It is so time. The time is now.

Early last year I was so stoked to send you my first zine — a fun little fiction guy I called "Last Ditch plus two more." I think it was maybe the best thing I've ever done — I've never had as much fun, felt as rewarded, as I did creating this thing and putting it out there. I was shocked at how many of you asked for one, and I was so grateful for all of the help that my friends offered along the way.

I intended to turn over a second zine a little faster, but you know it takes some time, things get in the way. A lot happened this last year. I wrote a lot, but I also let things sit a lot. I forgot about things. I let them come back around in their own time. And I think it paid off.

When Strange Ranger first announced Pure Music earlier this year, I wasn’t very excited. Even though I had been following the band since their first full-length Rot Forever came out in 2016 (under the name Sioux Falls), impressed and thrilled by their restlessness, tracking their constant transformations on each release, I was starting to feel that I had lost their thread. While I liked their experimental, largely electronic 2021 mixtape No Light in Heaven, I wasn’t thrilled at the prospect of the band leaving emo aesthetics behind entirely, and the teaser single “Rain So Hard” felt strange and distant to me, off putting when set against the blurry indie rock of Daymoon or the off-kilter pop of Remembering the Rockets. I waffled between a skepticism that they’d be able to pull off this complete leap into electronic art rock and a kind of blasé feeling that even if they could pull it off, it really wouldn’t seem like the same band anymore anyway. The prospect of losing them in this way, in nature if not in name, was particularly depressing to me. 

On the morning that Pure Music came out, the day was bright and mild, and I had plans to try and sneak in a haircut before my shift at the museum. Looking at the cover of the record, a snapshot of a glowing cityscape against a black night, the mood seemed a little off. But I decided I couldn’t wait to see if I could find the band I loved in this new sound, so I clipped my speaker to my backpack and gave it a first spin on my bike ride to center city in the early morning.

Strange RangerPure Music

On January 1, the 2010s-era pop-punk band Fireworks released their first album in nearly a decade, the brooding and expansive Higher Lonely Power. Alongside Parannoul’s otherworldly pop opus After the Magic, Higher Lonely Power has been sitting in the back of my head as an early-year list-topper for months. These days, I am trying to think less in terms of ranking and winning and number ones and all that stuff, but you see what tends to happen is people will ask me what my favorite album of the year so far is (or, more likely, what records I’ve liked recently) and if I don’t have a list in my head somewhere I will forget the literally dozens of records that I have poured hours and hours into enjoying over the last six months, and end up answering with some band I’m not even sure I like much. 

I have been listening to Higher Lonely Power pretty consistently this year, but I’ve come back to it in a bigger, bolder way last week after the band announced a physical release of the record on Run For Cover. Sometimes I wonder if I love a vinyl mock-up image more than the actual thing itself. Something about a pretty variant. What can I say, I love things and having them in my possession. And when they are green — all bets are off. Boy oh boy. Anyway. 

I am repeatedly amazed by Higher Lonely Power, a record I thought — after a three-year series of delays — we might never get to hear. Following the trail of the darker, more cynical tone of their pre-hiatus album Oh, Common Life, Higher Lonely Power does a more thorough job of infusing the snotty, miraculously catchy spirit of their pop-punk roots with a grander, more ambitious aesthetic. Everything here reaches for the rafters — like the lush, cavernous synth-pop of “I Want to Start a Religion With You” or the booming, sinister echo of “Jerking Off the Sky.” Back in the day, it made sense for an album like Gospel to get that pointed, airtight treatment from producer Brian McTernan, pushing the vocals up to the front and making the band sound like perfectly turning gears. These were pop songs, excellent ones, but they had a certain flatness, like the scratched pen drawings that adorned the covers of Gospel and Oh, Common Life. 

FireworksI WANT TO START A RELIGION WITH YOU

Higher Lonely Power resists those limited dimensions. Opener “God Approved Insurance Plan” imagines a much louder, more abrasive version of the band, pausing between shouts and screams to lower the tempo, let David Mackinder’s familiar nasal vocals let in some air, bring the drama. “Megachurch” is a full, sweeping post-rock anthem that recasts the band’s penchant for gang vocals (see: textbook buddy anthem “The Wild Bunch”) as a dazzling, mournful choir. “Machines Kept You Alive” turns a lonely, elegiac ballad into an abrupt blitz of glitching sound. Fireworks pull off all of these moves and more on Higher Lonely Power. It’s big, it’s bold, it’s earnest and obvious and maybe even a little bit too much, but it works. 

