Related Recs

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you should make a "heard in the wild" playlist

“I haven't found any music in a while.” This is something people say to me fairly often. Friends, family, even other musicians. Curious, this line of thinking, in an era of total comprehensive availability. Every song written since the dawn of creation, just a quick search away - the cannon at your fingertips and yet...  Maybe it’s a conundrum of choice. Maybe you’re like me, standing in the shampoo aisle at CVS, thinking to yourself, “Okay, I understand intellectually that I’m looking at colorful plastic tubes of post-capitalist chemical gloop, all of which serve a nearly identical purpose. I understand intellectually that the architecture of this moment is deliberate, that the sheer volume of product is meant to make me feel as though this decision matters greatly. I understand intellectually that in fact, this decision doesn’t matter in the slightest, and yet, here I stand, staring, “shopping.” Author’s Note: Please allow me to check my privilege here. I am lucky to possess what I have been told is “easy hair.” I wash it maybe once a week, and I am plagued by zero scalp-centric struggles. I do not wish to offend any readers by calling their post-capitalist gloops post-capitalist gloops. If you need a specific gloop to keep your noggin tip-top, I levy neither judgment nor verdict. I may be more empathetic to your plight than you imagine- I am exceedingly particular about deodorant. Rite Guard makes a very good gloop. And so, I step warily forward toward total personhood by way of scalpal salvation, and I pause. “This time you’ve gone too far,” rasps over the pharmacy speakers, a warm, familiar gravel to the sung phrase. No matter- important choices are to be made. Labels must be read and considered- words like jojoba and keratin could be the keys to finding meaning in this life, so we must think carefully! And then, another pause. “Wow, that guitar tone is gorgeous, even in this CVS. Maybe a strat through a JC-120, hell yeah.” And just like that, I am awake again. A sheriff of songs in the days of dueling, I am quickest to the hip and smoothest with the draw. My revolver is my iPhone, and it’s loaded with the most underrated ammunition that many of us forget we have in our arsenal. I aim, cock the hammer, pull the trigger, and blast a cold chunk of leaden Shazam into the heart of the buzzing speaker. I rarely miss my shot, and the payment of bounty pings my account instantaneously. “Of course!” I cry out in rapturous ecstasy, “Peter fucking Gabriel!” I add it to my latest heard in the wild playlist, I grab whatever shampoo is on sale, and I clear just a little bit of the post-capitalist gloop out of my brain.  I am of the opinion that music is meant to be heard in the wild. When I’m looking forward to listening to something, I’m thinking mainly about the context I will attempt to create around my listening. Where can I walk around where these songs make sense? When it works, it works, but it’s nearly impossible to engineer. As a person of Scottish descent with no real cultural ties whatsoever, I can’t even begin to describe what it was like, discovering Frightened Rabbit while playing a festival with them in Leeds, and then accidentally ending tour with a week off in Edinburgh, spent oscillating between hammered and hungover wandering the endlessly weaving city with “The Midnight Organ Fight” blaring in my headphones. Author’s Note: I didn’t mean it when I wrote “I can’t even begin to describe what it was like…”. What I actually meant was “I’m not going to describe what it was like in this essay. I’m going to write an entire essay on this, which you will be able to read soon. Look at me, I am doing internet things. So, here we stand, in the most infinite aisle of the most infinite pharmacy, trying to find something new to listen to. We have the world at our fingertips, but the world is too noisy, so we put on the noise we’re most comfortable with and we “go on about our business.” Thankfully, my shampoo analogy is about to fall apart, here’s why: The songs aren’t the gloop, your algorithm is. It is a useful and elegant marvel of technology, to be sure, but its methodology is no longer a thing of great mystery, and its goals are clearly defined. Streaming algorithms have been optimized to deliver you more of what they know you like, with the express intent of keeping you on their platform for as long as possible.  