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thewordofjono-blog · 11 years

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Review: Kanye West - Yeezus

The music industry is an interesting place these days. As someone who has been involved in some sort of music-related business (whether it be working on my own music, doing artist development and marketing for other artists, or producing and directing music videos) for over 10 years, I’ve often found myself in situations where I was meeting and shaking hands with people I never would have dreamed I’d meet. The biggest surprise, aside from the initial shock of realizing just how charismatic these people are, has always been the fact that most of these celebrities have been incredibly respectful, caring and supportive about my personal artistic output and professional aspiration – even if I’m often the youngest and poorest guy in the room.

In this swirling network of rock and roll, dance music, hip-hop and punk, my mutual friendships and professional contacts extend to Grammy award winners, Rock and Roll Hall of Famers, international pop icons, now alcoholic and drug addicted one-hit-wonders constantly attempting comebacks, imprisoned rappers, real life gangsters (both the hip-hop kind and the mafia kind) and any number of artists and industry folk between – particularly the kind, like myself, who have spent years tumbling through this sticky web of music and the surrounding cutthroat business, just one song or one project away from the big time. Ever so close, but still light years away.

In all this time, even though we share a few mutual friends and the same loose network of professional acquaintances, frequent some of the same areas of New York City, and even though I’ve heard we’ve been in some of these places only minutes or hours apart, I’ve only bumped into Kanye West in person once. I chose my words very carefully when I said “bumped” because the only time I encountered Mr. West in person was when we literally bumped into one another one night at the Brooklyn Bowl where I was bowling and enjoying an open bar for a friend’s birthday.

I had just stepped onto the walkway that separates the lanes from the dance floor and stage area to fire off a drunken text message to a former girlfriend. Looking down at the phone (and experiencing the desired effects of several shots of Jameson), I didn’t see a man about my height flanked by two enormous men approaching me. Nor did I hear their request for me to step aside over the bowl’s house band of the evening (who I later found out was Titus Andronicus). Before I could look up from my phone and react, I felt the man in the middle bump me, and, seeing from my reaction that I was a bit drunk, he kindly steadied me with a hand on my arm, looked directly in my eyes, nodded and continued walking briskly toward the stage of the club.

I hurried back to my group of friends, still bowling and taking shots at our assigned lane and blurted “I just saw Kanye West. Kanye West is here tonight.”

“Fuck you!” they slurred back. After convincing myself I was crazy, I continued to drink to the health and the graceful aging of my friend, blacked out nearly immediately after and, in a surprisingly adult move after taking a cigarette outside, headed back to my friend’s house and passed out.

I found out the next morning via text message from one of the aforementioned professional contacts he and I share that Kanye West had premiered several new songs from his forthcoming album that night, October 23rd, 2010, at the Brooklyn Bowl. “Could you imagine what that was like for people who were there? That place must’ve gone apeshit!” He didn’t (and perhaps still doesn’t) know that I had been and I had left before Kanye performed.

Today, June 18th 2013, Kanye West’s new album Yeezus is available in stores and online. It leaked about five days ago, and I got my hands on a review copy around then. I’m pretty blown away by it.

Close friends and ex-girlfriends of mine know of my love/hate/mostly love relationship with Kanye West’s public image and his music. When The College Dropout debuted in 2004, my junior year of high school, I remember feeling a sense of relief. It was good to hear a rapper who seemed to be an educated, clever guy on great beats (his own), who didn’t possess all the same ridiculous and sometimes sickening bravado and violent imagery as his contemporaries. There was a real humility to his process, his songwriting and his lyricism. He took some issue with the norms of hip-hop and the associated culture and seemed to enjoy the idea of acknowledging them and poking fun, while still being cautious and coloring inside the lines, so to speak. After all, he had a line in his first big hit that went “[We’re] all self conscious, I’m just the first to admit it”. I thought that was a huge step forward (or backward, in a good way) for rap. I was excited.

West’s second and third albums followed what could be seen in hindsight as a normal progression of an artist of his caliber in terms of experimentation, in comparison to his first. Late Registration represented an expansion of the musical motifs and style of Dropout with the introduction of more refined orchestration and the collaboration of Jon Brion, while Graduation saw new styles creeping in, incorporating dance music and house influences to utilize a much more striking sonic palette; one that went on to influence a new crop of rappers that didn’t necessarily subscribe to the “gangster” label – especially after his now-famous sales competition with 50 Cent.

