- Iron Maiden “Wasted Years” – A year or so ago I cast off one of the most monumental bands and sounds to ever grace this sweet and cursed planet. It was like disowning a child, wrought with disappointment, unspeakable pain and regret. The lead vocalist Bruce Dickinson’s terribly misguided comments supporting Brexit were just too much for me. Yet, the melodies remain, cast in iron in my head. This is one of them. One of their strongest songs and one who’s main riff can move mountains and who’s chorus has driven me to tears. Bruce, I forgive you for your misgivings and trespass, and rest assured dear reader, Adrian Smith wrote this epic.
- Derry Girls (Netflix) – Hilarious and unlikely comedy about a group of teenage girls and one boy in Derry in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. Imagine Catholic school gags and absurd situational comedy but with soldiers and roadblocks in the backdrop.
- Ol’ Dirty Bastard “Return to the 36 Chambers” – This still hits so hard 27 (!) years later it’s almost incomprehensible. This was the opus and potentially the start of the end of the Boom Bap era and goes beyond post-modern with Big Baby Jesus’s lyrical punch in the face bringing the head bobbing to an extent that is just not done anymore.
- Staying in hotels – Imagine you spend a non-trivial number of hours of your waking, non-working hours picking up things from the floor of where you live after someone else. Now imagine another way tidier and cleaner place where the opposite happens.
- The idea of playing tennis
- “A Visit from the Goon Squad” (Jennifer Egan)
- Tim Tams – I have no idea where it came from. I want to say a specialty sweet shop in a shopping mall in suburban Cleveland. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that package of Tim Tams, that unstoppable chocolate covered block of Australian awesome, didn’t survive 5 minutes with me. The next one won’t either.
- Parquet flooring – Let’s say you like wood flooring a lot like I do. Let’s also say that simple slats of floorboards just don’t do it for you anymore. Well here is your answer.
- Buddy Rich & Harry Edison “Buddy and Sweets”
- Coke Bust “Confined” – Ripping power-violence hardcore that might be straight-edge, I don’t even know.
