33 & 1/3 Under 45

You can find episodes on frondsradio.com and be sure to subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you have any suggestions or thoughts, my twitter handle is @stoopkidliveson and I’d love to hear from you. You can find Ryan's band, Premium Heart, on facebook or twitter for upcoming releases and shows.

The original column was published on December 22nd, 2018 and can be found below.

Something in the night

Something in the day

Nothing is wrong but darling, something's in the way

There's slaughter in the air

Protest on the wind

Someone else inside me

Someone could get skinned, how?

(My, my) someone fetch a priest

You can't say no to the beauty and the beast

I’m back and so is Bowie! Last week, I covered his 1977 masterpiece, Low. And don’t worry! Next week I’ll be talking about the final piece of the trilogy, Lodger.

But today is all about “Heroes.”

If Low was about facing your demons and recognizing where you went wrong, “Heroes” is all about what comes after that realization. From the opening track, “Beauty And The Beast,” I could feel Bowie’s desire to grow. But not by forgetting the past or ignoring your mistakes. Our flaws and origin stories are a part of us, whether or not we let them define us; ignoring them only makes it harder to prevent slipping back into those old habits.

I wanted to believe me

I wanted to be good

I wanted no distractions

Like every good boy shouldNothing will corrupt us

Nothing will compete

Thank god heaven left us

Standing on our feet

(My, my)

Beauty and the beast

Facing my struggles head on really is the only way I’ve found that helps me get over them. Pretending that you’re perfect just creates a cycle of constant avoidance and Bowie lays that out on this record. Like in “Joe The Lion,” a song that, to me, pretty clearly makes a case against the strong face we put all of our energy into maintaining instead of just letting everything in. It creates a cycle of “always on guard, always defensive” that isn’t good for anybody.

I’ve always had trouble with letting little things go. I always hold grudges and because of that, the slightest things set me off. This has been a pretty constant theme of my arguments with those I care about, as I’m so often saying “No, it has barely anything to do with this thing, it’s a larger issue.” If I could just address the issues as they happened, instead of staying silent at the time, these things wouldn’t build up so badly and I wouldn’t put all of my stresses onto one innocuous event. Moments that seem trivial to others often become these huge turning points, character defining moments, or silent breakdowns for me.

Sons of the silent age

Listen to tracks by Sam Therapy and King Dice

Sons of the silent age

Pick up in bars and cry only once

Sons of the silent age

Make love only once but dream and dream

Don't walk, they just glide in and out of life

They never die, they just go to sleep one day

Like Low,“Heroes” ends with several instrumental tracks that are just as beautifully constructed by Bowie and Eno as the ones from the last record. “Sense Of Doubt” is a terrifying and deep bass-heavy piece, but with swells of treble optimism. “Moss Garden” is an exploration of calm tranquility. “Neukoln” feels like a tense, dissonant sci-fi soundtrack that draws from both of the previous pieces. Just sit in a room and spend a few minutes with headphones on. I think this block is even more immersive and well-constructed than the ones on Low and are worth really diving into. They close the record with questions on where to go, like Low, but this time, I felt like some of the answers were hidden in there. Just waiting to be revisited and re-contextualized when I was ready for them. Now, of course, I can’t leave without talking about the title track. But I’m going to break chronology again and talk about another song first, “Blackout.” It pairs well with my main

You can find episodes on frondsradio.com and be sure to subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you have any suggestions or thoughts, my twitter handle is @stoopkidliveson and I’d love to hear from you. You can find Ryan's band, Premium Heart, on facebook or twitter for upcoming releases and shows.

The original column was published on December 15th, 2018 and can be found below.

Baby, I've been breaking glass in your room again

Listen don't look at the carpet

I drew something awful on it

See you’re such a wonderful person

But you got problems

I’ll never touch you

It’s been a rough month. The only way I can bring myself to describe it is transitional. And my main companion throughout it has been David Bowie. Last month, I talked about why and when I started listening to Bowie, so I won’t reiterate, but the shorthand context is that I just got married and election day came and went. And for this month, I’m going to dive into my favorite era and for the next few weeks, I’ll be covering an album from the Berlin Trilogy.