Here, we arrive at the dingey bottom shelf of the most infinite pharmacy aisle. Here lies the downside of having every song ever released wading patiently just upstream of your algorithm. You know that album you love, the one you had on loop back in the day? There are hundreds of thousands of songs that sound a lot like it. A reeking landfill of .mp3s that you will probably like, that will also, crucially, not pull at your attention or challenge you in the slightest.  After years of streaming, we’ve effectively self-reported what we think we prefer, what we know we have always liked, what we probably want a lot more of. And yet, “I haven’t found any music in a while.”  And so, I propose a new approach, one I have found helps me to transcend this dynamic- pay attention to the music you notice in the wild. Not the music you hear in the wild, as there are shards of song flung at us from all directions, all the time. I’m not talking about the cliche smooth jazz punishing you from the elevator speaker, I’m talking about the 1992 Peter Gabriel masterpiece “Digging In The Dirt” that reaches out from the heavens to give you a gentle, loving tap on the shoulder to remind you that you are alive. I’m talking about the not-so-rare piece of music that can remind you that life is short and capable of intense beauty and that you might not want to waste too much time on gloop in CVS. Make sure you don’t stop at the Shazam- add that song to your heard in the wild playlist. Maybe, like me, you can’t help but notice music erupting from car stereos at near-impossible volume 20 times a day. Usually, it’s background noise, but occasionally you’re dodging wild chickens while prowling the streets of Ybor City at 2:30 am on the fourth Friday of a five-week tour, the clouds part, and the god of bangers reaches downward with a shimmering Sistine finger outstretched. In a world of trunk-rattling 808s, one melody cuts through, for whatever reason, and thanks to your deftness at coming up off the hip before the red light can turn green, you’ve captured something real from your moment. A piece of art now belongs to you just as much as it belongs to anyone else. If you’re anything like me, you will probably enjoy revisiting this song for years to come, not because you love the genre or tend to listen to similar artists, but because this song, at least to you, is powerful enough to steal your attention away from all the other stimuli without even trying. You’ve already unwittingly pressure-tested the song’s ability to whip you into presence, now get to know it a little better and see where it takes you. These songs may also gain geographic significance as you continue to develop the habit. Anytime I listen to “Love & War” by Lil Poppa, I’m back in Ybor City, and I’m enveloped in this memory thanks to an artist from Jacksonville with 386k monthly listeners that the algorithm wouldn’t have served me in a million years. The geography doesn’t even need to be interesting to stick, and although I can mentally retrace countless adventures through my playlists, if I’m honest, a lot of the songs take me back to CVS or somewhere like it. That is also okay with me, because at least it means I walked away with a bit more than the post-capitalist gloop I came for.  (this is a pi only preview of a newsletter i'm launching this month. the newsletter is part of a larger project that includes original music (bangers) and youtube docs (about making / playing / loving bangers all around the world. if you've got any notes, i'd love to hear em, and if you like what you've just read, we should be friends. if you made it this far, i appreciate you genuinely and deeply. the world is crazy, but i've been working hard, and i'm excited to share everything. the newsletter site isn't live yet and none of the copy is final, but if you feel compelled, hit the link and signup pre-launch. <3. ok sick cya l8r.) photo by ashley gellman.

