I will cry for any of you behind your back
My seven year old iPhone has worked perfectly fine this entire time until I did the latest update like a mark and now it's a fucking piece of shit. I shouldn't have to shell out $1,000 just because a company felt like it was time to take it from me. Like my rent was due.
Ah crap it's the first of the month. The regular rent is also due.
Whatever computer stuff happened inside of its guts it makes the camera take pictures of the moon like this now:
Yes I was stoned when I took those photos but I don't think that is supposed to have any effect on the camera itself.
For today's main thing a few new pieces of short fiction by me. Plus I'm also going to share my most recent Flaming Hydra piece. It's about my favorite band. I talked to my pal Aaron Perrino about ten of his favorite songs he's written throughout his career. It's a fun talk about creativity and aging and trying to make a life as an artist and refusing the corporate life – a theme that runs throughout many of his songs. You can read it here or down below.
Luke O’Neil
Here's another good recent one about a beloved 90s band still going strong.
Luke O’Neil
First a bunch of my bullshit.
Subscribe for free or with a paid subscription if you can buddy. It's a really nice thing to do!
And since some of you often generously offer to fund other people's subscriptions here's a link where you can gift one to anyone you like. Thanks as always.
Man this is so cool. I love this very much. A potter (Baked Honey Ceramics on Instagram) made a bowl inscribed with my poem The Rules.
People are so talented. Making things with your hands is so cool.
Well this is certainly a metaphor.
I will hopefully have something more in depth on it soon but please do not miss what's been happening inside and outside of the Delaney Hall detention center in Newark the past few days. Detainees being held there have been on a hunger strike to protest routine and violent abuse.
Elizabeth Cronise McLaughlin has been documenting much of the cop rioting.
Of course the Democratic Governor Mikie Sherrill has unleashed the cops on the protestors. Will Bunch lays it out plainly here:
Will Bunch
What are good people doing right now? As news of a detainee hunger strike inside Delaney Hall reached the outside world, a few hundred protesters have made their way toward the gates of the facility run by the for-profit GEO Group — to voice support for the strikers, demand humane treatment, and, for some of them, put their bodies on the line to commit acts of civil disobedience against a human-rights catastrophe on American soil.
What is New Jersey’s newish Democratic Gov. Mikie Sherrill doing right now?
For two nights now, a battalion of Sherrill’s New Jersey State Police — who the first-year governor had claimed would “lower the temperature” in Newark — has turned up the heat to 11 by firing rubber bullets, tear-gas canisters, and flash-bang grenades while violently pushing back the demonstrators, both with mounted officers on horseback and with riot shields and batons.
North New Jersey DSA has a list of resources to donate to or where to direct action here.
I just don't know if we can rely on these blue state governors to save us man.
Luke O’Neil
I'm excited to have signed with a new agent to work on selling my next book (working title "I Am Never Going to Die lol.") If you'd like to publish it please let Erik Hane at Headwater Literary Management know. Please also direct any and all annoying comments or abuse you would normally send me to him.
Hane is a talented writer himself and did this extraordinary piece for Hell World about the siege of Minneapolis by ICE a while back if you never read it.
Luke O’Neil
Here are a couple newish pieces of short fiction I'm working on to perhaps include in the book.
Congratulations
Everyone’s kids were graduating high school according to my computer. Just like that out of nowhere. Some of them from college too which seemed incorrect. A continuity error perhaps.
I can barely tell you who the everyone I’m talking about consists of at this point never mind be expected to know anything about the graduates themselves. But man I was proud of them all anyway. Big tumbles of curled hair and floodlight smiles. The girls must have spent all morning on that. And all the sharp angled boys standing 5’9 in the cap mom makes them put back on for the photos after they’ve long since tired of it.
I don’t ask much of you she would have said.
Maybe the kids all sensed for the first time this newly compounding distance between them and thus surrendered. Performing once more for the road the role of a child for the person who will always see them that way long after no one else ever does. A curtain call kind of deal. Not only a beginning but a finale.