Up first is Low.

I’m new to the whole Bowie catalog and… lore would probably be the best way to describe the many personas and phases of his career. The first album that really resonated with me was the incredible Station To Station, under his Thin White Duke persona. Which if you don’t know, is an interesting and controversial era for him, when he made a lot of seemingly pro-fascist remarks, which he later attributed to cocaine and drug abuse. Following the end of that era, Bowie moved to the still-divided city of Berlin to escape the toxicity of his lifestyle in LA and work on his next three records with Brian Eno, the first of which is Low.

When I first learned this context, I had already fallen in love with the record, after getting caught in a blizzard with it for a very tense two hour drive home in the snow, but the story behind it made me take a closer look at what Bowie was trying to say. I was soon struck by just how much it really resonated with my feelings over the last month. From "Be My Wife."

Please be mine

Share my life

Stay with me

Be my wife

I hadn’t realized just how much of my anxiety and anger at the world was being scapegoated into the aforementioned wedding and election. I was constantly saying “Once we get through this, we’ll finally have time to…” and “Once this all goes right, I’ll be way better, I promise” to no one but myself. Afterwards, I felt… empty? The wedding was perfect and the election was a wave. Objectively, everything should be great now, but I wasn’t being honest with my problems in the first place. Just like Bowie’s (and America’s) temporary love affair with unchecked fascism, I was putting so much faith in this larger idea to just fix everything without having to actually rectify the issues inside of me. Hoping to be saved left me bottling up a lot of things I’ve struggled with for years, like my anger. I started really retreating into myself, choosing headphones over my stereo and sitting alone in my office instead of working in the open living room. Too often, when I tried to open up, I just found myself in another argument. More often than not they were either my own fault or I was over exaggerating the effect of someone else’s flaws. The next song, "What In The World," lays it out better than I can.

Deep in your room, you never leave your room

Something deep inside of me - yearning deep inside of me

Talking thru the gloom

What in the world can you do?

I’m in the mood for your love

I’m just a little bit afraid of you

So what you gonna say and what you gonna do?

Ah, what you gonna be?

I’ve always struggled with a lot of internal rage. At society, at my friends, at my family, the list goes on. I’m always aware that I’m flying off the handle, but I just can’t bring myself to stop. Even when, no, especially when those that I love are the focus, I can’t help it. I hate it, but I’m trying. Throughout L

You can find episodes on frondsradio.com and be sure to subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you have any suggestions or thoughts, my twitter handle is @stoopkidliveson and I’d love to hear from you.

The original column was published on November 15th, 2018 and can be found below.

It's silly, no? When a rocket ship explodes and everybody still wants to fly

But some say a man ain't happy unless a man truly dies

Oh why?

Time. Times.

I realized something recently. I don’t listen to music on accident. I’ve never really listened to the radio, not really as a kid and not now. Because of that, there’s a whole lot of music that everyone seems to know but me. But with the way I talk about music, and spit seemingly endless trivia, this always comes as a surprise to people. I have these huge gaps and I’ve been making a real effort to fill them lately. There are several reasons why I’m finally expanding my base, so let’s hit some of the big ones.

I’ll address the elephant mascot in the room real quick and just say, yeah, the world is absolutely terrible and the regular old escapism I’ve relied on for years just isn’t cutting it anymore. But that’s obvious and boring and stressful to talk about, so let’s get more micro here and forget the macro for a second.

I recently got married. My major source of stress/pride at the wedding was that, instead of a DJ or a band, I pre-mixed music that we chose ourselves. I’ve always loved pop, but my partner was much better versed in dance music and R & B than me. So when it came time to mix these playlists, there was a lot of music in there that had this vague familiarity, but was basically foreign to me. But, after listening to these songs over and over (and over), I started feelin’ it a bit. And seeing everyone on the dance floor really made me take a closer listen to what I was missing.

