My Favorite Albums of 2015

It’s always fun seeing how a year of music shakes out. That’s why I keep making these lists. I derive a great deal of personal pleasure ranking the things that I like. It’s a way to put a year in perspective. I like going back and looking at Year End List’s of bygone years (going all the way back to 2003) and I can remember who I was then, and every album is almost always tied to at least one moment or feeling or whatever from that year (with the exception of some of the late-to-mid 00s where the lists ballooned and there was a decent amount of filler, although even then I probably can tie it to reviewing it for music staff at KJHK which is a fond memory, I suppose).

My 2015 list is in order, but ask me to reorder it six months down the line and it might be different. That happened in 2012 when I put Father John Misty’s debut LP in the top spot over Japandroids Celebration Rock and in the intervening time Celebration Rock has become THEE landmark 2012 record for me. It’s the one I remember best. It's the one I still listen to on a regular basis (and somehow I don't have it on vinyl what gives?). But these things aren’t meant to be perfect. It’s why I don’t do a Best Of anymore. I used to obsess over qualitative judgments and now it just boils down to personal preference. I spent my KJHK years embedded in cultivation. Through music staff and ultimately as director I was trying to make sure the station was covering all of the bases. I listened to a way more diverse array of music back then, but by the end of my tenure I felt supremely burnt out and spent the following year listening to pretty much nothing but the Lemonheads’ It’s a Shame About Ray and Come On, Feel the Lemonheads. Ultimately I was able to reset and check out new music, but I just stuck with what I liked, which is indie rock, and pretty much exclusively that. My tastes have become incredibly boring and while a hip hop or electronic or ambient record will occasionally strike me, I’ve become sonically unadventurous. It’s like the Amish kids going out on rumspringa and after all the hard partying returning to the simple life of guitar music.

Jenny and I were looking for houses on Zillow the other day. We do this a lot. We open the app, tweak the settings to our prospective price range and requirements, and then check out the offerings neighborhood by neighborhood. My favorite album in high school was the Descendents Milo Goes to College, and I find it hilarious that my life has become “Suburban Home” with all of the biting satire removed. “I want to be stereotyped/I want to be classified,” “I want to live long/ I want a suburban home,” “I don’t want no hippy pad/ I want a house just like mom and dad.” Jesus Christ. That’s my life now, though. We had a kid and it stripped away all of my ego, or at least the I’M NEVER LIVING IN THE FUCKING SUBURBS parts I cultivated when I was 16. Maybe that accounts for my now totally safe and comfortable musical leanings. It’s not that I don’t appreciate the stuff that’s going to be consensus Best of 2015 stuff this year.The importance of Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly but after doing my due diligence and listening to it once I knew it wasn’t going to be something I was going to throw on when I was doing the laundry, much less find the time to unpack all of the dense and heady stuff crammed into that record. Which is funny because I associate Good Kid, M.A.A.D City with folding laundry and an Odyssean trip to IKEA to buy a computer chair. Just look at that sentence and feel how lame I am. I feel it too. Every single day. I should have my invisible credentials stripped. Honestly, I threw them in the gutter when I gave up and quit writing for print. As Dillinger Four said, music is none of my business.

Honestly, I don’t listen to nearly as much music as I used to. I spend an hour and a half in the car every day and I pretty much exclusively listen to podcasts or audiobooks. At home it’s mostly family time, and while sometimes I’ll put on music when we’re hanging out in the toy room, you can’t very well listen to the new Deafheaven or Baroness record with a toddler. I listened to the soundtrack to Frozen more than I listened to any of the albums on this list. It’s just what my life is like now, and I’m OK with that because I get into just enough new music every year to satisfy the part of my music brain that is still curious. Mostly it’s to keep up with bands I love (The Mountain Goats, Destroyer, The Tallest Man on Earth) or bands who I have high hopes for based on my limited interaction with their music (Courtney Barnett, Father John Misty), but every year there are a few records that come out of the blue and knock me on my ass and that’s why I still put in a little effort to find new stuff. I’d love to see this list a year ago and think to myself, “Who the hell are Hop Along? Or Julien Baker? What? Laura Stevenson is putting out a new record that’s awesome!” 

Anyway, these all filled the gaps between all the medical drama and all the insane joy of fatherhood in one capacity or another, usually overlapping, and I can't wait until I can go back to worrying about things that don't really matter.

15. Mac DeMarco - Some Other Ones (Self-Released)

I was a big fan of Mac DeMarco’s 2014 release Salad Days but his proper 2015 release--Another One--felt a little too samey. Some Other Ones, the instrumental album released a couple months after Another One, on the other hand, got a ton of play around the house. It was a perfect summer record, capturing all of the laid back vibe of DeMarco’s unique tuneage without any of the boring, dopey vocals.

14. Joanna Gruesome - Peanut Butter (Slumberland)

Once you get past the horrible (but yeah, pretty hilarious) band name, you get a really terrific young band who seamlessly blend the worlds of shouty, throbbing punk rock and sugary sweet indie pop. Their Welsh band’s second longplayer is sneaky good. Before you know it you’ve listened to the whole thing and you’re starting over again. Personally, it was very hard for me to get past the first track--”Last Year”--because it’s just so damn good I wanna listen to it over and over and over again. I do this thing every year, where I put all the songs for my prospective Top 40 Songs of the Year list and put them on shuffle in the car. After a while I start skipping tracks. The less apt I am to skip a track, the higher it charts, and I don’t think I have skipped “Last Year” once. I digress. I can still barely get over the fact that Joanna Gruesome made the list and Joanna Newsom didn’t.

