualities, but I recognize almost nobody hears those albums as I hear them… and that’s completely understandable. 

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The other night I was reflecting on my workday while watching an episode of Gilmore Girls and enjoying a cup of sleepytime tea. Over the course of months, this has become a time-honored tradition in my apartment, and I’d say it’s one of the few things keeping me grounded in 2021. As can often happen, someone said or did something in the show that made me think of a song. This phenomenon is liable to happen at any time in my day-to-day, but in this case, it happened to be someone in Gilmore Girls saying the word “Breathless.” That’s a pretty nondescript word, yet, for some reason, hearing it sent a pang shooting to some distant corner of my brain, which unearthed a memory of the song “Breathless” by Asking Alexandria. 

See, Last.fm is cool because it can tell me that I’ve listened to “Breathless” by Asking Alexandria precisely 29 times in my life. That song first released on an EP called Life Gone Wild on December 21st of 2010, and I created my Last.fm account eight months earlier in April of the same year. In other words, I have recorded data on every single time I’ve listened to “Breathless,” in this case, all 29 instances. That song is exactly four-minutes and nine seconds long. I’ll save you the math and tell you that 4:09 times 29 is 120 minutes and 35 seconds. One hundred and twenty minutes and thirty-five seconds. That means I’ve spent two hours of my life listening to “Breathless” by Asking Alexandria. Holy shit. 

 
 

As I threw the song on in 2021, years removed from its context or listening to this kind of music every day, I was struck by just how bland it was. The guitars were punchy, the screams were serviceable, and the breakdowns… existed, but as a 27-year-old, I could not bring myself even close to enjoying it on the same level as I did one decade ago. It’s a fine metalcore song, but I was surprised by how much mediocrity I had allowed my younger self to put up with. More specifically, I was surprised that I’d willingly sought out this mediocrity for over two collective hours of my life. 

This two-hour stat on its own is shocking, but what surprised me most in re-listening to the song was just how by-the-numbers blah it was. As the outro played a guttural repetition of “Forget my name / Forget my face,” all I could think to myself was ‘why?’ Why did I do this to myself? Why did I spend so much time with this song and this EP? Why did I not see this as substanceless garbage at the time?

I don’t know what it is about that line in particular that stood out to me, but it just felt so bland and uninspired that it led me to re-evaluate my entire high school metalcore phase. I’ve never been a big “lyrics guy,” and now I can see why. I listened to music like this for braindead caveman riffs, crazy high notes, and Crabcore-inspiring absurdity. I do not listen to metalcore songs for the message. Maybe I’ve tricked myself into thinking that not considering lyrics is the ideal way to listen to music because I always knew the writing was dogshit. 

“Breathless” isn’t tied to anything specific. It’s not a song worth mentioning, worth writing about, or even really worth listening to in 2021. It’s a fine metalcore song, but I just don’t have much nostalgia for it. That made me realize that a good majority of my favorite records from 2010s-era Rise Records bands are probably just as lifeless. They’re bolstered almost entirely by nostalgia and nothing more. I think that’s something I knew subconsciously but only recently came to recognize on my own. 

Listening to “Breathless” helped me realize how sometimes our nostalgia can be wrong. Memory is a powerful drug, and the haze of far-off happy memories is thick. Not only are those memories are obscured by the distance of time, but they’re also rarely as happy as we make them out to be in our heads. I don’t regret the two hours I’ve spent listening to “Breathless,” I just sometimes wish that time was spent on something better. In another ten years, I’m likely going to look back on what I’m listening to now and find myself again asking, “Why?” but for now, I’ll just try to enjoy the music before the nostalgia solidifies.