Featured
Redshift
A 12-song album to soundtrack moonsilvered night drives on the patchy back roads of a sprawling soundscape—out where the county lines of art-folk, indie rock, and Americana meet.
Jordan
Songwriter/producer in The Okay Lakes
Blog
Nothing's scarier than silence in "We're All Going to the World's Fair"
An analysis of a slow-burn, coming-of-age horror that asks the most important spiritual question of our times: “What if the internet's a demon we summon into our lives by posting on it?”
Music Video
A Cross on a Gravel Road (Music Video)
WARNING: Spirits in the mirror are closer than they appear in this midwest ghost story.
Blog
Mike Viola’s “Paul McCarthy” is an open love letter to classic rock
An album review (sorta), but mostly a look at the craft of veteran songwriter/producer operating at the top of his game
Blog
How to make peace with "the unsatisfying grunt labor" of writing
On Rick Bass, the spirituality of working at your craft, and fighting for what makes you feel free
Blog
Kill the part of you that cringes
Let he who has not been cringe cast the first ironically detached subtweet
Video
Homemade Horror Show '23
Every October since 2018, on a coffin-black night in Chicago, local indie filmmakers and horror buffs gather to make their offerings to Homemade Horror Show—an annual anthology of indie horror/comedy shorts.
The Okay Lakes
Watch a live, solo version of “Cracks”
A stripped-down, live, solo version of "Cracks" from our debut show at the Hideout in Chicago last August
lyrics
A Handful of Mud
So Before we go There’s something you ought to know There are bones In the shipwrecks below Holding their dying pose And they went Clawing for breath Clinging to hope that They would make it Out Mmm Out And when The panic sets in And your body betrays you
lyrics
(The Graves of the Glaciers)
(The lapping of waves—as the moon fingerpicks gently the morning lake water—mixes with indecipherable, ancient, whispered secrets about the true nature of the universe, time, being, etc., all suddenly grasped at last, albeit ephemerally)
lyrics
Till the End Time Begins
Blue bleeds through the blinds Another new year The same old lang synes Come… come… I saved your birthday cards “Your twenties,” you wrote “are gonna be hard” But there’s empty fifths in your trash And there’s questions that I’m too terrified to ask Yeah… Feel the
lyrics
Old Bruise
Your uncle’s on his shit again Four fingers of Midleton Nursing all his lone regrets Laughing off his eulogy That all the fools he used to be And all the men he might have been Wound up him instead What will you have when you’re looking back Once