13. Waxahatchee - Ivy Tripp (Merge)

The week this album was released I put it on in the car during a family outing. “Is this on Merge?” I asked Jenny, who I’m guessing just looked at me like what the hell are you talking about? “Look it up and see if this is on Merge Records. It sounds like a Merge album from the 90s.” Sure enough, Katie Crutchfield’s latest great leap forward as a singer/songwriter/asskicking indie rock musician was released by Merge. It’s the perfect place for her now. Her 2013 sophomore LP Cerulean Salt was quite a fragile record, full of hushed, heartbreaking vocals. Ivy Tripp isn’t without its pensive moments. The album deceptively opens with a blown out synthesizer and Crutchfield’s aching vocals but gives way to a bunch of songs with distorted guitars, 90s alt-rock radio sounding hooks (that’s meant as a compliment), glorious harmonies, and a sonic palate so different from Cerulean Salt it’s dizzying.

12. Beach Slang - The Things We Do to Find People Who Feel Like Us (Polyvinyl)

Beach Slang’s sound can be very easily defined as the Replacements-meet-Jawbreaker. That’s going to be the general consensus. There’s really no way around it because yep, that’s exactly what they sound like. AND YET. I love this record. It helps that I love the Mats and Jawbreaker, but the more I listen to this record, the more I think it’s less of a direct copy and more of a broad anthemic, ramshackle indie/punk sound. The way this record sounds is the way my aura would sound if auras had sound. The other thing working in Beach Slang’s favor is the quality of songwriting, which is excellent, and even though the emotive standout “Too Late to Die Young” sounds like equal parts “Here Comes a Regular” and “Condition Oakland,” I listened to that song dozens of times this year and got chills every time. Frontman James Alex is a Pennsylvania punk rock lifer and there is a world weary quality to these songs that makes them so engaging. That and some really, really catchy hooks and killer riffs.

11. The Tallest Man on Earth - Dark Bird is Home (Dead Oceans)

Though I probably most associate the new Mountain Goats record with my week of isolation in April, Dark Bird is Home was also in heavy rotation. The day after I took the radioactive iodine, I sat out on the back patio drinking coffee and listening to Kristian Matsson’s latest little masterpiece. It’s been wonderful watching Matsson develop his sound from sparse, finger plucked guitar and a serious Bob Dylan jones into something fuller and fresher and distinctly his. Watching Matsson get better and better, album after album, is so much fun. It's not like I'm waiting for him to slip up, but I genuinely don't know where how he could get any better and sure enough, album after album, he does.

10. Julien Baker - Sprained Ankle (6131)

I feel serious dread when I stumble across teenagers this talented. Julien Baker is a 19 year old college student from Tennessee who made one of the most devastating records of 2015. And that’s really all I have to say about this stark and gorgeous record, which speaks for itself.

9. Mikal Cronin - MCIII (Merge)

Mikal Cronin is frequently mentioned in the same breath as the psych-rock yin to his garage-pop yang, Ty Segall. The two came up and played together in bands in Orange County and have since gone their (mostly) separate ways and achieved individual success. Segall’s output is sprawling whereas this is just Cronin’s third album in five years. I gravitate toward Cronin’s masterful pop tunes because that’s just my sensibility, and holy shit, they’re so damn good. I was late to the party on his 2013 LP MCII, which certainly would have made my year end list had I discovered it in time. It’s just right up my alley. Cronin is an ace at molding big melodies, deceptively deft songcraft, and, this time around especially, some emotionally fraught subject matter. The album is cracked in two: six songs of bright, string-laden, and occasionally mournful Californian pop and a six song songcycle about a period of despair recovering from back surgery. Cronin talks about it on his episode of WTF with Marc Maron, and listening to that podcast I felt a certain kindred spirit with the guy. I guess that can happen when you graduated high school the same year as someone and you came up with the same music on the radio and followed similar trajectories into punk music.  

8. Laura Stevenson - Cocksure (Don Giovanni)

I didn’t even know this one was coming out. Probably because I still routinely spin and greatly enjoy her 2013 album Wheel. So, with no lead up, this one landed in my lap and I didn’t quite know what to do with it. I wasn’t ready Laura! I didn’t really like the album cover, and I didn’t really like the title so, for no good reason, I put it on the shelf and went about not listening to music (which I did a lot this year). But then I put it on while doing the dishes and I thought that Cocksure was a remarkably accurate title for Laura Stevenson’s fourth LP. With each successive album her confidence has grown and on Cocksure she’s displaying some serious sonic swagger. Lyrically though, Stevenson still excels at capturing all of the fucked up self doubt of twentysomething existence with aplomb.

7. Hop Along - Painted Shut (Saddle Creek)

Hop Along frontwoman Frances Quinlan’s voice needs to be categorized as a distinct musical instrument. The range she draws out of her throaty pipes is astounding, and her insanely emotive vocals--which always sound like they’re on the verge of totally giving out--push Hop Along’s endlessly listenable second album. Painted Shut is a thoroughly engaging off kilter batch of punky indie rock jams. Insanely, I discovered Hop Along through a Fantasy Football podcast, which I guess shows you what kind of year it has been and how out of touch I am these days. Regardless, I listened to Painted Shut an insane amount of times. It’s a fun record, with some really catchy melodies, but there’s a raw and distinct beauty to these songs that is exhausting. And any time I finish listening to a record, take off my headphones, and say “holy shit,” that’s basically my ultimate seal of approval.

