It’s always one of my favorite times of the year, but this year felt extra special. I’ve loved each evening when the lights turned on and slowly filled the house with gold.
A wonderful December with friends, family, and the two cats. We ate lots of good food, our annual Christmas party had all sorts of fun news and life changes from our friends, and we attempted ice skating for the first time in over a decade. And, of course, we listened to a lot of Christmas music.
December 2023
I’ve been trying to remind myself to take photos during the month so I have something to share at the end of it. November is always one of my favorite months of the year. Our wedding anniversary starts it while Thanksgiving and decorating for Christmas act as a perfect bookend. (And I see holiday music getting some extra plays this week has already started to creep into my most played albums of the month.)
November 2023
Congratulations to @blink182 on another number one album! My two variants have arrived and I’m just as happy with them as I am the album itself. Beyond my wildest dreams of what I could have hoped for when we heard Tom was coming back.
My full review is up on the website and the feedback has been a little overwhelming. Thank you to everyone for the kind words and for sharing with me how much this band has meant to you over the years. I had a good feeling I wasn’t the only one that felt the way I did, that grew up with blink-182 and experienced much of life soundtracked by their music.
With October coming to an end, I realize how little I’ve posted here over the past year. Not for lack of record buying. 😬 I guess I should try and step that up over the next few months and share some of the new additions.
#blink-182 #blink182 #vinyl
I wrote about @blink182’s new album and what the band has meant to me over the years at chorus.fm.
Call it a review, an essay, a love letter, or just a mess of words trying to work out how this band helped shape our lives.
Yes, I know it’s long. But when I sit down to write I always want the outcome to be something I’m proud of, and when I started writing this, so many different feelings started to bubble. It wasn’t long until I knew I needed it to exist.
The written album “review” barely seems to be a thing these days but they still matter to me. Soon I fear it’ll all be ChatGPT looking “summaries” and hot take reaction videos. But I tried to distill my history and musical journey, and put that into context with the band and their new music. And that matters to me too. My whole thing, from the start, is that I’ve wanted to treat this genre seriously when no one else did.
I’ve been writing this for a while. I hope you can relate. If not with this specific band, to one that’s changed your life.
Chorus.fm gets updated with new features regularly. All of the latest fixes and updates are tracked below. The website announcement thread is also updated with new changes, so you can follow that thread to be notified of updates.
Blink-182 performed two nights at Coachella as their first two shows back after reuniting with Tom DeLonge. I wrote about what the first performance meant to me in my newsletter:
Last night, Blink-182 returned to the stage to perform with Tom DeLonge for the first time in almost eight years. And the return at Coachella was live-streamed on YouTube. While I feel awful for the fans that had their shows postponed due to Travis’s injury, this being the return, to a massive hometown crowd and the entire thing being streamed so that fans across the globe could experience it together … was such a perfect treat. I texted a few friends to let them know it was happening, sat down on the couch, and experienced a new Blink-182 memory that I’ll carry with me for years to come with a whole bunch of fans in the Blink-182 thread on Chorus. It was an incredible evening. The band sounded as good as I think I’ve ever heard them with Tom. Mark sounded incredible. Tom sounded like he wanted to be there. Travis was an animal behind the kit. Seeing the smiles on the band’s faces, seeing how happy Mark was, and hearing the banter back and forth again was everything I could have hoped for. I sat there with a stupid grin on my face. Just an hour of being happy. An hour of hearing some of my favorite songs being played by one of my favorite bands and getting to nerd out with a bunch of like-minded fans just losing our shit like it was 2001. There’s a magic this band has always had that just hits different. A mixture of fun times with band members that we’ve grown up emulating and songs that we’ve spent countless hours listening to. And for those of us they’ve infected, it’s been an almost lifelong obsession now. Last night was a beautiful entry into the pantheon of Blink memories. With all the band drama, the health scares, and the years adding up on all of us, to see the band at this level deliver on that stage, with all of us experiencing it together, was truly special. Maybe it’s because I turned 40 a few weeks back. Perhaps it’s a combination of the collective trauma of the past few years. Or maybe it’s just an elder emo being over dramatic on a Friday evening, but I couldn’t help but be a little choked up seeing this all play out. The adoration for the songs that have meant so much to me over my life, the happiness radiating from the stage, and the shared experience with other Blink fans, was one more addition to the scrapbook of memories I’ve had with Blink-182. And they absolutely crushed it. Blink-182 for life.
Being able to experience this show, with other fans, really captured how much being a Blink-182 fan means to me and how the fanbase really is a wonderful community. I’m not usually a big bootleg, or even live album, listener. However, these two shows were so much fun to experience, and were two of the best performances I’ve heard from the band in ages, that I felt like they should live for posterity for all fans to experience over and over again.
I used the highest quality rip of the performance I could find, a direct from source download. Then I cut the files up into individual tracks, using The Mark, Tom, and Travis model of where to put the dialog and splice the songs. And then I used my, admittedly very novice, audio engineering skills to “master” the files in Logic Pro. I tried to clean up the audio the best I could, removing extra artifacts, trying to reduce the audible “hiss” that permeated weekend two’s vocals, and giving the entire thing a more clean and punchy EQ. It’s edited to my personal taste in what my ears find pleasing. Then I raised the volume to better match what I expect an album to sound like, and avoid any clipping, and exported all the tracks as 320 kbps MP3s.
I added the awesome artwork done by Danyel Saldanha Evangelista and am now sharing the entire thing with other Blink fans. Please feel free to share these as I believe everything deserves more Blink in their life. And, I’m crossing my fingers no one gets too mad at me for sharing live bootleg audio only files.
Y’all can keep the videos for your YouTube channel, let us share and experience the audio!
UPDATE • Apr 28, 2023Welp, Coachella’s lawyers are a bunch of party poopers:
God forbid people want to enjoy something and actually have a positive feeling about your festival. 🙄
Read More “Blink-182 Live at Coachella Bootleg”I remember turning 20. I was a sophomore in college building the website that would, in many ways, define the next two decades of my life. It was 2003. And while countless albums from those years left a mark on me, it’s often Fall Out Boy’s blue painted ‘Take This To Your Grave’ I think about the most. They blow up. My website blows up. And so begins a two-decade ride of following this band’s career. And it’s over these years that I find myself intertwined with the songs. Each album holds a special place in my memory for where I was when I first heard it, who I was with, and the person I was, even if that wasn’t the person I wanted to be. Those early albums became the soundtrack to my stumbling twenties. And when I turned 30 in 2013 I wrote about the band’s rebirth in a way that looking back was not so subtly partially autobiographical. So, it’s only fitting that I turn 40 a week before the band releases another album. In many ways, the perfect cosmic bow tie of coincidence. In others, the exact music I need to hear as I’m evaluating the person I am now, the life I lead, and the future ahead of me. Ever since I first listened to those early demos, there’s been something about how Patrick thinks about music that aligns almost identically with what my brain craves. The way he crafts melodies, uses syncopation, starts, stops, speeds up, and builds songs has been soul candy since the beginning. And it’s why from the moment I first hit play on their new one a few weeks ago I’ve had a massive smile on my face just thinking about the songs and what they created. It’s an album that wears obvious influence from each era of the band. And it culminates in arguably the band’s most cohesive and ambitious album since ‘Folie.’ I grew up listening to Fall Out Boy. If there’s a band that can define where I came from to where I am today it’s hard not to think of this one. And at the precipice of middle age, of no longer being able even half to pretend I’m not an adult, I find comfort in turning to this old friend once again. A boy on a couch with headphones, typing away about the music that moves him. I am, as I ever was, me. God damn, what a band. God damn, what an album.
Nobody likes you when you’re … 40?
Yeah, I’m still not sure how I feel about that number. But what I have discovered is that moving into my forties has a much different feeling than any previous birthday. A decade ago was a time of massive change, I was moving down to the city and feeling burnt out with the website I’d been running since I was a teenager. Today I’m feeling more grounded and at home than I ever have before, while my passion for music has seen its spark renewed.
I’m happily married to someone that can make this incredible @blink182 cake and surrounded by the best friends and family I could ever hope to have. And most days the two cats keep me company while I’ve turned a once stressful “job” into a place to write and talk about music with people that share the same love of music and community.
Life continues to have ups and downs, but the last ten years have given me a new appreciation for what can be endured and how a stoic mind can give a calming presence to any stormy sea.
Anyway, I’m 40. I’m on the other side of the proverbial hill. Um, yeah, I guess this is growing up.