Something funny happened when he released 808s and Heartbreak, though. The album, arguably West’s most interesting, possibly his most influential and certainly his most controversial, really pissed off and disappointed a lot of people when it first arrived on shelves. Talk of the album in industry circles before it came out would’ve made you believe it wouldn’t sell much more than a few copies. But why? Perhaps at the time hip-hop wasn’t ready for its savior from all-things-gangster to spill his guts across 52 minutes of electro-pop music. Maybe all those people who’d been turned on by the meticulous production and the simplicity of the strong, smart rhymes of hip-hop’s newest superstar weren’t interested in hearing him (a man who has no singing ability whatsoever) sing with the aid of auto-tune for that amount of time.

The people who forced themselves to take the time to listen and attempt to understand 808s have very different opinions of it and defend it, though some say it’s become difficult to listen to. It’s an album created by a man who’s fiancée left him and whose mother died within the same year. There aren’t a lot of happy moments. It seems easy that a casual listener might have associated the album with painful experiences mirrored by its content. While I shared those sentiments upon first listen and have my own emotional attachment to the record, 808s and Heartbreak was particularly moving to me because at that point in his career it seemed that Kanye West, a guy who in less than five years had become one of the strongest and loudest voices in entertainment and popular culture, no longer had any concern about his own longevity or about the possibility of alienating his entire audience. In fact, there was something so self destructive about his behavior and his musical output that I believed he wanted his career to be in jeopardy. By that time he’d already been the subject of some controversy over his award show antics, had been ridiculed for being a complete egomaniac and would soon become the butt of a very public running joke on South Park.

Kanye never voiced much regret for the album and never halted its release, though. He defended it. He behaved arrogantly about it, as an Avant-garde artist would an artwork that the public didn’t yet understand. He did all the normal press and several videos in support of it, singing and all, and they were all as interesting visually and groundbreaking as some of the other things he’d worked on as a traditional hip-hop artist. There was a tour that was canceled with Lady Gaga during the promotion of the album, but that seemed only to add to the mystique. It was as though somewhere in his deep disregard for the loyal fan-base that made him a star, Kanye West established himself as a true artist: not conforming to patterns that work just to earn easy money, not repeating musical ideas, not compromising in order to please people. Ego, reputation and public image issues aside, somewhere around then he’d crossed over to being a much more important figure to popular culture and the overall trajectory of hip-hop music.

My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy was a something of a return to form (at least in terms of primarily being a hip-hop album), with several radio-ready singles. Still, the darkened lyrical content and imagery prevailed from 808s. Kanye’s endless interest in the corrupt, the X-Rated, the excesses of celebrity lifestyle and the depths of depression seemed to be cemented into his lyrical content with this release. He meanwhile expanded his musical palette to include more menacing, haunting tones, while also incorporating his newly found love of auto-tune in certain passages, and relying on haunting collaborations with rock and roll and hip-hop royalty and indie artists alike. It’s a record that’s every bit as overproduced as The College Dropout, Late Registration, and Graduation, but more epic, more crucial, and still incredibly different.

Yeezus is another example, like 808s, of Kanye West almost purposefully alienating his audience. The entire album is a mish mash of hard, grinding textures that would’ve previously been found in industrial rock albums, low-fi grit, thumping rhythm and sparse, haunting samples. It’s generally formless and stream of consciousness musical output. Rhythmically, the album feels like a speeding train that shifts in pace, volume and shape without any warning, leaving a disorienting but captivating impression to the listener. There are no big hooks, the samples never run for long enough to establish themselves as true song elements (save for the final track “Bound 2”), and just when you begin to become comfortable with the motifs and themes that could structure a particular song, they grind to halt or quickly switch to something surprisingly dissonant and we as listeners are transported somewhere else entirely. The vocals on the album seem completely effortless and off the cuff, as if written without a second thought the day they were recorded or ad-libbed with Rick Rubin on the other side of the glass egging West on; At once incredibly brash and arrogant, but at the same time hilarious, graceful and possessing the same humor we have come to expect from Kanye (albeit a little more X-Rated).

