TRASH KICKERS: NOTHING BUT BANGERS, AND A WAY OUT SOMEHOW

October 20, 2026 your tuesday afternoon alternative Interviews #MusicDiscovery #ListenToMusic #DeepListening #MusicMatters #PowerOfMusic #MusicCulture #SupportIndependentMusic #DiscoverNewMusic #MusicIsLife #MusicCommunity, music, New Music, Review, reviews, rock, Trash Kickers, writing, YTAA

Chicago’s four-piece rock-and-rollers have a debut album, a warehouse full of bad smells, and absolutely no intention of behaving themselves.

There are two kinds of rock-and-roll bands in this world. There are bands that want to be rock stars, and there are bands that want to play rock and roll. The first kind spends a lot of time worrying about how it looks, whether the lighting is right, whether the photographs make them look sufficiently dangerous, and whether somebody somewhere has decided they are the next big thing. The second kind gets together in a room that smells like things best left unidentified, plugs in the guitars, turns everything up, and gets on with the business of making noise that means something.

The Trash Kickers, a four-piece outfit from Chicago, seem to belong firmly to the second category. And thank God for that.

Their debut album, Way Out Somehow, is the sort of record that reminds you why rock and roll was never supposed to be a respectable profession in the first place. It is a record built on guitars, friendship, musical instinct, a healthy disregard for conventional wisdom, and the deeply subversive proposition that a band ought to make music people actually want to hear. Not music that somebody’s algorithm has determined will be suitable for your lifestyle. Not music that sounds as if it were assembled by a committee of anxious marketing executives. Songs. Riffs. Hooks. Surprises. A little sweat. Maybe a little blood. And enough life in the proceedings to make you want to turn the damn thing up.

When I sat down with the band for a conversation on Your Tuesday Afternoon Alternative, I was already playing tracks from Way Out Somehow on the radio. I had heard the Replacements in there, some Big Star, the Rolling Stones, and that glorious, somewhat disreputable strain of seventies guitar rock that never needed to ask permission before kicking down the door. What I didn’t hear was a band simply dressing up in its influences and pretending to be somebody else. The Trash Kickers have been listening to their records, all right. They’ve also been paying attention to the business of being alive.

And that makes all the difference.

The Junk Pickers Become the Trash Kickers

Every great rock-and-roll band deserves an origin story that sounds at least a little improbable. The Trash Kickers’ begins with a pile of songs, a Chicago music venue, a few friends, a conversation over drinks, and a great-grandfather who played in a folk trio during the 1930s.

Tyler, the band’s singer, guitarist, and principal songwriter, had spent more than a decade accumulating songs that had never made it onto a record. He wasn’t necessarily dreaming of conquering the world. He wasn’t even planning to start a band. He simply wanted to record the songs, put them somewhere, and have them for himself.

As origin stories go, that’s a refreshing lack of grandiosity.

Tyler already knew Danny through Chicago’s music and nightlife scene, and John was in the same orbit through Lincoln Hall, where the band members worked. The songs began to take shape as the musicians played together, and a project that had started as an archival exercise gradually became something with a pulse of its own.

Then came Stash, the lead guitarist, who entered the picture through the oldest and most reliable recruitment process in rock history: a conversation at a bar about records.

The discussion turned to Big Star, the Replacements, and the Rolling Stones. Tyler played Stash a demo on his phone. Stash offered to play guitar if the opportunity ever arose. The band invited him to rehearsal, and after a couple of hours, the question was essentially settled.

As the guys recalled it, there was “instant chemistry.”

You can’t manufacture that stuff. You can buy equipment, rent rehearsal space, hire a producer, and spend a fortune trying to convince the world that four strangers have some mystical connection. But sometimes four musicians simply discover that they speak the same language, and the rest follows.

The name required a little more deliberation, though not much more dignity. Tyler’s great-grandfather had played in a folk group called The Junk Pickers. The band liked the family connection but apparently felt that “Junk Pickers” had certain sanitary implications they would rather avoid. So junk became trash, pickers became kickers, and the name Trash Kickers was born.

There were two contenders for the final name, and the band settled the matter by rolling a die. Ladies and gentlemen, rock and roll has never needed a more elaborate constitution.

A Record Made The Hard Way

The story of Way Out Somehow is, in its own fashion, a small epic of modern working-class music-making. Not the romanticized kind where everybody quits their job, moves into a loft, and spends six months discovering their artistic truth on somebody else’s money. The real kind, where you work, you pay your bills, you try to coordinate four separate lives, and you squeeze the music in wherever it fits.

The Trash Kickers began recording in July 2025 at a practice space and studio in a warehouse on Chicago’s northwest side. Tyler’s description of the building was one of my favorite moments in our conversation: it was a beautiful old warehouse that smelled like “bad things.”

That’s the kind of studio description I trust. Give me an old warehouse with questionable ventilation over a sterile room designed to make every musician feel as though they’re being audited by the Department of Professional Sound any day of the week.

The band members had day jobs, different schedules, and the usual adult obligations that make the fantasy of an endlessly available rock-and-roll life look rather ridiculous. Recording began whenever everyone could manage it. Eventually, Sundays became recording days. Then came weeknights. Then the deadline started looming, and Tyler took two weeks off work to lock himself in the studio and get the record finished, telling the others to come whenever they could.

They had set a release date before the album was complete. Back in October 2025, May 2026 seemed comfortably distant. Then February arrived, as February tends to do, bringing the unpleasant realization that time is not a suggestion.

The final push became a race against the clock. Sessions stretched late into the night and sometimes toward four in the morning. The band slept on couches under moving blankets, which Tyler helpfully described as “very itchy.” The album was finally uploaded to Bandcamp on the night of the release show, and the digital distribution process got its own last-minute adventure.

The band uploaded the record to streaming distributors just two hours before taking the stage. Two hours! The distributors recommend allowing something like two weeks. The result was a staggered release across platforms, compounded by a plagiarism allegation from the distributor involving a Green Day demo.

Because apparently finishing a rock album isn’t sufficiently difficult unless somebody makes you defend it against a ghost of Green Day.

But the record got out. Against the calendar, against the schedules, against the itchy blankets and the warehouse air, Way Out Somehow made its way into the world.

And the title couldn’t have been more appropriate. Many of these songs had been around for over a decade. For Tyler, who had never released a record before, the phrase captured something personal about finally finding a path through the years of writing, waiting, revising, and wondering whether any of it would ever amount to something.

A way out, somehow.

There’s a lot of rock and roll in those three words.

The Replacements Are in the Room. So Are the Stones. Nobody’s Calling the Police.

Let’s get one thing straight: influences are not the same thing as imitation. Every musician worth listening to has stolen something, learned something, misunderstood something, and eventually transformed those things into a language of their own. The question is never whether a band has influences. The question is whether it has anything to say with them.

Tyler admits to being the band’s biggest Replacements devotee. As a younger songwriter, he says he “stole whatever tricks” he could from Paul Westerberg. That strikes me as a perfectly honorable education. Westerberg understood that a great rock song could be ragged and melodic, funny and miserable, tuneful and half a step away from falling apart. He knew that the most revealing things often happen when a singer sounds as though he might not quite make it through the next line.

The Trash Kickers also share a deep affection for Thin Lizzy, the Stones, and Big Star. You can hear the attraction to big guitars, chiming melodies, and the kind of rhythm section that understands a song doesn’t have to be played with laboratory precision to have muscle.

Stash brings his own musical history to the proceedings: seventies and eighties punk, nineties alt-country, Uncle Tupelo, Whiskeytown, Wilco, Son Volt, the Buzzcocks, the Sex Pistols, and the Undertones. His assessment of his own guitar playing is wonderfully self-deprecating. He jokes that “every lick” he played on the album is somewhere on an Uncle Tupelo song; he’s simply hiding it really well.

Danny’s bass-playing instincts lean toward the Clash and Paul Simonon, with a fondness for early-2000s indie rock. John brings the sort of drumming Tyler associates with Charlie Watts: not a lot of fuss, just the kind of feel that makes a band move.

What emerges is a record that understands the difference between playing rock and roll and dressing up as a museum exhibit called ROCK AND ROLL, CIRCA 1974.

The Trash Kickers aren’t trying to recreate some vanished golden age. They’re interested in what happens when four people with different musical histories get together and play the same song.

As Tyler explained, he generally brings in a finished song but gives the others room to find their parts. Unless he has something specific in mind, he lets the guitar, bass, and drums develop their own ideas. Sections get moved. Chords change. Arrangements grow in unexpected directions. The object isn’t to protect the songwriter’s original conception from interference. It’s to discover what the song can become.

That kind of openness is rarer than it ought to be. Too many bands confuse leadership with control, and too many songwriters mistake the first version of a song for its final and sacred form.

The Trash Kickers understand that a song is not a fragile heirloom. Sometimes it needs a good kick.

