Why Music Still Matters

~ Troy Sennett ~ Leave a comment

Wonderful essay from Craig Manning at chorus.fm.

And so, to artists, I say this: don’t disappear; don’t stop the livestreams or the AMAs or the social media engagement; don’t delay your album releases, even though now might seem like the worst possible time to promote something. We need you right now. We need you to be there to help us make sense of the world, and of the lives we are living. We need your songs to offer reminders that this too shall pass, or welcoming shoulders to cry on at the end of the bad days. We need to be able to hear a lyric or verse and ask, “How did this person know that about my life?” It’s in times like these that music really saves people; reminds them that they aren’t alone; brings them together, even if it’s from afar. Someday soon, we’ll see each other again—in a bar or a club or an arena or a stadium—and we’ll all sing together, loudly. Until then, know we’re still out here, and we’re still listening.

Jeff Schaller and the Long Way Home – ‘Two Decades and Change (Deluxe Edition)’

~ Troy Sennett ~ Leave a comment

We’ve been slowly working on the first official Long Way Home record over the past year and a half. There’s still a ways to go, but in the meantime, we decided to re-issue our last album, Two Decades and Change, along with a remastered B-sides EP, demos, and a new version of "Book of Matches." I’m still immensely proud of this one.

We can’t put this up on streaming services under our new band name because the songs were previously released, but you can find it on our Bandcamp.

We’ll Grow Stronger Making Room and Sharing Space: 2019 In Review

~ Troy Sennett ~ Leave a comment

It’s the end of the year and the end of the decade (more on the latter in this post). It’s the time for me to reflect on the year and think too much about lists. Some things will never change.

Music I Worked On This Year

My Favorite Albums of 2019

I’ve had a one-sentence review of my number one album, Breakup Season by Future Teens, in my head for a few months: If I had heard this when I was seventeen, I might have been a better person. That sounds hyperbolic, but I haven’t been able to shake the idea. I know I could have used this album as a teenager. It’s so honest and introspective about heartbreak and sadness and dealing with those emotions in healthy ways. I’m so happy that a band like Future Teens exists. I’m jealous of the kid that hears Breakup Season this year and connects to it like I connected to The Upsides. Future Teens will be that kid’s first favorite band, the soundtrack to their formative years, their inspirations and role models. I keep likening this album to The Upsides, probably the single most influential album on my past ten years. It feels like a torch-passing at the end of the decade, and it’s all the more apt because I saw Future Teens open for the Wonder Years in October.

The rest of my list feels as varied as my year, spanning genre and scope from emo debuts to the biggest pop artist in the world. As always, I think there’s a lot to love on this list, so pick something and give it a spin.

  1. Future Teens – Breakup Season
  2. Charly Bliss – Young Enough
  3. Pedro the Lion – Phoenix
  4. The Menzingers – Hello Exile
  5. The Mountain Goats – In League With Dragons
  6. Jimmy Eat World – Surviving
  7. Taylor Swift – Lover
  8. Origami Angel – Somewhere City
  9. The Get Up Kids – Problems
  10. Telethon – Hard Pop
  11. Proper. – I Spent the Winter Writing Songs About Getting Better
  12. Aaron West and the Roaring Twenties – Routine Maintenance
  13. Ceres – We Are a Team
  14. Oso Oso – Basking In the Glow
  15. Better Oblivion Community Center – Better Oblivion Community Center
  16. The Dangerous Summer – Mother Nature
  17. Somos – Prison On a Hill
  18. Dave Hause – Kick
  19. American Football – LP3
  20. Bruce Springsteen – Western Stars
  21. Junius Paul – Ism
  22. The Maine – You Are OK
  23. Nervus – Tough Crowd
  24. Great Grandpa – Four of Arrows
  25. Vampire Weekend – Father of the Bride

My Favorite EPs of 2019

  1. Better Love – All I Ever Wanted Is To Be Where You Are
  2. Mineral – One Day When We Are Young
  3. Ruston Kelly – Dirt Emo, Volume 1
  4. Rat Tally – When You Wake Up
  5. Bosley Jr – No More

My Favorite Songs of 2019

Here’s a playlist on Apple Music and Spotify of songs I loved this year. It’s vaguely in order (at least the top ten or so).

