30 Years of Saddle Creek
ISSUE #238
One of indie’s most reliable engines has been chugging away in the middle of America, whether you knew it or not. Saddle Creek Records, a 50/50 split profit sharing label in Omaha, has for 30 years now been home to some the underground’s big hitters: Big Thief, Hop Along, Rilo Kiley, Hand Habits, Tokyo Police Club, and label founders The Faint and Bright Eyes.
Saddle Creek carved out a space for verbose and long-winded raconteurs who broke conventions of popular songwriting by threatening to burst through meter entirely with their detail-laden, literary yarns. The label’s namesake also breaks convention—Saddle Creek Road is a scar slashed across the clean Midwestern grid that followed what was once an old military road.
I first drove the landmark while visiting my college girlfriend, an Omaha expert, excited to visit the church of Bright Eyes after years of being part of the congregation with my siblings. Now, my sister lives here, and she’s just as likely to pass Conor Oberst in the store as she is to catch him playing secret shows for a few dozen people at her neighborhood dive.
Today, I’m back in Omaha for her law school graduation. To honor her dizzying intellect, the house that Saddle Creek helped build, I’ve mapped the history of the label that helped bring my family together in this playlist.
As for her—I’ve never been more proud of someone in my life.
When I was 21, I worked at Forever 21. I was the sole stock worker on any given shift, and I ran that backroom like a movie set—there wasn’t a single maxi dress I couldn’t echolocate.
I remember—I remember the first song I listened to for weeks. It was in 2004. I had loved a tune before, sure—your Cher’s “Believe,” your Smash Mouth’s “All Star”—but had never experienced that blissful hunger for one. That came with “All These Things I’ve Done”…
Chances are, you’re going to a Halloween party this year. Maybe you’re even throwing one. In either case, should you find yourself with the AUX, I bestow to you this gift—a six-and-a-half-hour mix of the best electro-goth and industrial dance music the 80s had to offer.
Two years after our first maddening descent into dungeon synth—the haunted, medieval, dark ambient subgenre born from side projects of Nordic black metal stars—and we’ve already seen a swell of scholarly literature on the genre from dark-corner music nerds and fantasy-flecked weirdos (both me) alike.
Kurt Cobain died on April 5, 1994. He killed himself—and he did kill himself. Crazy the acrobatics our minds will go through to rule out the reality of suicide. Impossible! That life could be too hard to live? We’re more likely to see misogynistic conspiracy lurk around every corner.
Irv Teibel, who released the influential Environments records over ten years from 1969–79, was a pioneer in putting field recordings (i.e., nature sounds) into the hands of stressed-out college students and, eventually, anyone who needed to drown out all the noise. Turns out that was a lot of people.
MJ Lenderman is one of the greatest guitarists. A supreme pleasure I get out of listening to his latest album is the sick guitar. He makes it talk, baby! I hear Dinosaur Jr. and Zappa’s best; I hear chapters in a book that switches narrators.
The opener to Mitski's latest album, “Bug Like an Angel,” starts as many songs do: with a single strum of an acoustic guitar. It’s not long before her voice becomes a choir, and the effect is that of intoxication, a blossom in the bloodstream, sinking at first and floating toward the end. Iggy Pop has described her as “probably the most advanced American songwriter that I know.”
I may have mentioned last week that 1984 did not turn out to be Orwell’s dystopia—but there was one consequential act of censorship that occurred. It was no panopticon, no ever-present Big Brother, no. Instead, it took the form of a tiny sticker—one that read “Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics,” and has adorned nearly every heavy metal, punk, and hip hop album since the mid-1980s.
1984 has been called the greatest year in pop, and I think it might still be true. If 1974 was music’s fallow period, ten years later was its opposite. We danced in the dark beneath the killing moon and under purple rain—this was the year the critics and the people met in the Minneapolis streets.
Yet these are often sophisticated and complex compositions. They’re designed at first provide stimulating play, but there’s artistic meat there nonetheless. It’s a hyper mix of classical, breakcore, bubblegum pop, and progressive rock.
When I started gathering my research for this Annivyrsary back in January, one thing became clear—1974 was not a good year for music. This was very much a puberty period, an awkward personality vacuum that comes between shedding the old and fully realizing the new. This was to be my Waterloo.
“Yup! Like it or not, Creed is back on top of the chart.” This is the caption that greeted me when I opened this month’s issue of my new favorite publication, The Cabbagetown Neighbor.
