Jaime David Music Posts

I Can Like Your Music and Still Be Disappointed in You: My Thoughts on the Bad Wolves and Skillet Drama

2026-08-29T05:00:28.738-07:00

I have a confession to make.

I like Skillet.

I also like Bad Wolves.

Well, technically, I should probably phrase that a little differently. I liked Bad Wolves, at least during the era of the band that I was familiar with. And when it comes to Skillet, I really like their older material. I haven't kept up with everything they've released in recent years, so I'm not going to sit here and pretend that I've heard every song they've put out lately.

But I know what I like.

And I know what I don't like.

And what I don't like is what has been happening surrounding these two bands.

If you haven't been following the latest rock and metal drama, Bad Wolves were supposed to be part of Skillet's upcoming fall tour, along with Escape the Fate. Then, seemingly almost as quickly as the tour announcement happened, Bad Wolves were gone.

The situation became particularly ugly because of Bad Wolves' new vocalist, Sara "KILLBOY" Skinner.

According to Skinner, after Bad Wolves were announced for the tour, some Skillet fans began digging into her personal life. She said that people began conducting what she described as a "transvestigation," with fans making claims about her being transgender and also focusing on her OnlyFans presence. She subsequently announced that Bad Wolves would no longer be joining the tour.

And honestly?

What the fuck are we doing?

I mean that sincerely.

What the fuck are we doing?

Because there is something deeply pathetic about a group of people seeing a woman they don't know, deciding they need to investigate her body, her identity, her personal life, her sexuality, her internet presence and whatever else they can dig up, and then deciding that this somehow gives them ownership over whether she deserves to share a concert stage with their favorite band.

That isn't fandom.

That's harassment.

And before anybody gets confused, let me establish something very clearly:

I am not writing this because I'm some lifelong Bad Wolves superfan.

I'm really not.

The main Bad Wolves song I knew was their cover of "Zombie."

That was the song that put them on my radar.

Back when Tommy Vext was the band's vocalist, I heard their version of "Zombie" and liked it. It was one of those covers that actually made sense to me. They weren't simply copying The Cranberries. They took a song that was already powerful and gave it a heavier interpretation.

That was Bad Wolves to me.

And that's pretty much where my familiarity with the band stayed.

The band has obviously gone through a lot of changes since then. Vext is no longer in the band, there have been other lineup changes, and now Bad Wolves have Sara Skinner as their new vocalist.

So no, I haven't spent the last several years obsessively following Bad Wolves.

But that doesn't mean I can't look at what is happening now and say, "This is bullshit."

Because it is.

And what's especially frustrating to me is that I also like Skillet.

I grew up listening to some of their older material. Songs from the era of albums like Collide and Comatose are the Skillet that I know best. Those songs were part of the soundscape of my life for a while.

I haven't really followed their newer material.

Maybe it's great.

Maybe it's not.

I don't know.

And I'm not going to pretend otherwise.

But I don't need to have listened to every album Skillet has released in the last decade to have an opinion about this situation.

Because this isn't really about whether Skillet's latest album is good.

It's about how people behave.

And that's where I have become genuinely disappointed.

I'm disappointed in some Skillet fans.

And I'm disappointed in Skillet itself.

Let's start with the fans.

There is nothing wrong with being a fan of a Christian rock band.

There is nothing wrong with having religious beliefs.

There is nothing wrong with wanting the musicians you support to share certain values.

But there is a gigantic difference between saying, "I don't personally agree with this person's lifestyle," and deciding that you need to publicly humiliate them, investigate their gender, insult them, spread rumors about them, or pressure a band into removing them from a tour.

Those are not the same thing.

Not even remotely.

And some of the stuff being thrown at Skinner was absolutely disgusting.

She has described the reaction as people deciding she was a "trans OnlyFans" woman and attacking her based on those assumptions. She responded by basically saying that the accusations weren't even accurate in the way people thought they were.

But here's the thing.

Even if every accusation had been true, I still wouldn't understand why this is anybody else's fucking business.

Let's say she was transgender.

So what?

She's a musician.

She's performing on a stage.

She's singing songs.

Did she suddenly become incapable of singing because of her gender identity?

Does a guitar riff somehow sound different because the vocalist is trans?

Does a drumbeat become less musical?

Does a concert ticket become invalid?

Of course not.

And if she has an OnlyFans account?

Again:

So what?

You don't have to like it.

You don't have to subscribe to it.

You don't have to consume her content.

You don't even have to agree with it.

But you don't get to treat another adult's private life like a public referendum simply because you bought a ticket to see their band.

That's where I think a lot of people have completely lost the plot.

Being a fan doesn't make you the owner of the artist.

And loving a band doesn't give you the right to dictate who they are allowed to work with.

That's not how this should work.

And this is where Skillet itself enters the conversation.

Because according to Skinner, Bad Wolves were removed from the tour following this backlash.

Now, I want to be fair here.

Skillet has apparently not publicly explained the situation in detail. There is no public statement from the band that I have seen that lays everything out and says, "This is exactly why we removed Bad Wolves."

So I'm not going to claim something as an established fact when it hasn't been officially explained by Skillet.

But that's actually part of the problem.

Silence.

Because if your fanbase is going after another musician, and that musician is publicly telling the world that your fans harassed her and that this harassment apparently played a role in her band being removed from your tour, then you have a responsibility to say something.

Especially if you're a major band.

Especially if you're a band that has spent decades building a Christian identity.

Especially if you're a band whose audience includes people who presumably believe that compassion, forgiveness, humility and treating other people with dignity are important.

Silence isn't a great look.

And I'm sorry, but I expect better.

I don't expect Skillet to suddenly become a band that agrees with everything I believe.

That's not realistic.

I don't expect John Cooper to adopt my politics.

I don't expect Skillet's entire fanbase to agree with me.

I don't even expect them to like Bad Wolves.

What I expect is basic fucking decency.

That's it.

Basic decency.

If someone is being bullied by your fans, tell your fans to knock it off.

If someone is being harassed based on rumors about their gender, tell your fans that isn't acceptable.

If your organization made a decision because of legitimate contractual or business reasons, explain that.

If there is another side to the story, give it.

But don't just let the whole thing sit there while everyone else tries to figure out what the hell happened.

Because silence creates a vacuum.

And the internet will fill that vacuum with whatever narrative it wants.

That's exactly what we're seeing.

And honestly, I think there's an important lesson here for music fans in general.

We have become way too comfortable treating musicians like characters in our personal entertainment universes.

We forget that they're people.

We forget that they have families.

We forget that they have feelings.

We forget that they have lives outside of the songs we listen to.

We forget that a woman standing on a stage is not suddenly public property.

And we especially need to stop with this bizarre obsession with "investigating" people's identities.

The whole idea of "transvestigation" is fucking creepy.

I'm sorry.

It is.

Imagine looking at somebody and thinking, "I need to determine what gender this person really is."

Why?

Why do you care?

Why are you zooming in on photographs?

Why are you comparing facial structures?

Why are you analyzing someone's voice?

Why are you examining their body?

Why are you doing any of this?

Just listen to the fucking music.

If you don't like the singer, don't listen to the band.

That's it.

You are allowed to walk away.

You are allowed to say, "This isn't for me."

You are allowed to spend your money somewhere else.

You are allowed to criticize the music.

You are allowed to criticize a band's business decisions.

You are allowed to criticize their politics.

You are allowed to criticize their lyrics.

You are even allowed to say you don't like the singer's voice.

That's part of being an artist.

But there is a line between criticism and cruelty.

And some people crossed that line a long time ago.

And here's the funny part for me personally.

I don't even have a huge emotional attachment to Bad Wolves.

I could have ignored this entire story.

I could have said, "Oh, that's unfortunate," and moved on.

But I can't.

Because principles matter more to me than fandom.

And this is one of those situations where I don't care whether I agree with someone.

I don't care whether I like their music.

I don't care whether I like their politics.

I don't care whether I like their personal choices.

If somebody is being treated unfairly, I'm going to say that they're being treated unfairly.

That's just where I stand.

I would defend an artist I despise if I thought they were being treated unjustly.

And I would criticize an artist I love if I thought they were doing something wrong.

That's what having principles is supposed to mean.

Otherwise they're not principles.

They're just preferences.

And I think that's something that gets lost constantly in modern fandom.

People will defend absolutely anything their favorite celebrity does while condemning the exact same behavior from somebody they dislike.

If their favorite musician does something questionable, suddenly there's context.

Suddenly there's nuance.

Suddenly we need to wait for more information.

But when somebody they don't like does it?

"Fuck that person."

No.

That's not consistency.

And I'm tired of it.

You don't have to abandon Skillet because of this.

You don't have to stop listening to their old music.

You don't have to suddenly decide that every song they've ever made is garbage.

I certainly won't be pretending that I never enjoyed their older material.

I did.

I still do.

A song doesn't magically become bad because the people who made it disappointed me.

Music is complicated like that.

Sometimes a song can mean something to you even when the artist behind it becomes somebody you don't particularly want to support anymore.

That's part of the strange relationship we have with art.

But I can listen to an old Skillet song and still say:

"Skillet, you could have handled this better."

Those statements aren't contradictory.

I can like "Comatose."

I can remember enjoying Skillet's older work.

And I can simultaneously think that the way this situation has played out is fucking disappointing.

Likewise, I can remember Bad Wolves primarily because of "Zombie" and not suddenly become their biggest fan because of this controversy.

I don't have to.

I don't need to.

This isn't about picking a favorite band.

It's about picking a standard.

And my standard is simple:

Don't be an asshole.

Don't harass people.

Don't obsess over strangers' identities.

Don't spread rumors.

Don't treat someone's personal life like your entertainment.

And if your fans are doing something reprehensible, don't sit quietly and pretend you can't see it.

Say something.

That's the part that bothers me most about Skillet.

Not even necessarily the tour decision itself, because I don't know everything that happened behind the scenes.

It's the apparent silence.

Maybe there is information we don't have.

Maybe there are contractual details.

Maybe there are conversations happening privately.

Maybe there is another explanation.

Fine.

Then say that.

You don't have to give us every private detail.

But acknowledge the situation.

Because when one side is publicly saying, "Your fans harassed me and this affected our place on your tour," and the other side says absolutely nothing, people are naturally going to draw conclusions.

And those conclusions aren't necessarily going to be flattering.

I think Skillet owes their audience more than silence.

And I think their fans owe other human beings more than whatever the hell happened here.

Because at the end of the day, this is supposed to be music.

Music.

That's the part I keep coming back to.

We're talking about fucking rock music.

People screaming into microphones.

Guitars.

Drums.

Bass.

Lights.

A stage.

A bunch of people standing in a crowd screaming lyrics back at somebody.

That's what this is.

It should be fun.

It should be cathartic.

It should bring people together.

And instead we're sitting here arguing about whether a singer is "really" a woman, whether she has an OnlyFans account, whether her existence is acceptable to a particular religious fanbase, and whether a band should be allowed to perform because some people on the internet got angry.

What happened to just listening to the fucking music?

If you don't like Sara Skinner, don't listen to Bad Wolves.

If you don't like Skillet, don't listen to Skillet.

If you don't like Christian rock, don't listen to Christian rock.

If you don't like metal, don't listen to metal.

There are literally millions of songs in the world.

Go find something you enjoy.

You don't need to destroy somebody else to prove that your favorite band is good.

And you definitely don't need to humiliate another human being to prove that your religion is correct.

That's not strength.

That's insecurity.

So yeah.

I'm disappointed.

I'm disappointed in the people who decided to harass Sara Skinner.

I'm disappointed in the people who thought investigating a stranger's gender was an appropriate use of their time.

I'm disappointed that Bad Wolves ended up caught in the middle of this.

And I'm disappointed in Skillet for apparently allowing the situation to happen without publicly addressing it.

Maybe I'll listen to some old Skillet today.

Maybe I'll put on "Zombie."

Maybe I'll listen to both and remember why I liked them in the first place.

Because I don't want my enjoyment of music to depend on whether every musician I like is perfect.

Nobody is perfect.

But I do want the people I support to be held to the same basic standard I hold everyone else to.

Treat people like human beings.

Don't be cruel.

Don't harass people.

Don't judge someone based on rumors.

And when your own community starts acting like assholes, have the courage to tell them to stop.

That's not politics.

That's not left versus right.

That's not Christian versus atheist.

That's not trans versus cis.

That's not Bad Wolves versus Skillet.

That's basic fucking humanity.

And honestly?

I don't think that's too much to ask.

And honestly, I never thought I would see this kind of shit surrounding Skillet.

I mean, I knew it was possible. Given the current climate, the way online fandoms behave, and how fucking obsessed some people have become with policing other people's identities, I knew something like this could happen.

But I still didn't think I would actually see it happen with a band like Skillet.

Maybe that's part of why this has bothered me so much.

Because Skillet was never a band I associated with this kind of drama. They were just a band whose older music I liked. They were part of that rock and metal landscape I grew up listening to. I wasn't sitting around thinking about their fanbase or their internal politics or whatever.

So seeing this whole situation unfold has been one of those moments where I'm just sitting here thinking, "Really? We're doing this now?"

I knew the possibility existed.

I just never expected to actually see it.

And look, I wasn't completely oblivious to the politics surrounding Skillet either.

I knew that John Cooper, at least, had become pretty openly MAGA and had said and done things politically that I absolutely don't agree with. I'm not going to pretend otherwise. I've seen enough of his public commentary to know that we're probably not going to agree on a whole hell of a lot.

And yet, I still liked Skillet's older music.

Because I can separate the music from the person making it.

That's something I've always tried to do. I don't need an artist to share all of my political beliefs for me to appreciate something they created. Sometimes you can take the art for what it is while recognizing that the person behind it is someone you wouldn't necessarily want to have a political conversation with.

So even knowing that John Cooper had gone down the MAGA-chud political rabbit hole, I still didn't think that meant there was going to be some insane fucking drama surrounding the band like this.

That's the part that caught me off guard.

I knew there were political differences.

I knew there were things about Cooper that I didn't like.

I knew that Skillet had a fanbase that could be pretty politically and religiously intense.

But I didn't expect to wake up one day and be reading about Bad Wolves getting kicked off a tour amid controversy over their new female vocalist and fans allegedly digging into her identity and personal life.

There's a difference between thinking, "Yeah, this musician and I probably disagree on a lot of shit," and thinking, "Holy shit, what the fuck is happening with this band and its fanbase?"

And that's where I am right now.

I can acknowledge the political and cultural baggage surrounding Skillet while still admitting that their older music meant something to me.

Those two things can coexist.

I don't have to rewrite my own musical history just because I now find myself disappointed in the people and the culture surrounding a band I used to enjoy.

Why This One Hits a Little Differently for Me

And maybe this is the part I haven't really talked about yet: my own personal connection to Skillet.

I first discovered Skillet when I was in high school.

And honestly, the timing is kind of funny when I think about it now.

Because around that same period of my life, I was becoming less religious.

My relationship with religion was changing. I was questioning things. I was moving away from the beliefs I had grown up with. Eventually, I would become an atheist, but even before I got to that point, I was already starting to drift away from Christianity.

And yet here I was, listening to Skillet.

And I liked them.

Not because I was sitting there thinking, "Wow, these lyrics perfectly represent my religious beliefs."

They didn't.

I wasn't listening to Skillet because I was looking for Christian music.

I was listening to them because I liked the fucking music.

I liked the sound.

I liked the heaviness.

I liked the energy.

I liked the way the songs felt.

That's something I think people sometimes misunderstand about music. You don't necessarily connect with a song because you agree with every single word coming out of the singer's mouth. Sometimes you connect with the sound, the emotion, the instrumentation, the memories attached to it, or simply the fact that something about it hits you in a way you can't completely explain.

That's what Skillet was for me.

They became part of my high school soundtrack during a period when I was changing as a person.

And that's why I don't want to sit here and pretend that the music suddenly means nothing to me because I've become disappointed in the band or parts of its fanbase.

It still means something.

Those songs are attached to a version of me that existed years ago.

And even though I've changed dramatically since then, that version of me was still me.

I can look back at my high school years and think about the person I was becoming, the questions I was asking, the things I believed, the things I stopped believing, and the music I was listening to while all of that was happening.

Skillet was part of that.

That's why this whole situation feels weird.

Because when you have a personal history with a band, you don't necessarily want to see them become involved in something like this.

You don't want to look at a band whose music you enjoyed when you were younger and think, "Seriously?"

And again, I'm not saying Skillet is some band that I've followed religiously throughout my entire life.

I haven't.

I haven't kept up with all of their newer music.

I'm much more familiar with their older material.

But that's almost beside the point.

I don't have to be a hardcore fan to have memories attached to their music.

I don't have to agree with John Cooper politically.

I don't have to agree with his MAGA politics.

I don't have to agree with his religious beliefs.

And I certainly don't have to agree with everything that happens within the Skillet fanbase.

I can still say, "Yeah, I used to fucking love some of these songs."

And that's okay.

That's the weird thing about growing up.

You don't necessarily stop being the person you used to be. You become someone new while carrying pieces of all the people you've been along the way.

The music you listened to when you were sixteen doesn't disappear because you're thirty.

The memories don't disappear.

The songs don't disappear.

And the fact that you no longer hold the same beliefs you did back then doesn't mean you have to hate everything associated with that period of your life.

Sometimes you can simply say:

"I've changed."

And:

"I still like this."

Both can be true.

That's how I feel about Skillet.

And that's also why I'm disappointed now.

Because when you have a personal connection to something, even a relatively small one, you want to believe that the people behind it are going to conduct themselves in a way that you can at least respect.

I don't need perfection.

I don't need agreement.

I don't need Skillet to suddenly become progressive.

I don't need John Cooper to start agreeing with my worldview.

I'm not asking for that.

I'm asking for basic human decency.

If the allegations surrounding this situation are accurate, then I think the harassment directed toward Sara Skinner was completely unacceptable.

And if Skillet's fans were responsible for creating that environment, then those fans should be called out.

And if Skillet really did remove Bad Wolves from the tour because of that backlash, then I think Skillet should explain why.

That's all.

Give people some clarity.

Say something.

Don't leave everyone else to speculate.

Because silence doesn't make controversy disappear.

It just makes people wonder what you're not saying.

And maybe there is more to this story than I know.

Maybe there are things happening behind the scenes.

Maybe there are contractual reasons.

Maybe there's another side of this that hasn't been made public.

Fine.

I'm willing to acknowledge that.

But until Skillet actually says something publicly, I'm left looking at what has happened and thinking that this is fucking disappointing.

And perhaps that's the biggest takeaway I have from all of this.

I don't want fandom to become an excuse for abandoning our principles.

I don't want to become the kind of person who says, "Well, that's my favorite band, so whatever they did is automatically okay."

No.

If I like you, I can still criticize you.

If I listen to your music, I can still disagree with you.

If your songs were important to me when I was younger, I can still tell you when I think you've fucked up.

That's what being honest means.

And honestly, I think we need more of that.

Less blind loyalty.

Less treating musicians like they're untouchable.

Less treating other fans like enemies.

Less digging through people's personal lives.

Less obsessing over someone's gender.

Less harassment.

Less cruelty.

More fucking humanity.

I started listening to Skillet when I was a kid who was already beginning to question his religious beliefs.

I listened to them because I liked their music.

Years later, I'm a very different person.

My beliefs are different.

My politics are different.

My worldview is different.

My life is different.

But I can still remember what those songs meant to me.

And I can still appreciate the music while saying that I'm disappointed in what I'm seeing now.

That's not hypocrisy.

That's growth.

I don't know where things go from here with Skillet, Bad Wolves, Sara Skinner, or any of the people involved in this mess.

Maybe more information will come out.

Maybe Skillet will eventually address it.

Maybe this will blow over and everyone will move on to the next internet controversy.

But I hope something actually gets learned from it.

I hope Skillet fans learn that being a fan doesn't give you permission to harass people.

I hope musicians understand that sometimes they need to stand up and tell their own communities when they've crossed a line.

And I hope the rest of us remember that we can disagree with people without dehumanizing them.

Because at the end of the day, I don't really care who wins some stupid internet beef.

I care about how people treat each other.

And that's why I'm writing about this.

Not because I'm some die-hard Bad Wolves fan.

Not because I'm some current Skillet superfan.

Not because I agree with everyone involved.

I'm writing about it because I remember being a teenager listening to Skillet while my own beliefs were changing.

I remember liking that music.

And I never thought I'd be sitting here years later writing about Skillet being surrounded by this kind of fucking drama.

I knew it was possible.

Given the current climate, I knew it was possible.

But I still didn't think I'd actually see it.

And maybe that's why I'm so disappointed.

I expected better.

And sometimes that's the most frustrating thing of all.

You can criticize something because you hate it.

But sometimes the strongest criticism comes from the fact that you used to like it.

I still like those old Skillet songs.

I'm not going to lie about that.

But liking the music doesn't mean I have to shut up when I think something is wrong.

And I'm not going to shut up.

And there's another reason Skillet's older music stuck with me: it helped me through periods of uncertainty.

There were times when I didn't know what the hell I was doing with my life. Times when I was questioning what I believed, where I was going, what kind of person I wanted to become, and what the future was even going to look like.

And during those periods, I had music.

Skillet's older songs were part of that.

Even as I was becoming less religious, their music could still speak to something in me. I could take the emotional weight of those songs and apply it to whatever I was going through at the time.

That's another thing people sometimes don't understand about music.

A song doesn't have to perfectly match your beliefs for it to help you.

Sometimes you aren't even thinking about the literal meaning of the lyrics. You're just feeling something. The guitars hit. The drums hit. The vocals hit. The emotion hits. And suddenly you're able to sit with something that you couldn't quite put into words yourself.

That's what some of Skillet's older music did for me.

It was there during uncertainty.

It was there during periods where I was trying to figure myself out.

And even though my relationship with religion eventually changed completely, the emotional connection I had with some of those songs didn't simply disappear.

That's why I can look at Skillet now and feel conflicted.

Because I'm not just looking at some random band I heard once.

I'm looking at a band whose music was part of my life during a time when I was still figuring out who I was.

And I think that's worth acknowledging.

You can outgrow someone's worldview without necessarily outgrowing every piece of art that helped you survive a particular chapter of your life.

Sometimes the meaning of a song changes as you change.

Sometimes you hear the same song years later and realize that it means something completely different to you now.

And sometimes you simply remember, "Yeah. I listened to this when shit was uncertain, and somehow it helped."

That's what Skillet's older music is for me.

And that's why this whole situation hits a little harder than it otherwise might.

Because when a band has been part of your life, even if you haven't followed them closely for years, you don't necessarily want to see them surrounded by controversy like this.

I don't want to rewrite my memories.

I don't want to pretend the music never mattered.

It did.

It helped me through some uncertain periods of my life.

And I can appreciate that while still saying that I'm disappointed in what I'm seeing now.

Those two things can exist at the same time.

The music helped me.

I still appreciate the music.

And I can still criticize the people and circumstances surrounding that music.

That's the honest answer.

August 11: The Day I Released My Debut Album

2026-08-25T15:32:28.606-07:00

August 11, 2026, wasn't just another day on the calendar for me.

It was my late uncle's birthday.

He died in 2019.

For years, August 11 has carried a certain weight for me. It was a date connected to someone I loved and lost. A date that could easily become associated with sadness, grief, and everything that comes with losing someone.

But this year, something different happened.

I released my debut album on that date.

And honestly?

I almost didn't.

I Wasn't Planning to Release It Yet

Before August 11, I was still trying to figure out when I wanted to release my debut album.

I was thinking about timing.

I was thinking about whether I should wait.

I was thinking about whether I should give myself more time.

I had already put so much work into the project that I didn't want to just throw it out into the world immediately.

There was this part of me that wanted to hold off.

Maybe release it later.

Maybe wait a few more weeks.

Maybe figure everything out first.

I was planning.

Thinking.

Overthinking.

Trying to find the "right" release date.

And then August 11 came around.

I knew what day it was.

I knew it was my uncle's birthday.

And I started thinking about the meaning that date had carried for me.

Then I had a thought.

Why not?

Why couldn't August 11 become something else too?

Why couldn't I take a day that had become associated with loss and give it another meaning?

And that's when I basically said:

Fuck it.

Let's release the album today.

Turning a Sad Date Into a Historic One

So I made the decision.

August 11, 2026.

That's the release date.

My debut album, Jaime David, was going out into the world.

And suddenly, August 11 meant something completely different.

It was still my uncle's birthday.

It still carried the memory of him.

That doesn't disappear.

But now it also became the day I released my first album.

It became the day I officially stepped into something I had never really thought I'd do.

It became the day I could look back on and say:

That's when I became a musician.

And I love that.

Because I don't want August 11 to be defined only by death.

I don't want it to be only a sad day.

I don't want it to be only a reminder of somebody who isn't here anymore.

I wanted to create something.

Something new.

Something alive.

Something that could continue existing long after that day.

So I did.

Maybe That's What Art Is About

There's something poetic about releasing an album on the birthday of someone who died years ago.

Because music is about creating something that continues.

A song can outlive the person who wrote it.

A recording can exist decades later.

A lyric can reach someone who wasn't even alive when it was written.

Art has a way of surviving us.

And maybe that's why this date felt right.

My uncle isn't here anymore.

But August 11 is still here.

And now, something I created exists on that date too.

Every year when August 11 comes around, I won't just think about loss.

I'll also be able to think:

That's the day I released my first album.

That's the day I took a chance.

That's the day I decided to stop waiting.

That's the day I said, "Fuck it. I'm doing this."

And honestly, I think that's pretty damn meaningful.

I Didn't Need the Perfect Moment

I think I was getting caught up in the idea that there had to be a perfect release date.

The perfect time.

The perfect plan.

The perfect circumstances.

But there really isn't such a thing.

At some point, you have to stop planning and start doing.

And August 11 gave me that push.

I realized that I could keep thinking about when to release the album.

Or I could actually release the damn thing.

So I chose the latter.

And I'm glad I did.

Because now the album has a story attached to it that I never could have planned.

It isn't just my debut album.

It's the album I released on my late uncle's birthday.

It's the album that transformed August 11 for me.

It's the album that came into existence because, on that particular day, I decided to stop waiting.

A Day Can Hold More Than One Meaning

I think that's something we sometimes forget.

A day can be sad and happy.

It can be painful and beautiful.

It can remind you of someone you've lost while also reminding you of something you've created.

Those emotions don't have to cancel each other out.

I can miss my uncle.

I can remember him.

I can acknowledge that he died in 2019.

And I can still celebrate what happened on August 11, 2026.

Those things can exist together.

And maybe that's what makes the date even more meaningful.