The big fight
The cum flowers were in full bloom and the president had some non-union guys he wasn't ever going to pay in a thousand years excavating an ad hoc pit to Hell on the south lawn of the White House. The first of the cicadas landed directly on his chin and got stuck in the bronzer like a chip in hummus. He didn’t notice for a full seven minutes. Just kept saying words. Numbers too. Everyone else was afraid to say anything. In the near distance what seemed like fifty shots thudded percussively and all the news crews stood there not moving at all. As if it wasn’t happening. As if nothing in history had ever happened. Some poor jackoff they had tricked into thinking he was a hero was already dead. Had been dead for months he just didn’t know it yet. Falling now into the same pit from a different entrance. Getting a head start on everyone else.
I’m very lucky
My accountant called to tell me that everything seemed to be in order with my filing and then added as a postscript that he had been diagnosed with cancer. He was going to be out of the country for a while getting treatment back home where it is free he said so he was rushing to get as many of his clients sorted as he could before then.
This was obviously sad news to hear. I didn’t know him all that well personally but I had been to his apartment in Inman Square a dozen times over the years and drank his tea and he of course had taken a pretty thorough peak under the hood of my life finances-wise. I felt the urge to cry for him but then had the idea he wouldn’t respect it. Stiff upper lip and all that. Instead I told him I would say a little prayer for him and I don’t think he cared for that very much either but he said thank you anyway because even dying people default to being polite.
When we hung up I cried all the same. I will cry for any of you behind your back whether you like it or not.
The next day my little sister called to tell me she had been diagnosed with cancer herself so that kind of knocked the accountant story out of the headlines. I should have kept my powder dry. She lied to me for a while about how it wasn’t going to be that bad while I listened to her lie and then I lied to her for a while about how it wasn’t going to be that bad while she listened to me lie.
Everything I’ve ever said about my dead parents was also about her dead parents. That’s how siblings work. Pardon me I know you know that. But there are not many people in the world I can say that about. Kind of an exclusive club.
It’s small she said. They caught it early she said. Thank god I said. Thank god for that. I’m very lucky she said. That’s right I said. I told her I’d come see her in the next few days and she said she would like that.
I put on some music to distract myself from the news I had just gotten and all it did was serve as a film score to the news I had just gotten. I used to think that every single song was about romantic love but at my age that’s not what they’re about anymore.
My Favorite Band: The Sheila Divine
This piece was originally published at Flaming Hydra.
I saw my first real rock concert in 1993. It was at an air force base somewhere in Rhode Island. The opening band that day was called Rage Against the Machine. This is going to be my life I thought. I am never going to get over this.
And then I made it my life.
I spent the next few years racing back and forth between Boston and Providence and Worcester seeing as many shows as I could. I knew from then on, at a pretty young age, that I wanted to be a music journalist more than anything else. I only really cared about two things, music and writing, so it seemed like the perfect synthesis. That was still a job you could aspire to make a living out of back then.
And then I made it my living.
I’d go on to play in bands myself for most of my twenties and thirties too. With plenty of high points and many, many more lows. It’s hard after all these years to remember much of it. Chalk some of that up to drugs and alcohol, but how many concerts is a person supposed to be able to recall after thousands of them?
Here’s one I remember distinctly though. It was late 2019 at a party I was throwing for the launch of my first book, Welcome to Hell World, at Great Scott in Allston. Covid was just around the corner although we didn’t know that. And Great Scott, my favorite rock club, was about to shut down, although we didn’t know that either. Naturally I wanted someone to perform some songs that night, and there was never any question of who the most appropriate person would be: Aaron Perrino of The Sheila Divine.
This one song from that night hasn’t left me in the intervening years. It’s called “Glacier.”
It starts so pure. Yeah we dream big
Something happens. Something changes
Like a glacier that slowly melts away
The hopes we had corrode and it starts a tidal wave
All my friends were there. Of course they were, because all my friends were always at Great Scott and all my friends were always at The Sheila Divine show.
Almost everything that ever happened to me in my life, good or bad, came out of the Boston indie and punk scenes of the late ’90s to 2010s. My friends, my wife, my career, I wouldn’t have any of it otherwise. And so many of those nights were soundtracked by this specific band. We were there throughout all their highs and lows too. Shouting along to our favorite songs.
