The Dillinger Four Time Machine
In April 2026, Twin Cities melodic punk veterans Dillinger Four returned to Japan for the first time in over two decades, bringing their always-infectious, at-times downright fierce melodies to a sold-out crowd at Live Bar FANDANGO near Osaka Bay. There was blood. There was sweat. There were tears. And there was unity.
My first memory of seeing Dillinger Four was either at the Foxfire Coffee Lounge in the Warehouse District of downtown Minneapolis or at the Whole Music Club on the University of Minnesota’s West Bank campus. Both shows would have been in 1997 or 1998, during my third year of high school. It was a time when three-quarters of my bi-weekly supermarket carry-out paychecks went to purchasing CDs at Extreme Noise, Treehouse, Cheapo, Best Buy, Circuit City, and/or Mutant Pop mail-order. The remaining quarter went toward putting enough gas in my car to get to those record stores and venues. And Marlboro Lights. To be frank, music was the only thing I truly cared about. It was a way of life, and everything felt fresh and exciting, as a now-legendary scene of Midwest emo and melodic punk unfolded before our very eyes. In hindsight, it seems impossible to have kept up with all the music and all the shows back then, but then again, I was a 17-year-old high school student—and admittedly not quite the autodidact I eventually grew into.
What I recall most fondly about that time period was finally etching my outline in the world, and with that came one of my most cherished identities: a show-going, record-collecting, punk rock T-shirt–wearing musichead. I could walk into the Foxfire Coffee Lounge, order a Jones Soda, head to the back room where the stage was, and just exist in this fantasy world of punk and roll while enjoying a puff with my comrades—truly a place apart from the MTV generation and recycled radio programming that was important in its own right but often difficult to escape.
Seeing Hot Rod Circuit at Foxfire blew the hat right off my head, and I rushed to their merch table to dish out ten dollars for a copy of If I Knew What I Knew Then. Jimmy Eat World, Pedro the Lion, and Alkaline Trio were also highlights from Foxfire-era Minneapolis, and the list goes on. But there was one show in particular at Foxfire that has been tattooed on my heart and mind: Dillinger Four and Lifter Puller. While I don’t recall much about Lifter Puller beyond the sense that they were a band to keep your pulse on, I remember vividly D4 putting on a show for the ages—one that brought the hardcore kids, the pop-punk kids, the emo kids, the metal kids, the hip-hop kids—everyone—together. We all sang along. Together. Dillinger Four haven’t left my rotation since. Their melodic punk-and-roll goodness has followed me to Edmonton, Japan, Honolulu, back to the Twin Cities, and back to Japan again, always bringing me back to that feeling of freedom in the late 1990s.
When I learned D4 was coming to play in Osaka this spring, I quickly secured my ticket (yes, a physical ticket!) and let the countdown begin. As time tends to pass more quickly with each year that melts away, the show snuck up on me, and suddenly it was D4 day—time for my maiden voyage to Sakai City in the south of Osaka for a midlife punk rock adventure. Admittedly, I was more excited for this than most recent shows. I couldn’t believe the band that helped shape so much of my listening in late high school was actually performing just an hour down the road.
Needless to say, Dillinger Four did not disappoint, and the idea that they might have was the furthest thing from my mind. They brought it all and left nothing on the table. An absolute epic performance—as good as, if not better than, the first time I saw them in the late ’90s. It’s not often you get to rediscover your 17-year-old identity, but when you do, its best to embrace it with an open heart and simply be grateful for the experience.
Montage of D4 at Livebar FANDANGO:
You can order Dillinger Four’s latest release, This Shit Is Geniuser, at Imakinn Records (Japan) and Anxious and Angry.
Observation + Imagination = Evocation
As photographers, we need to be constantly observing our surroundings, noticing the things others perhaps glance over, or hanging a left when others are venturing right. Through this continuous practice of observation, we can begin to anticipate scenes unfolding much like an author describes the intricacies of the protagonist, the battles with the antagonist, and all the details of each particular scene.
