There’s something quietly radical about the endurance of The Connells. In an industry that chews up regional bands and spits them out as trivia questions, they have persisted—less as nostalgia act, more as a living argument for melody, craft and community. Their appearance on Shaped by Sound, the PBS North Carolina series devoted to the state’s rich musical ecosystem, feels less like a retrospective than a homecoming.
The show’s format—interweaving live studio performances with intimate conversation—suits them. From the opening notes of “Scotty’s Lament” (00:33), you’re reminded that the Connells’ power has never been about bombast. It’s about architecture. Two brothers—guitarist and songwriter Mike Connell and bassist David Connell—alongside a tight circle of friends from Raleigh, built one of North Carolina’s most enduring bands not on spectacle but on structure: chiming guitars, melodic bass lines, and choruses that feel both inevitable and earned.
PBS NC wisely lets the songs breathe. “Carry My Picture” (05:37) shimmers in the studio lights, its emotional directness framed by Doug MacMillan’s unmistakable voice—clear, yearning, unforced. Keyboardist Steve Potak adds texture and lift, while guitarist Mike Ayers and drummer Chris Stephenson lock into a groove that’s crisp but never clinical. Trumpeter Mike Mole, a later addition to the lineup, colors the arrangements with subtle brass flourishes, a reminder that this band has always been willing to expand its palette without abandoning its core.
That core, as the full conversation reveals, was forged in Raleigh in the early 1980s. A group of friends playing local gigs, hauling gear into clubs, refining songs night after night. They were part of a regional circuit that rewarded perseverance more than hype. The Connells didn’t arrive fully formed; they were shaped by the rooms they played, the audiences who showed up, and the belief that songcraft mattered.
Then comes the moment casual viewers may be waiting for: “’74–’75” (11:22). The band’s surprise overseas hit—particularly in Europe—remains one of the great stories of American alternative rock’s second tier. Released in the mid-1990s, it didn’t explode immediately at home. But abroad, the song connected, its nostalgic meditation on lost youth and passing time resonating across language barriers. On Shaped by Sound, the performance feels less like a victory lap and more like a reckoning. The arrangement is lean; the melody carries the emotional weight. When MacMillan sings about photographs and the quiet ache of growing older, the years between then and now collapse.
What’s striking in the interview segments is the absence of cynicism. There’s no bitterness about near-misses or industry vagaries. Instead, the Connells speak about the slow accumulation of work—about studio memories, about learning how to layer guitars without cluttering a mix, about the discipline of editing a song until only what matters remains. They talk about how “Seven” (17:28) and “Over There” (22:40) fit into their evolving catalogue, each song a chapter in a longer narrative rather than a bid for reinvention.
This is where Shaped by Sound’s broader mission comes into focus. The series—produced by PBS North Carolina in partnership with the Department of Natural and Cultural Resources and presented by Come Hear North Carolina—spotlights artists across indie rock, hip-hop, R&B, alt-country, jazz, bluegrass, and folk. We highly recommend the episodes on Wednesday and Superchunk. By placing the Connells within this living, breathing statewide scene, the show resists the myth that meaningful music only comes from coastal capitals. North Carolina is not just a backdrop; it’s an incubator.
For the Connells, community is not branding. It’s origin story. Two brothers, a handful of friends, and a city that allowed them to grow at their own pace. That ethos still animates the band. You can hear it in the way the guitars interlock without competing, in the steady pulse of the rhythm section, in the democratic space each member occupies. No one is posturing. Everyone is serving the song.
In an era of algorithmic playlists and disposable singles, The Connells’ appearance on Shaped by Sound is a reminder that durability is its own form of rebellion. Songs built carefully, performed faithfully, and shared within a community can travel far—sometimes all the way across the Atlantic—and still return home intact.
If rock and roll has gravity, it’s the kind that pulls you sideways — toward the basement show, the overdriven amp, the song that sounds like it was recorded in a kitchen but somehow rearranges your emotional furniture. And for twenty years, Dayton/Columbus, Ohio’s Smug Brothers have been quietly defying that gravity by embracing it. Their forthcoming 20-year retrospective, Gravity Is Just A Way To Fall (out May 15, 2026), isn’t a victory lap so much as a beautifully scuffed scrapbook — a reminder that some of the best American guitar music of the last two decades has been hiding in plain sight.
To understand Smug Brothers, you have to start in Dayton and then take a drive to Columbus, Ohio — that stubbornly fertile patch of Midwest soil that has produced more sharp, strange guitar bands than the coasts would like to admit. Think Guided by Voices, think Times New Viking, think Cloud Nothings, think Heartless Bastards. Bands that made imperfection a matter of principle. Beautiful chaos. Bands that treated melody like contraband — something to be smuggled past the gatekeepers of taste.
Smug Brothers fit that lineage, but they also complicate it. What began in the mid-2000s as a scrappy recording project between singer/guitarist Kyle Melton and Darryl Robbins (of Motel Beds) hardened into something deeper and more resilient when legendary drummer Don Thrasher — yes, that Don Thrasher from Guided by Voices and Swearing at Motorists — joined the fold. Since 2009, Melton and Thrasher have formed the core of a band that feels less like a stable lineup and more like an ongoing conversation over music. Over the years, that dialogue has included a rotating cast — Marc Betts, Brian Baker, Shaine Sullivan, Larry Evans, Scott Tribble, Kyle Sowash, Ryan Shaffer — all contributing to a catalog that’s as collector-friendly as it is emotionally direct. Each player adding something distinctive to the records they worked on.
But here’s the beautiful irony: you don’t need to track down the cassettes, the limited LPs, or the out-of-print CDs. Gravity Is Just A Way To Fall does the curatorial work for you. Several tracks have been remastered; some have never appeared on vinyl; a few have never existed in any physical format at all. After twenty years, the band decided to “summarize the work up to this point.” That word — summarize — sounds almost academic. What they’ve actually done is distill the fever.
And what a fever it is.
Smug Brothers have always specialized in the kind of riff-driven indie pop that feels both handmade and cosmically aligned. The early lo-fi recordings hinted at greatness — fuzzed-out guitars, melodies that ducked and weaved, drums that sounded like they were daring the tape machine to keep up. But even in those rough cuts, you could hear the bones: a Beatlesque instinct for earworms, an affection for left turns, a refusal to sand down the serrated edges.
Over time, Melton’s recording finesse sharpened. He recorded and mixed much of this retrospective himself, with key collaborations from Darryl Robbins and Micah Carli. Everything was mastered by Carl Saff, whose touch has become something of a seal of quality in indie circles. The result is a set of songs that feel alive rather than embalmed. This isn’t nostalgia; it’s voltage.
What makes Smug Brothers matter — especially now — is their commitment to the album as an artifact and as an attitude that reflects the music within. The front cover, “Solutions Vary With Regions.” The back cover, “The Hungry Rainmaker” (Artwork by PHOTOMACH. Layout by Joe Patterson and PHOTOMACH). These aren’t afterthoughts; they’re part of the argument. In an era where music is often stripped of context and shuffled into algorithmic soup, Smug Brothers insist on the tactile, the visual, the deliberate. Even when the songs are streaming in invisible code, they carry the residue of collage and ink.
And then there are the songs themselves — all written by Kyle Melton. That authorship matters. Across two decades, Melton has built a body of work that feels diaristic without being self-indulgent. The hooks sneak up on you. The choruses don’t explode so much as insist. The guitars jangle, scrape, shimmer. The drums propel rather than pummel. You find yourself humming along before you realize you’ve been converted.
A retrospective like Gravity Is Just A Way To Fall lives or dies by sequencing, and Smug Brothers have always understood that an album isn’t just a container — it’s a mood swing you consent to. These thirteen tracks trace the band’s restless melodic intelligence, moving from punchy immediacy to sly introspection without ever losing that basement-show voltage. It opens with “Let Me Know When It’s Yes,” a title that feels like a thesis statement for the entire catalog — yearning wrapped in defiance. And to be fair, a song that we have often played on YTAA. The guitars chime with that familiar Midwestern shimmer, but there’s an undercurrent of impatience here, a sense that indecision is the real antagonist. It’s a perfect curtain-raiser: concise, hook-forward, emotionally ambivalent in the best way.
“Interior Magnets” (clocking in at an impressively tight 3:01) is classic Smug Brothers compression — all tension and release packed into a pop-song frame. The rhythm section locks in with that loose-tight chemistry Kyle Melton and Don Thrasher have refined over the years, while the melody spirals inward. It’s a song about attraction and repulsion, about the invisible forces that keep people circling each other. One of our favorite Smug Brothers’ songs, “Meet A Changing World,” expands the lens. There’s something almost anthemic about it — not stadium-anthemic, but neighborhood-anthemic. The guitars layer into a bright, bracing wash, as if the band is daring uncertainty to make the first move. In contrast, “It Was Hard To Be A Team Last Night” — a simply brilliant tune — pulls the focus back to the micro-level of human friction. It’s wry, a little bruised, propelled by a riff that sounds like it’s arguing with itself.
“Beethoven Tonight” is pure Smug Brothers mischief — high culture dragged through a fuzz pedal. The song plays with grandeur without surrendering to it, balancing a classical wink with garage-rock muscle. Then comes “Hang Up,” lean and kinetic, built around the kind of chorus that arrives before you’ve fully processed the verse. It’s sharp, unsentimental, and irresistibly replayable. “Javelina Nowhere” may be the record’s most evocative left turn. The title alone suggests a desert hallucination, and the arrangement follows through a slightly off-center, textural, humming with atmosphere. “Take It Out On Me” snaps the focus back into a tight melodic frame, pairing vulnerability with propulsion. It’s accusatory and generous at once, a hallmark of Melton’s songwriting.
“Silent Velvet” glides toward you, in contrast, with a softness in the title, grit in the execution. There’s a dream-pop shimmer brushing against serrated guitar lines. “Seemed Like You To Me” feels like an old photograph discovered in a jacket pocket: reflective, warm, edged with ambiguity. Late-album highlights “Pablo Icarus” and “Every One Is Really Five” showcase the band’s love of conceptual wordplay. The former fuses myth and modernity, soaring melodically before tilting toward the sun. The latter is rhythmically insistent, almost mathy in its phrasing, but anchored by a chorus that keeps it human.
