Liner Notes (November 23rd, 2024)

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I guess it’s been a little bit, huh? We may have a lot to talk about.

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A Few Things

• I remember listening to a podcast with CGP Grey where he talked about the “Four Lightbulbs,” the reductive version was that in life you have four areas that you’re constantly balancing: family, friends, health, and work. And sometimes, you need to turn down the light on one to be able to focus on the others. When I published the last issue of the newsletter on June 15th, I did not know I’d be turning down my work/newsletter lightbulb for a little bit, but circumstances demanded it—first, a little background. For the last twelve years I’ve lived in downtown Portland. I moved during a massive transitional period, and it was one of the best decisions I ever made. It’s where I re-discovered myself. It’s where I grew into an actual adult. It’s where I met my now wife, Hannah, and we began our life together. However, it was a two-bedroom condo with one bedroom as my office. As time went on it became clear we would need more space. Not just space for all our things but space to live, grow, and think about the rest of our lives together. A bathroom with one sink gets old after six years. My office closet doubling as pantry overflow can only be sustained for so long. We’d been talking about moving for a while, and this summer, the talks moved from theoretical to, “ok, let’s see what this would look like.” And thus began the “life lightbulb” maneuvering. To prepare to move my life of the last twelve years, let alone maintain healthy relationships, a real-life job, and my mental health, I needed to pull back somewhere. I decided to repurpose the time on the weekend that had been dedicated to prepping for and writing this newsletter to be “moving stuff” time. And oh boy was it needed. Remind me never to move again. I’d really, really, really love for this to be the last time. Moving is stressful. Moving is extremely taxing. Moving at 41 does different things to your body than when you’re 29. And the amount of mental tension that trying to sell your home while negotiating the purchase of another does to the brain is borderline maddening. But, after months of preparation, the stars aligned, and we had an offer on the condo the same weekend we saw a house we truly thought could be our dream home. An offer was made. And then the real fun begins. The closing process on both made me feel like my insides were being thrown through hell’s rollercoaster. But, we came out the other side. We moved on September 7th and have spent the past few months trying to settle in. Put together furniture. Re-decorate the home. Order more furniture. Realize that having the (wished upon) more space means we have more rooms to fill. But it’s all been worth it. And now, today, I feel settled back into a spot where I can sit down and write and not feel a nagging burn in my head that I should be doing something else. I can’t promise I’ll be back to an every-week schedule, but I will be writing more (and working on the website more) when it fits into the new routines we’re discovering. Moving from the city to the suburbs (and yes, literally to the burbs I wanted to run away from as an angsty pop-punk teen) has led to a learning period for what used to be simple things. The grocery store now means a car ride. But now we have space to store Costco sized purchases. It’s all about tradeoffs. And I’ve got to let myself find the right tradeoffs in the future for when I feel the pull to work on something on the house, or when I want to sit down and get lost in writing. It’ll be a work in progress, but damn have I missed writing.
• I expect there to be a lot of “home” stuff to write about in the coming months, because I’ve been having a whole lot of fun re-doing my office (a good excuse for a new blog post), setting up new home automations, and various other projects. I wrote up a 2024 Holiday Gift Guide recently that has some of the fun things I’ve discovered over the past year that I think will make cool gifts (those home sensors and the Starling bridge have been awesome).
• A few weeks back, I wrote my annual “state of Chorus” post, which was a precursor to getting back into writing shape. The website had a good year, and I’m super happy with where we are and the community we’ve created. I’m even more excited to tackle the growing to-do list of updates and improvements I want to make.
• I created a personal archive to highlight my favorite long-form pieces I’ve written over the years. A place to put all the articles, reviews, and other things I’m most proud of. Also, as a place to link on my profile. (I re-read those Back To.. and My Nostalgia articles this week as I started thinking about being able to sit down and bring back this newsletter. That is the series I’m most proud of having written.)

