Here is my article for the September edition of Eleven on the local band Union Tree Review. Union Tree Review like to keep things local. By local, I don’t simply mean to the city of St. Louis, but to the very neighborhood they live and play music. Union Tree Review describe themselves as a Cherokee [...]

The wool has been pulled from my eyes, yet what I see I do not understand. That statement has been my life since viewing the first two seasons of the HBO police drama The Wire. Not only do I feel like I know a little something about the seedy underbelly that is the drug world, [...]

We’ve all heard it said. Almost without fail any time an established band releases a new album, especially a new album that is well received and adds to the band new fans, someone (or some many) will say “Ehhh, I like their old stuff better.” Reasons for liking a band’s earlier work are as diverse [...]

This is part 2 of a series of articles on Dashboard Confessional’s frontman Chris Carrabba: an attempt to dissect his public persona in order to understand his inner person. You can read part 1 here. The Swiss Army Romance is a voyeuristic trip through a 20-something’s diary that feels as naked as it is. Thoroughly [...]

During a rehearsal with a band I was in the subject of Dashboard Confessional came up. Dashboard was probably first mentioned negatively, maybe as a joke about the band’s overly emotional nature but the bassist of my band reacted strongly against our jest saying that “Dude, Chris Carrabba means every word he sings!” If you [...]

Well, one of the problems anyway. ABC just launched a fun, kind of terrifying, mystical, psychological murder mystery called Happytown. Great show so far. I’ve seen two episodes that you can also see at Hulu. It reminds me of one of my all time favorite TV dramas, and one you should all see if you [...]

One major event I forgot to mention in my previous post about the people I encounter at Hartford is one of much significance: Friday’s Open Mic Night. A night filled with 60s-80s folk and pop songs performed by people who should never, ever sing in public and really awful poetry. Some of you may have [...]

As with many jobs in the service industry, you deal with some strange people. Many of my tweets lately have reflected such weirdos that enter Hartford Coffee Company and the weird things they do. These weirdos have nicknames, but I realize after receiving a few responses from some of you that you don’t have the [...]

I found today’s song review, first of hopefully many, on NPR’s SXSW mix page. The page allows you to stream over a hundred artists that played SXSW last week, and download some of the songs. Actually, quite a few of them. About 30 or so, but who’s counting, right? One of the songs I downloaded [...]

While browsing one of my favorite, funny websites at work this morning I came across an image that is similar to a few I found last week and blogged about here. While this picture of the “still loading” cat reminds me of blurry, fuzzy, incomplete jpeg images files of yester-internet-year, I also think of Star [...]