Just to follow up, piggyback, and circle 'round on what I said before - the official Brazil Live Bootleg project is currently wrapping up and getting prepped for a release at Post Festival this summer in Indianapolis, IN. I'll write more about it as the time gets closer, but consider this a soft pre-announcement, as it were. In fact, I may have already pre-announced it earlier. It's hard to keep track of things, but the way the Internet moves these days, most people have prob

"Life is great, without it you'd be dead." Today I am sad. It could be caffeine. It could be electrolytes. It could be the sun. It could be a lack of water. It could be a lack of sleep. It could be a lack of vegetables. It could be the unused gym membership. It could be the weather's sink back to sub-50. It could be the rise of artificial intelligence. It could be the demise of civic intelligence. It could be a failure of leadership. It could be a failure to communicate. It c

"Time is a flat circle." -RC "There's something in the water here in Petroleum." So says Lew Hurl, Jr., the founder and editor-in-chief of the mid-North's most influential rock rag - Drag Magazine . You won't find it on the shelf, nor will you find it on eBay, the Marketplace, or anywhere else except DL;BR dot com when the time comes, because it doesn't exist. Drag Magazine , like JC Autobody's Petroleum* and Brazil's Husherville, is a work of fiction. An apocryphal history o

Ingredients Tofu 1/4 stick of butter Italian bread crumbs Steps Preheat oven to 400F Wrap and drain the tofu When drained, cut into small squares Melt butter in a large ramekin or small bowl Dip tofu squares in melted butter Dredge in bread crumbs Place on baking sheet with parchment paper Bake for 45 mins, turning once after browning one side. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ What I’m reading: Sing Backwards and Weep (Mark Lanegan) What I'm liste

"Dry your eyes for Madame Joy." (or Finding Astral Weeks on the Way to the Rainbow Bridge) I sometimes worry that, at my age, music no longer imprints on me. At least not the way it did back when , when albums could creep up and attach themselves forever to my emotional core, sometimes multiple times a year. The obscene portability and ubiquitousness of streaming-on-demand has made life-soundtracking just another ritual of the mundane. But that's a rant that I won't get into

Working on two post-Backerkit projects at the moment (not including preparations for Post. Festival ). First up, a Rarities album - if you made a pledge to the POV Backerkit, you probably received a download code for this one (and the other one, too). Rarities is a rollup of a slew of demos, outtakes, and live performances pulled into the official historical document of Brazil's creative path over almost a decade. It includes 4-track sketches, single microphone live takes, a

Go on, git. There's a certain personality type that loves a good show of force. And it's been an odd and unsettling series of shows of force this last week. Once, I drove a van for Old Navy in a neighborhood parade in a town just north of here. We were standing in line waiting for the line to move, and I put it in reverse to give another car some room. All of a sudden, a guy was at my window. Handsomely coiffed, golf shirt, straight teeth, the whole thing. Screaming at me in

"Get the fuck to work." Ordered, received, and read a new book this week. But first, a dream I had: Someone I'd severely wronged a long time ago reappeared and shot me. As I bled out, my last words were " that's fair ...." No idea what it means (although I have my suspicions), but I have therapy next Thursday so maybe I'll find out. Anyway, about that book. For starters, I was going to write a how-to book series where the mundane, atomic tasks of everyday life are dissected,

Saint Robert. (Celebcandle company.) I watch an episode of The Joy of Painting every night before bed. It's every bit a part of my power-down routine along with sleepy-time tea and passionflower extract. Comfort tv. His show was filmed in my hometown, at the Minnetrista Cultural Center, where they also sometimes have Garfield-themed exhibits and educational things about the Indiana gas boom. His studio (with the ol' clock on the wall) is itself an exhibit now, and includes a

Not me relating to a 6 month old Japanese monkey. Things are well into 2026 now, and I've realized that when I sit down to create something, I'm less likely to reach the epiphanal state of mind required to create such things. Anything coming in through the forebrain always seem to hide like an Amazon package left behind a bush. I've realized, for the most part, some things have to come in through the side door. The shower principle. Or, for me, the treadmill principle. The Su

Call the number on your screen and have your credit card ready. I'm old enough to remember Fire by Night, the mulleted 80s evangelical answer to SNL that warned us of the dangers of rock music . I'm old enough to remember Bob Larson and his radio show , relentlessly promoting the alleged rock-music-to-satanism pipeline. Limbaugh for people who wished Rushie would talk about god more. I'm old enough to remember the Hell's Bell's documentary on regular rotation at youth gr

This time time stops. The "500 Days of Night" Substack launched last week, a long-awaited (by me) resurrection of the old Brazil tour journal I used to write. Going through the old entries, I'm already getting misty-eyed, and I expect it to get worse. The past is, as they say, a foreign country. But I figured I'd repost the first non-preface entry here for posterity, if for nothing else than just to show the Sunday blog some love. If you haven't subscribed, I hope you do so

The Ministry of Peculiar Things. Big news to end the month of January! The Official DL;BR Webstore is now open. We've launched with a new line of merch, and included the new vinyl in case you missed the Backerkit campaign from 2025. We've also included some vault items, like the last remaining CDs from the original pressing and the original 2006 tour posters. The beloved artifacts from the Husherville Collection (lathe cut, cassette, etc) will be added soon, so check back fr

Tickets on sale now. Alright I admit that I skipped a week on the blog, things got hectic with getting the Brazil vinyl out the door, plus the constant buzz of "unprecedented" news coming in a slow adrenaline drip seemingly meant to paralyze us into despair or compliance or both, as well as the historical rhetorical of How Did Such Things Happen Back Then having been fully answered, and the quick dawning that American "exceptionalism" has rotted the brains of a good many of u

Spin the wheel. Feeling lucky? I made some updates to the site last week, including a subtle little addition to the top menu called Tip Roulette . It works like a typical digital tip jar you see on a lot of sites, except with "DL;BR Tip Roulette," every fifth donation gets a gift in the mail. It doesn't matter the size nor the frequency of the donation. You might donate a dollar, and if you're the fifth, you might get a vinyl record in the mail that would cost you $30 at the

Wrap it up, son. Of all the years throughout history, 2025 was definitely one of them. Beyond the 50-odd rambling blog posts over Sunday morning coffee every week, there was the Canadian winter cabin retreat through two record-breaking snowstorms and a near-fatal brush with the wendigo in Les Laurentides. There were collabs with friends in Wenches , Calm Bomb Collective , plus the release of Emotions by The Tied Hands . There was the resurfacing of Brazil's lost magnum opus

Two years of writing Death, love, and broken records Every Sunday Tis what tis. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ What I’m reading: The Magnificent Ambersons ( Booth Tarkington ) What I'm listening to: Rossiter Roa d (Ahmad Jamal) Join the Substack:

Photo: Szoki Adams on Flickr My car dashboard has been endowed with a lifetime of secrets. The poor thing. There's something freeing about being and feeling far away from the ears and influence of another human being. I like my own space. I like my own company. Something I have always felt in my bones. I don't know why I have this urge. Maybe it's from being misunderstood more often than not. Maybe it's from having grown up in the micro-managed moral environment of evangelica

These are strange days. Before me sits a pile of fifteen cassettes, each one 30-35 years old. (Or more.) Yellowed labels, stuck on as early as the late 1980s, are being removed with mineral spirits and Q-tips. They document the names of sermons with titles like "Baptism - now what?" Spiritual Response to Demonic & Occult," and "Joy." I bought the tapes at auction, anticipating a project like this one would come along - braying old preachers taped over, muzzled for once. Inser

Kinda crazy journey over this last year, what with all the legal maneuvering in getting the masters back, finding old files, and placing our first ever band vinyl order. We'd never done a crowdfunding campaign before, collectively nor individually, and this itself was its own learning curve. But here we are in the final stages of all of this - the artifact is made, funded, and preparing to be widely released upon the earth. As we draw down into this final stage, here are a fe