Closing track “How Different We Are” is less a statement of division than an acknowledgment of complexity. The guitars don’t explode; they bloom. The rhythm section doesn’t crash; it carries. As finales go, it’s quietly expansive — a reminder that across twenty years, Smug Brothers have thrived on tension: between polish and rawness, intimacy and noise, gravity and lift.
If last year’s Stuck on Beta (2025) suggested a band still hungry, still refining, still pushing outward, this retrospective confirms the long arc. Smug Brothers didn’t burn out. They didn’t calcify. They kept writing, recording, releasing, playing shows, and deepening their chemistry. Gravity, in their hands, isn’t a force that pins you down; it’s the thing you learn to fall through with style.
There’s something profoundly Midwestern about that ethos. No grand manifestos. No self-mythologizing. Just songs that are stacked one after another, each carrying its own small revelation. In a culture obsessed with the new thing, retrospectives can feel like retirement parties. But Gravity Is Just A Way To Fall plays more like a dispatch from a band still in motion.
Twenty years in, Smug Brothers remind us that indie rock isn’t a genre so much as a practice: keep the overhead low, keep the guitars loud, keep the songs sharp, keep the faith. The noise may be louder than ever, the platforms more crowded, the attention spans shorter. But when a riff locks in, when a chorus lifts, when a drumbeat nudges your pulse into alignment, none of that matters.
Gravity is just a way to fall. And sometimes, falling is how you learn what’s been holding you up all along.
In 1974, Nick Lowe wrote a song that asks a question so earnest it borders on naïve: (What’s so funny ’bout) peace, love, and understanding? Lowe recorded the song with his band, Brinsley Schwarz, on their album The New Favourites of… Brinsley Schwarz.
When Elvis Costello later recorded it in 1978—with Lowe as producer—he “donated” it as a B-side secret cover to his producer’s A-side single. The song then became so popular that it was included on Costello’s next album in America, added as the final track to the US version of Costello’s 1979 album Armed Forces, replacing the song “Sunday’s Best”.
In Costello’s version the question took on a sharper edge. Sung with urgency and a trace of frustration, it sounded less like a slogan and more like a plea shouted into the wind.
Half a century later, the song still circulates, but its emotional register has shifted. What once sounded idealistic now risks being heard as faintly ridiculous. Peace, love, and understanding? In this economy?
The song’s humor was always there. Lowe didn’t write an anthem so much as a rhetorical shrug. The narrator isn’t triumphantly declaring belief in human goodness; the narrator sounds confused, even wounded. Someone trying to connect in a world that seems determined to misunderstand them. The repeated question—what’s so funny…?—suggests that someone, somewhere, is laughing. The joke, apparently, is on anyone who thinks empathy might still matter.
In the 1970s, this skepticism made sense. The optimism of the 1960s had curdled. Vietnam dragged on, Watergate unfolded, and rock music itself was getting louder, angrier, and more ironic by the minute. Punk was around the corner, sharpening its knives. Against that backdrop, asking for “peace and love” could sound hopelessly retro, like showing up to a street fight armed with a daisy.
But Lowe’s song never fully abandons the daisy. Instead, it holds it out stubbornly, as if daring the listener to swat it away. The narrator wants connection. They want understanding. A real need, a desperate urgency for someone—anyone—to meet them halfway. The joke, if there is one, is that these desires are treated as unserious, even embarrassing.
Fast forward to the Trump era, and the song begins to sound less like irony and more like anthropology. We now live in a political culture where empathy is routinely framed as dangerous, compassion is dismissed as weakness, and kindness is treated with deep suspicion. Caring too much is naïve; caring at all is often portrayed as manipulative. Understanding others is rebranded as “coddling.” Peace is for suckers. Love is sentimental nonsense. And understanding—well, that sounds like something an elite would do.
In this context, Lowe’s question lands differently. What’s so funny about peace, love, and understanding? The answer, it turns out, is that they violate the prevailing norms of performative toughness, constructed morality whose point is to judge others. Lowe’s lyrics plead to slow things down, to stop and look around you. They complicate simple stories about winners and losers. They ask us to imagine other people as human beings rather than as enemies, caricatures, or content.
The song’s narrator is lonely, but not in the grand, romantic sense. They’re lonely in a mundane, social way. They want to talk. They want to be heard. They wants to be understood without having to shout or sneer. This is not the loneliness of heroic alienation; it’s the loneliness of someone living in a world that has lost patience with vulnerability.
That loneliness feels oddly familiar today. Contemporary political discourse often rewards outrage over curiosity and certainty over reflection. Admitting uncertainty—or worse, seeking understanding—can be treated as a sign of weakness. In that environment, Lowe’s song sounds almost transgressive. It insists that connection is not only desirable but necessary, even if it makes you look foolish.
There’s also something delightfully inconvenient about the song’s moral framework. It doesn’t divide the world neatly into good people and bad people. Instead, it suggests that everyone is confused, defensive, and afraid—and that the solution is not domination but mutual recognition, mutual aid. This is not a message that lends itself easily to rally chants or cable news panels.
Perhaps that’s why the song feels so quaint now. Its moral universe assumes that understanding is possible and worth pursuing. It assumes that people might actually change if they felt heard. These are dangerous assumptions in a political culture built on permanent grievance and perpetual conflict.
And yet, the song persists. It keeps being covered, replayed, and rediscovered. It resists. Maybe that’s because its central question refuses to age out. Every era has its reasons for mocking peace, love, and understanding. Every era has its own version of the sneer. The song doesn’t argue back so much as it asks us to notice the sneer and sit with it uncomfortably.
In that sense, the song’s humor is less about punchlines than about exposure. It reveals how strange it is that basic human values need defending at all. Why is kindness funny? Why does empathy provoke eye-rolling? Why does understanding feel like a liability?
The joke, Lowe seems to suggest, isn’t on peace and love. It’s on a society that finds them laughable.
So maybe the song’s endurance isn’t ironic after all. Maybe it survives because, in moments when cruelty becomes fashionable and indifference is rebranded as realism, someone needs to keep asking the unfashionable question. Calmly. Repeatedly. Almost politely.
What’s so funny about peace, love, and understanding?
The unsettling answer, then and now, is not that they are absurd—but that we’ve worked very hard to pretend they are, so maybe… just maybe we can work to make them real.
If you spend enough time digging through Bandcamp tags at 2 a.m., you start to recognize the difference between lo-fi as an aesthetic and lo-fi as a way of seeing the world. The first is easy: tape hiss, gently warped guitars, a drum machine that sounds like it was rescued from a yard sale. The second is rarer and more interesting. It’s less about production tricks and more about a temperament—a willingness to let imperfection feel honest.
Dayton musician Luke Hummel, who will be appearing this week on Your Tuesday Afternoon Alternative with Dr. J from 4–5 p.m., belongs firmly in that second category.
Hummel has been drifting around the edges of Ohio’s DIY scene, releasing home-recorded EPs and singles that feel less like products than postcards. His songs arrive quietly, usually with little fanfare, and they tend to stick around longer than you expect. Listening to his catalog is a bit like thumbing through a box of Polaroids from someone else’s life: small moments, slightly faded, unexpectedly moving.
I’m supposed to have a vocabulary ready for this sort of thing. Words like “intimate,” “bedroom pop,” “hazy,” and “nostalgic.” All of them apply, and none of them quite capture what makes Hummel’s music worth paying attention to. The charm isn’t simply that it sounds homemade. It sounds lived in.
Take ‘woman,’ one of the standout tracks from his most recent release, dysphoria. The song barely rises above a murmur: a finger-picked guitar line, a barely-there beat, Hummel’s soft, conversational voice. On paper, it’s almost nothing. In practice, it’s the musical equivalent of a long exhale. You can hear the room around the song—the faint buzz of an amp, the subtle inconsistencies in the performance—and instead of feeling sloppy, those details make the track feel human.
That humanity is the through line of Hummel’s work. He writes about ordinary things: late shifts, half-remembered conversations, drives down Wilmington Pike after dark. But he treats those ordinary things with an uncommon tenderness. In an era when so much indie music strains for irony or grand statements, his songs feel refreshingly modest. They don’t demand your attention; they invite it.
Dayton, of course, has a long and strange musical history. This is the city that gave the world The Ohio Players, Guided by Voices, Brainiac, the Breeders, Hawthorne Heights, The New Old Fashioned, Oh Condor, The Creepy Crawlers—a place where scrappy experimentation has always thrived. Hummel fits comfortably into that lineage, even if his music is quieter than most of his hometown predecessors. Where Dayton rock once announced itself with blown-out guitars and basement-show chaos, Hummel represents the flip side: the reflective musician sitting on the back steps after the show, trying to make sense of everything.
One of the pleasures of lo-fi music is how it collapses the distance between artist and listener. Big studio records can feel like monuments; Hummel’s tracks feel like conversations. When he sings, it doesn’t sound like he’s performing so much as thinking out loud. In much of Luke’s music, it’s as if he is admitting that he’s better off being alone, ideas delivered so plainly thatit barely scans as a thought. Yet the idea lands with surprising weight. You believe him.
There’s also a gentle humor running through his work. Song titles like “fresh face” and “air dry clay” suggest a songwriter who understands his own anxieties well enough to smile at them. That balance—between melancholy and warmth, self-doubt and self-acceptance—is difficult to pull off without tipping into sentimentality. Hummel manages it with a light touch.
Hearing this kind of music on the radio can feel almost subversive. Commercial airwaves are designed for clarity and volume; lo-fi thrives on softness and texture. That’s what makes shows like Your Tuesday Afternoon Alternative with Dr. J so valuable. We carve out space for artists who operate outside the usual promotional machinery, musicians who might never trend on TikTok but who are building small, meaningful audiences one listener at a time.
For Hummel, a live radio appearance is less about plugging a product than about sharing a process. His performances tend to be relaxed and unvarnished, the musical equivalent of inviting strangers into his living room. I suspect that on the show, he’ll talk about quiet guitars, about recording on aging laptops, about the challenge of making art while holding down an ordinary Midwestern life. Those details matter because they’re inseparable from the songs themselves.
Lo-fi music often gets dismissed as minor or provisional—a stepping stone to something bigger and cleaner. Hummel’s work argues the opposite. There’s a quiet confidence in his refusal to polish away the rough edges. The imperfections aren’t problems to be fixed; they’re part of the story he’s telling.
