I’ve been awkward my entire life.
My social ineptitude can stand toe to toe with any homeschooled kid, which is inexcusable, considering I grew up in the hardscrabble public school system. There were years of my life spent being exhaustingly brash, loud, and painstakingly extroverted. It was all a mask, though. None of the social norms that seemed inherently understood for everyone else made any sense to me, so I went out of my way to become the most pretend normal person I could be.
At some point I shrugged my shoulders and accepted that I arrived defective from the factory, until recently it was suggested to me that I was likely on the autism spectrum. It felt like that moment in Hook where Robin Williams looks into the waters of Neverland and sees himself reflected as Peter Pan. There was suddenly an answer for everything. Not an excuse for anything, mind you, but an answer, at least.
Too often we see autistic people portrayed as brutally honest humanoid caricatures with no filter and a love for trains. I’m fully capable of lying—though it does make me immeasurably uncomfortable—and I know even less about trains than trains know about me. My hyperfixation has always been music.
Looking back at it now, I think Tales From the Underground started because I wanted an avenue for people to get to know me on my own terms, and music is a universal language. Most of the stories from my life are directly or indirectly tied to music. I found my tribe of misfits in high school through the punk rock scene. I started writing for a music magazine when I was 17, and everything else seemed to happen because of those two facts. Growing up in a post-9/11 suburban world armed with Ramones records and an earnestly misguided understanding of politics is a boyhood I would choose again every single time.
That awkward, chubby kid rode his passion to the University of Georgia and ultimately all the way to California. If nothing else, I’ll always be proud of that. Somewhere amid that beautiful noise, I had an epiphany of sorts and stopped everything. If Tales From the Underground is an ongoing story, then it’s only right to give it an ending. I want to tell you what happened when the boy grew into a man, and what his life has looked like since.
But first, let’s talk about a record.
…
The Review
Sam Fender
People Watching
2025
People Watching is a slice of magic in a landscape of drivel.
The overall quality of records has slipped in recent years, mainly because no one is buying them anymore. Musicians need to release records so they have something to tour behind because they make their money on the road. The music industry is an ever-evolving business, although these days it seems to be rhyming with a version of itself from the 1950s and 1960s; build a record around three or four singles with hit potential and then fill the gaps with whatever you have left. It’s a fine way to earn some quick cash and a Cadillac, but few have any significant staying power anymore.
Sam Fender writes songs that feel as though his very heart would explode if he couldn’t get them out. There’s an earnest ferocity to his work that rivals the best of early Springsteen. Fender has already captured the dragon that some artists have spent their entire careers chasing. What’s more exciting is that he’s just getting started. People Watching is so strong and fully developed that it feels like the late-era return-to-form classic of an artist decades into their career, and yet it’s only Fender’s third release.
While Fender seems to have remained criminally undiscovered in the U.S., he came across my radar with his 2021 single “Seventeen Going Under.” All cards on the table, I’m a sucker for British music. There must be something in the tea over there that gives their musicians a direct line to my soul. While American music can sometimes feel like it was created by an algorithm in a laboratory to sell Levi jeans, its U.K. counterpart seems more often like it’s done for the love of the craft. “Seventeen Going Under” is this incendiary, rollicking, self-contained novel of a song that lived in my head for weeks.
I streamed People Watching on the day it was released and loved it so much that I ordered a physical copy before I left work that day. Writing a review has proven difficult because the record is so overwhelming that trying to come up with clever lines about it feels disingenuous. Not only is every track like a movie, it’s like a movie you remember seeing with your best friend or on a date with your first love. It’s nostalgic, but in that all-encompassing way where the good, bad and ugly memories coalesce into the warm blood of life. There’s even a song about it on the record, aptly titled “Nostalgia’s Lie.”
The title track is an ode to his mentor Annie Orwin, specifically about the walks he took on his way to and from her hospice care facility. While other artists might have matched those themes with sad bastard acoustic drudgery, Fender takes the opportunity to pair it with pure heartland rock. There are moments like that across the album, comfort food prepared by loving hands. “Arm’s Length,” for example, would be right at home on any Tom Petty record. “Little Bit Closer” is a heavy tome that literally asks the question “What is God? I never found him.” And yet, that song has the sonic bones of something that could have been a hit in any decade.
People Watching is so full and layered that it sounds like Brian Wilson made a record with the E Street Band instead of the Wrecking Crew. Every time I listen to it, I find something new within the arrangement that makes me hear the whole thing differently. In a way, that’s like life, isn’t it? We remember a new detail, and the memory begins to change shape. Sam Fender made me go back and revisit some of the most important eras in my life.