The Wrench in the Works

Here’s where things get particularly interesting. Tyler has a term for the little musical disruptions that keep his songs from becoming predictable. He calls them a “wrench.”

You know the feeling. A song settles into a familiar groove. Your brain starts predicting what comes next. The chorus arrives where you expect it. The guitar fills the space you’ve already mentally reserved for it. And then something shifts. A chord goes somewhere unexpected, a section takes a left turn, or the rhythm throws you just far enough off balance that you have to start listening again.

That’s the wrench.

“Angel,” Tyler says, is practically “the embodiment of a wrench.” The band jokes that it’s the only country song with a bar of 5/4 in it. The odd meter appears right at the beginning, and the listener is left trying to figure out exactly what happened.

Then there are the “tasters,” a term Tyler picked up from an interview with Dean Ween. A taster is a small moment that occurs once or twice in a song, just enough to make you stop and think, Wait a minute. What was that? You go back and listen again. The moment works because it doesn’t happen constantly. If everything is a surprise, nothing is surprising.

This is a deceptively sophisticated way of thinking about rock songwriting. It isn’t sophistication for its own sake. Nobody is asking you to bring a calculator to the dance floor. The point is to keep the music alive, to make the listener a participant rather than a passive recipient of a sequence of familiar gestures.

On “Fly or Die,” a song Tyler identifies as a watershed in his development as a songwriter, the arrangement takes a turn roughly two-thirds of the way through. He remembers writing it after a long run of songs he considered unsuccessful and reaching the point where he finally thought he might actually be good at this.

That is a beautiful thing to hear from a songwriter. Not the triumphal proclamation that he has mastered his art, but the recognition that one song has opened a door he hadn’t been able to find before.

And “Come Undone,” the song that supplies the album’s title, has its own history. Tyler originally developed it with Ben Burns, a Chicago musician from his earlier band, the Weekend Lovers. The idea began with Tyler, hungover on his way to work, falling for a woman sitting across from him on a train. He mentioned the experience to Burns, who immediately recognized the possibility and sent him a phone-recorded demo about half an hour later.

The song was eventually carried into the Trash Kickers, where the new lineup made it their own.

A passing attraction on public transportation becomes a song. A song survives one band and finds a home in another. A riff supplied by an earlier collaborator lives on in a new arrangement. This is how rock and roll actually works: not as a neat sequence of intellectual property declarations, but as a long, messy conversation between people, places, memories, and sounds.

Sometimes you meet somebody on a train. Sometimes you meet your next guitar player in a bar. Sometimes the thing you have been carrying around for ten years finally finds the people who can make it work.

Nothing But Bangers

Every band has a philosophy, even if most of them would rather die than admit it. The Trash Kickers’ unofficial motto is admirably concise: “Nothing but bangers.” The meaning is straightforward. If a song doesn’t feel like a hit to the whole band, they move on. Every track has to earn a unanimous stamp of approval. They’re not interested in padding an album with filler just to reach some arbitrary number of songs.

It’s a simple idea, but it takes a certain amount of nerve to follow it. It means accepting that a song you’ve worked on may not be worth keeping. It means recognizing that the hours you spent writing something don’t automatically entitle it to an audience. It means understanding that a record is not a scrapbook of everything you’ve ever done; it’s a collection of the things you believe are worth sharing.

I brought up Guided by Voices’ Bob Pollard during our conversation, and the band’s willingness to work through a pile of ideas before committing to the best ones seemed entirely in keeping with that spirit. The object isn’t to produce a monument to your own productivity. It’s to find the songs that make people want to hear another song.

Tyler described the larger philosophy behind Way Out Somehow as “trusting the process.” Trust the development of the songwriter. Trust the band with the material. Trust the recording. Trust the mixing and mastering. Trust the song itself. That last one may be the hardest.

Because making a record requires a songwriter to let go. First you let go of the song as it existed in your head. Then you let your bandmates get their hands on it. Then you record it, listen to it, revise it, and eventually release it into a world where people will hear it in ways you never anticipated.

The Trash Kickers have built that trust into the way they live and work together. They see one another constantly, often outside of rehearsal. Tyler and Danny live close enough to each other that their proximity has become part of the band’s everyday rhythm. The four musicians have developed a shorthand of looks and nods, a private musical language that doesn’t require a committee meeting every time somebody wants to change direction.

Tyler put it beautifully: “If I can’t trust them with my songs, how can I trust them with anything?” That’s the real story behind the record. Beneath the riffs, the jokes, and the last-minute upload panic, there is a band that trusts itself enough to take chances.

And if you want to hear what that sounds like, start with “Come Undone” and “Fly or Die.” Then play the record again. Those tasters aren’t going to find themselves.

Don’t Suck. Have Fun.

If the Trash Kickers’ recording process is an argument for trust, their approach to playing live is an argument for getting out of your own way. I asked the band about their live philosophy. The answer came back in the form of a concise commandment: “Don’t suck. Have fun, and look like you’re having fun.”

I would put that on the wall of every rehearsal space in America. The band isn’t interested in standing perfectly still while delivering an immaculate reproduction of a recording. Given a choice between playing every note flawlessly without moving and throwing themselves into a performance, having a good time, and taking a few chances, they’ll take the latter. They believe the audience is more likely to have fun watching musicians who are actually having fun.

And they mean it. The Trash Kickers say they’ve received that comment from audiences regularly: the band looks as though it’s having a great time. That’s because it is.

When the crowd doesn’t respond, Tyler admits he can get “combative in his head.” Rather than retreating into the performance, he plays harder. The rest of the band responds, and the energy builds. John has even been known to punch parts of his drum kit that don’t have a song written for them.

I admire this sort of thinking. Not because recklessness is inherently virtuous, but because rock and roll loses something essential when musicians become more concerned with avoiding mistakes than creating an experience. The Trash Kickers put it another way: “We’re a band that plays covers; we’re not a cover band.”

That distinction matters. A cover can be a way of paying tribute, testing your own musical instincts, or simply having a good time with a song you love. It doesn’t have to turn the band into a human jukebox. At their release show, the Trash Kickers tackled the Replacements’ “Can’t Hardly Wait” and an Iron Maiden number, a combination that tells you something about their musical appetite.

They don’t seem especially interested in respecting the boundaries between rock tribes. Punk, classic rock, alt-country, power pop, metal: these are different rooms in the same house, and the Trash Kickers are happy to wander around.

They also play every show the same way, whether there are twenty people in the room or two hundred. “20 people or 200 people, we play the exact same way,” they told me.

Think about that for a minute. It is a declaration of independence from the tyranny of audience size, a refusal to let the number of bodies in a room determine the value of what you’re doing. There are always a couple of people near the front who are losing their minds, the band says. That’s enough. And it should be.

Some of the most important nights in the history of rock and roll happened in rooms that were barely full. Some of the best bands in the world spent years playing to audiences small enough to count without removing your shoes. The point is not to pretend that a crowd of two hundred doesn’t feel different from a crowd of twenty. The point is to understand that the obligation to play your heart out doesn’t change.

The Trash Kickers understand the assignment.

Chicago, Dayton, and the Road Ahead

For now, Chicago is home base. The band members know the city’s music and nightlife scene from the inside, not merely as consumers of its cultural mythology. They’ve worked the venues, built friendships, and developed a band out of the everyday connections that make a local scene function.

But a band can’t live forever in its own neighborhood. Eventually, you have to load the gear into a vehicle, drive somewhere unfamiliar, find the venue, figure out where you’re sleeping, and convince a roomful of strangers that the songs you’ve spent years developing deserve their attention.

The Trash Kickers are beginning to do just that.

Their first out-of-town experience in Madison, Wisconsin, apparently went better than expected and “way dumber than expected.” Six people wound up sharing a hotel room, and the band hauled its equipment inside to keep it safe from possible theft out of the van, blocking the window in the process. The arrangements became sufficiently uncomfortable that some of their companions moved to another room the following night.

Now that’s touring. Not the glossy fantasy of backstage champagne and a personal assistant holding your jacket, but a bunch of musicians trying to protect their equipment, get some sleep, and make it to the next gig with their sense of humor intact.

The next stop is Dayton, Ohio.

The Trash Kickers play the Trolley Stop Tavern on Saturday, October 24.

For those of us who spend our days and nights championing independent music, this is exactly the kind of show worth showing up for. Here is a band with a record we believe in, a set built around original songs, and the sort of live philosophy that makes a small club feel like the most important room in the world for an hour or two.

I’ve already got “Come Undone,” “Fly or Die,” and other tracks from Way Out Somehow in rotation on Your Tuesday Afternoon Alternative. I may or may not have entered a few of those songs into the station’s computer more often than strictly necessary, in the hope that the machinery of radio programming will do what machinery so rarely does on its own: give a good band a chance.

The Trash Kickers are also looking ahead to a spring run that, at the time of our conversation, included Cincinnati’s Comet Bar on March 11 and Columbus’s Space Bar on March 12, with additional Midwest dates being explored. The band jokingly referred to it as the “Ohio tour,” which is a fine thing for an Ohioan to hear. Perhaps they’ll become an Ohio band. We could do worse.