Yeezus doesn’t have to be your favorite Kanye West album, but you should probably understand the importance of Kanye West’s work in the context of all other hip-hop and popular music since he arrived on the scene and treat it as the potential paradigm shift in popular that it is (or, rather, might be). From the era of The College Dropout and Late Registration we got a revival of intelligent non-gangster rap, orchestral arrangement and meticulous production, opening doors for guys like Lupe Fiasco and more recently my friends Gilbere Forte and Raak, revitalizing the career of Common, Talib Kweli and restoring interest in groups like De La Soul. With Graduation and 808s and Heartbreak we saw house and dance music earmarked for a revival in the United States and meanwhile, running parallel in a different portion of the industry, the auto-tuned, emo-rap craze happen. With these two albums, the doors swung open for EDM on a large, popular culture scale and the radio waves opened (for better or worse) for people like Drake. My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy similarly created a parallel opening for different styles of music to cross into the mainstream as well: its indie leanings gave eventual 2011 Grammy Award Winner Bon Iver the chance to be discovered by a much larger audience and its dark, menacing production and lyrical content prepared the hip-hop and pop audience at large for the coming of Odd Future, Tyler the Creator, Earl Sweatshirt and Frank Ocean.

In the ten songs that make up Yeezus, there is the obvious influence of the aforementioned collective and particularly some similar lyrical content and vocal recording techniques to what has been introduced by Tyler the Creator and Earl Sweatshirt over the last few years, but, it’s not necessarily a copy as much as feels as though West is saying “I like where you took my Dark Fantasy, now let me show you how much further I can push your Goblin”. Sonically, if Kanye West’s influence remains consistent and his work continues to function as a predictor of what we can expect in the future of popular music, we can prepare ourselves, like it or not, to see a restored focus on and re-imagining of industrial rock sounds, glitch music, gritty sampling and sparse atmospheric sound design throughout popular music.

In what seems like a fair prediction of what his audience needs but don’t know they want yet, Kanye West has created an album in Yeezus that is at once shocking and instantly gratifying, a perfect soundtrack for the inexhaustible curiosity and devastatingly short attention span of the internet age.

#kanye west #yeezus #music #hip-hop

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thewordofjono-blog · 11 years

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Ladies and Gentlemen.. I give you Delmon Young.

#philllies #delmon young #mlb #baseball #itsonlymay #batthrow #umpire

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thewordofjono-blog · 11 years

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Throwback Thursday. This is cool. I've mentioned this before, but, I had a really cool and interesting childhood. My parents never made me feel like I was too young to do something or have refined taste in music. By the time I was 8 or 9 I was begging to go to punk shows and was in a band with guys 5 years older than me when I was 13. I got this in August of 1996 with my dad at Turk's Head Music Festival in West Chester, PA from the guys at Creep Records for $5 brand new in shrink. It was the first time I'd bought something new on vinyl and really got me into collecting. Most people who have seen my collection would be surprised to know that. I think that would've been 4 months after Brad died. I remember being miserable that summer because I would never get to see my new favorite band, Sublime, live. At that point my dad, Britt and I had already caught the bug that the rest of the world would catch that summer - we'd been listening to them all winter and Spring. We already owned original Skunk pressings of 40 oz to Freedom and Robbin' The Hood on CD at that point - I even had cassette versions of both to listen to at swim meets on my walkman - if only I could find THOSE. I'd be rich (sort of)! This now sells on eBay for $100. Best thing about this record is the Total Access mix. Most casual fans don't know that 'What I Got' was supposed to be on "Robbin' The Hood". http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zp4IY-KRfpw

Imagine, if you can, my completely blown 9/10 year old mind when I first listened to this band. My dad was a lover of surf rock and reggae from the time he was Spring breaking in Daytona Beach in college and I grew up around that. But this combined my favorite music with Dad's favorite and new music that I became completely obsessed with for the following 10-15 year: hip-hop.

I remember hearing Just Ice, Too $hort, NWA, KRS-One, Public Enemy and many many more hip-hop acts that Sublime sampled or mentioned in their lyrics for the first time because I became so obsessed with their lyrics that I had to know what they meant.

I owe a lot to this band.

#sublime #brad nowell #just ice #nwa #KRS-One #Public Enemy #Vinyl #1996 #records #throwbackthursday

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thewordofjono-blog · 11 years

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My father, Dave Robert Shepard Sr., died on either December 30th or December 31st, depending on what time zone you were in. I received the call on the 30th at 11:30PM in Los Angeles, but the caller, positioned in Detroit, was two hours deep into the 31st. He was dead at 62 years old. Small cell...