So I think it’s fair to say that The Sheila Divine is my favorite band of all time. Now hold on a second Luke, those of you who follow me online might be thinking, don’t you never shut the fuck up about Weezer? And for people who know me a little better, what about The Smiths or R.E.M., or Deftones, or maybe Elliott Smith or Jason Molina, or any number of ’90s emo bands? Yes that is true those are also my favorite bands, but The Sheila Divine is, nevertheless, my favorite band of all time. Favorite indie band certainly. Favorite Boston band hands down. (Although now that the weather has finally turned I cannot recommend putting on the Modern Lovers enough if you haven’t in a while).
This has been true since I first heard the Buffalo-by-way-of-Boston band’s 1999 debut New Parade, a perfect 10/10—maybe not better than the The Blue Album, the system by which I judge most things, but in the vicinity—and one I have yet to grow sick of all these years later after hundreds of listens and, I don’t know, roughly 100 concerts. (Check out upcoming tour dates including Brooklyn this week here).
It remained true into the 2000s when I started to cross paths here and there with the guys in the Boston rock world playing shows together, and it was true years before most of them, especially songwriter and frontman Aaron Perrino, became a good friend. It also, amazingly for me, did not change some fifteen plus years into my fandom when Aaron and I played in a band of our own called no hope/no harm in the late 2010s.
The thing is, there are elements of almost all of the kinds of music I like in their songs. Dark and propulsive post-punk atmosphere, the shimmering splendor of sometimes-shoegazey guitars, wiry, taut ’90s-style college radio hooks perfect for audience shout-alongs, and a lot of pained screaming. Maybe think of them as “Cure-vana” as Perrino said they were sometimes described. Or an angrier U2 or Echo & the Bunnymen if that makes more sense. It just makes me sad and want to sing man I don’t know what else to tell you.
With the release of the band’s eighth album The Middle Ages this week I called Perrino and asked to him pick ten songs from his catalog over the years that represented the different periods of his career and songwriting. You can listen to a playlist here where I’ve also included a bunch of songs from his band Dear Leader—you guessed it—another favorite of mine. We talked about how creativity changes as you age, accepting becoming a lifer in the arts, playing the No Kings rally, Buffalo, Boston, Belgium and so on.
“Automatic Buffalo” (New Parade, 1999)
Aaron Perrino: This song is probably my legacy song. The one that they’ll play at my funeral. I grew up in Buffalo, New York and a lot of my songs are about that place.
I have a love-hate relationship with Buffalo. It’s mostly love now, but growing up I did not like where I was from. I was bullied as a child. The mindset of a lot of people there doesn’t jive with the way I think. It’s a little more of a centrist or right-leaning type of place. There were a lot of jocks and stoners when I was growing up and I was the nerdy kid with the mullet. And if you lose four Super Bowls in a row, you know it’s not a good place to live. Once you get a taste of old Tom Brady you never go back.
But this song is about not wanting to live a 9 to 5 life, wanting to get out and see the world, which is also the subject of many of my songs. This song still has magic to it every time we play it, no matter who is playing in the band with me.
Luke O’Neil: The songs goes: “Make your money. Don’t stop working. You have your future. Financial planning. Without purpose. Like a robot. I have purpose. I won’t settle.”
You would’ve been in your early 20s when you wrote this one? When we’re young we all think we want to live these authentic and artistic lives. What do you think, looking back on it now as a middle-aged man? Do you think of that sort of thing as silly, or do you still feel the sentiment behind it?
I was 24 or something like that. I mean, it’s totally how I’ve lived my life. So if anything it was sort of prophetic. I’ve lived it. That’s why I feel like it’s a legacy song for me. I’ve never given in. Even though I should! I just continue to blow up my life every few years. Trying to stay true to being an artist. It’s hard. I never wanted to be a vice president of whatever.
I can certainly relate to that. There have always been so many people trying to get one over on one another, but it seems like it’s even worse than it’s ever been in our lives now.
