fiction and creative non-fiction from Brennan Quenneville
Author John Green once suggested that, despite being irrationally intense and lacking a foundation of substantial life experience, the emotions of the young are no less real than the emotions of adults. I think he’s right. Is it objectively silly to be in love with someone that you met two weeks ago in a high [...]
Aimee Mann is not known for blistering guitar solos. Neither is Tim Heidecker, a comedian who is only barely known for music at all. Yet somehow these two wrote “Soon Enough,” the third single from Mann’s 2012 release Charmer, a song that, as far as I’m concerned, exists solely to give birth to a searing, scorching [...]
I don’t believe in God, so, as an academic pursuit, the fallibility of man has always been vastly more interesting to me than the proposed infallibility of God. As a result, I have a soft spot for songs that grapple with crises of faith—As Cities Burn has had their fair share of entries on that [...]
In a few short hours, I was going to board a plane that would take me first to New York and then to Senegal, where I would live for six weeks, but all I could do was keep refreshing Myspace. It was early in the summer of 2007 and technically I was a student majoring [...]
One day, someone explained the idea of happiness to me and I thought, Sure, I know what that feels like. The same can be said for sadness, anger, and, if I’m being honest, schadenfreude. But there are some emotions that entered my life as definitions first and experiences later and that feels so weird because, now [...]
We need to take a few steps to get caught up to the present. In 1976, Kiss released Rock and Roll All Over which featured “Calling Dr. Love,” a song about a “doctor” who suggests that he can cure his patients with the magical healing powers of his penis. Fascinated by the absurdity of this (excessively creepy) premise, alternative/temporarily-ska [...]
I understand why Oscar-bait films are often slow and brooding and filled with misfortune and misanthropes: That style allows all the meta-textual material to be dumped right out in the open. No one is watching Schindler’s List and wondering what the film thinks about war and heroism, you know? Superhero movies are … not that. They’re big [...]
I was an elementary school student in the early ‘90s so, yeah, I had a mullet. I’m not proud of it, these are just the facts. Almost immediately after my parents found me a better stylist, my sister became old enough to realize that her younger brother had been rocking a cultural punchline. The mockery [...]
Every time I discuss Harry Styles, I have a strong compulsion to justify the discussion, to explain that his standing as a massive pop star of boy-band origin doesn’t preclude him from releasing great material in a different genre, that his first record is an excellent bit of retro-rock that warrants legitimate critical attention. And [...]
NOFX takes a fair amount of shit for being a joke band, a pejorative way of branding a band that doesn’t take themselves too seriously as a band that can’t be taken seriously. That’s a mistake. Sure, Fat Mike sings about clams (not) having feelings, has portrayed himself as a literal clown, and has spent his entire [...]
Songs & Stories 