Most every concert I’ve ever been to, when the main act starts, the crowd goes wild. Everyone paid for it, everyone anticipated it, everyone is glad it’s finally here. Even when the music was slower, there was always something about that first note that sends the crowd over the edge. There’s one notable exception in […]
Tag: music
Beatles Mania
As long as I can remember, I’ve always been a Beatles fan. The first album (that wasn’t soundtrack music) anyone ever bought me was a Beatles album my sister got me for Christmas or a birthday one year. I must’ve been twelve or thirteen at the time. I already knew half the songs that played […]
Quarantine, Day 300: New Year’s Eve Edition
The blankets are all over the floor even though I prefer them folded and put away when they aren’t in use. I have like five pillows from the bedroom that have ended up in the living room over the course of the last few days, and I just haven’t bothered to move them. To my […]
A Trip to Branchburg, from Quarantine to the Open Road
Down the road about an hour from where I live is a little town called Branchburg. I’ve never been to Branchburg. I don’t know why anybody living just outside of New York City would ever go to Branchburg. But now, I can say, I’ve been, and I think I’ll probably go back. That’s because after […]
Lead Us Not Into Penn Station
I’m not sure why, but lately, I’m hypersensitive to all the sounds that surround me. Maybe it’s because I’m used to a more rural environment that the sounds of the City are just that jarring to me. Maybe it’s because I’m living just next to the Garden State Parkway, which leaves in its wake a […]
The Curious Case of the Toilet Seat Picture Frame
A few years ago, when I was working at a church near Nashville, I took my youth group on a trip to do service work in the Appalachian Mountains at a summer camp there. It was a week filled with hack saws, lots of paint, and conversation with poor or elderly folks of the Grundy […]
Learning to Let People Sing their own Songs How they Need to be Sung
Have you ever listened to a song and in that moment that song was exactly what you needed to hear? Like, when my grandfather died, I had Blind Pilot on repeat, or there were times in Morocco where certain songs just powerfully spoke to me. It’s been a few years since my grandfather died or […]
Reflections of a Lifelong Education
It was the spring of 2002, my senior year of high school, and I’d been invited to Wabash College for the Lilly Honor Scholarship weekend, along with thirty other guys, many of whom were a lot more accomplished than I. Imagine a room full of thirty Max Fischers fighting at a chance to go to […]
Poindexter, Dave Matthews, and following your heart
When I started Wabash, I remember the day my parents moved me into the Kappa Sigma house was a really hot August morning, and when we walked into the fraternity house, I remember being greeted by “Bill” who was like the Hulk and shirtless and immediately intimidated the hell out of me. I was a […]
Remembering.
A year ago today, my grandfather died. A year ago, everything sort of set in motion, and if you’d told me then that I’d be here, in Morocco, where my grandfather lived for nineteen months, well, I wouldn’t have believed that. But as it were, next Tuesday, I will have lived in this country for […]
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