Sponsor: Wheelbite Release New EP

Wheelbite are a pop-punk band based out of Downstate New York and they recently released their new EP Purify. You can check it out on Spotify and on all streaming platforms. The band plays a high-energy brand of music meant for everyone to enjoy and to bring out maximum crowd participation at every show. Are you looking for a new band to check out this week? Add their new EP to your playlist and turn up the volume.

Like what you hear? Follow the band on Instagram for all updates.

In Case You Missed It

• Review: Linkin Park – From Zero
• Review: Bush – Sixteen Stone
• Interview: SOLAK
• 2024 Holiday Gift Guide
• Goo Goo Dolls Announce Summer Tour
• Laura Jane Grace Announces New Tour Dates
• Coheed and Cambria Announce New Album
• Poppy Announces 2025 Tour
• Coachella 2025 Lineup Announced
• Albums in Stores – Nov 22nd, 2024

Music Thoughts

• I clearly am not going to be able to get through everything I’ve listened to since the last issue (it looks like I listened to 677 different albums since then), but I do want to try and cover the stuff I’ve loved and played the most. So, these are going to be some quick hits. Let’s get started…
• Taylor Acorn released her debut LP, Survival in Motion, and it was worth the wait. Pitch perfect summery pop-punk with hooks for days.
• Origami Angel is carrying the emo pop-punk torch. And, in my opinion, it might be the standard barrier right now. Feeling Not Found is special.
• Hippo Campus’s Flood is probably my favorite album of the past few months. It’s been my go to ‘toss on after dinner’ album for the fall evenings—an awesome swerve from their quirky sound into a soulful indie-pop full of earworms. Highly recommend.
• This is probably a hot take, but while everyone has looked to many female uber-pop artists as the next “Taylor Swift” (and I like almost all of them), this Kelsea Ballerina album is more of a spiritual successor to Taylor than any of them from both a songwriting and feel perspective.
• Holy shit is that Sabrina Carpenter album fun, silky smooth, and horny as fuck.
• NVM continue to fly super under the radar, but their acoustic album is hauntingly gorgeous—perfect early winter music.
• Megan Moroney’s Am I Okay? is a level up for the country artist.
• Snow Patrol’s The Forest is the Path is, I mean this in the best way, shockingly good. Like, woah, I didn’t think they had this in them good.
• And following that theme: The Cure’s Songs of a Lost World dropped my jaw on first listen. Easily their best since Disintegration. Easily. It is an absolute instant classic in a discography that is virtually peerless. I did not expect this. Every single listen leaves me in awe.
• The Offspring’s dropped another spirited album in Supercharged; that’s two in a row for me that have worked.
• South Summit reminds me of The Maine meets Sublime. Intrigued? You should be. Add it to your “to check out” playlist; thank me later.
• Oh, and add the New Age Thief too.
• Marianas Trench released Haven, and I definitely think it’s a nice bounce-back album (their last never grew on me), but it still hasn’t found a way into regular rotation for me.
• Pale Waves haven’t missed for me. Smitten is great. A nice lean into a sound that reminds me a little of the Cranberries but still very much Pale Waves.
• Bleachers’ re-worked A Stranger Desired is a stunner. I wasn’t sure how I would feel, but I kept finding myself coming back to it. Seeing these songs bathed in this chilled vibe light is a treat.
• Blink-182’s One More Time…Part 2 came out the day before we packed up the moving truck. The idea of this band once again becoming the soundtrack to one of my biggest life changes is an almost hilarious portrait of symbolic poetry. Starting yet another chapter of my life with the boys in my headphones as I carted my life from the city to the burbs helped calm my nerves and remind me that I’ll always have music, and thank god for Blink-182. There’s some great stuff here but I don’t think it quite reaches the highs of the original. “All in My Head” is a blast. “Can’t Go Back” played all the right notes these past few months. And “No Fun” is all I could ask in a Blink song 2025. I can’t wait to see what they have in store for us next.
• Kendrick Lamar surprised dropped GNX yesterday, and it’s been just about all I’ve played since. It’s definitely the most immediate Kendrick album for me in a while. Almost flawless. (“Peekaboo” is the only one I’m not currently sold on.) I hope the Jack Antonoff praise is as loud as the hate was.
• Father John Misty’s Mahashmashana also came out yesterday (which led to me learning this cool fact) and I’ve only had time to spin it twice so far. I’m impressed. The past few have felt unfocused to me, a little too meandering, but this cuts through and highlights his strengths as a vocalist and songwriter. I expect this to sit in rotation over the next few months.

