fiction and creative non-fiction from brennan quenneville
Across the 26 years (!!) that they've been a band, Jimmy Eat World have written a lot of great songs. So many, in fact, that some have slipped through the cracks and never been fairly recognized for their brilliance. And I'm not talking about songs like "For Me This Is Heaven" which were never hits [...]
Remember liner notes? Before tangible media was sacrificed at the altar of the digital, I used to dig into CD booklets like I'd be tested on the material. (Which, depending on how you feel about nerdily bantering with friends, you could say I was.) One of my favorite aspects of liner notes was finding which [...]
There's a charming seasonality to OWEL's catalog. Back in 2013, the New Jersey band's self-titled debut arrived in the dead of winter with washed-out colors and a song literally warning that "death awaits in the snow." Their sophomore LP, dear me, was released in the fall of 2016 and is soaked in the fading light and [...]
The Queue is a recurring feature in which I discuss some of the music that I've been listening to recently. This week I examine an old favorite, an artist's early release that I'm only now getting into and a slow-burning single. Let's investigate. Between the Heart and the Synapse – The Receiving End of Sirens [...]
If you play guitar—and often enough, even if you don't—there's a good chance you have an acoustic lying around somewhere. Simpler and quieter than an electric, acoustic guitars are the most universal incarnation of the world's most popular six-stringed instrument (sorry, violists) and perhaps the laziest commodification of that ubiquity is the never-ending trend of [...]
Before I even arrived on campus for my freshman year, I had a homework assignment. A copy of James Gleick's Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything had been sent to every incoming freshman at my college and we had been instructed to read it prior to orientation. At the time, this really pissed me [...]
For a lot of upper-middle-class kids like myself, a back-to-school clothes shopping trip was the one chance a year I had to change or cement my look. On a sweltering August day, I'd find myself standing in a Pac Sun, trying to find a pair of jeans that fit and a novelty t-shirt that was [...]
Lately, I've been on a quest to sit down and listen to some of the albums that have been recommended to me over the years and that, for whatever reason, I've overlooked until now. Without further ado, let's take a look at three records that are classics for a lot of people and yet somehow [...]
It's a long-running joke in our house that my wife thinks I only listen to depressing music and, well, she may have a point. So let's infuse a little of that gloom into this most romantic of days by celebrating some of the most miserable "love" songs every written. "Falling in Love" by Lisa Loeb [...]
I learned to play drums by playing Rock Band. For several months, I spent a huge portion of my free time pushing the few pieces of furniture I owned to the periphery of my college apartment so that I could fire up my Xbox and smack wooden sticks against a flimsy contraption made of rubber [...]