I'm not replacing the memory of him.

I'm adding another chapter to the meaning of the day.

I'm taking something that could have remained entirely somber and saying:

This is going to be a day of creation too.

My Debut Album Became Part of My Story

Jaime David is my debut album.

It's the first major musical project I've released.

It's a collection of songs that represents where I was creatively at this particular point in my life.

And now, its release date is permanently connected to August 11.

That means every time I look back at the album, I'll remember that moment.

I'll remember sitting there and thinking about whether I should wait.

I'll remember going back and forth.

I'll remember realizing that I was overthinking everything.

And I'll remember saying:

Fuck it. Release it today.

That decision might have been spontaneous.

But I'm really glad I made it.

Because sometimes the moments that seem impulsive at the time become the moments you remember forever.

August 11, 2026

So that's what August 11 became.

Not just a birthday.

Not just a date associated with someone I lost.

Not just a day of remembrance.

It became the day I released my debut album.

It became a day of music.

A day of creation.

A day of taking a chance.

A day of beginning something new.

And in my own personal history, I think August 11, 2026, is going to be historic.

Because that's the day I released Jaime David.

That's the day I stopped waiting for the perfect moment.

That's the day I decided that the album was ready to exist in the world.

And that's the day I took a date that had been connected to loss and gave it another story.

A story about creation.

A story about music.

A story about moving forward.

I don't think that makes the sadness disappear.

And I don't want it to.

But now, when August 11 comes around, there will be another feeling there too.

Pride.

Because I made something.

I released something.

I created something that didn't exist before.

And I chose to do it on a day that already meant so much to me.

So here's to August 11.

Here's to my uncle.

Here's to music.

Here's to creation.

And here's to the beginning of my journey as a musician.

August 11, 2026.

The day I said:

Fuck it. I'm releasing my album today.

And I'm damn glad I did.

Dolly Parton Is Gone. But Her Music Isn't Going Anywhere.

2026-08-25T15:28:57.388-07:00

Today, August 25, 2026, we lost one of the greatest songwriters and performers to ever pick up a guitar.

Dolly Parton has died at the age of 80.

And as someone who writes and makes music myself, this one hits differently.

Because Dolly Parton wasn't merely famous.

She was a songwriter.

She was a musician.

She was a storyteller.

She was an artist.

And she understood something that I think every songwriter eventually has to learn: sometimes the simplest stories are the most powerful ones.

Dolly could take heartbreak, poverty, love, jealousy, ambition, loneliness, family and everyday life and turn them into songs that people could understand.

That's an incredible gift.

Her family announced that she died peacefully in Nashville at age 80. Her death marks the end of a career that lasted roughly six decades and produced some of the most recognizable songs in country and popular music.

But I don't really want to write an obituary.

I want to talk about the music.

Dolly Parton Was a Songwriter First

One of the things I find fascinating about Dolly Parton is that songwriting was never simply something she did because she happened to be a famous singer.

She was genuinely a songwriter.

She wrote songs because she had stories to tell.

And she wrote a lot of them.

Her catalog includes thousands of compositions, and some of those songs became enormous hits for other artists.

The obvious example is "I Will Always Love You."

Dolly originally wrote and recorded the song herself in the 1970s. It became an even larger worldwide phenomenon when Whitney Houston recorded it for The Bodyguard soundtrack in 1992. Dolly's songwriting therefore reached audiences who might never have otherwise listened to country music.

Think about how incredible that is.

A song begins with one person sitting down and writing.

Then someone else records it.

Then another generation discovers it.

Then another artist interprets it.

And suddenly something that began as one person's emotional expression becomes part of millions of people's lives.

That's what songwriting can do.

"Jolene" Is a Masterclass in Simplicity

Then there's "Jolene."

You don't need a complicated story.

A woman is begging another woman not to take the man she loves.

That's basically it.

But Dolly's performance makes the desperation feel enormous.

The song doesn't need a thousand words.

It doesn't need some gigantic production.

It needs the emotion.

That's one of the things I love about songwriting.

Sometimes the strongest songs aren't the ones with the most complicated lyrics.

They're the ones where you can immediately understand what the songwriter is feeling.

"Jolene" does that.

You know exactly what this person is afraid of.

You know exactly what she wants.

And you understand exactly why she's pleading.

That's songwriting.

Dolly Turned Her Life Into Music

Dolly also had an incredible ability to turn personal experiences into art.

"Coat of Many Colors" is a perfect example.

She wrote about growing up poor and about a coat her mother made from scraps of fabric.

On paper, that sounds like a small story.

But Dolly turned it into something universal.

It's not really just about a coat.

It's about poverty.

It's about family.

It's about childhood.

It's about dignity.

It's about the way a child can find enormous value in something that other people might consider worthless.

That's the magic of music.

You can take something incredibly specific and somehow make millions of people see themselves in it.

She Crossed Genres Before Genre-Crossing Was Cool

Dolly's influence also goes far beyond traditional country music.

She crossed into pop.

She crossed into rock.

She crossed into bluegrass.

She crossed into gospel.

She crossed into film music.

She collaborated with artists from completely different musical backgrounds.

And she never seemed particularly interested in being trapped by a label.

That matters to me as an independent musician.

I've been experimenting with different styles myself.

Rock.

Rap.

Reggae.

Polka.

Instrumental music.

AI-assisted music.

Different sounds and different approaches.

And one thing I've learned is that sometimes trying to force yourself into one genre can limit what you create.

Dolly Parton's career is a reminder that you don't necessarily have to choose one box.

You can make the music you want to make.

You can evolve.

You can experiment.

You can surprise people.

And you can still have a recognizable identity.

The Voice Was Only Part of the Story

Obviously, Dolly had a distinctive voice.

You hear her sing and you know it's Dolly.

But her voice wasn't what made her legendary by itself.

It was the combination.

The voice.

The songwriting.

The personality.

The performance.

The storytelling.

The humor.

The visual identity.

The ability to connect with an audience.

That's something I think aspiring musicians sometimes overlook.

Being a musician isn't necessarily about having the technically best voice in the room.

It's about having something to say.

It's about making people feel something.

It's about becoming recognizable.

Dolly understood that.

She wasn't trying to be somebody else.

She was Dolly.

And that was enough.

More than enough.

She Didn't Need to Pretend to Be Someone She Wasn't

There's another reason Dolly's career fascinates me.

She embraced who she was.

The big hair.

The rhinestones.

The makeup.

The humor.

The Southern accent.

The larger-than-life personality.

She could have tried to become more "serious."

She could have tried to hide the things that made her distinctive.

Instead, she leaned into them.

And underneath all the glitter was an extraordinarily disciplined songwriter and businesswoman.

That contrast is part of what made her so compelling.

The rhinestones weren't the substance.

They were part of the presentation.

The substance was the music.

And Then There Was "9 to 5"

"9 to 5" is another example of Dolly's ability to write something immediately accessible while still saying something.

It's catchy.

It's funny.

It's memorable.

But it's also a song about working, exploitation, frustration and wanting something better.

And somehow Dolly turned that into a massive hit.

That's difficult to do.

A song can have a serious message and still be fun.

It doesn't have to sound like a lecture.

Sometimes you can make people dance while you're telling them something important.

That's an art form in itself.

Her Music Outlived Her

And now Dolly is gone.

But here's the strange thing about being a musician.

Your physical life ends.

Your music doesn't have to.

Dolly Parton died today.

But "Jolene" is still going to be played tomorrow.

"I Will Always Love You" is still going to be sung.

"9 to 5" is still going to be heard.

"Coat of Many Colors" is still going to tell its story.

And somewhere, some kid who has never heard Dolly Parton before is going to discover one of her songs.

Maybe they'll hear it in a movie.

Maybe their parents will play it.

Maybe they'll stumble across it online.

Maybe they'll hear another artist cover it.

And that kid might become a musician.

That's the beautiful thing about music.

It doesn't die when the person who created it dies.

It keeps moving.

Every Songwriter Eventually Leaves Something Behind

As someone who writes songs myself, that's something I think about.

I don't know how far my own music will travel.

I don't know how many people will hear it.

I don't know whether something I write today will matter to somebody twenty years from now.

And honestly, none of us really know.

But that's not necessarily the point.

We create because we have something inside us that wants to come out.

Dolly had that.

She wrote because she had stories.

She sang because she had something to communicate.

She performed because she wanted to connect.

And eventually, she created a body of work so enormous that it became impossible to separate her music from American popular culture.

That's one hell of a life in music.

Thank You, Dolly

I'm not going to pretend that I was personally close to Dolly Parton.

I wasn't.

But as a musician and songwriter, I can appreciate what she accomplished.

She showed what can happen when you take songwriting seriously.

She showed that country music can reach enormous audiences.

She showed that a song can cross generations.

She showed that vulnerability can become strength.

She showed that you don't have to abandon where you came from in order to become successful.

And perhaps most importantly, she showed that being yourself can be one of the most powerful artistic choices you can make.

Today, Dolly Parton is gone.

But the songs remain.

The recordings remain.

The performances remain.

The covers remain.

The memories remain.

And the influence remains.

That's the thing about music.

A musician eventually leaves the stage.

But the song keeps playing.

So rest in peace, Dolly.

Thank you for the songs.

Thank you for the stories.

Thank you for the voice.

Thank you for showing generations of musicians what it means to write from the heart.

And thank you for leaving behind enough music that we can keep listening to you for generations to come.

The woman may be gone.

The music isn't.

Demon Hunter, KPop Demon Hunters, and the Strange Collision of Two Very Different Demon-Hunting Worlds

2026-08-22T08:27:10.293-07:00

There are some bands that you discover and immediately think, “Yeah, this is probably going to stick with me.” For me, one of those bands is Demon Hunter. I have listened to a lot of different music over the years, and my musical tastes have become increasingly weird and eclectic. I can go from J-pop to K-pop to reggae to polka to mariachi to rap to metal without really caring whether the genres are supposed to fit together. But Demon Hunter is one of those bands that has a particular emotional quality that has always stood out to me.

And now, rather unexpectedly, Demon Hunter has found itself in the middle of a very strange pop-culture story involving Netflix, an animated movie, K-pop, demons, trademarks, and a whole lot of confusion.

Yes, I am talking about KPop Demon Hunters.

I have never actually watched KPop Demon Hunters. I don't have Netflix. Part of the reason is simply that I don't want to keep paying for another streaming service. Streaming services have gotten ridiculously expensive, and at some point you have to look at your monthly expenses and say, “Do I really need another subscription just so I can watch this one thing?” So I have never sat down and watched the movie myself.

But I have heard plenty about it.

I have heard that it is genuinely good. I have heard the music is catchy. I have heard the animation is impressive. I have heard the characters are fun, the story has more substance than you might initially expect, and the movie became an enormous phenomenon. KPop Demon Hunters was released on Netflix in June 2025 and became a massive success, eventually becoming Netflix's most-watched film and winning the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. A sequel has also been announced.

So I am not approaching this from the position of someone who thinks KPop Demon Hunters is automatically terrible because it is popular.

Quite the opposite.

From everything I have heard, I actually think I would probably enjoy the movie.

And that is part of what makes the current Demon Hunter lawsuit so fascinating.

Because there is something almost comically strange about the fact that one of my favorite metal bands, Demon Hunter, is now suing Netflix over a movie called KPop Demon Hunters.

The premise sounds like the setup to a joke.

A Christian metal band called Demon Hunter.

An animated K-pop movie called KPop Demon Hunters.

Both involve music.

Both involve demons.

And now they are fighting over the name.

Except this isn't just some silly internet argument. Demon Hunter's corporate entity, Hyde Lane, filed a federal lawsuit in California on August 18, 2026, naming Netflix, Netflix Studios, and AEG Presents as defendants. The lawsuit alleges trademark infringement, false designation of origin, and unfair competition. The band's argument is essentially that the enormous success of KPop Demon Hunters has created confusion around the Demon Hunter name, particularly now that the franchise is moving beyond simply being a movie and into music, merchandise, and live performances.

And honestly, I can understand why Demon Hunter would be concerned.

At the same time, I can also understand why Netflix would look at this and say, “Wait, seriously?”

That's what makes this such an interesting situation.

Demon Hunter isn't some band that formed last year and suddenly decided that the words “Demon Hunter” belong to them because a Netflix movie became popular. The band was formed in Seattle in 2000. They have spent more than two decades releasing music, building a fan base, touring, selling merchandise, and establishing the Demon Hunter name. Their albums have appeared on the Billboard 200 and Billboard's Top Christian Albums chart.

That history matters.

If you have spent twenty-five years building a musical identity around a particular name, I can see why you would be concerned when a gigantic entertainment company suddenly creates a global phenomenon with an extremely similar name.

And the situation becomes more complicated because KPop Demon Hunters isn't merely a movie anymore.

The movie is about HUNTR/X, a fictional K-pop girl group consisting of Rumi, Mira, and Zoey. They aren't merely pop stars. They secretly fight supernatural threats while performing for massive audiences. Their main antagonists include the Saja Boys, a rival boy band that is secretly made up of demons.

In other words, the entire concept revolves around music and demon hunting.

That's a pretty significant overlap with a real band called Demon Hunter.

And now Netflix is expanding the franchise into live entertainment.

That's where this becomes particularly important from a trademark perspective.

The lawsuit isn't simply asking a court to erase the existence of a movie because its title contains similar words. According to reporting on the complaint, Demon Hunter is particularly challenging the use of the KPop Demon Hunters name in connection with recorded music, live performances, merchandise, and related entertainment. The band argues that those areas overlap substantially with what it has been doing for decades.

The band's complaint reportedly points to examples of actual confusion, including a person who accidentally purchased tickets for a Demon Hunter concert when they intended to attend a KPop Demon Hunters event. The lawsuit also describes media confusion involving an inquiry apparently intended for someone associated with the animated film.

That is where I think the band's argument becomes more understandable.

Because imagine being a fan of Demon Hunter.

You hear that there is a major entertainment event called KPop Demon Hunters.

You see advertisements.

You see the words “Demon Hunter.”

You might reasonably assume there is some relationship.

Maybe the band is involved.

Maybe it is a new side project.

Maybe there is a collaboration.

Maybe it's a tour.

Maybe it's a completely different thing.

That's not necessarily because people are stupid. It's because branding exists precisely to tell people where something comes from.

And when you have a massive entertainment franchise whose name contains the name of an established musical act, there is at least a legitimate question about whether consumers could become confused.

Of course, there is another side.

KPop Demon Hunters is obviously a different phrase from Demon Hunter.

It's plural.

It has “KPop” in front of it.

It's an animated fantasy film.

The characters are fictional.

The story is very different from the band's actual music.

Netflix also argues that the allegations are without merit and says it intends to defend the case.

And I think that is important to acknowledge.

Just because Demon Hunter filed a lawsuit does not mean Demon Hunter has automatically won the argument.

A lawsuit is an allegation.

A court still has to decide whether the legal claims are valid.

And trademarks are not simply a matter of saying, “I used these words first, therefore nobody else can ever use them.”

There are all sorts of questions involved, including what goods and services are covered, how similar the marks are, whether consumers are likely to be confused, and how the respective brands are being used.

But there is something else that makes this situation hilarious from a purely cultural perspective.

Demon Hunter has spent decades making music about demons.

KPop Demon Hunters is about pop stars fighting demons.

And now the real Demon Hunter is fighting the KPop Demon Hunters.

It's almost too perfect.

The fictional demon hunters have demons to fight.

The real demon hunters have lawyers to fight.

And somewhere in the middle, Netflix is probably wondering how it ended up in a legal dispute with a metal band.

I have to admit, though, that my personal connection to Demon Hunter makes me look at this a little differently than I might otherwise.

I don't consider myself some enormous expert on every album the band has ever released. But there are two Demon Hunter songs that particularly stand out to me: “I Am a Stone” and “I Will Fail You.”

Those are probably my two favorites.

And I think the reason I gravitate toward those songs says something about what I like about Demon Hunter in the first place.

“I Am a Stone” has this feeling of emotional isolation and resilience that I find incredibly powerful. There is something about the idea of becoming a stone, of becoming emotionally hardened, of trying to withstand whatever is coming at you, that hits differently depending on where you are in life.

It isn't simply an angry metal song.

It feels introspective.

It feels like someone trying to make sense of their own emotional state.

And that's something I appreciate in music.

I like music that can be loud, but I don't necessarily need the lyrics to be loud too.

Sometimes the most powerful songs are the ones where the instrumentation creates intensity while the lyrics are dealing with something much quieter and more internal.

That's also part of why “I Will Fail You” resonates with me.

That song has a very different emotional character. There is vulnerability there. There is an acknowledgement of human limitation and the possibility of failure. And I think that is one of the reasons Demon Hunter has remained interesting to me.

There is something very human about admitting that you are not invincible.

Music doesn't always need to tell you that you're going to conquer everything.

Sometimes it can say, “You are going to screw up.”

Sometimes it can say, “You are going to hurt.”

Sometimes it can say, “You might fail someone.”

And sometimes that's more honest.

I think that's what I appreciate about those two songs. They aren't simply songs I like because they sound good. They carry emotional weight.

And that brings me back to KPop Demon Hunters.

Because even though I haven't watched it, the story sounds like it has some surprisingly similar ingredients.

At the center of KPop Demon Hunters is Rumi, the leader of HUNTR/X. She isn't simply a superhero who happens to sing K-pop. According to Netflix's own character material, Rumi is half human and half demon, which makes her own identity part of the conflict. Her demonic heritage is both a source of power and something that creates internal struggle.

Then there is Jinu, the leader of the Saja Boys.

His story is also more complicated than simply “evil demon boy.”

Jinu was originally human and made a deal with the demon Gwi-Ma for fame and fortune. He became a demon and spent centuries serving that power. But eventually he begins questioning the role he has accepted and ultimately sacrifices himself to help Rumi.

That actually sounds like a pretty interesting story.

It isn't just “good people fight bad demons.”

It is about identity.

It is about temptation.

It is about fame.

It is about guilt.

It is about what people sacrifice to get what they want.

It is about whether someone who has done terrible things can change.

Those are pretty universal themes.

And maybe that's why KPop Demon Hunters connected with so many people.

You can make the surface incredibly colorful and ridiculous. You can have magical weapons, supernatural monsters, glamorous outfits, synchronized choreography, giant concerts, and demon boy bands. But underneath all of that, you can still tell a story about insecurity, identity, trauma, relationships, temptation, and redemption.

That's one of the great things about fantasy.

You can make the metaphor literal.

Instead of saying someone is battling their inner demons, you can literally have them battle demons.

And apparently, in KPop Demon Hunters, that's basically the premise.

I also think the contrast between the two Demon Hunters is fascinating.

Demon Hunter the band comes from Christian metal.

KPop Demon Hunters comes from Korean pop culture and animated fantasy.

One is a real band.

One is a fictional group.

One has been around since 2000.

The other became a worldwide phenomenon after a 2025 Netflix release.

One is associated with Christian metal.

The other is associated with K-pop.

They are wildly different.

And yet they ended up colliding because of two words.

Demon.

Hunter.

That's almost absurd.

But it also demonstrates how powerful a name can become.

A band name isn't just a label.

It's a brand.

It's attached to memories, music, artwork, concerts, merchandise, social media, search results, streaming platforms, and the expectations people develop over years.

If someone searches for Demon Hunter, they expect something.

If someone searches for KPop Demon Hunters, they expect something completely different.

But as the two brands become more prominent in the same entertainment ecosystem, the possibility of overlap becomes more meaningful.

And the timing makes this even more interesting because KPop Demon Hunters isn't fading away.

Netflix has already announced a sequel, with directors Maggie Kang and Chris Appelhans returning. Netflix said the first movie had surpassed 500 million views on the service, and the sequel is intended to continue the story.

There is also music.

There is merchandise.

And there is a planned live tour.

That means this isn't just a situation where a movie title happens to resemble a band's name for two hours.

The fictional franchise is becoming a larger entertainment brand.

That is probably why Demon Hunter is taking the issue seriously now.

Personally, I find myself in a weird position because I like Demon Hunter and I have nothing against KPop Demon Hunters.

I haven't even seen the movie!

So I can't honestly sit here and say, “KPop Demon Hunters sucks and Demon Hunter is obviously right.”

That would be ridiculous.

I haven't watched it.

I have heard good things about it.

I have heard the music.

I know the basic story.

And based on what I know, I can absolutely understand why people became fans.

If I had Netflix, I might watch it.

But I don't.

Netflix costs money, and there are only so many subscriptions I am willing to maintain. I already have plenty of other things competing for my attention and my wallet. I don't particularly want to spend money every month on a service just because everyone is talking about one movie.

Maybe someday I'll watch it.

Maybe I'll find some other legitimate way to see it.

But for now, I am basically observing the KPop Demon Hunters phenomenon from outside the window.

And now, somehow, one of my favorite bands is suing the company behind it.

What a strange world.

There is also something kind of funny about how easily people could misunderstand the situation.

Someone could hear, “Demon Hunter is suing KPop Demon Hunters,” and assume this is some kind of ridiculous culture-war feud.

It isn't really that.

This isn't Demon Hunter saying that K-pop is bad.

It isn't Demon Hunter saying that animated movies are bad.

It isn't necessarily Demon Hunter saying that Netflix shouldn't make a movie about demon hunters.

The dispute is fundamentally about branding and the commercial use of the name.

That's an important distinction.

You can like KPop Demon Hunters and still understand why Demon Hunter might be concerned.

You can like Demon Hunter and still understand why Netflix might think its title is sufficiently distinct.

You don't have to turn this into a team sport.

And honestly, I would rather see people approach it that way.

I am particularly interested in what happens as the case develops because the circumstances are so unusual.

The lawsuit involves what could be described as a smaller, established music brand confronting a gigantic entertainment company whose franchise has exploded into global popularity.

That's where the concept of “reverse confusion” becomes interesting. Reporting on the case has described Demon Hunter's position in those terms: rather than a large company being confused with a smaller company, the concern is that the massive newer brand could overwhelm the identity of the older one.

That is a fascinating problem.

Normally, when people think about trademark confusion, they imagine someone copying a famous brand.

But what happens when the newer thing becomes vastly more famous than the older thing?

What happens when somebody searches for a name that has existed for decades, but the search results are dominated by something that appeared much more recently?

What happens when the public starts associating a phrase with the newer thing?

That's not a trivial problem for the older brand.

And I think that's probably the heart of what Demon Hunter is worried about.

Imagine spending twenty-five years building something, only for a Netflix franchise to come along and make the words “Demon Hunter” immediately associated with something else.

That's got to feel strange.

At the same time, Netflix didn't create the concept of demons or demon hunters. Those are ancient concepts that appear throughout mythology, religion, fantasy, literature, movies, television, games, and music.

So the legal question isn't whether anyone is allowed to make art about demon hunters.

Of course they are.

The question is much narrower: whether the particular branding and commercial uses of KPop Demon Hunters infringe rights associated with Demon Hunter.

That's for the courts to decide.

And until that happens, I'm not going to pretend I know exactly how the case will turn out.

What I do know is that this is one of the strangest entertainment stories I've encountered in a while.

I also know that it has reminded me why I like Demon Hunter.

Because underneath all the legal drama and internet jokes, there is still a band whose music has meant something to me.

“I Am a Stone” is still one of my favorites.

“I Will Fail You” is still one of my favorites.

Those songs existed long before Netflix had a K-pop demon-hunting movie.

They existed long before HUNTR/X.

They existed before the Saja Boys.

And they existed before somebody accidentally bought the wrong concert ticket.

That's worth remembering.

The lawsuit doesn't define Demon Hunter.

The band existed before KPop Demon Hunters, and whatever happens in court, the music will continue to exist afterward.

And maybe that's ultimately what interests me most.

Names can collide.

Brands can collide.

Entertainment franchises can collide.

But music can still stand on its own.

I can listen to “I Am a Stone” and not think about Netflix.

I can listen to “I Will Fail You” and not think about trademark law.

I can appreciate the music for what it is.

And somewhere out there, millions of people can enjoy KPop Demon Hunters without necessarily knowing that a Christian metal band has been using a very similar phrase for more than two decades.

That's the bizarre intersection of modern pop culture.

Different worlds can suddenly crash into each other.

A Christian metal band from Seattle.

A Korean-inspired animated musical.

Netflix.

AEG Presents.

Trademark lawyers.

K-pop idols.

Demons.

Concerts.

Merchandise.

And me sitting here without Netflix thinking, “Well, apparently I need to write about this.”

I don't know whether I will eventually watch KPop Demon Hunters.

I probably will if I ever find myself with access to it and the opportunity comes along.

And if I do, I'll probably be watching it with a strange perspective.

I'll be thinking about the movie as its own story, because that's what it is.

But I'll also inevitably think about the fact that the words “Demon Hunter” have a history outside of this franchise.

And that history belongs to a band whose music I genuinely enjoy.

That's what makes this whole situation so interesting to me.

It's not simply a lawsuit.

It's a collision between two pieces of popular culture that, on the surface, couldn't be much more different.

One is heavy metal.

One is K-pop.

One is Christian.

One is animated fantasy.

One is a band.

One is a fictional universe.

One has spent more than twenty-five years building its identity.

The other became a worldwide phenomenon in a little over a year.

And somehow, they both ended up hunting demons.

Now they're hunting each other in court.

I have no idea where this lawsuit will ultimately go.

Maybe Demon Hunter wins.

Maybe Netflix wins.

Maybe the parties settle.

Maybe some aspect of the KPop Demon Hunters branding changes while the movie itself remains completely untouched.

Maybe the whole thing becomes a footnote in entertainment-law history.

Whatever happens, I hope people remember that there are actual artists and creative people behind these brands.

And I hope people can talk about the dispute without turning it into another pointless internet war.

Because I can simultaneously say, “Demon Hunter is one of my favorite bands,” and “KPop Demon Hunters sounds like a pretty damn fun movie.”

Those statements aren't contradictory.

I can love “I Am a Stone.”

I can love “I Will Fail You.”

I can be interested in K-pop.

I can enjoy weird genre combinations.

I can think the whole legal situation is fascinating.

And I can still admit that I haven't watched the movie because Netflix costs too much for me to justify subscribing just to see it.

That's my position.

For now, I'll keep listening to Demon Hunter.

I'll keep enjoying the songs that made me a fan in the first place.

And I'll watch this bizarre legal battle unfold from the sidelines.

Who knows?

Maybe one day I'll finally watch KPop Demon Hunters.

But until then, there is something undeniably funny about the fact that one of my favorite bands, Demon Hunter, is now in a real-world battle over a fictional group of demon hunters.