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thewordofjono-blog · 11 years

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the party stops here

I’m in the habit of not listening to good advice until it’s too late. I take the longest way to places over and over again because it happens to be the way I traveled there first – even though people have told me another way will save time; when I was younger, I made destructive decisions because they offered a temporary numbness that I craved even though it alienated people I cared about, even though those people had the ability to be frank with me about it; Hell, I once stayed with a woman I knew was cheating on me for several months because I felt too foolish to admit that I knew, even though my friends had all but bought billboards. I blame all number of things for my stubbornness, but I mostly chalk it up to being a creature of habit and an asshole. I accept these things about myself.

It wasn’t until a couple of years ago that I decided to start seriously listening to the musical recommendations of my friends. This was perhaps my greatest flaw as a human and I’ve corrected it and recovered, but in a lot of ways, I’m too late. Before, there was a deep-seeded hipster belief that I had the greatest taste in music in the world and if I hadn’t yet discovered something, it probably wasn’t worth hearing. Of course this is crazy - but if you’re wondering why I behaved that way - feel free to refer to the paragraph above. I’m an asshole. I missed a lot of great things and a lot of great artists died or became inactive in the time it took me to come around and listen to them.

I discovered Jeff Hanson exactly one month after he died of a drug overdose in his St. Paul apartment on June 5th 2009. My brother (who was one of the few people at the time that I would accept new music from) sent me torrent links to his music and begged me to listen. At first, I couldn’t believe my ears. Beautiful songwriting, beautiful guitar playing, amazing, stark instrumentation and, “well”, I thought “this guy must be collaborating with a female singer”. Google searches yielded an NPR audio interview that occurred during South by Southwest in 2007 and highlighted his music and YouTube videos revealed a nearly-200 pound man with the voice of a musical theatre-obsessed 14 year old girl playing some of the most beautiful music I’d ever heard. Then a familiar feeling washed over me: guilt, embarrassment and sadness. Had I heard this name before? Had an enlightened friend suggested him to me? Had I been asked to see him live on perhaps the only occasion he’d ever passed through New York? I couldn’t remember, but now there was nothing I could do. Because Jeff Hanson is dead and I’ll never be able to offer him the support his music deserved.

I associate this feeling with a lot of music that I love and discovered too late: Elliott Smith (dead), Jeremy Enigk (perhaps too weird / Christian), Neutral Milk Hotel (definitely too weird and went crazy) and as of this weekend: Jason Molina.

I discovered Jason a few years ago after his productivity had already taken a downturn due to a long battle with alcoholism. I sat awestruck in my still-unfurnished apartment on a spring day on the kitchen floor (where there was a single working outlet and an internet connection), listening to his entire prolific songwriting career from start to finish wondering what the hell I had been doing while he was active. (The answer, of course, is “being an asshole”). I did my research and learned of his issues with alcohol and became the sort of fan that lives by a musician’s music, hopelessly optimistic that they make a recovery. I’ve never been that lucky previously and didn’t know why I thought I would be this time around.

Jason released a statement through Magnolia Electric Co.’s Tumblr in May 2012 that gave a little detail about what he had been up to. He seemed positive. Excited to release new music. Optimistic to be sober and happy that friends, family and fans had come to his aid and been supportive of his efforts to get sober. It would be his final public message. I’ll never get to see Jason Molina live and I’ll never get to offer him the praise and support his music deserved while he was living. That’s as painful as some of the memories I associate with his and Jeff Hanson’s music.

When examining factors that likely led to Jason’s death, I’m reminded of a selfish thought I’ve had lately about another recent musical discovery of mine, the band Ween. Unfortunately, after their own incredibly productive career, their lead singer Aaron Freeman (also known as Gene Ween) broke the band up last year, citing his inability to avoid alcohol and drugs when on the road. After buying all their albums, seeing their live DVD and countless YouTube videos, I’ve been justifiably desperate to see them live, but before today I’ve failed to acknowledge that the reason I am unable to is because a musician I’ve grown to love is doing his best to stay alive and avoid potentially dangerous situations that have killed countless other musicians I love. I would rather know that Aaron Freeman will live a healthy life for many years to come, continue to produce music he thinks people will want to hear and never tour again than see him once and have him overdose or drink himself to death.

Being a musician, I understand (at least to a certain extent) that alcohol and drugs seem intrinsically linked to the profession. In many ways, touring accommodates the alcoholic lifestyle about as well as any imaginable: you wake up (sometimes in a moving vehicle),you have an entire day to nurse a hangover, you have very little bearing of your surroundings or where you’re headed, you play music for anywhere from a half an hour to two hours and then you walk off stage surrounded by people who would like nothing more than to party with you. To those folks, your show is their big night out for the week – for you, that’s just Tuesday. I can imagine it’s incredibly difficult to turn down the party when you’re the guest of honor every night.

My point here, I guess, is that in the end I should be less selfish about music and try to be more sympathetic to the people who are making it. I’m doing a fine job getting nostalgic about it as it is. The songs that become the soundtrack to my life don’t need to be any more bittersweet than they already are by having been penned by a dead guy.

Rest in Peace, Jason. Thanks for the music.

#Jason Molina #Ween #Jeff Hanson #Music #Death #Alcoholism #Elliott Smith #Neutral Milk Hotel #Jeremy Enigk

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thewordofjono-blog · 13 years

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About Max

I'm not sure how historically accurate some of the information here is, but, I'll give it a whirl because I'm inspired to write about a friend who's loved ones are sending him off today.

I met Max sometime around 2001 or 2002. I think I was a freshman or sophomore in high school and I was playing with a band called The Unsinkable Mr. Marden. I wasn't the band's first drummer and I wouldn't be their last either, but, for about five years while I was between the ages of 13 and 18 we developed what I would say was a really strong little scene. Our scene revolved around St. Matthews' church and another little church in Secane (which Bob Gordon could tell you the name of, but I don't remember). It was in these “venues” where Bob, Kurt, Matt and I first booked a few bands and started running our own shows in favor of trying to get all the underage kids from E.T. Richardson and Springfield High School into the occasional bar that we were playing in Philadelphia, New Jersey and Delaware. We really loved keeping the shows all-ages. It excited way more people. I remember spending long afternoons setting up the PA in the church basement and running mic cables and sound checking – which was no small feat for our band (at our largest we had 10 members).

I can't remember nearly as many of the bands that came through that place as I probably should, but the short list goes something like this: Us, Fake Bakon, 37 Slurp, Zolof the Rock n' Roll Destroyer (who may have been called something else at that point), Royal Noise Brigade, Capgun Heroes, The Emphasis, The Busdrivers, Attracted to Miss, I Voted for Kodos, Adam's Not Funny, Biocoogana, The Best Kept Secret, Case of the Mondays, Dirty Larry, Tough Guys Take Over (or whatever they were called in those days) and a few random “touring” hardcore bands that occasionally stopped by. Bob's mom would sell sodas and pretzels in the back and when the shows started to get really popular, each band would sell CDs, T-shirts, and buttons. We'd generally have between 100 and 200 kids at a show if I remember correctly. There may have been way more. It always felt like it.

Bob was always really good at finding bands in the area that ruled. He's got a natural gift for talent management and booking and probably should be working at The Agency Group or something. When Bob first had me check out The Emphasis, I was impressed by everything about them. They were sort of exactly the opposite of us, which is why I guess we did so many shows together. I loved the combination of Dan and George's voices and their guitar playing. They had a sort of wild, screamy, dissonant quality but annunciated so well and had such poignant lyrics. Their guitar playing was similar - sort of sounded like two power drills operating at different speeds and timbres (in the best way possible), both responsible for accenting different parts of songs that made up great stories. They were also rhythmically one of the best bands I'd ever seen or heard in person up to that point. My favorite part about their band was Max and Johnny. The two of them locked the hell in and no matter what just sounded amazing together.

After checking out their demo and talking to Bob a lot about them, we got them to come down from Warrington for a few shows, which I don't remember very well – save for one skate punk song that we played that had this ridiculous reggae break that Max really loved and when Dime and Bob played “Outside” with The Emphasis. I do remember Dan's big cherry red Mapex drum kit that Max was playing and finding out that Max had only been playing for about a year or something at that point. I couldn't believe it, and we struck up an immediate friendship based on our love of talking about drums and technique (I remember when I gave him my favorite snare book, “Southern Special”) and our similar senses of humor. In his defense, Max was always much much funnier than I was.

Later on, we did a split with The Emphasis that I think we pressed about 500 copies of total. Johnny labored over the design of the case, and it looked great (if not a bit cliché now.. how many people have taken that photo in New Mexico or wherever that was, right?). After that and after seeing some of the older guys in our band go off to college or get focused in college, I left The Unsinkable Mr. Marden and the little Pennsylvania scene that we'd started to build. I was bummed to have lost contact with a lot of friends, and Max was definitely one of them.