Which leads us to today’s tale …
…
The Tale
My lost weekend was only meant to last a few months.
When I moved back to the Georgia mountains in the fall of 2015, it took me awhile to recover. Nothing traumatic had happened exactly, but at first, I didn’t feel at home in my body. It felt like my whole life up until that point had been on a trajectory and now, I had unexpectedly jumped off the plane with an emergency parachute and was thudding onto the ground. No longer did I have my foot in the door of a writing career; I had slammed it closed. I wasn’t even the guy from that YouTube show anymore.
Thanksgiving had passed, winter was settling in, and I spent weeks doing nothing but watching television and resting my bones. I was barely 26, crashing at my childhood home, taking naps and eating snacks. Honestly, as much as I want it to sound like I crash landed into something harrowing, it was an amazing time. Being back in the warm bosom of the deep South was exactly what my soul had been craving. The sobering fist of reality finally hit late one afternoon when I was still in my bathrobe and my dad jokingly asked how I was enjoying my retirement.
Trouble was, I had no idea what to do. My degree was in journalism, but print media was actively dying. I had worked for two years at what was essentially a staffing company, but none of the staffing companies in the area would give me an interview. The more I looked, the clearer it became that I was in the vicious cycle of being too overqualified for minimum wage (on paper) and yet somehow not qualified enough for anything else. In the end, I decided to get a job at a local plant to start putting money back for the future while I figured out what I really wanted to do.
When I started at the glue factory, I had several other job interviews lined up. Even while I was initially being trained, I barely paid attention because I knew it was all temporary. It’s not that I was above sweating into my steel toed boots as I pounded the cold concrete night after night, but I knew it was nothing I would be interested in doing long term. Still, my phone wasn’t ringing off the hook, and I had nothing else going on, so I slowly began taking it seriously.
It wasn’t a very big operation.
The business had recently been absorbed by a European parent company who hadn’t bothered paying us any attention, yet. There were compounders who made the glue in enormous tanks, pullers and stackers who put it in buckets and stacked those buckets onto a pallet, and then forklift drivers who put those pallets on a truck. There was also a small, dedicated crew who labeled our buckets and a tiny quality control staff who checked the material before shipping released it for delivery. My dad was a manager there at the time, but we worked different shifts, so there was never a conflict of interest.
My favorite part of the job in the beginning was getting to know my dad on a professional level. I knew he was a hard worker, but what I didn’t know was how much his employees sincerely loved and respected him. He was warm to them, fair and honest, never using a firm hand unless absolutely necessary. He always told me that, growing up, most of the bosses he had felt like they needed to be mean bastards to merit respect, but he found taking the opposite approach was infinitely more successful. He fought hard for his people and treated them like family. I was always proud of him, but that new insight gave me a whole new appreciation for carrying his name.
As time went on, I found I was pretty good at the job. It wasn’t like I was Michael Jordan in the ‘90s, but it suited me better than I had initially anticipated. There was something about the repetition I found soothing. Not only that, but after having spent two years in a gray-walled cubicle listening to my coworkers talk incessantly about Game of Thrones, part of me enjoyed sweating for my paycheck. The floor was so sticky that I had to make a concentrated effort to pick my boots up as I walked, but I didn’t mind that either.
Soon I was apprenticing with the compounders, and before I knew it, I was helping the supervisor plan the production schedule. Once I got the hang of that, I started shadowing the lab personnel so I could cover shifts when they were out. That was the only room in the building with air conditioning, so it was mainly for my own self-interest, but I liked it so much that I threw my hat in the ring to work in the lab for the new plant they were opening down the street. Even though I had no scientific background to speak of, they hired me.
My few months at the glue factory had turned into a full year by the time I made the switch. I had moved out of my dad’s place and into a house I was renting with my girlfriend and my childhood best friend Heath. Heath and I had met when we were locked in the laundry room of our doublewide trailer daycare as punishment when we were kids.
That house was a nightmare. It had roaches the size of Great Danes, and the pressure in the shower felt like it was trying to blow a hole through your chest with the three minutes of hot water it had in its reserves. Sometimes we would come home, and the landlady would be randomly standing in our backyard or watching us from the window of an attic across the street. Our next-door neighbor was always vaguely accusing us of stealing his cat, though I’m not totally convinced he ever had a cat in the first place. Still, the rent was cheap, and the walls were so thin that I could hear my records in any room.
