fiction and creative non-fiction from Brennan Quenneville
I never need a reason to think about The Juliana Theory but their recent reemergence, including a pair of new singles and an upcoming album of 'reimagined' classics, provides a perfect excuse to talk about them here. More specifically, to talk about the best tracks from a band that was somehow both deeply beloved and [...]
The fast approaching end of 2019 means not only the end of the year but also of the decade. Ten years ago, in a similar situation, I was new to blogging and felt obligated to make clear that my decade-spanning retrospective was no more than one man's personal opinion. In 2019, there's no need for [...]
The year is drawing to a close and taking the decade with it (because, for some reason, we use zero-based numbering for that kind of thing). That means that we're approaching list season, when every denizen of the internet will bombard the digital void with lists of movies, albums, books and whatever else they have [...]
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 [...]
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" 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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Well, not literally. But the end of the year? Yes. Very near, indeed. Which means that it's time to start putting together year-end lists of favorite books and albums, a task that I always intend to fly quickly through only to then spend an inordinate amount of time fussing over. My intent this year is to [...]
Songs & Stories 