6. Sufjan Stevens - Carrie & Lowell (Asthmatic Kitty)

I listened to Sufjan Stevens’ Seven Swans a lot right after Rosie was born. I tasked myself to find quiet, yet engaging music to play in the wee hours of the morning when she slept on my chest and Jenny slept in the bed. This was our nightly routine, and I feel all weepy and nostalgic thinking about it now. That tiny girl, the quiet, gorgeous music, the peace of being a father, the hours and hours of playing FTL on the iPad from midnight to 5:30 am. These are potent memories. So upon hearing Stevens’ latest album, which returns to the starkly orchestrated and banjo-focused arrangements of Seven Swans, I promptly listened to the album ceaselessly for two weeks. Carrie & Lowell is a tough album to listen to, but it’s so beautiful and deeply felt and earnest it’s easy to get wrapped up. It’s a heavy meditation on memory, death, and forgiveness and one of the year’s most powerful works.

5. Jeff Rosenstock - We Cool? (Quote Unquote)

There’s this little indie/pop punk/folk punk/DIY middleground that appeals to me on every level. It’s nostalgic, catchy, emotionally charged, ramshackle, and supports marathon relistening. Jeff Rosenstock (as well as his bands Bomb The Music Industry and Antarctigo Vespucci, discovered when my obsession with We Cool? reached a fever pitch and I NEEDED MORE GODDAMNIT!) firmly resides in that aforementioned middleground and was one of those rare “What the hell, I don’t know who this is but I’ll give it a listen” albums that I don’t get enough of because I honestly don’t know where or how to find the good stuff anymore outside of the coolest people in my Facebook feed.

4. Father John Misty - I Love You, Honeybear (Sub Pop)

Josh Tillman comes across as a prickly artist type but goddamn did the man write one of the best album’s of love songs I’ve ever heard. The real, unadulterated affection Tillman puts on display for his wife here is sweet and staggering, and should they ever divorce, well, I’ll throw this album against the wall because it would just be too much to handle. Naturally, if you are married, or in love with somebody, these songs will resonate down to your core and bring you closer together. This Fall I saw two beautiful young people share their first dance as a married couple to “Chateau Lobby #2” because there’s really nothing more romantic than a dude belting out a profession of love to his wife and then, unable to profess any further with words, brings in a goddamn mariachi band. 2015 showed the world to be an ugly place but I Love You, Honeybear is a necessary contrast to all of the violence and hate that surrounds us.

3. Fred Thomas - All Are Saved (Polyvinyl)

“Who is this brilliant weirdo?” I wondered aloud, halfway through All Are Saved. And after about three seconds of internet research I learned that Thomas was the bandleader for Michigan indie-pop stalwarts Saturday Looks Good to Me. I was delighted by that. Saturday Looks Good to Me’s All Your Summer Songs was big when I was hosting an indie-pop-centric radio show in college, and though I can’t remember any of the songs off of that record, I very distinctly remember plugging in the band name, track, and album title into the interface we used to publish the Now Playing part of the station’s website. Where was I? Oh yeah, Fred Thomas is brilliant. The dude is a gifted pop songwriter and yet his latest solo record (his 8th!) is a murky wash of electronics and borderline stream of consciousness lyrics that take us to the dark recesses of Thomas’ mind and memories. The lyrics feel imperfect, like first drafts, and that’s what made me love them so much. Editing out a line like, “It’s like everyone we know collectively vomited up a pile of brown sweaters or something” would take away from the magic.

2. Courtney Barnett - Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit (Mom & Pop)

There is no cooler record this year than Courtney Barnett’s “debut.” I don’t feel right calling it a debut, even if it is Barnett’s first “proper” LP, because her dual EP collection The Double EP: A Sea of Split Peas was both a sparkling debut and basically an album in its own right. I tried swearing off reading music reviews this year but for some reason I read all of the year end lists and was annoyed that everyone is acting all surprised that her “debut” LP is so accomplished. It’s like c’mon she worked out the kinks on those EPs damnit!  I got sidetracked, which is fine, because I can tie that into Barnett’s songs, which often feel tangential which is one of the things that makes them so fresh. Australia has a long history of providing fun, unique, dare I say QUIRKY pop music that has its own distinct vibe and feel, and Barnett is right up there with the Church and the Go Betweens. She’s a marvel. Pure liquid fun without being at all fluffy. There’s weight to the tunes, and while I didn’t connect with it on a really deeply emotional level that’s OK too because that certainly didn’t keep me from playing the hell out of this album. And I think just about everyone who heard this record felt the same way, or at least the staff at Trader Joes on Ward Parkway the day after Thanksgiving when I got there five minutes before they opened and they were absolutely blaring “Elevator Operator” from the sound system. That’s a seal of approval if there ever was one.