The Stats: Over the past week, I listened to 32 different artists, 60 different albums, and 424 different tracks (450 scrobbles). Here is my Top 9 from last week, and you can follow me on Apple Music and/or Last.fm.

Entertainment Thoughts

• I won’t be able to go through everything I’ve watched over the last few months, but I’ll try to hit the highlights. (As always, you can see everything I’ve been watching on Trakt.)
• I finished reading It for the first time. That’s a behemoth of a book that took me a while to crank through (especially with trying to find time to sit down and read the past couple of months). It’s good. So very clearly, it is a thing that influenced many things I’ve loved over my life, and it shows. It’s cool to finally experience the original. Now I’m reading an excellent biography of Franklin Roosevelt.
• The Penguin was phenomenal. It’s going to be hard for anything to top this as my favorite (drama) thing I’ve seen this year. Highly recommend. I want to spend so much time in this world.
• And on a comedy front, English Teacher is a must watch. Before having seen The Penguin, I would have said this was the best new show I’d watched all year. I can’t wait to re-watch.
• Loved X-Men ’97. Perfect blend of nostalgia (I remember getting up for Saturday morning cartoons just for this show) and a relevant and poignant new story.
• Continuing the praise-fest: Alien: Romulus ruled. It got a little too wink-wink at the audience in a few places, but I can forgive that because everything else was great. Probably my third favorite Alien movie and one I absolutely will watch again.
• Come to Didi for all the nostalgic music references of our youth (his sister, for sure, visited AbsolutePunk). Stay because it’s a touching coming of age tale that reminds us that our experiences are a tad more universal than we first expect.
• Snack Shack was a similar surprise for me. Went in with zero expectations and had a smile on my face the whole time. It worked a lot better than The 4:30 Movie did for me, although I did like that one too.
• New Rings of Power season was good, Acolyte was decent-ish, Dark Matter did service to a book I thought was going to be impossible to adapt, Deadpool & Wolverine was alright, and Twisters was a fun popcorn distraction.

Random and Personal Stuff

• Should we talk about the election? I’m only at 2,500 words, we can double that shit up with a rant right here. Nah, let’s save that. I have thoughts.
• Okay, that’s enough about me, how have you been?

Ten Songs

Here are ten songs that I listened to and loved this week. Some may be new, some may be old, but they all found their way into my life during the past seven days.

1. Hippo Campus – Brand New
2. MxPx – Set a Fire
3. Happydaze – Way Out
4. South Summit – Take Me Down
5. Kendrick Lamar – Luther
6. Imogen Heap – What Have You Done to Me?
7. NVM – Glimmer of Doubt
8. Matt Nathanson – Whitney Houston’s National Anthem
9. Great Good Ok Fine – Let’s Talk
10. Koyo – I Might Not Get Through All of This

This playlist is available on Spotify and Apple Music.

Community Watch

The trending and popular threads in our community this week include:

• Kendrick Lamar – GNX (November 22nd, 2024)
• NFL Gameday Week 12
• Coheed & Cambria – Vaxis Act III: The Father of Make Believe (March 14, 2025)
• Spiritbox – Tsunami Sea (March 07, 2025)
• Architects – The Sky, The Earth & All Between (February 28, 2025)
• blink-182
• Netflix/Hulu/HBOMax/Prime (All Streaming Services)
• Wrestling Thread 8: Follow The Buzzards
• Vinyl Thread
• Entertainment Forum General Chat Thread

The most liked post in our forums last week was this one by popdisaster00 in the “General Politics XII” thread.

Previous editions of Liner Notes can be found here.

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