Published in the Quad-City Times on Nov. 13, 2024

I don’t know much. But I know one thing for certain. The streets look different when you see them for the first time. 

I’ve spent the first half of my twenties jittery. There’s a magnet in me that yearns for change. I can’t depolarize it. It aches. 

Maybe it’s the trained restlessness of growing up in a small Nevada town that I never felt like a lifer in.

Or it could be the four years I lived in Phoenix, a city where every person I met either just moved to town or was actively planning their exit.

Could it be inherent, this transience? Genetic, even?

I have five older siblings, all of whom are now in their thirties. Combined between them, they lived in 14 cities in their twenties and I’ve loved them in every single one. I’m predictable, because I’m already planning my third move in the last two years, too. 

But I can’t lie to you. This one feels a little different. 

When I first arrived in the Quad-Cities, the emotions were familiar. The first few days in a new city, one you’re expecting to stick around in for a while, are always strange. You drive past street corners, meet neighbors and walk into restaurants not knowing which ones are going to be the most impactful.

Everything has a glow to it, like you’re on some sort of permanent vacation. There is something addicting about the discovery.

Eventually, you settle in. Cruising altitude isn’t quite as romantic. You have to look a little harder for the spirit. It’s sort of like falling in love. It’s easy to take those little days for granted. 

But when it’s time to leave, the glow comes back. It bats its eyes at you for just a few days, long enough to keep the initial memory as the lasting one. It’s beautiful. You’re so, so beautiful.

This week, I’m leaving the Quad-Cities to follow my soulmate to Minneapolis. 

Looking back with these last-glimpse glasses, even the days in the middle start to catch the glow. The small things in my memories feel bigger.

The whimsical, silent film intro to every movie at The Last Picture House. The whitecaps of the river on a windy morning. The clicking keyboards of reporters in cubicles next to mine. The quiet ambience of a breakfast at Le Mekong. The view from Schwiebert Park. The taste of a stout at Bent River, or an Old Fashioned at Edison’s. The beaming, red “BUD” sign at the back of the Raccoon Motel.

In Sounds Good for the last year, I’ve written about music. 

But more than that, I’ve written almost every column about home. Finding home. Remembering home. Creating, hopefully, a sense of home. 

That’s because, to me, home has a sound to it. Nevada sounds like Everclear and “evermore.” Phoenix sounds like AJJ and JID. 

Here’s what you sound like, Quad-Cities.

I’ll miss you. Thank you.

On This Daytrotter: Sun June on Nov. 16, 2018

Let’s try out one more Daytrotter session. For old time’s sake. 

Six years ago this week, indie-pop band Sun June came to Davenport to record their session. I wrote about it at this time last year, and I’m writing about it again.

Hearing the band perform in this session reminds me of seeing them earlier this year at the Motel. There’s that signature Q-C intimacy. Laura Colwell’s hushed voice sits gently on the shoulders of the furnacing bass. 

“I’m coming home,” Colwell sings on “Slow Rise II,” repeating the refrain a few more times for good measure. “I’m coming home. I’m coming home. I’m coming home.”

Concert of The Week: Young Mister and Mike Mains at Bishop Hill Creative Commons

By the time you read this, I’ll be on my way to the Twin Cities, hustling in a U-Haul to get there in time for Mike Mains and Young Mister’s co-headlined Minneapolis show. Don’t worry, though, Quad-Cities folks. You’ve got time. 

Later this week, Mains and Young Mister, the indie-country project of songwriter Steven Fiore, will be at Bishop Hill Creative Commons, just outside of Cambridge, on Saturday at 7 p.m.

Mains was last in Davenport this summer, playing lovely little songs at the Motel like “Briggs,” one of my favorite romantic tunes. His encore for the show was an unreleased, acoustic track about loss that jabbed me in the chest. 

Standing in the same place where I once cried separately to songs by John McCauley and Drayton Farley, I frantically recorded what I could of Mains’ song to a voice memo on my phone. In this 50-second clip, I captured the refrain, where Mains asks to have his ashes someday mixed with a loved one’s.

He longs for permanence — “So if there’s nothing past this,” he sings, “you and I remain.”

Fiore has been one of my favorite songwriters for years now.

His self-titled record is a borderline masterpiece, with earworms like “Anybody Out There” and “Pasadena” alongside heavy-hitters like love song “Everything Has Its Place” and “American Dream Come True.” 

“Carolina” feels a little too on-the-nose right now. It’s a song about love. It’s a song about leaving. It’s a song about home. Aren’t they all? 

“What a predictable moment, the songbird leaves the nest with a dream and a heavy chest,” Fiore sings. “Writing winded words to the clouds out west.”