1. The Mountain Goats - Beat the Champ (Merge)

Beat the Champ was announced the day after I was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. I immediately ordered the deluxe edition LP to have something to look forward to over the forthcoming emotionally taxing months. The album was released a week before I underwent a week of isolation for radioactive iodine ablation and I spent most of my isolation listening to the album. It’s not just about wrestling. Of course it’s not just about wrestling. It’s an album about the lives of the people who wrestle--both real and imagined--as a metaphor for the important ideas kicking around in John Darnielle’s psyche. The birth of a child is told as the birth of a tag team in “Animal Mask.” Pure perseverance is told through a wrestler so tough he proclaims “Everybody’s got their limits/ Nobody’s found mine” on the quick hitting “Choked Out.” “Heel Turn 2” tells the story of a beloved wrestling hero betraying the trust of his fans and turning heel as a means of pure survival, both artistically and personally. “I don’t want to die in here,” Darnielle sings. Those lines resonated with me, obviously, but beyond that they got me through not only that shitty week trapped in my old basement bedroom at my parents’ house, but the summer where I thought I was going to have to have chest surgery, and the fall where I found out no I didn’t need chest surgery but I did need extensive neck surgery. They got me through the hospital. They got me through the three weeks of recovery. They are getting me through the aftermath where things look a lot better than they have in a long time but I’m still not out of the woods yet. In a sense Beat the Champ is just an extension of the relationship I’ve always had with the Mountain Goats. I have used John Darnielle’s songs to get me through the tough times since I first heard them when I was 17 or 18, and I’ll continue to do so for the rest of my life because no songwriter on earth is that tapped in to the human experience. Darnielle played a live solo show at the Lawrence Arts Center in at the end of the summer and that hour and a half was the most peaceful and wonderful hour and a half of 2015. It was bizarre feeling so comforted, and so OK with everything in the midst of feeling so definitely not OK I had taken to seeing a special cancer psychologist to find ways to cope with the dread and anxiety of what is honestly a very, very treatable cancer. But when you’re constantly the weird exception to the rule, and the treatments aren’t working 100%, dread is inevitable. And at the worst times I would retreat to a spare bedroom, put my headphones on, and listen to the Mountain Goats.

Killing My Inner Collector

My surgery went as well as it could have. I mean, I was passed out, so I'm guessing, but considering that I'm still here and seem to be healing I'm going to give my doctor at KU Med two thumbs up. They have apparently removed all of the cancerous lymph nodes that were present on my PET scan which is excellent. I mean, I HOPE they got them all, I'm just guessing there too. But the pathology report said they got six and the scan showed five so there you go. The trouble now is that I need another radioactive iodine treatment to go in and mop up any microscopic thyroid tissue remaining in my neck. This isn't a huge deal, and I expected another one of these would be necessary. The low iodine diet and going off of my thyroid hormone medicine is a drag and being isolated from my family for a week is heartbreaking but it beats chemo (which, hey, if this doesn't get everything in order, there is a chemo treatment for thyroid cancer and I'm not taking it off the table because, the way this has been going, I'm up for anything at this point).

The real trouble is that, since I had a CT scan with iodine contrast, I have to wait at least three months before the radioactive iodine is viable. We waited four months last time just to be sure. Three months would put treatment on December 28th, but I don't think that's going to happen. I think we're going to wait, which pushes this into the next calendar year and another deductible and out of pocket maximum to be met (which, hey guess what, just went up a thousand dollars this year hooray!). I apparently did a shitty job of timing all of this, but alas, here we are. If anyone tries to convince you that socialized healthcare is a bad idea for this country go to your nearest hardware store, purchase a pitchfork, and run them out of town for me will you?

I was able to cover my last two out of pocket maximums via selling off bits and pieces of my record collection. That would have been unthinkable a couple years ago and here I am this morning, making another sweep through my already pretty tight LP collection finding more stuff to list on Discogs.

Abel Tasmans? I was keeping that to add some flavor to my collection but flavor is a luxury and hey I have the MP3s anyway and I'll take $35 if I can get it.

Low? Do I keep Trust or Things I Lost in the Fire? I think I go with the latter. It's not like this is a Sophie's Choice situation or anything.

Do I really need New Order on vinyl? Or the Magnetic Fields The Charm of the Highway Strip? Will I ever listen to these or am I just holding onto them because they represent the part of me that loves these records. They're like tokens of fandom. Why do I have four Talking Heads records? I like the Talking Heads just fine but I can't tell you a single track from Remain in Light? Is that the one is "Girlfriend is Better"? See, I don't even know.

Collecting anything is inherently weird to me now because my eyes have been replaced by those cartoon eyes with the dollar signs in them. Debt is large, money is short, and I have become obsessed with optimizing our family's finances. I think the main reason I hang onto some of these records is because I want Rosie to grow up around them and inherit them. She probably won't even care and, more likely, she will end up destroying some of them. I didn't really have any records to inherit and by the time she's old enough to appreciate this carefully and painstakingly crafted and curated collection they won't even make turntables anymore.

Here I am, going full anti-collector, because I have to convince myself that it is a meaningless endeavor in order to do something very difficult. Sitting in a hospital room staring at a wall, all stitched up and out of my mind on painkillers with drains hanging out of holes in my neck, really helped me grasp the existential qualities of life. I have limited motion in my neck and feel like a golem sulking around the house. I can't pick up my kid, I can't really do anything but sit around. I'm mobile enough this week to flip through my records and try to make them meaningless even though each and every one has a story, or was a miracle find, or was a personal treasure at one point. Anything I think will appreciate over the years I keep, but those are few and far between and the logic reverts back to: Do I really need every Silver Jews record? I only really like a couple songs on Starlite Walker. Why do I have seven Bruce Springsteen records when the only ones I will ever listen to again are Nebraska and Tunnel of Love?

