If You Want to Be on the Right Side of History, Follow the Music
History is loud when you’re living inside it. Everyone is certain. Everyone has a microphone. Every moment feels urgent and absolute, as if the future is being decided in real time by whoever speaks with the most confidence.
But history is quiet when it looks back.
What survives is rarely the speeches that demanded obedience. It’s the songs that told the truth gently enough to outlive the moment that produced them.
I have a theory I keep returning to, especially when the world feels heavy.
If you want to be on the right side of history, follow the music.
Irony, Sincerity, and the Quiet Work of Becoming
I used to think sincerity and irony lived on opposite sides of a line.
Sincerity felt like childhood. Open windows. Music played too loud. Letting things land without first checking how they might be received.
Irony felt like adulthood. Distance. Taste as armor. Knowing how to belong without revealing too much.
What I understand now is that irony is often sincerity that learned how to survive.
That realization came back to me unexpectedly while watching a movie scene I thought I already understood.
A few days after seeing Song Sung Blue, Pearl Jam posted an old clip from Milwaukee Summerfest. Eddie Vedder onstage with Lightning & Thunder. A moment that, viewed through today’s eyes, feels uncomfortable. A little sharp. A little knowing. The kind of posture that reads less like generosity and more like performance.
It landed differently for me than it once might have.
Not because I wanted Eddie to be perfect.
But because I no longer believe people are frozen at their worst moments.
I felt disappointed, yes. But more than that, I felt certain that what I was seeing was not who he is now.
And that certainty said something about me.
THE NIGHT MY MUSICAL ARROGANCE WAS HUMBLED AGAIN
There are humblings that hurt
and humblings that heal.
Friday night at the Panida was the second kind.
KRFR Radio’s Holiday Spectacular was meant to be lighthearted —
local musicians, a house band, holiday songs.
But something in me shifted again,
the same way it had years earlier at The Longshot,
on that Middle Fork trip,
and the first time I heard Little Wolf sing about coming home.
It happened the moment Kjetil Lund walked onstage.
He stepped into the lights barefoot, pants rolled up like Huck Finn,
a blond afro exploding around his head,
buffalo flannel hanging off him like some parallel-universe folk hero wandering in from Clark Fork.
THE LONG BRIDGE HOME
An Essay About Music, Place, and the Quiet Work of Becoming
If you had asked the younger version of me who I was meant to be, I would have said something confident, rehearsed, and completely wrong.
I was a Boulder kid who went to Boston to major in music — the kind of student who imagined himself under stage lights, whatever success was supposed to look like back then. I believed, without ever articulating it, that real art lived in big cities, in big scenes, in places with reputations.
THE FOUR VOICES THAT BUILT ME
A Philosophical Reflection on a Life Lived Through Truth, Observation, Courage, and Conscience
There are people who build their worldview through institutions, academies, sermons, and systems.
And then there are people who build theirs through voices — not the kind that shout from stages,
but the kind that slip through the cracks of the world and say,
“Look closer.”
Fear and Fire at Ten: Ryan Bingham’s Rose Hill Drive Era
Ryan Bingham has always sounded older than his years. From the moment his whiskey-and-dust voice carried The Weary Kind through Crazy Heart, listeners pegged him as a songwriter built for lonesome highways and smoke-stained barrooms. But there was a moment — a brief, combustible stretch — when Bingham’s music became something bigger, louder, and less predictable. That moment was Fear and Saturday Night, released ten years ago, and the spark came from two Boulder musicians: guitarist Daniel Sproul and drummer Nate Barnes of Rose Hill Drive.