150 Best Albums of 2023

As the hottest year on record so far wound down to a holiday season portending what’s sure to be an even hotter and otherwise frightening on many fronts 2024, an article began making the rounds on what little social media I tune into wondering whether rock music is dead, over, kaput. In 2023, no less!…

Appetizer For American Pie

Phil Dellio asked me to write a foreword to his 2023 book Happy For. a While, which, as its subtitle suggests, attempts to make a reckoning with “American Pie,” 1972, and the Awkward, Confusing Now. That foreword is below. I highly recommend you read the book as well — and view the Zoomcast that Phil…

Searching for my Mainline: The Social Geography of Manayunk

The assignment started off with Frank Kogan requesting “social maps,” to his readers’ high school lives and otherwise, in his interrogatively inspiring ’90s fanzine Why Music Sucks. An impressive roster of respondents replied: Liz Armstrong, Renée Crist, Jane Dark, Phil Dellio, Laura Morgan, Luc Sante, Sara Sherr, Rob Sheffield, Mark Sinker, Scott Woods, on and…

Shania Twain single review, 1995

Well, sort of a Shania Twain single review. Ostensibly. In Phil Dellio’s Top 40-oriented fanzine Radio On, see, you could write pretty much anything and call it a review, and doubt I ever stretched the definition farther. Also maybe among the more embarrassing things I’ve written. Names redacted for privacy’s sake, just like in its…