fiction and creative non-fiction from Brennan Quenneville
20 years ago, Blink-182 released of Enema of the State and became every 13-year old's favorite band. (Why yes, I did turn 13 in 1999.) Last week the band played Enema in its entirety at Chicago's Riot Fest and tomorrow the band will release a new album, NINE. To celebrate the last 20 years of [...]
Reading is an inherently independent activity so if there's anything unusual about my reading The Lord of the Rings every year, it's limited to the fact that I read The Lord of the Rings every year and not that I do so alone. Most years, after I finish that reading, I watch Peter Jackson's trilogy [...]
Yesterday I posted an article that compared Veronica Mars, The Postal Service's Give Up and Kenna's New Sacred Cow in a discussion of how our perceptions don't always match reality. The article was fun to write and was based on an idea that I had had a few years ago but never finished, that original [...]
Veronica Mars is an outsider, someone who doesn't fit in, someone who doesn't belong. We know this because the narration to Veronica Mars—narration spoken by Veronica herself—tells us so. We know this because, when the series begins, Veronica is repeatedly shown to be clique-less. We know this because, driving down the Pacific coast in a [...]
Having learned the art of brevity from his time as a journalist, Ernest Hemingway created what became known as iceberg theory: By omitting everything but the barest necessities of narrative, a capable writer lets the reader intuit deeper, thematic truths, thereby improving the reading experience and strengthening the story. One of the side effects of [...]
If you've ever found yourself wishing that your favorite bands had written more songs about the infuriating, restrictive bureaucracy of the music industry then ... well, there might be something wrong with you. But in spite of the fact that business is usually, at best, a necessary evil for most musicians, it does occasionally inspire [...]
One day I was listening to my music catalog on shuffle, as I often do, when PVRIS's "You and I"Â came on and was followed by Paper Route's "You and I." After a quick search revealed that I also had Fightstar's "You & I" lurking in my library, I thought that it would be fun to [...]
When it comes to post-rock soundtracks, the focus is usually on Explosions in the Sky because their music has been featured in several films while Tides of Man is often overlooked because, well, they haven't. But just because Tides of Man hasn't written the soundtrack for a film doesn't mean they can't write the soundtrack [...]
Five years ago I wrote about an Artifex Pereo song that appeared to lift one melodic line and half its lyrics from an old NOFX song. Rather than intentional theft, what I suggested may have happened was a case of cryptomnesia, a fascinating word which describes an odd phenomenon. Cryptomneisa is when you learn something, [...]
In the 22 years since "Brick" made him a recognizable figure in pop music, Ben Folds has explored his art in an awful lot of ways. He's recorded albums with his band, as a solo artist and with William freaking Shatner. After he unexpectedly became an a cappella icon, he hosted a singing competition with [...]
Songs & Stories 