Everything’s a scam now. It’s insane how much… It’s getting worse and worse. Capitalism is so over. I do feel like the algorithm for me on YouTube has been like “we’re all waking up.”
Let’s hope so. You said they’ll play this one at your funeral. You know you’re going to have to play a song at my funeral if I go first right?
Okay. And what’s that?
Well, I don’t know. You’re gonna have to figure it out. You can get like a crackerjack band of Boston rock all-stars.
I’m just gonna do a Linkin Park song.
You know I love Linkin Park!
“Hum” (New Parade, 1999)
I’m not sure if this is one of my favorite songs, but you have to put it in because without it I would not have been able to do a lot of the interesting things I’ve done in my life. Lyrically it’s kind of a comedy song, which is funny, being someone who always wanted to be all Morrissey-like, thoughtful and poetic. It’s sort of dumb singing about the Spice Girls, but it’s catchy as hell. I think Jim Gilbert’s bass line is a key part of that song.
Over the years I’ve used the middle section to be my medley section of the set where I just put in stupid songs, so that has kept it fresh and fun for me.
What are the kinds of songs you stick in there?
It could be anything from Lit’s “My Own Worst Enemy,” to Fugazi, to Echo & the Bunnymen and some heavy metal songs. Just anything that can fit in there. Rick Springfield. Toto.
“Hum” was the hit on the first album. How much of an actual hit was it though? Explain the context of it for people who don’t know it.
It did chart. We were in the top 10 alternative records back then, and it got added to like 100 radio stations. But you needed 200 or whatever for it to be a hit so… But it was the song that, when we toured, brought people out, and got us tours and good stuff happening.
It was the early 2000s when you guys were first ascendant. You talked about going out and seeing the world. Do you feel like you did get to more or less because of this one and the band in general?
Definitely. Not all the places I’d like to go. I would like to be more well-traveled. But it gives me the opportunity to travel. We’re going to Paris on Saturday, on the way to Belgium. It’s a nice vehicle to be able to go places.
The Belgium thing, that’s always kinda interesting. People who know the band are always like, “Well, they’re popular in Buffalo, Boston, and Belgium.” What was that about?
Our A&R guy at Roadrunner Records loved the band, and made it his priority. This guy Stef Devos. So he got several songs on the radio there. The difference between Europe and here is that the radio stations are sort of government run, so if you get on one you’re on in the whole country.
You started going back there a lot in the past couple years. What’s the experience been like for that?
We’ve had a resurgence. It’s just kind of gotten bigger and bigger. Next Thursday we’re playing the biggest show I’ve ever done. It’s the best club in Brussels, like 2,100 people.
That’s great. You played on lots of big festivals and stuff in the early days though right?
Yeah, it’s not the most people we’ve played for, but this is our show.
Who are a couple that stand out for you still?
We were on a festival in Belgium with David Bowie. On the same show was Primal Scream, but with Jim Reed from Jesus & Mary Chain and Kevin Shields from My Bloody Valentine in the band. So hanging out with them, then the band Travis and Frank Black. Lots of bands.
My son Liam, the other day, he was like, I was bored so I listened to your song “Sweep the Leg.” He said, this song is like nothing you ever did again. It reminds me of this band I like Sparklehorse. I was like, I played shows with Sparklehorse! He was like what?
You know the ones I always like to hear about are the Morrissey and Weezer shows.
We played with Weezer several times over the years and, you know, they’re pretty nice, but… Rivers is kind of exactly what you would think. Just a weird nerd. But they’re certainly nicer than most. Morrissey is also obviously exactly like you would think he would be. Just miserable.
“Spacemilk” (New Parade, 1999)
This sounds so stupid but in college I took LSD with Shawn from the band, and it was pretty strong stuff. I wrote in a journal for several hours. Most of it was garbage, but there was some interesting stuff. One of the lines I wrote is, “in this space so infinite, the sea of milk, we float like wood.” The song’s not about LSD. I’m not even sure what it’s about, just kind of a relationship song or something, but it’s got magic because I got some of those words from the other side.
Are psychedelics something that has come back into your songwriting? I know you do them every now and again, but is that a source of creativity at this point?