But before the spring comes, there’s a Saturday night in Dayton to consider. The Trolley Stop is the kind of place where a band can get close enough to an audience to find out what the songs really do. There are no arena-sized screens to distract you, no elaborate stage production to conceal the musicians, no distance between the people making the noise and the people receiving it.

There’s just the room, the band, and whatever happens when the first chord hits. That is where rock and roll still makes its best argument.

A Way Out Somehow

There is a tendency to talk about rock and roll as though it were a finished historical event, something that happened in the past and now survives as a set of reference points, vintage T-shirts, and reunion tours. We talk about the Stones, the Replacements, Big Star, and Thin Lizzy as if their greatest contribution were to provide a catalog of sounds for later generations to imitate.

But rock and roll isn’t a museum. It’s a living argument about what music can do when people take it seriously without taking themselves too seriously.

The Trash Kickers are part of that argument. They have the records, the influences, the riffs, and the hooks. They also have something harder to manufacture: the willingness to let the music change, the trust to let four people make decisions together, and the determination to keep playing whether twenty people show up or two hundred.

They began with a songwriter who wanted to preserve a decade’s worth of songs. They ended up with a band, a debut album, a release-day scramble involving digital distributors and an alleged Green Day resemblance, and a growing itinerary of clubs beyond Chicago.

Along the way, they learned that the songs became better when they stopped treating them as untouchable objects. They learned to trust the people standing beside them. They learned that a record could take years to arrive and still be worth the wait. And they learned that sometimes the best way to make a song memorable is to put a wrench in it.

Maybe that’s what Way Out Somehow is really about. Not escaping something in the grand, cinematic sense, but finding a way forward through the ordinary complications of life: the jobs, the schedules, the unfinished songs, the doubts, the long nights, the itchy blankets, the records you love and the records you hope to make.

You keep going. You keep playing. You trust your friends. You don’t fill the album with songs you don’t believe in. You don’t wait for a crowd of two hundred before you give everything you’ve got.

And when the moment comes, you turn up the amplifiers and get on with it. The Trash Kickers have a wonderfully uncomplicated motto for all of this: “Nothing but bangers.” Fine by me.

I’ll see you at the Trolley Stop Tavern on Saturday, October 24. Bring your friends. Bring your ears. Bring the kind of enthusiasm that makes a band want to play harder. And if you happen to find yourself standing near the front, losing your mind while the guitars roar and the drums come crashing down, don’t worry about looking cool. The band isn’t. That’s the whole point.

Trash Kickers — Way Out Somehow. Chicago rock and roll, made by four friends who trust one another, refuse to settle for filler, and would rather have a good time than stand still.

KISS, “Mr. Speed,” and Fifty Years of Rock and Roll Over

October 16, 2026October 20, 2026 your tuesday afternoon alternative Review, Revisiting Eddie Kramer, Kiss, Kiss album, music, Music Writing, opinion music writing, Record Review, Record Reviews, Review, reviews, rock, Rock and Roll Over, writing, Your Tuesday Afternoon Alternative, YTAA

Some rock records announce themselves with a grand entrance. Others kick the door open, knock over the furniture, and get straight to business. KISS’s Rock and Roll Over, released in November 1976, belongs firmly in the second category. Fifty years later, the album remains a terrific reminder of what the original band did best: turn loud guitars, lean songwriting, theatrical personalities, and a whole lot of rock ’n’ roll attitude into something that feels less like a carefully assembled product than a band ready to blow the roof off the place.

Now, with original producer and engineer Eddie Kramer returning to the album for a new 2026 mix, there’s another opportunity to revisit the record. The anniversary edition draws on the original analog multitrack tapes, bringing Kramer’s decades of experience and contemporary production technology to music he helped shape the first time around. The new mix of “Mr. Speed” is a particularly welcome excuse to return to one of the album’s less celebrated tracks. The 50th-anniversary releases are scheduled for November 6, 2026, with a special seven-inch featuring the new mix and an unreleased instrumental demo also announced for October 16.

“Mr. Speed” has always had something going for it that a greatest-hits package can’t quite capture: the pleasure of discovering a band operating just outside its most familiar territory. It doesn’t have the instantly recognizable thunder of “Detroit Rock City,” the arena-ready stomp of “Calling Dr. Love,” or the singalong familiarity of “Hard Luck Woman.” Instead, it offers a different kind of KISS magic, built around a confident groove, sharp-edged guitars, and the sort of swagger that made the band’s best material sound simultaneously calculated and gloriously spontaneous.

That balance was central to KISS at its mid-seventies best. Beneath the makeup, the stage theatrics, and the carefully cultivated larger-than-life personalities was a band that understood the fundamental economics of a great rock song. Give the listener a riff worth remembering, a rhythm section that knows when to push, a vocal that sells the attitude, and a melody that sticks around after the record stops spinning. Don’t overcomplicate the transaction. Rock ’n’ roll has never needed a mission statement when a good guitar part will do.

The genius of Rock and Roll Over is how economically it delivers the goods. The album followed Destroyer, a record that expanded KISS’s sound and theatrical ambitions with the help of producer Bob Ezrin. With Rock and Roll Over, Kramer and the band returned to a more immediate, stripped-down approach. The result was a record that felt closer to the physical experience of a rock band playing together: direct, muscular, and unconcerned with making every moment sound monumental. Its power comes partly from refusing to make a big deal out of itself.

That is where “Mr. Speed” fits so comfortably. The song has the easy confidence of a band that knows its strengths and doesn’t feel compelled to prove them all over again. There is a difference between music that is merely loud and music that has genuine momentum. KISS, when firing on all cylinders, understood that distinction. The rhythm has to move; the guitars have to contribute more than volume; and the performance needs just enough looseness to keep the whole enterprise from feeling like a commercial for itself. “Mr. Speed” delivers that kind of unpretentious rock ’n’ roll satisfaction.

A new mix invites us to listen differently, too. There is always a question hanging over anniversary reissues: Are we hearing something genuinely revealing, or simply another opportunity to sell familiar music back to people who already own it? The answer depends on what the new presentation actually contributes. A remix cannot manufacture a better song, and no amount of studio technology can substitute for the chemistry that made the original recording work. But revisiting the original multitrack tapes can offer a fresh perspective on the relationships between the instruments, the balance of the performance, and the details that might have receded into the background over the years.

Kramer is particularly well placed to undertake that task because he was there when the original album was made. His 2026 mix is not an outsider’s attempt to modernize KISS or sand down the rough edges that made the band exciting. It is a return to material he knows intimately, informed by five decades of additional experience behind the mixing desk. The new version of “Mr. Speed” is part of a larger anniversary project that also includes new mixes of all ten original album tracks, alongside demos, outtakes, alternate mixes, and live recordings in the expanded editions.

The important thing is not whether every listener prefers the new mix to the original. That argument can keep record collectors happily occupied until the next century. The more interesting question is what happens when familiar music gets another chance to be heard. Does a guitar line catch the ear in a different way? Does the rhythm feel more immediate? Does the performance reveal another detail that makes you appreciate the musicianship behind the mythology? Those are the pleasures that make revisiting an old record worthwhile.

And fifty years is a good moment to revisit Rock and Roll Over. The album belongs to a period when KISS had become a major force in American rock but still operated with the urgency of a band that knew its reputation depended on what happened when the needle hit the groove. The songs were compact, the performances were committed, and the band understood that rock ’n’ roll was as much about attitude and physical impact as it was about notes and chords. The makeup might have made KISS look larger than life, but the records worked because the music underneath it all was direct and human.

“Mr. Speed” deserves another spin for precisely that reason. It reminds us that the deeper pleasures of a band’s catalog are often found just beyond the obvious landmarks. The hits tell us why a band became famous. The less celebrated tracks can tell us why we keep listening.

Fifty years on, Rock and Roll Over still has the goods. Eddie Kramer’s 2026 mix offers a new way into an old favorite, but the essential ingredients remain the same: guitars, groove, melody, and four musicians who knew how to make a rock song move. No museum glass required. Put the record on, turn it up, and let “Mr. Speed” do its work.

That’s what rock ’n’ roll is for.

The Love Built in Ordinary Days

August 3, 2026 your tuesday afternoon alternative Dr. J's Thoughts family, life, love, mental-health, writing, Your Tuesday Afternoon Alternative, YTAA

I’ll be taking a little break from the airwaves this week to celebrate something pretty special: 25 years of marriage to my favorite person.

Twenty-five years.

It’s a simple number, but it carries the weight of a lifetime. It holds thousands of ordinary days that, somehow, became extraordinary simply because we lived them together.