My Favorite Shows of 2019

I went to 63 shows this year, 35 of which I played. Here were my favorites. These were all great, but the John K. Samson show is a contender for my all-time favorite performance. He doesn’t tour much, so make it a priority to see him if you have the chance.

  1. John K. Samson and Christine Fellows – 11/23 at Beat Kitchen
  2. The Wonder Years, Future Teens – 10/20 at Metro
  3. Ruston Kelly – 11/1 at Thalia Hall
  4. Mineral – 1/24 at Lincoln Hall
  5. Pedro the Lion – 5/18 at The Castle Theater
  6. Jacob Sigman, Jetty Bones – 3/29 at Beat Kitchen
  7. The Sidekicks, Adult Mom – 7/7 at Subterranean
  8. Spanish Love Songs – 5/19 at Cobra Lounge
  9. Los Campesinos! – 7/6 at West Fest
  10. We Were Promised Jetpacks – 7/13 at Bottom Lounge

My Favorite Podcasts of 2019

Two Headed Girl is the best new podcast I listened to this year. It’s a chronicle of gender dysphoria, transitioning, and marriage. Hosts Alex and Matthew Cox are unflinching in their honesty with each other about their lives, health, and feelings. It’s kind of amazing that they recorded all of this and are willing to share such a personal journey with the world.

Elsewhere in the podcast world, two of my favorite long-running podcasts hit new highs in 2019. On episode 102 of Reconcilable Differences, “Preparing the Way,” John Siracusa buys a refrigerator. The two-hour chronicle of this harrowing adventure is everything I love about the podcast format. And The Watch, Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald’s twice weekly talk about movies and TV, transitioned from purely critique to a behind the scenes look at making a TV show as Andy called in from the set and editing room of his upcoming show, Briarpatch.

Finally, I’ll recommend Michael Lewis’s Against the Rules, a meticulously researched exploration of societal rules and the people who make and enforce them. Unlike the long-running conversational shows I typically like, the tight format and high production value make Against the Rules feel more like an audio book.

My Favorite Books of 2019

As usual, I read very few new releases this year, but the few I did read were fantastic: Hanif Abdurraqib’s latest poetry collection, A Fortune For Your Disaster, Mark Z. Danielewski’s children’s book for all ages, The Little Blue Kite, and Mischa Pearlman’s One Day When We Are Young, a retrospective on the emo band Mineral and a companion piece to their first new music in over twenty years.

The best book I read this year, regardless of release date, was The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver.

My Favorite Television of 2019

I started 2019 with the vague goal of “keeping up” with TV, but I quickly realized that’s impossible. There’s just too much great TV. With that in mind, I just want to highlight a few of my favorite shows of the year, all remarkable for very different reasons, which also happen to be short and digestible.

Fleabag – Season 2

A tour de force of emotion and energy, every episode left me thinking that writer / producer / star Phoebe Waller-Bridge might be the most talented person alive.

Watchmen

Every frame of this show is immaculate. I’m a longtime defender of the endings of Lost and The Leftovers so I had confidence in Damon Lindelof and his team to pull this sequel/remix, and my expectations were still far exceeded.

When They See Us

Ava Duvernay’s docu-drama about the Central Park Five is a heart-wrenching examination of injustice. The opening sequence alone is worth the price of a Netflix subscription.

Chernobyl

A different kind of bleak docu-drama, set on the opposite side of the world as When They See Us, Chernobyl is equal parts moving, gruesome, frustrating, and deeply sad.

And I can’t leave the TV section without giving a shout to Baby Yoda on The Mandalorian, constant cause of delighted squeals (both Liesi’s and mine) every time he’s on screen.