In the end, that may be the best way to understand Luke Hummel: not as a local curiosity or a genre exercise, but as a careful observer translating everyday experiences into gentle, durable songs. His music doesn’t try to change the world. It tries to keep it company.
And on a Tuesday afternoon in Dayton, that feels like more than enough.
I have been watching a lot of music movies and documentaries. One of the most interesting music films I have seen is Deliver Me From Nowhere.
So, sure… I’m supposed to talk about a movie here, Deliver Me From Nowhere, which already sounds like a bootleg lyric scribbled on a diner napkin at 3 a.m., which is exactly right, because if you’re going to make a movie about Bruce Springsteen and you don’t start from the place where he’s half-lost, half-feral, recording songs alone with ghosts rattling around the room, running around his mind, then you’re just making another shrine, another museum exhibit with the volume turned down.
The trick with Springsteen—especially for film—is that he’s been embalmed while still breathing. Bandanas, stadiums, flag-waving, the myth of blue-collar transcendence with a backbeat you can chant to while buying merch. All of that is real enough, but it’s also the loudest, safest version of him. Deliver Me From Nowhere wisely points the camera in the opposite direction: toward the guy sitting alone with a cheap recorder, a harmonica, and a head full of the past that we all are trying to outrun from when we were kids, running as much from as well as to American dread. Toward Nebraska.
Let’s get this out of the way right now: Nebraska is one of the best albums Bruce Springsteen ever made. Maybe the best. And before the E Street choir starts humming “Born to Run” in protest, understand that this isn’t a knock on the big stuff. Those records are monuments. Nebraska is a crime scene. And crime scenes tell you more about a culture than monuments ever do.
The movie—at least in spirit, and somewhat in execution—gets that Nebraska wasn’t a detour or a demo tape that accidentally escaped. It was a confrontation. Springsteen stares straight into the cracked mirror of American masculinity and says, “Okay, let’s not lie about this.” No big band. No catharsis-by-chorus. Just flat voices telling flat stories about people who don’t get saved, or don’t even believe in salvation anymore (honestly, which is worse?).
If you want to understand why Deliver Me From Nowhere matters, you have to understand that Nebraska is a record made by someone who had already “won.” The success machine was humming. He could have turned the crank again and printed another anthem. Instead, he made a record where the American Dream shows up already foreclosed, the lawn brown, the marriage strained, the highway leading nowhere in particular.
That’s not an accident. That’s a choice. And it’s a deeply uncommercial one, which is what makes it all the more meaningful.
What the movie seems to grasp—again, fingers crossed as it doesn’t chicken out—is that Springsteen’s genius isn’t just empathy. A lot of critics stop there, because empathy is safe. Empathy doesn’t ask uncomfortable questions. But Nebraska isn’t just empathetic; it’s accusatory. Not in a preachy way, but in the way a good true-crime story accuses you by refusing to tidy itself up.
Take the title track. A killer talks. No moral lesson. No orchestral swell telling you how to feel. Just a voice explaining itself, almost bored, almost numb over the fact that the world is a place full of mean, anger, and hostility. That’s radical. Rock music, especially in the early ’80s, wasn’t supposed to do that. Rock was about triumph, even when it pretended to be about suffering. Nebraska lets suffering sit there without redemption, like an unpaid bill that you read in the dark after the electricity has been turned off.
A film about this period has to resist the urge to explain too much. Explanation is the enemy of dread. If Deliver Me From Nowhere turns into a neat psychological case study—“here’s why Bruce felt sad”—then it misses the point. The power of Nebraska is that it doesn’t psychoanalyze its characters. It listens to them. And sometimes listening is more disturbing than understanding.
What makes Nebraska one of Springsteen’s best albums (I know, I already said that) is precisely what made it risky: it’s unfinished in all the right ways. The tape hiss is part of the meaning. The thin sound isn’t lo-fi nostalgia; it’s a sonic moral choice. These songs don’t deserve polish because their lives don’t have it. You don’t add reverb to a confession. You do not turn up a whisper, you lean in and listen hard.
If the movie captures that—if it lets silence do some of the talking—it could be one of the rare music films that understands restraint. Most biopics are loud because they’re afraid. Afraid the audience will get bored, afraid the myth won’t survive scrutiny. But Nebraska survives because it’s small. It’s the sound of someone realizing that being heard by millions doesn’t mean you’ve said what you needed to say. There’s also something profoundly American about the timing. Nebraska comes out in the early Reagan years, when optimism was being sold wholesale again, when flags were back in fashion, and the word “hardship” was being politely escorted off the stage. Springsteen responds not with protest anthems but with stories about people who don’t make it into speeches. That’s political without being programmatic. It’s sociology disguised as folk noir.
And here’s where the movie has an opportunity most Springsteen narratives avoid: showing that this record isn’t an aberration but a key. You can draw a line from Nebraska forward—to The Ghost of Tom Joad, to the quieter corners of Tunnel of Love, to every moment when Springsteen chooses unease over uplift. Nebraska isn’t the opposite of the stadium-Bruce; it’s the engine room underneath it.
In the end, Deliver Me From Nowhere doesn’t need to convince us that Springsteen is important. That argument was settled decades ago. What it needs to do is remind us that importance isn’t always loud, and greatness isn’t always communal. Sometimes it’s one guy, alone, trying to tell the truth without a safety net.
That’s why Nebraska endures. Not because it’s bleak, but because it’s honest. It refuses to fake hope, and in doing so, it earns whatever hope you find in it. If the movie understands that—if it trusts the audience to sit with discomfort, with ambiguity, with the hiss of the tape still running—then it won’t just be another rock biopic. It’ll be something rarer: a film that knows the quietest records sometimes make the most noise.
How often have you been asked to name your top ten albums, or debated which records you’d take to a desert island? The “desert island album” is a familiar, hypothetical concept among music fans: the one record you could listen to endlessly and never tire of. It’s simply a way of naming your most cherished, all-time favorite album. For Dr. J, one of those perfect records is Counting Crows’ 1993 debut, August and Everything After.
Some records arrive like polite guests, shaking hands with the radio, smiling for the cameras, making sure not to spill anything on the carpet. And then some records kick in the door at 3 a.m., overwhelmed on their own feelings, bleeding a little, asking you if you’ve ever actually lived or if you’ve just been killing time until something breaks your heart. August and Everything After is the latter. It doesn’t so much introduce Counting Crows as it announces them, like a cracked-voiced preacher stumbling into town with a suitcase full of secrets and a head full of weather. That it’s their first record feels almost obscene. Bands aren’t supposed to sound this fully formed, this bruised, this emotionally articulate right out of the gate. This is supposed to take years of failure, challenges, and ill-advised love affairs. But here it is, fully alive, staring you down.
If genius means anything in rock and roll—and it does, despite all the sneering irony we’re trained to wear like armor—it means the ability to translate private confusion into public communion. Adam Duritz doesn’t just write songs; he writes confessions that somehow feel like yours, even when you’ve never lived in California, never stood on a street corner at night wondering who you were supposed to be, never tried to make sense of love after it’s already gone feral and bitten you. These songs don’t explain feelings; they inhabit them. They sit in the mess. They let the awkward silences linger. They don’t clean up after themselves. And that’s why people keep coming back.
“Round Here” opens the album not with a bang but with a question mark. It’s a song about dislocation, about being young enough to believe that identity is something you can find if you just look hard enough, and old enough to know that it might already be slipping away. “She says she’s tired of life, she must be tired of something,” Duritz sings, and it’s not melodrama—it’s reportage. He’s documenting the emotional static of a generation that grew up on promises it didn’t quite believe. There’s no manifesto here, no slogans. Just the sound of someone pacing around a parking lot trying to figure out how to be real in a world that feels increasingly wrong and staged.
And that’s the trick of August and Everything After: it sounds intimate without being precious, expansive without being bombastic. The band plays like they’re backing a nervous breakdown that somehow learned how to swing. The guitars shimmer and sigh; the rhythm section keeps things grounded, like a friend who knows when to let you rant and when to hand you a glass of water. T Bone Burnett’s production (Burnett also contributed guitar and vocals to the record) gives everything room to breathe, which is crucial because these songs need the oxygen. Smother them, and they’d collapse into self-pity. Instead, they hover in that dangerous space between vulnerability and confidence, where the best rock records live.
“Omaha” — one of my favorite songs on the record — is where the album first threatens to explode. It’s restless, jittery, propelled by a sense that staying still is a kind of death. Duritz sounds like someone running not toward something but away from the version of himself he’s afraid to become. This is a recurring theme throughout the record: movement as salvation, travel as therapy, geography as a stand-in for emotional states. Cities become characters, roads become metaphors, and every mile marker is another chance to start over, or at least pretend you can.
Then there’s “Mr. Jones,” the song that doomed the band to a lifetime of misunderstanding by becoming a hit. People heard it as an anthem of ambition, a singalong about wanting to be famous, to be seen. But listen closer, and it’s a song about emptiness, about mistaking visibility for connection. “We all want to be big stars,” Duritz sings, and it’s not triumph—it’s confession. The song pulses with the anxiety of someone who knows that being watched isn’t the same as being known. That radio stations turned it into a party song is almost beside the point; the genius is that it works despite the misreading, smuggling existential dread onto pop playlists like contraband.
The middle stretch of the album is where August and Everything After really earns its indispensability. “Perfect Blue Buildings” and “Anna Begins” slow things down, letting the emotional weight settle in your chest. These are songs about relationships not as fairy tales but as negotiations, as ongoing attempts to be less alone without losing yourself entirely. “Anna Begins” in particular feels like eavesdropping on someone thinking out loud, trying to talk himself into love and out of fear at the same time. It’s hesitant, messy, human. The song doesn’t resolve so much as it exhales, which is exactly right. Love rarely comes with neat conclusions. And remember, this is the band’s first record — wow.
What makes this record one that everyone has either owned, borrowed, stolen, or at least absorbed through cultural osmosis is how unapologetically it centers feeling in an era that was increasingly suspicious of it. The early ’90s had irony for days. Grunge made disaffection fashionable; alternative radio thrived on detachment. Counting Crows, meanwhile, walked in waving their emotions like a white flag and dared you to flinch. They didn’t hide behind distortion or sarcasm. They sang about longing, loneliness, and the aching desire to matter. And people listened because, beneath all the posturing, that’s what everyone was dealing with anyway.
