You ever listen to Fuckin' Todd Rundgren? Me either, until a week or two ago. The spitefully in-the-know point to Rundgren as the origin point for basically the whole dumb psych rock revival spectrum, from Whitney to Tame Impala to Mac DeMarco. They're right, but that was '70s Todd.

I was a pizza delivery guy at Domino’s for two straight summers (2011 and 2012), but this essay is about the first one. Right before I started, my parents realized that I was smoking weed; I was grounded except for getting that paper and hanging out with my first serious girlfriend, whom I had just started dating. In other words, I had the exact degree of autonomy (perhaps more) than I would have otherwise expected.

Whether he knew it or not, Bobby Womack was just about dead when he made this thing. Not a lot of artists get to make an album which Wikipedia calls their twenty-seventh and final, and fewer still do anything worthwhile with it; immediately preceding Bravest Man in the Womack catalog are 1994's Resurrection, an aspirationally-titled comeback that is unforgettable only in the sense that it was never remembered, and 1999's Traditions, Bobby's contribution to the horrifying genre of Christmas albums by penniless soul legends. Womack watched his career come to an unceremonious close almost entirely outside of his control, its last gasps coming in the form of albums like the above-named or the gospel pivot Back to My Roots, casting around desperately for any still-living audience.

Having submitted my two weeks' notice to my job (the one I've written about before in this space), I redirected all efforts to getting fired as quickly as possible. I had already planned to go down to Santa Fe for the weekend of my birthday, and the sooner I could prove myself useless the more I could extend the trip.

This was recommended to me by Lawrence English, who called it one of the great, transformative texts that’s come out of the 20th century in one of my first and favorite interviews. It's an odd one to recommend to acquaintances here in Denver; as a loose plot summary, a man writing obsessively and beautifully about following a bird around, and eventually his consciousness fuses with the birds tends to garner the wrong sort of interest.

Is G Perico really about what he raps? I don't know for sure, but I can say this: after we met, it was somewhat difficult to get the interview started because of his repeated apologies for having stepped on my shoes as we shook hands. Very real imo.

Ray Ray From Summerhill is YFN Lucci's second project named in tribute to a dead friend (following last year's Long Live Nut), and there's no reason to think that it will be his last. It's an album less about grieving than living with and beyond grief; the integration of a gaping void into one's ongoing existence. Emotionally, lines like can't believe my cousin died before the deal came are irreducible into individual vectors of good/bad/sad; for Lucci, loss is less a discrete occurrence than a permanent caveat to his own ever-growing success.

Around the corner from Denver's Larimer Lounge (coincidentally the venue that's hosted the last three artists I've interviewed here), there's a funny little bench (hidden behind the van here, but I tried) that gives the impression of an old-school talk show set - it's really wide, but with two distinct seats that are slightly turned to face each other. It's there that I had the below chat with Meghan Remy, perhaps better known as the frontwoman of U.S. Girls.