Sometimes life is hard. And sometimes you have to reevaluate the way you live to make it better for the people around you. But hey, at least I got this sick scar!

Our Cancer Year

It's been a year since I first noticed the lump in my neck. I'd just started at the library and didn't have insurance, so I had to wait until November to get it checked out and here we are now. I'm having another surgery on Wednesday. This one will remove the lion's share of lymph nodes from my neck, and then maybe, after another radioactive iodine treatment, I'll feel confident enough to say I'm cancer free. It's been a long year.

But it could be way, way worse. I reconcile that every time I start feeling sorry for myself. But even "As far as cancers go, this is the one you'd want to get" cancer goes, it's still supremely anxiety inducing. It certainly didn't help when, after noting some radioactive iodine uptake in my chest, my endocrinologist told me that it looked like there was a mass in my chest but he wouldn't know for sure for THREE MONTHS and I spent the whole summer coming to terms with having my chest cracked open in the fall. When the three months were up, the doctor ordered a whole body scan with a diagnostic dosage of radioactive iodine to see if there was still uptake. The radioactive iodine uptakes in any remnant thyroid tissue left in the body that metastasized from the cancerous thyroid. Once the radioactive iodine has been ingested, they very slowly drag you through a machine that acts like a giant geiger counter. The end result is actually actually pretty neat looking: your neck (and in my case, lightly, my chest) filled with static. The diagnostic whole body scan showed nothing. Totally thrilling.

The PET scan my doctor ordered, on the other hand, showed some "overactive" lymph nodes in my neck. Five of them. I went to my beloved ENT Dr. Hill to see what he thought, or if he could remove them, and he referred me to a doctor at KU Med who specializes in aggressive lymph node removal. "I could do it," he said. "But you want someone who's in there pulling out tons of lymph nodes every day," he said, in so many words. Unlike my endocrinologist, Dr. Hill made me feel more at ease. I went to see the doc at KU Med and she recommended just getting rid of all of the lymph nodes possible. You can't get them all, but you can get most of them, and by removing the probably cancerous nodes, yanking out the rest reduces the risk of it recurring down the line (which happens about 30% of the time, recurrence). She stuck a camera up my nose to look at my vocal cords because you gotta surprise yourself every day and it was one of the Top 5 worst experiences of the whole cancer debacle, so I'm lucky there.

She also ordered a biopsy of some of the neck nodes because, since one of them is in my thyroid bed, it involves going back through the scar from my thyroidectomy and that whole area is a big scar tissued mess and going back in runs the risk of destroying my parathyroid glands (which regulate calcium in the body) or damaging my laryngal nerve (which regulates your voice and, considering how I basically yell all the time because I'm part deaf from so many punk rock shows in my younger years, might not be such a bad thing). I don't know if I whined about the biopsy I had on my cancer lump last December, but that was the #1 worst part of this whole affair in the Top 5 Worst Things About Thyroid Cancer. The list looks like this.

5.) Having my vocal cords assessed via having a thin camera shoved up my nostril. They had to restrain me. It was fucked up.

4.) The pain in my hand from the IV the day after my thyroidectomy. The surgery was actually a breeze (again, I can't recommend Dr. Hill enough. The man is a magician. I asked him how many thyroids he takes out a year and he said he takes out 3 a week. That was exactly what I needed to hear!) and the worst part was the liquid diet dinner they brought me after the procedure (I actually wrote a song about it, it was so bad). The saltiest chicken broth you've ever tasted and lemon ice and hot iced tea. Fortunately, the young man with the kidney stone in the bed next to me neglected to eat his dinner before he left and I had Jenny snag me his cheesecake and it was incredible. Totally mood boosting. I only stayed one night, but wasn't discharged until the next evening and by then the IV in my had started to hurt really bad. I don't know why that's what I think about when I think about that hospital stay, but it stuck with me. That and the nurses coming in every 2 hours to take my blood, which totally got me over my fear of needles. Cancer will get you over needle anxiety right quick.

3.) Radioactive Iodine Treatment Isolation - You think it's gonna be fun, you try to treat it like a vacation, and instead you're living in your childhood bedroom you haven't lived in for like ten years and it's full of dust and you get sick and can't tell if its severe allergies or the radiation working its way through and out of your body. You can't see your family and your dad says, "HEY MERI HE'S GLOWING!" every time you come up stairs to shower the radioactive sweat off of your body (Dad's comments were actually pretty funny). You watch sporting events you have no real interest (the NBA playoffs, the FA Cup semifinals) and, for some insane reason, hours of "Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives" and you admit to yourself you're not even hate watching the show and you despair. There are nice moments, like your parents buying you tons of junk food and fast food to compensate for the 2 hellish weeks of low iodine diet that preceded the treatment, but you can't enjoy it because you just want to hug your baby but you know you can't. On the plus side, you have some serene moments sitting on the back patio alone in the early morning sipping coffee and listening to the new Tallest Man on Earth album. You watch John Wick at 2 in the morning and immediately consider watching it again it's so damn awesome and you have nothing better to do. You write a fistful of songs for a concept album about the whole cancer experience but you wait until your last day in isolation so you don't get as far as you would have liked. Plus there were Royals games on every night.

