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!
Today’s show on Mixcloud
music
Lips Speak Louder Means Exactly What It Says
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.
Video of the Day: The New Old-Fashioned – What In The Hell
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
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
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
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
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.
Dayton Favorites The New Old-Fashioned Return with New Music
Today on YTAA, The New Old-Fashioned crashes into the studio, carrying the kind of anticipation that only comes when a band has been quietly building something behind the scenes instead of flooding the world with half-finished updates and social media breadcrumbs.
For fans of the Dayton scene, this is a notable moment. The band’s upcoming single, arriving June 6, marks the first new music released since the Big City EP. This record captured their knack for balancing heartland storytelling, jangling guitars, and the restless energy of musicians who understand that the best songs are often born somewhere between nostalgia and forward motion.
Listening to The New Old-Fashioned has always felt a little like finding a stack of well-worn records in a friend’s basement: familiar enough to immediately feel comforting, and alive enough to remind you why rock and roll keeps reinventing itself while recognizing where it came from in the first place. Their music pulls from the past without becoming trapped by it. That’s a difficult trick. Plenty of bands know how to imitate history; far fewer know how to converse with it.
And that’s what makes this new material intriguing. After the long stretch since Big City, the question isn’t whether the band can pick up where they left off. The question is what they’ve discovered in the meantime. What stories have accumulated? What rough edges have become sharper? What melodies have been waiting for the right moment to emerge?
Tune in this afternoon for a sneak peek at the new song and a conversation with the band about the road from Big City to this next chapter. If rock and roll is a continuing argument between who we were and who we’re trying to become, then The New Old-Fashioned sounds ready to pick that argument back up.
Listen here: WUDR YTAA Stream
The Heartland Railway Reunion Show Was Loud, Ragged and Beautiful
There are reunion shows that feel like exercises in forced nostalgia, half-remembered songs dragged out of storage like old winter coats that still smell faintly of dirt and heartbreak. And then there are reunion shows that remind you why music mattered in the first place. Last night at Blind Bob’s, Charlie Jackson and the Heartland Railway didn’t just reunite — they detonated. They transformed a packed bar into a sanctuary for those who believe in loud guitars played with genuine soul, rust-belt poetry, and the notion that music can still bear the weight of everyday lives without succumbing to irony.
The whole night felt less like a concert and more like a gathering of survivors. Dayton has always been one of those cities where music grows out of cracked pavement and factory smoke, where bands don’t emerge from marketing strategies but from long nights, cheap beer, broken hearts, and a refusal to disappear quietly. The room at Blind Bob’s had that sacred grime to it — sweat on the walls, people pressed together, everyone buzzing with the nervous electricity of seeing something that might actually matter.
Opening the night was Age Nowhere, and if you’ve been foolish enough to think alt-country has become nothing but boutique sadness for people who buy $70 vinyl reissues, this band would’ve knocked that idea straight out of your skull. They played with the kind of battered sincerity that can’t be faked. No posturing. No carefully curated “Americana” cosplay. Just songs that sounded lived in.
And then came the Ray Price cover. Damn. Paul Monin has a deep appreciation for country music that staggers the imagination.
Most bands cover classic country songs like they’re handling museum artifacts. Age Nowhere attacked theirs like they were trying to pull the ghost of every lonely highway bar in America directly into the room. The song swayed and cried and staggered with that beautiful drunken dignity that old country music understood so well.
You could practically hear decades of jukeboxes rattling inside it. It wasn’t revivalism; it was resurrection. For a few minutes, Blind Bob’s stopped being a bar in Dayton and became every neon-lit tavern where somebody ever sat staring into a whiskey glass, wondering where their life wandered off to.
That is the effect of real country music.
Then came The New Old Fashioned, who delivered a set so fierce and emotionally direct it felt like being punched in the chest repeatedly by someone who genuinely loved you. There’s always a danger with bands carrying that kind of roots-rock torch that things drift into bar-band competency — pleasant enough, ultimately forgettable. But The New Old Fashioned played like they understood the stakes.
Their songs had dirt under their fingernails.
The guitars roared without becoming indulgent, the rhythm section locked into a relentless heartbeat, and every song carried the feeling that the world outside the club doors is coming apart faster than anyone wants to admit. They weren’t selling nostalgia for some imaginary better America. They were documenting the actual emotional wreckage people are dragging around right now.
And then they closed with a new song called “What the Hell.” That title alone sounds like a muttered prayer from modern America.
The song built slowly, almost cautiously, before exploding into this furious, weary anthem that captured the confusion and exhaustion of living through an era where everything feels simultaneously absurd and terrifying. It wasn’t political sloganeering. It was something rarer and more valuable: honest emotional testimony. The chorus hit the room like a collapsing ceiling. People weren’t politely applauding; they were reacting physically, shouting the words back by the end like they’d known the song for years. That’s the mark of something real. Great songs don’t introduce themselves. They reveal that they’ve been hiding inside people all along.
By the time Charlie Jackson and the Heartland Railway took the stage, the room already felt transformed, but what happened next elevated the night into something mythic. They didn’t play like a reunited band trying to recapture former glory. They played like a band that had spent years absorbing life and came back with scars and love worth singing about. From the first notes, they sounded enormous — not polished, not slick, but alive in the way only truly great rock and roll can be alive.
Charlie Jackson himself commanded the room with the weary charisma of somebody who has seen enough disappointment to understand joy properly. His voice carried that beautiful raggedness that can’t be manufactured in studios or singing lessons. It cracked in exactly the right places. Every lyric sounded earned. To call Charlie a great songwriter is to underplay the hand you’ve just been dealt. He writes about everyday life, family, real true love like his heart could explode from the weight it carries. A more real songwriter would be almost impossible to find.
And the band — good lord, the band.
The Heartland Railway lived up to their name. They sounded like freight trains rolling through Midwestern darkness, all momentum and thunder and aching beauty. The guitars shimmered and roared, songs expanded and contracted organically, and every player seemed completely locked into the same emotional frequency. This wasn’t technical perfection. It was something better: conviction.
That’s what made the night extraordinary. Conviction.
Nobody on that stage seemed interested in trends, algorithms, branding strategies, or whatever hollow nonsense currently passes for music industry ambition. These bands played because they had to do so, as if their very lives depended upon it. Because songs remain one of the few ways human beings can tell each other the truth without immediately looking away.
And maybe that’s why the reunion mattered so much.
One of the things that elevated Charlie Jackson and the Heartland Railway beyond merely being a great bar band reunion was the sheer emotional force of the harmonies between Charlie Jackson, Denny Cottle, and Brad Bowling. These weren’t polished, antiseptic harmonies built for pop radio or Nashville songwriting camps. These were human harmonies — rough around the edges in all the right ways, voices colliding and lifting each other like old friends finishing each other’s stories after years of hard living. Honestly, I believe that Denny could harmonize with anyone and make them sound better.
At times they sounded almost impossibly huge for such a small room, rising above the guitars with this aching, blue-collar grandeur that felt deeply Midwestern. There were moments when the three voices locked together so perfectly the entire room seemed to lean forward instinctively, like everyone suddenly realized they were hearing something increasingly rare: genuine musical chemistry that can’t be rehearsed into existence.
And underneath all of it was the drumming of Ricky Terrell, who played with the kind of instinctive power that held the whole night together. Terrell didn’t overplay because drummers like him understand something too many modern musicians forget — groove is emotional architecture. His playing was muscular but deeply human, giving the songs both propulsion and gravity. At times he sounded like a runaway freight train hammering through the Rust Belt at midnight; at others he pulled back with astonishing restraint, letting the songs breathe and ache before kicking them forward again. He was the engine underneath the Heartland Railway name, keeping everything moving with relentless heart and soul.
In an age where music is increasingly flattened into disposable content — background noise for scrolling and advertising — Charlie Jackson and the Heartland Railway reminded everyone packed into Blind Bob’s that live music can still feel dangerous, communal, and spiritually necessary. The show wasn’t about reliving the past. It was about proving there’s still life in this battered old form called rock and roll.
Last night in Dayton, there absolutely was.
Walking the Wire: Fragile Voices and Electric Heartbreak
Some songs sound fragile because they’re carefully arranged that way. And then some songs sound fragile because the people making them are actually coming apart in real time. That’s the feeling you get listening to ‘Walking on a Wire’ by Richard and Linda Thompson.