Susto – “Live From Codfish Hollow”

If there’s one thing I’ve been as drawn to as change in the first half of my twenties, it’s live music.

Sometimes, though, the experience can feel a little too corporate. The exorbitant fees and mean-mugging security guards breathing down your neck. The festival stages are sponsored by deodorant brands. 

Thankfully, Q-C, you have a venue that’s the antithesis of this: Codfish Hollow in Maquoketa.

Right outside that barn is one of the first places where I truly felt at home after moving to town. I sat under the stars and counted until I ran out of time. And there just weren’t nearly enough. There never are. 

Alt-country band Susto loves Codfish enough that they recorded a live album there and released it earlier this year.

Under all that crowd noise, you can hear the love in the room. “Live From Codfish Hollow” even starts with a throaty introduction by local comic Mike Steele, a barn tradition.

The songs themselves sound great, too. They cover Lana del Rey and Oasis. Personal Susto favorites like “Break Free, Rolling Stone,” “Mt. Caroline,” “Diamond’s Icaro” and “Friends, Lovers, Ex Lovers” are all crisp. 

“Black River Gospel,” though — a song ostensibly about the confines of growing up in the religious South — reads like a sermon today.

“The spirit of the open country started calling to me,” goes singer Justin Osborne. “So I set out across the continent with my friends.

“Oh Black River, I don’t think I could do it again,” he continues. “‘Cause I know now that all good things will come to an end.” 

Counting Crows – “Somewhere Under Wonderland”

The first concert I reviewed as an entertainment reporter for the Times/Dispatch-Argus was the Counting Crows at the John Deere Classic in July.

I had a few gripes about the distance of the stage, but it’s impossible not to feel a little bit close to an Adam Duritz lyric. The band is especially potent when it comes to memories. 

On piano ballad “Possibility Days,” Duritz captures the pains of the could’ve-beens. It sums up how the last few weeks have felt, knowing I’m leaving town soon — “and the worst part of a good day is the one thing you don’t say.”

It’s hard not to ache a bit. 

“God of Ocean Tides,” though, is a relief. Its monkey-bar acoustics, bursts of brass and prosaic lyrics about candle wax and poems to California, Carolina and China are somehow crystal clear. 

“You can see through water all the way up to the sky,” Duritz sings. “Gods of water, Gods of rain, cover up the sun again.

“We are crossing at the Mississippi line, and I tried all my days to love you just the way you hoped I might.” 

The Brazen Youth – “The Ever Dying Bristlecone Man”

Did you know one of oldest living things on earth is a bristlecone pine tree? It’s called Methuselah and it has been around for nearly 5,000 years.

In that lifespan, whole civilizations came and went and a couple teenagers from New England called The Brazen Youth wrote a beautifully profound folk album about how painful it must be to watch everything change while you stay still. 

“The Ever Dying Bristlecone Man” is full of gentle acoustics, whispers of bliss and triumphant gang vocals. It hits its boiling point with the “You’ll Be Forever Nameless” suite, a five-part, 14-minute masterpiece split into two songs. 

“Center of Gravity,” though, is this album’s slugger. On it, vocalist Nic Lussier paints a picture. It’s a familiar one.

“He is 16 and locked out his car, and he’s waiting for someone to call him home,” he sings. “And he sits there, and dreams of a world where the air is clear, and there’s freedom to roam away.

“Away.”

The driveway back in Nevada used to burn my heels when I’d run outside to take out the trash at night. But still, I’d stand and stare at the stars when I got the chance. I own snowshoes now. I think that’s lovely.

The Head and The Heart – “The Head and The Heart”

I’ve been holding all these moving emotions inside for a few weeks now, incapable of deciphering them. But on a recent drive through downtown Davenport, it all became clear. 

I listened to the self-titled album from folk band The Head and The Heart, listening closely for clarity. I drove past the Capitol Theatre, where I saw the band perform one year ago this week. 

“The Head and The Heart” is about the coldness of leaving and the warmth of having been — “I will miss the days we had,” goes “Winter Song,” later landing on the more satisfying conclusion of “I’ll be back again to stay.” 

“Down in The Valley” played on this drive, and the emotions came pouring. That glow, splattered under my eyelids, sprayed against the window panes, spread against the 40-degree Quad-Cities sky. 

“Look at the sign in the door, and it reads to me just like the grass and the sign when you walked in,” sings lead vocalist Jonathan Russell. 

The streets look different when you see them for the first time. They look better when you go. Leaving is a gift and a curse. I know that now. 

“Down in the valley, with whiskey rivers, these are the places you will find me hiding,” Russell sings. “These are the places I will always go.” 

There’s a memory of you, Quad-Cities, that I’ll never shake. The melody is on the tip of my tongue.

It sounds good. It sounds like home.