My Favorite Movies of 2019

As always, I’m very behind on movies at the end of year, but Knives Out is a masterpiece.

  1. Knives Out
  2. Marriage Story
  3. The Irishman
  4. Booksmart
  5. Midsommar
  6. The Report
  7. Toy Story 4
  8. Us
  9. Dolemite Is My Name
  10. High Life

Next Year

I haven’t made a formal new year’s resolution in quite a few years, but I do have some plans for 2020.

  • Pelafina will be releasing a new EP in the next couple months. More on that very soon.

  • The Long Way Home are deep in the process of recording our next album. That will hopefully be out later in the spring.

  • I didn’t make a single blog post this year, and I want to change that. I don’t have a clear structure in mind, but I just want to write more.

  • I’m going to listen to more jazz.

My Best Years May Still Be Ahead of Me: My Favorite Albums of the 2010s

~ Troy Sennett ~ 1 Comment

An Introduction

The Upsides leaked on Christmas Eve, 2009.

Wonder Years vocalist Dan Campbell was panicking in an Outback Steakhouse bathroom (seriously, he wrote a song about it), and I was sitting at my parents’ desktop computer downloading the album that would have an immeasurable influence on the next ten years of my life. I don’t know Dan personally, but I would guess that was as much a turning point in his life as it was in mine.

The Wonder Years would go on to tour the world, release four more albums, and become my favorite band in the process. In the meantime, I was playing in bands, writing songs, and occasionally touring. I was briefly a critic, writing reviews for two music blogs. I recorded and mixed records for myself and my friends. But first and last, I was a fan. All these years later, I still love the feeling of hearing a great album for the first time and letting it wash over me, of a lyric that cuts to my emotional core, of singing along with a room full of people or by myself in my car, of feeling seen and understood, feeling like I was a small part of something important.

A decade-spanning list like this is fraught with complications, biases, and tough questions. How important is a decade anyway? How do you weigh an album with five or eight or ten years of influence against one that came out six months ago? Can I cheat and list two EPs as one album? How do you reckon with the personal significance of art whose work is tainted by the artist’s problematic behavior?

I don’t have good answers to those questions. I just have a list of albums that were important to me over the past decade. These are the albums that soundtracked every significant moment of my life since senior year of high school. They’re in some semblance of an order, although that order gets messier the further down the list you go. I hope you listen and find something you love.

I was eighteen years old, still in high school at the start of this decade. I was still buying every album I liked on CD. I had yet to discover vinyl collecting (and Vinyl Collective). I didn’t know DIY bands were releasing their albums for free on Bandcamp and dubbing their own cassette tapes. Spotify hadn’t launched in the US. The entire musical landscape is so much different now than it was back then, and I’ve certainly grown a lot in the intervening years as well, but it’s still possible for music to move me like it did a decade ago, by the light of a desktop computer, the first time I heard The Upsides.