Sunday evening, a brief moment before the wheel of the week begins again. It’s here where we lean our shoulder against the hour hand, hoping to prolong a weekend bliss, holding onto the seconds before the inevitable churn of the week ahead swallows us in her seas.
And it’s here that I often find myself reaching for the albums that make me feel motivated, the ones that can pull back the weekend haze and prepare me for the job ahead. Lately, that’s included coming back to Anberlin’s ‘Cities,’ an album that still has the same propulsive drive and polish to sound as fresh and modern as the day it was released. I’ve found myself starting the week with this at the top of my playlist, and my Monday’s not seeming so daunting.
“They lied when they said the good die young…”
#anberlin #vinyl
The year comes to an end. Our annual best of feature is now up in the website.
chr.us/2022
I’ve been putting together a list of my favorite albums since at least 2005. And here we are at the end of another year, so I suppose it’s time to once again figure out what albums I should decide are those that best defined my last twelve months. I listened to more music in 2022 than any year I can remember (let alone that I’ve tracked), and trying to distill it all down is harder than ever. But, we might as well try.
You can subscribe to my newsletter if you’re interested in a weekly rundown of the music and other entertainment I consume, and the staff compiled best of 2022 list can be found here.
Read More “Jason Tate’s Top Albums of 2022” This past year brought a ton of exciting music styles and a plethora of great releases from so many talented artists. I found myself extremely motivated to continue to write, and thus my list is hyperlinked to a lot of my past work from 2022. I hope you find something new that you’ll enjoy, in not only my list, but in also all of the other talented contributors’ lists. I wish everyone a very happy New Year, and I can’t wait to start talking about our Most Anticipated Albums list in a few more weeks!
Read More “Adam Grundy’s Top Albums of 2022”
As the years go on, I find myself interested by how differently I’m using music from one year to the next. In high school, music was purely an emotional soundtrack to all the upheaval that time of your life brings. In college, it was the soundtrack to the thousands and thousands of miles I drove to keep a long distance relationship alive. In the years immediately following college, it was background music as I found my way as a freelance writer. And then later, as I picked up songwriting, I studied the music I loved almost academically, trying to figure out what made it work from lyrical, musical, and production standpoints.
The last few years have brought new utilities for music in my life. In 2020, music was a crutch, something I relied on to get me through hard times. In 2021, it felt like so much of the music I loved was about communicating and amplifying the euphoria of being able to get back to some semblance of a normal life. This year, music was jet fuel. I spent 358 hours running this year and covered 3,131.3 miles, first in preparation for my first marathon, then for a variety of other races and goals. Music was a companion across most of those miles, pushing me forward and giving me the inspiration and the confidence to push harder — to drop the pace another 30 seconds per mile, or to keep going on those 20-mile days when my legs were burning and even my brain felt tired.
I think I’ll always have a special connection to these albums for how they accompanied me on that brand-new journey. There will be other marathons and many more miles to run, but 2022 will always be the year that I pushed myself to do something that even 28-year-old me never would have thought I could do, and the music on this list will always remind me fondly of pushing those limits and discovering that no human being is limited. Here’s to pushing a few more limits in 2023.
Read More “Craig Manning’s Top Albums of 2022”Long ago, an online friend, Drew Sung, messaged me on AIM and told me he had a new band I should check out. I told him to send me a song. He said he couldn’t yet since they didn’t have a singer finalized, but that he’d drive down to Redlands and play it for me. So, sitting in my sophomore dorm room, we hit play together on the all instrumental version of this EP. My jaw just about bounced off the floor. I asked about the missing singer, he said they were trying one out who he thought could be a “game changer.” I asked if they had a band name, he said he wasn’t sure but they were tossing around “Saosin” as an idea. A few weeks later the MP3’s with Anthony Green’s instantly iconic vocals showed up. I think I wrote something back like, “this may very well shape the curvature of the music scene, in the future we may talk about music before this album, and then music after this album.” I’m not sure how much of my teenage hyperbole came to pass, but this release remains an absolute monster. A force in power and unmistakeable passion. An album that to this day can knock me on my ass and dominate an entire day with just 15 minutes, and five incredible songs.
I’m beyond happy to finally have this in my collection, and the smile on my face when it arrived today was not unlike when I first heard it all those years ago.
#saosin #vinyl #whenwereyoung
After about ten years, the office was in need of an upgrade. I wrote about the whole process, with links to the various products and more photos, on my blog: chorus.fm (link in stories).