The song appears on Shoot Out the Lights (1982), a record that has come to feel less like a collection of songs and more like a document of emotional collapse. By this point, Richard and Linda Thompson’s marriage was effectively over, and the tension that had been building for years wasn’t just informing the performances—it was structuring them.
And then there’s Linda Thompson’s voice.
During the recording of Shoot Out the Lights, Linda was dealing with significant vocal strain—problems that had been building and were made worse by the emotional and physical intensity of the sessions. You can hear it in the delivery: the controlled fragility, the slight break in tone, the sense that every phrase is being carefully negotiated in real time. But what’s striking is that the record never tries to smooth it out or hide it. Instead, it turns that limitation into part of the emotional architecture of the song.
A technically “perfect” vocal would actually feel like a lie here. Because ‘Walking on a Wire’ isn’t about resolution. It’s about the attempt to maintain balance when everything underneath you is already gone. Richard Thompson’s guitar is precise, almost cutting in its clarity—circling, tightening, never quite settling. And Linda sings like someone holding herself together by sheer force of will, line by line.
There’s a kind of emotional restraint in the performance that’s more devastating than overt breakdown. No shouting, no collapse—just endurance. And that’s what makes the song so difficult to turn away from.
Knowing what Shoot Out the Lights represents in the arc of their relationship only deepens it, but even without that context, ‘Walking on a Wire’ stands as one of the most harrowing and beautiful performances in British folk rock—intimate, controlled, and quietly shattering.
This is Richard and Linda Thompson.
Still Here and Still Swinging: High on Stress Carry the Minneapolis Rock Tradition Forward
There are records that sound like they were made for streaming playlists, and there are records that sound like they were made because four guys still believe rock and roll is a sacred, sweaty, half-broken thing that can save your life for three and a half minutes at a time. Still Here by High on Stress belongs violently, gloriously to the second category.
This thing doesn’t stroll into the room. It kicks the jukebox until beer spills on the floor and somebody starts shouting along before they even know the words. It sounds like Minneapolis in winter — cracked lips, cigarette smoke curling outside the club at 1:45 a.m., somebody sleeping in a van behind First Avenue because gas money disappeared two towns ago. The ghosts of The Replacements are all over this record, not in the lazy tribute-band sense, but in the way these songs understand that melody only matters if there’s some damage underneath it. You can hear traces of Soul Asylum too — that desperate, bruised romanticism — and the working-class ache of The Gear Daddies humming beneath the amplifiers like an old furnace in a Midwestern basement.
“House of Cards” opens the album like somebody throwing open the door of a bar just before last call. Guitars slash across the room, Nick Leet sounding like he’s trying to outrun disappointment with pure momentum. It’s got that classic Twin Cities push-and-pull: huge hooks wrapped around the suspicion that everything might collapse tomorrow. Great rock songs don’t solve anything. They just make you want to survive long enough to hear the next chorus.
“Closer to the Truth” is pure heartland voltage. This thing could’ve fit on a lost Westerberg cassette between hangovers and revelations. The guitars don’t polish the pain — they grind it into something usable. There’s a ragged nobility here, the kind you only get from musicians who’ve actually lived inside these songs instead of assembling them from indie-rock instruction manuals.
“Over/Thru,” co-written with Kevin Salem, barrels forward with power-pop precision and bar-band recklessness colliding at full speed. It’s catchy in the way nicotine is addictive. Chad Wheeling’s guitar work throughout the album deserves its own shrine somewhere off Highway 61. These guitars don’t shimmer; they scrape paint off the walls.
Then comes “Uphill Climb,” which is exactly the kind of title Minneapolis rock bands have been earning honestly for forty years. No irony, no fashionable detachment, just exhausted perseverance transformed into a singalong. This is where High on Stress separate themselves from all the poseurs playing Americana dress-up. They understand that resilience is ugly sometimes. You drag it behind you. You don’t post inspirational quotes about it.
“Cliffhanger” barely pauses long enough to breathe before detonating into another tight, melodic punch to the ribs. There’s not an ounce of wasted motion anywhere on this record. Twelve songs, no self-indulgence, no bloated production tricks, just melodies delivered with the urgency of men who still think rock and roll matters because it does.