Well I’m not Perry Farrell. I’ve done it a handful of times, but wouldn’t call it, like, the source of my songs. When I do it I try to get something creative out of it.
What is the source then? Because you’re very prolific. How do you get yourself to do it? Is it a practice or do you wait for inspiration?
It’s a practice. I get up and when I’m drinking coffee I plug into my Logic, and try to write something. When I’m in a writing period, like I just got out of, I try to write at least one or two things a day. So I’ll amass like thirty songs, go back and listen to which ones were good, and then flesh them out more. It’s like doodles or notes. You put down an idea, then going back you listen to it and think, okay, that’s pretty cool. I can’t believe I did that. Then you get the second round of inspiration to finish it.
That’s similar to what I do. It sounds stupid, but I kind of use, Twitter before, and now Bluesky, and I’ll write something that I think is a funny line or joke, then I’ll think, hm, I should save that one. I’ll put it in a document, then six months later I look through and say let me see if I could take this original premise and turn it into something bigger.
That’s cool. I feel like I’m very successful with that. You just gotta be ready for it when it happens.
I also have this theory that there are periods of creativity, creative bursts in your life…
Definitely.
When you’re in your 20s, you’ve got all this raw passion, and you don’t really know what to do with it, and then it comes out one way. And now that I’m getting up toward 50, I found this new fount of creativity. It’s like an older man’s creativity if that makes sense.
It does. I will say, I really struggled in my mid-30s and 40s, and I had a lot of cool opportunities with publishing companies or whatever, but I almost made fun of the fact that I was still making art. I cheapened it in a way. And now I don’t give a fuck anymore. Now I know I’m a lifer and this is what I’m going to do. It’s just made me have to make harder decisions.
I have a whole new band. That was a hard decision, to cut out people that were only sort of into doing it. But this is my art, and I want to take this seriously, so I need to get people who want to make it as seriously as I am. To make it their thing too.
It’s almost like a growing pains sort of thing. It is kind of embarrassing in a way to be in a band when you’re 40, you know?
Yeah! But now I think how fucking lucky am I? We’re planning fun tours and going out to eat and I’m hanging with my friends. It’s awesome.
You sort of get over that self-consciousness as you get older. I bet there’s another stage too that you and I haven’t gotten to yet, when you’re 65 or 70 or something. From the perspective of creativity. Obviously we’ll have less energy.
It happens. Think about when David Bowie wrote that last record.
I do find that writing from the perspective of what age you’re at is interesting.
“Countrymen” (Where Have My Countrymen Gone, 2001)
Countrymen is a weird record for me. You have your whole life to write your first record and then you have like a year to make the next one. We spent a lot of time on Countrymen, and a lot of money. We got dropped from Roadrunner, so we self-funded it, but there was still a lot of energy and sort of hope in the band about going to the next level, so we put a lot of pressure on ourselves. I think this song is the best one on the album. A minor hit in Belgium. I think it’s my first one that’s a more overt political message. I also like the falsetto part.
So you had this period when you were on the major label and you got dropped. Was that a low point?
It wasn’t in the beginning, because we had a lot of interest. We had like Columbia and a couple others, some of the big ones at the time, Epic, whatever. They were coming to our shows, so we thought we have to make something that delivers, so we could get a real… [pause] We ended up on Roadrunner by default. In a lot of ways we thought this could be a good thing, but… not so much.
Speaking of politics, the band headlined the big No Kings rally on the Boston Common a few months back. What did that platform feel like? What did you want to convey to the people?
We were very excited to be asked. The less cynical side of me still believes that music can spur positive change in the world. Probably from watching Queen at Live Aid or Fela Kuti performances on YouTube. Over the years I’ve written so many social and political songs about power, religion, war, and the struggles of living in a capitalist cesspool.
I thought No Kings might be a good place for those songs to be well received.
Any interactions with any of the politicians?
We got to hang with Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey backstage. I’m pretty down on most politicians, but I do think Warren is better than most. She was generous with her time and hung out with us for a while. It was definitely surreal.