2.) Overall existential dread and death anxiety and the idea that my daughter will grow up without a father. The psychologist I see at KU Med referred to this as a Negative Feedback Loop. Yep. Sounds about right.

1.) That goddamn first biopsy. It lasted less than 10 minutes and was worse than the root canal I had that took 4 and a half hours spread over 3 days.

I will also include the second biopsy in there with the first one because all biopsies are horrible, some worse than others. Just ask the guy in the chaotic Interventional Radiology prep area there for a bone marrow biopsy. "You've had this done before, correct?" "Oh yeah," he said. That made me feel like a big fat princess baby since I was there whining about how my doctor said I could have conscious sedation and the nurse at IR was like, "Yeah we don't usually do that because this is such a minor procedure but you can have some Ativan. And we can have the sedation on tap in case you really need it during the procedure." The Ativan didn't do much, and by the time they went into the left side of my neck and started digging around I tapped out, and then I blacked out, and then I woke up feeling dreamy. Because I'm a big baby but hey, I paid the damn $50 copay so if I say take me to La La Land, you take me to La La Land.

I swear, I've said "I'm a big baby" to every doctor and nurse I've met at KU Med. It's a defense mechanism because even though I know I'm in incredibly capable hands, the prospect of having my neck cut open on both sides and at my throat and all the lymph nodes scooped out like pumpkin guts is scary. But hey, at least I'll get to watch the Royals play in the World Series from my hospital bed so that's something!


The thing with Thyroid Cancer is that I know it could be so much worse, and that still doesn't make it less shitty. I'm a neurotic anxiety-ridden worrier by nature and the cancer has only made those tendencies worse. It has also overtaken all creative aspects of my brain which is one of the sadder things because there's still stuff rattling in there, music and comics and the book I need to finish but I can't motivate myself to do anything but distract myself with TV or baseball or fantasy football or staring at my phone. It's a sad sort of self medication.

The best thing lately has just been doing random stuff with Rosie. We came home from an errand the other day and just sat on the gravel driveway together for an hour. We dug a little hole, we picked up rocks, Rosie threw dirt on me a bunch, and it was one of the sweetest, nicest hours I can remember from the last year and I'm trying to get more of that. I feel like I have been distracted as a father and I hate that. I'm pretty good at doing my dad duty but I'm lazy and not 100%. I could be contributing more to make sure our daughter doesn't grow up to be some media obsessed/totally detached loon like her father. More sitting in the dirt. More walking up to the barn to mess with Bart the barn cat. More silly games and activities.

That's all part of getting better, and even though I feel totally normal physically, I'm mentally shut down. You know when your Pokemon gets poisoned or something and it can still function but loses a little HP every turn? Yeah, just like that. You know exactly what I'm talking about. Negative Feedback Loop. "We tend to think about the worst thing that could happen, so when you start thinking that way, flip it around. Think, what's the best thing that could happen?" It seems like some basic psychologisty stuff but that has been pretty helpful. That and lying in a dark room listening to guided meditations that put me in a log cabin with a crackling fire. Or vomiting a few thousand words into the public sphere because even writing in my private little journal is too much work these days.

So anyway, they're cutting me open on Wednesday and I'm sort of excited. Mostly because it's one of the few proactive moments in a year of waiting around for proactive moments. There's not a lot you can do on your own to fight cancer, so you just wait. And wait. And wait some more until your appointment. And then they stick a fucking camera up your nose and you just want to burn the hospital to the ground.
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Because this is a music blog, and because I'm obsessed with pinpointing every moment in my life with a song, I made a cancer playlist. Unlike the playlists I cobble together in a couple of hours to represent something or other, this is one I've been compiling all year. That's it up there, up top, and I'm going to annotate it because writing about cancer surprisingly takes my mind off of cancer.

1.) The Mountain Goats - "Heel Turn 2"
I was lucky enough to attend John Darnielle's solo show at the Lawrence Arts Center a couple months ago and it was hands down the best concert I've ever attended. I could watch him do that show once a week for the rest of my life. It was loose and informal and featured some of the most devastating arrangements of songs I've loved for years (and anecdotes too! Darnielle spinning a yarn about an underheated house by some railroad tracks in Ames, Iowa before saying "This song was written in that house" and playing "There Will Be No Divorce" is the stuff I live for, and I think my whole body tingled at that moment). Beat the Champ came out right around the time of my Radioactive Iodine treatment and I preordered the limited edition vinyl version the day after I was diagnosed with Thyroid Cancer so I would have something to look forward to. I listened to Beat the Champ a lot in my isolation chamber, but trapped in that room, the refrain from "Heel Turn 2" made my bones chill. It's about a beloved babyface wrestler turning heel and accepting the repercussions because he can't keep being the favorite. "I don't want to die in here," he says. I wrote a big long post about how fighting cancer is like wrestling, and I wrote it because that was the experience I laid on top of this record. Naturally, Darnielle's live rendition at that Lawrence show gave me megachills. I think about this song a lot, especially at the hard and dark parts and, like most Mountain Goats songs, it gives me strength.

