fiction and creative non-fiction from Brennan Quenneville
The story, as my parents once told it to me, was that the year before Caitlin and I started dating was the worst of my life. That is, uh, pretty harsh, as parental assessments go. And while I’d probably disagree, I can see their point. In that purportedly worst year, I graduated college and did a [...]
I enjoyed “Santa Monica” during its radio run, but I only became an Everclear fan when I watched them perform “Everything to Everyone” and “I Will Buy You a New Life” during an ESPN broadcast of Winter X Games 2. After that viewing, I dragged my parents to Borders so that I could buy a copy [...]
Arguably the greatest concert lineup I ever saw was a 2005 bill featuring Paramore and Cartel as the openers for The Receiving End of Sirens and Acceptance. 17 years later and it seems impossible that those bands could have possibly toured together, given the way that each of their legends has expanded in the years since. Each [...]
My Alkaline Trio fandom peaked at the turn of the century and like presumably every Trio fanatic, I loved “Radio.” Spotify tells me that “Mercy Me” has more plays, but that seems like a quirk of streaming statistics and I refuse to believe that it’s a more popular track among the band’s fans; if you’re asked to think of [...]
“doomsday” opens with the specificity of poetry: “pull the plug in September / I don’t wanna die in June.” And like good poetry, McAlpine’s songwriting pulls the listener forward, both sonically and lyrically, with the promise of what’s to come, the hope that your questions will be answered. Why, for example, is McAlpine’s narrator flatlining? (Heartbreak, obviously!) And [...]
Atom and His Package is not for everyone. The long-since-defunct band—and we’re really stretching that word here—was the lo-fi synth-punk project of Philadelphia’s Adam Goren. Atom was Adam, of course, and the Package was his synthesizer, and that weird little explainer is the part that made sense. Atom loved (skewering) punk and so he, uh, [...]
I mean this as no disrespect to the long tenures, considerable talents, and sizable contributions of Nate Mendel and Chris Shiflett, but I have always thought of Foo Fighters as “Dave Grohl’s band with Taylor Hawkins.” That perspective is not, strictly speaking, accurate, but it does seem to capture the spirit of the band. While Mendel [...]
I once told a friend that, when it came to music, I didn’t have any guilty pleasures because I never feel guilty about listening to something that I enjoy. And that’s still true! But when my fortitude on that front is tested, it’s not by my deep and abiding love of all things Sara Bareilles or even by my [...]
I don’t know how to explain Mobile Steam Unit to you because I don’t know what Mobile Steam Unit is. They’re a band, sure, and they released their first full-length album, Desk Jockeys, earlier this year. Past that, things get murky fast. See, Mobile Steam Unit is a band that writes songs about business, often enough [...]
The French term terroir is vastly underutilized. The idea of terroir is that indirect factors like climate, soil, topography, and local flora can influence a wine’s flavor profile. It’s astonishing to me that a word like this—a word describing the phenomenon of external factors indirectly but materially impacting the development and end product of something extraneous—isn’t applied to essentially everything, all [...]
Songs & Stories 