Right around the same time I was making this playlist, my partner gave me a bag of CDs for my birthday. Now, if anyone knows me, they know I don’t really let people just pick media for me. I do tons of research, make a plan on how best to immerse myself in the material, and dive DEEP into what makes whatever I’m into SO good. (Yeah, I know, the most sterile way to enjoy media organically, but what're you gonna do? I only get to listen to something for the first time once.) But this time, my almost-wife made a plan for me and pushed me to start filling two of my biggest gaps, Prince and David Bowie.

I’m sure you’ll hear more about Bowie in a later column, but I’m here to talk about Prince. I followed her plan and started with 1999. It was great! But it didn’t *really* speak to me yet. Yeah, "1999" and "Lady Cab Driver" ruled, but I didn’t really feel like I was missing out all these years. Then I went on to Parade. Ok, I was starting to get it. "Girls & Boys," "Under The Cherry Moon," and "Kiss" were some killer tracks. Then it ends with "Sometimes It Snows In April," and my god. I was really looking forward to the third album in her list.

This was the album I needed to get me through the weeks leading up to the wedding and the dreaded midterm elections. The opening title track is somehow both so 1987 and so relevant. I’ll let Prince speak for himself.

In France, a skinny man died of a big disease with a little name

By chance his girlfriend came across a needle and soon she did the same...

Hurricane Annie ripped the ceiling of a church and killed everyone inside

You turn on the telly and every other story is tellin' you somebody died

A sister killed her baby 'cause she couldn't afford to feed it

And yet we're sending people to the moon...

Baby make a speech, Star Wars fly

Neighbors just shine it on

But if a night falls and a bomb falls

Will anybody see the dawn?

Double albums tend to have a bunch of filler, but every song on this album is so damn good. Just when the first disc starts to wrap up, as

You can find episodes on frondsradio.com and be sure to subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you have any suggestions or thoughts, my twitter handle is @stoopkidliveson and I’d love to hear from you.

The original column was published on May 28th, 2018 can be found below.

Oh, for once in my

Oh, for once in my life

Could just something go

Could just something go right?

I don’t think I enjoy media anymore. Well, that’s a lie. I still love things, just not in the same ways I used to. I used to just pop on a record or watch a movie and just enjoy the ride without analyzing every single emotional beat and what it means to me at that exact moment. That’s a lie, too, but it’s easier to pretend that this is some big shift into the dramatic.

The first time I heard The Decemberists’ I’ll Be Your Girl, their newest record, I was driving home from a late night meetup with some friends on Record Store Day with my better half asleep in the front seat. When the first song, “Once In My Life,” started, it seemed like the Decemberists I’ve loved for a decade and I was feelin’ it. But then all these synths came in and I was… feelin’ it less. If you’ve never listened to them, they mostly write folky songs about boats and chimneys and medieval queens. After that first listen through, the record sat on my shelf for a month and didn’t get a whole lot of revisiting. Fast forward and I’m listening to it on repeat and crying on the side of the highway. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Since the election, I’ve been struggling with a lot. I feel guilty when I enjoy things that seem “trivial,” but I’ve also felt that those things are more important than ever. I’ve always been an escapist, but I was having a harder time escaping and not yelling “But think about what it represents in a larger context! Think about the ramifications of this story in Trump’s America!” to any squirrel or rabbit who hadn’t yet learned to run away at the first sign of “Post-modern breakdown Ryan.” This was embodied by my two favorite releases of 2017: Paramore’s After Laughter and Star Wars: The Last Jedi. They captured the dichotomy of this feeling better than I could explain. After Laughter is an 80s-style synth-pop record that’s so easy to dance to. But on the first listen, I missed just how sad Hayley Williams’ lyrics were on it. The big single from the album, “Hard Times,” was my “fun song of the summer,” but… well, I’ll let her explain.

