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 [...]
Like any self-respecting Nerdfighter who loves to read and is privileged enough to have disposable income, I signed up for a physical subscription to the Life's Library Book Club as soon as I learned about it. (For the uninitiated to whom the preceding sentence made precisely zero sense, a brief primer: Nerdfighters are, among other [...]
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 [...]
As I watched the Stranger Things 3 trailer for the 40th time, I had the same thought that occurs to my brain every couple of hours: With all due respect to my wife, I will never know a relationship as pure and loving as the Steve-Dustin bromance. For my money, Steve evolving from a self-important douche [...]
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 [...]
Assassin's Creed Odyssey is a game almost exclusively about violence. The game's narrative, so far as I've experienced it, is about the violence that the player commits as an adult after being victimized by a terrible instance of violence as a child. Considering all that, the fact that I've quickly come to love Odyssey is [...]
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 [...]
At the outset of A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Rebecca Solnit explains how the book was inspired by a student bringing her an ancient koan: How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you? I don't know that Solnit ever satisfactorily answers that question, unless the [...]
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 [...]
Rebecca Solnit's A Field Guide to Getting Lost is ostensibly a collection of essays on the varying ways that we, as the title suggests, "get lost." Solnit approaches the idea of getting lost through the baseline implication of finding yourself directionless in an unknown place but, much more interestingly, she also approaches the idea from [...]
Songs & Stories 