It’s hot out there folks, so you know what that means—fight fire with fire, crank up the heat, love your blisters till they callous. Just grab onto whatever you can.
Technically, halfway through the year is next Monday, July 1st. This is a leap year, after all. They’re the only years where there’s an even split in days; the only times the divide falls at midnight, not noon.
There are now roving bands of sonic scavengers in the fractured data gutters of the post–Web 2.0 internet, musicians often known by little more than alt-code symbols (♡u∫agi幻覚∀∁ⓛᙌ✬) or keyboard vomit (Sophiaaaahjkl;8901). These boundary pushers are chopping and screwing so hard it sounds like a chainsaw, their samples reduced to little more by the end than glitter and stardust.
I’ve been watching through the films of Danny Boyle. Some examples: Trainspotting, Sunshine, 28 Days Later, Slumdog Millionaire. From early on, Boyle was rightfully recognized for his edgy and sophisticated musical taste—the Trainspotting soundtrack alone, from Iggy’s “Lust for Life” through Underworld’s “Born Slippy (Nuxx)”, helped define the tastes of a whole generation.
Trance is one of the cheesiest genres in the world, which makes it one of the very best. Contrary to the name, it is not conventionally relaxing, though I find strange comfort when awash in it. It usually starts with a kick drum, then a tide of synthesizers, then arpeggios that dart and echo like a bee trapped in a concert hall.
My little brother died just after midnight on January 20, 2023. We buried a handful of his ashes in the Smoky Mountains on his 28th birthday that May. I know we weren’t supposed to. What choice did we have? It was one of his wishes; I’d fulfill them all if I could.
Feeling stressed? Overwhelmed? Press play and step into my garden. Breathe deep and put your hands in the dirt. These songs will hydrate you, warm you up, root you into place.
Steve Albini—perhaps the greatest audio engineer of my lifetime, the first producer I knew by name—is dead at 61 this week. He produced thousands of records, dozens of masterpieces, and shaped the sound of the 90s through his work with Nirvana, PJ Harvey, and the Pixies.
These cursed wanderers have built a rich musical tradition over centuries. So sink your teeth into the gothic country of the cowboys of vampire valley. But best you get inside before the sun sets—strange things tend to happen here after dark.
A 2012 profile in the New Yorker put it best: “People seldom forget their first encounters with Nine Inch Nails.” I certainly didn’t—I was trying to find someone to cut my hair to look like Ewan McGregor’s. My stepmom took me to her friend’s house, a former hairdresser who looked a little like John Cameron Mitchell. In his kitchen, in fading light, he perfect a Kenobi-cut while The Downward Spiral played.
Earwyrms turns six years old tomorrow, and now that my baby’s old enough for the first grade, I’m going to have to change some things around the house. As a birthday present, I’ll be making two major changes to the newsletter in next few days: 1) the weekly release day of Earwyrms is moving from Fridays over to Tuesdays; and 2) I’ll slowly be transferring this enterprise over to Substack. The first Tuesday issue will be released on April 30th, with Substack coming shortly after.
When Vampire Weekend was getting dunked on hard in the Obama era, it was just because they were clearly the best of their class—they had much more of a thing than your Two Door Cinema Clubs or your Passion Pits. Love them or hate them, Vampire Weekend was good enough to be in the crosshairs.
Up here—no, up here! In the saucer. I've been up here all day—these guys know how to party. They gave me the AUX, I'm spinning 80s astro pop. Come up and hear this sub, dude.
Now, lamb songs don’t have to be low energy to be soothing. They simply need a sunny disposition, a 74-degree mid-cycle feel. They shrink you down and plop you into a flute of champagne—plus you can breathe water now, easily as air. The bubbles give you quick little kisses as they pass. You only get drunk if you wish.
Philip Glass is one of those names—the name of perhaps the most famous living composer, of course—that you’ve either heard but never investigated or have read about so many times that your eyes are rolling already. His reputation lies halfway between never needing to be written about again and still needing everybody with a pen to do so.
Something preposterous happened in 1964: On the week of April 4, one artist had the top five songs on the Billboard Hot 100. It’d never happened before and it hasn’t been matched since. Mere weeks before, in the warming days of March, America found that no fewer than 60% of all records sold were songs by the Beatles.
The best song of 2024 isn’t on Spotify. It’s called “24/7 Heaven,” Diamond Jubilee’s closer. It comes drenched in strings and draped in blue light, at the end of Cindy Lee’s two-hour album. It’s the epitome of sublime, if you ask me—a sweet and perfect fruit, an apple at first sight.