My new job in the lab, however, was a dream.
They hired me three months too early, so I had nothing to do but read and listen to music. There were days when I could have gone home to take a nap without anyone noticing. My lab partner was a man in his 50s named Bill with paper-thin confidence and a short fuse, but he had great stories from playing in bands all his life, and he was always good for a laugh. He hated that I played Bruce Springsteen albums through the computer speakers all day, but he never complained to my face. For all his quirks, he had a giant heart that was hard not to love.
It was in those first few months that I got to know a woman named Shayna who would eventually become my boss, although at the time she was a member of the Research and Development team sharing our lab space. Shayna and I had the exact same sense of humor, the same view of the world, and our personalities were so well-tuned to each other that it felt almost predestined we would meet and become friends. When I met her, it felt like I had known her my entire life. When she met me, she hated me immediately and passionately.
Shayna: I hated you in the beginning because you were in my space acting like you belonged there. You did belong there, but I wasn’t ready for all the changes you represented. Also, who wears newsboy caps unironically? Nobody I’m willing to trust out of the gate, that’s who. I changed my mind because your charisma is relentless, and you’re the funniest person I know.
Before Shayna took over, I had a boss who I’m going to call Doober. Doober was a little man who looked almost as if you hit Gary Sinise with an Acme mallet and shrunk him. He tried hard to supplement his stature with alpha male bullshit bravado. Doober treated our workplace like he was Little Finger working in the shadows of Westeros, although the stakes couldn’t have been lower, and no one took him seriously. He chain-smoked mile long cigarettes and doused himself with Axe body spray after every single one. That smell permeated the lab for months after his inevitable termination. There are dozens of stories I could tell about him, but one illustrates everything you need to know perfectly:
Doober was so noticeably inept at the job so quickly that corporate brought in a manager from another lab in another state to try to get him up to speed. He mostly ignored her in favor of yelling at us and trying to impress an imaginary captivated audience. At some point during the last week of his last chance training, a rusty cog shifted in his head which convinced him that he could charm her into forgetting he was a disaster.
I watched with a hidden cringe as he made continuous attempts to flirt with this incredibly professional and visibly uninterested woman who was simply trying to do her job by teaching him how to do his. Things reached peak weirdness on her last day with us. The three of us stood in the brightly lit and silent room, Doober on one side, our guest on the other, me in the middle. The two of them were preparing to go to lunch when it happened.
“Are you about ready for lunch?” Doober asked with a hint of impatience.
“Oh, yes, but first let me run to the restroom,” she said.
“Why …” Doober asked with a grin, looking to me for a nod of approval he would never find, “You gotta POO-POO?!”
I had never in my life wished more that I could turn into a puddle of liquid and slide out of a room, Secret World of Alex Mack style, than I did in that moment. Instead, I just had to stand there, bathing in the awkwardness. Our guest walked out of the room without saying a word. Doober looked at me as if to say, “Aren’t I a rascal?” and followed her. I took a moment to wonder why I had left California for this.
Over the next few months, Doober remained a lost ball in high weeds. He once spent an entire day trying to figure out how to get the plant’s dumpster replaced, even though he worked in quality control and literally no one had asked him to investigate it. After about six months total with the company, he had a sudden meltdown over having not yet been promoted. His solution was to barge into a closed-door corporate meeting and demand a title change and raise if they were to keep him even one more day. He had made a literal power point presentation—complete with charts and graphs—illustrating why our company’s president was an idiot for not promoting him already. He was turned around in the parking lot the following morning.
With Doober gone, we entered what would later affectionately be referred to as the Dirty Work era.
Shayna became our boss in short order. We had already cultivated a great working relationship with her; she had an impressive resume and was literally already in our lab. Corporate could give her an extremely modest raise without even changing her parking spot, and she would get a title bump that could carry her into a whole new pool of opportunities if she so chose. It was a win-win for everyone involved, and things gelled into something great almost immediately.
There are several periods I can point to in my life where I’ve been the happiest. We’ve talked about most of them throughout this article series. Nothing lasts forever—even cold November rain—but some stretches of time are so perfect that, if ghosts are real, it’s because you left the best parts of your energy behind in them. I didn’t particularly like high school, but that time in my life where I was free from the responsibility of doing anything but hanging around the local punk scene and editing my high school morning announcements is hard to beat. Discovering who I was in college while playing with my old band Leave Home was a sweet spot. Figuring out Randomland on that red porch is California is at the top of my list too, lord knows.