Part of this new maximalism extends to the band’s preoccupation with institutional power, particularly that which comes from a conservative weaponization of Christianity in America. The world of Higher Lonely Power is swarming with reminders of these forces — crosses outside school buildings, babies on billboards, homophobic slogans on bumper stickers. The record functions on the tension between this omnipresent power, supposedly working to connect us all and give us comfort, and the ways in which it pushes us away from each other (“Religious freedom won't be touched / We'll keep the gays from our children / Hurts to know we're on our own / Sad to know we're in control”). 

A couple of years ago, I started a column at The Alternative called “On Shuffle.” It’s all in the name — I’d put my library of songs on shuffle and write extensively about my experience with whatever song came up first. It was really fun to do and I probably would have stuck with it a lot longer had I not published the first entry on my very first day of graduate classes. That’s the kind of timing I knew was doomed to fail. I did a few more entries over the next year, but I was too busy to ever keep it up consistently.

A few months ago I got the idea that I might try to start the column up again. The format was a really nice balm for the feeling that I was in a creative rut, the conceit inventing its own prompt. The song that shuffle gave me was “An Ocean Between the Waves” by The War on Drugs. I started writing it and I found that things started to go a little off the rails. Months later, I decided to embrace it and finish what I started here, but I found that the final product reads a little more I Keep a Diary than The Alternative, so I’m sharing it here. Here it is:

I don’t typically think of myself as a vindictive person, but every once in a while I am reminded of the feeling. I remember the songs I loved so much growing up, how spiteful and furious they always were, usually about things that probably didn’t deserve anything even close to the level of vitriol that these bands could dish out like it was nothing. I’m thinking of songs like “Tell That Mick He Just Made My List of Things to Do Today” (“let’s play this game called ‘when you catch fire, I wouldn’t piss to put you out’”) or “There’s No ‘I’ in Team” (“best friends means I pulled the trigger…means you get what you deserve”) or a heaping pile of other songs I can no longer stomach for about 100 different reasons. 

I’m not exactly sure what I was so angry about when I was 12 or 14 and these songs were so important to me. I could certainly garner that these were responses to relationships and friendships gone up in smoke, and an important aspect of all this is the toxic way in which songs like this communicated to me and so many others that these were normal responses to this kind of situation. But more than that, I think I had a naive idea that anger, that vengeance was the key to accessing a real life, that pain meant that you were living through something real. I found these songs enticing I think not because of the spite and the venom, but because of the experiences that precipitated all of that. 

It's been a little while. Hey.

I said I'd get right back into writing when the semester ended but actually it turns out that you feel a little disoriented after cranking out nearly 60 pages in seminar papers and grading hundreds of pages of freshman work. It took me a few days to stop seeing all of that stuff in my dreams. It made me feel insane, but actually kind of like good insane. I made it a year.

Well hi. Rainy slushy grey kinda week right? Not so bad I guess. Felt a little too slippy out yesterday to ride my bike so I took a pretty nice walk to campus in the morning. Gave me a chance to think my thoughts and also listen to a really good new album from a Philly band that I want to talk about later but maybe not just yet. It took a little extra time to get to where I needed to go, but I actually think it felt good to have a little...empty space? Guess I've been a little too busy these past few weeks—not to mention the kind of jarring transition from zoom class to being on-campus every morning at 9 a.m.—and haven't had much time to just stare out into nothing.

It's amazing how much nothing I think I need but maybe that's another topic. But something about this seemed to realign something in my rattling little brain and all the sudden yesterday I decided I was gonna be a music writer again? Not that I was thinking of quitting or anything like that...I don't really have much to quit and like all of the things I do (this newsletter included) my bandwidth and interest waxes and wanes and over the years I've just accepted that that's gonna be the normal state for something I can't make a living on anyway.