The List

  1. The Wonder Years – Suburbia I’ve Given You All and Now I’m Nothing
  2. The Hotelier – Home, Like NoPlace Is There
  3. The Gaslight Anthem – American Slang
  4. Fun. – Some Nights
  5. Jason Isbell – Southeastern
  6. Bleachers – Strange Desire
  7. Beach Slang – Broken Thrills
  8. John K. Samson – Provincial
  9. Laura Stevenson – Wheel
  10. Jimmy Eat World – Damage
  11. The Gaslight Anthem – Handwritten
  12. The Menzingers – After the Party
  13. Spanish Love Songs – Schmaltz
  14. John K. Samson – Winter Wheat
  15. The Wonder Years – The Greatest Generation
  16. Motion City Soundtrack – My Dinosaur Life
  17. Thursday – No Devolucion
  18. Joie de Vivre – We’re All Better Than This
  19. The 1975 – I Like It When You Sleep For You Are So Beautiful and So Unaware of It
  20. Fake Problems – Real Ghosts Caught On Tape
  21. Ruston Kelly – Dying Star
  22. Brian Fallon – Sleepwalkers
  23. Paramore – After Laughter
  24. Into It. Over It. – Intersections
  25. The Graduate – Only Every Time
  26. The Horrible Crowes – Elsie
  27. The Wonder Years – The Upsides
  28. The Menzingers – On the Impossible Past
  29. Jimmy Eat World – Invented
  30. Against Me! – Transgender Dysphoria Blues
  31. The Front Bottoms – Talon of the Hawk
  32. Bleachers – Gone Now
  33. The Hotelier – Goodness
  34. Kendrick Lamar – To Pimp a Butterfly
  35. You, Me, and Everyone We Know – A Great Big Hole / I Wish More People Gave a Shit
  36. Jeff Rosenstock – We Cool?
  37. Hellogoodbye – Would It Kill You?
  38. Aaron West and the Roaring Twenties – We Don’t Have Each Other
  39. The Tower and the Fool – How Long
  40. The Hotelier – It Never Goes Out
  41. Waxahatchee – American Weekend
  42. Modern Baseball – Sports
  43. Desaparecidos – Payola
  44. Copeland – Ixora
  45. The Sidekicks – Happiness Hours
  46. The Wonder Years – Sister Cities
  47. Taylor Swift – Red
  48. The Menzingers – Rented World
  49. The 1975 – The 1975
  50. Future Teens – Breakup Season
  51. Phoebe Bridgers – Stranger In the Alps
  52. Andrew McMahon In the Wilderness – Andrew McMahon In the Wilderness
  53. The World Is a Beautiful Place and I Am No Longer Afraid To Die – Whenever, If Ever
  54. Charly Bliss – Young Enough
  55. Arcade Fire – The Suburbs
  56. The Swellers – The Light Under Closed Doors
  57. The Mountain Goats – Beat the Champ
  58. mewithoutYou – Pale Horses
  59. You, Me, and Everyone We Know – Some Things Don’t Wash Out
  60. Joie de Vivre – The North End
  61. Julien Baker – Sprained Ankle
  62. Frank Turner – Tape Deck Heart
  63. State Lines – Hoffman Manor
  64. Into It. Over It. – Proper
  65. Pedro the Lion – Phoenix
  66. Fireworks – Oh, Common Life
  67. Jimmy Eat World – Integrity Blues
  68. Broadway Calls – Comfort/Distraction
  69. Transit – Keep This To Yourself
  70. Polar Bear Club – Clash Battle Guilt Pride
  71. Vampire Weekend – Modern Vampires of the City
  72. Empire! Empire! (I Was a Lonely Estate) – You Will Eventually Be Forgotten
  73. The Dangerous Summer – War Paint
  74. Japandroids – Celebration Rock
  75. Real Friends – Everyone That Dragged You Here
  76. The Gaslight Anthem – Get Hurt
  77. Guster – Easy Wonderful
  78. Titus Andronicus – The Monitor
  79. Better Love – We Were Younger and Less Put Together
  80. I Am the Avalanche – Avalanche United
  81. Brian Fallon – Painkillers
  82. Bomb the Music Industry! – Adults!!!
  83. Smallpools – Smallpools
  84. The Wonder Years – No Closer To Heaven
  85. Jason Isbell – The Nashville Sound
  86. Los Campesinos! – Romance Is Boring
  87. The Swellers – Good For Me
  88. Braid – No Coast
  89. Modern Baseball – You’re Gonna Miss It All
  90. Converge – All You Love You Leave Behind
  91. Touché Amore – Is Survived By
  92. All Get Out – Nobody Likes a Quitter
  93. Fireworks – Gospel
  94. Joyce Manor – Million Dollars To Kill Me
  95. Hostage Calm – Please Remain Calm
  96. Mixtapes – Ordinary Silence
  97. Daytrader – Demo
  98. Aficionado – Aficionado
  99. Counting Crows – Somewhere Under Wonderland
  100. The Appreciation Post – Work/Sleep