The demons were supposed to be the problem.

Apparently, the trademark lawyers were the real final boss.

I Want the Jaime David Music Blog to Get Out There

2026-08-08T08:05:38.274-07:00

I’ve been thinking about something lately: I really want the Jaime David Music Blog to get out there.

Not just exist.

Not just sit on the internet with a few posts that I occasionally add to.

I actually want people to find it.

That might sound like an obvious thing for someone running a music blog to say, but for me, there’s something bigger behind it. The Jaime David music project has become something that I genuinely care about. I’m not just making a couple of songs and throwing them online. I’m experimenting, writing, recording, creating strange instrumental pieces, working with AI, playing instruments, making sounds in Audacity, and figuring out what kind of musician I want to be.

And I want somewhere to document all of that.

That’s what the Jaime David Music Blog is for.

I want it to become a place where people can follow the journey rather than only seeing the finished product. Because there is a lot that happens before a song becomes a song that somebody else gets to hear.

Sometimes I’m sitting there experimenting with an instrument.

Sometimes I’m recording something completely unconventional.

Sometimes I’m making music out of sounds that probably weren't originally intended to be musical.

Sometimes I’m writing lyrics and then figuring out how those lyrics should actually be performed.

Sometimes I’m using AI as a performer for something I wrote because the song calls for a vocal range or performance that I personally can't provide.

Sometimes I’m making something that sounds completely ridiculous.

And sometimes I accidentally make something I really like.

I want the blog to capture all of that.

I also want people to discover the music itself. The blog isn't separate from the music project. They're connected. The songs are the music, while the blog is where I can talk about the ideas, experiments, stories, and experiences behind them.

I don't expect everybody who finds the blog to suddenly become a fan. That's not realistic. Not everybody is going to like experimental music. Not everybody is going to like AI-assisted music. Not everybody is going to like my songwriting. Not everybody is going to like the weird combinations of genres and sounds that I sometimes come up with.

And that's okay.

I don't need everybody.

I just want the people who do connect with it to have a way to find it.

That's why I've been thinking more about things like RSS feeds and ways of making the blog easier to follow. I recently created a FeedBurner feed for the Jaime David Music Blog so that people who use RSS can subscribe and keep up with new posts.

You can check it out here:

Jaime David Music Blog FeedBurner Feed

I'm also interested in getting the blog connected to more places where people might discover it. Social media, content platforms, search engines, RSS readers, and other corners of the internet all provide different ways for someone to stumble across something they wouldn't have otherwise known existed.

Because that's ultimately what I want.

I want somebody somewhere to stumble across a Jaime David song or blog post and think, "What the hell is this?"

And then maybe they listen.

Maybe they read another post.

Maybe they find another song.

Maybe they disagree with something I said.

Maybe they love something I made.

Maybe they think one of my experiments is completely insane.

Honestly, any of those outcomes are better than nobody ever finding it.

I've never really been interested in creating things just to put them in a drawer.

When I write something, I want it to exist.

When I make a song, I want somebody to have the opportunity to hear it.

When I write about the process, I want somebody to have the opportunity to read it.

And when I put an idea out into the world, I want to give it the chance to reach somebody who might actually need to encounter it.

That's especially important to me because a lot of what I create has meaning behind it. My music isn't always just about making something that sounds good. Sometimes there is a message. Sometimes there is an idea. Sometimes there is frustration. Sometimes there is humor. Sometimes there is compassion. Sometimes there is anger. Sometimes there is an entire philosophical idea hiding underneath a song.

That's part of why I want the blog to grow.

I want the blog to become a record of this whole period of my life where I decided, "You know what? I'm going to make music."

I didn't start out as some established professional musician with a studio, a record deal, years of formal production experience, and a huge audience waiting for my next release.

I'm figuring this out as I go.

And honestly, that's one of the most interesting parts of the story.

I'm learning what works.

I'm learning what doesn't.

I'm learning how to record.

I'm learning how to mix.

I'm learning how different instruments sound.

I'm learning how to turn weird sounds into actual musical ideas.

I'm learning how to work with AI.

I'm learning how to release music.

I'm learning how to promote it.

And I'm learning how to build an audience from essentially the ground up.

The Jaime David Music Blog is part of that process.

So yes, I want it to get out there.

I want more people to know it exists.

I want more people to discover the songs.

I want more people to read the stories.

I want more people to follow the experiments.

I want more people to see what happens when someone decides that they don't necessarily have to follow the traditional rules of how music is supposed to be made.

And maybe that's the most important part.

I'm not trying to pretend that I'm something I'm not.

I'm Jaime David.

I'm making music.

I'm experimenting.

I'm writing.

I'm learning.

I'm creating.

And I'm putting it out into the world.

Now I just have to help the world find it.

So if you've stumbled across this blog, welcome.

If you've been following along for a while, thank you.

And if you want to help this little music project get out there, share a post, share a song, tell somebody about it, subscribe to the RSS feed, or simply keep coming back.

Every person who discovers this project is one more person who gets to see where this weird musical experiment goes.

And I have a feeling I'm only getting started.

Jaime David Music is here. Now let's see how far it can go.

The Beauty of an Album

2026-08-08T07:54:17.814-07:00

There is something special about an album.

In today's world, it is easy to focus on individual songs. Streaming services make it incredibly convenient to jump from one track to another, to shuffle playlists, and to discover new artists one song at a time. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. Some songs become memorable all on their own and leave a lasting impression after only a few minutes.

Albums, however, are different.

An album is not simply a collection of songs.

At least, I do not think it should be.

The best albums feel like journeys. Sometimes they tell obvious stories. Sometimes they do not. Sometimes the songs are connected through themes. Other times they are connected only by the artist's state of mind during the period in which they were created. Every album has its own identity, even when the songs themselves seem very different from one another.

That has become something I have thought about quite a bit recently.

What makes an album memorable?

Is it having one massive hit that everyone remembers decades later?

Is it having every song fit perfectly together?

Is it telling a story from beginning to end?

Or is it something much simpler?

Perhaps an album becomes memorable simply because it captures a particular moment in an artist's creative life.

When I think about many of my favorite albums throughout the years, I often realize they are more than just music. They become snapshots of a particular period in time. You remember where you were when you first heard them. You remember how they made you feel. You remember the songs that stayed with you long after the album ended.

That is something I admire about albums.

Unlike a single song, an album gives an artist room to breathe.

There is room to experiment.

There is room to surprise listeners.

There is room to try ideas that might never work as standalone singles but somehow fit perfectly within the larger project.

An album allows artists to show different sides of themselves.

One song might be energetic.

Another might be thoughtful.

Another might be emotional.

Another might simply exist because the artist wanted to create something different.

That variety is part of what makes albums so fascinating.

No two creative journeys are exactly alike.

Some musicians spend years carefully crafting every song before recording a single note. Others write quickly and capture the energy of the moment. Some create albums that stay comfortably within one musical style. Others enjoy exploring different ideas and seeing where creativity takes them.

Neither approach is inherently better.

They are simply different ways of approaching the same artistic challenge.

The more I have thought about albums, the more I have realized that creating one requires a very different mindset than creating a single song.

A single song asks one question.

An album asks dozens.

How should everything fit together?

How should one song transition into the next?

Should every piece feel connected?

Should there be surprises?

Should there be contrast?

Should there be consistency?

Every creative decision influences the larger experience.

That process fascinates me.

It also reminds me that listeners rarely see everything happening behind the scenes.

An album often represents countless hours of experimentation, revisions, organization, learning, and creative problem-solving before anyone ever hears the finished product.

People often hear the final result.

Artists remember the journey.

There is something beautiful about that.

I also think albums encourage patience.

Not only for the artist, but for the listener.

Some albums reveal everything during the very first listen.

Others become more rewarding over time.

Sometimes your favorite song is not your favorite on the first day you hear it.

Sometimes a track quietly grows on you until months later you realize it has become the one you return to the most.

Albums allow those discoveries to happen naturally.

That sense of discovery is something I greatly appreciate.

It reminds us that art does not always have to reveal itself immediately.

Sometimes mystery is part of the experience.

Sometimes curiosity makes the journey more enjoyable.

Sometimes allowing listeners to discover things on their own creates a much stronger connection than explaining everything beforehand.

I have always believed that creativity should leave room for interpretation.

Artists create.

Listeners discover.

Some people hear one meaning.

Others hear something completely different.

Both experiences can be equally valid.

That is part of what makes music such a unique art form.

It belongs to the artist while it is being created.

It belongs to the listener once it is heard.

Perhaps that is why albums continue to matter, even in an era dominated by playlists and individual tracks.

An album gives artists an opportunity to present a larger vision.

Not necessarily a concept.

Not necessarily a story.

Simply a body of work that represents who they were during a particular chapter of their lives.

I find that idea inspiring.

It reminds me that creative work does not have to fit neatly into expectations.

It simply has to be honest.

As someone who enjoys exploring different forms of creativity, I have developed an even greater appreciation for the amount of thought that goes into creating a full-length musical project.

There is a tremendous amount of work involved.

There is also an incredible amount of excitement.

Every completed step brings the project closer to becoming something people can finally experience.

For now, that journey continues.

There are still ideas taking shape.

There are still creative decisions to make.

There are still moments of experimentation.

There are still surprises waiting for the right time.

And honestly, I think that is one of my favorite parts.

Sometimes it is exciting not because everyone knows what you are creating.

Sometimes it is exciting because they do not.

Sometimes the anticipation becomes part of the story.

Sometimes the best way to introduce a creative project is not by explaining every detail, but simply by letting people know that something meaningful is on the horizon.

When the time is right, the music will speak for itself.

Until then, the journey continues.

My CD Collecting Journey: Apparently, I Need to Check the Damn Cases

2026-08-07T15:03:11.146-07:00

There is something deeply satisfying about collecting physical music in an age when practically every song ever recorded is sitting somewhere on the internet waiting to be streamed. I know I can open Spotify, YouTube, Apple Music, or whatever other service I happen to be using and find an enormous percentage of the music I could possibly want to hear. I know that, technically, I don't need a wall of CDs. I don't need jewel cases taking up space. I don't need to hunt through garage sales, thrift stores, used record shops, flea markets, or online marketplaces looking for old albums. I don't need to spend time wondering whether a particular CD is going to be scratched, whether the case is cracked, whether the booklet is missing, or whether the disc is actually inside the damn case.

And yet, here I am.

I have started collecting CDs.

It wasn't necessarily something I expected to become particularly invested in. For a long time, physical media felt like something that belonged to another era. CDs were everywhere when I was growing up, of course, but streaming eventually became the normal way to listen to music. The idea of physically owning an album became less of a necessity and more of a choice. And honestly, I think that is part of what makes collecting CDs appealing to me now. When I buy a CD, I'm not buying it because I need the music. I'm buying it because I want the physical object. I want the album. I want the artwork. I want the booklet. I want the little plastic case. I want the whole thing.

There is something about having an actual physical representation of music that feels different.

Maybe part of it is nostalgia. Maybe part of it is just the weirdness of collecting things. Maybe it is because music has become so intangible that having something physical feels increasingly special. A streaming library is convenient, but it is also ephemeral. You don't really see the music sitting on your shelf. You don't have a tangible reminder that you own a particular album. You just search for it, press play, and move on.

A CD is different.

A CD sits there.

It exists.

You can pick it up.

You can look at the cover.

You can open it.

You can read the booklet.

You can put the disc into a player and hear the music without needing a streaming subscription, an internet connection, an account, an algorithm, or a company deciding whether the album is still available.

Of course, collecting physical media also means discovering one of the great truths of human existence: people are fucking weird about used CDs.

And that brings me to my recent garage sale adventure.

I found some CDs at a garage sale recently and, naturally, I got excited. Garage sales can be great for this sort of thing because you never quite know what you're going to find. You might find some random obscure album that you have never heard of. You might find something you remember from childhood. You might find a movie soundtrack. You might find an artist you have been meaning to check out. You might find a CD that would cost significantly more online but is sitting on somebody's folding table for a dollar.

And when something is a dollar, my brain apparently stops functioning.

I bought five CDs.

Five.

Not fifty. Not five hundred. Five.

And because they were only a dollar each, I apparently decided that I had entered into some kind of financial risk-free zone where normal purchasing procedures no longer applied.

There was only one tiny problem.

I didn't check whether the CDs were actually inside the cases.

Yes.

I know.

This was my fault.

There is no elaborate conspiracy here. There is no villainous garage-sale proprietor who carefully removed the discs and secretly plotted against me. There isn't even a particularly interesting story behind it.

I simply failed to check.

I saw the CDs. I looked at the cases. I thought, "Oh, cool." I bought them.

And then I got home.

And discovered that four of the five CDs were missing the actual discs.

Four.

Out of five.

I had purchased five CD cases and one CD.

That is an impressively bad ratio.

There is something almost comical about getting home from a garage sale, excited about your new music purchases, opening the cases, and realizing that you've basically bought four empty plastic containers.

At first, I had to laugh.

What else was I going to do?

I mean, technically, I had only spent five dollars. This wasn't some catastrophic financial disaster. I wasn't suddenly going to have to sell my furniture to recover from the loss. I hadn't lost hundreds of dollars. I hadn't been scammed out of my life savings.

But still.

Four out of five.

Come on.

If one of them had been missing, I could have shrugged and thought, "Okay, annoying." Maybe two would have been irritating. But four? At that point, it becomes almost impressive.

I had somehow managed to garage-sale my way into collecting empty CD cases.

And that's when the more practical part of my brain kicked in and reminded me that I actually wanted the music.

The cases weren't enough.

The whole point of collecting CDs is that I want the CDs.

So I started looking online.

And this is where the $5 garage-sale purchase began turning into something considerably more expensive.

Because, naturally, the discs were available on eBay.

Of course they were.

eBay is simultaneously one of the greatest and most dangerous places for a collector. It is incredible when you're looking for something specific. If you need some obscure album from twenty years ago, there is a decent chance that somebody somewhere has listed a copy.

But that convenience comes with a price.

Sometimes literally.

Suddenly, my five-dollar purchase wasn't just a five-dollar purchase anymore. I was now looking for individual discs to put into the cases I had already bought.

This is the kind of thing that probably makes absolutely no sense to somebody who doesn't collect physical media.

They might look at the situation and say, "Why don't you just buy another copy?"

And honestly, that is a perfectly reasonable question.

But when you're collecting, the situation becomes more complicated.

Maybe I already have the original case.

Maybe the case has the artwork.

Maybe the booklet is inside.

Maybe I like having the original physical package.

Maybe I don't want to throw away what I already bought just because the previous owner apparently decided the discs were more useful somewhere else.

Maybe I am simply stubborn.

That last one is probably relevant.

So I started buying the missing discs.

And then the universe decided that I hadn't suffered enough.

One of the discs arrived.

Cracked.

The fucking disc was cracked.

I don't even know how to properly express the level of absurdity involved in this.

Imagine the sequence of events.

I go to a garage sale.

I see five CDs.

I buy them without checking the cases.

Four of the five discs are missing.

I then spend more money online to replace the missing discs.

One of the replacement discs arrives.

And it's fucking cracked.

At that point, all I could really do was stare at it and think:

You have got to be kidding me.

There is a particular kind of frustration that comes from something going wrong immediately after you've tried to fix something that already went wrong.

It's not just the individual problem. It's the accumulation.

First I made the stupid mistake.

Then I discovered the stupid mistake.

Then I spent additional money correcting the stupid mistake.

Then the correction arrived damaged.

It almost felt like the CD universe was personally mocking me.

I had gone from "Hey, cool, I found some cheap CDs!" to "Why am I spending money to assemble these fucking CDs one disc at a time?"

And this is the thing about collecting that nobody really explains when you first get into it.

The object you want is rarely just the object.

There are layers to it.

You want the album.

But maybe you want the original release.

Maybe you want the original artwork.

Maybe you want the booklet.

Maybe you want a particular pressing.

Maybe you want the disc itself to be in good condition.

Maybe you want the case to be intact.

Maybe you want the whole thing to look nice on your shelf.

And suddenly what seemed like a simple purchase becomes a scavenger hunt.

It is almost like archaeology, except instead of digging through the ground, you're digging through eBay listings and garage-sale tables.

And sometimes your archaeological discovery is an empty jewel case.

There is also something strangely funny about the way CDs exist as both music and objects.

The music itself is digital information encoded onto a little plastic disc. But the physical experience surrounding that disc is completely different. The disc has artwork printed on it. The case has a cover. There might be a booklet. There might be liner notes. There might be photographs. There might be lyrics. There might be credits.

When I buy a CD, I'm buying an artifact.

That's what makes the missing-disc problem so irritating.

An empty case isn't really the artifact.

It's part of it.

But it's incomplete.

It's like finding a book with all the pages ripped out.

Or buying a vinyl record sleeve and discovering there is no record.

Or buying a video game case and discovering somebody took the cartridge.

Technically, you own something.

But not the thing you thought you were buying.

And yet, even after this experience, I don't think I'm going to stop collecting CDs.

If anything, the experience has taught me a lesson.

Check the fucking case.

Seriously.

If you're buying a CD at a garage sale, thrift store, flea market, or anywhere else where you can physically inspect it, check the case.

Open it.

Look at the disc.

Make sure the disc is actually there.

Check whether it is cracked.

Check whether it looks like it has been through a wood chipper.

Check whether the case contains a completely unrelated CD.

Check whether there is a burned CD in there instead of the original.

Check everything.

I have now learned this lesson through experience.

And I paid approximately five dollars for the lesson, plus however much I've now spent replacing the missing discs.

Which is still not the worst tuition bill in the world.

But it is certainly an annoying one.

The funny thing is that this experience has actually made me think more about why I like collecting CDs in the first place.

There is a kind of treasure-hunting aspect to it.

When you're shopping for CDs online, you generally know what you're getting. You search for an album, find listings, compare prices, look at pictures, read descriptions, and make a purchase.

Garage sales are different.

You don't know what you're going to find.

You might walk up to a table and see a stack of CDs sitting there for a dollar each.

You might recognize an album immediately.

You might discover something you've never heard of.

You might find something you've been searching for.

You might find something completely ridiculous.

And sometimes you might find four empty cases.

That's part of the adventure, I guess.

There is something wonderfully random about physical-media collecting.

It reminds me of how music discovery used to feel before everything was instantly searchable.

You had to browse.

You had to look.

You had to take chances.

Sometimes you bought an album because you liked the cover.

Sometimes a friend recommended something.

Sometimes you heard one song on the radio.

Sometimes you saw an artist mentioned somewhere and decided to give them a chance.

And sometimes you just picked something up because it was sitting there for a dollar.

I think that's part of why collecting physical music has become appealing to me while I'm also making my own music.

I'm creating songs myself now. I'm experimenting with different sounds, instruments, vocals, AI-generated performances, Audacity-generated tones, and all kinds of strange combinations. I'm building my own little musical world.

And at the same time, I'm becoming more interested in the physical history of music.

There is something almost poetic about those two things happening simultaneously.

On one side, I'm making music in a very modern way.

On the other, I'm collecting an older physical format.

I can sit at my computer and create a bizarre experimental song from tones and sounds, and then I can turn around and put an actual compact disc into a CD player.

The contrast is kind of wonderful.

Music doesn't really have one correct format.

It can be a file.

It can be a streaming link.

It can be a CD.

It can be a vinyl record.

It can be a cassette.

It can be a live performance.

It can be someone humming into their phone.

It can be someone banging on a table with pens and deciding that, yes, that is now percussion.

Music is incredibly adaptable.

Maybe that's part of why collecting CDs feels right to me.

I'm not collecting them because I think streaming is bad.

I'm not collecting them because I believe CDs are somehow objectively superior.

I'm collecting them because I like them.

That's enough.

And despite the garage-sale disaster, I still love the idea of building a collection.

I like imagining what my shelf might eventually look like.

I like seeing albums together.

I like being able to physically pick something out and say, "I want to listen to this."

There is a ritual involved.

You take the CD off the shelf.

You open the case.

You take out the disc.

You put it into the player.

You press play.

And then the album begins.

It's a little more deliberate than opening an app and tapping a song.

Neither experience is inherently better.

They're just different.

Streaming is incredible for discovery and convenience. Physical media is incredible for ownership and connection to an object.

And I think I want both.

I can stream music.

I can make music digitally.

I can distribute music digitally.

I can listen to music digitally.

And I can still collect CDs.

There is no contradiction there.

In fact, I think the contradiction makes it more interesting.

The more music becomes intangible, the more interesting physical music becomes.

When albums were primarily physical objects, owning a CD wasn't particularly unusual.

Now it feels almost ceremonial.

You're choosing to own something that you could otherwise access without owning it.

That's a different relationship with music.

And yes, that relationship apparently includes occasionally buying four empty CD cases at a garage sale.

At least I got one actual disc.

One out of five.

A twenty percent success rate.

That's not exactly a glowing review of my purchasing strategy.

But maybe the real lesson here is that collecting isn't about having a perfect collection.

It's about the process.

It's about the stories attached to the things you collect.

Years from now, I might look at those CDs and remember this ridiculous experience.

I might remember buying them for a dollar each.

I might remember getting home and realizing four were empty.

I might remember searching eBay for replacement discs.

I might remember the moment that one arrived cracked and thinking, "What the fuck?"

And honestly, that makes the CDs more interesting.

They aren't just objects anymore.

They have a story.

That's one of the strange things about collecting.

Eventually, the collection becomes a record of your own life.

You remember where you found something.

You remember who you were with.

You remember how much it cost.

You remember whether it was difficult to find.

You remember whether you almost didn't buy it.

You remember the ridiculous circumstances surrounding the purchase.

And sometimes the story is, "I apparently forgot to check whether the damn CD was actually in the case."

That is now part of my collecting history.

I would certainly prefer that the replacement disc had not arrived cracked.

I would prefer not to spend extra money replacing something I thought I had already bought.

And I would especially prefer not to learn an extremely obvious lesson in the most annoying possible way.

But I suppose this is what happens when you start collecting physical media.

You learn.

You make mistakes.

You find bargains.

You occasionally get burned.

You search online.

You wait for packages.

You open packages.

Sometimes you're thrilled.

Sometimes you're disappointed.

Sometimes you get exactly what you wanted.

And sometimes you open the package and discover that the fucking thing is cracked.

That's the journey.

And I'm still on it.

If anything, this experience has made me more excited to keep looking.

The next time I see a box of CDs at a garage sale, I'm going to approach it differently.

I'm going to pick up the cases.

I'm going to open them.

I'm going to look inside.

I'm going to inspect the discs.

I'm going to make sure the thing I'm paying for actually exists.

And then, assuming everything checks out, I'm going to happily hand over my dollar and walk away with another piece of music history.

Because despite all the frustration, I still love the hunt.

I love finding music.

I love owning music.

I love the weird little artifacts that surround music.

And apparently, I love learning expensive lessons about checking CD cases.

So here's to the collection.

Here's to the garage-sale finds.

Here's to the eBay purchases.

Here's to the scratched discs, cracked cases, missing booklets, mysterious fingerprints, questionable sellers, unexpected treasures, and albums that somehow survive decades of being tossed around.

And most importantly, here's to checking the fucking CD case before you buy it.

Learn from my mistake.

Open the case.

Look inside.

Make sure the disc is there.

Because I have now personally discovered that "five CDs for five dollars" can very quickly turn into "five CD cases for five dollars, followed by a completely unnecessary eBay shopping spree."

And apparently, that is how my CD collecting journey continues.

One disc at a time.

When “Ghost” Became More Than a Song: How Music, Loss, and Memories Found Me Through Justin Bieber

2026-08-02T08:42:20.254-07:00

There are certain songs that are more than just songs. They are not simply melodies, lyrics, or a collection of instruments arranged in a certain way. Sometimes a song becomes a time capsule. Sometimes it becomes a doorway back to a moment, a person, or a feeling that you thought you had buried deep inside yourself. Sometimes a song finds a part of you that you did not even realize was still hurting.

For me, that song is “Ghost” by Justin Bieber.

Before I talk about why this song means so much to me, I have to talk about something that changed the way I experience music forever: losing someone I loved.

In 2019, my uncle passed away. At the time, I did not fully understand how much that loss would affect me. I had experienced sadness before. I had experienced disappointment, stress, and difficult moments in life. But this was different. This was the first major loss that truly shook me. This was the first time someone important to me was gone, and there was no fixing it, no going back, no waiting for things to return to normal.

Death has a strange way of changing how you see the world.

Before losing someone close, you can understand grief intellectually. You know what it means when someone says they miss somebody. You know what it means when someone says a song reminds them of someone they lost. You can empathize. You can imagine what it must feel like.

But there is a difference between understanding something and experiencing it.

Before 2019, I would see artists crying while performing songs on stage. I would see musicians break down while singing about personal experiences, loved ones, or painful memories. I always understood that it was emotional. I understood that music could be powerful. But there was still a part of me that wondered what it actually felt like to become so overwhelmed by a song that you could barely perform it.

I understood it from the outside.

I did not understand it from the inside.

Then my uncle died.

And suddenly, the meaning of certain songs changed.

The interesting thing is that “Ghost” did not even exist yet. When I lost my uncle in 2019, that song was still years away from being released. I had no idea that in 2021, a song would come out that would capture a feeling I had been carrying for years.

Then Justin Bieber released “Ghost.”

And something about it hit me immediately.

Now, I have to admit something: I was never really a huge Justin Bieber fan.

In fact, during his early years, I was one of those people who did not really enjoy his music. When he first became famous, I viewed his songs as typical mainstream pop. To me, it felt like the kind of music that was everywhere, playing constantly on the radio, and I personally did not connect with it. I thought it was generic pop music. I did not understand why everyone was so obsessed.

Obviously, artists change. People change. Music changes.

And sometimes an artist creates something that reaches people who never expected to connect with them.

That is what happened with “Ghost.”

The first time I heard the song, something immediately felt different. It was not just another pop song. It was not just another catchy chorus. There was a sense of longing, sadness, and love underneath the lyrics. It felt like a song about holding onto someone who is no longer physically there.

Then I watched the music video.

That was when everything really hit me.

The music video is about memories, family, love, and the pain of losing someone. Watching it brought back emotions I thought I had already processed. It reminded me of my uncle. It reminded me of what it feels like when someone important is no longer around. It reminded me of the strange feeling of continuing life while carrying memories of someone who cannot experience those moments with you anymore.

And I started crying.

Not just because the song was sad.

Because it was familiar.

It felt like someone had taken a feeling I had struggled to explain and turned it into music.

That is the power of art.

Sometimes the artist is not creating something specifically about your life, but somehow it feels like they are telling your story anyway.