On countless walks through central Kobe, Japan, I’ve taken thousands of photographs. Most days I am left skunked, but rarely am I disappointed. Alex Webb said that 99% of photography is failure. Wayne Gretzky said that you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take. And what is it that Thomas Edison said? Something along the lines of instead of failing, he simply found 10,000 ways that did not work. With this in mind, I keep framing shots, pressing the shutter button, adjusting the ISO, and trying to place any potential disappointment in the backseat. If anything, a good photo walk will yield about eight to 10,000 steps and a chance to breathe some fresh air. It will also yield around 100 frames, depending on caffeine level, light conditions, and subject matter.
While out photographing the world the other day, I was listening to a lecture series about writing fiction by author and professor James Hynes. At one point Hynes mentioned “observation plus imagination” in regard to character development in fiction writing. While my current bucket list does not include composing a novel, I do find these lectures quite intriguing. I’ve started to draw parallels between attempting fiction writing and trying to become more effective with my photography. As photographers, we need to be constantly observing our surroundings, noticing the things others perhaps glance over, or hanging a left when others are venturing right. Through this continuous practice of observation, we can begin to anticipate scenes unfolding much like an author describes the intricacies of the protagonist, the battles with the antagonist, and all the details of each particular scene. However, simple observation may not quite be enough to yield a photograph that brings joy and satisfaction. We need imagination as well. Imagination in photography could be attempting new perspectives, using a softer focus, intentionally over or under exposing, slowing the shutter speed to portray some sort of movement, or even breaking every rule of composition ever written and framing a subject barely coming into or escaping the frame.
Hynes also poses that fiction writing needs to not only be descriptive, but also evocative. One can easily describe a scene or a character with a handful of carefully chosen adjectives, but to evoke takes writing to the Nth degree. And maybe that is what the best photography does as well. It stirs something within us so deep that we cannot quite explain what makes the photograph stand out. We simply know it does.
Keep observing. Keep imagining. Strive for evocation.
Central Kobe | February | 2026
YOU ARE NOW AT A BRIGHT EYES CONCERT
If you have been to a Bright Eyes concert in the last year or so, you surely noticed that the band made it very apparent as to where you were at the time. Behind the band there is a digital message that reads in big upper-case letters: YOU ARE NOW AT A BRIGHT EYES CONCERT.
If you have been to a Bright Eyes concert in the last year or so, you surely noticed that the band made it very apparent as to where you were at the time. Behind the band there is a digital message that reads in big upper-case letters: YOU ARE NOW AT A BRIGHT EYES CONCERT. It is a simple sentence, truth be told. As an identity-seeking linguist, I thought it would be interesting to analyze this sentence for all it’s worth by diagramming its syntactic structures. Trying to make sense of a sentence that has now been seen and consciously or subconsciously processed by thousands of Bright Eyes fans is wonderful fodder for any wintery afternoon.
But first, I must pose a question: Why do you think Bright Eyes has such a display at their live shows? What is the implicature of this message? Of course, taken for its semantic value, it simply states that you are, in fact, now at a Bright Eyes concert. Easy enough. But what about its pragmatic function? Could it imply that, since you are now at a Bright Eyes concert, you should put your phone away and take in the show without posting immediately to social media? Or does it entice the audience to snap more photographs of the stage decoration, posting it online and therefore giving the Bright Eyes namesake that much more visibility on all the social networking platforms? Regardless, it’s a brilliant marketing tactic.
See the image below for a syntactic tree structure of the sentence at hand. We have the sentence as a whole, but within the sentence, there are two noun phrases [“you” and “a Bright Eyes concert”], a verb phrase [“are now at a Bright Eyes concert”], an adverb [“now”], a prepositional phrase [“at a Bright Eyes concert”], a preposition [“at”], and a determiner [“a”]. There is quite a bit going on in this sentence - and in any sentence, really - syntactically.
Language is everywhere. Pause, take a look around, and have a deep think or two about what a string of words has the potential to imply.
