May 2026

I grew up in a small, beaten-down town, one that is both part of the Rust Belt and part of Appalachia; what this means is that one can find their misery often doubled. It’s one of those rare pockets of America that exists in the public eye as pure myth— the red barn and golden cornfield, the football captain and prom queen, the abandoned trailer park with the tattered American flag—but the reality is much stranger and sadder than the iconography. Perhaps no artist manages to capture these images, both their loneliness and their mythic quality, more than the late musician Jason Molina.

In 1963, Richard Wright was an architecture student who wanted to be in a band. He joined a group of guys, switched from guitar to keyboards, dropped out of school. The band called itself the Tea Set, then changed its name to Pink Floyd

If you’re lucky, at a young, impressionable age you’ll listen to an album that will change your life. If you’re luckier, those around you will respond with complete befuddlement. I say this because of my experience with “Vicious Circle,” the 1982 release of the Zero Boys. It only took hearing the opening notes of the album to know something, I don’t know what, changed in me.