Well well well. Well. Well well. Happy new year. Hope you're all doing well or on the way there. Paradoxically, as usual, it's been a while. Predictably, I got pretty busy as the semester wound down and the holidays + the ensuing covid surge took a lot of my attention—it's been difficult to figure out what to put here and when.

That's not to say that I haven't been occupied with stuff I want to share with you all. I've got a lot to share, it's just gonna look a little different. But I'll get to that in a moment.

Actually no let's talk about this right now because I'm too excited to write about anything else. I'm finished making my very first zine and I can't wait to send it to you. The zine is called Last Ditch plus two more and it's composed of three short stories, one longer and two little ones. The stories are fiction. That's right, I've put together 28 pages of LIES just for you.

I settle nicely into a routine. The moment I realize that my weeks are starting to look quite a bit alike is not usually the moment when I panic. I freak out when the internal stuff starts to feel like a broken record, when I'm having the same conversations with myself over and over and I can't seem to negotiate an out. But an external sameness is fine with me. My weeks lately look like this:

• Monday: Reading day. Doing as much reading as I can for the week, usually trying to finish the novel I have to read for my Tuesday class or getting into the theory stuff for my Wednesday class. At night I put on The New Matt Show, a radio block on Drexel's WKDU station that's hosted by Matt Scottoline from the band Hurry. (Note: it appeared that The New Matt Show wasn't on this week, but thanks for playing Turnstile last week all the same.)

• Tuesday: Writing day. Usually this is when I'm doing the bulk of my essay writing for all my classes, usually working from bad, messy drafts I've handwritten in notebooks. If I'm ahead of the game, I'll write an On Shuffle column or a review or maybe a newsletter (howdy).

• Wednesday: Catching whatever I missed the last two days that wasn't urgent.

• Thursday: Prepping for the class I literally teach (????) in the afternoon. Afterwards I usually enjoy one to two beers.

• Friday: Doing the reading for the teaching practicum and figuring out everything I need to do for next week.

• Saturday: Whatever the hell I want!!! This week I made pumpkin muffins and rode my bike down to center city where I read part of the book Storm by George R. Stewart while an actual storm seemed to be brewing in Rittenhouse. (Note—exploring these NYRB titles has been a lot of fun and I have a wishlist a mile long right now. Great cover design too. Here's a cool newsletter with more about those designs.)

• Sunday: I clean our house in the morning and Nick and I usually do a long walk or head to the dog park. Usually I try to start my longest reading (this week it was The Argonauts, which was cool).

Hey everyone! The newsletter lives, am I right? I think I start every one of these with some kind of assertion of the continued survival of this thing, as I’ve slowly gone from a weekly to a monthly appearance in your inboxes. Once again, I’m still here, and I’m very glad for it.

Today I have a short little personal thing about starting grad school this week. That’s below, but first I want to point you in the direction of something new I started doing this week over at The Alternative. It’s called “On Shuffle,” and it’s a new weekly column that I’ll be writing in which I’ll flip the all-powerful shuffle switch to the “maximum shuffle” setting and let the powers of chance decide what I write about. If you like this newsletter, you’re too nice, but also you’ll probably dig this too (especially if you’re here exclusively for the tunes, which I’m sorry there won’t be a ton of on the I Keep a Diary channel this week). Check that out over here:

• Introducing: On Shuffle
• On Shuffle #1: Discovery’s “I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend” (ft. Angel Deradoorian)

Bleed American turns 20 this weekend and I have been thinking for a while that I wanted to write about it, but I spent a lot of time last year working on a bigger thing about that album that didn’t pan out. I thought that I might share a piece of what I was working on last year, which is more about “The Middle” than anything, but really it uses that song as a kind of key to understanding the record as a whole. I did a little light editing but I resisted changing too much. Here it is:

Try Everything You Can

Welcome back. Or thanks for welcoming me back. I guess since this newsletter is presumably arriving in your inbox it’s your inbox who would be saying welcome to me. Thanks to your inbox for not kicking me to spam (hopefully). Also welcome if you’re coming from a Twitter link or something. Is this too much? I’m on a new platform so I may be getting my sea legs still. You may notice that I Keep a Diary has left Substack and moved onto a new platform, Buttondown. This is not a mistake! This is where the newsletter will live for the foreseeable future. I Keep a Diary is a feeling and not a place etc.