“Time and Time Again” and “Rain King” push the album toward something almost mythic. Duritz begins to sound less like a diarist and more like a prophet with stage fright, evoking imagery that feels both biblical and personal at the same time. “Rain King” is particularly a masterclass in building atmosphere. It swells and recedes, gathering momentum until it feels like the sky might actually open up. It’s about control and surrender, about wanting to command the elements of your life while knowing that you’re mostly at their mercy. It’s the sound of someone learning to live with uncertainty rather than trying to conquer it.
And then there’s “A Murder of One,” the closer that doesn’t tie things up so much as leave them humming in your bloodstream. It’s expansive, reflective, tinged with regret but not crushed by it. Ending the album here feels intentional: after all the searching, all the restless motion, the record concludes not with answers but with a kind of hard-won acceptance. Life is complicated. Love is risky. Identity is a moving target. The best you can do is keep singing, keep reaching out, keep trying to make sense of the mess.
What’s staggering is that this is a debut. Not a tentative first step, not a collection of demos dressed up for release, but a fully realized statement of purpose. Counting Crows sound like a band that already knows who they are, even as their songs wrestle with uncertainty. That tension—between confidence and doubt, polish and rawness—is what gives August and Everything After its staying power. It feels lived-in, like these songs existed long before they were recorded, waiting for the right moment to surface.
In the end, the genius of August and Everything After isn’t just in its songwriting or performances, though both are exceptional. It’s in its insistence that emotional honesty is a form of rebellion. That talking about loneliness, about the hunger for connection, about the struggle to define yourself in a world that keeps changing the rules—that all of this matters. This is a record that people return to at different stages of their lives and hear something new each time, because it grows with you. Or maybe it just reminds you of who you were when you first heard it, and who you thought you might become.
Either way, it’s indispensable. Not because it tells you what to feel, but because it reminds you that feeling deeply is still possible. And for a debut album to pull that off—to make itself a permanent fixture in the emotional furniture of rock and roll—that’s not just impressive. That’s a small miracle, wrapped in August light and delivered just in time.
Mike Bankhead’s “Something That I Can’t Explain” doesn’t so much begin as it leaks out of the speakers, a humid, half-remembered confession that carries a feeling from basements, barroom carpets, and the ghost of every rehearsal space Dayton ever forced into existence. You don’t listen to this song so much as you wander into it, like opening the wrong door in a familiar house and finding a room you forgot was there. That’s Bankhead’s trick: he makes the local feel mythic and the mythic feel like it’s leaning against a busted amp, waiting for the others to arrive.
Dayton has always been one of America’s great under-credited noise factories, and yup, I am ready to die on that hill. We gave the world funk, post-punk, industrial weirdness, and enough basement-bred genius to stock a dozen glossy documentaries that will never get made. Mike Bankhead sits right in the middle of that lineage—not as a tourist or a revivalist, but as a lifer. He’s one of those musicians who doesn’t just play in a scene; he is part of its circulatory system, hauling gear, showing up for other people’s gigs, recording, mixing, encouraging, needling, and generally making sure the whole messy organism keeps breathing. Every scene needs someone like Mike, part fan, part musician, part reminder of the reasons people do this.
“Something That I Can’t Explain” sounds like it was written by someone who’s been around long enough to know that the best songs aren’t about clarity; they’re about staying with the confusion. Sometimes the grey area matters more than the easy answers. The melody lurches forward like it’s got something urgent to tell you and then second-guesses itself halfway through the sentence. The vocals don’t demand your attention—they sidle up to it, muttering truths they’re not totally sure they’re allowed to say. This is not stadium rock. This is backroom metaphysics.
What makes Bankhead essential to Dayton isn’t just that he writes songs like this; it’s that he’s helped create the conditions where songs like this can exist at all. Scenes don’t survive on big breaks. They survive on people who show up. Bankhead has been one of those gravitational figures who make it easier for others, strangers, and the less confident artists to take the leap. When someone tells you, “Yeah, Mike’s involved,” you know it means things will actually happen—records will get finished, shows will get booked, weird ideas will be taken seriously instead of laughed out of the room.
There’s a Dayton-specific emotional weather system in “Something That I Can’t Explain.” It’s in the way the song refuses to resolve cleanly, the way it keeps circling a feeling instead of pinning it down. Dayton’s a town that’s been promised a lot and delivered just enough to keep hoping. Bankhead understands that tension, and he doesn’t try to smooth it over. He lets it hum, like feedback you don’t quite know how to kill without losing the song.
Lester Bangs used to say that the best rock and roll made you feel less alone in your own weirdness. Bankhead does that, but he does it with a Dayton accent—gritty, affectionate, slightly suspicious of success, deeply loyal to the people who were there before anyone else cared. “Something That I Can’t Explain” isn’t just a song; it’s a little flare shot up from a city that keeps reinventing itself in basements and back rooms. And Mike Bankhead, bless him, keeps striking the matches.
The Cords: how a band turns pop instincts into craft
If rock and roll really is dead, then The Cords clearly missed the memo, because their new self-titled record kicks the coffin lid open, steals the eulogy notes, and sets the funeral pyre dancing like it’s 1979 again and tomorrow doesn’t exist. This thing isn’t just a debut—it’s a declaration, a sugar-buzzed jolt of pop-bright indie rock that doesn’t pretend to be cool, doesn’t hide behind irony, and doesn’t give a damn about whatever trend some influencer is spoon-feeding their followers this week. It’s melody as oxygen, chorus as lifeline, guitars strummed like they’re trying to shake loose every last excuse you’ve ever had for not feeling something. And thank God for that—because in a year drowning in algorithmic uselessness, The Cord showed up with color, conviction, and the kind of hooks that tattoo themselves on your spine: refreshingly infectious, all-ages indie-pop and jangle pop collection with bright, melodic hooks and irresistible harmonies.
When a band chooses to release a self-titled record deep into a career or at a moment of reinvention, it’s rarely an accident. A self-title asks listeners to pay attention: this is who we are, for better or worse. On The Cords, that gesture reads less like self-importance and more like quiet confidence. The album crystallizes a group whose greatest gift is the paradox of seeming easy: songs that land as immediate, catchy pop but reveal, on repeat listens, careful craftsmanship — arrangements that balance lift and restraint, choruses that stick without shouting, and lyrics that prize specificity over cliché.
This review explores why The Cords has quickly emerged as one of 2025’s most beloved releases (or at least for us at Your Tuesday Afternoon Alternative), examining how the record was made, what each musician brings to its radiant clarity, and how the band’s sound fits squarely—and confidently—within contemporary indie-pop and power-pop currents. Reviewers have praised the album’s effervescent hooks, bright harmonies, and early-Beatles-meets-C86 charm, calling it a reminder that joy, immediacy, and craft can still feel revelatory. By looking closely at the songs and the meticulous yet exuberant musicianship behind them, this piece makes the case echoed by critics across the board: The Cords proves that in an era of over-processed noise, genuine craftsmanship not only still matters—it stands out.
Who are The Cords?
Asking “Who are The Cords?” is entirely reasonable, especially given how quickly the duo seemed to burst onto the 2025 music landscape with a fully formed sound and a debut record that feels more like the work of seasoned veterans than newcomers. Their name appeared almost overnight in reviews, playlists, and year-end lists, prompting curious listeners to wonder how a band this polished could arrive with so little advance fanfare. The question reflects both genuine intrigue and the natural impulse to understand the people behind a record that has connected so widely, so suddenly. Ok, ok… let’s answer the question directly: The Cords are a rising Scottish indie-pop sister duo, Eva (guitar, vocals) and Grace (drums and percussion) Tedeschi, known for their catchy, jangle-pop sound reminiscent of ’80s/90s C86 indie, featuring loud guitars, drums, and infectious melodies. They gained buzz in the UK indie scene, playing with major bands like Belle and Sebastian, and released their self-titled debut album this year, solidifying their place as exciting new musicians with a fresh take on classic indie pop.
So, sure, The Cords are a rising indie rock band whose self-titled debut has pushed them from regional curiosity to one of the year’s most talked-about new acts. That love comes honestly. It is built around a shared love of sharp pop melodies, jangling guitars, and choruses designed to ignite rooms both small and large. The band blends classic power-pop instincts with the earnest shimmer of modern indie. While each member brings a distinct musical background to the project—ranging from DIY home-recording scenes to more polished studio work—they come together with a unity of purpose: to make songs that feel immediate, heartfelt, and boldly melodic. Their chemistry is unmistakable, the kind of collaborative spark that makes a first record sound less like a beginning and more like a band arriving fully formed.
A band in the room, not a solo project on a laptop
One of the first things you notice about The Cords is its sense of feel. The record breathes the way a live band breathes: near-mic’d guitars trade phrases, the bass doesn’t merely hold down the root but sings counterlines, and the drums are both precise and human — they click when they should and push when the song needs momentum. That sonic chemistry suggests an actual group in a room rather than a single songwriter piling tracks onto a click-track.
On this record, the players are careful taste-makers: a lead vocalist who carries the melody with an effortless honesty; a guitar riff is economical but unforgettable; bass lines that anchor and color in equal measure; a drummer who doubles as a dynamic architect; and occasional keys and backing vocals that thicken textures without smothering them. The album’s production is shaped in large part by Jonny Scott and Simon Liddell, who not only handled the recording and overall sonic direction but also contributed additional bass and keyboard parts. Their involvement adds depth, texture, and subtle melodic detail, helping the songs land with a clarity and fullness that elevate the duo’s core ideas. That production leans toward warm melody rather than slick overprocessing — vocals swirl, the guitars ring, and harmonies bloom in native stereo. The effect is immediate and intimate, like a favorite radio station that somehow still surprises you with classic Scottish indie pop, bringing energy and authenticity to the genre.
Classic hooks, modern precision
Musically, The Cords live at the intersection of indie-pop and modern indie rock. If power-pop is the art of building irresistible choruses around smart songcraft, this record nods to that lineage while keeping its feet in the present. The guitars often prefer jangle and concise counter-motifs over endless studio tinkering with reverb; the drum sounds favor snap and presence within the mix; the bass is melodic. Production choices keep the songs forward and communicative.
