Liner Notes (January 20th, 2024)

This week’s newsletter looks at Green Day’s new album and sprinkles in some other thoughts on the music and entertainment I spent time with last week. This week’s supporter Q&A post can be found here.

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A Few Things

I (for obvious reasons) enjoyed this article from Joan Westenberg arguing that forums have some real benefits over places like Slack/Discord. I continue to like our community and how it looks/works over any other online platform I’ve played around with.
I saw some sad news this week. Former AbsolutePunk writer Tony Pascarella passed away. Tony wrote some of my favorite reviews back in the day, and I’ll remember him for never being afraid to tackle a takedown of a popular artist. Rest in peace.
I asked Alexa about the weather this morning. It gave me the weather and asked if I wanted headlines for the upcoming NFL games. Has anyone written the definitive piece on what went wrong with this product? Every “did you know…?” prompt makes me want to throw this thing through a window.

Music Thoughts

This week’s big release is Green Day’s Saviors. I think it’s a wonderful return to form after quite a few years of the band wandering in the wilderness with mediocre songs (and the straight up unlistenable last album). It’s an album that embraces the best parts of the band and has some of Billie’s most inspired songwriting since American Idiot. Highlights for me are “Goodnight Adeline,” “Dilemma,” and “Living in the ’20s.” There’s an awesome energy to “Living in the ’20s” that I didn’t think the band had in them anymore. There’s still a few duds (the last three songs drag a little, and the chorus to “Coma City” bugs me), and the album feels its length at 15 songs, but as a whole, I’m extremely happy to have a new Green Day album that I thoroughly enjoy. I’m still holding out hope that the band could do a whole album of songs like “Goodnight Adeline,” “Corvette Summer,” and “Suzie Chapstick” that would feel like a spiritual successor to Warning — a great start to the music year.
The new Strung Out song has me buzzing. Quickly climbing my most anticipated chart.
I like the new Taylor Acorn single; I hope to see a full length this year.
The rest of my week was spent rediscovering MxPx’s Secret Weapon, doing an Alkaline Trio discography run, and sprinkling in some old school Bad Religion at the gym.

The Stats: Over the past week, I listened to 25 different artists, 46 different albums, and 459 different tracks (581 scrobbles). Here is my Top 9 from last week, and you can follow me on Apple Music and/or Last.fm.

Entertainment Thoughts

I loved Ms. Marvel (the TV show). I liked Captain Marvel. Adore both actresses. And I still thought The Marvels was a total mess. It felt like four scripts badly edited together. It was cut extremely weird, made little sense, and the story’s core was boring. It’s been a long time since I walked away from a Marvel movie excited.
Self Reliance was completely fine.
I’ve been keeping up with my goal to read more in 2024. Of the things I’ve read over the first few weeks, I liked Small Mercies by Dennis Lehane the best. I also finally read Travis Barker’s book. I’d give that a solid 2.5 stars. 2.5 is also the number of pages Travis can apparently go without mentioning how many women he’s slept with. There are some good Blink-182 tidbits throughout, and I would have loved more of a dive into the recording of those albums, but that wasn’t the book’s core. Overall, I’m glad I finally sat down to read it. That dude sure has lived a full life. (I’m really hoping Mark Hoppus’s book gets finished soon.)

Random and Personal Stuff

All my family and friends who lost power in the craziness of last week’s winter storm have power back up as of right now. My sister got hit the worst. Their power was out for five days; downed trees and power lines kept them from getting out of their neighborhood, and then it went back on for just over 24 hours before another outage hit them, and they were without it again for another day. Thankfully, the power company got it back on quicker, and the weather has finally calmed down. I still can see a lot of ice on the streets, and I’ve got zero interest in spending much time in that. Home by the fire with my music and books is just fine for me.
I have seen some version of the same phrase/meme pop up on various social media accounts over the past few weeks that says something like, “If you knew me before age X, you don’t know me anymore.” And I’ve been thinking about that a lot after an acquaintance from high school messaged me on Instagram. There are traces of who I was from 15-30 around (probably most seen in my musical taste), but by and large, I feel so far removed from that person.

Ten Songs

Here are ten songs that I listened to and loved this week. Some may be new, some may be old, but they all found their way into my life during the past seven days.

Green Day – Goodnight Adeline
Strung Out – Cages
Yours Truly – Call My Name
Taylor Acorn – Gray
Arm’s Length – I Don’t Love You
Alkaline Trio – Dethbed
Green Day – Dilemma
Bad Religion – Atheist Peace
MxPx – Angels
Mitchell Tenpenny – Breaking My Heart

This playlist is available on Spotify and Apple Music.

Community Watch

The trending and popular threads in our community this week include:

The most liked post in our forums last week was this one by Craig Manning in the “Green Day – Saviors (January 19th, 2024)” thread.

LOL. Time to fire Craig.

Previous editions of Liner Notes can be found here.

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