Month: March 2025

The Best Version of ‘Never Take Friendship Personal’

Anberlin
Jason Tate

This morning, I tried listening to the re-record of one of Anberlin’s classic albums, Never Take Friendship Personal, and I do not have positive thoughts:

This sounds like the YouTube covers of songs that I find pretty obnoxious. Like the cover of this album should just be a dude with a beard making a weird face with a yellow font saying “what if Matty Mullins sang for Anberlin?!!”

All the life has been stripped out of these and replaced with vocals that have had every inch of personality mechanically pulled from them. Anberlin’s a top 20 most played band for me and I’m glad they can continue making money I guess, but I really kinda just hate everything about this one? Like … stand on your new music? Between this and the deleting or replying to fans with rude comments on Instagram has really soured me on this era of the band.

However, this whole re-record thing did lead to something positive. I’ve been complaining for years about the online master of the original album on all streaming services. It’s extremely low volume and washed out. Today I saw a comment that the weird three-album-compilation thing Tooth and Nail put on streaming services actually has the better, proper, master. I went to Apple Music to check it out, and holy hell, they’re right! And because Apple Music still lets you change metadata on the Mac app (please never take this away Apple), this means it was very easy to swap this version out in my library. Finally.

Highly recommend. This is the definitive version of this album to me.

Review: A Day To Remember – Big Ole Album Vol. 1

Adam Grundy

The eighth studio album from A Day To Remember, called Big Ole Album Vol. 1, finds the band at a bit of a crossroads. This is the first record without founding bassist Josh Woodard, who departed the band in October 2021 due to allegations of misconduct, and A Day To Remember try to regain their footing after the lukewarm reception of their last record, You’re Welcome. Big Ole Album Vol. 1 features a litany of producers, six in total, including lead vocalist Jeremy McKinnon and the album has a bit of a tough time finding its direction. The album feels like an A Day To Remember record, but with so many artistic directions taken here, it’s a bit of a jarring listening experience. Instead, the album plays out almost like a “Greatest Hits” set that goes through the ground the band covered since their early days to now. Preceded by a physical only release on February 21st of this year, the streaming date has arrived for an album that has already achieved a Top Five Billboard 200 debut.

Read More “A Day To Remember – Big Ole Album Vol. 1”

Former Eminem Employee Charged With Selling Unreleased Music

Eminem
Jason Tate

The FBI has charged a former Eminem employee for selling his unreleased songs for bitcoin:

In a statement shared with Variety, Eminem’s longtime spokesperson Dennis Dennehy said that the rapper is pleased with the latest development in the case. “Eminem and his team are very appreciative of the efforts by the FBI Detroit bureau for its thorough investigation which led to the charges against Joe Strange,” he said. “The significant damage caused by a trusted employee to Eminem’s artistic legacy and creative integrity cannot be overstated, let alone the enormous financial losses incurred by the many creators and collaborators that deserve protection for their decades of work. We will continue to take any and all steps necessary to protect Eminem’s art and will stop at nothing to do so.”

Updated Recommended Blogs + RSS Still Rules

Jason Tate

I realized that I hadn’t updated my “recommended blogs” page in a while and as I (try to) move away from social media that means I’ve been adding even more to my RSS reader on a regular basis. Since these days more and more people are writing newsletters instead of blogs (bring back the blogs!), Jason Snell has a good reminder on the various ways you can pipe these newsletters directly into your RSS reader. I use NewsBlur as the backend for RSS (which also has an email address you can signup for newsletters with) and then for most of these I need to use ReadKit’s “reader” mode and the result is a newsletter perfectly rendered in the app.

Note: No need to be fancy, you can subscribe to my newsletter directly with RSS. (And this blog too.)

Ronnie O’Sullivan: Snooker Genius

Snooker
Jason Tate

I found this article by Sally Rooney at the New York Review (archive) fascinating:

The last remaining red ball is stranded up by the cushion on the right-hand side, and the cue ball rolls to a halt just left of the middle right-hand pocket. The angle is tight, awkward, both white and red lined up inches away from the cushion. O’Sullivan surveys the position, nonchalantly switches hands, and pots the red ball left-handed. The cue ball hits the top cushion, rolls back down over the table, and comes to a stop, as if on command, to line up the next shot on the black. O’Sullivan could scarcely have chosen a better spot if he had picked the cue ball up in his hand and put it there. The crowd erupts: elation mingled with disbelief. At the end of the frame, when only the black remains on the table, he switches hands again, seemingly just for fun, and makes the final shot with his left. The black drops down into the pocket, completing what is known in snooker as a maximum break: the feat of potting every ball on the table in perfect order to attain the highest possible total of 147 points.

Watch a little of this sort of thing and it’s hugely entertaining. Watch a lot and you might start to ask yourself strange questions. For instance: In that particular frame, after potting that last red, how did O’Sullivan know that the cue ball would come back down the table that way and land precisely where he wanted it? Of course it was only obeying the laws of physics. But if you wanted to calculate the trajectory of a cue ball coming off an object ball and then a cushion using Newtonian physics, you’d need an accurate measurement of every variable, some pretty complex differential equations, and a lot of calculating time. O’Sullivan lines up that shot and plays it in the space of about six seconds. A lucky guess? It would be lucky to make a guess like that once in a lifetime. He’s been doing this sort of thing for thirty years.

What then? If he’s not calculating, and he’s not guessing, what is Ronnie O’Sullivan doing? Why does the question seem so strange? And why doesn’t anybody know the answer?

And, after reading the article, watch the match described. I’ve been playing pool since I was a teenager; I’m decent at best. This makes me never want to pick up a pool cue again.