What’s clever about the album is how it uses contrast. A sleek, hummable chorus might follow a verse that’s rhythmically skittish or harmonically unusual; a bright hook will sit atop an unexpectedly rueful lyric. That push-and-pull keeps songs from flattening into mere earworms. The band knows how to write a chorus that hooks on first listen, but they’re more interested in building shoulders for those hooks to stand on so the singer can mean what she has to say within the sway of the song.
Ordinary detail, emotional honesty
Lyric writing on The Cords resists broad platitudes. Instead of grand pronouncements, these songs live in particulars: a lit street outside an apartment window, the wrong song playing on a cheap jukebox, saying goodbye, not knowing what to say. Those details anchor the songs emotionally; they make choruses feel earned rather than handed to the listener.
Themes recur — the ache of imperfect relationships, the friction between wanting to leave and wanting to belong, the peculiar loneliness of modern urban life — but the band treats these themes as lived experience, not albums’ worth of slogans. There’s tenderness here, an ability to hold both humor and regret in the same line. When the chorus opens up into sing-along clarity, the words are often small but direct, the kind that a listener can latch onto and repeat in daily life.
Rather than a list of titles, the album’s architecture is worth noting: it opens with a confident, urgent cut, “Fabulist” that announces the band’s melodic ambitions; it centers itself with a pair of mid-album songs that reveal its lyrical depth while stilling rocking (“You” and “I’m Not Sad”); and it closes with a return to the jangle with a reflective piece that leaves more questions than answers, “When You Said Goodbye” — a satisfying structure that mirrors human experience rather than manufactured catharsis.
The opener works as a thesis statement: brisk tempo, jangly guitars, a pre-chorus that sets up the payoff, and a chorus that lands like a bright bruise — it’s immediate and impossible to ignore. The arrangement focuses on guitar and drums, yet leaves space for letting the lyric breathe before swelling into a harmony-rich chorus. That dynamic — economy vs. abundance — is where the record’s emotional intelligence shows. The listener feels tugged along rather than pushed.
Musicianship: pop instincts, instrumental care
One of the pleasures of The Cords is hearing instrumentalists who understand restraint within the landscape of Scottish indie pop. The lead guitar rarely indulges in long solos; instead, short melodic figures become hooks in themselves. The bass often carries melodic interest in places a secondary vocal might have; the drums use space and silence as effectively as fills and cymbal swells. These are not instrumental showpieces; they are choices made to serve the song.
Backing vocals are used sparingly but to great effect: stacked parts in choruses heighten the sense of communal voice, whereas single harmony lines in bridges add emotional nuance. Keys and synths make tasteful cameos — a pad here, a tuned key there — supporting rather than competing. The overall musicianship communicates a band comfortable with pop’s mechanics yet allergic to disposable glitz.
Production plays a crucial role in a record like this. The engineers and producers behind The Cords opt for a live-room warmth; you can hear the string of the guitar and the breath before the vocal. The mix privileges midrange clarity so the melodies cut through without overwhelming the low end. Transients on percussion are preserved to give the drums snap, and the stereo image is used to place instruments in space rather than to dazzle with effects. That sonic philosophy — preserve the room, let the song guide the mix — keeps the album feeling human. It’s pop music with a pulse rather than sterilized pop.
For whom this record is made
The Cords will appeal to listeners who prize tunes that reward attention. Fans of classic power-pop and jangly indie rock will find the hooks irresistible, but casual listeners will also appreciate the plainspoken choruses and immediate melodies. The record sits comfortably between the worlds of radio friendliness and indie credibility: radio programmers get singable choruses; critics get craft and nuance.
Younger listeners who grew up with playlist culture may be surprised by how an album built around consistent melodic logic can still create small shocks of recognition — the kind of “I know this” feeling that a succinct chorus can produce. Older listeners will appreciate the band’s affinity for tradition without nostalgia.
This record matters
In a popular music moment dominated by hyper-production, viral singles, and an ever-shortening attention span, a record like The Cords is quietly radical. It insists on songcraft: beginning, middle, and end; it assumes the listener will return; it foregrounds human voices and real instruments. The album’s lack of pretense is, paradoxically, its statement. It shows how pop can be both pleasurable and thoughtful, how choruses can be cathartic without being manipulative.
For a listener who wants immediacy without cheapness — a hook that doesn’t insult intelligence — The Cords offers reassurance: good songs still matter, and a band playing together still sounds like something worth cherishing.
A self-titled album is a claim. The Cords lay claim to that title gently but firmly: here is a band confident in its pop instincts and literate in its emotional choices. The record’s charm rests on the marriage of classic pop construction with modern precision, the musicians’ disciplined instincts, and songwriting that values detail over slogan. It isn’t a manifesto; it’s a practice. And in an era of flash, there’s a particular pleasure in watching a band quietly do the work of making songs that last.
I’ll just say it: Grand Epiphaniesis one of the most human records you’re going to hear in 2025, and maybe one of the few that doesn’t insult your intelligence along the way. While many releases this year seem hell-bent on either drowning themselves in studio varnish or hiding behind hipster irony, Kim Ware walks in like someone who’s survived a few things and isn’t afraid to speak plainly about the bruises. These songs don’t howl, they don’t posture—they breathe. And in an era when pop throws confetti over every emotional breakdown and calls it catharsis, Ware has the guts to sit with the silence, to let the ache settle, to make music that’s actually about feeling something and not just Instagramming the wreckage. This is a record that believes in sincerity, and for that alone, it hits like a revelation.
Deepening the craft: Why Grand Epiphanies matters
When Grand Epiphanies was released in September 2025 via Fort Lowell Records, it arrived not as a gimmick or a throwback — but as an earnest statement from a songwriter who has spent nearly two decades refining her voice. For fans of Kim Ware and The Good Graces, the EP represents both continuity and evolution. It retains the emotional honesty and Southern-tinged indie-folk roots listeners have come to expect, while embracing fuller arrangements, sharper lyrical clarity, and a maturity of perspective that only time (and living) can provide.
What emerges is a collection of songs that treat heartbreak, regret, longing, and self-doubt not as melodrama, but as shared human truths. Ware doesn’t write to shock, to boast, or to gloss over. She writes to reach — to offer a mirror to listeners, and maybe a little company in whatever dark or quiet moment they find themselves. This EP is a reminder: vulnerability doesn’t have to be pretty. It just has to be honest.
The team: musicians behind the music
Although Kim Ware remains the creative heart of The Good Graces — vocals, guitar, and songwriting — Grand Epiphanies is a collaborative effort, supported by skilled players and producers who understand how to highlight nuance rather than mask it.
On this release, producers and multi-instrumentalists Steven Fiore and Justin Faircloth play central roles, adding guitar, piano, keyboards, bass, and even backing vocals, and in doing so, help shape the record’s rich but still intimate sonic layers. Their presence builds on a long tradition within The Good Graces: throughout previous albums, different collaborators have drifted in and out of the lineup, each contributing something distinct to the band’s evolving sound. That kind of fluid membership has always been part of the project’s identity, keeping Kim Ware’s songwriting deeply personal while allowing the music itself to remain open, flexible, and continually renewed rather than fixed in a single form.
This flexible model echoes what Ware once said about the band: not as a fixed entity but as a “very talented group of friends,” coming together when inspiration, time, and circumstance allow.
In practice, this means Grand Epiphanies doesn’t feel overproduced or manufactured. Instead, it feels like friends gathered in a room, listening, playing, and creating together — a mood that invites trust and intimacy rather than distance and gloss.
Sound and style: picking up old threads, weaving new ones
Listeners familiar with earlier Good Graces albums — from Sunset Over Saxapahaw (2008) through Ready (2022) — will find much that’s familiar on Grand Epiphanies. Ware’s Southern-tinged twang, her blend of folk, country, and indie-rock sensibilities, the unhurried melodies, the earnest vocal delivery — these remain essential.
Yet this EP also feels more expansive than some earlier efforts. The production, led by Fiore and Faircloth, layers guitars, piano, subtle harmonies, and occasionally banjo or other acoustic touches to build a richer emotional landscape around Ware’s voice. Although personal taste will always shape which tracks linger the longest, several songs on Grand Epiphanies stand out for the way they crystallize what the record does best. Take the track “Old/New”: its guitar strumming and vocal lines evoke late-afternoon melancholy, but as the song unfolds, piano and backing instrumentation widen the space — giving the listener room to sink into memory, longing, and possibility. unfolds like a gentle meditation on what we leave behind and what we carry forward, its subtle layers of instrumentation creating room for genuine emotional reflection.
“Wish I Would’ve Missed You” approaches heartbreak without melodrama, turning regret and longing into something more like the experience of leafing through old photographs—quiet, tender, and unexpectedly overwhelming. And then there is “Missed the Mark,” a song that speaks directly to the insecure, the hopeful, and the uncertain, offering both an appeal for human connection and a confession of imperfection that feels disarmingly honest.
The choice to include a cover — a reimagined version of Some Guys Have All the Luck — also signals the confidence in balancing reverence and reinvention. On this EP, the cover doesn’t feel like a novelty; instead, it sits comfortably alongside Ware’s originals, transformed gently to align with the EP’s mood and tone. “Some Guys Have All the Luck” serves as a bridge between past and present, inspiration and reinterpretation. It doesn’t overshadow the original; it complements it, reminding listeners that songs evolve just as people do.
Overall, the sound of Grand Epiphanies suggests maturity without restraint, emotional depth without melodrama — the kind of record that lingers long after the final note fades.
The gift in the songs: everyday life, honest reflection, and human connection
What often sets the best singer-songwriters apart is a gift for translating ordinary moments into emotional touchstones. On Grand Epiphanies, Kim Ware exercises that gift with clarity and courage. Rather than lean on clichés — heartbreak melodrama, romantic tropes — she mines the subtler, messier terrain of real experiences: regret, nostalgia, second chances, self-doubt, hope, and quiet resilience. Many of these themes resonate universally: longing and loneliness, memory and loss, the ache of roads not taken, the fragile optimism that hums beneath everyday life.
