Category Archive

From the Feb. 6, 2006 New Yorker: I asked people to post caption ideas—here’s my favorite, from Al Scott: “The rest of my band has complaints, too, but their car wouldn’t start.”

Some people like lyrics, some like a good melody, and some just like the cars, the cars that go boom. I love songs that are poetic. Unusual images startle me, strange phrases or ideas help me see different perspectives, and musical language can move me as much as a beautiful melody. What songs do you think have the best lyrics? …

I saw G. Love & Special Sauce tonight at the Showbox. I used to groove to G. Love in college—his funky blues guitar and marblemouthed vocals got me through many a chore-filled Sunday, and I performed a rap about Herbert Hoover over the song “Garbageman” for my portfolio presentation at Stanford’s School of Education. So I was psyched when my …

The webmaster community has been in a froth over the past few days in anticipation of Google’s latest update of every website’s PageRank, which is a number between 1 and 10 displayed on the Google toolbar. It’s a gross rating of how popular your site is, based on the number of links to your site from other sites, the quality …

I was eight years old when, 25 years ago, John Lennon was killed. I don’t remember hearing about it, and I don’t think I would have known his name if I did. My mind was on treehouses, rope swings, and what the next few hours had in store. I never saw Lennon perform, and I haven’t even seen him on …

It’s snowing in the city! Snow always makes this place feel magical. In addition to checking the window every thirty seconds, the weather has inspired me to post Ordeal by Eggnog again. It’s the story of my buddy Chris and I circumnavigating Seattle on cross-country skis in January of 2004. No guitars were involved in execution or documentation of this …

. . . the moon gazed on my midnight labours, while, with unrelaxed and breathless eagerness, I pursued nature to her hiding-places. —Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. I think I’ve figured out the appeal of this whole build-your-own-amp craze. It dawned on me during my soldering lesson with Al a couple weeks ago. I’d just made my first few attempts at soldering …

I’m gonna build an amp. Not content to leave my fate up to highway traffic, rockfall, or old age, I’ve decided to go where no spacey musician belongs—into a box of wires, jacks, knobs, caps, tubes, pots, screws, nuts, transistors, transmogrifiers, thermal detinators, and crystal gravfield trap receptors; from which, if all goes as planned, I will emerge with a …

Last night I had an epiphany. I was at the Paramount Theater in Seattle, to see Gillian Welch and David Rawlings play their gorgeous mournful music. It was an incredible show. I knew Gillian Welch was a great singer and songwriter, but it was Rawlings’ virtuosity on the guitar that blew me away. Anyway, my epiphany started around the second …

Let’s be frank. How many of us, given the choice, would really want to be rock stars? Sure, having people hock your nosehair on Ebay at $200 a strand might be fun for a while, but let Keith Richards’ face tell you what it’s like to rock long and hard. But to be a rock star for a day? Who …