Yesterday I celebrated twenty-five years of marriage with the love of my life, Mrs. Dr. J, and I find myself thinking less about the milestones than about the quiet moments that truly define a life. The maps messily folded across dashboards on road trips with no particular urgency. The music that has always been the soundtrack to our lives. Long conversations that stretched late into the night. Shared laughter over things no one else would ever understand. The comfortable silence that only comes when you’ve spent enough years together that words are no longer required.

I’ve come to believe that love is built less by fireworks than by simple faithful presence.

Life has never unfolded in a straight line. There have been moments of celebration and moments of heartbreak, seasons of confidence and seasons of uncertainty. There have been professional triumphs, disappointments that lingered longer than they should have, losses that changed us, illnesses that reminded us of our fragility, and countless unexpected detours that no carefully made plan could have anticipated.

Through all of it, Tracey has been my constant.

She has loved me not only when I was easy to love, but when I was distracted, discouraged, overwhelmed, stubborn, or convinced I had to carry every burden. She has met my imperfections not with judgment, but with a generosity of spirit that still humbles me. Her kindness has softened my rough edges. Her patience has steadied me when I was anxious to move too quickly. Her quiet acceptance has given me the freedom to become more fully myself.

That is no small gift.

As a sociologist, I spend much of my professional life studying conflict, division, extremism, and the ways people can lose sight of one another’s humanity. Perhaps that is why I treasure what we have even more deeply. Every day, she reminds me that the world is also held together by quieter forces—compassion, grace, forgiveness, humor, generosity, and the simple decision to keep choosing one another, day after day, year after year.

Those choices don’t make headlines. They don’t go viral. Yet they are among the most revolutionary acts we can offer another human being.

Looking back over twenty-five years, I realize that our greatest adventures were never really about the places we traveled. They were about becoming who we are together. Every new city, every concert, every road, every unexpected stop became another chapter in a story that neither of us could have written alone.

Time has a way of changing us. The people standing here today are not the same two people who exchanged vows twenty-five years ago in the Elizabethan Gardens in North Carolina in 2001. We’ve been shaped by joy and grief, success and failure, certainty and doubt. But if anything has deepened with time, it is my gratitude.

The older I become, the more convinced I am that the richest lives are measured not by accomplishments or accolades, but by the people who make us feel known. Truly known. Seen without pretense. Loved without condition. Accepted not for who we hope to become someday, but for who we are, even when we fall short of our own expectations.

I am grateful for the life we’ve built—not because it has been perfect, but because it has been real. Beautifully, wonderfully, imperfectly real and true.

Thank you for every mile we’ve traveled, every song we’ve sung, every hand you’ve held through uncertain moments, every laugh we’ve shared until we couldn’t breathe, and every ordinary day that quietly became part of an extraordinary life.

That is the gift she has given me. She has been my home in every season of life.

So, I celebrate much more than an anniversary. I celebrate a remarkable woman whose kindness has made me gentler, whose patience has made me wiser, whose unwavering love has made every joy brighter and every burden a bit lighter.

Twenty-five years feels both like forever and like the blink of an eye.

If I’ve learned anything, it’s that love is not found in the grand gestures that movies promise us. It’s found in the accumulated grace of thousands of ordinary days, faithfully shared.

And if I were given the chance to begin this journey again, knowing everything that life would bring, there is only one decision I would make exactly the same.

I would choose you. Every single time.

Today’s show on Mixcloud

July 28, 2026 your tuesday afternoon alternative Interviews, Live In Studio, Radio Show American Whale, Dayton, Dayton Music, Dayton Music Scene, Interview, Live in the Studio, music, New Music, Your Tuesday Afternoon Alternative

Dayton’s own American Whale stopped by the YTAA studio for a great conversation about music and songwriting. The show has already aired—and you can catch the whole thing now on Mixcloud. Turn it up and give it a listen!

Lips Speak Louder Means Exactly What It Says

July 28, 2026July 28, 2026 your tuesday afternoon alternative Interviews, New Music Alternative Rock, Angela Lese, Consolation Prize, Female Musicians, Independent Music, Indie, Indie Rock, Lips Speak Louder, Live Music, Midwest Music, Minneapolis Music, music, Music Interviews, New Music, Rachel Brandsness, Review, reviews, rock, Rock and Roll, Rock Music, Songwriting, Women in Rock, writing, Your Tuesday Afternoon Alternative

One of my favorite things about doing Your Tuesday Afternoon Alternative is discovering a band that somehow slipped under my radar and then wondering how on earth that happened.

That was exactly my reaction when a friend pointed me toward Lips Speak Louder.

The Minneapolis-based duo—guitarist and vocalist Rachel Brandsness and drummer Angela Lese—make the kind of rock records that remind you why guitars still matter. Big riffs. Bigger hooks. Songs that are melodic without losing their edge. Their album Consolation Prize has been getting plenty of spins on the show, and after talking with Rachel and Angie over Zoom, I came away even more impressed by the thought and intention behind the music.

Ironically, the band’s name began with another favorite band.

“We’re huge Yeah Yeah Yeahs fans,” they told me. “Lips Speak Louder” comes from a lyric buried inside the song “Soft Shock.” They loved the phrase because it sounded “anthemic,” but over time it took on a deeper meaning.

“It feels like permission to say what you really mean,” Rachel explained.

That philosophy runs through everything the band does.

Rock music, they argue, shouldn’t apologize for existing. It should be loud. Honest. Imperfect. It should refuse to shrink itself to make other people comfortable. “Rock music refuses to be quiet. It’s loud and kind of in your face. You’re saying what you mean, when you mean it, how you mean it.” That isn’t simply a philosophy about music—it’s a philosophy about life.

Angela pointed out that, particularly for women, there is often enormous social pressure to be agreeable and not “take up space.” Playing in Lips Speak Louder became an opportunity to reject that expectation. Angela explained that, particularly for women, there is often enormous social pressure to be agreeable and avoid drawing attention to yourself.

Rachel shared that “I feel like, especially as women, you’re raised to be polite and don’t step on anybody’s toes. Playing and singing is my chance to be loud and take up space.” It’s my chance to be loud and take up space.”

That statement may be the best summary of the band you’ll ever hear.

Of course, the music industry has not always made it easy. Both Rachel and Angie laughed while recounting stories of loading heavy equipment into venues only to have someone ask whether the gear belonged to their boyfriend. They’ve repeatedly encountered audiences and industry professionals who seemed surprised that two women could walk onstage and deliver unapologetically heavy rock music.

Those experiences even inspired the title of Consolation Prize.

The title is more than a clever phrase. It’s a tongue-in-cheek response to years of being passed over simply because they didn’t fit someone else’s expectations of what a rock band should look like. Angie noted that “we named our album Consolation Prize because we can’t tell you how many times we’ve come up short for a gig…just because we were women.”

The satisfying part, they admitted, comes after the music starts.

Angie observed the transformation on the faces of the audience: “We can actually watch people’s expressions change. Watching everyone’s eyes turn from a place of doubt to just being super into it—that’s pretty cool.”

Or, as Rachel put it, “If you can win a crowd over by being two females playing rock and roll, that’s a fun feeling.”

The audience goes from skepticism to raised fists, phones in the air, and enthusiastic applause. Few things are more satisfying than dismantling assumptions with a great performance.

Listening to Consolation Prize, one thing immediately stands out: this is an enormous-sounding record. That becomes even more impressive once you realize only two musicians are creating all that sound.

Rachel has developed an ingenious live guitar setup that simultaneously covers guitar and bass parts while Angela’s powerful drumming provides the foundation. Instead of treating the duo format as a limitation, they’ve embraced it as a creative advantage.

“It forced the vocal melodies to have to be better. It forced the songs to be better,” Rachel said.

Without multiple guitars and layers of studio overdubs to hide behind, “there wasn’t going to be a bunch of extra fluff” – the vocal melodies had to become stronger. The riffs had to matter. Every note had to earn its place. It’s a refreshing philosophy in an era when technology can often become a substitute for songwriting.

As we talked about their writing process, another theme emerged. Neither musician seems interested in showing off. They are interested in making great songs. Every note has to matter. Every hook has to earn its place. Rachel noted that “if I have that chorus hook, I feel like I can build whatever I need around that.” Because, as she admitted, “If the chorus doesn’t really anchor it, the song is only ever going to be okay.”

That’s a remarkably disciplined way to think about songwriting.

Rachel usually begins with a chorus because, in her words, if the chorus isn’t memorable, the rest of the song rarely comes together. From there, the pair trade demos back and forth, constantly refining arrangements while giving one another room to contribute new ideas.

What struck me most was the trust between them. Sure, there are disagreements. Different versions get recorded. Feelings occasionally get bruised. But they always arrive at the same destination because they’re pursuing the same goal.

“We both have the same end goal—trying to make a great song.”

That mutual trust is one reason the record sounds so cohesive. Their move from Nashville to Minneapolis also says a great deal about who they are as musicians and performers.

After years of working in one of America’s music capitals, they wanted something different. Nashville is full of extraordinary musicians, they told me, but it has also become crowded, expensive, and increasingly geared toward hired-session work.

