Smash!: Green Day, the Offspring, Rancid, Nofx, and the '90s Punk Explosion

Smash!: Green Day, the Offspring, Rancid, Nofx, and the '90s Punk Explosion by Ian Winwood
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

If you're looking for an encyclopedia entry explaining how punk went mainstream in the 90s, this is not the book for you. This distills down the era to the core bands - Green Day, The Offspring, Operation Ivy/Rancid, NOFX and Bad Religion, along with the key players and labels, namely Epitaph and Lookout. In revisiting, the most interesting aspect to me was The Offspring, who managed to be wildly successful yet, without a second act like Green Day's "American Idiot," have fallen down the musical memory hole for not being serious enough, despite being more successful than most 90s bands.

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New Album INNERVERSE Available Today!

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The Happiness Playlist

The Happiness Playlist by Mark Mallman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A deeply personal book about love, loss, anxiety and healing through music, specifically uplifting "happy" music. Not knowing of Mark prior to book, but familiar with the Minneapolis-St. Paul music scene, there were aspects that appealed to me as a music fan. I'm not sure I would have picked this up and read it without the music angle, but I'm glad I did as I was able to empathize with author's struggles with anxiety and difficult sleeping.

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Video: We Are The Void

Here's a video for a song of my newest collection of ambient/electronic/instrumental/experimental music "INNERVERSE" out next Friday 2/22 on Reverbose Records, available to stream at all the usual places.

Albums That Changed My Life

At Pencil Storm they have a recurring series of posts about albums that "changed your life." I decided to tackle this in my own way.

My first question was - how did it change my life? In what way? For the better or the worse? I’ve listened to albums that were so lyrically and thematically dark, I spent days in a depressed fog afterward. I’m still haunted by them, and revisit when I want to wallow, but they are certainly not my favorite in any sense, nor did they make my life better. Maybe they acted as a temporary salve on wound - hey bud, you suffering? Here’s some minor chords to commiserate and some dissonance to drown your sorrows.

To actually change my life, something good had to come out of it. A better path had to be opened and explored. That’s the directive I’m following with this. Here goes.