When I was seven and Thriller was released, I begged my mother for it, and she was all like, “Why don’t you just have Uncle Henry make a tape of it for you?”

“That’s not the point!” I whined. With all due respect to my uncle Henry—definitely one of my hipper, more musically aware uncles— I wanted the official album on tape, the complete package: that shimmery white suit reproduced in a tiny 3×4″ format, and the ugly beige cassette itself, with the song titles and everything stamped on the plastic. That was my holy grail.

So I wore my mother down and eventually got it, and played the hell out of it, and eventually lost it, and a couple years later moved onto the second album I ever owned, Songs From the Big Chair. But that album, the video for “Shout,” and the ensuing 25 years of pop music couldn’t have existed without Thriller, or the man who created it.

As soon as I heard the news yesterday, my brain performed that curious elision that allows adults to reckon with nuance, controversy, and cognitive dissonance: I immediately forgot the past 20 years of Michael Jackson’s narrative—the weirdness and the plastic surgery and the baby-dangling and the allegations of impropriety—and thought only about Thriller and Bad, about being a single-digit age in the 1980s—an era I consider more frequently even as it continues to recede.

The bells at Minneapolis’ City Hall are playing Michael Jackson songs. You can hear them all over downtown. I recorded them playing “I’ll Be There.”

Those were heady days: three consecutive seasons of truly horrid playing on my part and raucous postgame summits at the bars whose owners probably could not fucking believe they sponsored an adult kickball league.

We first convened at Carol’s Pub in Uptown, just across the street from Chase Park, where we played. Carol’s was a country-western themed bar that was frequently by actual Southerners, along with the occasional hipster and/or kickball league. A couple seasons later we moved to the Four Treys in Roscoe Village and THE RAIL in Ravenswood, a sports bar whose name I wouldn’t remember if it weren’t printed on the back of one of my WAKA t-shirts and where I once employed the TV-B-Gone I carried on my keychain to hilarious effect, because I am an asshole.

There was a lot of drinking, a lot of a coed adult sport taken far too seriously by twenty- and thirtysomethings, infinite rounds of flip cup, and a lot of hungover Wednesday mornings. And it’s one of those things that, even though it was only four or five years ago, feels like it occurred in a different lifetime. Chicago was where the highest percentage of my friends lived at the time, and 99.9% of them played on my team. Which meant that every Tuesday night I got to see pretty much all of my friends.

The Onion article made me laugh because, as usual, it was spot-on. Then it got me waxing nostalgic and looking at some old photos. But it wasn’t until late last night that I remembered a specific moment from a postgame wingding at Carol’s in July 2004. I was either sitting at the bar or ordering a drink when I looked up at one of the televisions (I did not yet possess a TV-B-Gone at that point, or the compulsion to use it in this context). It was tuned to the Democratic National Convention and its keynote speaker, a young Illinois state senator whose strange name I’d heard maybe twice before, tops.

And I feel kind of sheepish for not realizing, until I was on the edge of sleep last night, the serendipity inherent in our team’s name:

Can We Kick it? Yes We Can.

After that we drove to Philadelphia, where we were warmly welcomed by the women who run Girls Rock Camp there and several of their friends, including members of the delightfully insane ensemble Oh! Pears. The next day we even walked around the historical parts of the city.

That evening we joined Oh! Pears onstage at Johnny Brenda’s, along with An American Chinese and The Mean.

The drive from Philadelphia to Minneapolis was twenty hours long and punctuated only by a midnight meal at Denny’s and the unfortunate news of Jay Bennett’s death.

Now that I’m back, I’ve done that neat trick I performed after my tour with Nolan, which is to immediately and efficiently ablate from memory all the tedious or frustrating parts of touring with a band, leaving only memories of the fun, and the desire to do it all again as soon as possible.

More here.

It was dark. My brother, in the passenger seat, cued up “Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It)” on his iPod. I smiled for the entire duration of the song. I found myself entertaining the admittedly mundane thought I always do in the presence of great art:

How sad that people who died before this song was released cannot hear it.

But maybe they can—and for the rest of the song my only (mundane but worthwhile) wish in the world was this: that all the dead people I’ve known and haven’t known should be able to enjoy “Single Ladies”—and every other creation of equal or greater value.

Driving back, at 3 a.m., my brother put on Lost and Safe by the Books. I’d forgotten all about that album, and the Books, but 3 a.m. on an empty Iowa highway was the perfect time to be reminded.

“Be Good to Them Always” began and I immediately pictured an extremely specific location: the corner of Pierce and Damen, facing east, four years ago. Morning, summer. Taking a left at Penny’s and rounding the corner, hurrying to catch a train. Already sweating in my work clothes. I suppose song was in heavy rotation on my iPod.

The song’s lyrics—if you can call snippets of dialogue and field recordings lyrics layered over beats, cello, and Rhodes, all chopped into carefully reconstituted smithereens—those lyrics were unsettling then, and seem prescient now, on the perpetual cusp of national disaster.

Different music, different context, same mundane but worthwhile wish: that the dead should hear this music. At 3 a.m. on an empty Iowa highway that wish was transformed; it became less mundane, more desperate, both less and more specific—extrapolated out to address whatever amazing song might be playing, but now also invoking a singular departed.

More here.