The Midwest kept calling them back.

Every tour through Wisconsin, Minnesota, and surrounding states reinforced the same impression: audiences simply love rock music. “The whole region seems thirsty for some rock, so we’re just excited to be here.”

So, they relocated. The gamble appears to be paying off.

The Minneapolis music community has welcomed them warmly, local radio has embraced their songs, and they already feel at home in one of America’s great rock cities.

One observation Rachel made really stuck with me. Independent artists experience time differently from listeners.

While Consolation Prize no longer feels “new” to the band, it is brand new to nearly everyone discovering them for the first time. “To us the songs don’t feel brand new anymore…but to 99.9 percent of the population they’re brand new.” That’s an important reminder that great records never really have an expiration date.

When I asked about working with Emily Wolfe as producer, Rachel immediately emphasized something every artist hopes to find. “She helped us get the sound we wanted but preserve who we are.” Angela added that Wolfe pushed them creatively without changing their identity. The result is a record that feels polished but never sterile.

As Rachel explained, “We wanted it polished enough to sound professional, but we wanted to harness that raw energy.” That may be the single best description of Consolation Prize.

When I asked about favorite songs from Consolation Prize, the answers revealed another side of the record. Angela chose “Handle With Care,” partly because it lets her unleash an extended barrage of double-kick drumming that she had always wanted to play.

Rachel highlighted “Dog Days of Summer” and “Loser,” two emotionally cathartic songs that build from intimate moments into soaring, full-throttle rock anthems.

I understand exactly why.

“Loser” may have become my favorite track on the record. Every time I hear it, I find myself singing along before I even realize I’m doing it. That’s what good songwriting does.

Toward the end of our conversation, I asked about performing live. Their answer wasn’t about gear or logistics. It was about creating an experience. “How can we make it larger than life? How can we create a moment?” That’s exactly what every great rock band should be asking before walking onstage.

I asked the most important question of the afternoon as we neared the end of our conversation: “When are you coming to Dayton?” The answer was encouraging and promising.

Angela actually has family in Kettering, the band is working with a booking agent, and Midwest touring is very much in the plans. I immediately began recommending venues like Blind Bob’s, The Brightside, and South Park Tavern. Hopefully, we’ll see them here sooner rather than later.

If they do make it to Dayton, I’ll probably have a classroom full of University of Dayton students earning extra credit by attending the show. Going to local concerts is the only extra credit assignment I offer students.

After spending an hour talking with Rachel Brandsness and Angela Lese, it became obvious that the name Lips Speak Louder isn’t just clever. It’s a mission statement that encourages all of us to be authentic. Don’t apologize. Write great songs. Turn up the amplifiers. Let the music flow.

Let the music do the speaking.

The Last 120 Minutes of the Weekend

July 14, 2026July 15, 2026 your tuesday afternoon alternative Memorial, Radio Show #MusicDiscovery #ListenToMusic #DeepListening #MusicMatters #PowerOfMusic #MusicCulture #SupportIndependentMusic #DiscoverNewMusic #MusicIsLife #MusicCommunity, 120 Minutes, Dave Kendall, MTV

There are people who become famous, and there are people who quietly change lives without ever expecting to. Dave Kendall belonged to the second category. If you came of age in the late 1980s or early 1990s with an antenna pointed toward MTV, chances are you remember him not because he tried to become the star, but because he never did. He simply opened the door, stepped aside, and invited the music to speak.

That was his gift.

Long before algorithms promised to “discover” artists for us—and then promptly served us more of what we already liked—there was 120 Minutes. Sunday nights. Midnight. The weekend fading into Monday morning. Homework not quite finished. A school day or workday looming only a few hours away. Common sense said to go to bed.

Instead, there was Dave Kendall. He would appear on the screen with that unmistakable calm confidence, introducing bands that felt like transmissions from another planet. There were no pyrotechnics. No shouting. No manufactured excitement. Just someone who clearly loved music enough to assume you might love it too.

That assumption changed everything. I stayed up far later than I should have. Every Sunday.

Looking back now, I realize I wasn’t simply watching a television show. I was attending church.

Not the church of nostalgia—that disease that convinces us everything was better before—but the church of possibility. Every week there might be a new band from Manchester, Glasgow, Athens, Minneapolis, or some college town I’d never heard of. Every video suggested there was another musical universe waiting just outside the Top 40.

American rock critic Lester Bangs once argued that rock and roll was never really about perfection. It was about collision. Noise. Discovery. Joy wrapped inside imperfection. 120 Minutes lived by that philosophy. It wasn’t polished into something safe. It was a glorious collision of goth, shoegaze, industrial, punk, dream pop, college rock, post-punk, alternative, and artists that refused to fit inside convenient marketing categories.

It trusted its audience. Imagine that.

Today we speak endlessly about “content.” We optimize playlists. We chase engagement metrics. We let recommendation engines tell us what listeners supposedly want before they’ve even heard it. Dave Kendall practiced something radically different: Curation. He wasn’t selling us music. He was introducing us to friends we hadn’t met yet.

Some weeks I loved every song. Some weeks I wondered what in the world he had just played. Those weeks were often the most important. Because taste doesn’t grow by hearing things we already understand. Taste grows by being puzzled. By being challenged.

By sitting through three songs that don’t connect so the fourth one changes your life.
Years later, when I found myself behind a radio microphone hosting Your Tuesday Afternoon Alternative, I realized just how much of Dave Kendall had followed me into the studio.

Not consciously. Almost by osmosis. I don’t think about playlists as products. I think about conversations.

A DJ isn’t there to prove superior taste. A DJ is there to make introductions.
“You’ve never heard this before.”
“You might not like it.”
“But give it three minutes.”

That’s Dave Kendall talking through decades of accumulated records and memories.

Every Tuesday afternoon I catch myself making the same leap of faith he made every Sunday night: trusting listeners to be curious.

College radio occupies a strange and beautiful corner of the musical ecosystem because curiosity still matters there. No shareholders are demanding that every song sound like the previous hit. Sometimes we make odd transitions. Sometimes we mispronounce names. Sometimes the levels aren’t perfect. Sometimes we discover an incredible Dayton band that deserves far more attention than it receives. That humanity matters.

Curating music experiences is celebrating the beautiful messiness of people chasing an unknowns, chasing something authentic instead of something market-tested. College radio remains one of the few places where authenticity still regularly beats efficiency.
Dave Kendall understood that instinctively.

His interviews reflected it too. He asked musicians about music rather than celebrity. He treated artists as creators instead of commodities. Watching those conversations taught many of us that intelligence and enthusiasm could occupy the same sentence.
That’s a lesson that extends well beyond broadcasting.

As a sociologist, I spend much of my professional life thinking about communities—how they form, how they sustain themselves, how ideas travel. Looking back, 120 Minutes wasn’t simply a television program. It was an invisible community.
We didn’t know each other. But every Monday morning there were thousands of us carrying around the same songs, the same videos, the same feeling that we’d glimpsed something just outside the mainstream.

Before social media. Before streaming. Before someone could immediately search every lyric. The mystery was part of the experience. You scribbled band names onto notebook paper. You drove to record stores hoping they carried the album.

Sometimes they didn’t.

The search became part of the love. We’ve gained remarkable convenience since then, but we’ve lost something harder to name. Discovery has become frictionless. Yet friction often created devotion. Maybe that’s why I still enjoy digging through crates of vinyl or hearing a local band no algorithm would ever recommend. Discovery still feels like work worth doing.

Dave Kendall reminded us that music is not background noise.
It’s geography.
It’s identity.
It’s memory.

Years after those Sunday nights, I still hear certain songs and immediately remember where I was sitting in the house, how dimly lit the room seemed, how everyone else had gone to bed while I stayed awake believing there might be one more extraordinary song before the closing credits.

Usually there was.

Dave Kendall died having influenced countless listeners who may never have realized just how much they borrowed from him. DJs. Record store clerks. Music journalists. Professors. Lifelong fans. People like me.

Kendall’s legacy isn’t measured by ratings. It’s measured by record collections. By independent radio stations still taking chances. By conversations beginning with, “Have you heard this?” By listeners willing to stay awake a little longer because they believe the next song might change something.

Most weeks it didn’t. Sometimes it did. Those were the Sundays that became part of who we are.

Every Tuesday afternoon, when I slide the microphone fader up and introduce another artist who deserves to be heard, I like to think those late Sunday nights are still echoing somewhere in the background.

Not as nostalgia.
As gratitude.
Thanks, Dave.

Now…here’s another song you might not know.
Yet.

The Beautiful Imperfection of Live Radio

July 10, 2026 your tuesday afternoon alternative Radio Show

Or in true Rocky and Bullwinkle, subtitle form:

Why criticism has made me a better radio DJ—and a better listener.

Imagine you are standing in front of the music board for the radio station. — Independent music for everyone!

There is a peculiar vulnerability that comes with opening a microphone every Tuesday afternoon.

