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Midlife Mixtape Concert Review: The Avett Brothers
The Band: The Avett Brothers (pronounced AYvett, not Aavett), Wednesday July 20 2011. This hirsute folk rock band from Concord, North Carolina has been around since the late 1990s and has been slowly...
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Midlife Mixtape Concert Review: Bryan Ferry
The Band: Bryan Ferry, October 14 2011, former lead singer for Roxy Music and prolific solo artist, on tour in support of his latest studio album Olympia. Maybe it was the Roxy Music/Duran Duran...
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Midlife Mixtape Concert Review: tUnE-yArDs and St. Vincent
The Bands: a doubleheader by St. Vincent and tUnE-yArDs, Tuesday April 24 2012. After reading with dismay earlier in the day about the new pink-washed girly Legos that are selling like hoecakes –oops,...
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Midlife Mixtape Concert Review: New Order
The Band: New Order, October 5 2012. A British New Wave rock band whose guitar-and-synth sound conjures instant images of asymmetrical haircuts and pegged pants, New Order was born from the ashes of...
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Midlife Mixtape Concert Review: Grouplove and The Rubens
The Band: Grouplove, September 15 2013. This is the LA based five-person alternative rock band that you know from hearing “Tongue Tied” on the radio all the time last year. Their current tour, in...
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Midlife Mixtape Concert Review: The Pixies
The Band: The Pixies, February 21 2014. A seminal alternative rock band formed in 1986, the Pixies broke up in ’93. That means that their reunion tour, which kicked off in 2003, has actually run three...
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Midlife Mixtape Concert Review: Lorde
The Band: Lorde, March 27 2014. Ella Maria Lani Yelich-O’Connor is the preternaturally mature seventeen year old Kiwi who won this year’s Grammy for Song of the Year for Royals. With her Goth...
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Concert Review: Lord Huron
The Band: Lord Huron, May 15 2015. Lord Huron is a band based in LA that originally started as a solo project for lead singer Ben Schneider, and has slowly expanded to include five members on this...
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Concert Review: Jenny Lewis
The Band: Jenny Lewis, May 28 2015. That rare specimen, a former child TV star who actually transcended her past, Lewis co-founded indie rock band Rilo Kiley in 1998. She’s also released three solo...
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Concert Review: Brandi Carlile
The Band: Brandi Carlile, September 18 2015. Carlile hails from the Seattle area and plays the broad alt-country-rock category, with a catalog ranging from the quietest ballads to windmilling...
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Concert Review: Vance Joy
The Band: Vance Joy, February 26 2016. Darling Aussie mop head and ukulele maestro, Joy first hit the scene with the single “Riptide” from his debut album in 2014, which caught Taylor Swift’s...
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The Music Apprenticeship Ends
So there I was standing on the floor of the Fox Theater crying uncontrollably last Friday night. Let me back up. When I saw that young British blues rocker James Bay would be stopping through Oakland...
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Things My Neighbor Has Given Away on Nextdoor
Two Sad Orchids Yay for the digital age and how easy it is to connect with our neighbors without ever leaving our homes and putting a face and name together! I speak, of course, of Nextdoor, the...
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Ace Driver’s Ed with Aceable
This post is sponsored by Aceable. Maybe it’s because I’m the passenger and not the driving student now, but it seems to me that almost everything about learning to drive in 2016 is less convenient and...
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Commencing the Next Phase
At my eldest daughter’s high school graduation on Tuesday night, a friend who reads the blog said, “Every day I think ‘today’s the day she’ll blog about graduation’ but you haven’t yet.” I haven’t...
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“There Was a Fire Here” Mixtape
Risa Nye and I met on the anthology reading circuit almost a decade ago, when I had an essay in “Knowing Pains: Women on Love, Sex, and Work in our 40s” and she was promoting “Writin’ on Empty: Parents...
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A Lot of A Lot
Raise your hand if you feel the same way. Here’s the worst part of the annus horribilis that is 2016: what’s happening in the wider world is the least of my worries right now. My parents are facing...
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Vanity Bites
When I was a kid, I had a rogue tooth. It was determined to hide behind the tooth next to it, and throughout the ‘70s I underwent a series of orthodontic procedures that came straight from the Medieval...
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Baby Therapy
Our new across-the-street neighbors came over for a visit a couple of weeks ago, the night before I was due to take a redeye back East to visit my parents and help out with some medical issues they are...
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In Memoriam: My Dad
My beloved dad passed away on July 20 after a brief and sudden illness. Here is his obituary if you’d like to learn more about him. This is what I read at his funeral on July 25. Leaning on him in 1972...
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