All that I want

Is to wake up fine

Tell me that I'm alright

That I ain't gonna die

All that I want

Is a hole in the ground

You can tell me when it's alright

For me to come out

Gonna make you wonder why you even try

Hard times - gonna take you down and laugh when you cry

These lives - and I still don't know how I even survive

Hard times -  And I gotta get to rock bottom

And my favorite song of the record, “Fake Happy,” is… pretty self explanatory. Just like my 2017: wow, there’s a lot of great stuff in here and it’s so much fun! But woah, this narrator just shoe horns in some sad and self loathing stuff the whole time!

I’m not gonna go into a whole thing about Last Jedi. Enough people have heard my rant on how it’s all about identity politics and rejecting the savior mentality of the Berniecrats in a post-Obama world, while also rejecting the obsession with legacy and the past that the establishment Democrats won’t leave behind. But there’s so many good jokes and fun settings in it! So yeah, Star Wars.

So that brings me to The Decemberists and I’ll Be Your Girl. Knowing that it had some poppier production, I figured it would be a fun escape from all the terrible. And this time, I really listened to Colin Meloy’s lyrics. It wasn’t! At all! The opening lines are up at the top, but hell, did I start feelin’ it this time through. The songs seem dancy and poppier than the Decemberists have ever been, but the lyrics are maybe Colin’s

You can find episodes on frondsradio.com and be sure to subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you have any suggestions or thoughts, my twitter handle is @stoopkidliveson and I’d love to hear from you.

The original column was published on May 15th, 2019 can be found below.

Ryan's Bass Tone Spotify Playlist for his new record: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/39rbB9NlgBVseO4o9nPqf5

Welcome to the freak show

Brace yourself. I’ve never seen Stranger Things. I’ve never seen a whole lot of stuff, but Stranger Things is one of those rare cultural zeitgeist kinda things that everyone seems to really love. Sure, everyone was talking about Game Of Thrones, but half of the takes were about how trash it was. Everyone saw Avengers: Endgame, but there was still a lot of hate out there for it. I’ve never really heard anyone say anything negative about Stranger Things, though. I’ll watch it one of these days, I promise! But until then, I’ll gladly just cherish this rare thing where everyone I know all seems to be really into it and just bask in it. Which brings me to the new Ingrid Michaelson record, Stranger Songs.

As far as I can tell, this album isn’t officially affiliated with Stranger Things at all and is just heavily inspired by it. So, like I constantly do, Ingrid was just inspired by a piece of media and wrote a whole lot about how it made her feel, and thus, Stranger Songs was written. There’s something pure and beautiful about one of my biggest influences, just gushing about a TV show for 40 minutes through her music. (Ingrid’s been my favorite lyricist since high school and it’s only a matter of time before one of her early albums ends up in this column). It’s really cool to see someone whose work I so often project my feelings onto or to not feel so alone with, showcase the exact same thing for herself, even if I don’t get any of the references.

The show seems to really hit some universal themes of love and rejection, themes that have always been prevalent in Ingrid’s work. It’s clear enough from the material itself, but right before the record came out, I saw her live for a “sneak peak” show and there was a lot of banter and explanation of why the show resonated with her so intensely. (As an aside, if you’ve never seen Ingrid, you really have to. She’s as hilarious as she is talented.) These universal themes shine through in songs like “Hate You.”

2 am, 3 am, then 4, I’ll never sleep, not like I did before

You’re the living nightmare that I always dream about

I can’t seem to live without you

I don’t hate you, I don’t hate you, I just hate how much I don’t hate you

God I want to, want to hate you, I just hate how much I don’t hate you

I don’t hate that you called our love bullshit when you were drunk that night

I don’t hate how much I love you, I don’t hate that I cry

And I don’t know why, oh why, oh why

Or in “Best Friend,” a song that captures the romantic tensions that become the focus of most coming of age stories, certainly mine.