For three hours, I invite complete strangers into my musical world. I ask them to trust me enough to follow a trail that might begin with a jangly indie band from Dayton, wander through Americana, stop briefly for a forgotten punk single from 1979, and somehow arrive at a songwriter whose latest album has only a few hundred streams.

Sometimes the journey makes perfect sense. Sometimes it resembles someone spilling an entire record collection down a flight of stairs.
That’s live radio.

After more than four decades behind microphones at four different stations—and more than twenty years hosting Your Tuesday Afternoon Alternative on WUDR—I’ve learned something that took me much longer than it should have.

People aren’t really criticizing the music.
They’re telling you something about themselves.

One listener wonders why I played that song. Another wishes I’d feature more local music. Someone else thinks the show has become too eclectic, while another insists it isn’t eclectic enough. One person loves hearing deep album cuts; another just wants songs they recognize. If I post too often on social media, someone notices. If I don’t post enough, someone notices that too.

In my day job as a prof of sociology, we spend a lot of time thinking about perspective. Music reminds me every week that perspective isn’t just an academic concept. It’s deeply personal.
Every listener arrives carrying an invisible soundtrack.

Their first concert. The song that got them through divorce. The album they shared with their father. The band they discovered in college that convinced them life could be larger than their hometown. A song or an album or a band that changed their life.

No wonder people feel strongly.

Music has never been merely entertainment.
It’s autobiography set to melody. That gradual realization has slowly changed how I hear criticism.

Early on, I sometimes took it personally. I wondered whether I’d chosen poorly or somehow failed the audience. But radio has a remarkable way of sanding down your ego. You miss a cue. You mispronounce an artist’s name. You accidentally leave the microphone on while shuffling papers. You introduce the wrong song. You post something on social media that could have been written more clearly or more thoughtfully.

Live radio has an excellent memory. And so does the internet.

The temptation is to become defensive. To explain yourself. To remind everyone that producing three hours of live radio every week involves juggling playlists, interviews, engineering, timing, software, breaking music news, community events, and trying to sound like you’re not simultaneously wondering whether you remembered to turn off the coffee pot before leaving the house.

But explanations rarely build community.
Listening does.

One of my favorite observations about radio comes from legendary broadcaster John Peel, who believed a DJ should surprise listeners, not simply reassure them. His programs became famous because he trusted audiences enough to let them discover music they didn’t yet know they loved.

I’ve always admired that philosophy.

Not because I think every song I choose deserves universal praise. Far from it. Some songs simply don’t connect. Some artists I become excited about fade away. Others I overlooked become favorites years later.
Curiosity requires humility.

And humility means accepting that you won’t always get it right — And that is a hard fact to accept.

Years ago, I wrote that if even one person found comfort in a song, then the show mattered. I still believe that. In fact, I believe it more deeply now than when I first wrote those words.

But I’ve also come to appreciate the other side of that equation. If someone tells me a transition felt awkward, maybe it did.
If they point out that I interrupted a guest too quickly, I should think about that.
If they wish I spent more time letting the music breathe instead of talking over an introduction, perhaps they’re hearing something I missed.

Not every criticism is correct. Neither is every compliment. The challenge is learning which voices help you become the person—and broadcaster—you hope to be.

This isn’t easy.

Social media encourages certainty. Radio rewards confidence. Neither naturally encourages reflection. Yet reflection may be the most important skill a broadcaster can cultivate.

After every show I hear the things no one else probably noticed. The sentence I stumbled over. The interview question I wish I’d asked differently. The local band I forgot to mention.
The moment I rushed because I glanced at the clock instead of trusting the conversation.

These aren’t failures. They’re tomorrow’s lesson plan.

Lester Bangs once wrote about rock and roll as though every record might save civilization or accidentally set the amplifier on fire trying. That’s probably the right amount of drama for radio too.

Every Tuesday I still believe the next song could change someone’s afternoon. Maybe not their life. But perhaps their day. Maybe they’ll pull into their driveway and sit in the car for another three minutes because they need to hear how the song ends.

That’s enough.

What I’ve learned is that radio isn’t really about proving your taste. It’s about sharing your enthusiasm generously enough that other people feel invited into it.

The older I get, the less interested I am in winning arguments about music. I’d rather introduce someone to a band they’ve never heard before. I’d rather give a Dayton musician their first interview. I’d rather make room for voices that commercial radio has forgotten.

I’ve often said that “support your local music scene” isn’t just a slogan. It’s a philosophy. Supporting musicians means showing up, buying records, paying cover charges, telling friends about great bands, and creating spaces where artists can be heard. Radio is one small part of a larger ecosystem.

The funny thing is that criticism has become part of that ecosystem too. It reminds me that people are listening carefully or reading passionately enough to care. That’s a privilege.

I still make mistakes.

I always will.

I’ll occasionally hit the wrong button, misidentify an album, write a social media post that could have been more thoughtful, or discover that what sounded brilliant in my head landed somewhere closer to “well, that was awkward.”

Good. Because perfection has never made memorable radio.

Human beings, well at this radio station anyway, make memorable radio. The slight hesitation before introducing a favorite song. The laugh when something unexpectedly goes wrong.

The excitement of hearing a new artist who reminds you why you fell in love with music in the first place.

Those moments can’t be automated. They can’t be programmed. At least it is hard to create perfect mistakes. And they certainly can’t be focus-grouped.

They simply happen because another imperfect human being is sitting behind a microphone trying to connect one song—and one listener—to another. Sure, voice tracking and the other computerized soulless efforts strive for that ‘sounds real effect’ but it misses the mark in ways we can all tell when listening.

Every Tuesday afternoon I still hope I can do the show a little better than I did the week before. Not because criticism tells me I’m failing. Rather because listening—to music, to musicians, and sometimes to the people who disagree with me—reminds me that learning never stops.

Maybe that’s the real job of a radio DJ. Not simply to play songs. But to keep listening.

Video of the Day: The New Old-Fashioned – What In The Hell

July 2, 2026 your tuesday afternoon alternative Video David Payne, Dayton, Dayton Music, Great Horned Audio, Guitars, Kent Montgomery, Magnaphone Records, Matt Oliver, music, music review, Music Video, New Music, Reel Love Recording Co, Review, reviews, rock, The New Old Fashioned, The New Old-Fashioned, Tom Blackbern, What In The Hell, writing

There is something wonderfully disorienting about “What In The Hell.” The New Old-Fashioned has always occupied that sweet spot where power pop, garage rock, country, and indie sensibilities collide, and this latest single turns the amps up while keeping the hooks firmly intact. It’s a song that feels both urgent and effortlessly catchy, asking a question that sounds increasingly relevant in 2026: What in the hell is going on?

The band’s trademark vocal interplay gives the track its personality. Tom Blackbern, Kent Montgomery, Matt Oliver, and David Payne sound less like a traditional lead singer with backing vocals and more like four friends shouting observations from different corners of the same room. The result is energetic, lived-in, and refreshingly authentic.

Musically, the song leans into crunchy guitars, a relentlessly driving rhythm section, and melodic choruses that refuse to leave your head. David Payne’s engineering at Reel Love Recording Co. captures the band’s live chemistry, while Tim Pritchard’s mix and mastering at Great Horned Audio gives every instrument room to breathe without sanding away the grit that makes the performance so engaging. Great Horned Audio and Reel Love Recording both deserve a mention as fantastic contributors to the Dayton music scene. They provide essential recording, mixing, and mastering studios for the local indie and alternative music scene, acting as a key hub for bands and artists on Magnaphone Records. Spaces that allow artists to be themselves are invaluable in contemporary music.

The music video, directed, filmed, and animated through inventive stop-motion by writer, musician, and artist Brandon Berry (The Paint Splats), perfectly complements the song’s restless energy. Rather than simply documenting a performance, Berry creates a visual world that mirrors the track’s quirky humor and anxious momentum. The stop-motion aesthetic gives everything a handmade, tactile quality that fits the band’s DIY spirit, making every frame feel like a labor of love.

Taken together, “What In The Hell” is another reminder of why Dayton’s music scene continues to produce artists with a distinctive voice. The New Old-Fashioned doesn’t chase trends—they make guitar-driven rock with a nod to country music that feels timeless while still speaking directly to the confusion and absurdity of the present moment. It’s smart, spirited, and impossible not to enjoy.

Turn It Up Before the World Goes Silent

July 1, 2026 your tuesday afternoon alternative Music Narratives Authenticity, blog, Community, Creativity, Cultural Commentary, Dayton, Dayton Music Scene, Independent Music, life, mental-health, music, Music Analysis, Music and Empathy, Music criticism, New Music, Popular Culture, Rock and Roll, Why Music Matters, writing

Every few years somebody announces that music is dead. They say streaming killed it. Algorithms killed it. Social media killed it. Attention spans killed it. Artificial intelligence killed it. Radio killed it. MTV killed it. Napster killed it. Vinyl prices killed it. Somebody is always writing the obituary while another kid is sitting on the floor with a cheap pair of headphones hearing a song that rearranges their nervous system forever.