I’ve been wanting to write a new newsletter for a few weeks but I’ve had a lot of trouble trying to decide what exactly I want to put in this space, trying to think of what will fit thematically and what folks would get the most enjoyment out of reading. There are actually a lot of changes happening in my life coming soon, but I don’t really think I’m quite ready to write about them yet. As someone who tends to write a lot from a personal point of view, sometimes I get a pervasive feeling that nobody wants to read some bullshit about my life all the time. I started a few drafts of this newsletter with very “I” and “me” heavy pieces and I felt myself rolling my eyes a little bit too much. I’m alright putting myself out there in this space and everyone is always amazingly kind about the things I write. But sometimes I think it makes sense and feels healthy to take a step back.

Anyway, I think I was putting a little undue pressure on myself and kind of forgetting what this newsletter is all about. As the premise reads: “Building something, I don’t know what, about books, music, and my complex feelings about being perceived.” I’m here to write about music, books, and writing. If what I’m doing on I Keep a Diary counts as journalism (unlikely), then those are my three beats. (I guess I have four if you count complex feelings but we already covered that in the last paragraph, sucker!) So for today’s newsletter I’m going to touch base on each one.

[John Wilson voice] Hey, New York. [/John Wilson voice]

It’s been a while. Here’s a little narrative in honor of the recent 15-year anniversary of Taking Back Sunday’s Louder Now.

I am easily moved by the smallest of things. Little gestures from coincidental forces. A TV show character with whom I identify wearing the very same H&M jacket I bought at half price in 2013. A perfect green leaf falling into my open hands while I sit out back. I wouldn’t exactly count myself a believer in what I’ve seen called “the universe” and the things it may or may not be telling us—I’m not usually looking for guidance or hoping for a sign or even listening to whatever higher power might be doing the telling. But there’s a certain moment of connection, collision with the rest of the world that just feels good when it happens. The moment of recognition—“hey, I have that hoodie,” that feeling of your hand closing around something green and alive now resting gently in your palm. The smile. This is the shit I live for. 

I got a new bike a few weeks ago. My last one had been stolen from our back porch over a year ago, my promise to myself to find a new one the following spring thwarted by the beginning of the pandemic. I am not a particularly active person—I mean, I walk my dog every day and we do little sprints up and down the streets of my neighborhood to get his energy out, but I wouldn’t exactly call that dedicated exercise—so it was not my natural inclination to get back on the road as soon as possible, especially during the cold months. 

But once the days started getting reliably warmer, it became hard to deny that I missed riding around the city, cruising down the bike lane on Pennsylvania Ave., the museum to my right in a little cloud of green shrubbery and the center city skyline looming in front of me. Being pretty much stuck inside for the entirety of last year’s warm months made me feel restless about these coming spring days. Things are distinctly not back to normal yet, and I think we’ve still got quite a bit of time to go before they are, but if there’s a way to not feel totally rooted to one spot now that the ice has melted, even if it’s illusory, I’ll take it. 

Hey hi how are ya? I was thinking a lot about Pedro the Lion the other day and I remembered something I had stowed away in my files that I realized I wanted to share. In a stroke of very good timing for this newsletter, the band hinted yesterday that they’re working on new music. So this newsletter is actually timely after all.

It’s been a few weeks since I’ve returned to this space. All I can really say is that I’ve been trying pretty hard to claw my way back here through the mostly awful days of February, to not much luck. I loved the consistency, the little ritual of my first few weeks writing this newsletter, but I kind of knew all along that that consistency wouldn’t last forever, or maybe very long at all depending on your perspective. I think it’s natural and expected to fall away from a routine that you’ve built for yourself, especially when it’s something that no one’s holding over your head or forcing you to sit down and do, especially when it’s something you set on top of a pile of other things you do have to do, especially when it’s a writing project and you’re prone to self-doubt on top of procrastination and well everything else. 

