Category: music
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First, I audio’d this, which made it sometimes confusing. Being an oral history, which is to say, “block of pertinent quote” led into by attribution, all read here by and in the same voice, I kept having to tap back twenty seconds, to hear again WHO I was listening to. Maybe ten hours in, though, I got into the lope of it, and all was great. Also, audio’ing it was by far the quickest way to get this into my head. And I verymuch wanted it all, faster and faster…
It’s always driven my crazy, how Guns n’ Roses just apostrophes the truncated ‘d’ of their “and,” but just leaves us all wondering what happened to the ‘a.’ It’s a petty concern, granted, but it seems to me that, if you’re not going to go just with a straight, naked ‘n,’ then you’re kind of compelled to stash an apostrophe on each side of that lonely letter, so that we visually understand i…
Which is to say: Bob Seger singing a Waylon Jennings song written by Steve Earle. Maybe the most golden pedigree I can dream of. I mean, okay: if this was somehow all happening in the passenger seat not just of a 77 Trans-Am, but if all three of these music makers were in the actual car with Burt Reynolds AS they’re shooting Smokey & the Bandit, AND Jerry Reed-as-Snowman is riding right behind AND they’re driving past Graceland, then it could maybe be cooler. But …
Not what I listened to while Mongrels-writing, but some songs that synch up well with Mongrels, I think. Which you can cue up just on Spotify, here*. Also, before I get to annotating and embedding and pulling my hair about because the versions I want aren’t available, etc, I also put together a Youtube playlist—different stuff, same vein—here* (also, no guarantees there isn’t a bit of overlap between Youtube and Spotify—I get really clicky about werewolf songs…
I tried so hard to make a YouTube playlist for Growing Up Dead in Texas. Songs that are in the book and songs that kind of encompass the book. But it wasn’t meant to be; the songs I needed can’t be included in playlists.
So, in lieu, I’ll put them all here, in the order that feels right — or, how they happen (for me) in the book. And this first one, it breaks my heart every time, but it always puts it all back together, too:
( there’s an ad on this one, sorry…
Don’t be afraid to embrace a song, or how it makes you feel. Remember the person you were when it touched you, or where you were — Brian Azzarello
At the end of December 2011, I finally read Robert McCammon’s A Boy’s Life. One of the more amazing reading experiences I’ve had—maybe I’d somehow known to save it for the month before I turned forty? 
Anyway, somewhere in it the grown-up narrator says how important it is to always keep listening to the new music, how that keeps you a…
So on the radio the other day I heard a song that took me right back to the second grade–The Gatlin Brothers’ “All the Gold in California.” Some excellent stuff. But it got me thinking about what all else I used to listen to about that time. Up until the fifth grade, anyway. I mean, once I hit sixth, I’d discover Prince and Quiet Riot and Shalimar and Terrence Trent D’Arby and the FOOTLOOSE and GREASE soundtracks, and all that would carry me u…
is the NYT bestselling author of 35 or so books, +350 stories, some comic books, and all this stuff here. He lives in Boulder, Colorado, and has a few broken-down old trucks, one PhD, and way too many boots. More