2.) Why? - "These Hands"
I think about this song a lot. Yoni Wolf writes the sort of lyrics that you think of when you're trying to fall asleep at night. The guy is a wizard. I think I like this track so much right now because it tonally captures how I feel. If this were Happy Feet this would be my heart song right now. Also, have you seen Happy Feet? That movie is WEIRD. It opens with a 20 minute mating ritual, a lady penguin sings a Prince song! "Let's talk about eggs baby." Rosie brings me the DVD case after we have watched the first half hour of Frozen for the fifth time, and I put it in and we are both a little confused and a little shocked and just want the safe comfort of Frozen.

3.) Andrew Jackson Jihad - "Linda Ronstadt"
A beautiful and uplifting capture of what it feels like to be caught off guard by something tremendously beautiful and to feel that beauty through your whole body to the point of tears.

4.) Cheap Girls - "Hey Hey, I'm Worn Out"
I have the acoustic version on my iTunes playlist, but the title captures the tone. Also, it's from an album called My Roaring 20s and that's a great goddamn album title.

5.) The Mountain Goats - "This Year"
A requirement for playlists like these. An important sentiment.

6.) Bright Eyes - "Beginner's Mind"
I still feel like I'm the only person who REALLY REALLY loved The People's Key. I think it's the best Bright Eyes album and it actually led me to abandon my atheistic tendencies and to leave the door open for the spiritual. I still don't have any place in my life for religion, but I do have a place for feeling ones place in the universe and being a sort of seeker person, if that makes any sense at all.

7.) The Tallest Man on Earth - "The Dreamer"
I just love that line "Sometimes the blues is just a passing bird." That's the title of the EP from which this song was culled, and in addition to listening to TTMOE's latest Dark Bird is Home in my isolation chamber, I listened to this EP a lot too.

8.) Volcano Choir - "Tiderays"
What I love about Volcano Choir is they take a guy whose songs and lyrics have meant a lot to a lot of people of late and basically pull page from the My Bloody Valentine playbook and go vocals not lyrics. Justin Vernon's lyrics are more free association poetry than anything out of the Bon Iver songbook (though his last album veers in that direction). I'm still very much a lyrics guy when it comes to music, but this year I let myself off my leash a little and got into stuff that was could make you feel a certain way without explaining itself to you.

9.) Youth Lagoon - "17"
I ignored this band at first because there are too many vaunted weird little bedroom pop acts to keep track of. But this song was in the movie The Kings of Summer and I immediately tracked it down. Still haven't listened to the full album, which is strange because this song is incredible. The sound and sentiment of it is appealing on a lot of levels, but the musicianship is devastating. It's so sneaky! It sounds like a little guy in his bedroom, just singing this mournful little song but it's slowly building until it's quickly building and then this drum machine drifts in and the whole song totally shifts and delivers the last chorus. Floors me every time.

10.) Frog Eyes - "Claxxon's Lament"
This song has been floating around for 10 years. It was the Wolf Parade cover I heard first, which led me to Frog Eyes, who were a little too weird for me. They still are, but Carey Mercer's songwriting chops are undeniable and his album Carey's Cold Spring (written after the death of his father and released just after he revealed his diagnosis with throat cancer) is a gorgeous, heartbreaking record. I mentioned my love of lyrics, and the way Mercer forces them into songs in interesting ways with different vocal inflections is one of his great gifts. He wrote a great essay in response to naming one of his albums Fuck Death and seemingly inviting cancer into his life via not respecting death, and I found that to be a great read and a great resource.

11.) John K Samson - "Taps Reversed"
John K Samson's Provincial has been following me around since its release in January of 2012. I had already loved the Weakerthans for many years, and since they only released an album every four years or so, I had learned to get the most out of them. I listened to this on the way to the hospital on the day Rosie was born. I soundtrack my life all the time, but I hadn't prepared for this. I had a big delivery room playlist, but nothing for the short voyage from the house to the hospital. So I put this on, because it always gives me the feels. That day was so amazing, and I'm glad that album was a part of it (the other side of that coin is that when the doctor was breaking Jenny's water, Lady Gaga came on shuffle and Jenny exclaimed, "Turn it off! Oh god, did I just have my water broken to Lady Gaga?!"). A year and a month later I was going back to that hospital for my radioactive iodine and it was impossible not to notice the two very polar opposite circumstances. I listened to this album after my thyroidectomy too. My mom stayed with me most of the time, but on my second day there she left to get food or to go home and I had a couple hours to myself. I tried to sleep because I slept poorly the night before (see: doctors coming in every 2 hours to take my blood, uncomfortable hospital bed, literal pain in neck, tubes coming out of arm, etc). I couldn't sleep, so I put on Provincial and just stared out the window and listened. The song "Letter in the Icelandic from the Ninette San" hit hard because it's about a man dying of tuberculosis writing a letter to his brother back home telling him to get on with his life and has little details like kids from the children's ward running by his room on their way to a Halloween party. It's a real downer, and one of the highlights of Samson's incredible songbook (and considering that I'm going to be in the hospital on Halloween, I'll probably listen to it and mournfully stare out the window waiting for my wife and child to stop by on the way to trick or treat). "Taps Reversed" is less of a downer, and one I found myself fixated on this year. It's a duet between Samson and his wife Christine Fellows, an extremely talented singer/songwriter herself. It's a little song about an old house and tedious home life stuff but told with such beautiful language like "The old house drinks everything we hide/ And hums sad songs that keep us up at night." I love that an album almost four years old can still reveal new sides of itself.