“Ghost” was not written about my uncle. Justin Bieber did not know my personal experiences. The song was not created with my memories in mind. But somehow, through the combination of the lyrics, the melody, the emotion in the performance, and the imagery in the music video, it connected to something personal inside me.

That is what makes music incredible.

A song can belong to the person who created it and still become something completely different to the person listening.

Recently, as I have been practicing saxophone, I have found myself returning to this song again and again. There is something about playing an instrument that makes music feel even more personal. When you are not just listening, but physically creating the sound yourself, the emotion becomes different.

You breathe into the instrument.

You control the notes.

You feel the vibrations.

And sometimes, unexpectedly, those emotions come rushing back.

Practicing “Ghost” on saxophone has brought me to tears.

And honestly, that surprised me.

I always knew music could be emotional. I always knew certain songs could make people cry. But experiencing it myself while playing made me finally understand those performers I used to see breaking down on stage.

It is not just sadness.

It is memory.

It is love.

It is missing someone.

It is feeling connected to someone who is no longer physically here.

When an artist cries during a performance, sometimes people watching might think, “Why are they crying? They have performed this song so many times.”

But that is the thing.

Sometimes performing a song hundreds of times does not make it less emotional. Sometimes it makes it more emotional because the artist has lived with those words and melodies. Every performance can bring back the original emotions that inspired the song.

And listeners experience something similar.

A song becomes attached to moments in our lives.

A song can become attached to a person.

A song can become attached to a memory.

That is why hearing certain songs years later can instantly transport you back to a specific place or time. It is almost like your brain stored that song alongside the emotions you were feeling.

For me, “Ghost” became connected to my uncle.

It became connected to grief.

It became connected to the realization that even though someone is gone, their impact remains.

The title itself carries a powerful meaning. A ghost is something that is no longer physically present but still exists in some way. It is a memory. It is an echo. It is something from the past that continues to influence the present.

That is exactly how losing someone feels.

The person is gone, but the love is still there.

The memories are still there.

The lessons are still there.

The moments you shared are still there.

People sometimes talk about moving on after someone dies, but I think that phrase can be misunderstood. Moving on does not mean forgetting. It does not mean leaving someone behind. It means learning how to carry their memory with you as you continue living.

Songs like “Ghost” remind me of that.

They remind me that grief is not something that simply disappears. It changes over time. Sometimes it becomes quieter. Sometimes it returns unexpectedly through a song, a photograph, a smell, a place, or a random memory.

And when it returns, sometimes the healthiest thing you can do is let yourself feel it.

Let yourself cry.

Let yourself remember.

Let yourself acknowledge that someone mattered.

I think that is why this song affected me so much. It was not just because it was a beautiful song. It was because it arrived at a point in my life when I finally understood what those emotional performances were about.

Before my uncle died, I understood grief as an idea.

After my uncle died, I understood grief as an experience.

And after hearing “Ghost,” I understood how music can become a bridge between those two things.

A song can take something painful and make it beautiful.

A song can take a memory and give it a voice.

A song can make someone feel less alone.

That is why I have so much respect for artists who can create music that reaches people on such a deep level. Whether it is a massive pop artist like Justin Bieber or a small independent musician recording songs in their bedroom, the goal is often the same: to communicate something human.

And grief is one of the most human experiences there is.

Everyone eventually loses someone.

Everyone eventually has a memory they wish they could revisit.

Everyone eventually has a moment where they wish they could talk to someone who is no longer there.

Music gives us a way to process those feelings.

For me, “Ghost” is a reminder of my uncle. It is a reminder of love, loss, and the strange way people continue to exist in our lives even after they are gone.

It is a reminder that a song does not have to be written about you to be meaningful to you.

It just has to find something inside you.

And sometimes, when the right song finds the right person at the right moment, it can become something much bigger than music.

It can become a memory.

It can become a tribute.

It can become a connection between the past and the present.

“Ghost” became that for me.

A song I never expected to love from an artist I never expected to connect with.

A song that made me finally understand why musicians cry when they perform.

A song that reminds me that even though people may leave this world, the love they gave us does not disappear.

Sometimes it stays with us forever.

Sometimes it comes back through a melody.

Sometimes it comes back as a ghost.

Growing Up Around a Family That Loved Collecting Music

2026-07-26T07:48:28.680-07:00

One of the reasons I think I have developed such an appreciation for collecting physical music is because I grew up around people who have been doing it for years. Long before streaming services became the dominant way people listened to music, buying albums was simply how you experienced new releases. If you wanted to hear your favorite artist whenever you wanted, you bought the album. That mindset has never really disappeared in my family, and looking back, I think it quietly influenced my own interest in building a collection.

These days, almost any song you can think of is available through a streaming service. That convenience is incredible, and I use it all the time. But there is still something special about walking over to a shelf filled with CDs, picking out an album, and knowing it is part of your family's collection. It feels personal in a way that scrolling through a digital library sometimes does not.

My family has accumulated quite a collection over the years. It was never really about trying to own the biggest music library possible or chasing rare collector's items. Instead, it happened naturally. Whenever someone found an artist they really enjoyed, they would eventually pick up one of their albums. Then another. Then another. Over time, those individual purchases turned into shelves filled with music.

Looking through the collection is almost like taking a journey through different generations of musical tastes. Every artist represents a different period of someone's life. Some albums were bought when they were brand new. Others were discovered years after their original release. Some were gifts during birthdays or holidays, while others were picked up simply because someone happened to be browsing a store and found an album they wanted.

I think that is one of the things I appreciate most about physical collections.

They grow organically.

Unlike digital libraries that can suddenly gain hundreds of albums in just a few minutes, physical collections tend to build slowly over years or even decades. Every album has a reason for being there. Someone chose it. Someone wanted it enough to bring it home. Every case on the shelf represents an individual decision.

That gives the collection personality.

Growing up, I always thought it was normal to see shelves filled with CDs. At the time, I never really stopped to think about it because it was simply how music was stored. If you wanted to listen to something, you found the album, opened the case, put the CD into the player, and pressed play. That was just part of everyday life.

Now that streaming has become the norm, those shelves almost feel like a time capsule.

They represent decades of musical history sitting in one place.

One thing I have always found fascinating is how diverse my family's collection is. It is not limited to one genre or one era. Different people naturally enjoy different styles of music, and over time that variety became reflected throughout the collection itself. Instead of seeing the same type of artist repeated over and over, you find a mixture of rock, pop, alternative, hip-hop, classic artists, newer artists, and everything in between.

I actually like that.

Music should be diverse.

Our moods change.

Our interests change.

Our lives change.

It makes sense that our music libraries would change right along with us.

As I have started building my own collection, I have noticed that I am following a similar philosophy. I am not trying to collect only one genre or only one particular type of artist. I simply want to collect music that I genuinely enjoy listening to.

That feels much more meaningful than collecting simply for the sake of collecting.

I also appreciate the visual aspect of physical music.

There is something satisfying about seeing rows of albums lined up on a shelf. Every spine represents another artist, another album, another memory waiting to be revisited. Album artwork itself is a form of art that deserves appreciation. Designers, photographers, illustrators, and musicians all work together to create an image that reflects the music inside. When you display physical albums together, it almost becomes a miniature art gallery dedicated to music.

Streaming services obviously display album covers as well, but it is not quite the same experience.

Holding an album in your hands makes it feel more personal.

Another thing I admire about my family's collection is how durable it has been. Some of those CDs have been around for years and still play perfectly. Despite all the changes in technology, they continue working exactly as they did when they were first purchased.

That says something about physical media.

People often assume that newer automatically means better, but I do not think that is always true. Streaming offers incredible convenience, but physical media offers permanence. Once you own an album, it is yours. It does not disappear because of licensing agreements or changes to a streaming catalog. It remains part of your collection for as long as you choose to keep it.

I think there is real value in that.

Growing up around a physical music collection also taught me something else.

Albums matter.

Today, playlists are incredibly popular, and I enjoy them too. They are great for discovering artists or listening during specific activities. But albums tell complete stories. Artists carefully arrange songs into a specific order. The opening track introduces the experience. The middle tracks develop ideas and emotions. The final song often leaves the listener with something memorable to think about.

Listening to a complete album feels different than hearing individual songs shuffled together.

That is something I have come to appreciate more and more over the years.

As someone who has recently begun creating my own music, I think I understand that even better now. Every release represents countless hours of creativity, practice, recording, editing, and planning. Seeing my family's collection reminds me that every album sitting on those shelves represents someone's hard work and artistic vision.

That makes me appreciate every CD even more.

It is also interesting to think about how collecting habits evolve over time. Years ago, buying physical music was simply what everyone did. Today, collecting has become more of a hobby than a necessity. That actually makes it feel even more special. People who collect physical media today usually do so because they genuinely enjoy it, not because it is the only option available.

There is something refreshing about that.

It means every new addition to a collection is a deliberate choice.

As I continue building my own collection, I know I probably inherited some of that appreciation from my family. Watching shelves gradually fill with albums over the years showed me that collections are not built overnight. They grow naturally, one purchase at a time, reflecting the interests, memories, and personalities of the people building them.

There is no finish line.

No requirement to own thousands of albums.

No pressure to collect every release from every artist.

Just buy the music you love.

I think that is the best advice anyone can give to a new collector.

Your collection should tell your story.

When someone looks at your shelf years from now, they should be able to get a sense of who you are simply by seeing the artists you chose to bring home.

That is what makes physical collections meaningful.

They become personal.

They become memories.

They become little snapshots of different moments throughout life.

Looking at my family's collection reminds me that music is more than entertainment. It is part of our lives. It becomes attached to birthdays, road trips, holidays, celebrations, difficult times, and everyday moments that somehow become unforgettable because of the songs playing in the background.

I am grateful that I grew up around people who appreciated physical music. Without realizing it, they showed me that collecting albums is about more than simply owning CDs. It is about preserving memories, supporting artists, appreciating creativity, and building something that reflects your own journey through life.

Now, as I slowly build my own shelf of favorite artists, I like to think I am continuing a tradition that started long before I ever bought my first CD. My collection may still be growing, but it already represents the artists who have helped shape my own musical journey, and I look forward to adding many more albums in the years ahead.

Why I Still Love Collecting Music in the Streaming Era

2026-07-26T07:47:54.999-07:00

Music has always been one of the most important forms of art in my life. It has been there during moments of happiness, times of stress, creative breakthroughs, long drives, quiet evenings, and everything in between. Some songs instantly bring back memories from years ago, while others become the soundtrack to entirely new chapters of life. That is one of the things I find most fascinating about music. It has an incredible ability to stay with us, even as everything else around us changes.

Like most people today, I stream a lot of music. It is hard to deny just how convenient streaming has become. With just a few taps or clicks, I can listen to millions of songs from artists all over the world. If I suddenly remember a band I have not heard in years, chances are I can find them almost instantly. Streaming has made discovering new artists easier than ever before, and I am grateful for that.

At the same time, though, I have found myself becoming more interested in something that has existed long before streaming services ever arrived.

Collecting physical music.

For me, there is something special about owning an album. It feels different than simply adding another song to a playlist. A CD is something tangible. You can hold it, display it on a shelf, admire the artwork, flip through the booklet, read the lyrics and production credits, and appreciate all the effort that went into creating the final product. It feels like owning a small piece of music history.

Maybe that sounds nostalgic, but I honestly think physical media still has a place in today's world.

When I first started collecting CDs, I was not trying to build some massive archive overnight. I simply wanted to own albums from artists whose music had become meaningful to me over the years. I wasn't interested in buying albums just for the sake of having more CDs on my shelf. Instead, I wanted my collection to reflect my own musical journey.

That is what collecting means to me.

Every album represents an artist whose music has been part of my life in one way or another.

Naturally, my collection began with Blue October.

Anyone who has followed my writing for a while probably already knows how much I appreciate their music. Blue October has been one of those bands that I continue coming back to again and again. Their songs are emotional, honest, vulnerable, hopeful, and deeply personal. Whether I need something uplifting or something reflective, there always seems to be a Blue October song that fits the moment. It only made sense for them to be the foundation of my collection.

Once I started collecting, though, it became obvious that I wanted to expand beyond just one band.

Music is simply too diverse to limit yourself to a single artist.

Slowly, I began adding more bands and musicians that have been important to me throughout different stages of my life.

Alter Bridge was one of the first additions. Their combination of incredible musicianship, powerful vocals, memorable guitar work, and emotional songwriting has always impressed me. They have a sound that is both heavy and melodic, something I have always enjoyed listening to.

Then came Linkin Park.

Few bands have influenced modern rock the way Linkin Park did. Their ability to blend rock, electronic music, hip-hop, and emotional lyrics into something completely unique made them one of the defining bands of an entire generation. Their music still feels just as relevant today as it did years ago, and I expect it will continue connecting with listeners for many years to come.

Evanescence also earned a place in my growing collection. Their music combines haunting melodies with heavy instrumentation and orchestral influences in a way that very few bands have successfully replicated. Amy Lee's voice remains one of the most recognizable voices in rock music, and every album showcases just how talented the band truly is.

Green Day was another obvious addition.

They have spent decades creating energetic punk rock that somehow manages to be both fun and meaningful at the same time. Their music has evolved over the years while still maintaining the identity that made them one of the biggest rock bands in the world. Whether someone discovered them in the 1990s, the 2000s, or more recently, there is a good chance they have heard at least a few Green Day songs along the way.

Then there is Eminem.

Even people who are not huge hip-hop fans usually recognize his incredible lyrical ability. His storytelling, wordplay, technical skill, and willingness to tackle difficult subjects have made him one of the most influential rappers of all time. Every time I listen to his music, I find myself noticing new details that I somehow missed before.

Jay-Z became another important addition to my collection. His influence extends far beyond individual songs. Over the course of his career, he has become one of the defining voices in hip-hop, constantly evolving while helping shape the genre itself. His albums represent decades of creativity, ambition, and consistency.

Story of the Year is another band that I have always enjoyed. Their energetic style, emotional performances, and memorable songs fit perfectly alongside many of the other artists in my collection. They bring another flavor of rock that I continue enjoying every time I revisit their music.

Finally, My Chemical Romance became another addition to my shelf.

Their music was unlike almost anything else when they first emerged. They combined theatrical storytelling with powerful rock music, creating albums that felt like complete experiences rather than simply collections of songs. Their creativity and willingness to embrace dramatic concepts helped make them one of the most recognizable bands of their era.

Looking across my collection, one thing immediately stands out.

None of these artists sound exactly alike.

That is intentional.

I have never believed that people should limit themselves to one genre of music.

Some days I want to listen to alternative rock.

Other days I feel like listening to punk.

Sometimes hip-hop is exactly what I am in the mood for.

Other times I just want something emotional, energetic, relaxing, or completely unexpected.

Music reflects our emotions, and our emotions constantly change. It only makes sense that our playlists and collections would reflect that variety.

One of the things I enjoy most about collecting music is that there are no real rules.

Some collectors focus exclusively on vinyl records.

Others collect cassette tapes.

Some only buy limited editions or rare imports.

Others collect every album from a single artist.

Some people own thousands of CDs covering dozens of genres.

None of those approaches are wrong.

For me, I simply want to collect the music I genuinely enjoy listening to.

That is my philosophy.

I do not care about owning albums just because someone tells me they are essential.

I am not trying to impress other collectors.

I am not trying to own every album ever made.

I simply want my shelf to represent the artists that have become part of my own life.

I think that makes collecting much more enjoyable.

Every time I add another CD, it feels intentional.

Instead of buying music simply because it is popular, I am choosing albums that I know I will continue listening to for years.

That also means I expect my collection to keep growing over time.

There are plenty of artists I enjoy that I have not added yet. As I continue discovering new music and revisiting older favorites, I know more albums will eventually find their way onto my shelf.

There is no deadline.

There is no finish line.

Music collecting is one of those hobbies that naturally grows over time.

Another reason I enjoy physical albums is because they encourage me to experience music differently.

Streaming often encourages skipping around between songs. We jump from one artist to another, shuffle playlists, and rarely listen to complete albums from beginning to end.

Owning the physical album encourages a different mindset.

Instead of asking, "What song do I want to hear?"

I find myself asking, "What album do I want to experience today?"

That simple shift changes everything.

Albums are carefully assembled by artists. The opening track introduces the listener to the project. Songs build upon each other. Themes develop. Emotions change. By the time you reach the final track, you often feel like you have completed an entire journey.

That is something I have come to appreciate much more as my collection grows.

As someone who has recently started creating my own music, I think I appreciate albums even more now than I did before. Even creating a single song gave me a much greater appreciation for everything musicians do behind the scenes. Writing, recording, editing, mixing, mastering, designing artwork, planning releases, and countless other tasks all come together to create one finished project.

Listening to music is enjoyable.

Creating music is challenging.

Owning physical albums reminds me of the incredible amount of work that artists invest into every release.

I also enjoy simply looking at my collection.

Album artwork has always fascinated me.

A great cover can become just as iconic as the music itself. Sometimes the artwork perfectly captures the feeling of the album before you even hear the first note. Other times it becomes instantly recognizable years later simply because of how closely it is connected with the music inside.

A shelf full of albums almost becomes a miniature art gallery.

Every cover tells part of a story.

As my collection continues growing, I know it will also become something of a timeline.

Years from now, I will probably remember exactly when I added certain artists.

I will remember where I was in life.

I will remember what songs I had on repeat.

I will remember the projects I was working on.

Music has an incredible way of preserving memories that few other things can.

That is another reason I enjoy collecting.

It is not just about owning music.

It is about preserving moments.

In a world where so much entertainment exists only digitally, there is something refreshing about owning something you can actually hold in your hands.

Will I continue using streaming services?

Absolutely.

Streaming is convenient, and I have no intention of giving it up.

But I also plan to continue building my CD collection one album at a time.

For me, the two experiences complement each other perfectly.

Streaming helps me discover new artists.

Collecting helps me celebrate the artists whose music has already become part of my life.

At the end of the day, I do not collect CDs because I have to.

I collect them because I genuinely enjoy music.

I enjoy supporting artists whose work has inspired me.

I enjoy looking at the artwork.

I enjoy experiencing albums the way they were meant to be heard.

Most of all, I enjoy building a collection that reflects who I am.

Whether it is Blue October, Alter Bridge, Linkin Park, Evanescence, Green Day, Eminem, Jay-Z, Story of the Year, My Chemical Romance, or whatever artists I discover in the future, I look forward to continuing this journey one album at a time.

Because in the end, the best music collection is not necessarily the biggest one.

It is the one that tells your story.

When the Music Stops: D4VD, the Pretrial Process, and Why We Have to Talk About This Carefully

2026-07-26T07:33:02.193-07:00

There are certain stories that a music blog doesn't want to write about, not because they aren't newsworthy, but because they sit so far outside the realm of album reviews and tour announcements that it feels strange to even type the words. The ongoing case against David Anthony Burke, known to millions of fans as D4VD, is one of those stories. It is not a story about a new single or a surprise deluxe edition. It is a story about a teenage girl named Celeste Rivas Hernandez, about a preliminary hearing unfolding in a Los Angeles courtroom, and about an industry, a fanbase, and a public that are all trying to figure out how to process something this heavy while the legal process is still very much in motion.

We are writing about this because it would be strange not to. D4VD built a real career, a genuine one, off of songs that resonated with a young, emotionally raw, and largely online audience. He wasn't a manufactured pop product pushed by a label machine, he was a bedroom musician who found an audience organically, the kind of story that music blogs like ours love to cover because it feels human and unscripted. That same audience, the one that grew up on his music, is now watching him face first-degree murder charges, along with additional charges connected to alleged sexual conduct with a minor and the alleged mutilation of a body. That is an enormous, disorienting gap to sit with, and pretending it isn't happening, or that it has nothing to do with music coverage, would be dishonest.

So let's talk about where things actually stand, because a lot of people online are talking about this case with far more certainty than the legal process currently allows. As of this point in the summer of 2026, D4VD has not been convicted of anything. He has pleaded not guilty to the charges against him. What is currently happening in court is a preliminary hearing, which is a specific legal step that exists before a case ever goes to a full trial. A preliminary hearing is not a trial itself. It is a proceeding where a judge listens to evidence and testimony presented by prosecutors, and decides whether there is enough of it to establish probable cause, meaning enough to justify sending the case forward to trial. It is a lower bar than the standard of proof used at an actual trial, which is proof beyond a reasonable doubt. That distinction matters enormously, and it's one that gets lost constantly in social media conversation, where a headline about graphic testimony gets treated as if it were already a guilty verdict.

This is the part of the conversation where we have to be honest about something uncomfortable: the presumption of innocence is not a technicality, and it is not a shield that only exists to protect people we like. It is a foundational principle of how the legal system is supposed to work, precisely because it has to apply evenly, even to people accused of something this disturbing, even to people whose music we have personally enjoyed, even to people the internet has already decided are guilty based on a few viral clips of courtroom testimony. Saying "innocent until proven guilty" is not the same as saying "nothing happened here" or "let's ignore the victim." It is simply a recognition that the legal process exists specifically because facts have to be tested, evidence has to be challenged, and a jury or a judge, not a comment section, is the body that gets to make that determination. That is true no matter how compelling or how disturbing the details reported from the courtroom might sound.

And the details that have come out during this preliminary hearing are, by any measure, deeply disturbing. Prosecutors have laid out an extensive narrative involving alleged forensic evidence, digital records, testimony from law enforcement, and allegations regarding the nature of the relationship between Burke and Rivas Hernandez, who was fourteen years old at the time her remains were discovered inside a vehicle registered in his name. These are not small allegations. They are about as serious as allegations get, both legally and morally. It would be irresponsible for us to pretend that the weight of what has been presented in court so far doesn't matter, or to treat this as some minor legal formality that will simply resolve itself quietly. It won't. This is a capital-adjacent case involving the death of a child, and the public attention it has drawn is proportionate to how serious those allegations are.

At the same time, we want to be careful here, because there is a difference between acknowledging the seriousness of allegations and asserting as fact things that have not yet been established through a completed legal process. We don't know, with the kind of certainty that would let anyone write a definitive account, exactly what happened to Celeste Rivas Hernandez. We can look at what prosecutors have presented and form impressions, the way any person following news coverage naturally does, and it is human and understandable to feel a strong reaction to the images and testimony that have been described in reporting from this hearing. But forming an impression is not the same as knowing. The evidence presented by one side in a preliminary hearing is, by design, only one side of the story. The defense has not yet fully presented its case, cross-examination is ongoing, and a full trial, if this moves forward to one, would involve a much more complete airing of evidence from both sides. So while we can, and probably should, sit with the discomfort of what's been alleged, we should hold off on writing the ending of this story before the legal system has actually reached one.

What we can say clearly, without any hesitation or hedging, is that Celeste Rivas Hernandez was a real person. She was fourteen years old. She had a family who has shown up to this hearing, who has sat through testimony that no parent should ever have to hear about their child, and who is grieving a loss that the rest of us are only observing from a distance, mostly through headlines and social media posts. It is easy, in true crime culture and in the endless churn of internet commentary, to let a victim become a footnote in a story that ends up centering the accused, the celebrity, the "shocking twist," the drama of the case. We don't want to do that here. Whatever else this case is about, whatever legal arguments get made, whatever public narrative forms around D4VD as an artist, this began with the loss of a young girl's life, and that loss deserves to stay at the center of how we talk about this, not get pushed to the margins in favor of talking about what this means for someone's music career or public image.

Now, here's the part of this piece that we think is actually the most important thing to say, and it's the reason we wanted to write this at all instead of just staying quiet and letting the news cycle run its course without any input from us. As this case continues, and especially if it moves forward to a full trial, there is a real chance that public anger, which is a completely understandable emotional response to what's being alleged, starts to spill over in ways that cause harm to people who are not on trial. We've seen this pattern before in other high-profile cases involving public figures. Family members get doxxed. Defense attorneys get harassed simply for doing their jobs, which, as a reminder, everyone accused of a crime is constitutionally entitled to have someone do. Witnesses get targeted online. People only tangentially connected to a case, sometimes people with no real connection at all beyond sharing a last name or having once been photographed near the defendant, become targets of internet mobs who have decided that anger needs somewhere to go and any nearby target will do.

We want to say, as plainly as we can, that this would be a mistake, and not just a strategic one, but a moral one. Everyone involved in this case, on every side of it, is a human being. That includes the family and friends of D4VD, who did not choose this situation and who are presumably going through something genuinely awful themselves, regardless of what ultimately gets proven in court. It includes members of his professional team, his label, his collaborators, people who worked with him as a musician and who had no way of knowing what was happening in his personal life, if the allegations turn out to be true. It includes attorneys, court staff, and witnesses, who are simply performing roles that the legal system requires someone to fill. None of these people are on trial. None of these people should be treated as though they are guilty by association, and none of them deserve to have their safety or their peace threatened because the internet is angry and looking for an outlet.

To be extremely clear about something, because this is the kind of point that gets misread if it isn't stated directly: none of this is an argument for looking away from accountability. If the allegations against D4VD are proven true through the legal process, that is an extraordinarily serious matter, and accountability in that circumstance is not just appropriate, it is necessary. Nothing about urging people to avoid harassment is the same as urging people to excuse or minimize what's being alleged. Those are two entirely separate conversations, and collapsing them into one, as though caring about due process means you don't care about the victim, or as though wanting people to avoid vigilante harassment means you're defending the accused, is a false choice that doesn't actually reflect how any of this works. You can hold both of these truths at once. You can believe that serious allegations deserve serious scrutiny and, if proven, serious consequences, and you can also believe that people not charged with any crime don't deserve to have their lives upended by strangers online who have decided to act as judge and jury before either institution has finished its work.

This matters specifically in a case like this one because of how much attention D4VD's music has received, and because of how parasocial fan culture tends to work in the internet age. Fans who feel personally betrayed by an artist they connected with often respond with intensity that goes far beyond typical disappointment, and that intensity doesn't always stay contained to the person who is actually accused. It spreads outward. It attaches itself to anyone even loosely connected. And in cases involving allegations this serious, particularly ones involving harm to a child, the emotional charge behind that anger is completely understandable, even righteous in a certain sense, but understandable anger still needs somewhere responsible to go, and harassing bystanders isn't it.

There's also something worth saying about how we, as consumers of news and social media, engage with cases like this one in the first place. It is very easy to treat an unfolding criminal case as a form of entertainment, something to follow the way you'd follow a television drama, complete with plot twists and cliffhangers and hot takes. Court TV clips get shared for their shock value. Screenshots of testimony get turned into memes or reaction content. That impulse is worth resisting, not because we shouldn't be informed or shouldn't care, but because treating a real child's death and a real ongoing legal proceeding as content flattens something that shouldn't be flattened. There's a difference between staying informed about a serious matter and consuming it the way you'd consume a plot twist in a streaming series. We'd encourage anyone following this story to keep that distinction in mind, for their own sake as much as anyone else's.

