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The first song on Big Thief's colossal new double album is called "Change." It's a quiet song. It eases you into its 20-song track-list without overwhelming you. For a record as long as Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You, it understands what it's asking of the listener. Rather than throwing you in the deep end, it teaches you to swim in the shallow end first. Change is hard, especially big change. You become so accustomed to what you currently have that it can be jarring when it is suddenly taken away from you. Adrianne Lenker knows this, and she knows that change is natural and unavoidable.

When I found out that my grandfather, who we all called Papa, passed away on Sunday, I felt that shock. I stared at the bedroom wall as my mom broke the news to me, processing everything and nothing. Like Lenker, I know that change is inevitable. I know that change is something we all experience, big and small. Nothing really prepares you for it, even though you know it will happen at some point.

Change like the wind

At the beginning of every year, I have this tradition where I replay my favorite video game from start to finish. If you know me well, then you probably know that it's Kingdom Hearts 2. This is something I didn't start doing until three years ago. I acquired a PS4 in 2019 for the sole purpose of playing Kingdom Hearts 3, a game that I was unequivocally too excited to play. I figured that I should probably justify spending a lot of money on this console by spending more money on it, so in December 2019, I purchased the 1.5 and 2.5 HD collection, which houses every mainline entry in the series aside from KH3.

It included Kingdom Hearts 2, so I played it all the way through for the first time since I was a teenager. I decided that, because I once again owned my favorite game ever made, I would play through it every year. At the start of 2020, I finished a Standard Mode play-through. When 2021 came around, I did a Proud play-through, which is the slightly more difficult mode. Right now, I'm playing the game on Critical for the first time, the hardest mode possible. I played KH3 on Critical, which was indisputably harder, but the masochist in me is still having fun with KH2's counterpart. I've been killed in two hits on this play-through by a basic enemy. That's wonderful.

Hey, everyone. It's been a while, hasn't it? I just checked, and I haven't written for my newsletter/blog since June. I took a bit of a hiatus because I got caught up with freelance assignments. It's been my busiest year by a wide margin in terms of writing for publications, which is a good thing. Lately, I've had the urge to resuscitate this newsletter and give it a fresh coat of paint, so to speak. So that's what I'm doing right now. I had an idea of how I could accomplish that.

I listen to an album I haven't heard before at least once a day for the most part. I think it's important as a music journalist to constantly surround myself with music that's new to me. For instance, I just finished listening to The Replacements' Tim for the first time and enjoyed it. With that being said, I thought I could do deep dives into artists' catalogs and write a little about each album in their discography. Generally, I'd like to do this for artists I know very little about to make it more interesting and educational for both you and myself. So I'm going to try to do these artist deep dives whenever I have free time/feel like it.

To kick things off, I'm starting with Adele. It feels topical, and I had a revelation that I'd never heard an Adele record all the way through before, so this seemed like a great incentive to familiarize myself with her body of work. She's also releasing her fourth album, 30 (out today), which one of my favorite writers, Craig Jenkins, deemed her best album yet. I haven't heard it yet because I am not important enough (or am I? Drake heard it first. Her own son hasn't even heard it, and it's designed to explain Adele's divorce to him. He even had to wait for the hype-drop to understand a deep part of his family, which I find both sad and a little funny? My parents are divorced, for what it's worth).

I digress; it's time to dive into Adele's music. Also, please subscribe to this newsletter/blog and follow me on Twitter. It helps, and I appreciate it.

sorry I couldn’t resist using this image.

In May 2018, I emailed several writers whose work I admire for advice on breaking into music journalism. Nearly everyone responded to my pleas, providing me with useful bits of wisdom. I had just finished my junior year in journalism school, so jobs were on my mind. I had done an internship at the previous summer, and I had just started freelancing for . But I was a pure neophyte in terms of skill, and I had no idea how I could make a career for myself in this field.

On Friday, The Rollling Stones’ 1971 album, Sticky Fingers, turned 50. I’ve heard the record now, but, frankly, I didn’t grow up on the Stones in the way that many music obsessives did. Instead, I grew up on bands like The Cure, Death Cab for Cutie, and, of course, Blink-182. For a sizeable chunk of my adoloescence, was my favorite album, and in many ways I consider it one of the definitive records of my middle-school experience. Ultimately, this means that a lot of music I hear is subconsciously compared to Blink-182, whether I want that to happen or not.

Last month, I read Amanda Petrusich’s astounding essay in on genre and how, ultimately, it’s become an obsolete qualifier for music. Streaming has undoubtedly brought about a period of genreless consumpton. Listening patterns have gradually shifted more toward “vibes” and playlists because of algorithmic marketing from streaming giants like Spotify. It’s an excellent piece that’s very much worth your time, and this led me to think even more about genre on a conceptual level when I finished reading it. Namely, I thought about the nebulous genre that is “singer-songwriter.”

Everybody knows that part of The Killers’ “All These Things That I’ve Done.” The chorus cuts out, and only guitars remain. Brandon Flowers comes in with a tentative “I’ve got soul, but I’m not a soldier,” and he slowly gets louder until a gospel choir accompanies him. It’s perhaps one of the most iconic bridges next to the Golden Gate Bridge, and, as both a songwriter and a music writer, I’ve always marveled at the weirdest section of any song: the infamous bridge.