Still, as strange as it sounds, the Dirty Work era of my job might be the happiest I’ve ever been. At the very least it’s the only time where I loved a job so much that it didn’t feel like working. It was just one of those things where all the pieces come together to equal something greater than the sum of their parts. Shayna and I had become best friends. My friend Matt, a star of many Tales adventures, had started working with us. After Bill had a nervous breakdown and quit shortly after Doober left, my cousin Will joined the team too. He was a kid, barely 19, and became a collective little brother to us. We all had the same sense of humor, the same reference points, and a similar enough taste in music that anyone could be that day’s DJ without much fuss. We were still in a pre-COVID world, back when things still felt like they had some hope and promise.
As I mentioned earlier, we shared our lab space with a research and development team, and even they became friends with us. The senior research tech on their team was Justin, a tall blonde man who favored Doogie Howser when he wore a lab coat. He was strait-laced on the surface, but once he opened up, he had a sharp, caustic wit. His lab partner was Casey, a young woman fresh out of college. When she came through the lab on her first interview, she wore a suit. She came into the lab expecting business casual propriety and respected hierarchy dynamics, only to find our band of hill people and their ritualistic chaos. She adapted quickly, though. We all became so close that we went to her engagement and housewarming parties. Shayna and I even made the playlist for her wedding and reception.
We started calling it “Dirty Work” because our facility essentially made dirt, and every week something so ridiculous and hilarious would happen that it felt like we were living out an NBC workplace sitcom ala Parks and Recreation or Superstore. It got to the point where we were marking seasons of our show by changes in our lives. Shayna taking over was the end of Season One. My fiancé and I broke up, and the aftermath played out in Season Two, etc. To this day, I still think it would work as a television show.
Shayna: Dirty Work was a really magical time for a lot of reasons, both personal and professional. I think one of the biggest reasons was that our plant manager was such a cartoon character, and the only people who truly understood what it was like to work for him were those who lived it. We were bonded by the chaos of working in a bizarro world, and we were also just good friends having fun playing in the dirt and figuring it all out together. There was a trust and reliability that we never replicated with any other team, and we were underdogs in a brand-new plant who were fucking nailing it. It was a high energy, work-hard-play-hard but never take it too seriously dynamic.
Tyler: It would have been totally different if we were looking down our noses at the company and rolling our eyes at the work. That wasn’t it at all, though. Our plant and our roles within it were sort of being mapped out in real time, and we all took it seriously. In all of our time together, we never let a bad product leave the building. We never had a single customer complaint, and we aced every audit. All of us had worked shitty jobs in the past, and we knew from experience what worked and what didn’t. In a way we had the freedom to build whatever environment we wanted. We almost never wore lab coats, we always had music playing and I think we all laughed more inside those walls than we did at home. It was one of those impossibly rare things where your work family also becomes your chosen family. Once we all had a space where we felt comfortable, we built a lab that became the blueprint for every other lab in our company, nationwide.
Matt: That was a fun era, and having Shayna as a boss was super cool. We had good days and bad days. It was nice not having to worry about some hard ass trying to get you in trouble or be a dick to you. The boss always having your back was cool. Some days it just felt like friends hanging out in a lab, and that feeling isn’t often found in a job. The real highlight of that era for me will always be Bill quitting after coming in and seeing like four bags that needed testing while “I Want to Break Free” by Queen played in the background.
Will: It’s not too common to strike gold straight out of high school. I was 19. Most people drift around for years before finding a work environment like that. Every day was the same, but completely different. It was a plant with solid structure, somehow run by a lab full of absolute buffoonery. Honestly, it was more likely you’d learn quantum physics in a day than leave that lab in a bad mood. Our quality of work clearly respected our spirit of friendship.
Casey (R&D Chemist): Since it was my first big job out of college, I expected everything to be very professional. I expected Shayna to be strict, since that is what I had seen in other parts of the company. But she was super great to her people, I remember everyone wanting to work in the lab because the environment was so good. We all cared about each other. It was great to walk into an environment where we could listen to music and talk about whatever we wanted. It created a lot of long-lasting relationships. To this day I would say we are all still close.
Things hit their peak in 2019. By that time, Ramona and I were dating, and it looked like I had found my forever home with her. Things were so chummy in the lab that I would find myself pacing on Sundays because I couldn’t wait to get back. I would have done my job for free if it was asked of me back then. By the end of that year, on Halloween, everyone even dressed like me as a prank. They wore flannel, news boy caps, and Ghost t-shirts. Shayna even wore a fake beard all day.