So where does that leave a blog like ours, one that exists to talk about music, in relation to a story like this? Honestly, in an uncomfortable place, and we're not going to pretend otherwise. D4VD's music will likely always carry the shadow of this case now, regardless of how the legal process resolves, and that's simply the reality of what's happened. We're not going to tell readers how they should feel about listening to his songs going forward, because that's a genuinely personal decision that depends on values, on comfort levels, and on how each individual person processes difficult information about artists they've connected with. What we can do is commit to covering the factual, verified developments in this case as they happen, without speculation dressed up as certainty, without treating unproven allegations as settled fact, and without losing sight of the fact that a real young girl lost her life and that her family is living through something none of us would wish on anyone.

As the preliminary hearing continues, and as this case likely moves toward a decision on whether it proceeds to a full trial, we'll keep watching, the way a lot of people will. We'd just ask, for whatever it's worth coming from a small music blog, that everyone following along try to hold onto a little bit of restraint. Let the legal process do what it's designed to do. Direct anger, if you feel it, toward accountability through that process rather than toward strangers online who happen to share a connection to someone accused of something terrible. Keep Celeste Rivas Hernandez, a real person who deserved a full life, at the center of how this story gets told. And remember that everyone caught up in the orbit of a case this large, whether they're a family member, a bystander, or simply someone who once worked on a song, is still a person too, one who deserves basic decency even when the situation surrounding them is anything but decent.

That's really the whole point of this piece. Not to defend anyone. Not to accuse anyone beyond what's already been alleged in court. Just a reminder, from us to you, that it's possible to take something this serious seriously, without losing our own humanity in the process.

How I Created My Debut Song, "Lotsa Tones"

2026-07-22T02:40:25.088-07:00

When people think about creating music, they often picture expensive studios, professional instruments, and years of formal musical training. While there is certainly nothing wrong with that approach, it isn't how Lotsa Tones came to be.

Instead, this song began with something much simpler.

Curiosity.

I've always believed that creativity starts by asking one simple question: What happens if I try this?

That question has led me to write novels, poetry, short stories, blog posts, podcast episodes, and now, my first piece of music. Every creative journey I've taken has started the same way. Not because I already knew exactly what I was doing, but because I wanted to learn.

That mindset is exactly what led to Lotsa Tones.

For this project, I wasn't trying to create the next chart-topping hit. I wasn't trying to perfectly imitate another artist or fit neatly into an existing genre. Instead, I wanted to experiment with sound itself.

The tool that made this possible was Audacity.

Most people know Audacity as a free audio editor. It's often used for recording podcasts, editing interviews, cleaning up audio, or mixing tracks. I've used it extensively for editing episodes of The Jaime David Podcast, so I was already comfortable navigating the software.

But one day I started wondering...

What if I used Audacity for something completely different?

Instead of simply editing audio that already existed, what if I tried creating music from the sounds built into the software?

That question became the beginning of this project.

I started opening different generators and effects inside Audacity just to see what they could do. I generated tones. I listened to different waveforms. I experimented with pitches, frequencies, durations, and rhythms.

Some combinations sounded interesting.

Others sounded completely ridiculous.

Some lasted only a few seconds before I immediately deleted them.

But every experiment taught me something.

One of the things I enjoy most about creative work is that there isn't always a right answer. Sometimes the only way to discover something interesting is to allow yourself to make things that don't work.

In fact, I would argue that failed experiments are often just as valuable as successful ones because they teach you what directions you may or may not want to explore next.

So I kept experimenting.

I'd generate a sound.

Listen.

Move it around.

Layer another sound over it.

Adjust the timing.

Delete something.

Add something else.

Repeat.

Little by little, what started as random experimentation slowly became recognizable as a piece of music.

I never sat down with a detailed blueprint saying, "This is exactly how the song will sound."

Instead, I let the song develop naturally.

One sound inspired another.

One rhythm suggested the next.

Every decision influenced the one that followed.

That process reminded me a lot of writing fiction.

When I write a novel, I don't always know exactly where every chapter will lead. Sometimes the characters surprise me. Sometimes the story changes direction halfway through writing it.

Music, I discovered, can work the same way.

Rather than forcing every idea into place, I tried listening to what the piece itself seemed to need.

Sometimes it needed another layer.

Sometimes it needed less.

Sometimes the silence between sounds became just as important as the sounds themselves.

That was an interesting lesson.

As creators, we often feel the need to constantly add more.

More notes.

More instruments.

More effects.

More complexity.

But complexity isn't always better.

Sometimes restraint creates something stronger.

One of my goals throughout the project was simply to stay curious.

If I wondered what two sounds might be like together, I tried it.

If I wanted to hear what happened when I adjusted the timing, I adjusted it.

If I thought an effect might completely change the mood, I clicked the button and found out.

Not every experiment survived the final version.

Many didn't.

Some sounded awkward.

Some became too cluttered.

Others just didn't fit.

That's completely normal.

Creativity often involves making dozens—or even hundreds—of decisions that nobody ever sees.

The final product is only one snapshot of a much larger creative process.

What listeners hear in Lotsa Tones is the result of countless little moments of experimentation.

Some lasted seconds.

Some lasted hours.

All of them helped shape the final piece.

One thing I particularly enjoyed was discovering just how much can be created using simple building blocks.

People sometimes assume that creativity depends on having the newest software, the most expensive equipment, or an endless collection of tools.

While those things can certainly expand your possibilities, they aren't what create ideas.

Ideas come from curiosity.

Tools simply help bring those ideas into reality.

Audacity became that tool for me.

It allowed me to explore without feeling intimidated.

Because I wasn't working inside software filled with thousands of virtual instruments and endless menus, I focused more on listening than on endlessly browsing options.

Ironically, those limitations encouraged creativity.

They forced me to think differently.

Instead of asking, "Which preset should I use?"

I found myself asking, "What can I create with what I already have?"

I think that's an important lesson that applies far beyond music.

Whether you're writing, painting, programming, filming videos, or building something entirely different, it's easy to believe that you need better equipment before you can begin.

Sometimes you don't.

Sometimes the best thing you can do is simply start.

That's exactly what happened here.

I started.

I experimented.

I learned.

Then I kept going.

Would I make Lotsa Tones exactly the same way if I were starting today?

Probably not.

And that's actually a good thing.

Every project teaches us something.

Every project changes the way we approach the next one.

Already, I find myself thinking about new techniques I'd like to explore.

I'm interested in experimenting with more melodies.

I'm curious about creating richer harmonies.

I want to explore different rhythmic structures.

I want to see what happens when I combine multiple approaches together.

That's one of the most exciting parts about beginning a musical journey.

There is so much left to learn.

Some people worry about not being experts before they start creating.

I understand that feeling.

But I also think expertise is built by creating.

Nobody learns music by never making music.

Nobody becomes an author without writing.

Nobody becomes a podcaster without recording.

Experience grows through practice.

Every project becomes part of the education.

For me, Lotsa Tones represents that first lesson.

It represents curiosity over perfection.

Experimentation over hesitation.

Creation over fear.

Could I have waited until I knew more?

Of course.

But then I might still be waiting years from now.

Instead, I chose to create.

Now I have a debut song.

More importantly, I have experience.

And experience becomes the foundation for whatever comes next.

I don't know what my future music will sound like.

Maybe it'll become more melodic.

Maybe more cinematic.

Maybe more electronic.

Maybe something completely unexpected.

I'm looking forward to finding out.

For now, though, I'm proud of what Lotsa Tones represents.

Not because it claims to redefine music.

Not because it pretends to be perfect.

But because it marks the moment I stopped wondering whether I could make music and actually sat down to try.

Sometimes that's the hardest step of all.

Thank you to everyone who has listened to Lotsa Tones and supported this new chapter in my creative journey. Whether you discovered me through my books, my podcast, my blog, or now through my music, I'm grateful you're here.

This is only my first song.

There are many more experiments waiting to happen.

And honestly, I can't wait to hear where curiosity takes me next.

Terrified: How One Story of the Year Song Became Part of My Life

2026-07-11T14:07:45.699-07:00

There are certain songs that become attached to a specific chapter of your life. They are more than just tracks on a playlist. They become memories, emotions, and time capsules. Whenever they come on, you are instantly transported back to another version of yourself. Sometimes that version is happier. Sometimes they are struggling. Sometimes they are simply younger, trying to figure out who they are.

For me, one of those songs is "Terrified" by Story of the Year.

Story of the Year has never been my absolute favorite band. That title belongs elsewhere. But they are absolutely one of my top ten favorite bands of all time. I have always felt they deserved much more recognition than they received. They found success during the 2000s post-hardcore and alternative rock explosion, but I have always believed they should have been even bigger. They possessed incredible musicianship, emotional songwriting, memorable choruses, and enough energy to compete with nearly anyone from that era.

Out of all of their songs, though, "Terrified" has always stood above the rest for me.

It is still my favorite Story of the Year song.

It also happens to be one of the very first songs I ever discovered from them.

That alone makes it special.

But time has a funny way of making songs become even more meaningful.

In just two years, "The Black Swan," the album that introduced me to "Terrified," will celebrate its twentieth anniversary.

That realization honestly feels surreal.

The older I get, the more I realize music is one of the greatest markers of time.

You don't always remember exactly what happened during a particular year, but you remember the soundtrack that played while life was happening.

That soundtrack becomes permanent.

For me, "Terrified" is one of those permanent songs.

The Black Swan was released in 2008.

That was the same year Grand Theft Auto IV came out.

It is strange connecting those two things together because both feel like products of another lifetime. Back then, gaming felt different. Music felt different. The internet felt different. YouTube was still young. Streaming barely existed compared to today. Social media was nowhere near the all-consuming force that it eventually became.

Everything felt a little slower.

Music especially.

You discovered bands through friends, video games, random YouTube recommendations, forums, or simply stumbling across them somewhere online.

There was something exciting about finding a band that not everyone else was talking about.

Story of the Year became one of those bands for me.

I actually discovered them a little later than when The Black Swan originally released.

I found "Terrified" while I was in high school.

Looking back, that makes complete sense.

High school is often where we begin discovering the music that shapes our identity.

Those are the years when music becomes deeply personal.

You're trying to understand yourself.

You're figuring out your interests.

You're learning who your friends are.

You're beginning to imagine your future.

Music becomes the soundtrack to all of it.

I attended high school from 2010 through 2014.

At the time, those four years felt incredibly long.

Now they feel unbelievably short.

When I first heard "Terrified," I had no idea that I would still be listening to it well over a decade later.

I certainly didn't imagine I would someday be writing an entire blog post about it.

Yet here we are.

One thing I have always appreciated about Story of the Year is their ability to balance aggression with melody.

Many bands can scream.

Many bands can write catchy choruses.

Fewer bands manage to do both while keeping everything emotionally authentic.

Story of the Year always seemed capable of walking that line.

Their heavier moments never felt heavy simply for the sake of being heavy.

Their melodic moments never felt forced.

Everything served the emotion of the song.

That is especially true with "Terrified."

The song immediately grabs your attention with its atmosphere.

Then it gradually builds into something emotional without ever losing its intensity.

The guitars create tension.

The drums keep everything moving.

The vocals communicate vulnerability without sacrificing power.

Every piece feels intentional.

That balance is probably one of the reasons I connected with it so much.

Even back then, I tended to enjoy bands that blended emotional lyrics with powerful instrumentation.

Bands that weren't afraid to be loud while still having something meaningful to say.

That combination has always appealed to me.

Even today, if someone asked me what kind of music I naturally gravitate toward, I would probably describe exactly that.

It is interesting thinking about how our musical tastes evolve.

Some bands disappear from our playlists.

Others remain forever.

Story of the Year has remained.

Years have passed.

Technology has changed.

Streaming services have replaced physical collections.

Phones replaced MP3 players.

Social media completely transformed how music spreads.

Yet somehow "Terrified" still feels just as powerful as it did the first time I heard it.

That says something.

Great songs age well.

Not because they sound modern.

Not because they follow trends.

They age well because they are emotionally honest.

Honesty doesn't really have an expiration date.

I think that is one reason I continue returning to music from the late 2000s and early 2010s.

There was an emotional sincerity that I still appreciate.

That isn't to say modern music lacks emotion.

Far from it.

There are incredible artists today.

But every generation has its own sound.

Its own atmosphere.

Its own identity.

For those of us who grew up during that period, albums like The Black Swan represent more than just collections of songs.

They represent moments in our lives.

Looking ahead almost feels even stranger.

In just two years, The Black Swan will officially be twenty years old.

Twenty years.

That number almost refuses to make sense in my head.

How did that happen?

It feels impossible that something which still sounds so fresh to me is approaching two decades of existence.

Then I realized something else.

When The Black Swan reaches its twentieth anniversary, it will only be two years before another milestone arrives.

It will be twenty years since I started high school.

That realization honestly hit me harder than the album anniversary itself.

I entered high school in 2010.

By 2030, twenty years will have passed since that first day.

Twenty years.

That is nearly impossible to wrap my head around.

I still remember walking through those hallways.

I remember classes.

Teachers.

Friends.

Lunch periods.

The awkwardness of adolescence.

The excitement of discovering new interests.

It all feels simultaneously distant and incredibly close.

Time compresses memories in strange ways.

Some events from high school feel like yesterday.

Others feel like they happened in another lifetime.

Music somehow bridges that gap.

Whenever "Terrified" starts playing, that younger version of myself suddenly doesn't seem so far away anymore.

I remember spending hours listening to music after school.

Watching music videos.

Searching for new bands.

Finding songs that resonated with me.

Building playlists before streaming algorithms decided everything for us.

Those experiences shaped my musical identity.

Story of the Year became part of that journey.

The funny thing is that I don't think I fully appreciated how important those discoveries were while they were happening.

Back then, I was simply enjoying music.

Now I realize I was building memories.

Music became the filing cabinet for different periods of my life.

Some songs remind me of middle school.

Others remind me of college.

Some remind me of difficult periods.

Others remind me of happier ones.

"Terrified" reminds me of discovering another great band that would stay with me for years.

Another interesting connection is Grand Theft Auto IV.

Both GTA IV and The Black Swan arrived in 2008.

That immediately places them together in my mind.

Whenever I think about one, I inevitably think about the other.

It is amazing how cultural moments become linked like that.

Different forms of entertainment become intertwined simply because they existed during the same period.

By 2030, both GTA IV and The Black Swan will be twenty-two years old.

Twenty-two.

That sounds unbelievable.

Entire generations have grown up since then.

Players who enjoy GTA IV today may not have even been born when it originally released.

Listeners discovering Story of the Year today may be experiencing "Terrified" for the very first time while longtime fans like me have been carrying that song around for well over a decade.

That is one of the beautiful things about music.

Great songs don't expire.

They simply find new listeners.

Every generation gets the opportunity to experience them for the first time.

I hope Story of the Year continues reaching new audiences.

I genuinely think they deserve it.

They have always felt slightly underrated to me.

When conversations about the great alternative rock and post-hardcore bands of the 2000s happen, Story of the Year sometimes feels overlooked.

People remember the biggest names.

The platinum-selling bands.

The household names.

Meanwhile, Story of the Year quietly built an impressive catalog filled with emotional songwriting, energetic performances, and memorable melodies.

That deserves recognition.

Perhaps that is another reason I enjoy talking about bands like them.

Sometimes the most rewarding musical discoveries are the ones that exist just outside mainstream conversations.

If someone reading this has never listened to Story of the Year before, I genuinely encourage giving them a chance.

And if I had to recommend only one song to start with, it would absolutely be "Terrified."

Not because it is objectively their greatest song.

Music is subjective.

Different listeners will connect with different tracks.

But for me, "Terrified" represents everything I enjoy about the band.

It captures their emotional depth.

Their intensity.

Their musicianship.

Their ability to balance heaviness with melody.

It also carries years of personal memories.

That emotional connection cannot really be measured.

It simply exists.

As I have gotten older, I have found myself appreciating music differently.

When I was younger, I focused mostly on whether a song sounded good.

Now I think about where I first heard it.

Who I was at the time.

What was happening in my life.

How the song has stayed with me.

The emotional history becomes just as important as the music itself.

Maybe that is one of the greatest gifts music gives us.

It allows us to revisit previous versions of ourselves without actually returning to the past.

We cannot relive high school.

We cannot return to 2008.

We cannot experience those exact moments again.

But we can press play.

For four or five minutes, those memories become vivid once more.

That is something incredibly special.

As The Black Swan approaches its twentieth anniversary, I find myself appreciating it more than ever.

Not simply because it is an excellent album.

Not simply because it introduced me to my favorite Story of the Year song.

But because it reminds me how music quietly accompanies us through life.

We rarely notice it happening.

Years pass.

Decades pass.

Albums grow older.

We grow older.

Yet the songs somehow remain exactly the same.

Maybe that is why they continue feeling timeless.

They are fixed points while everything else changes.

When I hear "Terrified" today, I don't just hear a great rock song.

I hear memories.

I hear discovery.

I hear late nights listening through headphones.

I hear high school.

I hear another chapter of my life preserved inside a song.

And I suspect that twenty years from now, I will probably feel exactly the same way.

Some songs simply become part of who we are.

For me, "Terrified" by Story of the Year is one of those songs.

It was one of my first introductions to an underrated band that has remained one of my all-time favorites. It has survived changing technologies, changing tastes, and changing stages of my life. It has outlasted high school, accompanied me into adulthood, and continued to remind me why I fell in love with music in the first place.

That is the power of a truly unforgettable song.

Where to Actually Find Physical Media (And How to Not Overpay for It)

2026-07-11T13:59:43.648-07:00

Where to Actually Find Physical Media (And How to Not Overpay for It)

So after that last post about starting my CD collection, I got a handful of messages and comments asking some version of the same question, which was basically, okay, that's cool, but where do you even find this stuff anymore. And it's a fair question, honestly. We've spent the last decade or so watching physical media sections shrink in stores, watching entire chains disappear, watching the culture around browsing shelves for music or games or movies fade into something a lot of younger folks never even experienced firsthand. So I get why the question comes up. If you didn't grow up in the era of physical media being the default, it's not obvious where you'd even start looking. So I wanted to put together a follow up post specifically about that, about how to actually find physical media in a world that's mostly moved on from it. I'm going to be talking about this mostly through the lens of CDs, since that's what's relevant here on the music blog and what I've been actively hunting for lately, but honestly almost everything I'm about to say applies just as easily to movies, games, books, whatever physical format you're chasing. The hunting process is pretty universal once you get into it.

The first place most people probably think of, and honestly the place I've had a decent amount of luck with, is just going online, specifically to places like Amazon and eBay. And I know that sounds almost too obvious to even mention, but I think it's worth talking about because there's a right way and a wrong way to approach these platforms if you're trying to build a collection without draining your wallet. Amazon is honestly hit or miss depending on what you're looking for. If you're after something recent, something still in print, Amazon can be a solid option, and sometimes you'll catch decent prices, especially if you're not picky about buying new versus used. Amazon does have a used marketplace built into a lot of listings, where third party sellers offer copies in various conditions, and that's usually where the better deals are hiding. A lot of people skip right past those used listings because the "buy new" button is right there and convenient, but if you actually click through to see other sellers, you'll often find the exact same CD for a fraction of the price, sometimes with only minor wear that honestly doesn't matter much once you're just popping it into a player anyway.

eBay, though, is really where things get interesting for physical media hunting, at least in my experience so far. eBay tends to be a much better resource for older releases, out of print albums, special editions, or anything that's a little more niche, because it's essentially a massive marketplace of individual sellers, many of whom are just regular people clearing out old collections or flipping stuff they picked up somewhere for cheap. The auction format on eBay can work in your favor too if you're patient. Sometimes you'll find listings that barely anyone is bidding on, and you can snag something for way less than you'd expect just because it wasn't something a lot of other collectors happened to be watching that week. I'd say the key with eBay is patience and a willingness to actually search using different terms. Don't just search the album title once and call it done. Try searching with the artist name plus the album title, try searching just the artist name and scroll through what pops up, try adding words like "sealed" or "used" or "lot" depending on what you're after, because a "lot" listing, where someone sells a bunch of CDs together as one bundle, can sometimes get you multiple albums for less than buying them individually, even if a few of them aren't things you were specifically hunting for. Sometimes those bonus discs end up being some of your favorite finds, honestly, stuff you wouldn't have thought to look for on your own.

That said, I don't want to make it sound like online shopping is the whole story here, because honestly, some of the best finds don't happen online at all, they happen in person, and I think that's a part of the hunt that's easy to overlook if you're used to just clicking around online for everything. Going to actual physical stores, if you're lucky enough to have any left near you, is still one of the best ways to find good deals, and there's something genuinely fun about it too that online shopping just can't replicate. I'm talking about places like used record stores, secondhand shops, thrift stores, pawn shops, that kind of thing. These places are basically graveyards for old physical media, in a good way, because so many people over the years have cleared out their old collections without realizing there's still demand for this stuff, and it ends up sitting in bins, often criminally underpriced. I've heard plenty of stories, and had a few small moments myself, of finding CDs in thrift stores for like a dollar or two, sometimes even less, that would go for way more if you tried to track them down online. Thrift stores especially tend to not really know what they have a lot of the time, so the pricing can be almost random, which works out in your favor more often than you'd think.

Used record and CD stores specifically are a step up from thrift stores in terms of curation, since the people running them usually do know the value of what they're selling, but even then you can find good deals, and the experience of actually flipping through bins of CDs, reading the spines, pulling out ones that catch your eye, is just a different kind of experience than scrolling through a webpage. There's something almost meditative about it. You're not being fed algorithmic suggestions, you're not seeing "customers also bought" prompts, you're just physically going through what's there, and sometimes that leads you to stuff you never would have thought to search for online in the first place. I think that's actually one of the underrated benefits of shopping in person for physical media, the discovery factor. Online shopping tends to work best when you already know exactly what you're looking for. In person shopping is where you stumble into things.

And speaking of stumbling into things, flea markets deserve their own mention here too, because if you've got any near you, they can honestly be some of the best hunting grounds for physical media, especially for cheap. Flea markets are this weird mix of people selling all kinds of random stuff, some of it junk, some of it genuine treasure, and physical media, especially CDs, tends to show up there a lot because people are often just trying to clear out old collections quickly rather than maximize profit on each individual item. I've seen flea market vendors sell CDs in bulk for insanely low prices, sometimes literally by the box, where you can just buy a whole stack for next to nothing. Now, I'll be honest, flea market finds can be a mixed bag in terms of what's actually there. You're not going to walk in with a specific want list and expect to check everything off, because it's much more random and dependent on what that particular vendor happens to have that week. But if you go in with the mindset of just seeing what's available and staying open to surprises, flea markets can be genuinely great for building a collection cheaply, and honestly kind of fun as an outing too, especially if you enjoy that whole treasure hunting vibe.

I think one thing that's worth mentioning too is that the actual act of physically searching for these things, whether it's at a thrift store, a used record shop, or a flea market, ends up becoming part of the appeal of collecting itself, at least for me. It's not just about acquiring the item, it's about the process of finding it. There's a kind of satisfaction in flipping through bins and finally spotting an album you've been hoping to find, that just doesn't exist when you type a title into a search bar and have it delivered to your door two days later. Both methods have their place, honestly, and I use both depending on what I'm after, but I do think the in person hunting is where a lot of the joy of collecting physical media really lives.

Now, obviously, not everyone has access to a ton of these resources locally. I know plenty of people live in areas where there just aren't many thrift stores, or used record shops, or flea markets nearby, and in that case, leaning more heavily on online resources makes total sense, and there's nothing wrong with that. Even within online shopping there are more resources beyond just Amazon and eBay worth keeping in mind. There are dedicated marketplaces and community driven sites for buying and selling used media that some collectors swear by, and there are also local buy, sell, trade groups on social media platforms that can be a good source too, especially for finding stuff locally without paying for shipping, and sometimes negotiating a better price directly with a seller. Facebook Marketplace and similar local selling apps have become a pretty solid option for a lot of collectors too, since people are often just trying to offload old collections in bulk and are willing to negotiate, especially if you're picking up in person and saving them the hassle of shipping.

Another thing I'd say, especially if you're just starting out building a collection like I am, is to not get too hung up on chasing specific albums right away. I think it's tempting when you first get into collecting to make a big want list and feel like you need to track down every specific item on it immediately, but that mindset can actually make the process more frustrating and more expensive than it needs to be. If you go in with a more open mindset, being willing to grab stuff that's cheap and interesting even if it wasn't on your radar beforehand, you end up building a collection more organically, and you save a lot of money in the process because you're not paying premium prices to track down one very specific, possibly rare item. Save the hunting for specific rare stuff for later, once you've got a solid base built up from cheap, easy finds.

Pricing is honestly something worth paying attention to as you go too, because it's easy to get taken advantage of if you don't have a baseline sense of what something is actually worth. Before buying something online, especially something that seems priced kind of high, it's worth doing a quick search to see what similar copies have sold for recently, particularly on eBay where you can actually look at sold listings, not just active ones, to get a real sense of market value. Active listings can be wildly overpriced because sellers can list something for whatever they want, but sold listings show you what people are actually paying, which is a much more honest number to go off of. I've saved myself from overpaying more than once just by taking that extra minute to check sold prices before committing to a purchase.

I also think it's worth mentioning condition, since that plays into pricing a lot too, especially with CDs specifically. A lot of the time you can find CDs that are technically used but still in great shape, maybe some light wear on the case, maybe the booklet has a slight crease, but the disc itself plays perfectly fine, and those are honestly the sweet spot for value. You don't need mint, sealed condition unless you're specifically going for collector grade pristine copies, which, fair enough if that's your thing, but if you're just building a collection to actually listen to and enjoy, slightly worn but fully functional copies are going to save you a ton of money compared to chasing sealed or near mint versions of everything.

At the end of the day, I think the real takeaway here is that physical media hunting takes a mix of patience, a willingness to check multiple sources, and honestly just enjoying the process itself rather than treating it purely as a transaction. Between online marketplaces like Amazon and eBay, physical stores like thrift shops and used record stores, and the more unpredictable but often rewarding world of flea markets, there are genuinely a lot of ways to find physical media out there still, even in an era where everything keeps pushing toward digital only. It just takes a little more effort than it used to, and a willingness to actually go looking rather than expecting it to be handed to you instantly the way streaming and digital downloads have trained us to expect. But honestly, I think that extra effort is part of what makes building a physical collection feel meaningful in the first place. If it were as easy as clicking a button, it probably wouldn't feel like nearly as much of an accomplishment when you finally track something down.

