This post is mostly unrelated to the type of content that I typically post here, but I wanted to take a minute to highlight some music that I have recently found to be quite exceptional. Within the last couple months — I wish it had been sooner — I have become acquainted with Spotify, which makes available nearly every recording ever produced, with a few notable exceptions like The Beatles and Pink Floyd, etc.

I “came of age” when grunge was cool, so my favorite bands are from that early- to mid-1990s era: Nirvana, STP, Pearl Jam, Bush, Dinosaur Jr., R.E.M., Counting Crows, Green Day, etc. But for 30-somethings like myself, there is still plenty of new stuff to appreciate and dive into. Here are some selections that I have been enjoying as of late:

• New from Green Day: Stay The Night and F*** Time. Check out the new albums Uno and Dos.
• Tame Impala – Be Above It
• Tame Impala – Why Won’t They Talk to Me?
• Tame Impala – Feels Like We Only Go Backwards
• Tame Impala – Elephant
• Fiona Apple – Daredevil
• Cloud Nothings – No Future/No Past
• Cloud Nothings – Stay Useless
• Cloud Nothings – Separation
• Japandroids – The Nights of Wine and Roses
• Japandroids – Fire’s Highway
• Japandroids – Evil’s Sway
• Godspeed You! Black Emperor – Mladic
• The Smashing Pumpkins – Quasar
• The Smashing Pumpkins – Panopticon

A classic about a classic musician:

If I could make it rain today | And wash away this sunny day down to the gutter I would
Just to get a change of pace | Things are getting worse, but I feel a lot better …

Because I don’t have anything else intelligible left in me today, here’s a song titled “Barely Out of Tuesday” by Counting Crows that never fails to pull me inside out and then back again.

This is apparently the only recording of the song. I have the show at which it was played sitting in a CD case from back in my trading days. The girl that he mentions in the beginning is Courteney Cox I do believe. She appeared in “The Long December” music video.

I woke up Wednesday morning,
Sometime Wednesday evening,
Hoping for a piece of something easy to believe.
When you live out on the border
Of everything and nothing
There’s nothing but waking and dreaming.
I’m barely out of Tuesday.
There’s no one to receive me,
And nothing is changing.
Maybe you could leave a light on (leave a light on) for me.

1. I rarely wear jeans and would probably never where jeans lest they were given to me. If you gave me a pair of jeans as a gift, rest assured I DO wear them. I just wear slacks more often.
2. I can eat multiple packs of Twizzlers in one sitting.
3. I’m a fan of the Denver Broncos and the Clemson Tigers, the former mostly because of John Elway and the latter mostly because I went to school there and live there.
4. Can’t for the life of me beat Lou on Hard in Guitar Hero III. Stupid “Devil Went Down to Georgia!”
5. Listening to less new rock ‘n roll and more synth, spacey, emo, something or another music.
6. Can balance up to 20 or so pennies on my elbow and catch them into the same hand.
7. Can spin a mean yo-yo.
8. Can eat breakfast anytime, day or night … and would, in fact, if it were practical.
9. Can drink coffee anytime, day or night … and would, in fact, if it were practical.
10. Has to avoid bookstores lest I walk out with five books that I won’t have time to read until 2012.
11. Plays guitar and to a lesser extent, piano. Used to play trumpet, but at this point, I think it’s safe to cross that off the list.
12. Likes to travel and experience the feeling of being nowhere in particular.
13. Has a constant nagging that I should devote more time to writing.
14. Feels more alive in the winter than in the summer.
15. Career goals include becoming an editor of some form at a major newspaper, preferably The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and having at least one book published and some short stories.
16. 25 of these? For real?
17. Plays a first-person shooter called Counter Strike: Source under the name Paripatetic. The real word begins with “peri,” actually.
18. Thinks one of the greatest tragedies of modern America is that most work their entire lives at jobs that may or may not like just to make ends meet, when, in the end, they are for the most part, only putting more money in the someone else’s pocket. Teachers, nurses, doctors and scientists are largely excluded. I’m certainly not.
19. Is scared of heights and tries to avoid anything that may cause me death via freefalling. Rollercoasters are a no-go for that reason. The Scooby Doo ride at Carowinds: No sir! I sometimes have a dream of freefalling from a light pole. Bizarre stuff.
20. Somewhat frequently has dreams about relatives who have passed away.
21. Misses his grandfather.
22. Has a large collection of live Counting Crows shows on CD.
23. Wanted to be a computer programmer, hence, creating cool programs like facebook, hence, making more money, but my left brain seems to be entirely non-functional.
24. Has an extensive collection of song lyrics floating around in the attic and sometimes posts them as my status. Before there was free access to computers, I wrote them in some school notebook.
25. Wonders what everyone did before there was facebook … or Google … or computers. I remember those days. OK Computer.

Bonus No. 26! Wants to visit California, London, Ireland and Alaska at some point. (Runners-up: Chicago and Holland)

We’re getting older and older and older
and always a little further out of the way
You look into her eyes
and it’s more than your heart will allow
And August and everything after
you get a little less than you expected somehow. – “August and Everything After,” unreleased, Counting Crows

Since I’ve used this user name in various capacities over the years, I thought it might be appropriate to go ahead and get this out of the way. I came up with the name “everythingafter” years ago, and it comes from the Counting Crows’ 1993 album, “August and Everything After.” The album title is the name of a real Counting Crows song just released in a concert only a year or two ago – the lyrics of which are published (in fragments) in a handwritten type on the cover of the album.

Many, many people know this album, so that’s probably all I need to explain. I will also note that this band has helped me get through many difficult times in my life, when I have questioned myself, my life, my faith, everything. It’s poetic imagery and heart-draining lyrics often cut me to the quick and made me numerous times nearly break down whilst singing out loud, in my car, alone, to “Anna Begins” or “Time and Time Again” or “Sullivan Street.”

The key line in the song is “In August and everything after, I’m after everything,” and to me, the song is about having all these expectations from love and life and then realizing that few, if any of them, are actually coming to fruition.

All of the sudden she disappears
Just yesterday she was here
Somebody tell me if I am sleeping
Someone should be with me here
(cause I don’t wanna be alone) - “Catapult,” “Recovering the Satellites,” Counting Crows

During my school years, I was nuts about girls. I was also shy and insecure in my abilities to talk to them. As a result, every year, August was the time that we all went back to school. This meant for me new opportunities to at long last muster up the courage to talk to someone new. This, of course, never happened in high school or college, and this album embodies that disappointment for me, and probably explains why I relate to so many lyrics from that album, and others, from the band.

But “everythingafter” has another meaning for me. It’s about everything that comes AFTER we are done with this life. My grandmother recently succumbed to a long battle with various ailments, particularly Alzheimer’s. She now knows for sure what we on this side of the everafter don’t know for 100 percent fact. She either knows nothing and ceased to exist on that fateful Mother’s Day when she breathed her last. Or, she knows about everlasting life. We may think we know about the afterlife, and believe with all our being that something - in the Christian tradition, that would be heaven and hell – exists after this life, but until we get there, we certainly aren’t God, and our knowledge is limited to our own environs. So in that, this user name entails the knowns and the unknowns of what happens after this physical life is over. In essense, it entails what happens in august and everything after And everything that happens after “everything.”

 With that, I begin.