As I’m sure some of you have read by now, Substack is doing some things that aren’t exactly great. For those of you who don’t know, I’ll do my best to sum everything up. Substack is paying transphobes to write for them because … well, there really isn’t a good reason. The executives of the company are citing “diversity of thought” and “healthy discourse” as their rationale, but seeking out writers who cause a great deal of harm to particular swaths of people isn’t “diversity of thought.” It’s bigotry. This is one of the most nefarious examples of “both-sides” rhetoric, where a false equivalency is established with one side oppressing the other while claiming it’s an equal playing field.

Anyway, I could go on and on about that topic, but I think a section from puts it best:

The trek here had been long and arduous. He had never been here before, never been in a ship, but now he was all alone. Pure isolation. This isolation felt even greater, given that he’d been stuck in the same seat for what felt like an eternity. No motion in this place. Floating like the infinite planets that littered the universe. He used to fight it, troubleshooting for hours and days on end, but now he had come to accept it.

It wasn’t entirely bad, after all. No one could hurt him up here. It felt strangely safe. Solitude can be piercing, but with the quiet of the stars and the hum of the engine, it was pleasant. He’d dream of spending time with others only to return to his reality at hand, fully understanding the weight of this situation. The rest of the crew had been killed, not by other humans, but by the demanding nature of their setting. He predicted he would lose his mind after all of this time alone, but he was serene. A calm had washed over him.

He knew he would wither away, but he tried not to think of it in a grotesque, violent way. He framed it as evaporation, the beautiful way water turns into mist once it’s deemed unfit for its environment. He would evaporate. He would unite with the vacant terrain of his surroundings. He would be forever lost in what he had always wanted to explore. There was no telling when it would happen exactly, but the certainty of that event was beyond a single doubt.

But maybe he’d predicted this too soon. A light whirring sounded in the distance, and a glimmer of orange refracted itself through the small window near him. Some type of satellite, gone absolutely haywire. At his current view, it was mesmerizing. The crashing, burning satellite coursing through space was barely audible, almost imperceptible if he didn’t give it his full attention. He saw it inch closer and closer. He could almost feel the blistering heat of its speed clashing with the ship.

They had to be getting close now. The sisters could gradually feel the pavement underneath their feet morph into sand, as they sunk a bit deeper with each step. She looked at the beach below her, her bare feet leaving slightly larger imprints than the smaller ones to her right.

It was one of their favorite ways to spend time together, roaming the beach aimlessly with the ocean breeze cooling their skin. Everything was silent except for the crashing waves and whistling wind, interrupted only by her younger sibling’s eager complaints. “How much longer?” she asked petulantly. Sometimes, she ignored her questions, but that only made her sister more impatient. Most of the time, she indulged her, but seldom with a direct answer. “You need to learn to be patient,” she replied. “Good things take time.”

Her sister exhaled deeply, expressing her frustration. They had been walking for what felt like an hour, despite the fact that it was much closer to 20 minutes. Her feet were getting slightly sore, but no matter how much she vented to her older sibling, she loved every minute of their excursions. Hopefully, today, they would find what they were looking for.

The pair inched their way closer to the crystalline shore, sparkling to reflect the day’s nascent sunrise. From the distance, the older sister descried groups of lumps underneath the sand, some moving and others completely still. She decided to leave the moving ones alone, allowing them to continue their crustacean travels. She kept her eye on the immobile ones, noting the minute protrusions in the soaked sand.

When Nintendo announced that they would release HD versions of Super Mario 64, Super Mario Sunshine, and Super Mario Galaxy as one definitive package, aptly titled , I was ecstatic. I thought I could do my own personal ranking of all five 3D Mario titles for this newsletter (I don’t count or ). But I need to take a brief hiatus from ranking things I enjoy. Just to get it out of the way, here’s how I rank the 3D Mario games:

Before reading today’s short post, I just wanted to thank my incredibly talented fiancée Rachel Tingle for creating a logo for this newsletter! She posts her creations and illustrations on Instagram, where you can follow her @liltingz or @rayricreates.

I’ve heard that, in order to fall asleep quickly and efficiently, you need to make your pre-sleep routine as boring as possible. Simply put, I’m astoundingly bad at that. Before I even get in bed, I’m watching YouTube videos and listening to music. You could say I also fail at this because I never actually fall asleep to silence. I usually have something on in the background functioning as a kind of white noise. The thing is, though, I never fall asleep to actual white noise. Sometimes it’s a podcast. Sometimes it’s a YouTube video. But typically, it’s music.

I’ve been falling asleep to albums since my freshman year of high school. Some of these records were M83’s , Bombay Bicycle Club’s , or Passion Pit’s , to name a few examples. All of these are albums I still love, and falling asleep to them regularly made me love them even more. Admittedly, there are some tracks on each of those albums that aren’t exactly sleep-friendly. Ironically, Passion Pit’s “Sleepyhead” is thoroughly obnoxious, but that’s part of why I adore it.