“The Swan” (Secret Society, 2002)
This is another Buffalo song. Real moody. I love Colin’s guitar. Another complaint about Buffalo and its coldness and desolation. Buffalo is so weird because the architecture is insane, as a once-great city, but it’s sort of deteriorating obviously. There’s a giant revitalization going on, so it’s not the place it was when I lived there, but it’s kind of like that show American Pickers where you look at all these crazy treasures but they’re just sitting in dust and rust and you’re like what the hell is wrong with you? But there is a beauty in that as well.
“My Life as a Wrestler” (War Chords, 2003)
The band had just broken up when I wrote this one. We had toured relentlessly. We went on tour with this band The Realistics in London, and with The Damn Personals all through the U.S., then Jim and I got into a fake fist fight on stage. Everyone kind of just came back from all that stuff where we had no money and were living like starved dogs not sure if we wanted to do it anymore.
Lyrically, this just kind of came to me, about how when you’re living in close quarters with a bunch of people all chasing the same dream and it’s not happening it brings out the worst parts of your personality. This is probably one of my favorite songs to play live.
This is the only Dear Leader song you picked?
This was on the first Dear Leader EP, but I consider it a Sheila Divine song. We played it live the entire time. It’s never gone away.
“The Beginning of the End” (Beginning of the End Is Where We’ll Start Again, 2019)
This is one I love lyrically. The older you get you kind of question why am I still doing this? I could just have my man cave and watch some sports and grill some ribs, but no, I make art. It’s just kind of why I keep doing it, how important it is to me, and I think it has some nice poetry in it.
I like this one a lot. It’s got what I was talking about before, like the later in life thesis statement. If “Automatic Buffalo” was the young man’s one, this is the older man reflecting on…
I completely agree. I feel like they’re like companion songs.
“Lilydale” (I Am the Darkness. We Are the Light, 2024)
Lily Dale is a spiritual community outside of Buffalo where all these mediums live. Some of the best in the world, if you believe in that stuff. I took my mom there to see one and the place just has such an energy to it. I’m really into occult stuff, mysticism, horoscopes, the spiritualism movement, The Kybalion, so I tried to incorporate some of that imagery and create something moody. It’s got a Neil Young vibe to me.
Some bands always want to make sure they have their specific sound. I don’t believe in that. My favorite artists, sometimes they make something I fucking hate. This is me in my robot voice phase. Johnny Cash wrote all these indigenous songs for an album. A lot of what Neil Young has done. But with this album people were saying, oh, you’re doing a lot of psych-rock stuff now. I’m like, I don’t care. That’s what I like right now.
“I Climbed Inside a Whale” (The Middle Ages, 2026)
Living in Boston and driving anywhere is the worst. I have weird anxiety driving with lots of cars around. People are aggressive here and it takes you over an hour to just go like 5 miles. I just tried to capture the anger of that, the boxed in feeling, and my disdain for trying to go anywhere. How it makes me just not wanna leave the house.
“Hurry Up” (The Middle Ages, 2026)
I think lyrically this song is one of my better ones in a while. It really captures the political climate and the sentiment of everybody just feeling hopeless and defeated. We’re all just waiting and watching as our country crumbles.
Is the band a Buffalo band or a Boston band or both?
It’s a Boston band, but I just feel like you kinda write from a certain perspective, or I did at that time.
Who’s the best Boston band of all time?
That’s tough. In my life it would be Pixies, although I don’t know if they’re considered Boston or…
Yeah, we count it.
Then that would probably be my favorite.
I was gonna write that The Sheila Divine is my favorite Boston band.
I mean, favorite Boston band, I think, no problem. But I’m trying to figure out how to say it, because I want to say it’s my favorite band, but also point out, like, well, not if you count The Smiths and R.E.M. and stuff like that.
Yeah, yeah, of course. Exactly.
I mean obviously I like Oasis better.
Of course!
Who do you like better, Oasis or The Sheila Divine?
Uhhh… well, I guess I like my own stuff better.
Oh so you think you’re better than Oasis huh?
I do. I do. I think they’re a bunch of old geezers.
Some good taste havers:
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This was lovely. I wish I wrote this: