speakers push the air

I went to a rock show on Saturday night. Been a while since I did that outside of a specific context—a festival, or maybe an Austin City Limits taping—and I found myself thinking how I did that so often when I was younger that I’m probably still averaging a show every other week, if you spread it out from the ages of twenty-two, when I first moved to Austin, to today. I used to walk from my little West Campus apartment to Sixth and Red River three or four nights a week.

Often, I’d meet my friends Andrew and Cindy at those shows, and they were there on Saturday, at Mohawk, to see Pretty Girls Make Graves.

Pretty Girls Make Graves aren’t really a band that looms large in even the niche that is indie rock culture. They really only existed for about five years, from their debut in 2002 to their third and final album in 2006. They were maybe a line-three act on the poster for a mid-sized rock-oriented festival at their absolute height, which was after they jumped from Lookout Records to the bigger and cooler Matador for their second album, The New Romance. I know I saw them at least once or twice in those years, though I couldn’t tell you for sure when or where. At some point, it all starts to get a bit blurry.

They reunited for a few shows last year, after living what seem like normal lives. (I know the singer opened a hair salon in Seattle.) Then they added one more, in Austin, and I realized that if I didn’t go, there was a good chance that I’d never hear anyone play “Speakers Push the Air” live again, and that would be a shame. So I went, and they closed their set with it. It sounded great, a song about the feeling the song conjures—about the way music feels like a home to a certain type of person, that makes it feel like a missing piece of yourself just turned up—which is a rare and difficult thing to pull off.

The show came at a good time; the day before they played, I started reading the book Deep Cuts by Holly Brickley, which is a novel about being a person in your twenties obsessed with music in the first decade of the new millennium, which is an experience I also very much had, and so I was already feeling a bit nostalgic.

The book is good. There are surprisingly few books about people in their early twenties, which I’ve never really understood except that that period occupies a weird donut hole in between YA fiction and the rest of contemporary literature, and there’s an idea that teenagers would rather read books about characters their own age, while older readers are not interested in what a bunch of twentysomethings are up to. (I once had a TV executive explain something similar to me about why it wasn’t worth developing a pitch for a show about characters that age—and when she asked me if I could name one that did, I understood what she meant.) But Deep Cuts is charming and tender, the sort of thing that will probably appeal to people who loved High Fidelity even though, aside from both being similarly obsessed with music, the two books have pretty different perspectives on what that lifelong obsession means and what to do with it.

I always thought that period in a person’s life is one of the most interesting ones, where you are officially no longer a kid, no longer even have the pretense that you could be one, but also have no idea what you’re actually doing as an adult, and have to figure it out for yourself. For me, the answer was often walking downtown to Emo’s, paying my last few dollars so I could stand around watching a band I only learned about that week play music that would fill me with purpose until the next one came through, and the next, and the next. Pretty Girls Make Graves were one of them, and what they made holds up better than most.

It’s been a while since I did one of these, so I’m overdue for a new playlist. I didn’t overthink this one too much—it’s really just songs I loved at various points since I was twenty-two. You can listen on Apple Music here.

1. “Speakers Push the Air,” Pretty Girls Make Graves (2002)

Such a bop! Three singers, all alternating lines over a frenetic, punky little pop number that spangles into Andrea Zollo singing lines like “and nothing else matters when i turn it up loud” like it is the most important thing in the world—which, in the moment, it can be.

2. “Walking Contradiction (feat. Steve Ignorant),” Sunny War (2025)

Here’s a brand-new song that has been out for just long enough for me to know that it’ll be one I come back to over and over again for a long time. Sunny War is an anarchic-in-spirit singer and songwriter who is also an anarchist in her politics, which makes a folk duet with Steve Ignorant from Crass go from bizarre to perfect. Especially a song like this, which increases in urgency as the two singers offer a clear-eyed assessment of life in the world we’ve built (“everybody gets a soapbox and a bag of dreams / and an echo chamber allocated for the screams”) and deliver it in a steady, breathless cadence that makes the relentlessness the song describes feel inescapable. Then the chorus comes in and they sing about how we’re compelled to divide each other into users and abusers, us and them, peace and war, until we don’t see the people behind those labels, and the song becomes both prettier and more intense on its way out.

3. “108 Battles (of the Mind),” Kula Shaker (1999)

This is one of those songs I’ve kept tucked in my back pocket for (apparently) twenty-six years now. Kula Shaker were a one-and-a-half-hit-wonder nineties band who are best remembered, if at all, for a cover of Deep Purple’s “Hush” that was on the soundtrack to I Know What You Did Last Summer, but their 1999 album is a collection of spacey, Indian-influenced bangers that split the difference between Ravi Shankar and Nirvana. “108 Battles (of the Mind)” is pretty straightforward, but it opens with the sound of thunder and the words “there’s something on my mind / but i don’t wanna talk about it,” and goes on to a chorus that starts with “I’m just a man who’s battling with his mind,” which are sentiments that have spoken to me at various points over the years, and probably will forever. (Though therapy has been treating me well lately, thank you for asking!)

4. “Killian’s Red,” Nada Surf (2003)

This song maybe sounds more like being twenty-two to me than any other song does. There’s a tension and a moodiness to it, that minor-key guitar intro stretching for several measures before that loping bass and drumbeat come in, and then the Nada Surf Guy, who was in his mid-thirties by the time he wrote the song, starts singing a song about longing and waiting and wanting and how sitting under a sign at a bar hoping that the person you want to see walks in, and how good it feels when they do, and how that good feeling is tempered by the awareness that it still might not ultimately give you what you want, all of which are feelings that defined a couple of important years for me. Anytime I want to feel that way again for six minutes, which isn’t very often but also isn’t never, I put “Killian’s Red” on and I get to do that.