I am not sure what kept me from writing in the end, but I do know that February felt long, protracted, strange. Pretty powder snow turned to plastic dirty ice pretty quickly, and there’s a harsh glistening white spread over the memory of the entire month. I faced a few personal rejections that compounded a general creep of time. And a few weeks ago, we lost our grandmother after a difficult few years. 

I think maybe I don’t know what to say about that last thing. I feel strange and tentative about grief in the first place, I’m never particularly sure what to do with it. But the pandemic has made a loss like this ever stranger, ever more uncertain, and absolutely more difficult. I’m alright (don’t worry) but I feel a little...bewildered? It’s a feeling of, on top of everything over the last year, now we have this returning, familiar cruelty. And it’s somehow the same as it was before and completely new, although maybe that’s the way it is every time something like this happens.

One of my favorite things about the first round of lightning book reviews I did last month was the way it brought me back to the different bookstores I used to go to all the time before everything shut down. Going through the first half of that list, it felt a little like I was roaming around Philly again, stopping in all of my favorite spots. Walking down the street on a break from work, just to get out of the building. Letting my friends get me out of my room to see another neighborhood for a change. It was nice to think of these things not so much in the context of missing them, which I do, but as tangible little pieces of a year defined by the lack of them. 

One thing I noticed is that I didn’t get to touch on any of my favorite used book stores in that first installment. So shout out to Book Haven on 22nd and Fairmount, here’s a real picture of Nick and I outside their windows as we pass by on our walks:

It feels like my entire room is shelves, and somehow I’m still always running out of space. I squeeze books into the crevices above more neatly arranged (but not organized) paperbacks. I move a handful of records from one shelf to the next, trying to give them a little breathing room, transposing a stack from each subsequent shelf to settle the score. I flip through magazines piling up next to my bed, deciding how many weeks’ worth of issues is reasonable to keep, tossing the rest into a recycle pile. 

I’ve always kind of been a collector. After reading David Anthony’s newsletter about collecting vinyl earlier this week, I’ve been thinking a little bit more about why I do this kind of thing. Like Anthony hints, the reasons are probably deep-seated and kind of embedded in my personality. When I was a kid, I had a thing for boxes. Just...boxes? I didn’t like to see them thrown away—I liked nice little boxes that you could hide things in and big, refrigerator-sized cardboard boxes that you could hide yourself in. My room was filled with these kinds of things, and I’m still not all that clear on the reasons.

Jordy Walsh @Jordalsh

sunday 3x3 (new ikea shelf edition)

January 17th 2021

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Hey good morning.

it’s chewsday @harrytuesday

August 4th 2020

4,360 Retweets16,223 Likes

Thanks for coming back. A few different things for ya today. Let’s jump in.

Hello! Thanks for coming back to I Keep a Diary, I’m glad you’re here. Today’s newsletter is about books, but here are eleven songs before we get started: 

Last year, I kept a diary. From May 2019 to September 2020, I opened up the same google doc maybe a billion times (I don’t feel like counting) and forced myself to put something down. I never set rules or boundaries or anything like that, but I’d typically just write about the first idea that came to my mind—sometimes it was an actually pointless thought about a song or a record that I had in my head (looking back, I have at least two entries about Dashboard Confessional, which feels a little too on-the-nose but sometimes the truth is the truth). Sometimes, the entries were little scenes that I made up, evolving over the course of a few days at a time. Often, they were mundane reflections on whatever I was doing that day, and because I’ve always been a little bit reclusive and easily socially exhausted, a startling majority of my entries were usually centered on my daily walks with my dog Nick, mostly because that’s usually my favorite part of any given day.

This activity was basically an under-thought play on something I had vaguely heard about but failed to actively research or look much into called automatic writing, which I’m looking up right this moment and actually appears to be a more spiritual thing than I had thought, so maybe what I’m thinking of is actually called something else. But the idea was that I would sit down and write whatever popped into my brain without worrying about whether it was asinine or whether people would care about it. I’d just get something on the page and write until I was done with it. I flippantly called the google doc “free sketching,” which was probably me trying to remember what automatic writing (or whatever it is) was actually called, but I never changed it. 

Welcome to I Keep a Diary by me, Jordy Walsh.

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