Wide awake, I lay beside you

It’s in the middle of the night and I really want to

Wake you up, tell you my secret, that you’re the one I want

But I don’t want to mess this up, I don’t want to say too much

It always gets too real, when I tell them how I really feel

Here I go again, Falling in love with my best friend

Try to hold it in, but you’re making it hard, hard to pretend

And we don’t just fall in love with characters because they show our best traits. Like in “Jealous,” you can see Ingrid latching on to characters that fall into the same traps we all do. Universal flaws that we can never seem to get right.

Hurts bad seeing you out, knowing that you’re happy now

You’re laughing like the way we used to do

I feel it rising in me, I feel the tide pulling deep

I never knew I could be so mad at the one that I love, no

I do bad things when I’m jealous

I do bad things,

You can find episodes on frondsradio.com and be sure to subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you have any suggestions or thoughts, my twitter handle is @stoopkidliveson and I’d love to hear from you.

The original column, published on May 15th, 2019 can be found here.

And now we're saying bye. I was nineteen, call me.

Nostalgia sure is something. We all feel it from time to time, but sometimes it's just relentless. I get it real bad every year around June; I think it has to do with my job. I'm a home school tutor, so I don't spend a whole lot of time in actual schools until finals time, when I go in and out every day, focusing on exams, trying to power through the last few weeks before summer break. Being surrounded by kids waiting for that last class, or, even worse, applying to colleges and planning orientations, certainly doesn't help it. Or maybe it's just the way June smells. Because damn, late spring just has that smell, doesn't it?

But this year's been a lot stronger. Both the feeling and probably the smell, too, at least based on my allergies. This is my first finals season since my wedding and there is a certain grown-up vibe that that carries along with it. I'm back in a band with one of my oldest collaborators, writing totally new material from a familiar place. And yes, it would be dishonest if I didn't mention that Banjo-Kazooie coming to Smash Bros got me all misty eyed. But most of all, I'm now more than a decade out from going away to college for the first time and a recent trip to my campus to meet up with my roommate was pretty brutal on the old nostalgia heartstrings. And on the long, solo trip home, I decided to really lean into it with some Tegan And Sara, specifically their 2007 album, The Con.

I've always had a complicated relationship with nostalgia. I've never really wallowed in it, like a lot of people do, and I've never really taken solace in reflecting on the "good old days" either. I've certainly had times in my life where I was left pining for something that was over, but I've always been pretty good at looking towards the future and the things that are either already great or that will be. When I look back at previous eras of my life, it's usually more as a narrative and a way to contextualize why I am the way I am or feel the way I do, not really as a yearning for the way things were. A lot of that definitely has to do with how lucky and privileged I've been, but I still have to work at it from time to time, especially in today's macro-climate with... everything that's going on. Sometimes I do get caught in a loop of really falling back into my old habits or way of looking at the world, and I find revisiting some quirks I've demonstrated in previous relationships, whether it be romantic or friendly, that pushed those people away from me. Habits that I'm not proud of and would really love to exorcise completely. The more of my narrative people become a part of, the harder it is to keep those parts closed off. And walking through some buildings on campus for the first time in 7 years really started re-contextualizing a lot of those patterns. So it's no wonder that on that trip back home, songs like "Back In Your Head" ended up on repeat.

I just want to get back into your head.

I'm not unfaithful, but I'll stray.

When I get a little scared, I run, run, run

When I jerk away from holding hands with you,

I know these habits hurt important parts of you.

Remember when I was sweet and unexplainable?

Nothing like this person, un-loveable

Or in "Hop A Plane"

And in the closer, "Call It Off"

Maybe I would have been something you'd be good at.

Maybe you would have been something I'd be good at.

But now we'll never know.

I won't be sad, but in case, I'll go there everyday to make myself feel bad.

There's a chance I'll start to wonder if this was the thing to do.