So if you're thinking about starting your own physical media collection, whether that's CDs like me, or movies, games, books, whatever it is you're into, don't get discouraged if it feels slow at first or if you're not sure where to start looking. Start with what's accessible to you, whether that's browsing eBay listings during your downtime or checking out a local thrift store on the weekend, and build from there. The collection grows slowly, sure, but that slow growth is honestly part of the fun, and every piece you track down ends up meaning a little more because of the effort it took to find it.

On Starting a CD Collection in a Digital World (Yeah, I Know)

2026-07-11T13:40:13.405-07:00

So a few weeks back I made a post on my Instagram that I honestly didn't think would get the reaction it did, which was basically me announcing, somewhat sheepishly, that I've started a CD collection. And I know how that sounds. In a world where literally everything is streaming, where you can pull up any song ever recorded in about four seconds flat, where your phone holds more music than any physical shelf ever could, here I am going out of my way to buy little plastic discs. It's wild, honestly, even to me, and I laughed a little writing that caption because I could already picture people reading it and going "wait, CDs? like, actual CDs?" Yes. Actual CDs. And I wanted to take some time here, since this is my music blog after all, to actually sit with why I'm doing this, because it's not a decision I made lightly or randomly. It's been building for a while, and I think it says something bigger about where I'm at with music, with ownership, and honestly with physical media in general.

Let me back up a bit first, because context matters here. I'm not new to collecting things. Not even close. I've got a comic book collection that's been growing for years. I've got a manga collection sitting right alongside it. I collect books too, actual physical books, even though I could just as easily read everything on a Kindle or a tablet. I've got a flag collection, which is a weirdly specific one that people don't expect when they hear it, but it's there and it's real. I collect keychains, which started as this small, almost accidental thing and turned into something I actively seek out now when I travel or visit new places. I've got a Funko Pop collection that takes up more shelf space than I probably want to admit. I've got a stuffed plush collection that brings me a kind of comfort that's hard to explain to people who don't get it. And on top of all of that, I've got a video game collection, physical copies, cartridges, discs, cases and all, even in an age where digital downloads make that almost unnecessary. So when you look at all of that together, it's not exactly out of character for me to want physical things. I've always been someone who likes having something I can hold, something I can look at on a shelf, something that exists outside of a screen or a cloud server somewhere. But music, specifically, is the one area where I hadn't really gone that route until now, and I think that's worth digging into.

For most of my life, my relationship with music has been almost entirely digital. I grew up right around the transition, so I had a little bit of the physical era, but not a ton. Mostly I came up in the age of digital downloads, then streaming, then more streaming, and honestly it's been convenient as heck. I've got a massive digital music collection built up over the years, playlists on top of playlists, and I use streaming constantly, just like everyone else does at this point. There's nothing wrong with that. It's efficient, it's accessible, it fits into modern life in a way that physical media just doesn't always manage to do anymore. I'm not here to pretend like digital music is some inferior format or that streaming is ruining music or any of that. I don't believe that. I think digital access to music has been one of the best things to happen for music discovery in general, honestly. But somewhere along the way, I started to feel like something was missing, and it took me a while to actually put my finger on what that something was.

I think part of it is that digital music, for as convenient as it is, doesn't really feel like it belongs to you in the same way physical media does. You don't own a CD the way you own a stream. A CD sits on a shelf. You can hold it. You can look at the artwork, the liner notes, the little booklet that comes tucked inside the case, the way the tracklist is laid out, the little details the artist and the label put thought into that most people don't even think about anymore because streaming stripped all of that away. There's a tactile, physical relationship you build with an album when it's a real object versus just a line item in a digital library. And I didn't fully realize how much I missed that until I started thinking more seriously about physical media in general, which, funny enough, ties into something I actually wrote about over on my gaming blog not that long ago.

See, I made a post over there about the recent decisions from companies like Rockstar and Sony to move away from physical media, or at least to lean much harder into digital-only formats and distribution for a lot of their stuff going forward. And in that post I talked about how I get it, honestly. I understand the business decision. I understand the convenience angle from a consumer side too, because heck, I use Steam constantly. My gaming library is mostly digital at this point, same as my music library, and I'm not going to sit here and act like that hasn't been convenient for me too. No discs to keep track of, no worrying about scratches, no swapping games in and out of a console, just click and play. It makes sense why companies are pushing in that direction, and it makes sense why so many consumers have gone along with it without much resistance. But even while I was writing that post and acknowledging all of that, there was this undercurrent of, I don't know, mourning almost, for physical media as a concept. Because once it's gone, it's gone. You can't get it back easily. And there's something about owning a physical copy of something you love, whether that's a game or an album or a book, that digital ownership just can't replicate, no matter how convenient it is.

That's really where this CD collection idea started to take shape for me. I started thinking about all the media I already collect physically, the comics, the manga, the books, the games, and I realized music was the one glaring gap. I had built this entire identity around being someone who values physical media, who likes having tangible collections of things I care about, and yet the thing I probably care about most, music, existed for me almost entirely as data. Streams, downloads, playlists, all invisible, all intangible, all sitting on servers I don't control and files I don't really "own" in any meaningful sense. And once I started thinking about it that way, it started to bother me a little. Not in a dramatic way, not like I suddenly hated streaming or anything like that, but more like a itch I needed to scratch, you know. Like something had been missing without me fully clocking it until I sat down and thought about it directly.

So I decided to start collecting CDs. And I want to be honest, this collection is small right now. Like, really small. I'm not out here pretending I've got some sprawling music library on physical media already. Right now what I've got is a handful of Blue October CDs, and that's basically it so far. But I think that's actually kind of fitting, honestly, because Blue October is a band that means a lot to me, and starting with them felt right. There's something meaningful about building a collection slowly, intentionally, rather than just buying a giant lot of random CDs off somewhere just to have numbers. I want this collection to actually mean something to me as it grows, the same way my other collections do. My comic collection isn't just comics for the sake of having comics, it's stuff I actually care about. Same with the manga, same with the books, same with basically everything else I collect. So starting small with a band I genuinely love, and letting the collection grow from there naturally, feels like the right way to approach this.

And honestly, the growing part is part of the fun too. I'm not trying to rush out and buy fifty CDs overnight. I like the idea of slowly building this up over time, finding albums here and there, maybe picking up used copies at record stores or thrift shops, maybe ordering specific albums online when I can't find them locally, treating it almost like a little ongoing hunt rather than a one time purchase. There's something satisfying about that process itself, the searching, the anticipation, the moment when you finally track down an album you've been looking for. That's an experience streaming just doesn't give you. When everything is instantly available, there's no hunt, no story behind how you got it. And now that I've got a small physical collection starting, I've actually got stories attached to at least some of it, even if it's early days.

I also picked up a mini CD player, which honestly might be one of my favorite little purchases in a while. There's something almost nostalgic about physically putting a CD into a player and pressing play, even though I never really grew up doing that as my primary way of listening to music. It's a different kind of ritual. You can't just skip instantly to whatever song you want without thinking about it, at least not as effortlessly as you can on a phone. You kind of have to sit with the album as a whole, listen through it the way the artist intended it to be listened to, track by track, in order. And I think that's something we've genuinely lost with the shift to streaming and playlists. Albums used to be experienced as complete works, start to finish, with a flow and a narrative arc to them, and now everything gets chopped up into individual songs that get shuffled into playlists alongside a hundred other unrelated tracks. There's nothing wrong with that exactly, it's just a different way of engaging with music, but having a CD player again lets me go back to that more intentional, album focused way of listening, at least some of the time.

I think what really gets me about this whole thing is how it fits into a bigger picture of what physical media represents, especially now, in an era where companies keep pushing harder and harder toward digital-only everything. When Rockstar and Sony make moves away from physical formats, it's not just a business decision in a vacuum, it's part of this broader trend where ownership itself is becoming this abstract, fragile concept. You don't really own your digital games the way you'd own a cartridge or a disc. You don't really own your digital music the way you'd own a CD. You're licensing access, essentially, and that access can be revoked, altered, or lost depending on decisions made by companies you have basically no control over. A physical CD doesn't disappear because a streaming service loses the rights to an album. A physical CD doesn't vanish because a company decides to shut down a platform. It just sits there, on your shelf, yours, permanently, as long as you take care of it.

And I think that permanence is part of what's pulling me toward building this collection now. It's not that I think streaming is going away anytime soon, or that digital music is somehow doomed. I don't think that at all. I think digital and physical can coexist, and honestly for most of my music consumption day to day, streaming is still going to be the primary way I listen. But I want there to be this physical anchor too, this collection of albums that truly matter to me, that I can hold, that I can look at, that exist independent of any app or platform or subscription. Something that feels like mine in a way that a digital library, no matter how big, never quite manages to.

So yeah, I'm starting a CD collection. It's small right now, just a few Blue October albums and a mini CD player, but it's going to grow, slowly, intentionally, the same way my other collections have grown over the years. And I think it's a fitting addition to everything else I collect, honestly, another piece of this bigger picture of who I am as someone who values physical media, tangible ownership, and the kind of connection you build with things you can actually hold in your hands. I'm excited to see where this collection goes, what albums end up finding their way onto my shelf, and how it grows alongside everything else I already collect. It's a small step, but it feels like the right one, and I wanted to share the thinking behind it here, since this is exactly the kind of thing this blog is for.

The Weight We Carry For Others: Why "Overweight" Is My Blue October Deep Cut

2026-07-03T04:34:59.991-07:00

When Blue October asked their fans on Facebook the other day what their favorite deep cut is, I didn't even have to think about it. The answer arrived instantly, the way certain songs just live in you permanently, tucked into some quiet room of your chest that only opens when the right question is asked. For me, it's "Overweight." Not the singles, not the songs that get played on the radio or show up on curated playlists for people just discovering the band. It's this one, the one that doesn't get talked about nearly enough, the one that opens with a line so simple and so devastating that I still catch my breath a little every time I hear it. Ever carry the weight of another, for how long. That's it. That's the whole thing. Seven words that somehow manage to describe an entire way of moving through the world, an entire personality, an entire life pattern that some of us fall into so naturally we don't even realize we're doing it until a song comes along and names it for us.

I think what gets me most about that opening isn't just the sentiment, it's the phrasing, the way it's framed as a question rather than a statement. It's not "I carry the weight of another." It's "ever carry," like the singer is turning to face you directly, like they already know the answer, like they're not really asking so much as they're recognizing something in you that you've never said out loud. And for me, the answer has always been yes. Not in some abstract, philosophical way, but in a very real, very daily, very exhausting way. I am the kind of person who carries things for other people. I always have been. My friends, my family, strangers I barely know, people who probably have no idea how much space they take up in my head on any given day, I carry pieces of them. Their stress becomes my stress. Their bad days seep into mine. If someone I love is struggling, some part of me is struggling right alongside them, even if I never say a word about it, even if I smile through the whole conversation and tell them everything is going to be okay.

I don't say this to make myself sound noble or self-sacrificing, because honestly, it's not always a virtue. Sometimes it's just a habit, and not always a healthy one. Sometimes it's less about choosing to care and more about not knowing how to not care, which is a very different thing. There's a difference between compassion that flows freely and comes back to you, and compassion that just keeps pouring out until you're running on empty and don't even notice because you've gotten so used to running on empty that it starts to feel normal. That's the tension "Overweight" captures so well, at least for me. It's not really a song about romantic love or heartbreak in the traditional Blue October sense, even though the band is often associated with those raw, confessional, emotionally bruised kinds of songs. This one feels different. It feels like it's speaking directly to the people who function as emotional load-bearing walls in other people's lives, the ones who hold everyone else up and rarely get asked who's holding them.

I've thought about why this resonates with me so specifically, and I think a lot of it comes down to how I'm wired. I'm an ENFJ, and if you know anything about that personality type, you probably already know where this is going. ENFJs are sometimes called "the givers" or "the protagonists," depending on which framework you're reading, but honestly, "the carriers" might be just as accurate. We tend to be extremely attuned to the emotional temperature of a room. We notice when someone's quiet in a way that isn't their usual quiet. We notice when a friend's texts start sounding a little flatter than normal. We notice the things people don't say, and then we quietly start trying to fix them, support them, hold them, without always being asked to. It's not performative. It's not for credit. It's just how we're built. Our attention naturally orients outward, toward the needs of the people around us, sometimes so much so that we lose track of our own needs entirely.

That's the part of being an ENFJ that doesn't get talked about enough, at least outside of niche personality theory corners of the internet. Everyone loves to talk about how warm we are, how good we are at making people feel seen, how naturally we step into supportive or even leadership roles in group settings. And all of that is true. But what's less discussed is the cost of it. The way that caring for everyone else can become such an ingrained reflex that caring for yourself starts to feel foreign, almost like a skill you never developed because you were too busy developing everyone else's. I used to think this was just a personal quirk of mine, something specific to my own history and my own relationships, but the more I've read about the ENFJ type, the more I've realized it's practically a defining feature. We put others first, even when it costs us something. Even when it costs us a lot.

And I want to be careful here, because I don't want this to turn into some kind of self-pitying narrative, because that's not what this is. I'm not trying to paint myself as a martyr or someone who suffers quietly and deserves applause for it. That's not the point. The point is just that "Overweight" put language to something I've felt for a long time but never quite had the words for, and there's something enormously relieving about that, about hearing a song and thinking, oh, someone else understands this, someone else has felt the specific exhaustion of carrying things that were never technically yours to carry. There's comfort in that kind of recognition. Music does that sometimes, it reaches into a part of you that you've never fully articulated, even to yourself, and it just says it plainly, and suddenly you don't feel quite so alone in whatever that thing is.

I think about the people in my life a lot, probably more than is strictly necessary. I think about my friends and whether they're doing okay, really okay, not just okay in the way people say when they don't want to get into it. I think about my family and the quiet weights they carry that they don't always talk about. I think about people I don't even know that well, coworkers, acquaintances, people I've had maybe a handful of real conversations with, and I still find myself hoping things are going well for them, still find myself carrying a little sliver of concern for their wellbeing even though logically I know I can't do much for them and they probably don't expect me to. That's just how my brain works. I care about people in general, not just the people closest to me. It's not something I decided to do, it's something that seems to happen automatically, almost involuntarily, like my empathy doesn't have an off switch, only a volume dial, and even at its lowest setting it's still turned on.

The tricky part, the part that "Overweight" gets at so precisely, is that this kind of caring has a cumulative weight to it. It's not like you carry one person's burden and then set it down and move on. It stacks. You carry a friend's heartbreak, and then a family member's health scare, and then a coworker's bad week, and then a stranger's rough day that you happened to witness in passing, and none of it fully leaves you, it just kind of layers on top of the last thing, until you're walking around holding all of it at once without really noticing how heavy it's gotten. That's the "for how long" part of the lyric that hits just as hard as the first half. It's not just asking if you carry the weight of another, it's asking how long you've been doing it, which implies a kind of chronic, ongoing thing, not a one-time act of kindness but a lifestyle, a default setting, a way of existing that you never consciously chose but that became who you are anyway.

I don't think I'm unique in this. I think a lot of people who hear this song feel exactly what I feel, which is probably part of why it resonates so strongly even as a deep cut, even as a song that never got the radio play or streaming numbers of some of Blue October's bigger hits. Deep cuts have a way of finding exactly the people who need them, almost like they're waiting quietly in the back of an album for the right person to stumble onto them at the right moment in their life. I don't remember exactly when I first heard "Overweight," but I remember the feeling of hearing that opening line and just sitting with it for a second, letting it land, because it felt like someone had reached into a very specific, very private part of my experience and pulled it out into the open without my permission, except in the best possible way.

What I appreciate about the song, beyond just the lyrical content, is how unflinching it is. It doesn't try to wrap up the experience of carrying other people's weight in some neat, redemptive bow. It doesn't pretend that this kind of caregiving, this kind of chronic empathy, is uncomplicated or always healthy. It just names the reality of it, sits in the discomfort of it, and lets the listener draw their own conclusions. That's something I respect a lot in songwriting generally, and Blue October specifically, this willingness to describe emotional experiences honestly rather than tidying them up into something more palatable. So much of their catalog does this, actually, deals with themes of struggle, mental health, addiction, relationships, in ways that don't shy away from the messier, harder-to-look-at parts of being human. "Overweight" fits right into that tradition, even if it's not one of the songs that usually gets mentioned when people talk about the band's most emotionally raw material.

I've been trying, in the last while, to get better about this pattern in myself. To notice when I'm slipping into that automatic mode of caretaking without checking in on whether I have the capacity for it, without asking myself what I actually need in a given moment before rushing to figure out what everyone else needs. It's slow work. I won't pretend I've figured it out or that I've become some perfectly balanced person who cares for others exactly as much as I care for myself. That's not realistic, at least not for me, and maybe not for anyone who's genuinely wired this way. But I think there's value in at least being aware of the pattern, in being able to name it the way this song names it, rather than just moving through life on autopilot, carrying weight after weight without ever asking myself how long I've been doing it or whether it's sustainable.

I also think there's something worth saying about the difference between caring for people because you feel obligated to and caring for people because it genuinely brings you joy, even when it's heavy. For me, most of the time, it's the second thing. I don't resent the people I care about, and I don't think of the weight I carry for them as some kind of burden imposed on me against my will. I choose it, mostly, even if the choosing happens so automatically it barely feels like a conscious decision anymore. There's something deeply meaningful about being the person someone can lean on, about being trusted with someone's hard days, about being the kind of friend or family member or even acquaintance who people feel safe being honest with. I wouldn't trade that away even if I could. But I'm also learning that meaningful doesn't always mean sustainable, and that even the things we choose gladly need boundaries, need moments of rest, need us to occasionally set the weight down and just breathe without anyone else's needs pressing in on us.

That's ultimately what makes "Overweight" my favorite deep cut, more than the melody or the production or any of the more technical elements of the song. It's that it holds space for both sides of this experience at once, the meaning and the exhaustion, the choosing and the cost. It doesn't tell you which one is more true, it just lets them coexist, the way they actually do in real life. And I think that's rare. A lot of songs about caring for others lean hard into either the noble self-sacrifice angle or the burned-out resentment angle, but "Overweight" manages to sit in that uncomfortable middle ground where most of us who do this kind of emotional labor actually live. It doesn't resolve the tension, it just acknowledges it, and sometimes that acknowledgment is more valuable than any resolution could be.

So when Blue October asked what our favorite deep cuts were, this was the one that came to mind immediately, without hesitation, because it's not just a song I like, it's a song that understands something about me that I don't always have the words to explain to other people. It's the soundtrack to a particular kind of exhaustion that doesn't get talked about enough, the exhaustion of people who care too much, who feel too much, who carry too much, not because anyone asked them to but because it's simply who they are. If you've ever carried the weight of another and lost track of how long you've been doing it, I think you'll understand exactly why this one hits the way it does.

Parallel Waves: The Uncanny Echoes Between Keane and Blue October

2026-06-26T14:25:19.081-07:00

It’s funny how certain realizations don’t arrive all at once, but instead build slowly over time—like waves rolling in, each one bringing a slightly clearer picture than the last. I’ve written before about the similarities between Keane and Blue October, and every time I think I’ve exhausted the connections, something new surfaces. Maybe it’s coincidence. Maybe it’s just the way our brains like to find patterns. Or maybe there’s something deeper, something quietly shared between these two bands that goes beyond surface-level comparisons. Either way, the parallels are hard to ignore once you start looking closely.

The most recent thing that caught my attention was purely visual at first. Blue October’s debut album, The Answers, and Keane’s third album, Perfect Symmetry, share a surprisingly similar color scheme. At a glance, it might not seem like much—after all, album art across music history often overlaps in tone and palette. But when you’re already aware of multiple connections between two bands, even something as subtle as color starts to feel meaningful. The warm, almost glowing hues in both artworks give off a similar emotional resonance. It’s not just about aesthetics—it’s about mood. There’s a kind of introspective warmth, a sense of emotional intensity contained within something visually inviting.

Was Keane inspired by Blue October? That’s impossible to say for sure. There’s no clear documentation, no interviews or statements that confirm such a link. But the idea lingers. Artists are constantly absorbing influences, often unconsciously, and sometimes those influences manifest in ways that aren’t immediately obvious. Even if it’s purely coincidental, it still adds another layer to the ongoing comparison. It becomes one more thread in a web of similarities that keeps expanding the more you look at it.

Then there’s the timing—something that feels almost too aligned to ignore. In 2026, Keane’s second album turned 20 years old. That album, Under the Iron Sea, marked a defining moment in their career, pushing their sound into darker, more introspective territory. At the same time, Blue October’s fourth album, Foiled, also hit its 20-year anniversary in 2026. Two completely different bands, two albums released in the same year, both reaching that milestone together two decades later. It’s the kind of synchronicity that doesn’t necessarily mean anything on its own, but when placed alongside everything else, it starts to feel significant.

What makes this even more interesting is the thematic overlap between those two albums. Both Under the Iron Sea and Foiled are, in their own ways, ocean-themed. Not in a literal, conceptual-album sense where every song tells a continuous maritime story, but in a more symbolic and emotional way. Blue October’s Foiled includes “Into the Ocean,” one of their most iconic songs—a track that uses the imagery of the ocean as a metaphor for struggle, escape, and emotional depth. It’s raw, vulnerable, and deeply personal, using the vastness of the sea as a way to express something internal and overwhelming.

Keane’s Under the Iron Sea, on the other hand, leans heavily into aquatic imagery across its entire atmosphere. The album title itself evokes something submerged, something hidden beneath the surface. The music carries a kind of weight and fluidity that mirrors the feeling of being underwater—beautiful, but also isolating. Songs drift and swell in a way that feels almost tidal, capturing a sense of emotional immersion that parallels the themes found in Blue October’s work.

What’s fascinating is how both bands approach similar emotional territory from completely different stylistic angles. Keane, with their piano-driven sound and soaring, melancholic melodies, creates a sense of introspection that feels almost cinematic. Blue October, meanwhile, channels a more raw and direct emotional energy, often blending alternative rock with deeply personal lyricism that cuts straight to the core. And yet, despite these differences, both bands arrive at a similar place—exploring vulnerability, mental health, longing, and the complexities of the human experience.

This is where the ocean metaphor becomes especially powerful. The ocean is vast, unpredictable, and often overwhelming—much like the emotions both bands are known for expressing. It can be calm and reflective one moment, and turbulent the next. It represents depth, mystery, and the idea that there’s always more beneath the surface than what we initially see. In that sense, it’s the perfect shared symbol for two bands that have built their identities around emotional honesty and introspection.

The more I think about it, the more it feels like these parallels aren’t just random coincidences. Even if there’s no direct line of influence connecting Keane and Blue October, they seem to exist in a kind of shared emotional and artistic space. They’re both bands that emerged in the early 2000s, both carving out a niche that blends alternative rock with deeply personal storytelling. They both have a way of making music that feels intimate, almost confessional, while still being accessible and widely relatable.

And maybe that’s the real connection—not shared producers, not direct inspiration, not even similar album art or release dates, but something more abstract. A shared sensibility. A similar way of translating emotion into sound. When two artists are working within the same emotional framework, it’s almost inevitable that certain parallels will emerge, whether intentional or not.

Still, it’s hard not to be intrigued by how specific some of these overlaps are. The color similarities between The Answersand Perfect Symmetry. The synchronized 20-year anniversaries of Under the Iron Sea and Foiled. The ocean imagery that runs through both albums. Each individual connection might be easy to dismiss on its own, but together, they form a pattern that feels too cohesive to completely ignore.

And then there’s something even deeper—something that goes beyond albums, visuals, or release timelines. It’s the people behind the music. Because when you start looking at the personal histories of Justin Furstenfeld and Tom Chaplin, another layer of similarity emerges, and this one feels far more human than anything else.

Both artists have been open about their struggles. Both have navigated difficult periods involving mental health, identity, and the pressures that come with success and expectation. Their journeys haven’t been smooth, and that’s part of what makes their music resonate so deeply. There’s an authenticity there that can’t be manufactured. When they sing about pain, it doesn’t feel abstract—it feels lived in.

Justin’s songwriting often feels like reading pages torn directly from a diary—unfiltered, intense, and unafraid to confront uncomfortable truths. Tom, in his own way, channels that same emotional weight through a different lens—more restrained on the surface, but no less powerful underneath. There’s a quiet vulnerability in his voice that carries just as much impact.

And it’s this shared emotional background that makes the idea of a collaboration between Keane and Blue October feel not just interesting, but almost natural. Not in a commercial, surface-level sense, but in a way that could genuinely produce something meaningful. Imagine those two perspectives coming together—Justin’s raw, confessional intensity meeting Tom’s soaring, reflective melancholy. It wouldn’t just be a crossover of styles; it would be a convergence of emotional worlds.

Of course, there’s no indication that such a collaboration is actually in the works. It might never happen. But the idea itself feels believable because of everything else that lines up between them. The parallels in their music, their themes, their timing, their visual aesthetics—and now, even their personal journeys. At a certain point, it stops feeling like a stretch and starts feeling like a missed opportunity waiting to happen.

Even if it never becomes reality, it’s still fascinating to think about. Because sometimes, the connections between artists don’t need to be officially acknowledged to be real in a different sense. They exist in the way listeners experience the music, in the patterns we notice, in the emotional threads we follow from one band to another.

In the end, whether Keane and Blue October ever collaborate or not, the similarities between them have already created something meaningful. They’ve shaped the way their music can be experienced—not just individually, but in conversation with each other. And that, in itself, is a kind of collaboration, even if it’s one that exists purely in the minds of listeners.

And knowing me, this probably won’t be the last time I find another similarity between them. There’s always something new waiting to be noticed, another thread to pull on, another connection to explore. Some might call it overthinking. I call it paying attention.

Because sometimes, the most interesting stories in music aren’t the ones that are explicitly told—but the ones that quietly reveal themselves when you start looking a little closer.

A Trailer, a Tide, and Twenty Years of "Into the Ocean"

2026-06-26T14:24:30.611-07:00

This post was written on 6/24/2026.

Today is June 24, 2026, and Netflix finally let the world see "The One Piece," the WIT Studio remake of Eiichiro Oda's manga that fans have been waiting on since it was first announced back in December of 2023. The teaser dropped at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival, and within hours it was everywhere, splitting opinions the way only a beloved, decades-old franchise can when it gets a new coat of paint. Some viewers are thrilled by the cleaner animation and the fluidity of the fight choreography, while others are mourning the loss of the scrappy, lived-in texture of the Toei original that's been airing since 1999. That tension is the whole story of a remake, isn't it, you're not just updating visuals, you're asking an entire fanbase to renegotiate its relationship with something it has loved unconditionally for a quarter century.

