A rock lyric, a habit of hearing things where maybe I wasn’t supposed to.
I first encountered U2 as a college freshman in 1983, walking across the LSU quadrangle on my way to class. I came upon a spray-painted logo on the concrete, all illicit excitement: two characters, “U2,” encircled. There was an economy to it. Nothing elaborate. Just a circle, carefully kept round, and those two characters renderedContinueContinue reading “U2 at Fifty”
I’ve been listening to U2’s ‘Scars’ a lot lately. The more I hear it, the more it seems to carry the weight of its own words—the voice, the guitar, the drums and bass all leaning into the same ache. It gets inside my head. The first thing I thought about was a scar on theContinueContinue reading “Scars”
I interviewed a musician named Matthew Schwartz once, if you can call it that. Cropped black hair. Thick-framed black glasses. Quiet and unassuming. In 2015 I ran a short fill-in-the-blank Q&A article for my blog called Meet Me In The Sound. The headline was “Getting to Know Pacifico”—the obvious one, the kind I still reachContinueContinue reading “Still Getting to Know Pacifico”
Delta Spirit is an American band formed in San Diego, fronted by singer-songwriter Matthew Logan Vasquez. They make passionate, roots-influenced rock that carries real weight. I first came across them back in 2014 while living outside Baton Rouge. A reviewer once described them as something like “U2 before they lost their angst.” That was enoughContinueContinue reading “The Song That Still Gets Under My Skin: Delta Spirit’s “Patriarch””
