In December 2020, Jason, Kristin and I bought two lockdown livestreams of musical performances, The Bouncing Souls and Less Than Jake. We all desperately missed going to live concerts, so we did our best to re-create the experience. We turned the lights off in the basement, stood behind the couch instead of sitting on it,…
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Former President Barack Obama is 59 years old. Every summer he releases an amazingly curated summer playlist filled with hot new shit, obscurities, deep cuts from legendary artists, and other stuff that for whatever reason tickled his fancy this summer. Like, what’s Sheryl Crow’s “All I Wanna Do” doing on the same list as Anderson…
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Every year I make a new playlist on my birthday to commemorate the year that was, and write about it. This year, I’ve broken the post about by song and written a mini-essay for each entry. Sometimes these will pertain directly to the song, sometimes I won’t talk about the song at all. I had…
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People often ask me, “What’s your ultimate goal for Deft Communications?” which I suppose is an honest enough question, but never fails to make me laugh both because of how boring and seemingly unambitious my answer is. Here’s my honest answer: All I want is for Deft Communications to do well enough to where I…
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I’m starting to wonder if anyone ever truly and fully grows up. I don’t know if adulthood ever completely takes in anyone because some of the neural pathways you set seem so irrevocable that you never change. Or perhaps it’s that the markers of adulthood are fixed generationally, so that once an older generation dies…
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I’ll admit to not understanding the Taylor Swift thing in the least until very recently. Until that “Shake It Off” song stormed everyone’s consciousness earlier this year, I couldn’t even name you a single Taylor Swift song. In fact, outside of the aforementioned “Shake It Off,” and the song this essay is about, I still…
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“Do you know about his strength in convictions? Or how she puts all her faith in religion? Did you take the time to really discover how little we know about each other?” That’s from a song called “All My Best Friends are Metalheads” by Less Than Jake. It’s one of my favorite Less Than Jake…
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In last week’s article I talked about how that Arcade Fire song, “Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains),” made me feel many of the feels. The biggest reason for that is this video, created by Brooks Wheelan. He notes that “if you only film one second out of your day and put it to music, it…
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For basically the first time in my life, I ran on the treadmill for an extended period of time. To quote myself whenever I talk about running, “I did not enjoy it!” But then, I also sort of did because the treadmill is an interesting machine that makes you think you’re a better runner than…
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