@buyingfireworks

Apr 8, 2025

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she cleans up by Father John misty

An absolute banger with perfect lyrics about women taking revenge on men and the world, with a nice reference to Glazer’s Under The Skin too. Songwriting at his best. The misogynist's daughter made him rethink what he said I know just how this thing ends She has trouble reconciling Pops with the things that she read I know just how this thing ends Hundred billion babies born every millennium I know just how this thing ends Man, I hope nobody messes with the wrong rejected men I know just how this thing ends Sure your politics are perfect with the gun against your head I know just how this thing ends It's a good thing God gave us someone on whom we can depend to clean up

@mouse

Nov 4, 2024

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anx/bodies

The first single from Winter Boyfriend from the upcoming album set a, frankly, very different note. 'anx/bodies' is an outlier for us, musically and lyrically, but when putting the final touches to the album it was one of the songs that people seemed instinctively to engage with if they weren't broadly invested in our main thing, essentially indie/indie-punk made by a would-be emo band. At the very least it provoked a reaction. It's a song inspired by a very specific series of events but is not specifically autobiographical. Outside of the world of this song i am much less forward about sex. I enjoy being 'too much' with friends but i really don't want it going anywhere my family might hear it. Repression is fun! I often wonder if that's similar to what actors feel when doing nudity or whatever. It's a case of, "I don't want to know you've seen me experience that?" Anyway, honesty can help in art, but also maybe so too does a little internal repression. It was written about a memory of going to a university disco, arriving at the club where everyone was looking hot and cool, and i suddenly becoming very aware of my inability to be calm. It is essentially about over-stimulation and amorousness and the confusion of that smashing like a wrecking ball through any semblance of chill i might have had. The verse bass riff is really old, easily over 10 years old. I wrote it for a different project, a Death From Above 1979 rip-off thing, and my pal Martin played bass, while i sang and drummed. The song was unremarkable but the riff was cool. There was no way i wasn't keeping it. Also, it explains why it's the only song that uses a fuzz bass tone. Yet. I have no idea when i came up with the guitar riff but it's one of my favourite parts i've written. It's rythmic and a little bit dissonant, but i think the G# implies an E Major chord, making it A minor natural (sorry music theory experts, probably butchering this). I was also unsure if i could allow myself to write the chorus which used power chords. It always feels too basic. But it worked in the context of the song. I finished it years ago aside from a few lyrical tweaks and the introduction sound (chord played, tremolo arm depressed as it fades out, recorded and reversed). Also when mixing the song my references were very different and included a lot of 00s and 10s music, including bands that have been grandfathered into the whole 'indie-sleaze' thing, and it made me realise the second verse needed, nay demanded!, a cowbell and some percussion (the other percussion is drumming on glass bottles fyi). I feel like 'anx/bodies', and the song that follows it, 'on our way home', are two sides of the same coin. One uptight, repressed yet explosive, and the other unrelenting, desperate and flailing. You could almost imagine the latter being later in the same night, getting existential when worse-for-wear. More on that one later.

@ffraniel

Jun 19, 2024

Top Recs from @coreydubrowa

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When your new book is finally available for preorder ❤️

Hey tyler hopefully this doesn’t violate some PI.FYI golden rule But after nearly two years of writing, editing and arguing, my book about the EP is coming out in May and can be preordered here: https://hozacrecords.com/product/aifl/ The book is about the origins, history and cultural impact of the EP since these little objects first started coming out in the 50s. Over 50 of my music biz friends then helped me shape the list and review the top 200 ever released, according to us (ha). For those of you who are into this kind of geekery/snobbery, I can’t wait to hear what you think. A labor of love, as all books are! ❤️

@coreydubrowa

Mar 27, 2024

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The cure announcing their first album in 16 years by PUTTING up a single poster outside the pub in crawley UK where they played their first gig

“Songs Of a Lost World” coming to a goth listening station near you Nov 1 🖤 The fr FW Me Friday the 13th the world was looking for

@coreydubrowa

Sep 14, 2024

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Unwound

I will fail to explain just how much this band meant to me in the 90s. So I will borrow from AV Club who did a fine job of distilling it: “Unwound is the best band of the ’90s. Not just because of how prolific, consistent, and uncompromising it was, but because of how perfectly Unwound nested in a unique space between some of the most vital forms of music that decade: punk, post-rock, indie rock, post-hardcore, slow-core, and experimental noise. That jumble of subgenres doesn’t say much; in fact, it falls far short of what Unwound truly synthesized and stood for. Unwound stood for Unwound. But in a decade where most bands were either stridently earnest or stridently ironic, Unwound wasn’t stridently anything. It was only itself. In one sense Unwound was the quietest band of the ’90s, skulking around like a nerdy terror cell. In another sense it was the loudest, sculpting raw noise into contorted visions of inner turmoil and frustration.” R.I.P. Vern Rumsey. This is their finest song, from their finest album. I really can’t say enough about the sheer bloody minded genius of this group. 🖤

@coreydubrowa

Mar 23, 2024

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