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since I frustrated my good friend Denny with the indulgence of the song lyrics as headers, they are:

There’s a man who walks beside me, he is who I used to be - Jason Isbell, "Live Oak"

Pride is what you charge a proud man for having - Drive-By Truckers, "Shit Shots Count"

I saw taillights, last night, in a dream about my old life - The Gaslight Anthem, "The '59 Sound"

There are nights when I think that Sal Paradise was right - The Hold Steady, "Stuck Between Stations"

If we're near or far from out city by the sea-side / as long as we keep our stride, I believe we'll be fine - Ted Leo & The Pharmacists, "Walking To Do"

Everywhere I go, I’m just trying to find the fastest way back home - Frank Turner "The Fastest Way Back Home"

The downtown club scene ain’t nothin’ like it used to be - Against Me! "Thrash Unreal"

You’ve been rolling solo, time to get down with the team. - UGK ft. Outkast "International Players Anthem"

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Apr 24, 2020Liked by Scott Hines

The album that most defines my college years is Jimmy Eat World's Futures. The band did a tenth anniversary tour where they played the album front to back and it was my favorite concert I've ever been to.

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Apr 24, 2020Liked by Scott Hines

Oh hell yeah Scott, I bought 20 pounds of pork butt three weeks ago after you posted your smoked pork recipe - been cooking it up in 5 pound increments since. Week 1: Smoked Pork. Week 2: Pork Carnitas Tacos. Week 3: Girlfriend yelled at me about not wanting to eat another damn ounce of pork.

Looks like week 4 is about to be Ssam burittos! How did you season the pork for this one? Anything special?

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Apr 24, 2020Liked by Scott Hines

I have a few albums for a time and place. The one that feels just in line with this is Painkillers by Brian Fallon. I was just coming out of a time my best friend and I have taken to calling the Abyss. About a year before that I'd been kicked out of my first single apartment, I was depressed, and was in a job that stressed me to no end.

That summer after the album came out was when I suddenly decided that I would work 40 hours a week instead of 60 or 70 and if they decided to fire they could go for it. My work actually got better, I felt better about myself, and I felt like I knew what I was doing for the first time since college ended.

I played that album on repeat in the backyard of the house I was sharing with 3 pretty cool guys I met on Craigslist of all places, drinking beers and reading. It was that fall I met my now fiance and that album reminds me of when I got my shit together (mostly).

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Apr 24, 2020Liked by Scott Hines

There are a whole lot of time-and-place albums in my life but none is as set as Arcade Fire's Neon Bible.

I had just finished high school and was working a completely fake office job (there was some summer student job grant I qualified for that gave them more than they gave me, so they didn't actually have enough work but hired me anyways). It quickly became apparent that any time I asked what I should do they'd find something in the backlog that didn't actually need to be done - I once spent two days updating the whole office's copy of regulatory books with the quarterly policy updates that get mailed going back 6 or 7 years, often replacing the pages i'd just put in the for previous quarter - when a lawyer admitted they don't actually use the books but go to the current policy online when needed.

So I started taking long walks through the neighbourhood. On those walks I'd do one of two things. I'd either call my long distance not-quite-girlfriend and talk or I'd listen to Neon Bible on my black and (RED) u2 iPod. I must have listened to Neon Bible dozens of times while 'working' that summer, and despite everything about that album not sounding like summer, I can't listen to it without being taken back to that time.

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O.A.R.'s "Stories of a Stranger" came out between my freshman and sophomore years of high school. They came to Syracuse on tour that fall and it was the first time I'd gotten to go to a concert without adult supervision--at that point in my life, I had never experienced anything like it. I try not to have "guilty pleasures" because fuck it, you know, like what you like, but I don't actively trumpet the fact that that album (and some of their live albums) still give me chills when I decide to dust them off and listen again. I wouldn't want to be 15 again but man, I *felt* things back then and occasionally I feel compelled to try to summon those feelings again.

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Apr 24, 2020Liked by Scott Hines

Also the superior soda to mix with vanilla vodka is diet root beer.

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Apr 24, 2020Liked by Scott Hines

Those twilight years of my 20's were heavily soundtracked by The Hold Steady, too. Fell in love with them from the first time I heard the piano on Stuck Between Stations, and had the joy of seeing them on that tour, in a tiny-ass, burning hot dive bar that's long since been replaced by a doucheplex. I ordered the last Lone Star longneck in the cooler that night. Best beer I've ever had.

And right as I got married and started realizing that people actually enjoyed me for me, instead of feeling like I needed to be a character from Craig Finn's imagination, High Violet came out...

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Apr 24, 2020Liked by Scott Hines

The cocktail, and more specifically the note about guests mocking you then indulging themselves, put a giant smile on my face.

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Apr 24, 2020Liked by Scott Hines

I have so many answers to the album prompt, but I'll stick with the one you teased: The Gaslight Anthem, The '59 Sound. I was in my late 20s, in law school, about to divorce the kind but increasingly less compatible man I married six weeks after turning 21 (not a great course of action! ask me how I know!). That record settled into my bone marrow. Even now, in the right mood, "I saw tail lights last night in a dream about my first wife, everybody leaves and I'd expect as much from you" can still cut me. I was still living in DC when they played the reunion shows that did the record top to bottom, and that catharsis was sustaining: jumping around and belting every word at the top of my lungs with a packed room full of people experiencing the same thing. I have tickets to the reunion tours of Rage Against the Machine and My Chemical Romance, for August and September respectively. The hope of reaching that catharsis again, at a moment where it's needed most, is dimming daily. Sigh...

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Apr 24, 2020Liked by Scott Hines

I don't want to imply that I've always been bougie, but there was a point in grad school (which for most of my time was more a state of being than focused activity, doctoral programs are an amazing way to waste time) when pre-gaming meant "it's Saturday in the summer, let's think about somewhere to go that's not the grad student bar," so we'd have monster G&Ts in pint glasses (basically very very weak G&Ts, heavy on the tonic) for an hour or two. Net result: we were properly hydrated for the walk over to the grad student bar when we ran out of ideas of nicer places to go that wouldn't already be packed.

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Apr 24, 2020Liked by Scott Hines

I can't help but notice you didn't actually explicitly state how you enjoyed your "creamsicle" in the article. Was it actually kinda good, or was it just gross?

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Apr 24, 2020Liked by Scott Hines

In the long run, do you think you came out ahead by pregaming? I'm guessing I ended up just about even. I'd head to the bar drunk enough to buy people drinks and slap down my credit card without thinking.

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Last year I saw Coheed and Cambria in concert, who's first 2 albums I loved back in high school. I was devastated to learn that they are on album 8 or 9 and I only recognized like 4 songs out of the entire set. I dug out my 1st album t shirt for the show and probably had the oldest shirt in the entire venue.

The show was still fun, especially as i now realize there probably won't be any concerts this summer at all

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