“Time Will Tell You” carries some of that old Soul Asylum melancholy — the feeling that wisdom arrives about thirty years too late to be useful. Mark Devaraj and Jim Soule lock into the kind of rhythm section groove that doesn’t call attention to itself because it’s too busy holding the whole damn enterprise together. The song rolls forward like an old car with a failing transmission that somehow keeps making it home.
“Can You Feel Me?” is two-and-a-half minutes of pure emotional combustion. No filler. No indulgence. Just direct transmission from nerve endings to amplifier tubes. Somewhere, the spirit of every lost Midwest dive bar is cheering. “Plans Have Plans” is the kind of title Lester Bangs himself would’ve appreciated because it sounds simultaneously profound and completely defeated. The song sways between fatalism and stubborn survival instinct, which is basically the entire emotional history of Minneapolis rock distilled into three minutes.
“Under the Table” brings a little extra grime into the mix, with Soule’s co-writing contribution adding a rougher edge. This is where the band’s love for the Del-Lords and old American garage rock really surfaces. It sounds lived-in. Beer-stained. Earned. “Ambassador” somehow manages to sound triumphant and world-weary at the same time, which is harder than most bands realize. High on Stress understand one of the central truths of rock and roll: the best anthems are usually about losing.
“Parachutes and Bandages” is one of the emotional high points of the whole record, all scar tissue and survival instinct wrapped in chiming guitars. You can practically hear the miles traveled in these songs. Not metaphorical miles. Actual miles. Snowstorms. Cheap motels. Bad coffee at gas stations somewhere outside Eau Claire.
And then the title track, “Still Here,” arrives like the mission statement for the entire album. Not triumphant. Not defeated. Just present. Alive. Scarred up but still standing in front of the amp while the speakers hum. That’s the whole philosophy of Midwestern rock and roll right there. The Replacements knew it. Soul Asylum knew it. The Gear Daddies knew it. And High on Stress know it too.
What makes Still Here hit so hard is the songwriting’s refusal to hide behind irony or studio gloss. High on Stress write songs the old-fashioned way: sharp hooks, emotional honesty, and enough grit in the machinery to make every chorus feel earned instead of manufactured. These songs are built from working-class frustration, late-night reflection, stubborn survival, and the kind of lived experience that can’t be faked. Nick Leet has a gift for writing lines that sound conversational until they suddenly land like revelations at 2 a.m. in a half-empty bar. There is heartbreak throughout the record, but it is never passive or self-pitying. Every song pushes forward with the determination of people who know life can knock you flat, but still insist on getting back up for one more round.
The record’s sound sits beautifully at the crossroads of power pop melody and ragged Midwestern rock and roll. You can hear echoes of many influences in the looseness and emotional urgency, while traces of the Minneapolis of the ’80s emerge in the album’s bruised sincerity and anthemic sweep. There is also that same blue-collar storytelling spirit that made so many indie bands so deeply enduring. But High on Stress never feels derivative. They take those influences and run them through their own sweat-soaked barroom filter until the result sounds completely alive and immediate.
The guitars are the engine that drives the entire album. Chad Wheeling layers ringing rhythm parts, rough-edged riffs, and sharp lead lines that never overpower the songs but constantly elevate them. Nothing here feels overproduced. The band wisely avoids sanding down the edges, allowing the album to breathe with the energy of a real rock band playing together in a room. Jim Soule’s bass lines give the songs warmth and movement, while Mark Devaraj’s drumming keeps everything charging forward with restless momentum. The production captures exactly what this kind of music needs: volume, tension, melody, and the feeling that things could come gloriously apart at any second.
Most importantly, Still Here understands something many modern rock records forget: great rock and roll should sound human. The imperfections matter. The strain in the vocals matters. The guitars buzzing just slightly against the red line matter. High on Stress makes music that feels worn-in rather than polished, and that humanity is exactly what gives the record its power. These songs do not chase trends or attempt reinvention. They simply trust the eternal force of loud guitars, unforgettable hooks, and emotional truth delivered without apology.