What caught my attention, though, wasn't just the animation debate, it was the timing. Because this trailer landed in 2026, the same calendar year that Blue October's album "Foiled" turns twenty years old. "Foiled" came out on April 4, 2006, and it became the band's breakout record, the one that finally got them on the Billboard charts, the one that turned "Hate Me" and "Into the Ocean" into the songs people still associate with Blue October above everything else they've ever recorded. Two decades later, the band is marking the anniversary with vinyl reissues and a tour where they're playing the album front to back, which tells you everything about how much that record still means to people. And somewhere in that same stretch of calendar, completely unrelated on paper, Netflix dropped a trailer for a show about pirates chasing a treasure across an endless ocean.

I don't think these two things are connected in any official sense, there's no press release linking WIT Studio to Blue October, no soundtrack announcement confirming any of this. But sometimes the universe hands you a coincidence so clean you can't help but run with it, and this is one of those. Because "Into the Ocean" isn't just a song with the word ocean in the title, it's a song about being pulled under by something bigger than yourself, about drifting, about the terror and the relief of letting go and seeing where the current takes you. Justin Furstenfeld wrote it during a stretch of his life when he was untethered, living in Los Angeles, putting together demos for what would eventually become "Foiled," and you can hear that unmoored quality in every line of it. It's a song about surrender to water, literal and emotional both, and that is, when you boil it all the way down, what "One Piece" has been about since chapter one.

Luffy doesn't even know how to swim, that's the joke that's been baked into the premise since the very beginning, a boy who ate a Devil Fruit that grants him incredible power at the cost of being permanently vulnerable to the one element that defines his entire world. He can't swim, and yet he spends every single day of his life out on the open water, chasing something that may or may not even exist, trusting a crew of equally broken, equally hopeful people to keep him afloat when the ocean inevitably tries to claim him. That's not just an adventure premise, that's the emotional architecture of the entire franchise, and it's almost eerie how well "Into the Ocean" maps onto it without ever having been written with Luffy in mind. The lyric isn't about pirates, obviously, it's about a relationship, about being swept into something that scares you and excites you in equal measure, but strip away the specific context and what you're left with is a universal feeling of being pulled into deep water and choosing, against every instinct, to stop fighting it.

That's why I think "Into the Ocean" belongs somewhere on "The One Piece" soundtrack, whether as a needle drop in a key episode or as something woven into a trailer down the line. Soundtracks for big anime remakes get a lot of scrutiny, and based on the reactions to today's teaser, the score is already one of the more contested elements of this whole rollout. Longtime fans have pointed out that the new music doesn't carry the same emotional weight as the themes they grew up with, the orchestral swells and the openings that have lived in their heads for over a thousand episodes. That's a real challenge for any remake, you're competing with nostalgia, and nostalgia almost always wins unless you give people something that earns its place rather than simply replacing what came before. A song like "Into the Ocean" earns its place because it's not trying to out-orchestra anything, it's a rock song with a confessional core, and it would land as a needle drop the way "Lust for Life" landed in "The Wolf of Wall Street," not as background music but as a thesis statement.

Picture it for a second, the East Blue Saga is where this first season is staying, according to everything that's been reported about the seven-episode run, which means we're getting Luffy's earliest days, the recruitment of Zoro and Nami and Usopp and eventually Sanji, the formation of a found family that doesn't know yet how big its world is about to get. There's a moment in nearly every adaptation of this saga, official or fan-made, where Luffy stands on the deck of the Going Merry and looks out at water that goes further than he can see, and that shot, that exact beat, is begging for a song like "Into the Ocean" to swell underneath it. Not as a literal narration of the scene, but as emotional shorthand, the audience feeling the vertigo of stepping into something vast and uncertain at the same moment the character does. Music supervisors do this kind of thing constantly, they reach for a song that isn't about the show at all but somehow says everything the show is trying to say, and "Into the Ocean" is sitting right there, two decades deep into cultural memory, just waiting to be repurposed.

There's also something poetic about the math itself, the fact that "Foiled" turns twenty in the same year this remake finally shows its face after three years of waiting. Twenty years is long enough for a song to become a generational touchstone, the kind of track that soundtracked breakups and road trips and late nights for an entire cohort of people who are now in their thirties and forties, the exact demographic that grew up reading "One Piece" or watching the early Toei episodes when they first aired. If you were a teenager in 2006 falling apart to "Into the Ocean," you were probably also a teenager discovering Luffy and his crew for the first time, and now, twenty years later, both things are being revisited simultaneously, one through anniversary vinyl and a victory lap tour, the other through a total reinvention aimed at a new generation. There's a strange symmetry there, an old song getting a fresh spotlight at the exact moment an old story gets a fresh face, and if Netflix or WIT Studio wanted to make a statement about continuity, about old and new coexisting, dropping that song into the new soundtrack would do it without saying a single word.

Of course, none of this is confirmed, and it's worth being honest about that, this is speculation built on a coincidence of timing and a thematic alignment that feels too good to be accidental even though it almost certainly is. Soundtrack decisions for a project like this are made up of a lot of unglamorous, complicated factors, licensing costs, the composer's original vision, what the director wants the emotional palette of each episode to feel like. "Into the Ocean" might never make it anywhere near the final cut, and the people actually making these decisions might not have even thought about Blue October once during the entire production process. But that's sort of the fun of being a fan watching something get built in real time, you get to throw your own associations onto the canvas before anyone official tells you you're wrong, and sometimes the connections you draw say more about why you love the story in the first place than any official announcement ever could.

So today we got a trailer, divisive, ambitious, clearly the product of a studio trying to thread an impossible needle between honoring twenty-five years of source material and making something that feels alive for people who've never opened a single volume of the manga. And this year we also get to watch a band celebrate the twentieth birthday of the record that made them, touring the country playing a song about being swallowed by water you can't control. Two anniversaries, two oceans, one coincidence that probably means nothing and feels like it means everything anyway. If "The One Piece" ever does drop "Into the Ocean" into an episode, I will absolutely take credit for calling it, and if it doesn't, I'm still going to play that song the next time I watch Luffy stare out at the horizon and decide, against every rational impulse, to keep going anyway.

The Furstenfeld Theory: Why the Best Justin in Music Isn't the One You're Thinking Of

2026-06-21T10:10:53.294-07:00

There is a strange parlor game that exists in the corners of music nerd culture, a kind of bracket nobody officially built but everyone seems to understand instinctively, and it goes something like this, if you had to rank the most culturally significant Justins in popular music, who comes out on top, and the immediate gut reaction for most people is to reach for the two names that dominate headlines and streaming charts, Justin Timberlake and Justin Bieber, two men who built empires out of boy band beginnings and solo reinventions, who have sold more records combined than most countries have citizens, who are, by any conventional metric of fame, untouchable. And yet, if you actually sit with the question, not as a popularity contest but as a question about who has done the most interesting, emotionally resonant, technically impressive work as a vocalist and songwriter, the answer quietly drifts toward a name most casual listeners have never said out loud, Justin Furstenfeld, the frontman of Blue October, a band that has spent over two decades making music that trades stadium polish for something rawer, stranger, and ultimately more honest.

This is not a knock on craftsmanship, because Timberlake and Bieber are both, undeniably, gifted performers, but craftsmanship and depth are not the same currency. Timberlake came out of the Mickey Mouse Club and NSync, and somewhere along the way managed the rare trick of becoming a credible solo artist, leaning into falsetto, Timbaland-produced funk, and a kind of suave, Justified-era confidence that made him feel like the heir to Michael Jackson's pop throne. His vocal control is real, his pocket and timing are immaculate, and songs like Cry Me a River and What Goes Around Comes Around show a man who understood how to weaponize heartbreak into something danceable. Bieber, for his part, took a different but equally impressive path, starting as a teenage YouTube phenomenon and slowly clawing his way into being taken seriously, with Purpose marking a genuine creative leap and later work showing flashes of real vulnerability, particularly when he started writing more candidly about marriage, faith, and mental health. Both men have range, both have hits that will outlive most of us, and both have proven they can evolve.

But evolution toward polish is not the same as evolution toward truth, and this is where Furstenfeld separates himself from the pack in a way that matters more the longer you listen to his catalog. Blue October's music, especially in albums like Foiled and Approaching Normal, is built almost entirely out of confession, out of a man dragging his own worst moments into the light and setting them to music without much concern for whether it sounds commercially safe. Furstenfeld has talked openly about his struggles with bipolar disorder, addiction, and the kind of personal collapse that ends marriages and friendships, and instead of sanitizing that into vague pop platitudes about heartbreak, he names it, he sits in it, he lets the listener watch him fall apart in real time. Hate Me is the obvious example, a song so specific and so unflinchingly self-critical that it almost feels uncomfortable to listen to, like reading someone's diary without permission, and that discomfort is exactly the point. Pop music built around relatability tends to smooth out the edges so everyone can see themselves in it, but Furstenfeld does the opposite, he gets so specific about his own pain that it becomes universal precisely because it refuses to generalize.

Vocally, Furstenfeld doesn't have Timberlake's silky falsetto or Bieber's pop sheen, but he has something rarer, a voice that cracks exactly where it needs to crack, that strains and breaks and recovers in ways that feel less like vocal performance and more like emotional necessity. There's a rasp in his upper register that sounds like it costs him something to produce, and that cost is audible, and that audibility is the entire appeal. Where Timberlake's vocal choices often serve the groove, and Bieber's often serve the melody, Furstenfeld's vocal choices seem to serve only the truth of the moment, even when that truth is messy, even when it would have been easier to clean it up. That is not a small thing, and it is the kind of thing that separates artists who make you dance from artists who make you sit very still and stare at a wall for a few minutes after the song ends.

Songwriting is really where the gap becomes impossible to ignore. Timberlake's best songs are often co-written with elite producers and writers, which is not a criticism, that is how most modern pop works, but it does mean the emotional architecture of his songs is frequently a collaborative invention rather than a direct transmission from his own life. Bieber's catalog similarly leans on outside writers for much of its emotional framing, even when his personal experiences clearly inform the themes. Furstenfeld, by contrast, writes from a place that feels almost dangerously personal, songs about his daughter, about his divorce, about staring down his own worst impulses, and he does it with a lyrical specificity that pop radio rarely rewards but that real music fans recognize instantly as the good stuff. There's a reason Blue October built a devoted, almost cult-like fanbase rather than a mainstream juggernaut audience, the band trades scale for intimacy, and that trade produces music that rewards repeated, careful listening in a way that radio hits, built for instant impact, often don't.

None of this means Timberlake and Bieber are lesser artists in some absolute sense, because greatness in music isn't one dimensional, and there's a strong case that pure vocal technique, performance charisma, and cultural impact favor both of them heavily. But if the question is specifically about who writes and sings with the most unguarded honesty, who takes the biggest creative risks with their own personal material, who makes music that feels less like a product and more like a confession booth with a drum kit in it, Furstenfeld wins, and he wins by a wide margin. He is, in essence, the songwriter's songwriter of the three, the one other musicians quietly respect even if mainstream audiences never fully caught on, and that kind of respect tends to age better than chart positions.

And yet, here is the strange twist in all of this, the part that should not make sense but somehow does, despite genuinely believing Furstenfeld is the superior artist of the three when judged on depth, honesty, and songwriting courage, there is something deeply appealing about the idea of all three of them collaborating on a single project together. Not a novelty single, not a stunt, but a genuine creative collision, because the contrast between these three approaches is exactly what makes the idea so compelling. Timberlake brings rhythm, groove, and an instinct for pop architecture that could give a song commercial muscle without gutting its soul. Bieber brings a modern vocal sensibility and an audience that skews younger, an audience that might never otherwise encounter the kind of raw, confessional songwriting Furstenfeld specializes in. And Furstenfeld brings the emotional gravity, the lyrical risk taking, the willingness to make a song actually hurt a little, which is the ingredient most mainstream pop collaborations are missing entirely.

Imagine a track structured the way a great film uses contrasting actors, where Furstenfeld writes and sings the verses, raw and specific and a little uncomfortable, the kind of lines that make you feel like you walked in on something private, and then Timberlake takes the bridge, smoothing the chaos into something rhythmic and controlled, using his falsetto to translate that rawness into something with more groove and lift, and then Bieber closes the song with a vocal run that ties it together for a generation of listeners who might otherwise never click on a Blue October song in their life. The genre blending alone would be fascinating, because you'd be forcing alternative rock's emotional bluntness to coexist with pop's structural polish and contemporary R&B's vocal flourish, three different musical languages trying to have the same conversation, and when that kind of cross genre experiment works, it tends to produce something that none of the three could have made alone.

There's also something almost poetic about the idea on a purely narrative level, three men who all share a first name, who all came up through wildly different paths, one through boy band stardom that became sophisticated R&B pop, one through internet virality that became global pop dominance, and one through underground rock confessionalism that became a devoted cult following, all converging on a single song. It would be a strange kind of statement about how many different roads can lead to the same destination, which is simply making people feel something real, even if the methods couldn't be more different. Furstenfeld doesn't need Timberlake or Bieber's platform to validate his artistry, his fans already know what he's capable of, but a collaboration could expose his songwriting to an audience that has spent years only hearing him through the narrow lens of one or two radio singles. Likewise, Timberlake and Bieber, both of whom have flirted with more vulnerable, stripped down material as their careers have matured, could benefit creatively from working alongside someone who has built an entire career on refusing to flinch away from difficult emotional material.

There's precedent, in a loose sense, for unlikely pairings producing surprisingly great results, music history is full of moments where artists from wildly different worlds collided and made something neither side could have predicted, and those moments tend to be remembered far longer than the safe, predictable collaborations that dominate awards season. A Furstenfeld, Timberlake, and Bieber collaboration would not be safe, it would not be predictable, and that unpredictability is exactly why it would be worth hearing. It wouldn't need to be a long term partnership or a tour or anything resembling a supergroup, even a single song, even an unexpected feature on one of their albums, would be enough to test the theory, and the theory is simple, that creative tension between vastly different approaches to vulnerability, performance, and craft often produces something more interesting than three artists comfortably staying in their own lane.

The theoretical collaboration doesn't have to stay theoretical, because there's actually a blueprint for it already sitting in the math of these three songs, and the blueprint starts with Into the Ocean carrying the instrumental. That song has a chord progression and a tempo that feels almost built for layering, moody and atmospheric without being sluggish, with enough rhythmic pocket underneath the gloom that it could comfortably hold other vocal lines on top of it without losing its identity. The idea would be to let Furstenfeld's instrumental do the emotional heavy lifting, the bassline and guitar tone setting a tone that's a little aching and a little restless, and then let Can't Stop the Feeling and Peaches trade off vocally on top of that foundation, alternating verses or even trading lines within the same verse, two completely different pop sensibilities taking turns riding the same wave.

This isn't just a hypothetical, because I actually built this exact mashup myself a few years ago, pairing the vocals of Can't Stop the Feeling directly onto the instrumental of Into the Ocean, and the result was honestly startling, in the best way. On paper those two songs shouldn't have anything in common, one is a maximalist, horn-driven, impossible to sit still pop anthem, and the other is a brooding alt rock confession about drowning and emotional exhaustion, and yet the moment the vocals locked into the instrumental, something clicked that had no business clicking that well. The tempo matched almost perfectly, the key relationship worked without much fighting, and the contrast between Timberlake's buoyant, sunshine vocal delivery and Furstenfeld's heavier, moodier instrumental created this strange emotional tension, like joy and dread shaking hands, and it somehow made both songs feel more interesting than they did on their own. I never got to post it because YouTube's copyright detection shut it down before it could see daylight, which is its own kind of frustrating irony, a mashup good enough to get flagged instantly but never good enough to actually be heard by anyone outside my own headphones.

Peaches is the trickier piece of the puzzle, because its original tempo and lazy, sun-drenched groove doesn't naturally sit in the same pocket as Into the Ocean's more urgent low end, but that's a solvable problem rather than a dealbreaker. Speeding up Peaches even slightly and nudging the pitch upward would tighten its laid back drawl into something with a bit more forward motion, enough to match the momentum of the instrumental without sanding off what makes Bieber's vocal performance on that track so distinct, that breathy, almost whispered delivery that relies on space and groove rather than power. Once the tempo and pitch are adjusted to fit, Peaches could slide into the second verse or function as a kind of vocal bridge, handing off from Furstenfeld's mood and Timberlake's brightness into something cooler and more restrained, completing a three way vocal conversation atop a single unified instrumental. The fact that this isn't just theory, that it's been tested in miniature and it actually worked, is what makes the larger collaboration idea feel less like fantasy booking and more like something with real sonic logic behind it.

So the final answer to the parlor game is a strange but confident one, Justin Furstenfeld is the better Justin when it comes to the deeper, harder to fake qualities that separate good music from great music, the honesty, the lyrical risk, the willingness to let a song actually cost something emotionally, and Timberlake and Bieber, for all their commercial success and genuine vocal talent, simply haven't built their careers around that same kind of unguarded confession. But greatness doesn't have to exist in isolation, and the idea of these three very different Justins occupying the same song, the same studio, the same creative space, even briefly, is too interesting an idea to dismiss just because it doesn't fit neatly into a ranking. Sometimes the most compelling music doesn't come from picking a winner, it comes from forcing very different winners to sit in the same room and see what happens when their instincts collide.

Blue October x Mitski: The “Crazy” Collaboration That Could Become Something Legendary

2026-06-19T23:59:54.250-07:00

There are certain collaborations in music that make immediate sense. The kind where audiences hear the announcement and instantly understand the vision. Same genre. Same audience. Same aesthetic. Safe combinations that feel inevitable before a single note is even recorded.

And then there are collaborations that initially sound completely insane.

The ones that make people pause because the artists seem to exist in entirely different musical universes. The pairings that sound random until you actually stop and think about them for longer than five seconds.

That is exactly what happened to me when I started thinking about Blue October and Mitski.

Because at first glance, it sounds absurd.

But the more you think about it, the more disturbingly perfect it becomes.

And honestly? If Blue October’s next album after Spinning The Truth Around Part II eventually embraces collaborations with newer alternative artists, Mitski might genuinely be one of the smartest possible choices.

Not because she is trendy.

Not because it would guarantee streaming numbers.

Not because it would suddenly make Blue October “relevant” again.

But because emotionally, atmospherically, and artistically, this collaboration actually makes an incredible amount of sense.

Especially modern Blue October.

That distinction matters.

If this were 2006 Blue October, maybe it would not work. That version of the band was emotionally explosive, chaotic, unpredictable, and operating almost entirely through raw emotional catharsis. But Blue October in 2026 is different. Older. More restrained. More cinematic. More reflective. They still carry emotional intensity, but now they understand silence, atmosphere, pacing, and emotional tension in ways younger versions of the band did not always prioritize.

And weirdly enough, that evolution brings them much closer to the emotional territory Mitski already thrives within.

Because underneath the genre labels, both artists understand the same thing:

Loneliness as atmosphere.

Not just sadness.

Not just heartbreak.

An emotional environment.

That is the connection people miss.

The best collaborations are not built around matching genres. They are built around matching emotional frequencies. And Mitski and Blue October oddly operate on neighboring emotional wavelengths despite sounding different on the surface.

Both artists understand emotional isolation in cinematic ways. Both understand restraint. Both know how to weaponize silence inside songs. Both allow instrumentation to carry emotional meaning instead of merely filling sonic space.

And perhaps most importantly, both artists deeply understand atmosphere.

Especially orchestral atmosphere.

That is another massive reason this collaboration could genuinely work musically rather than just conceptually.

People often think of Blue October strictly as an alt-rock band, but they have never really operated like a traditional guitar-driven rock group. Even during their heaviest eras, they leaned heavily into strings, piano, ambient textures, cinematic layering, emotional swells, and theatrical instrumentation. Songs like “Into the Ocean,” “18th Floor Balcony,” “Fear,” “The End,” and especially “Congratulations” all rely on atmosphere and orchestral emotion as much as rock structure itself.

And Mitski absolutely operates in that same emotional space.

She understands how orchestral instruments can function psychologically inside a song rather than simply sounding pretty. Strings in Mitski songs often feel emotionally oppressive, distant, haunting, or devastatingly intimate. The arrangements become part of the emotional storytelling itself.

Blue October does this too.

Just differently.

Which is why the overlap becomes fascinating.

And honestly, there is already historical proof that Blue October can thrive in this exact kind of collaboration.

People forget that back in 2006, Blue October collaborated with Imogen Heap on “Congratulations.”

And looking back now, that collaboration feels wildly ahead of its time.

Because Imogen Heap occupied a strangely similar cultural role during the 2000s that Mitski occupies now. Not identical musically, obviously. But spiritually? Absolutely.

Imogen Heap represented emotionally intelligent atmospheric alternative music. Art-pop sensibilities. Emotional vulnerability. Cinematic production. A slightly outside-the-mainstream artistic identity that deeply resonated with emotionally isolated listeners.

Sound familiar?

That is exactly why the Mitski idea is not actually random at all.

Blue October has already proven they can create emotionally devastating music with artists operating in that atmospheric emotionally complex alternative space.

And honestly, “Congratulations” remains one of the most haunting songs in their entire catalog specifically because of that contrast. Justin Furstenfeld’s emotional intensity combined with Imogen Heap’s almost ghostlike emotional distance created something larger than a normal duet. She did not merely feature on the song.

She altered its emotional gravity.

And Mitski could absolutely do the same thing in her own way.

Which brings everything full circle to what might be the most fascinating idea of all:

What if Blue October revisited “Congratulations” itself?

Because now the timing becomes almost poetic.

Blue October recently released a music video for “Congratulations” nearly twenty years after the song originally came out. And that fact alone already feels emotionally symbolic. Songs do not randomly re-enter artists’ lives after two decades unless they still emotionally matter to them somehow.

Especially songs like “Congratulations.”

That song always felt strangely timeless even back in 2006. Less tied to trends. More cinematic. More emotionally suspended in space. In some ways, it almost sounds closer to modern Blue October than the era it originally came from.

And honestly, a modern reimagining of “Congratulations” featuring Mitski could become something extraordinary.

Not a remake.

Not nostalgia bait.

A reinterpretation.

A continuation.

Almost like an emotional conversation across generations of alternative music.

Originally, “Congratulations” featured Imogen Heap, an artist who represented emotionally atmospheric art-pop during the 2000s. Now imagine the song reborn twenty years later with Mitski, an artist who occupies a similarly influential emotional-art-space for modern alternative audiences.

That is not replacing the original.

That is honoring its lineage.

Almost like the song itself survived long enough to evolve into another era.

And emotionally, the themes of “Congratulations” would probably hit even harder now than they did twenty years ago.

Because time changes songs.

Time changes voices.

Time changes meaning.

Justin Furstenfeld singing those lyrics in 2026 would not emotionally sound the same as Justin Furstenfeld singing them in 2006. The years themselves would become part of the performance. The song would carry the weight of survival, aging, memory, reflection, regret, healing, and emotional endurance.

And Mitski’s voice would fit that atmosphere perfectly.

Not by overpowering the song.

By haunting it.

Imagine a slower, more orchestral arrangement.

Minimal percussion.

Soft piano.

Wide ambient strings.

Maybe cello carrying emotional tension underneath everything.

Justin’s voice sounding older, more reflective, more weathered.

And Mitski entering almost like memory itself.

Not dramatic.

Not explosive.

Quietly devastating.

That kind of arrangement would perfectly fit both artists because both Blue October and Mitski understand how orchestral music can carry emotional weight without becoming melodramatic. The instrumentation itself becomes part of the psychological atmosphere.

And honestly, orchestral instrumentation ages beautifully.

That matters.

Songs built around trendy production often become trapped in their original era. But strings, piano, ambient textures, and cinematic arrangements tend to evolve gracefully with time. Which is probably why “Congratulations” still emotionally works two decades later.

The emotional architecture of the song was always strong.

A modern orchestral reinterpretation with Mitski could reveal that even more clearly.

And visually? The possibilities are unbelievable.

Imagine the music video.

Texas highways at dusk.

Empty motels.

Faded neon signs.

Late-night diners.

Long silences.

Memory imagery.

A visual atmosphere suspended somewhere between emotional collapse and emotional acceptance.

Not flashy.

Not overproduced.

Just deeply human.

That aesthetic would fit both Mitski and Blue October almost perfectly.

And honestly, this collaboration would symbolize something bigger than one song.

It would represent the emotional continuity of alternative music itself.

People often act like emotionally vulnerable alternative music disappeared after the mid-2000s. But it did not disappear.

It evolved.

Some of it became indie rock.

Some became atmospheric art-pop.

Some became bedroom pop.

Some became dreamlike folk.

The emotional DNA survived even as genres changed shape.

Blue October collaborating with Mitski would almost acknowledge that lineage directly.

Imogen Heap represented one era of emotionally atmospheric alternative music.

Mitski represents another.

Blue October somehow emotionally connects to both worlds.

And that honestly says something fascinating about the band itself.

Because Blue October was never really just a standard alt-rock band. Even at their peak, they felt emotionally stranger than many of the bands around them. Too theatrical for some rock audiences. Too emotionally sincere for the irony-heavy culture of the 2000s. Too cinematic to fully fit inside straightforward radio-rock formulas.

Which might actually be why they lasted.

Bands trapped entirely inside one era often fade with that era.

Bands slightly outside their era sometimes survive longer emotionally.

And honestly, Blue October has earned the right to experiment creatively now more than ever.

Not chase trends.

Not desperately seek relevance.

Experiment.

There is a difference.

Too many legacy bands collaborate with younger artists from a place of insecurity. Audiences can feel that immediately. But this would not feel like that. A Mitski collaboration would feel artistically plausible because the emotional overlap already exists naturally.

It would feel sincere.

And sincerity is something both artists understand deeply.

Which is why this “crazy” idea might actually be one of the smartest artistic directions Blue October could take moving forward.

Not because it would dominate charts.

Not because it would go viral.

But because it could create something emotionally timeless.

Something atmospheric.

Something orchestral.

Something haunting.

Something neither artist would likely create alone.

And honestly?

That is what great collaborations are supposed to do.

Blue October Helped Me Become a Better Saxophone Player

2026-06-15T09:33:19.859-07:00

People often ask musicians what inspired them to pick up an instrument or what helped them improve over time. Sometimes the answer is formal lessons, expensive classes, music school, or endless hours of technical exercises.

For me, a huge part of my growth as a saxophone player has come from something much simpler.