To call Sufjan Stevens prolific would be an understatement. The indie-folk songwriter has traversed boundaries both within and beyond the “indie” and “folk” labels. Throughout his seven solo albums, Stevens has toyed with banjos and synthesizers alike, and that’s not even including his ambitious collaborative projects with artists such as The National’s Bryce Dessner, Nico Muhly, James McAlister, or Asthmatic Kitty’s co-founder (and his own stepfather) Lowell Brams. That’s not even including his Christmas albums (plural) or his fictitious 50-states project (singular). With another LP, The Ascension, releasing later this month, I thought I’d dive into the polymath’s discography and rank each of his solo studio albums. Let me clarify here that I’m not counting collaborative projects or Christmas albums. Anyway, here is my ranking of Sufjan Stevens’ albums from A Sun Came to Carrie & Lowell.

I conducted an extensive quantitative study (a Twitter poll) over the weekend to see whose discography I should rank. I kicked this series off with Arctic Monkeys, and for the rest of these posts, I’ll take to Twitter to find out what artist’s catalogue I’ll be delving into next. For this poll, I was deciding among The Killers, Death Cab for Cutie, Radiohead, and Beach House, and The Killers won with 30% of the vote, so here we are. Consequently, I spent the past week or so listening to the great songs and not-so-great songs from Brandon Flowers and Co.

As I was re-experiencing the entirety of The Killers’ discography, one quote from ringleader and vocalist Brandon Flowers continually resurfaced in my mind. “I feel like I write a lot of solid 6s and 7s,” he said in 2017. It’s strange to think that this quote came from Flowers, a frontman who seems wholly distanced from any form of humility. But this was him reckoning with the notion that The Killers have some excellent songs, very few terrible songs, and a wealth of slightly above-average material. Flowers and I have made similar observations about his music, and I’ll explore that further in the actual ranking.

On July 30, I conducted a quantitative study to see if I should start a new thing for my newsletter. This new thing would involve comprehensive rankings of artists’ discographies, and I would conduct additional quantitative studies to discover what discography I will be ranking for the next edition. Turns out, 83.3% of participants believed this would be a worthy endeavor. However, that means 16.7% of participants found this idea uninteresting, so I apologize in advance to those 16.7% of you because I now must please the 83.3% of participants and provide my official, deadly serious rankings of artists’ discographies on an irregular basis.

So, I figured that there wouldn’t be a better way to start this series off than with Arctic Monkeys, a band whose discography I co-ranked for my first byline in Consequence of Sound, which is also the first time I ever ranked an artist’s catalogue for money. You can read the story , but I’m not sure I agree with that ranking anymore. For starters, I placed in dead last, and people on Facebook threatened to beat me up if they ever met me. Well, joke’s on you, Todd; I’m amending my errors.

In the first post for this newsletter, I promised to write about music, movies, books, video games, and Waluigi. You may have thought that I was joking. If you truly know me, then you knew that I absolutely meant that I had plans to write about Waluigi. If you truly know me, then you know how unhealthily obsessed I am with this meme-inducing, purple abomination. Most of the time, people think I’m merely joking about him, that the only reason I’m talking about Waluigi is because his existence is a meme in and of itself. Sometimes, that’s valid. But other times, I’m expressing my deep, earnest fondness of this celestial, godawful video game character.

Perhaps I should start with one reason I love Waluigi, and that is because he is purple. Purple has always been my favorite color, despite the fact that I almost exclusively wear black. I loved purple before I was even introduced to Nintendo games. So when I saw that Waluigi was the purple version of Mario, I was stupefyingly ecstatic. It felt like this character were made with me in mind because I am the only person whose favorite color is purple. I am what advertisers call the target audience.

For those of you wondering, “Grant, why do you feel this irrepressible urge to write about Waluigi right now? What’s the news peg here?” Well, mom, I figured now would be an auspicious time because Waluigi turned 20 this past week. He made his debut as Wario’s tennis parter in the Nintendo 64 version of , and it felt like the time was right. I also realized that I am this young lad’s elder of three years, which frankly makes me feel so far behind in life. Waluigi has starred in countless games whereas I can barely cook my own meals. But to put into perspective how truly enamored I am with this gentleman, I dressed up as him for Halloween last year and enjoyed myself way too much. Yes, that’s a real mustache. It’s called commitment.

This past week, I finished my first play-through of the original Donkey Kong Country on Nintendo Switch Online’s SNES application. I had played both Donkey Kong Country Returns and Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze because I am very cool, so it was refreshing to see from where these modernized iterations sprung forth. It was free to play because I pay $20 annually for Nintendo Online (don’t think about that too hard), so I booted up the SNES app and hit start on .

Hey, everyone! Welcome to this blog/newsletter I’m starting completely on a whim. For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Grant Sharples. I’m a freelance writer with bylines in MTV News, Consequence of Sound, Paste, , and . I mostly write about music, but I enjoy many facets of pop culture, such as movies, books, video games, television, and more (what else is there actually?). You might know me as the guy who tweets about Waluigi way too much, or you might know me as the guy who got 14k views on his 8th-grade guitar cover of Sum 41’s “Fat Lip” on YouTube. The like-dislike ratio is unimportant.