In “Wish I Would’ve Missed You”, Ware reflects on regret and longing with a spare lyricism that strikes more powerfully than most breakup ballads. “Spent it all on grad school… every now and then a memory stops me in my tracks,” she sings — not flaunting heartbreak but confessing to being human, vulnerable, flawed.
Elsewhere — in songs like “Missed the Mark” — she turns the lens inward, wrestling with feelings of inadequacy, uncertainty, and the desperate hope to connect. “I scan the room and hope the messages I send / Somehow reach a brand new stranger, and they become a brand new friend,” she confesses, exposing the artist’s fear and longing behind performing.
The album doesn’t promise closure. It doesn’t pretend that “everything works out.” Instead, it offers companionship: a voice that says, “I feel a lot of this too.” In that way, Grand Epiphanies avoids insulting the listener’s intelligence by offering simplistic solutions. It acknowledges complexity. It honors pain. And it believes in healing — not as a fairy tale but as a slow, sometimes messy process.
How Grand Epiphanies compares to previous work
To appreciate Grand Epiphanies, it helps to see it against the backdrop of Kim Ware’s musical journey. The Good Graces began in 2006 after Ware picked up an old acoustic guitar and started composing songs rooted in Southern indie-folk traditions.
Earlier records, like Close to the Sun (2014), showed a willingness to experiment — to mix folk and country, to play with ambient touches, drum machines, and subtle electronic textures. But even then, the core remained familiar: Ware’s voice, simple guitar patterns, emotionally candid lyrics.
With Ready (2022), the songwriting felt sharper, more intentional; melodies caught between wistful longing and restless urgency. Yet Grand Epiphanies pushes further. The songs are more cohesive; the instrumentation more deliberate; the emotional stakes clearer. Listeners can trace how time, experience, and loss have deepened Ware’s perspective.
This latest EP also suggests a renewed trust in collaboration. Rather than relying solely on acoustic minimalism — the refuge of vulnerability — Ware embraces fuller arrangements. The result isn’t flashy, but it feels abundant in feeling. It’s as though she’s saying: “These aren’t just my stories alone anymore; they are ours.”
Why Grand Epiphanies feels especially relevant in 2025
We live in a time when noise is constant — in our politics, our social media, our media cycles. Simplicity and quiet reflection often feel like luxuries. In that environment, an EP like Grand Epiphanies doesn’t just matter musically; it matters morally. It represents a kind of resistance — not flashy or confrontational, but human.
Kim Ware doesn’t demand answers; she offers empathy. She doesn’t pretend life gets clean after the hard parts; she reminds us that even when scars remain, beauty can survive. For listeners who feel worn down, uncertain, or haunted by memory, these songs can be small lamps in a dark room. For those simply seeking honest songwriting in a sea of glossy distractions, the EP offers relief.
Moreover, the collaborative, evolving model of The Good Graces — weaving friends, producers, rotating musicians into a living tapestry — speaks to music as community, not commodity. In an age of streaming algorithms and viral hits, that matters.
A few honest limitations — and why they don’t hurt the EP’s purpose
As with any release built around vulnerability and introspection, Grand Epiphanies may not cater to all tastes. Listeners expecting polished pop hooks, glossy production, and immediate gratification might find its pacing too slow, its mood too muted. The EP’s strength lies precisely in its restraint — in accepting that some feelings don’t come wrapped up neat and loud.
And with only five tracks, Grand Epiphanies can feel more like a snapshot than a full portrait. Themes are introduced, emotional arcs hinted at, but not always resolved. The sense is less of closure and more of continuation. Which, in many ways, may be the point: life rarely offers tidy endings.
Still — if you’re open to being held in uncertainty for a little while; if you’re willing to sit with a guitar, a voice, and a few gentle chords — the EP offers something rare: a place to breathe.
Kim Ware and The Good Graces — still speaking, still feeling
In a musical climate often dominated by spectacle, loudness, and overstated sentiment, Grand Epiphanies stands out not because it demands attention, but because it deserves it. Kim Ware’s songwriting remains a gift: honest, gentle, unguarded, but never cloying or insincere. Backed by The Good Graces, she continues to prove that folk and indie rock can still speak to our messy, uncertain lives with clarity and heart.
For longtime listeners, the EP will feel like a meaningful evolution — a band maturing, growing more confident, more open to collaboration. For those just discovering Ware, it offers a doorway into a catalogue full of stories that don’t hide behind cliches or affectation. And for anyone longing for music that reflects rather than distracts, that comforts rather than commodifies — Grand Epiphanies is a small, glowing jewel.
In 2025, when the world often seems determined to overwhelm us with noise, Kim Ware and The Good Graces invite us to slow down, listen, and remember: we are not alone. We are human. We are trying. And maybe — just maybe — that’s enough.
Look, Nebraska was already perfect in that cold-coffee, blackout-3-a.m. way that records sometimes accidentally are—Springsteen mumbling ghosts into a four-track like he’s afraid the neighbors might hear him unraveling. You don’t “improve” a hallucination. But here comes Nebraska ’82 with its alternate visions, its rust-belt apparitions, and suddenly you realize perfection isn’t the point anyway. What we’re getting now is the messy archaeology of a masterpiece—the dirt under its fingernails, the tape hiss, the roads not taken. It doesn’t dethrone the original bedroom-confessional monolith; it stands off to the side like a cracked mirror held up to the same bleak American sky. And damn if that mirror doesn’t show something worth staring into all over again.
Nebraska ’82: Expanded Edition arrives at the right time
With the 2025 release of Nebraska ’82: Expanded Edition, Springsteen and his team have delivered the most comprehensive, honest, and vivid portrait of one of the most haunted, intimate, and influential albums in rock history. The box set includes a newly remastered version of Nebraska as originally released, previously unheard demo outtakes, the long-rumored “Electric Nebraska” sessions with the full band, and a newly recorded live performance filmed in 2025.
For newcomers and longtime fans alike, this release offers both context and extension: context for how Nebraska came to be — from home demos on a TASCAM to a full LP — and extension in the form of alternate takes, jukebox-ready electric arrangements, and reflections of the songs through decades of memory.
It’s not just nostalgia or archival shelf-cleaning. What emerges is an album whose darkness, subtlety, and emotional power remain urgent. Nebraska ’82 still speaks — perhaps even more clearly now — to lives marked by uncertainty, longing, and resilience.
The original Nebraska — stark, personal, unforgettable
When Springsteen recorded Nebraska in late 1981 and early 1982, he did so not with a studio full of musicians but with a four-track recorder in his bedroom, an acoustic guitar, and a stark vision. The result was an album unlike anything else in his catalogue: bleak, intimate, confessional, but not confessional in a self-pitying sense. These were songs born from solitude, from the rawness of fear, regret, despair — made real by economy of arrangement.
Tracks like “Atlantic City,” “Johnny 99,” “State Trooper,” and “My Father’s House” traversed the margins of the American dream: economic hardship, moral desperation, violence, yearning for redemption. The spare instrumentation — sometimes only a guitar and a voice — made every lyric, every tremor of the vocal, every pause between notes count. The result is widely considered one of the great solo records in rock.
Decades later, Nebraska remains the gold standard for how quiet, low-fi recordings can deliver emotional immediacy. For many, it’s not just an album — it’s a private confessional, seen through the lens of loneliness and lost dreams.
What the Expanded Edition adds — and why it matters
Remastering with care
First, the 2025 remaster brings Nebraska into sharper focus without erasing its haunted intimacy. In a landscape where remasters often polish away character, this one preserves the album’s texture — the creaks, the echoes, the warmth of an acoustic guitar reverberating in a home studio — while improving clarity and depth. Critics who’ve heard the new edition note that the remastering reveals subtle layers previously buried: the quiet background of a mandolin here, the soft echo in the final chords there, the breath before a harsh lyric.
In short: the remastered Nebraska doesn’t feel like a revived relic — it feels alive again.
Solo outtakes and previously unreleased songs
The set’s first discs unearth acoustic outtakes and songs from the original 1982 sessions that didn’t make the album: Child Bride, The Losin’ Kind, Gun in Every Home, and On the Prowl — material fans have traded as bootlegs for decades or assumed lost forever.
Hearing them in official, high-quality form is revelatory. Tracks like “Gun in Every Home” offer a nightmarish portrait of domestic collapse and despair; “On the Prowl” pulses with a restless, searching energy that resonates with the rest of the album’s themes. Even though these songs were originally omitted, they expand the emotional terrain of Nebraska — reminding listeners that the darkness had multiple facets and that the record’s focus was always selective, not total.
Electric Nebraska — the “what might have been”
Perhaps the most dramatic and controversial addition is the long-rumored “Electric Nebraska” sessions. In April 1982, shortly after finishing the solo demos, Springsteen brought several members of the E Street Band into the studio (including Max Weinberg and Garry Tallent) and attempted full-band recordings of several Nebraska songs. In 2025, those sessions have finally emerged publicly — the first time many had heard them.
The results provoke awe — and ambivalence. On one hand, songs like electric versions of Atlantic City or Johnny 99 have a muscular, rock-ready energy. A demo of Born in the U.S.A. — originally written in the same era — appears in trio form (Springsteen, Weinberg, Tallent), described as “punk rockabilly.” It is electrifying, raw, and historically fascinating.
On the other hand — and critics largely agree — turning Nebraska into a full-band rock record would have gutted much of its power. The original’s bleak intimacy, its ghost-town loneliness, its moral urgency — all flowed from isolation and austerity. As Uncut’s review put it: “Electric Nebraska might have produced a competent rock album, but it wouldn’t have been Nebraska.”
The electric versions often feel like exercises — intriguing, occasionally thrilling, but never quite as honest. The contrast only strengthens the myth of the original: a man alone with a guitar, bearing witness to the American underbelly.
A 2025 live performance: memory as lens
Rounding out the set is a newly filmed live performance — Springsteen playing the full Nebraska album in order, at the Count Basie Theatre, Red Bank, New Jersey. Accompanied subtly by veteran musicians such as Larry Campbell and Charlie Giordano, the performance is respectful rather than grandiose, earnest rather than nostalgic. In a press statement, Springsteen remarked on the experience: hearing the songs again, he was struck by their “weight” — their capacity to move, even after decades.
