Stumped by My Morning Jacket in a Small Apartment in Honolulu
Fast-forward 12 years and I am standing in Hungry Ear Records, a cozy record shop in the Moiliili district of Honolulu. I am there to purchase the new Mumford and Sons, but as I am browsing, this vibrant-looking record is staring at me as I stare up at it on the wall in the NEW RELEASE section. It’s the new My Morning Jacket, titled The Waterfall. I am intrigued. I had not taken a chance on a new record in quite a while.
I was introduced to My Morning Jacket in the fall of 2003 while watching Late Night with Conan O’Brien during my ninth and final semester at the greatest university on Lake Superior, the University of Minnesota-Duluth. They played the tune “One Big Holiday” from It Still Moves in all its five-minute-plus rocking glory. Conan’s reaction to their performance was something along the lines of “I AM GOING TO BUY THAT ALBUM!” Anyway, I was hooked from that moment and immediately requested It Still Moves for review (I was editing an online music site called 30music.com at the time), and fell in love with it while having a Moosehead Canadian Lager in my room after Monday night class. Since then, I have always enjoyed MMJ. They are a band that pushes boundaries with their near-hypnotic blend of folk, rock, and sometimes simply bizarre jams.
Fast-forward 12 years and I am standing in Hungry Ear Records, a cozy record shop in the Mōʻiliʻili district of Honolulu. I am there to purchase the new Mumford and Sons, but as I am browsing, this vibrant-looking record is staring at me as I stare up at it on the wall in the NEW RELEASE section. It’s the new My Morning Jacket, titled The Waterfall. I am intrigued. I had not taken a chance on a new record in quite a while. Typically, before I buy a record, I will preview it on iTunes or Amazon or just find a YouTube stream if I desire to hear it in its entirety. But this time I wanted to go old school. I wanted to take a chance on a band that I knew I at least liked enough to take a chance on. So I dropped the 20-whatever dollars it was on the double gate-fold vinyl and carried it back to my apartment with that sense of excitement I used to get after spending $100 on compact discs at Cheapo in Uptown Minneapolis on payday.
After a spin-through of the new Mumford, which is quite good (and still holds up), I place The Waterfall on the turntable and wait with anticipation for the needle to drop and the music to pour out of my JBL Bluetooth speaker. The opener, “Believe (Nobody Knows),” starts slow with a fairytale-type sound leading into some very, very interesting vocals. I know Jim James is known for pushing the envelope vocally, but what I am hearing is so unusual that I feel he has either lost the plot entirely or found some insanely potent marijuana and recorded the entire record completely stoned out of his mind. The vocals are deep, slow, nearly slurred—definitely not the Jim James falsetto-ish vocals I am used to enjoying. But I try to accept this new direction he is taking his art. He has every right to. A career this long, what else is there to prove? As the record progresses, this slow, echo-y, distant, and just very slurred vocal style is found on every song. While I still cannot quite accept or wrap my head around it, I hear melodies in the songs that make me realize this album will just take some getting used to and, if I give it four or five spins, perhaps I will learn to absolutely adore it. So, I get to the fourth side of the album, and at this point I am about ready to give up on not only this album, but MMJ altogether. I cannot take it anymore. It was OK for a while, but now it is just downright annoying and I have thoughts of selling the album back to the record store for whatever it is they will give me—peanuts, I don’t care.
I then have a thought that maybe, just maybe, I should play the record at 45 RPM even though it is a 12-inch record to help speed things along, so I switch it to 45 RPM and.... BAM!... it sounds almost too fast, but the vocals are immediately normal and coherent!
Turns out the suggested play speed of the record is 45 RPM instead of 33 RPM, which I assumed it was, as every single one of my 12-inch records plays back properly at this spin rate.
I feel like a fool and start it over at the proper spin rotation, and am blown away with how simply great this record sounds (at proper speed).
I doubt something like this will ever happen to me again because so many elements had to come into play—a perfect musical storm—to even begin to make this ridiculous story a possibility, but it is something I will never forget. And from now on, when I purchase a record I have never heard before, I am going to check the little label to confirm whether it spins at 45 RPM or 33⅓ RPM. Interestingly enough, nine years or so later at Banana Records in Kobe, Japan, I come across a used copy of S/T II: The Cosmic Birth and Journey of Shinu TNT by Akron/Family that has the suggested speed of 45/33⅓ for its final track. God is in the details.
Relive the moment Conan O’Brien falls in love with My Morning Jacket
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