Music keeps surviving because it isn’t a product first. It’s evidence that human beings are still trying to tell each other the truth.

That’s why music still matters.

Not because every new release is a masterpiece. Most records have always been forgettable. If you wandered into a record store in 1974—the supposed golden age—you’d discover mountains of disposable junk stacked beside the classics. History performs ruthless editing. We remember the albums that changed lives and conveniently forget the landfill.

The miracle isn’t perfection. The miracle is persistence.

Somewhere tonight a band is loading battered amplifiers into a rusty van because thirty people in a neighborhood bar deserve something louder than despair. Somewhere a songwriter is spending six hours chasing a lyric that will eventually sound effortless. Somewhere a teenager in a bedroom is discovering that three chords are enough to begin constructing an identity.

That’s civilization.

Music isn’t background noise. It’s one of the oldest technologies human beings ever invented for surviving themselves.

The best songs don’t merely entertain; they interrupt us. They stop the machinery of everyday life long enough to whisper—or scream—that we’re not crazy for feeling what we’re feeling. They give shape to grief before we know how to describe loss. They turn anger into rhythm instead of violence. They transform loneliness into harmony. They make joy communal instead of private.

You don’t dance because life is easy.

You dance because for three minutes somebody convinced you it was worth staying in the room.

And here’s the part the streaming executives and data analysts never quite understand. Nobody has ever cried because an algorithm correctly predicted what they wanted to hear next.

People cry because artists like Jay Farrar, Bruce Springsteen, and American Aquarium sound like they are carrying every factory town in America on their shoulders. They cry because Nina Simone makes heartbreak sound like a moral philosophy. They cry because the Replacements stumble into emotional perfection just as they’re threatening to fall apart. They cry because Aretha Franklin doesn’t simply sing respect—she demands that the universe finally recognize human dignity.

Music matters because authenticity is still audible.

You can’t fake conviction forever. The microphones eventually catch you cheating.

That’s why local music scenes remain sacred. Every city has them. Dayton. Detroit. Austin. Toronto. Minneapolis. Glasgow. Liverpool. Manchester. Places where musicians keep creating despite indifferent audiences, shrinking budgets, and the economic absurdity of trying to build a life around songs. They aren’t doing it because it’s profitable.

They’re doing it because silence would be worse.

Go stand in a club where forty people are watching a band you’ve never heard before. Listen carefully. That’s democracy working better than most legislatures. Complete strangers agreeing that for the next hour they’ll surrender their individual anxieties and become one audience. Every applause break says, “I hear you.” Every encore says, “Stay a little longer.”

We desperately need more of that.

Our politics rewards outrage. Our technology monetizes distraction. Our economy encourages isolation. Music quietly rebels against all three. It insists that listening is an ethical act. Really listening means allowing another person’s experience to occupy your own emotional space.

That’s empathy with a backbeat.

The old critics loved to argue about what was “real rock and roll,” but the argument was always bigger than guitars. They were really asking whether culture could still produce honesty in a world increasingly devoted to image. That’s still the question today, except now image comes filtered, optimized, branded, monetized, and endlessly recycled across glowing screens.

A great song cuts through all of it.

Three minutes.

One voice.

One unforgettable melody.

Suddenly you’re sixteen again, or grieving your mother, or driving nowhere with your best friend, or falling in love, or surviving the worst year of your life. Time collapses. Memory becomes physical. Your pulse syncs with a snare drum. A lyric you’ve heard a hundred times suddenly reveals a meaning it was saving until you were finally ready to understand it.

No other art form enters ordinary life with quite that kind of stealth.

Books demand stillness. Films require schedules. Paintings wait in museums.

Songs climb into your car, your kitchen, your headphones, your funeral, your wedding, your first kiss, your last goodbye.

They accompany us through the ordinary until the ordinary becomes unforgettable.

So no, music isn’t dying.

The industry changes. Formats disappear. Genres mutate. Technologies evolve. Critics grow old. Trends come and go with exhausting predictability. But somewhere, right now, somebody is writing the song another stranger will someday need to survive a terrible Tuesday afternoon.

That possibility alone is enough to keep believing.

Turn it up. Not because louder is always better.

Because sometimes hope arrives disguised as feedback, wrapped inside a melody, played through a beat-up amplifier by people who still believe that a song can change a life.

They’ve been right all along.

Elephants and Stars Kick the Door In, Spill Their Guts, and Call It Philistine Vulgarity—God Bless the Noise

June 23, 2026 your tuesday afternoon alternative Dr. J's Thoughts, Review Album, Album Review, Brief Shining Moment, Canadian, Canadian Music, Drowning in Doubt, Elephants and Stars, Even Out The Lies, Guitar band, Indie Music, Kinda, Manfred Sittman, music, Music Matters, New Music, Of Halfway Houses and Ambulances, One Light at a Time, Philistine Vulgarity, Propensity for Violence, Review, reviews, rock, Sanctuary Cities, Take It All, The Reckoning (Come On Down), Underground Music, Your Tuesday Afternoon Alternative, YTAA

Elephants and Stars have been stalking the edges of the Canadian underground for years, the kind of band that doesn’t so much arrive as accumulate—record by record, show by sweat-soaked show, turning small rooms into minor revelations for anyone paying attention. They’re not interested in being the coolest band in the room, which is probably why they end up being the most necessary. Literate but never precious, political but allergic to slogans, they deal in the messy stuff: doubt, friction, the uneasy truce between wanting to care and wanting to check out entirely.

And here’s the thing—they don’t sound like they’re trying to prove anything anymore. That fight is over. What you get instead is a band that knows exactly what it is: a guitar and drum band, yeah, but the kind that treats guitars like blunt instruments and percussion you feel in your body, both instruments opening wounds at the same time. There’s punk in there, and heartland rock, and that old alternative ache that used to mean something before it got turned into background noise for coffee shops. But none of it feels curated. It feels lived in, like these songs have been rattling around in their bones for years before anyone bothered to hit record.

Frontman Manfred Sittmann comes off like a guy who’d rather torch the idea of “high art” than ever be caught polishing his feelings for display. And that’s the secret engine here: nothing is overly arranged, nothing is too clever for its own good. The band trusts the songs to stand up straight on their own bruised legs. In a time when so much music winks at you like it’s all one big joke, Elephants and Stars stare you down and mean every word—and somehow that lands harder than any grand statement ever could.

For more than half a decade, Elephants and Stars have carved out a distinctive place in independent music: literate without pretension, political without sloganeering, melodic without sacrificing urgency. That balance defines this record. Across six albums, they’ve built a reputation the slow way—through relentless songwriting, word of mouth, and songs that land somewhere between the gut and the conscience. Philistine Vulgarity feels like the clearest distillation of that identity yet.

The guitars hit first—not with flash, but with presence. They breathe. Each riff carries tension; each melody leans against something just out of frame. Producer Ron Hawkins (The Lowest of the Low) understands the assignment completely. His approach favors clarity over gloss and atmosphere over excess, sharpening the band’s core qualities: passion, confrontation, humanity, and melody. Nothing feels buried or inflated. The songs arrive mid-conversation, as if they’ve been unfolding long before you pressed play.

“Drowning in Doubt” opens with anxious propulsion, a reminder that alternative rock was never meant to feel comfortable. “Propensity for Violence” compresses fury into a tight burst without tipping into caricature. Meanwhile, “Take It All” and “Brief, Shining Moment” showcase the band’s quietest strength: choruses that don’t beg for attention but linger anyway, settling in over time rather than announcing themselves.

By the midpoint, the album reveals its deeper concerns. “Kinda” and the strikingly titled “Of Halfway Houses and Ambulances” resist easy resolution. These are not songs about triumph; they’re about endurance—another Tuesday, another misstep, another fragile attempt at faith in other people. It’s difficult terrain, and Elephants and Stars navigate it with unusual grace.

The album’s title is not incidental. Philistine Vulgarity wrestles directly with political violence, alienation, economic anxiety, and emotional exhaustion, but it refuses to surrender empathy in the process. Echoes of punk, heartland rock, post-hardcore, and alternative textures run throughout, yet the songwriting never feels like a genre exercise. It remains rooted in narrative and emotional truth.

That ethos is summed up by Sittmann: “These songs are just honest rock songs played with feeling… they’ll never be mistaken for high art, and I couldn’t be happier about it.” In a musical landscape that often hides behind irony or self-awareness, that kind of directness feels quietly radical. Elephants and Stars don’t hedge. They mean what they say.

“One Light at a Time” and “Even Out the Lies” carry that philosophy forward with restraint and confidence. There’s no attempt to overwhelm—only a trust that honesty has its own momentum, and that listeners are willing to meet the band halfway.