The filmed concert is not a re-creation but a meditation. Compared with the original 1982 recordings, the live versions reflect the distance of time — a deeper voice, more lived-in phrasing — but they carry the songs’ sorrow, hope, and grit into a present that, for many listeners, remains uncertain.
What Nebraska ’82: Expanded Edition reveals about Nebraska’s enduring power
Listening to the full box set is, in a way, a masterclass in artistic decision — what to keep, what to discard, what to preserve, what to experiment with.
The original Nebraska stands undiminished. If anything, the contrast with the electric takes and outtakes sharpens what made it special. The sparseness, the solitude, the haunted tonal space — all reveal that Springsteen’s choice to release demos instead of studio recordings was not a compromise but a commitment to emotional truth. As one critic writes, the set underscores that “even when testing out the material with his most intuitive collaborators … the definitive version of Nebraska remains the one he captured on tape… tracking solo demos.”
Yet the collection is not purely about preservation — it expands the artist’s vision. The outtakes and electric versions show songs as living things: malleable, re-interpretive, incomplete. They reflect a period of creative restlessness, of questioning whether Americana songs needed to be acoustic, dark, personal, or if they could rock, rage, and roar.
For fans and historians, Nebraska ’82 offers context. For new listeners, it might serve as the entry point. For all, it’s a reminder that rock — stripped-down or electric — can still carry the weight of real human stories.
A few tensions and enduring questions
The Expanded Edition is not without controversy. Some reviewers warn against over-romanticizing the demos and dismissing the electric takes outright. As one Guardian column argues, if listeners imagine full-scale E Street–style treatments, they’ll likely be disappointed: the electric tracks “take the edge off, neutralising their impact.”
Others worry that the outtakes and alternate versions — while fascinating — might dilute the mythic purity of Nebraska. After all, part of the record’s power lies in its restraint. The expanded set invites comparisons, second-guessing, and reconsideration that can feel like peeling away a protective layer.
But perhaps that is precisely the point: art is not a mausoleum. Revisiting is not desecration — it is re-examination. And Nebraska ’82 gives listeners the tools to understand not just what the album was, but what it might have been, and what it still can be.
Why this edition matters — now so many years later
2025 is not 1982. The world Springsteen sang about — poverty, despair, moral compromise, broken dreams — has changed in many ways, yet in others remains startlingly similar. Economic instability, social dislocation, disillusionment with institutions — many of the conditions that haunted Nebraska then still haunt us now.
In that sense, Nebraska ’82: Expanded Edition arrives not as nostalgia, but as relevance. The spare melodies, the tales of desperation and longing, the fractures in the American dream — they resonate with renewed urgency. And by revisiting them alongside alternate takes and newer interpretations, listeners are invited to reflect not just on the past, but on how songs age, shift, and heal.
For younger listeners who might only know Springsteen from his arena-rock anthems or later work, this box set offers a different face of “the Boss” — quieter, darker, more human.
For longtime fans, it’s a gift: a chance to listen again, to compare, to reconsider.
A masterpiece re-examined — and still alive
Nebraska ’82: Expanded Edition does more than archive a landmark record. It reopens its doors, pulls back the curtain, and lets us hear not just the final songs, but the echoes, the experiments, the what-ifs, and the near-misses.
In doing so, it reaffirms what made Nebraska a classic: the courage to strip away everything but voice and guitar, to trust silence, to speak plainly about fear, regret, and survival. But it also acknowledges that songs are not static. They breathe, shift, and can be reborn.
Whether you come for the electric sessions, the unheard demos, the 2025 live film — or simply to hear Nebraska again — the result is the same: you feel the weight of its stories, the depth of its sorrow, the faint but persistent light of hope.
Forty-three years after it was first recorded in a bedroom in Colts Neck, Nebraska still matters. Nebraska ’82: Expanded Edition proves that not just as history, but as living, breathing music.
Indie rock has always thrived on the fringes: small venues, tiny labels, and the slow-building careers that reward patience more than hype. Few contemporary bands embody this spirit better than Elephants and Stars, the Canadian band whose latest album, Under the Earth and Above Heaven, feels like the result of years dedicated to refining melody, guitar as truth, rock and roll meaning, and a hard-won optimism tempered with a slight sarcasm that comes from not taking oneself too seriously. A real understanding that life has ups and downs.
The album’s title suggests a band thinking about place, about being suspended between hardship and hope, about grounding themselves even as they reach. And in many ways, this duality captures the spirit of Elephants and Stars themselves: musicians who write like they’ve lived a little, but still believe that a good chorus can solve something in the soul. A great song can change the world.
Under the Earth and Above Heaven is, simply put, their most confident and emotionally resonant work to date. But the record is also a reminder of why rock, guitars, harmonies, and honest storytelling still matter.
The band behind the sound To understand the record, it helps to understand the people who made it. Elephants and Stars operate in a tradition familiar to fans of early 2000s alternative rock: tight rhythm sections, guitars that shimmer and crunch, and lyrics that manage sincerity without slipping into sentimentality.
The lineup, anchored by frontman Manfred Sittmann, whose signature vocals blend warmth with a slight rasp, has solidified into a group whose interplay feels lived-in. Sittmann writes and sings with the clarity of someone who knows the exact weight of each line, but the band behind him keeps things agile rather than precious. Sittmann’s melodic instincts shape much of the band’s identity. He’s joined by Adam Seed, whose lead guitar work brings a sharp, expressive edge to their sound, and longtime collaborator Michael MacMillan, whose bass lines provide both structure, rhythm, and warmth. The rhythm section finds its heartbeat in drummer Stewart McKinney, while Simon Head expands the band’s sonic palette with textured, atmospheric keyboard layers. Together, they create a modern rock sound grounded in pop-punk roots. Music that’s unmistakably hook-driven yet designed with a clear mission: to help bring rock back to the forefront.
The band’s story stretches back years, especially for Sittmann and MacMillan, who previously played together in the excellent group Soap Opera. Their long creative history gives the songs on their latest release a natural chemistry and ease, the feeling of musicians who know exactly how to respond to one another. That chemistry reaches a new peak on Under the Earth and Above Heaven, released in February of this year and produced by Ian Blurton, a collaboration that sharpens their sound while preserving the emotional immediacy that defines their work.
The guitars, often handled in layered pairs, move between bright open-chord passages and more aggressive leads. The bass lines are melodic without overpowering the mix, and the drumming is purposeful and punchy where it should be, restrained where the lyrics need breathing room. The result is a sound built on chemistry rather than simply studio polish.
The band feels like a cohort of people who know how to play to each other’s strengths. This matters because Under the Earth and Above Heaven is an album that depends on emotional pacing: crescendos that feel earned, shifts in tone that feel organic, and choruses that arrive with the momentum of a live show.
A sound defined by uplift without naïveté From the opening track, Elephants and Stars make it clear that they are uninterested in the cynicism that often dominates modern rock. Their guitars ring with a kind of unguarded cascade of sonic joy, even when the lyrics are wrestling with frustration or loss. One of the most striking qualities of this album is how hope and melancholy coexist—not in competition, but in conversation.
The production leans into this duality. Vocals sit slightly forward in the mix, giving Sittmann’s storytelling a sense of directness and intimacy. The guitars, meanwhile, expand outward: wide, textured, layered. It’s the kind of sound associated with late-afternoon festival sets—sunlight still visible, the air cooling, the crowd settling into a collective feeling. And the sound? Loud, propulsive, aggressive, like a sonic caress.
What keeps the record from drifting into nostalgia is the band’s sense of precision. Each song feels built, not merely written. The hooks land with purpose. The bridges feel like necessary expansions, not detours. And the choruses—Elephants and Stars’ greatest strength—arrive like emotional confirmations. This is a band that believes in melody the way some bands believe in distortion pedals: as the emotional engine of the music.
The lyrical world of the album If the sound carries the emotional lift, the lyrics provide the grounding. Under the Earth and Above Heaven reads like a record about transition—moving from one stage of life to another, reconciling who you were with who you’re trying to become. The “earth” and “heaven” of the title function less as metaphysical spaces and more as metaphors for the pressures we carry and the aspirations we hold. Across the record, recurring themes emerge.
Across Under the Earth and Above Heaven, Elephants and Stars weave a thematic through-line that feels both deeply personal and universally readable. The record begins by making peace with the past, returning again and again to the bittersweet truth that old mistakes never quite vanish. Yet the band refuses to sink into regret. Instead, they treat memory like an old photograph—something to regard with a mix of tenderness and hard-earned gratitude for having made it through. That reflective stance sets the stage for one of the album’s central concerns: the search for steadiness in a world that rarely offers it. Life, as their lyrics suggest, often feels precarious, a suspended moment in which you’re “almost there” but never fully settled. But rather than express anxiety, the band leans toward determination, riding out the instability with resolve.
That determination is buoyed by another recurring insight: the importance of connection. Throughout the album, relationships of all kinds—romantic partners, close friends, the communities we build around ourselves—appear as the forces that keep us grounded. These songs push against the temptation to withdraw, insisting instead that meaning comes from being in the world with others. And within that engagement, the band finds flashes of transcendence in the most ordinary places: singing in the car, watching the sunrise after a sleepless night, catching the sound of someone’s laughter at just the right moment. These quiet, luminous details echo the “above heaven” imagery of the album’s title, suggesting that the extraordinary often reveals itself in the spaces where we least expect it.
The record carries an autobiographical weight without tipping into confession. Rather than offering a straightforward personal narrative, it gestures toward shared emotional terrain—less “here is my story” and more “here is a feeling you have probably known.” And while a full song-by-song analysis would exceed the scope of this discussion, several tracks stand out for the way they shape the album’s emotional arc, guiding listeners through reflection, uncertainty, connection, and ultimately the little but meaningful possibilities of joy.
The opener: urgency with clarity The opening track, The Ceiling, wastes no time establishing the album’s stakes. A driving beat, guitars that arrive fully formed, and lyrics that describe the moment when indecision becomes action. It feels like a thesis statement: the band is not here to wallow; they are here to move. A bit more than midway through the record comes a standout track that shifts the tempo and deepens the tone, ‘Unlucky.’ This is where the band’s lyrical strengths shine: reflections on resilience, the cost of growth, and the quiet strength found in simply continuing. The arrangement builds around a groove—guitar, sway in the keyboards, more subtle percussion, then a full electric swell—mirroring the emotional climb.
