Unsure how much of the LBJ readership is Colorado-based, but thought it worth mentioning that I have dipped my toe into the show-booking game. (Early returns re: ticket sales suggest that this may be a once-ever occurrence, so consider the experience highly collectible.).

It was the first week of March, 2012, and I was on spring break. The Boys had assembled, as if having no other choice, to trek up to Richmond for a Neon Indian show. The opener, a duo called Purity Ring, left a much stronger impression.

The Important Rappers.

Hello all, just a few thoughts on ye…. He’d call them thots, maybe…. Kanye thought about killing me once….

At some point in my childhood, I inherited someone else's massive, space-consuming collection of National Geographic magazines - some twenty years' worth. This was not, as you might expect, the happy accident which birthed my love of nature; it was, however, my introduction to the craven commercialization thereof towards which all Earth-focused publications trend. In that sense, this trip was an inevitability - myself, two Hip Replacement day ones along for the ride, and a third making appearances in both Denver and Salt Lake City.

Kendrick Lamar is inescapable, to put it lightly. This past Sunday, I spent the morning and half the afternoon listening back through his discography, To Pimp A Butterfly in my headphones and DAMN. on at the coffee shop; Section.80 on the stereo and good kid, m.A.A.d city on the playlist at the breakfast spot with the $12 burrito. DAMN. again from a passing Subaru.

The only two things I'll ever identify as good at are playing basketball and interviewing musicians (since moving to Denver my ping pong skills have atrophied beyond recognition), and people know better than to get me started on the former. I started doing the latter because the god Mitch Oliver told me that I could get into music festivals for free if I identified myself as a WTJU staffer, but I felt a little guilty about doing nothing with my ill-gotten press passes. I started doing festival interviews with any- and everyone that would have me, my tendencies towards the obscure paying off for once as a startling number of my musical heroes felt, to some extent by self-preservatory obligation, that they could not pass up an interview with a large college's student radio station.

Apologies in advance for the pictures. Any place blighted by French culture is going to be an absolute breeding ground for assholes waiting giddily for you to ask about a disposable camera so that they can say that they thought all cameras were disposable, and so I was perfectly happy to rely on my cell phone for this trip. Google provides a really insulting service where if they detect multiple failed attempts at a photo they'll combine them into a single, hyper-saturated entity that looks neither real nor like what you intended to capture (see the Bruges photo), which isn't wholly unexpected now that people have apparently given up on images as faithful representation.

I’ve written more than enough about King Krule (real name Archy Ivan Marshall) already, I’m sure, but never about my favorite of his albums. I still don’t really know a lot about A New Place 2 Drown; it came out at the very end of 2015 and escaped any meaningful notice beyond half a day’s worth of tweeting and, if I recall correctly, a non-committal but generally on-brand nod of approval from Pitchfork. It’s one of the first albums that I considered reviewing, in those weird days where I had no venue for publication and no sense of the music writing world and big hopes about being a professional writer of some sort (both of the former are required for the latter).

I was a pizza delivery guy at Domino’s for two straight summers (2011 and 2012), but this essay is about the first one. Right before I started, my parents realized that I was smoking weed; I was grounded except for getting that paper and hanging out with my first serious girlfriend, whom I had just started dating. In other words, I had the exact degree of autonomy (perhaps more) than I would have otherwise expected.