Regular readers of my Substack may have noticed I’ve stolen more lines from Nada Surf to illustrate ideas than lines from any other band in recent years, most recently, my essay called “All Flavors All the Time,” a line from “So Much…
Despite being a lifelong music geek, I wasn’t familiar with the Dutch band NITS until this past year. It’s not like the band has been hiding under a rock for the fifty years of their existence, and I’m not ignorant…
To do a dangerous thing with style Is what I call art. – Charles Bukowski When my concert companion asked what I thought about Rickie Lee Jones’s performance in Helsinki Wednesday night as we walked from the venue, it made…
During the encore of his 32-song, three-hour show in Helsinki Friday night, Bruce Springsteen asked the audience of 42 thousand, “Do you think you can outlast the E Street band?” I, for one, couldn’t, even if Springsteen is 74 and…
I vividly recall Nick Cave’s tour stop in Helsinki on the “Conversations with Nick Cave” tour in 2019. Not just because I was one of the lucky few selected to sit on stage with the performer during the first of his two-night…
10 years is a not such an insignificant chunk of time in the web world. Think of the web 10 years ago. No MySpace (founded 2003), no Facebook (founded 2004), no YouTube (founded 2005.) Imagine. But there was HowWasTheShow! HowWasTheShow’s…
Seeing Finland’s Arto Järvelä and Minnesota’s Kaivama perform together at The Cedar Cultural Center in Minneapolis Friday night made me feel downright happy. For a musical performance to be a success, happiness need not be either the intention or the…
Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends. – Joan Didion “It will happen to you,†author Joan Didion (played by Barbara Berlovitz) says in the opening scene of Didion’s…
In the 1990s during the War in Bosnia and Herzegovina, over 100,000 people were killed and more than 2 million people displaced in one of the most horrific set of human-inflicted tragedies since WWII. Heaven, a new work by Flying…