There were enough hijinks every single week that it sincerely felt like we were living in the best years of The Office. Once, when things were slow, we spent our entire shift trying to learn how to moonwalk. We would often play truly disgusting, hours-long games of “Would You Rather?” while testing our samples. Will was the king of pranks, one time setting up an elaborate scene that was made to look like someone drowned it a bucket of cured concrete. All of us sat together in meetings and made it our goal to crack each other up so much that it would be impossible to ignore, like we were back in high school. We even had our own version of the Dundies, called the Best Boy Award. I won it once for “Shrillest Complaints and Highest Snake Score.” There was no reason to believe the good times wouldn’t last forever.
Everything changed after COVID.
I had gotten a promotion and was now the lab lead. Everyone knew it could have gone either way, but it left Matt with no room to advance. He was always the stronger tech, but for some reason, they chose me. The coin could have just as easily flipped in his directions, but it happened to land in my favor. Understandably, he chose to move to a different department for the good of his career. His departure broke my heart, but it wasn’t the last big change, just the first domino to fall.
Ramona got offered her dream job in another state, and she took it. Will fell victim to post-COVID downsizing and left the company. Our friends in R&D left for a new facility in another town a few exits down the interstate. Corporate stopped paying attention to us, and our plant manager took the opportunity to become a dictator of sorts. We lost our music privileges and were issued uniforms. Any time we took a breath out of line, we were written up. I once came back from lunch a little late after learning my grandfather had died and was suspended for a day.
Shayna and I became the only constant figures in the lab amid a revolving door of new characters. As a result, we became inseparable. We agreed that neither of us would ever leave unless we both agreed to it, even if that meant retiring together. It was me and her against the world, fighting in the trenches together, day in and day out. We were so close that we could have entire conversations without opening our mouths. She was my best friend, sister and work wife. Like any relationship though, it grew toxic when we lost sight of boundaries.
Remember, we spent 40-60 hours a week in a room together, 52 weeks a year, for several years. We were around each other more than anyone else in our lives; it wasn’t even close. There were days when we would laugh from opening to close, but there were also days where we would rub each other the wrong way and spend hours in tense silence. Looking back, our friendship was a blessing and a curse in equal measure. In some ways, there was a power struggle. It’s not that I wanted the power she had; it’s that I always wanted her to be my friend first and my boss second. Even if she wanted to do that—which I’m sure she did—it would have been impossible. At some point we started taking professional obligations as personal slights. We needed a break from each other, I know that now, but at the time I couldn’t figure out what was happening.
Then the interview happened.
To everyone’s delight, our tyrannical Plant Manager was offered a job in the Midwest. He mercifully accepted, and his departure left in its wake a power vacuum. Shayna was qualified and beloved by corporate. Our department had become the envy of everyone; multiple people had come to us inquiring about any potential openings. Things were streamlined well enough that she could turn her office over to someone else without skipping a beat. Naturally, I would be next in line to take her place. She would still be my boss; we would both be making more money, and the company would stand to benefit as well. It was such an obvious no-brainer that not many others even bothered to apply. Matt threw his hat in the ring, since he had begun quickly moving up the ranks in his new department, but it was essentially a gambit to let everyone know he was serious about continuing his advancement. Bumble-Butt the Mullet Man (not his Christian name), a low-level supervisor, also applied—which made everyone roll their eyes—but those were the only three contenders.
Shayna nailed the first round of interviews, then came back and destroyed the second round. No one could know anything for sure, but the chatter was that it was hers for the taking. We spent a lunch together talking about the future and making plans. She was putting together a training binder for me to make both of our transitions easier. All she had left was a long interview with the final decision maker at corporate. This should be the moment where I tell you that she accidentally farted on a picture of his family and ruined everything, but the truth is, that interview went even better than the other two. We even heard through the grapevine that her name had been given as the official recommendation.
Bumble-Butt the Mullet Man was announced as our new plant manager a few weeks later.
Shayna was utterly defeated. I couldn’t blame her, of course. The decision reeked of blatant sexism. I was devastated for her, but for me, the silver lining was that she was still poised to be the best boss I ever had for years to come. Her not getting promoted meant I wouldn’t be either, but that didn’t bother me. I was happy with our dynamic, with our team. I was too lost in my own homeostasis to see how much it had truly broken her spirit. She was ready to give up while I was content to keep Dirty Work going for several more seasons. The show had to end. Our ratings were slipping, and the story was done, but I was unwilling to accept it.
