There was a time when I marked every summer with a baseball-centric trip with my friend Colin. In our fearless, energized youth, we would load up a vehicle with modest provisions and embark on cross-country journeys built around stops in cities that could boast a major league baseball team: Chicago, St. Louis, Houston, Dallas-Ft. Worth, Kansas City, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Detroit, New York City, Toronto, and, to help properly date the era of these trips, Montreal. Through all this dedicated journeying, we only made a point of getting to one city that had no home team to root, root, root … Continue reading One for Friday: Half Miler, “Here Comes A Regular”

Once I found my way to the student-run radio station in college, I’d found my home. This was true to such a degree that I was quick to chose spending time there over my actual home some hundred miles away. During the winter break of my freshman year, I made the obligatory trip home from Christmas, but begged off on staying much longer, noting the extraordinary need at the station for extra hands. This was true. 90FM was, with great pride, a station that didn’t operate under the philosophy that a break from school was a break from broadcasting. What’s … Continue reading One for Friday: The Frogs, “Whether U Like It Or Not I Love U”

I think one of the natural tendencies of students working in college radio is to spend the time building their own personal music collections. I don’t mean that the theoretically student in question plays something new and exciting on their radio program, inspiring a trip to the friendly neighborhood record store. Instead, it it done somewhat illicitly, spare copies of CDs or vinyl records going straight from mailed packages to bookbags. I use the qualifier somewhat because, in my experience, the representatives of the labels and the distribution companies were often complicit in this practice, actively encouraging music directors to … Continue reading One for Friday: Juliana Hatfield, “Everybody Loves Me But You”

As I’ve noted before, my time as a student in college radio was a prolonged musical education. Many people walk through the doors of a station like that convinced that they have unique reservoirs of knowledge that they are duty-bound to share with the world. I was certainly opinionated and had my flashes of ego when it came to matters of musical taste (especially when contrasting my interest in, say, Husker Du against the adherents of godawful hair metal prevalent among the population of the wing I lived in during my freshman year), but I was also always keenly aware … Continue reading One for Friday: American Music Club, “How Many Six Packs Does It Take To Screw In A Light”

I think most music fans want to have songs, albums, artists that they can think of as theirs. We can connect with music so deeply that we almost want to find a pathway to a relationship that feels a little reciprocal. This instinct, this desire leads to favorite artists, well-worn albums, cries of “that’s my song,” when a certain tune starts emanating from the radio or jukebox. We’re all people in the audience, watching Tom Frank sing “I’m Easy,” convinced it’s a personal message. That’s the extreme. There are levels to this, and one of the simplest (and safest) is … Continue reading One for Friday: Fire Town, “Carry the Torch”

My first three decades, I was a Wisconsinite. I was born in Madison, went to college in Stevens Point. On my thirty-first birthday, we climbed in to a big moving van and departed for a completely different part of the country. Since then, I’ve lived in Florida for six years and North Carolina for two. Through it all, America’s Dairyland still feels like home. For a long time–and still now, I suppose–I was especially attuned to any mention of Wisconsin in the pop culture. It’s the natural convergence of state pride and pop culture obsession. This included to a special … Continue reading One for Friday: Dead Milkmen, “Living in Wisconsin”

I came into my music fandom clumsily. As a young kid, I was surrounded by music, sometimes literally. I lived in a home dominated by a record collection, my stepfather’s vinyl effectively serving as the walls of the living room. Each and every night, whatever new rock record was dominating his attention served as the soundtrack. The Dark Side of the Moon was released when I was two-years-old and its gloomy lushness was such a constant presence that I would sing along to “Money” while I played with my Tonka trucks. Despite this, I wandered into my teenage years with … Continue reading One for Friday: Graham Parker, Get Started. Start a Fire