At Temple, Bob remained close or at least on speaking terms with the guys from Capgun Heroes who had recruited Attracted to Miss singer Shane to be in their new project Valencia. I say project because I remember hearing some of the first Valencia tunes when they had a lot of programming based stuff. Maybe like the Postal Service or something. It was either George or Brendan that I'd be talking to on AIM and they would send me some samples of new music that they were writing. They knew that guys in our band had gotten pretty good with recording and I remember having a lot of ideas bounced off us around that time. I'm pretty sure it was Bob in those days who took Max to a Valencia show with Days Away and introduced Max to the band a few months later when whomever replaced Sean Mundy (from Capgun Heroes and later Valencia's merch guy for a bit) ended up not working out. I think I had even brought my girlfriend to a few pre-Max Valencia shows, one of which where they might have shared a drummer with Zolof of something. This is also around the time I started drinking, so my memory is not great.

A year later, following my senior year of high school, Valencia had just finished up “This Could Be A Possibility” and were doing small stuff around the area and maybe had done a tour or two. Marina (the aforementioned girlfriend) and I went to check them out at a local stage at Warped (I don't think it was Ernie Ball, but it could've been). I remember right after they finished Max jumping off the stage, ignoring some other people who by now knew his name that were yelling at him and sort of being awkward, walking right over and giving me a hug and asking how I'd been. Marina snapped a photo, which is somewhere, but I remember that being the type of person Max was. He didn't seem to want a whole lot of spotlight or weird, adoring fan type people. He knew who his friends were (even if they weren't super close ones) and wanted to make sure that he'd acknowledged them. I appreciated that about him.

I heard a lot about Valencia the following year, and even saw some footage of them at the Fuji Rock Festival in Japan – where I stayed for a majority of the summer after Freshman year of College.

The next time I ran into Max was at the Warped Tour after my Junior Year at Hofstra. My friends Bruce and Steve were with me, and the three of us were all really excited to see Motion City Soundtrack, Alkaline Trio and New Found Glory that year. I remember getting there and seeing that Valencia and Monty RI were playing the Ernie Ball Stage by the concessions during right around when we had been planning on eating lunch, so we went over to check them out between some of the other bands that we had wanted to see. Again, right after their set, Max came right over and gave me a big, sweaty hug and asked me all about my life. He was much more tired looking and much tanner than I remembered seeing him last time. This time, he asked me what I was doing and if I wanted to go out on tour with anyone yet. I told him that I was almost finished college and that after, I'd love to do a couple of tours with a band. He said that he felt like for someone like me there'd always be an opportunity, and that if I ever wanted to after school, I probably could – but that I should finish up my degree first. I felt better about what I was doing and how hard I was working knowing that a guy who was pretty much living my dream had said something supportive about what I was doing. I ended up enrolling in graduate school following college, effectively killing any chance of me heading out on the road for another two years, but if I had gotten serious about it, I would have had a resource there. That's the last time I ever saw Max.

You don't spend your life worrying that someone like Max is going to die because Max feels like a person that will live forever when you see him play music or talk to him. Occasionally when working hard behind the drums it appeared as though a thought would cross his mind and suddenly he'd sort of sigh and have this enormous smile across his face. He looked thrilled and concentrated to play music and (especially in my last interaction with him) seemed focused and as though he was really looking forward to something in his life. Maybe he knew at that point that he wasn't going to be with Valencia or music forever and that's why he said what he said about what I was doing with education. Maybe he knew that the traveling eventually wouldn't be for him and he'd want to settle down and try something else out. I'm not sure and I'm sure Shane, Brendan, George, JD and Dan know more about that than I do, but I loved the way he played and the person that he was to me.

One of the saddest parts of Max passing (among literally thousands that flood my mind) is knowing that The Emphasis will never play together again. By far my favorite band to participate in our little scene, I always hoped that some day when I was older and had a bit more money, I could rerelease their old stuff and then pay for them to record again. I was sure that this time around, someone would get it like Bob and I (and Tila Tequila) did so many years ago. I'll miss the dream of playing another great gig with Marden and having The Emphasis there.

I feel awful knowing Max left sooner than he or anyone else planned, but find solace in the music he was responsible for and my interactions with him. I loved running into him, cherished his sense of humor, envied his gifts and (later) found value in mine because of things that he'd communicated to me. I wouldn't change our occasional, happy meetings and hope that he remembered them as fondly as I do.

If there's another side, Max, I hope to see you there.

#maximsoria #theemphasis #valencia #punkrock

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