Shayna: It was more difficult to go against the retirement pact than it was to leave the lab in general. I think, by that point, we had pulled an Icarus. We had achieved this incredible feat of taking that place from nothing to the best performing lab in the country, and we were left smoldering in a heap with nothing to show for it. If you could build a whole career on good vibes, the Dirty Work kids would be millionaires. At some point we started to see that the grownups weren’t taking us seriously in that sandbox, and we all just started to move on.
With nowhere left to move within our branch, Shayna left our department in favor of a new opportunity at our sister plant down the road. It was around the same amount of money she would have gotten if she had been promoted, but with fewer headaches and more opportunities to work remote if she so chose. When she left, I was not given the opportunity to take her place. Due to restructuring on the corporate level, my department was downsized, and I was lucky to squeak by with the job I already had. Now it’s just me left, the last original Dirty Worker.
When speaking to Shayna in preparation for this column, I told her that felt like Dirty Work had lasted for six wonderful, critically acclaimed seasons, then went off the air with a banger of a finale. While everyone else went off to their own spinoffs, however, I just kept coming to set every day. I live in the space that exists after the credits roll. Of course, the work didn’t stop because my imaginary TV show ended.
For years my life was wrapped up in my career. It’s so funny looking back now because it’s not like I was running my own business or working for social justice. I was just doing something every day that I liked that I was good at, with people I loved. When the smoke cleared and I was on my own, I realized that it had become just a job so gradually that I hadn’t even noticed. What followed was an existential crisis that I couldn’t shake until I remembered something I had forced myself to forget years before:
I wasn’t meant to be a lab tech; I was supposed to be writing.
…
The Aftermath
My lost weekend lasted nearly two years.
At first, I thought the lost weekend was the entire span of time that I put aside my creative endeavors and focused solely on a quest for authenticity. Calling that time lost cheapens the entire experience, I realize now. I wasn’t moving towards a creative goal anymore, but I was still building something worthwhile. I became a better friend, partner and (hopefully) human being.
Things only started to feel adrift for me when they became stagnant. With Shayna gone and the adventure finished, I stopped moving forward or backward and simply began floating. I wasn’t making music, writing, filming or anything. At some point I became a 30-something single man who ate the same lunch every day and watched TV until bedtime. It wasn’t a bad life, exactly, just a life on pause. While that was happening, the onslaught of depressing news every waking hour wasn’t exactly inspiring me to get out into the world much.
The America I knew and loved seemed to have vanished when I wasn’t looking. I watched the news every night and saw my country tearing itself apart over an elderly game show host. We were like Gotham City without a Batman. I remember, when I was a kid, there used to be civil discourse. Now it doesn’t appear that anyone wants to find common ground to build on anymore, every conversation descends into vitriol and madness within seconds. It’s brother against brother.
What began pulling me out of my self-imposed swamp exile was the death of Jimmy Carter. Carter had always been a hero of mine, so much so that I had written him a letter in my youth that I’m sure never came across his desk. When he died I had so much to say that I couldn’t get it all out with a self-indulgent social media post. So, I wrote something. It was the first real thing I had written in 10 years. I told the story of meeting him, what he meant to me, and what I learned from the experience.
Writing that story felt so good that I wrote another, then another. Soon I had all these autobiographical musings and nothing to do with them, so I brought them to New Noise Magazine. The editor, Lisa Root, was my editor at Loud Fast Rules! all those years ago. Things felt so warmly, perfectly full circle. We turned it into a series called Tales From the Underground, which you’re reading now.
I’ve been all over this country and have met so many incredible people from all walks of life. I’m lucky enough to have friends that span every race, religion, gender, sexuality and political party. What I can tell you is that almost everyone I’ve met wants the same basic thing—to keep their friends and family safe and happy. I know that’s all I want, and if you’re reading this, I would bet that’s all you want too. If nothing else, we have that to build on together.
Part of me wanted to tell these stories from my life because I’m just a regular guy who has had the insane luck to go on many adventures with all these beautiful characters. I wanted to tie them to music for many reasons, but chief among them is that music is a universal language. The best part is, if you like me, it’s because you got to know me on a personal level. You don’t know how I vote, who I love or anything else that could pull us part. If this weird little memoir accomplished nothing else, at least it gave us a break from the bullshit long enough to relate on a human level. And just by reading it, you gave me the greatest gift of all.
You made me a rock journalist again.