The miracle of is that it never sounds nostalgic even while carrying the DNA of every great Minneapolis bar band that ever staggered onto a stage with something to prove. This isn’t cosplay for aging punk survivors. This is a living, breathing rock and roll record made by musicians who still trust guitars, sweat, melody, and truth more than trends.
In an era where so much music feels algorithmically focus-grouped into emotional wallpaper, High on Stress have made an album that bleeds. And thank God for that.
We’ve Been Had Again: Matt Derda and The High Watts Find the Beautiful Exhaustion Inside an Uncle Tupelo Classic
There are songs that do not age so much as they sink deeper into the American soil, collecting ash, heartbreak, rusted-out Buicks, and the smell of bars where the neon has been buzzing since the the 1970s. “We’ve Been Had,” by Uncle Tupelo from their last studio album, Anodyne, is one of those songs. It always sounded less like a performance than a high energy Jeff Tweedy penned confession sung into a kitchen table at 2 a.m., after the fight, after the layoffs, after the dream has already packed its bags and left town.
And now comes Matt Derda and The High Watts, stumbling gloriously into that sacred Midwestern wreckage with a cover that understands the central truth of the song: this is not music for winners. This is music for survivors.
A lot of bands cover Uncle Tupelo like they are handling a museum artifact. They treat the song with reverence, polish it up, preserve it in climate control. That is exactly the wrong instinct. Uncle Tupelo never sounded preserved. They sounded like they were coming apart at the seams in real time. The original version carried the exhausted genius of Jay Farrar and Jeff Tweedy trying to invent an entirely new American language out of punk rock, Woody Guthrie, and recession-era despair.
Matt Derda and The High Watts wisely avoid trying to “improve” any of that. Instead, they lean into the bruised humanity of the track. The guitars ring with the kind of weathered sincerity that modern Americana often tries to imitate but rarely earns. There is no pure algorithmic precision here, no sterile Nashville overproduction with twenty-seven tracks of digitally perfected authenticity. The song breathes. It sways slightly. It feels inhabited.
Most importantly, Derda sings like somebody who has actually lost things.
That matters.
Too much contemporary roots music is performed by people who seem like they discovered hardship through expensive vinyl reissues and prestige television dramas about coal miners. But this performance carries the emotional fatigue the song demands. His voice does not chase grandeur. It settles into resignation. And resignation, in a song like this, becomes its own strange kind of wisdom.
The beauty of “We’ve Been Had” has always been its refusal to explode. Lesser bands would turn this into an end of the show over-the-top cathartic anthem, all crashing drums and emotional release. Uncle Tupelo knew better. Real disappointment rarely arrives with fireworks. Usually it arrives quietly, in bills stacked on counters, relationships going cold, and the realization that adulthood is mostly a long negotiation with compromise.
This is not to say that the original does not rock and hit hard, it does. The song is not an anthem, it is a sonic recognition that you can feel the bad times and curse into the headwinds.
Matt Derda and The High Watts understand depth and restraint. Their version simmers rather than detonates. The arrangement leaves space for silence and ache. That takes confidence. In the streaming era, where every song is engineered to grab attention within eleven seconds before listeners drift away to TikTok videos of raccoons stealing donuts, restraint can feel almost radical.
And maybe that is why this cover works so well right now.
Because we are once again living in an America that feels profoundly exhausted. The economic anxieties, the cultural fragmentation, the sense that ordinary people are forever getting conned by institutions, corporations, politics, and sometimes by their own dreams — all of it hums beneath this song like electrical interference. “We’ve Been Had” remains painfully current because America remains painfully current.
That was always the secret engine beneath Anodyne. Released just before Uncle Tupelo imploded, the album sounded like a band realizing both the promise and failure of the American project simultaneously. Alt-country would later become a genre industry unto itself — beard oil, boutique guitars, curated authenticity for upscale audiences — but Uncle Tupelo came from somewhere real. Their music had dirt under its fingernails.
Matt Derda and The High Watts reconnect the song to that lineage. Their cover does not feel nostalgic. It feels lived in. There is an enormous difference.
And that may be the highest compliment possible for a song like this. Because “We’ve Been Had” was never supposed to make you feel good. It was supposed to make you feel less alone.
your tuesday afternoon alternative 