12.) Frank Tuner - "Keira" (No Use for a Name cover)
The tribute album to dear departed No Use for a Name frontman Tony Sly is a more interesting listen than any NUFAN record on its own. Sly was a great songwriter, and I'm not even gonna add the "for a dude in a pop punk band" because, hearing all these varied artists' takes on his songs shows that the world lost a talented and soulful guy. He wrote "Keira" for his daughter, and it's a really, really, really sad song about a dad feeling sorry for being gone all the time on tour. Sly's death gives it a new, deeply sadder meaning and Frank Turner's sparse rendition is one of the saddest things you will ever hear. It snuck on shuffle one night and I haven't been able to get away from it. See above: all that anxiety about not getting to see my daughter grow up. It doesn't matter how treatable the cancer is, once you're diagnosed you that door of death anxiety gets blown wide open and you just live there staring at it indefinitely. The time I spend with Rosie is the best time I have, and it's the thought of missing the random, quotidian stuff involved with watching a child grow up that makes my heart ache. If it was just me, I don't think the cancer would be such a big issue. I'd be able to accept it more. It's not that I had nothing to live for before Rosie, it's just that with Rosie I have something I really need to live for because she needs me. This is the sort of stuff that makes me seize up on a regular basis. Very excited for the day someone says "You're clear for now" so I can get back to being a 100% focused dad.

13.) The Tallest Man on Earth - "Dark Bird is Home"
The title track and closing track from Kristian Matsson's latest album, an album I listened to on repeat in the isolation chamber. One full of death imagery, but also one full of acceptance of life's inevitability.

14.) The Extra Lens - "Dogs of Clinic 17"
I snuck another John Darnielle track on there because that's who I am. My reading of this is that it's from the point of view of a dog in a medical testing facility, and it ends with a line that's a really intriguing blend of optimism and bleakness: "There's a light in the window/ There's a light in all of us trying to get free/ There's a light in all of you who hear my song/ There's a virus eating its way through me." And then there's a weird little synthesizer bit!

15.) The Weakerthans - "Reconstruction Site"
I mentioned how Weakerthans albums only came out every four years and I had to make them last, and I've been making Reconstruction Site last since 2003 when it was released and I bought it at Best Buy. They used to have indie and punk CDs on sale for like, $5 right when they came out! When I was 17 I loved driving around Olathe. I used to drive up to Best Buy just to go to Best Buy, or go to Borders and sit and read. You don't think about that new independence you get when you learn to drive, but it's unlike anything else you will ever experience. It's where you really get to start being a person. Where you crawl out of the pond scum and walk out into the wilderness. So I bought this album on one of those excursions. I was already a Weakerthans fan, having made Left & Leaving my all-time favorite album the year prior, and they represent the dividing line between my punk rock days and my indie rock days. It was fitting because John K Samson played bass in Propgagandhi, one of the more violently political and noisy punk rock bands (and funny, too) and the Weakerthans was Samson's way of moving away from that to write more personal songs. Reconstruction Site is a concept album about a man with terminal cancer and, according to Wikipedia, "A song cycle about grief, regret, loss, and eventual hope." So needless to say I revisited this album and put my own circumstances on top of it like I do. I can't mention the excellence and generousness John K Samson's songwriting enough. To have crafted albums I'm still discovering and learning about 12 years after the fact. This song draws up a lot of nostalgia and it's funny because this song is about having nostalgia drawn up via the protagonist remembering a very small and detailed moment from childhood from his hospital bed. It's the details that make us feel connected.

Felt Pilotes - "Moving Day" 7"

Felt Pilotes – “Moving Day” 7”

Spit and a Half, 1994

Acquired: Love Garden, Used, 2015

Price: $1

John Porcellino is one of my favorite graphic novelists. His memoir Perfect Example was one of the books that flipped a switch in my brain that made me not only obsessed with comics as a storytelling medium, but one that I could participate in. Porcellino’s spare drawings contain multitudes, and he has a gift for turning the quotidian into something utterly profound. Sometimes if I’m feeling like a real piece of shit, I’ll crack open the longbox where I keep all my single issue comics, pull out an issue of King Cat, and try to recenter myself with the universe. He’s come through Lawrence a couple of times to speak and I very nervously had him sign my copy of Perfect Example at the Autoptic comics expo in Minneapolis when were living there. I don’t know why I was so nervous, because by all accounts he is a very nice, sweet guy. I think I just respect his work so much, meeting him was like meeting Elvis or something.

In addition to being an outstanding artist, he also ran Spit and a Half records, which released some terrific low-key indie rock record in the mid 90s (I believe the label now functions as a indie comix distribution company). I found Felt Pilotes lone CD Wonderful Summer in the Half Price Books clearance section a few years ago and, despite my inclination to like anything John P crafts, I really loved that record. I barely buy any vinyl anymore as a cost cutting measure, but I do have a short list in my head of stuff I will definitely buy if I can find it for the right price. We stopped into Love Garden before John Darnielle’s solo show at the Lawrence Arts Center last week, and I beelined for the $1 7”s because those satisfy my built-in urge to buy records and I can peruse and even buy one or two without feeling guilty. I found this Felt Pilotes 7” in there and I consider that a monumental success. The songs are quiet and basic DIY indie rock with some slowcore leanings a la Low. It is very much of the sound that satisfies the deepest part of my indie rock heart.