5. “The Kids Are Alright (Live),” Pearl Jam (2000)

Pearl Jam has covered “The Kids Are Alright” a lot of times over the years, but this version—a slowed-down, solo-electric take on the Who song—is my favorite (even if Eddie Vedder does muff the first line, that’s the magic of live music). Not every song on this list is meant to evoke being twenty-two years old, but also “but i know i gotta away / and i know if i don’t / i’ll go out of my mind” is also very much a sentiment that twenty-two-year-old me felt often.

6. “Crooked the Road,” Mon Rovia (2025)

Mon Rovia was barely alive when I was twenty-two, so let’s reboot the concept here: There’s something really beautiful and delicate in “Crooked the Road” and it doesn’t go away when the song goes from soft finger-picking to thumping drums and a prominent bassline. I’m always fascinated by artists who can pull of the magic trick of maintaining an emotional throughline in a song that expands to fill space like this, and it gives me a lot of time for Mon Rovia, who just released his second EP this year. He’s an interesting story—born in Liberia during the second civil war, and found refuge as a child when his family emigrated to Tennessee. There’s a strong Appalachian element to his music, but it’s more expansive than it is the sound of a retread or a revival act. Partly that seems to be a symptom of his new sound being a second act—he debuted in 2021 as a more traditional R&B artist—but either way, he’s on to something interesting here. I saw him play a few weeks ago at an in-store appearance at Waterloo Records and hearing that voice, which has such an interesting texture to it, live and up-close, was a real highlight for me.

7. “Probably Will,” Concrete Blonde (1992)

Theory: Johnette Napolitano, the frontwoman of Concrete Blonde, has one of pop music’s great unheralded voices. That’s not to say she’s the best singer, because she isn’t, but there aren’t two just like her when it comes to being expressive. Because I am the sort of person who deeply relates to Deep Cuts, I have given a good deal of thought to who the most distinct voices in pop music are, and she’s high on that list. (Also on it: Robert Smith, whom no one seems interested in singing like; Zach De La Rocha, whom a million people tried to sound like and couldn’t; and Ben Folds, whom no one would choose to sing like but who has always made it work for him.)

“Probably Will” was a b-side from the band from the early nineties, a shuffling little country-tinged number that doesn’t sound like much else they recorded, except Napolitano doesn’t ever fake anything and so it still sounds entirely like her.

8. “Our Hearts Are Wrong,” Jessica Lea Mayfield (2011)

Coincidentally, Jessica Lea Mayfield released “Our Hearts Are Wrong” when she was twenty-two, and the song sounds like the product of that age (complimentary, if you hadn’t figured that out by now). It’s a calm little heartbreak number with Mayfield singing plainly in her Appalachian Ohio accent, with some unmistakeable Dan Auerbach production behind her giving the song the feel of early 2010’s indie rock without making either side of the track feel like an affectation.

9. “Seventeen,” Julianna Joy (2020)

I don’t know how old Julianna Joy was when she wrote “Seventeen” (though I have a guess). I do know that the feelings of young people are really important, and she expresses hers here that really lands. The song is a sort of updated “All Too Well,” with the details unique and specific to her (driving around, listening to Brockhampton and pining for some boy isn’t universal, but also it kind of is, even if you aren’t into boys and don’t know who Brockhampton are?).

I don’t remember how I found Joy’s music, but I’m glad I did. There’s a rawness to the songs a teenager can write that is harder to find anywhere else, and when they’re as gifted as she is, that’s really something special.

10. “Circle the Fringes,” The Gutter Twins (2007)

The Gutter Twins were a one-off project where Greg Dulli of the Afghan Whigs and the Twilight Singers paired up with Mark Lanegan for an album and an EP worth of duets, and I don’t think either of them ever used their voices better. Dulli, whose voice is plaintive and capable of carrying a lot of emotion and not a lot of tune, played the junior partner on most of the songs, in a way that created space for Lanegan to come in like the voice of Lucifer come to add gravity. “Circle the Fringes” is the best example of that dynamic, with Dulli taking the first two verses, and building an anticipation for Lanegan’s gravelly baritone to come in and seal the deal. Can’t believe we only got twenty songs from them, but I’ll take what I can get.

11. “Eat For Free,” Haley Bonar (2014)

I have such a clear memory of hearing “Eat For Free” for the first time. It was during SXSW, I guess in 2014. I was downtown with my friend Amy, and Haley Bonar was playing in one of Austin’s beautiful old downtown churches at dusk. And, well—listen to the harmonies on this one, and tell me you could forget it, either.

12. “The Other Side of Mt. Heart Attack,” Liars (2006)

I did not like Liars when I first heard them, which was in my early twenties and when I was starting to get tired of what we’d soon know as “indie sleaze,” a noisy, dance-y, poppy, punk-inspired movement of stuff that conjured watching people do coke or maybe just get really drunk and pass out in the Emo’s bathroom. Fun, if that’s your thing! But it was never mine.

Something inspired me to give them another shot a few years later, when they released an album with the truly dopey name Drum’s Not Dead, and then it turned out that the album’s final track was one of the most beautiful things I ever heard, a meditative epic that somehow sounded both huge and quiet at the same time. We all grow up in our own ways, I suppose, and that is a gift unto itself.