I won't be out long, but I stil

You can find episodes on frondsradio.com and be sure to subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you have any suggestions or thoughts, my twitter handle is @stoopkidliveson and I’d love to hear from you.

The original column, published on May 15th, 2019 can be found below

Do you remember? Do you recall? Do you remember? 'Cause I remember it all.

So over now. It's so over now. So over now. It's so over now.

I've been thinking about grief a lot lately. Way more than I should, that's for sure. A lot of it centered around death, but not in a way that I'm used to. So if you don't want to read any thoughts on death right now, feel free to hop out here.

I've always been pretty good at compartmentalizing the "celebrate their lives rather than mourn their deaths" kind of grieving and often end up being the first one to crack some dumb joke and try to make people smile again. Not that I don't get depressed about it, too, that's just not where I really find my grief. Mine usually comes more from the realization that the end of someone's story is some random, arbitrary jumping off point, and knowing that I'll never be ready for it.

Rolling on the grass, some things never last

Just stay for a while, we could have a blast

How can I go on without you now?

How can I live without you when you have become my everything?

Maybe we'll have an accident.

You are my everything. The song that I might sing

You are my everything

I was thinking a lot about this even before I picked up the final Cranberries album, In The End, but this record certainly drove it home for me.I've had a passing fondness for The Cranberries for a long time, but nothing deeper than remembering how good "Zombies" was in 1994. But right around the time this album came out, the podcast Song Exploder had an episode about the opening track, "All Over Now" and I immediately ran out and bought a copy. If you're not up to date with The Cranberries, the singer, Dolores O'Riordan, passed away very unexpectedly last year, while they were still working on demos for In The End. After sitting on it for a while, the remaining band members decided to return to the studio with Dolores' vocal demos and finish the record in her honor. I'm not sure how somber the original demos were, but the album's a heartbreaking goodbye to Dolores, but with a healthy dose of optimistic self-reflection that really helped me sort through a lot of the grief I'd been focusing on lately.

Maybe it's just that I'm getting older and a lot of the older artists I grew up following are starting to pass away more frequently. Maybe I'm just melodramatic and looking for an escape from all of my anger at the world. There's a lot of reasons I've fallen into this cycle lately, but I'd like to focus on some of the more trivial ones, especially since I don't really feel that it's my place to project and discuss other peoples' losses or grief. Recently, my favorite comic book character was killed off in a pretty... I'll say problematic way. But I realized that I was way more angry about the way the book discussed and further stigmatized trauma and mental illness than about the fanboy complaints I had and it didn't affect me in any of the ways I expected it to. After thinking on it for a while, I started to really re-evaluate how I viewed death, both as a narrative device and then in my own life. Because real death, unlike in fiction, is so random, I think we too often put too much weight on it. It's just a moment, same as any other moment, in a person's story and I don't think it's fair to belittle all the other moments that made up their lives, just to focus on the one where they weren't any longer. By putting all of our sadness and focus on that single moment, it reduces an entire person to one thing. A monolith of regrets, unexperiences, wasted potential, emptiness. And I hate that. No matter who it was, I can guarantee they were way more than that. A story's end o

Hello everyone, and welcome to the Hidden Track at the beginning of this show. If this is your first time hearing 33 and ⅓ Under 45, there’s some stuff I have to get out of the way. This is a monthly music column and all written versions can be found on flyingmachine.network/blog and either click on my name, the music or 33 and ⅓ subcategories, or search for 33.

These audio versions were originally released on the Flying Machine Patreon 6 months prior to their release here, so if you want to get them early, or get exclusive access to the first 10 episodes and donor chosen columns, head over to patreon.com/flyingmachine and back us at the $1 level. If you don’t mind waiting, expect episodes here on the 5th of every month, with bonuses!

You can find episodes on frondsradio.com and be sure to subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you have any suggestions or thoughts, my twitter handle is @stoopkidliveson and I’d love to hear from you. Enjoy!