It was 43 years ago today that “Instant Karma! (We All Shine On)” sprang from John Lennon’s head fully formed. John Lennon wrote and recorded “Instant Karma!” in a single day. He famously stated “I wrote it for breakfast, recorded it for lunch, and we’re putting it out for dinner.” The single, which bore the […]
Tomorrow is my first day of graduate school. Tomorrow I begin my coursework to get a Master’s degree in literature from the University of Memphis. I did not plan to wait until I was 35 years old to start this process, or to put it off until I had two children and twelve years of […]
This weekend I finished Please Kill Me by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain, the exhaustive oral history of the New York City punk scene . It was a fascinating and trashy read, and it had me obsessing about music even more than I usually do. So I gave myself a 5-4-3-2-1 project, inspired by an assignment […]
Richard Nixon was born 100 years ago today. Here’s a song I wrote about him. I wrote this song, “The Misconduct of Public Men,” with my brother Justin Fox Burks (who you probably know as The Chubby Vegetarian), back in 2006. That’s him singing. We were in a band called The Hometown Nobodies, and we […]
Here’s what I read in December 1. The Human Stain by Philip Roth For me, reading Philip Roth is like listening to the Smiths or rooting for the Steelers. It’s just a natural thing for me to do. But for the past three years, I have purposely avoided reading Philip Roth, instead forcing myself to […]