“The Reckoning (Come On Down)” plays less like judgment than invitation, setting up the closing statement: the seven-minute “Sanctuary Cities.” It’s a rare kind of finale—patient, searching, willing to wander. Instead of racing toward a climax, it expands and circles back on itself, ultimately landing somewhere that feels earned rather than engineered. By the time it fades, the silence it leaves behind feels intentional.

What resonates most is how little of this feels manufactured. Elephants and Stars are not chasing trends or optimizing for algorithms. They are refining a voice—layered guitars, thoughtful construction, and melodies that reveal themselves gradually. The audience they’ve built reflects that same patience: one song, one record, one believer at a time.

Philistine Vulgarity is a reminder that guitar bands still matter—not as preservationists of some sacred past, but as translators of ordinary anxiety into something shared and bearable. The album doesn’t pretend the world makes sense. It simply insists that making honest music within that confusion still matters.

And that’s more than enough reason to turn it up again.

Transmission from the Beautiful Midwestern Static

June 16, 2026 your tuesday afternoon alternative Radio Show, WUDR, Your Tuesday Afternoon Alternative American Aquarium, and The Long Ryders, Bruce Hornsby, Cliff Hillis, Couchboy, Dayton, Dayton Music, Dayton Music Scene, Elephants and Star, Humbird, Joe Pernice, Kiwi Jr., music, New Music, Pere Ubu, Review, reviews, rock, Sonic Whip, Sports Boyfriend, The Laughing Chimes, The Linda Lindas, The Menzingers, The New Old-Fashioned, writing, Your Tuesday Afternoon Alternative, YTAA

You know what I love about radio? One minute you’re getting your soul rattled by Elephants and Stars sounding like somebody spray-painted heartbreak across the side of a collapsing bowling alley, and the next minute The Linda Lindas come flying through the speakers like they just hijacked your older cousin’s garage band and turned it into a revolution. THAT’S radio, baby. Chaos with a heartbeat.

Sonic Whip’s “Survive” sounds like the inside of a jukebox after three cups of gas station coffee and a nervous breakdown somewhere outside Akron at 2 a.m. And I mean that as the highest compliment imaginable.

Cliff Hillis comes in with “The Square Route” like Big Star wandered into a neighborhood bar where somebody’s uncle still argues about whether power pop ever really died. Spoiler: it didn’t. It just learned how to drive at night with the windows down.

And then Bruce Hornsby shows up with Ezra Koenig like some kind of impossible musical blind date that SHOULD NOT WORK but absolutely does. It’s jazz-adjacent adult existentialism for people who still own concert ticket stubs from 1997 in a shoebox under the bed.

American Aquarium’s “History Repeats Itself” sounds like somebody reading tomorrow’s headlines through a busted neon sign in a Southern roadside diner. There’s dust on the boots, blood in the memory, and enough truth in there to make politicians nervous.

You hear a band name like Sports Boyfriend and think maybe you’re getting irony. Nope. You’re getting sharp little pop songs that ricochet around your skull like pinballs in a dive bar arcade nobody’s cleaned since the Clinton administration.

And then BOOM — Pere Ubu crashes into the set like a shopping cart full of sparks and loose wires. “Non-Alignment Pact” still sounds like the future arguing with itself in a Cleveland factory basement. Some songs age. That song mutates.

The Menzingers always sound like they know exactly how it feels to miss somebody while staring out the window of a moving car at 1:17 in the morning wondering where all your old friends went. Nobody writes working-class nostalgia with this much gasoline and heart.

Joe Pernice drops in with “Twenty-Thousand Times” sounding like a man who has quietly mastered the art of surviving disappointment beautifully. Some songs shout at you. Pernice just leans over and tells you the truth softly enough that you actually listen.

And The Laughing Chimes? Man, those songs sound like Midwest summers that disappeared before anybody realized they mattered. Jangling guitars, beautiful ache, tiny moments turned cosmic. Dayton understands that kind of music. Ohio INVENTED that emotional weather.

This is why we do this show. Because somewhere between Kiwi Jr., Humbird, Couchboy, The New Old-Fashioned, and The Long Ryders, somebody listening right now is hearing their new favorite song for the first time. And that little moment? That’s still magic.

Listen along at https://listen.streamon.fm/wudr

The Electricity of Being Human: Matt Derda and the Art of Saying Too Much and Just Enough

June 9, 2026June 8, 2026 your tuesday afternoon alternative Review Life You Didn't Know, lyrics, Matt Derda, Matt Derda & The High Watts, Matt Derda and The High Watts, music, rock, Rock and Roll, Song, Song Analysis, Songwriter, Songwriting

Most songwriters spend their careers trying to sound profound. Matt Derda sounds like he’s trying to survive another Tuesday.

That’s not an insult. It’s the highest compliment I can think of.

Because somewhere between the barroom confession, the self-deprecating joke, the hard-earned wisdom, and the moment where the floor drops out beneath a lyric you thought was headed somewhere safe, Derda has built something increasingly rare in contemporary songwriting: songs that feel authentically lived in rather than written in service to ego or corporate overlords.

Matt Derda and The High Watts don’t announce themselves with grand statements. They don’t arrive carrying manifestos or pretending that every chorus is going to save your soul. Instead, they do something harder. They tell the truth in a language ordinary people actually use.

The first thing that strikes you about Derda’s writing is how conversational it is. Not conversational in the lazy sense that often passes for authenticity these days, but conversational in the way the best storytellers are telling the truth as they understand it from the perspective of being wrapped up in life. His songs sound like somebody sitting across from you at last call, finally deciding to admit what they’ve been avoiding all evening.

Then comes the twist.

Just when you think you’ve settled into a familiar phrase, Derda turns it sideways. A joke becomes a wound. A cliché becomes a revelation. A casual observation suddenly opens into something larger and more unsettling. His gift is not simply for cleverness, though he’s certainly clever. It’s for using cleverness as camouflage for vulnerability.

That’s a difficult balancing act. Too much wit and the listener never gets close enough to feel anything. Those songs may sound great but they never land as true. Too much confession and the song collapses under its own weight. Derda operates in the narrow space between those extremes, where humor and heartbreak become indistinguishable from one another.

The best songwriters understand that vulnerability isn’t about exposing everything. It’s about exposing the right thing in the right way at the right time. Derda seems to know this instinctively.

His songs are populated by imperfect narrators, people trying to make sense of disappointments they may have helped create. There is very little self-mythology in his work. He rarely casts himself as the hero. More often, he sounds like a participant-observer in his own life, documenting the mess while simultaneously contributing to it.

That perspective gives his lyrics a refreshing lack of certainty that is damn uncanny. Too much modern songwriting arrives prepackaged with conclusions. Every emotional conflict is resolved. Every lesson is learned. Every wound has already become wisdom. Or worse, they revel in being the problem.

Derda isn’t interested in those tidy endings. His songs frequently occupy the uncomfortable territory where most of us actually live: somewhere between understanding and confusion, hope and resignation, confidence and doubt. He trusts listeners enough to leave some questions unanswered. And thank all that is holy that he trusts an audience and treats us as intelligent if flawed human beings.

Musically, The High Watts understand a principle that should be tattooed on the forehead of every aspiring rock band: the arrangement serves the song. This sounds obvious until you realize how rarely it happens across styles and genres.

In lesser hands, strong lyrics become excuses for instrumental excess or emotional overstatement. Every feeling gets underlined three times. Every chorus is pushed toward artificial grandeur. The High Watts resist that temptation.

The arrangements feel less like decoration and more like architecture. Guitars enter when they’re needed and disappear when they’re not. Rhythms create momentum without demanding attention. Melodies carry emotional weight without becoming sentimental and falsely sweet.

Nothing feels accidental for Matt Derda and The High Watts, but nothing feels forced either. The band understands that a great lyric often needs room to breathe.

That’s where Derda’s writing flourishes. The spaces between notes become as important as the notes themselves. A well-placed guitar phrase can illuminate a line. A restrained rhythm section can make a confession land harder than any dramatic crescendo ever could.

The result is music that feels remarkably confident in its own skin. And maybe that’s what ultimately separates Matt Derda and The High Watts from so many contemporary acts. They aren’t trying to impress you. They’re trying to connect with you.

There’s a difference. A very big difference.

One approach asks listeners to admire the songwriter. The other invites listeners to recognize themselves in the song. Derda’s songs consistently choose the second path. And that is a very good choice.

They acknowledge failure without celebrating it. They embrace humor without hiding behind it. They explore vulnerability without turning it into spectacle. Most importantly, they understand that the details of ordinary lives are often where the biggest truths reside.

Rock and roll has always been at its best when it remembers that human beings are contradictory creatures—simultaneously brave and frightened, selfish and generous, ridiculous and profound.

Matt Derda writes songs for those contradictions. And The High Watts provide the electricity that makes them glow. The songs don’t shout. They don’t posture. They don’t demand attention. They earn it.

And in an era overflowing with noise based on what a corporation thinks it can sell to teenagers that may be the most radical thing a songwriter can do.