fiction and creative non-fiction from Brennan Quenneville
Much of 2020 was awful but the new music released in this Year of Endless Sorrows™ wasn't. To celebrate, rather than posting one single article about the year in music, I'm going to post a new piece each day this week. Monday through Thursday will cover my four favorite albums of the year and Friday [...]
Every word of Good Apollo, I'm Burning Star IV, Volume One: From Fear Through the Eyes of Madness is burned into my brain. So too are the album's subtle motifs and, no less, its more obvious ones. This is largely because, for a spell in the mid-2000s, progressive rock concept albums—with their overwrought titles, literary [...]
The Queue is a recurring excuse for me to talk about songs or albums in short form. I'm bending that formula a bit today to discuss The Peer Pleasure Podcast which I've been binging lately. Let’s investigate a few of my favorite episodes. Ep. 147 – Bobby Darling (Gatsbys American Dream) The first episode 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 [...]
Ursula K. Le Guin, my hero, died on a Monday. On the Wednesday that preceded her passing, only five days before her death, I sent her the only piece of fan mail I've ever written. In it, I struggled to contain and express the boundless praise and thanks due to a woman who, despite our [...]
For a few years I was lucky enough to work as a staff writer at Type In Stereo where I got to voice all my strange and needlessly in-depth opinions about music. It was a great time. So I'm happy to announce that some of my fellow writers from Type In Stereo are dusting off their [...]
Alliance Commander: "Seems odd you’d name your ship after a battle you were on the wrong side of." Malcolm Reynolds: "May have been the losing side. Still not convinced it was the wrong one." Firefly, ‘Bushwacked’ --- When we lost Gatsbys American Dream after their self-titled album in 2006, they were - in their own [...]
During the summer of 1999 I spent an inordinate amount of time inside, hiding from the heat by playing a computer game called Total Annihilation and listening to Silverchair's Neon Ballroom on repeat. I learned about Silverchair when I saw the video for 'Ana's Song (Open Fire)', a grinding confessional about singer Daniel Johns' battle with [...]
In a critical scene of the film Memento, recall-challenged anti-hero Leonard Shelby laments the failings of memory. “Memory's unreliable,” he says. “Memory's not perfect, it's not even that good...[it] can change the shape of a room, it can change the color of a car. And memories can be distorted. They're just an interpretation, they're not [...]
After the splintering of my beloved Gatsbys American Dream, its members went off to participate in a variety of diverse projects - Kay Kay and His Weathered Underground, Search/Rescue and Places and Numbers, to name a few - but only a handful of those acts ever released any actual albums, and only one of those releases prominently featured Gatsbys' [...]
Songs & Stories 