The late-album surge: an anthem of uplift As the album nears its conclusion, the band leans into one of their most triumphant choruses to date on ‘Paint Me Alive’. It’s the kind of moment designed to be shouted back at the stage, hands in the air, the kind of collective catharsis that only rock music can produce. The lyrics, which center on choosing light even when darkness is familiar, feel earned precisely because the album has carried listeners through doubt and tension.
The final track, The Ghosts, does something rare: it provides closure without collapsing into tidy resolution. It acknowledges the uncertainties that remain but offers a melodic reassurance that moving forward—however imperfectly—is worth celebrating.
Three elements make Under the Earth and Above Heaven one of Elephants and Stars’ most compelling releases: 1) Musical consistency without monotony. 2) The band has refined their sound without becoming predictable. And 3) Each song feels connected to the whole, but no two entries collapse into each other.
Emotional honesty that creates community In an era where irony often dominates indie music discourse, Elephants and Stars commit wholeheartedly to sincerity. Their stories are earnest but never naive. The band creates A sense of community embedded in the music. Listening to the album feels like being welcomed into a shared emotional space. It’s personal, but it’s not private.
Elephants and Stars occupy an interesting place in today’s musical world. They are neither trend-chasers nor purists. Instead, they carry forward the tradition of emotionally articulate guitar rock: bands like The Weakerthans, early Jimmy Eat World, or mid-period The Hold Steady—artists who treat songwriting as craft rather than marketing. Their music reminds listeners that rock still has a role to play in articulating everyday emotional life. Not the grand dramas, but the subtle struggles: trying to be better, trying to stay hopeful, trying to find footing. In a digital era marked by fragmentation and fatigue, Under the Earth and Above Heaven feels refreshingly grounded.
Perhaps the greatest achievement of the album is its replayability. The first listen offers immediacy—hooks that land, choruses that stick. But subsequent listens reveal the details: the way a harmony hangs in the background, the way a guitar line subtly echoes a lyrical theme, the way the rhythm section builds tension without overstating it. This is music built not just to impress, but to accompany. It is the kind of record listeners grow with and discover far more over repeated listens.
An album for the moment we’re in Under the Earth and Above Heavensucceeds because it feels like an album made by people committed to the power of song—not spectacle, not persona, but the craft of building moments of connection. In a fractured cultural moment, that feels almost radical.
Elephants and Stars may never be the kind of band that dominates streaming algorithms or headlines massive festivals. But this record demonstrates why they matter: they make music that sees listeners clearly. They make music that names the feelings many of us carry. They make music that reaches upward, outward, toward one another.
And sometimes, that’s exactly what good rock music is supposed to do.
We could have easily titled this column ‘Making Sense of It All: The Kyle Sowashes and the Enduring Power of Indie Rock Honesty,’ because the band’s new record not only showcases their musical growth but also highlights how their plainspoken sincerity continues to resonate in a genre often crowded with irony and affectation.
Independent rock has long thrived on the margins—small rooms, frayed gear, and bands that carve out meaning from the ordinary. Few groups embody this spirit as honestly and as energetically as The Kyle Sowashes, the long-running Columbus, Ohio outfit centered around singer, guitarist, and songwriter Kyle Sowash. Their terrific new record, Start Making Sense, feels both like a culmination of years of steady work and a refreshed sense of purpose. It is an album that sounds lived-in yet ambitious, familiar yet surprisingly expansive.
Like so many of their releases, it is driven by a collaborative band spirit, anchored by Sowash’s unmistakable songwriting voice. But on Start Making Sense, the musicians around him play an especially notable role. This is not merely a collection of songs written by a single songwriter—it is a group effort in the best sense, marked by thoughtful arrangements, spirited performances, and a chemistry that can only develop after years of making music together. The result is a record that feels warm, wry, cathartic, and deeply human.
A Band Made of People, Not Parts
The Kyle Sowashes have always been a band that foregrounds musicianship over mythology. No one is placed on a pedestal; every member shapes the sound. On Start Making Sense, the interplay among the musicians is central to what makes the record feel so alive.
At the center, of course, is Kyle Sowash, the principal songwriter, guitarist, and narrator of the band’s emotional landscape. His style has always blended self-deprecation with sincerity, humor with frustration, resignation with hope. He writes songs the way people talk when they’ve stopped trying to impress anyone. That honesty, paired with a gift for sticky melodies and driving chord progressions, continues to anchor the band.
But the supporting cast expands and elevates the material. The rhythm section, always a strength for the group, is especially tight on this release. The basslines give songs bounce and propulsion, while the drumming adds both momentum and nuance—capable of big-room punch but also subtle shifts in tone that mirror Sowash’s lyrical turns. Together they give the album its shape: urgent when needed, contemplative when the songs pull inward.
The guitar arrangements, too, show a band deeply comfortable playing with space. There are moments of noisy celebration, fuzzed-out riffs, and guitar lines that nod to 90s indie rock and power pop without ever feeling derivative. But there is also restraint when the songs call for it—arpeggiated lines, single-note phrases, and open-chord patterns that accent Sowash’s vocal pacing. The band understands when to push and when to stay out of the way, and that mutual sensitivity is one of the record’s quiet triumphs.
All of this makes Start Making Sense feel less like a front-person project and more like a snapshot of a genuine musical community. The band members are collaborators—not session players—and the record reflects that shared vision.
Sound: An Indie Rock Dial Tuned Just Right
The defining pleasure of listening to The Kyle Sowashes is the feeling that the band knows exactly who they are and that they approach their sound not as a limitation but as an expressive engine. Start Making Sense follows this tradition, delivering songs that are rooted in classic indie rock but refreshed through craft, energy, and emotional clarity.
The album’s guitar-forward sound recalls the big-hearted crunch of bands like Superchunk, The Weakerthans, early Guided by Voices, and 90s midwestern basement rock. But The Kyle Sowashes are not imitators. Their tone is warmer, their pacing more deliberate, their hooks more conversational. They capture what it feels like to be a functional adult who still carries adolescent anxieties; what it feels like to want to grow but not always know how.
The production strikes a careful balance. It is clean enough to reveal the band’s tight musicianship but raw enough to preserve the lived-in charm that defines their identity. The vocals are present but never over-polished; the guitars are textured but not overly layered; the drums have a live-room feel that makes even the more introspective songs sound communal.
This approach is particularly effective because Sowash’s songwriting thrives on immediacy. These songs feel like they were meant to be played in small rooms full of people who understand what it’s like to try, fail, and try again. The sonic palette—guitars that jangle and buzz, drums that sprint and shuffle, bass that grounds and guides—mirrors the emotional palette of the songs themselves.
What the Lyrics Reveal: Vulnerability Without Pretension
What has always separated Kyle Sowash from many of his indie rock peers is his ability to write lyrics that feel like real conversations. He avoids metaphors that spin out into abstraction and instead leans on the everyday: the tension between optimism and exhaustion, the mundane rhythms of adulthood, the stubborn persistence of doubt.
On Start Making Sense, the lyrics feel particularly pointed. There is a thematic thread running through the record about wanting to take stock of one’s life, wanting to be better (or at least different), but also feeling the tug of old habits or long-held insecurities. This tension animates the album emotionally.
Sowash wrestles with questions familiar to anyone who has lived long enough to feel the weight of their own decisions:
Am I becoming the person I hoped to be?
Am I letting people down without realizing it?
Is it too late to make meaningful changes?
Why does clarity arrive when I am least prepared for it?
And yet, the writing never lapses into self-pity. Sowash has a rare talent for pairing difficult emotions with flashes of humor or casual understatement. His delivery—half earnest, half exasperated—adds to this effect. Even in the most introspective moments, he trusts his audience. He doesn’t sermonize or hide behind dense metaphor. He simply tells the truth as he sees it.
The Album as a Whole: Why Start Making Sense Works
The strength of the record lies not just in its individual songs but in its overall narrative arc. Start Making Sense feels like a journey, not in a conceptual or theatrical sense, but in the emotional progression from beginning to end.
The early tracks tend to have a forward-thrusting, energetic urgency—songs filled with questions, doubts, and attempts to find clarity. As the album unfolds, the pacing shifts: there are moments of introspection, acceptance, humor, resignation, and renewed commitment.
By the final songs, the album arrives somewhere quieter and more grounded. The narrator has not solved everything—far from it—but there is a sense of movement, of incremental progress. And that sense is arguably more meaningful than any dramatic revelation would be.
This emotional pacing mirrors the band’s musical pacing. The guitars pull back when the lyrics sink deeper; the rhythm section tightens when the narrator feels unsettled; the arrangements widen when Sowash leans into hopeful refrains. The band listens to the songs, and the songs reward that attention.
Why They Matter Now
There is something profoundly refreshing about hearing a band like The Kyle Sowashes release a record like Start Making Sense in 2025. In a music culture where so many albums are shaped by algorithms, trends, or online personas, this record feels defiantly human. It is made by musicians who value craft, community, and honesty over spectacle.
Moreover, the themes of Start Making Sense—struggle, ambivalence, small victories, persistent hope—resonate in a cultural moment marked by fatigue and uncertainty. Many listeners will hear echoes of their own lives in the record: the feeling of trying to recalibrate when everything seems slightly off; the desire to “start making sense” of things that once felt straightforward.
The album does not promise transformation or transcendence. Instead, it offers companionship—a reminder that confusion and self-questioning are universal, and that music can help make sense of things even when life does not.
A Career Highlight and a Quiet Triumph
Start Making Sense stands as one of The Kyle Sowashes’ most affecting and best-crafted albums. It blends the energy of earlier records with a deeper emotional palette; it shows a band confident in its identity yet open to growth. The musicianship is sharp, the lyrics are resonant, and the sound manages to be both comfortingly familiar and subtly evolved.
It is not merely a strong indie rock record—it is a document of adulthood, of persistence, of reassessment, of trying again. In its modesty, it finds profundity; in its humor, it finds catharsis; in its unvarnished honesty, it finds connection. For longtime fans, Start Making Sense will feel like a natural and satisfying next chapter. For new listeners, it offers a compelling introduction to a band that has quietly built one of the most sincere bodies of work in Midwestern indie rock. And for everyone, it offers something increasingly rare: a rock album that makes you feel less alone.
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