Liner Notes (February 20th, 2021)

Mars

I hope everyone had a good week.

This week’s newsletter has some thoughts on the current state of technology and how I feel about it all as I get older. Then I share thoughts on the Manchester Orchestra video performance and new single, plus some other commentary on music I enjoyed this week. And there’s the usual entertainment thoughts and a playlist of ten songs I think are worth your time. This week’s supporter Q&A post can be found here.

If you’d like this newsletter delivered to your inbox each week (it’s free and available to everyone), you can sign up here.

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Big Loser – “Post-Almost-Overdose” and “I Love You (Billie Eilish)” (Acoustic) (Video Premiere)

big loser

Big Loser put out one of the most underrated albums of last year, Love You, Barely Living. Mixing punk and Americana a la The Menzingers or The Gaslight Anthem, Big Loser catalogued struggles with addiction and relationships coming to an end. But through it all Love You, Barely Living is positively anthemic. The band is getting ready to press the album to vinyl for the first time, nearly a full year after its release. To celebrate, we’re proud to premiere an acoustic session by frontman Chase Spruiell in which he performs “Post-Almost-Overdose” and a performance of Billie Eilish’s “I Love You” acoustic. Stripped down, “Post-Almost-Overdose” takes on a whole new level of melancholy, while his take on “I Love You” retains the haunting atmosphere of the original.

Check those out below, and if you like what you hear, pre-order Love You, Barely Living on vinyl..

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Dan Ozzi Pens New Book ‘Sellout’

Dan Ozzi wrote an new book called Sellout. It is going to be right in the wheelhouse of most readers of this website. You can pre-order it here, and read more about it here:

The period of punk I lived through, from the mid-90s through the 2000s, has gone largely undocumented in any substantial way, at least in book form. When is someone going to properly chronicle this period, I often wondered. So, finally, I did it myself.

I wrote a book called SELLOUT because that word pretty much defined the era of music I grew up in. This was when there was still money in the music industry—the kind of money people were literally swimming in. And after Nirvana’s Nevermind changed national music tastes overnight, major labels went looking for indie rock’s next big thing. They found it in 1994 with Green Day’s Dookie, which set A&R reps’ sights on punk. From there, interest shifted to whatever subgenre of punk became popular over that decade—emo, hardcore, even ska.