Listening to and playing along with Blue October songs.

I've been practicing saxophone for years now. I don't consider myself a professional musician by any means. I play because I genuinely enjoy it. It's therapeutic. It's creative. It allows me to express emotions that sometimes words cannot fully capture. Over the years, I've discovered that some of my biggest improvements haven't come from scales or practice books alone. They've come from finding music that challenges me, connects with me emotionally, and motivates me to keep picking up the instrument even on days when I don't feel like practicing.

Blue October has been one of those bands.

What's fascinating is that Blue October's catalog spans so many different eras, styles, moods, tempos, and emotional landscapes. Because of that variety, their music has unintentionally become one of the best practice tools I've ever had.

Every song teaches me something different.

Learning Through Emotion

One of the reasons Blue October works so well for me is because their music is emotional.

Music isn't just notes on a page.

It's storytelling.

It's vulnerability.

It's energy.

It's pain.

It's hope.

When I play along with Blue October songs, I don't feel like I'm simply practicing an instrument. I feel like I'm trying to communicate something.

That emotional connection makes me want to improve.

It makes me pay attention to dynamics, phrasing, timing, and expression in ways that simple exercises sometimes don't.

The songs make me want to get better because I want to do them justice.

"Fear" – Learning Control and Dynamics

One song that has helped me tremendously is "Fear."

This song taught me a lot about control.

It's not overly fast or technically overwhelming, but that doesn't make it easy. In fact, sometimes slower songs can be much harder because they expose every mistake.

The sustained notes require breath support and consistency.

The emotional buildup throughout the song taught me about dynamics. Learning when to play softly, when to build intensity, and when to pull back became important.

Playing "Fear" reminded me that music isn't always about showing off technical skill.

Sometimes it's about restraint.

Sometimes it's about allowing simple notes to carry emotional weight.

As a saxophone player, that was an important lesson.

"Into the Ocean" – Developing Endurance and Expression

Then there's "Into the Ocean."

This has become one of my favorite songs to practice.

Emotionally, it's a powerful song. Musically, it requires maintaining focus throughout multiple sections that shift in intensity.

This song helped me work on endurance.

Longer phrases forced me to think more carefully about breathing.

It also helped me develop expression.

The song carries such emotional depth that simply playing the notes wasn't enough. I found myself trying to match the feeling behind the music.

That challenge pushed me beyond technical accuracy.

It encouraged me to become more musical.

"Everlasting Friend" – Finding Warmth in Simplicity

"Everlasting Friend" taught me something different.

Not every song needs to be difficult to be valuable practice.

Sometimes simplicity is exactly what you need.

This song encouraged me to focus on tone quality.

How warm was my sound?

Was I rushing?

Was I actually listening to what I was playing?

Was I allowing the melody to breathe?

These questions helped improve my musicianship.

Playing slower, more reflective pieces can often reveal weaknesses that faster songs hide.

I learned that improvement doesn't always come from complexity.

Sometimes it comes from mastering the basics.

"I Hope You're Happy" – Confidence and Energy

If there's one Blue October song that has probably helped me the most recently, it's "I Hope You're Happy."

I've talked before about how much I enjoy playing this song.

It has energy.

It has momentum.

It has attitude.

The faster pace challenged my coordination and timing.

Transitions between sections forced me to become more comfortable moving around the instrument quickly and accurately.

Most importantly, this song helped build confidence.

There is something incredibly satisfying about successfully playing along with a song that once felt intimidating.

It reminds you that progress is happening, even if it's gradual.

The songs that once seemed impossible slowly become manageable.

Then they become enjoyable.

Then they become favorites.

That realization is one of the most rewarding parts of learning an instrument.

"Oh My My" – Adapting to Different Styles

One of the biggest benefits of practicing Blue October songs is learning adaptability.

"Oh My My" represents a different style and energy compared to some of their earlier work.

This variety forced me to adjust.

Different songs require different approaches.

Different articulation.

Different phrasing.

Different emotional tones.

Being exposed to these variations helped me avoid becoming stuck in one style of playing.

It expanded my musical flexibility.

As musicians, we often grow the most when we're willing to step outside our comfort zones.

Blue October's evolving sound naturally encouraged me to do that.

"Blue Skies" – Emotional Storytelling Through Music

Perhaps one of the most important lessons came from "Blue Skies."

This song reminded me that music tells stories.

When playing saxophone, I sometimes focus so much on technical execution that I forget about communication.

But songs like "Blue Skies" brought me back to that idea.

Music is meant to make people feel something.

Even if no one else hears me practicing, I want to feel connected to what I'm playing.

I want the notes to mean something.

I want the performance to have emotional honesty.

This song reinforced that philosophy.

Technique matters.

Practice matters.

Accuracy matters.

But emotional connection matters too.

One Band, Many Lessons

What amazes me most is that all of these lessons came from one band.

One band.

Multiple eras.

Multiple albums.

Multiple emotional experiences.

Each song contributed something unique to my development.

Some taught timing.

Others taught dynamics.

Some improved endurance.

Others strengthened breath control.

Some challenged my technical ability.

Others deepened my emotional expression.

I don't think there's a perfect collection of songs for learning an instrument.

Everyone finds inspiration differently.

For me, Blue October happened to become that source of inspiration.

Why Familiar Music Matters

I think there's value in practicing songs you genuinely love.

Traditional exercises absolutely have their place.

Scales are important.

Technical studies are important.

Fundamentals matter.

But practicing music you connect with emotionally can sustain motivation in a way that exercises alone sometimes cannot.

When you love a song, you want to return to it.

You don't mind repeating difficult sections.

You celebrate small improvements.

You become invested in the process.

That emotional investment keeps you practicing.

And consistency is often the biggest factor in improvement.

I didn't become better overnight.

There wasn't a magical moment where everything suddenly clicked.

It happened little by little.

One practice session at a time.

One difficult phrase mastered.

One breath taken at the right moment.

One song revisited months later only to realize it felt easier than before.

Progress is often invisible until you look back.

Growth Beyond Music

Interestingly, I think learning these songs has helped me outside of music as well.

Playing saxophone has taught me patience.

It has taught me that growth takes time.

It has taught me that frustration is often part of the learning process.

It has shown me that consistency matters more than perfection.

There are days when practice goes poorly.

There are notes that don't come out right.

There are songs that feel impossible.

But if you keep showing up, improvement eventually follows.

That lesson extends far beyond music.

It's applicable to writing.

Relationships.

Careers.

Personal growth.

Many worthwhile things in life improve through persistence rather than instant success.

Thank You, Blue October

I don't know if the members of Blue October realize how many people their music has impacted beyond simply listening.

For me, their songs became educational tools.

They became practice partners.

They became milestones marking my own development as a musician.

Songs that once challenged me now remind me how far I've come.

And there are still many more songs left to learn.

That's one of the beautiful things about music.

There is always another challenge.

Another opportunity to improve.

Another way to express yourself.

As I continue practicing saxophone, I know Blue October's music will continue being part of that journey.

Because sometimes the bands we love don't just provide a soundtrack to our lives.

Sometimes they help shape who we become.

In my case, Blue October helped me become a better saxophone player.

And for that, I'll always be grateful.

A Helicopter, A Bowl Cut, And The Things We Don't Say At Funerals

2026-06-15T09:32:32.357-07:00

On June 14th, 2026, a singer named Oliver Tree died in a helicopter crash over Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Two helicopters collided mid-air above a neighborhood called Recreio dos Bandeirantes, in the western part of the city. One of the aircraft came down and crashed into a car dealership, igniting a fire among several parked vehicles, killing all six people on board. Tree was in his helicopter with four other people, passengers Lucas Vignale, Gaspar Prim, Lucas Brito Chaves, and pilot Alexandre Souza. The other helicopter carried only its pilot, who also did not survive. It was sudden, it was violent, and by all accounts, it was the kind of death that nobody sees coming on what should have been a normal Sunday morning in South America. Yahoo!TMZ

I'll be honest with you: I had never heard of Oliver Tree before this happened. Not once. His name had never crossed my radar, not on the radio, not on a playlist, not in conversation. He was, according to those who knew his work, a singer, comedian, and internet personality best known for his signature bowl cut, which apparently became something of a visual trademark, an aesthetic so committed it bordered on character. He had millions of followers across TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram. He had fans who genuinely loved him. And yet, for whatever reason, he existed entirely outside of my world. That happens sometimes, especially with artists who built their followings online rather than through traditional radio or album cycles. You can be enormous in one corner of the internet and completely invisible to someone living right next door. That was Oliver Tree for me, and I imagine for a lot of people who are only now learning his name because of how he died, which is always a sad way to be introduced to someone. Men's Journal

American singer-songwriter Oliver Tree, whose infectious electro-pop songs attracted millions of fans across the world, died Sunday morning in a helicopter crash that killed six people in Rio de Janeiro. He was 32 years old. There is something particularly bleak about dying at 32, an age that still feels like the beginning of something, like a person is still figuring out who they are going to become. He had been in Brazil on what seemed like a good trip. An influencer named Iae Break had shared videos from Tree's trip in the days prior to the crash, full of street soccer, seasoned meat, motorcycles, and more fun, with a hilarious clip showing Tree jokingly calling himself Neymar after the famed Brazilian soccer star and holding a faux version of the FIFA World Cup trophy. He was having a good time, the kind of carefree content that ends up feeling haunted in retrospect, the way all last moments do once you know they were the last ones. The Washington PostTMZ

And then there is the helicopter.

This is where the conversation always goes when a celebrity dies in a helicopter, and it is not an unfair place to go. The death of Kobe Bryant on January 26th, 2020 changed the way a lot of people think about private helicopter travel. That crash, which killed Kobe, his daughter Gianna, and seven others, was a moment that shook the country in a way that few deaths in recent memory have. It felt impossible, the idea that someone that alive, that present, that physically dominant could simply be erased in the fog over the Calabasas hills. And yet. Six years and some months later, we are here again, watching another public figure get swallowed by a machine that people have quietly known for decades is far less safe than it appears.

Helicopters are not airplanes. They are extraordinarily complex pieces of machinery, and they operate on a fundamentally different set of principles than fixed-wing aircraft. They require constant, active mechanical input to stay aloft. Where a plane can glide if something goes wrong, a helicopter is less forgiving, far more sensitive to mechanical failure, pilot error, weather, and visibility conditions. And yet they have become a kind of status symbol, a way for wealthy or famous people to skip the traffic, to arrive somewhere quickly, to feel unbound by the constraints that everyone else has to live with. Private helicopter use has expanded dramatically in the last decade, especially for entertainers, athletes, and executives doing business in sprawling cities or remote locations. The convenience is real. But so is the risk.

Authorities in Brazil have launched an investigation into the incident to determine the cause of the collision that resulted in the deaths of all six individuals on board. We do not yet know exactly what went wrong, whether it was pilot error, a communication failure, a mechanical issue, or simply the unpredictable chaos of two aircraft occupying the same airspace at the same time. What we do know is that this kind of thing keeps happening. Mid-air collisions between helicopters, while not common in the statistical sense, are not rare either, and they are almost universally fatal. The airspace over cities like Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, or Los Angeles involves dense, complicated helicopter traffic that puts enormous pressure on coordination systems that are not always equipped to handle it. People die. They keep dying. And after each one, there is a brief cultural conversation about helicopter safety that fades almost as quickly as it begins, because the people who can afford to fly in helicopters are generally the same people who do not feel the need to change their behavior based on tragedies that happen to others. Yahoo!

Kobe's death should have been that conversation. Maybe it was, in some circles. But here we are, six years later, and another person is dead in the same way.

Now, this is the part of the post where things get a little more complicated, and I want to be careful here because the man just died yesterday and his family is grieving and five other people are also dead and that matters enormously. Death is real. Loss is real. The grief of people who actually loved Oliver Tree is real, and nothing that follows is meant to minimize that. But there is a specific kind of intellectual dishonesty that takes over whenever a celebrity dies, where the internet collectively decides that criticism becomes forbidden, that everything the person ever did gets washed clean, and that anyone who raises a question is somehow a monster for doing so. That particular dance feels dishonest to me, and I would rather skip it.

The truth is that Oliver Tree had some things in his past that were legitimately worth raising an eyebrow at.

The most significant one involved something truly tasteless. In 2019, Oliver Tree posted an image on his official YouTube community tab to promote his Goodbye Farewell Tour. In the image, his face was photoshopped onto a photo from the funeral of SHINee's Jonghyun, who died in 2017. Jonghyun was a beloved South Korean artist whose death by suicide was genuinely devastating to millions of fans around the world. The idea of taking a photo from that funeral, a moment of real grief for real people, and editing your own face into it to promote a tour is the kind of thing that is difficult to explain charitably. Fans were quick to notice the image, and it was reportedly taken down soon after. However, over the past week, archived screenshots of Tree's 2019 post started resurfacing online, leading to a wave of criticism from fans who started to trend "#apology_Olivertree" on social media. Following this, he bowed his head and said he apologized to Jonghyun's family, who may have been hurt because of him, and added that it was not an intentional or malicious appropriation, and that he was sorry to those who were hurt by mistake. Maybe that apology was genuine. Maybe it was damage control. Either way, the original action remains what it was, which is the cynical use of a dead man's funeral for self-promotion. That is a hard thing to defend regardless of how sorry someone says they are afterward. Sportskeeda + 2

Then there was the whole mess around his most famous song, "Miss You," which turns out to have a murkier origin than his fans might have known. A rising producer named Southstar had originally reworked Oliver Tree's track "Jerk" and titled it "Miss You," which Robin Schulz then allegedly copied the production of, also calling it "Miss You" but managing to get Oliver Tree on the track as a feature, as they were both from the same label. Southstar had cleared the publishing rights with the three authors of "Jerk," including Oliver Tree himself, allowing him to release his reworked version called "Miss You." He was disappointed to see that an exact copy of his rework was up under the name of another famous producer and was even being perceived as the original version instead of his. Oliver Tree and his label largely stayed quiet while a smaller independent artist essentially got steamrolled by the machinery of a major label relationship. The version with Oliver Tree went on to chart significantly higher. The smaller artist got the shorter end of the stick. Tree may not have orchestrated the whole thing, but his silence while it happened, and his label's combative response on his behalf, did not exactly paint him as someone fiercely committed to fairness in the music industry. We Rave YouThe Music Network

None of this makes him a villain. People are complicated. Artists are complicated. A person can make bad choices at 25 and still deserve to be mourned at 32. But the reflexive hagiography that follows celebrity death, the way every flaw evaporates and every sin gets retroactively forgiven purely because someone is no longer alive to defend themselves or be held accountable, does not actually serve anyone well. It does not serve the people who were hurt by his actions. It does not serve the truth. And honestly, it does not even serve his memory, because a flattened, perfect version of a person is not really a person at all.

What we have here is a 32-year-old man who made music that connected with a lot of people, who had a genuinely distinctive persona, who was apparently in the middle of what looked like a good trip to Brazil, and who is now dead because two helicopters collided over a car dealership in Rio de Janeiro on a Sunday morning. That is genuinely sad. The other five people who died alongside him are also dead, and they deserved to be named and mourned, not just treated as background casualties in a celebrity death story. The people who loved Oliver Tree are hurting today, and that pain is real regardless of what you thought of him or whether you had ever heard of him before this week.

But we do not have to pretend he was something he was not. We do not have to ignore the parts of his story that were complicated just because it feels impolite to mention them now. We can hold both things at once, the genuine sadness of a young life cut short and the honest acknowledgment that the life in question, like most lives, contained some chapters that were harder to defend than others.

The helicopter will keep being the headline. That image of two aircraft colliding in the sky over a South American city will be the thing people remember. And maybe, this time, the conversation about helicopter safety will last a little longer than it did after Kobe. Probably not. But maybe.

Oliver Tree is gone. I didn't know who he was when I woke up Saturday morning, and now I know more about him than I expected to by Sunday evening, which is perhaps the strangest and most modern version of meeting someone. The bowl cut, the internet fame, the controversies, the crash. All of it arriving at once, too late to matter in the way it might have otherwise.

That is a particular kind of sad too.

My First Real Concert Experience Happened on the Same Day the Knicks Won It All

2026-06-14T06:19:34.959-07:00

June 13, 2026, turned out to be a pretty memorable day for me for more than one reason.

On that day, the New York Knicks defeated the San Antonio Spurs and won the NBA Championship. The first Knicks championship in a very long time. As a Knicks fan, that alone made the day special.

But on that exact same day, another first happened in my life.

I went to my first real concert.

Now, technically, I've seen live music performances before. Years ago, I saw a cover band playing at a park. And a few years after that, I attended an orchestra performance for a college music class because I had to write an essay about it.

But this was different.

This was my first actual concert experience. The first one I genuinely wanted to go to. The first one I went out of my way to attend because it interested me. Not because it was free. Not because it was for an assignment. Simply because I wanted to experience it.

I saw The Black Crowes, with Southall opening the show and Whiskey Myers performing before The Black Crowes took the stage.

And honestly? The whole thing was fire.

I had never seen any of these bands live before. To be completely honest, I wasn't even very familiar with their music beforehand. But they were in the area, it sounded like something fun to do, and I decided to go for it.

I'm really glad I did.

It was pretty much exactly what you'd expect from a rock concert. There were drinks available, both alcoholic and non-alcoholic. I personally stuck with water lol. Some people were vaping. The crowd was cheering, singing along, and just having a great time. At one point, people in the lower levels were even tossing beach balls around through the crowd.

The atmosphere was energetic and fun.

It was one of those experiences that made me think, "Yeah, I get why people enjoy concerts so much."

And honestly, I think what made it even better was that this was something I chose for myself. This wasn't something I stumbled into or had to do. This was something I wanted to experience.

The fact that it happened on a Saturday was also perfect since I didn't have to worry about taking time off from work during the week.

So June 13, 2026, ended up being a day of firsts.

The Knicks won their first championship in decades.

And I had my first real concert experience.

Not a bad way to spend a Saturday.

Red October, Blue October

2026-06-05T15:09:16.270-07:00

Sometimes I have ideas that are completely ridiculous.

And sometimes I have ideas that are so ridiculous that they somehow circle back around and become brilliant.

This is one of those ideas.

If Hollywood ever decides to make a modern reboot of The Hunt for Red October, there is only one band that should be allowed anywhere near the soundtrack or score.

Blue October.

I am completely serious.

Now, obviously, part of this is because the names line up in the funniest possible way.

Red October.

Blue October.

You cannot tell me that isn't perfect.

But the more I think about it, the more it actually makes sense beyond just the joke.

One of Blue October's most famous songs is Into the Ocean. A submarine movie and a band known for a song about the ocean already feels like a weirdly fitting combination.

Then there is the symbolism.

Red and blue.

Opposite colors.

Opposite sides.

Opposite forces.

Yet coming together to create something new.

And if you've ever seen The Hunt for Red October, that's kind of the whole point of the story. It is a Cold War thriller built around mistrust, tension, uncertainty, and people trying to bridge enormous divides.

So somehow the accidental color symbolism actually works.

I can already imagine the marketing campaign.

The Hunt for Red October.

Music by Blue October.

The posters practically design themselves.

Would it be cheesy?

Absolutely.

Would people make jokes about it for months?

Without question.

Would I buy a ticket just to see how far they committed to the bit?

Immediately.

Sometimes the best creative decisions are the ones that make people stop and say, "Wait a minute... that's actually kind of perfect."

This might be one of those cases.

Or maybe I've simply spent way too much time thinking about submarine movies and rock bands.

Either way, if a Red October reboot ever happens, I know who gets my vote for the soundtrack.

But why stop there?

If we're committing to this idea, then let's commit all the way.

The lead singer of Blue October, Justin Furstenfeld, should play the captain of the Red October.

Now before anyone says I'm being ridiculous...

Yes.

I am.

But hear me out.

One of Blue October's music videos, Calling You, features Justin as the captain of a submarine.

So the connection is already there.

The man has technically spent more time commanding a submarine on screen than most actors have.

That has to count for something.

And honestly, the entire thing would be one giant callback for Blue October fans.

You would have Blue October doing the soundtrack for Red October.

You would have Justin Furstenfeld playing the captain of Red October.

You would have the sea and submarine themes that already appear throughout parts of the band's catalog.

And you would have one of the most unintentionally perfect naming coincidences in entertainment history.

Red October.

Blue October.

It practically sounds like a crossover that was destined to happen.

At that point, the movie would almost stop being a reboot and become a giant Blue October easter egg that somehow also happens to be a Cold War submarine thriller.

Would it ever happen?

Probably not.

Would it make absolutely no sense from a traditional Hollywood perspective?

Almost certainly.

Would I watch every second of it?

Without hesitation.

In fact, if we're already rewriting reality, maybe Blue October should do the entire score, the soundtrack, and appear somewhere in the film as naval officers.

At that point, you've gone too far to turn back anyway.

And honestly, there is something oddly poetic about it.

A movie called The Hunt for Red October being reborn through the music of Blue October.

Red and blue.

Opposites.

Different worlds colliding.

A strange idea that somehow feels weirdly fitting the more you think about it.

Sometimes the best ideas start as jokes.

And sometimes those jokes become ideas you can't stop thinking about.

The Optics of Timing: Why Caleb's Music Release Raises Questions Even Without Accusations

2026-05-30T10:16:50.204-07:00

Whenever a high-profile criminal case captures public attention, the actions of people connected to that case often come under intense scrutiny. That scrutiny is not always fair, and it does not always mean that anyone has done anything wrong. Sometimes people simply make decisions that, while entirely within their rights, create questions because of the timing. That is how I view the situation involving Caleb and his efforts to launch a music career around the same period that public attention was heavily focused on the death of Celeste and the legal case involving his brother.

To be clear from the beginning, this is not an accusation against Caleb. It is not an accusation against his brother either. The trial process exists for a reason, and the principle of innocent until proven guilty matters. Courts are where evidence is examined and verdicts are reached. Public speculation should never be confused with proof. Nothing in this discussion should be interpreted as suggesting guilt, innocence, involvement, or responsibility regarding any criminal matter.

What this discussion is about is timing.

Timing matters in public life. Timing affects perception. Timing affects how people interpret actions, even when those actions may have completely innocent explanations. A decision that appears normal during one period can look very different when viewed against the backdrop of a major public controversy.

From what many observers have noted, Caleb appears to be attempting to establish himself as a musician and build his own audience. There is nothing inherently wrong with that. Countless people pursue careers in music every year. Every artist has to start somewhere. Every musician eventually reaches a point where they release songs, create content, promote themselves, and try to gain attention from listeners. Building a music career is difficult, competitive, and often requires persistence.

However, the issue that some people have raised is not the fact that Caleb released music. The issue is when that release occurred.

When a person's family is connected to a highly publicized criminal case, every public move becomes magnified. Every social media post is examined. Every interview is analyzed. Every public appearance generates discussion. That is simply the reality of modern internet culture.

Because of that reality, some people naturally wonder whether releasing music during such a sensitive period was the best decision from a public relations standpoint.

Again, that question is not the same as an accusation.

A person can make a decision that is legally, morally, and personally within their rights while still making a decision that others view as questionable from a strategic perspective.

At the end of the day, artists generally control when they release their work. Songs do not usually appear out of nowhere. Release schedules involve planning. Uploads can be delayed. Promotional campaigns can be adjusted. Launch dates can be moved. In many situations, creators have flexibility regarding when material becomes public.

Because of that, some observers have suggested that Caleb could have waited.

He could have postponed a release until public attention surrounding the case had decreased.

He could have waited until after major legal developments.

He could have waited until the trial process concluded.

He could have chosen a point in time when his music would be discussed on its own merits rather than being connected to headlines surrounding his family.

Those are all possibilities that existed.

At the same time, there are also arguments in the opposite direction.

Someone pursuing a music career may feel that putting life on hold indefinitely is not realistic. Criminal cases can take months or even years to move through the legal system. Delaying every personal goal until a case reaches a conclusion could significantly affect someone's own future plans. From that perspective, a person might reasonably decide that continuing with previously scheduled projects is the better option.

That is part of what makes the discussion complicated.

There is a difference between saying, "I understand why someone continued with their plans," and saying, "I think the timing looks good."

Those are not the same position.

A person can acknowledge Caleb's right to release music while simultaneously believing that the timing creates difficult optics.

The concept of optics is important because public perception often operates independently from facts. People form impressions based on appearances. They notice patterns. They notice timing. They notice proximity between events.

Whether those impressions are accurate is a separate question.

For example, if a musician releases a song during a period when public attention is intensely focused on a tragedy connected to their family, some people will inevitably view that decision through the lens of the tragedy. That reaction may be fair or unfair, but it is predictable.

In many ways, this situation highlights a broader reality about internet culture. Modern audiences do not separate events as neatly as they once did. News stories, social media discussions, entertainment releases, and personal branding efforts all exist within the same digital ecosystem. As a result, people connect dots constantly.

Sometimes those connections are meaningful.

Sometimes they are not.

But they happen regardless.

That is why timing can become almost as important as the action itself.

If the same song had been released six months later, public reactions might have been very different. If it had been released after the legal proceedings concluded, the conversation might have focused primarily on the music rather than on the surrounding circumstances. If it had arrived during a quieter period, fewer people might have questioned the decision at all.

Instead, the timing ensured that discussions about the release would become intertwined with discussions about the broader case.

That does not mean the release was wrong.

It does not mean there was malicious intent.

It does not mean anyone was trying to capitalize on public attention.

Those are conclusions that would require evidence, and speculation should never replace evidence.

What it does mean is that public figures and people adjacent to public controversies often have to think carefully about how their actions will be perceived.

Sometimes perception becomes part of the story.

Sometimes timing becomes the story.

And sometimes a decision that may have seemed straightforward ends up generating debate simply because of when it occurred.

Ultimately, my position is fairly simple. Caleb has every right to pursue a music career. He has every right to release songs. He has every right to build an audience and follow his own ambitions. None of those things should automatically be viewed with suspicion.

At the same time, I think it is understandable why some people look at the timing and find it unusual. Not criminal. Not proof of anything. Not evidence of wrongdoing. Just unusual.

When events of major public interest are unfolding, people naturally pay attention to the choices made by those connected to the situation. In this case, releasing music so close to such a heavily discussed and emotionally charged series of events was always going to attract attention.

Whether it was the right decision is ultimately a matter of opinion.

But I do think it is fair to say that waiting until the public controversy had cooled down, or until the legal process had reached a conclusion, would likely have avoided many of the questions that are being asked today.

And that observation, by itself, is not an accusation. It is simply a reflection on timing, perception, and the complicated relationship between public events and public image.