Linguistics aside, it was wonderful to see Bright Eyes perform after what had been just over 20 years. They were in top form, played a smattering of songs from their entire catalog, and left us all thinking more profoundly about what “One For You, One For Me” means.
Bright Eyes at Yogibo META VALLEY | Osaka, Japan | December 3, 2025
See Your Heroes on a Tuesday
Seeing Jawbreaker take to the stage and break into “I Love You So Much It’s Killing Us Both,” from the record that broke them was so disorienting that it took 45 seconds for me to figure out what song they were playing, despite knowing it as well as “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”
I first heard Jawbreaker on Revolution Radio in the fall of 1995. I was alone in my living room. It was cold. It was dark. It may have been raining. The moment “Fireman,” from their major label debut Dear You, transmitted through the airwaves and onto the three-disc changer AIWA bookshelf audio system, I was instantly hooked. The clashing guitars, the pop of the Rob Cavallo-produced snare drum and the smooth delivery of lyrical poetry grooved a much needed neural network in my brain, one that would soon be treated to an entirely new canon of music. As soon as I discovered Jawbreaker and their then - and even more so now - revered back catalogue, they disappeared - a major record label deal gone sideways and a once welcoming - on the fringes, at least - punk rock community disowning them for abandoning life in the van. Fans were left crushed. Having just discovered the band that could save our generation, and then after coming to terms with the fact that we would never get to see them perform their genius on stage, was disheartening at best. It was akin to discovering The Beatles’ catalogue in 1966, only to shortly after learn they had put the brakes on live performances. In a way, this was worse. At least The Beatles continued to record and release music for another four-plus years. Yes, Jawbreaker were our Beatles - at least in a very underground and imaginative sense.
Blake Schwarzenbach gives Adam Pfhaler (not pictured) a nod
You can imagine that, 30 years after first hearing “Fireman,” finding myself on my way to a small club in Osaka’s Umeda district with a ticket to a Jawbreaker show in my left breast pocket was a tad more than surreal. Seeing Blake Schwarzenbach, Chris Bauermeister, and Adam Pfhaler take to the stage and break into “I Love You So Much It’s Killing Us Both,” from the record that broke them was so disorienting that it took 45 seconds for me to figure out what song they were playing, despite knowing it as well as “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” That neural network was reconfiguring itself in real time, barely able to process what was unfolding five metres in front of me. It wasn’t until five or six songs into the set that my mind settled in and actually began processing what was happening: my heroes playing the melodies and singing the lyrics that carried me through so much of my teenage angst, 20-something coming of age nonsense, 30-something self-rediscovery, and my now mid-40s, reflectively sentimental self. A single tear streamed down my right cheek when Pfhaler perfectly queued the voice sample on “Condition Oakland.” The driving guitars complemented the cruise-control drums all the way to the final breakdown, with all its double snare hits and intermittent rhythmic patterns. This is my condition.
Chris Bauermeister (bass) and Adam Pfhaler (drums) dialing in the rhythm
The remainder of the set was a blurry dream-like euphoria, like the opening and sharing of a bottle of a 1995 Château Cheval Blanc to celebrate a 30th wedding anniversary. I tried my best to take it all in, to be fully encompassed by the noise, and to let the memories of listening to Jawbreaker over the last 30 years simply exist. To finally hear Blake sing “1, 2, 3, 4: Who’s punk what’s the score!?” in the same room, in real-time: his guitar perfectly out of tune, a broken string, a crowd-surfer, a sing along.
Blake Schwarzenbach offers a cheers to the crowd with a freshly cracked near-beer
Listening to Jawbreaker sounds different now and in the best way possible. I can reflect on a memory I once thought impossible, while revisiting late-night drives, mixtapes with “Jink Removing,” and the fantasy of how spectacular it would have been to actually see them play live. Go see your heroes, even if it’s a Tuesday.
Jawbreaker at Club Quattro | Osaka, Japan | December 2, 2025
