Someone once described grief as a ball in a box, an analogy now familiar to many. It’s as though grief is a ball inside a box, along with a pain button. In the immediate aftermath of a loss, the grief ball is large, and it hits the pain button often…

I sit in the salon chair while my friend and hair stylist Emily rifles through the mop of curls on my head, tilting her head and pursing her lips. “What do you want to do today?” she asks. “I don’t know,” I say. “What do you want to do?” Most…

For a music lover, someone who loves Record Store Day and looks forward to it every year, my track record is abysmal — I’ve only ever actually gone out for it twice, almost always because of work. …

As early as my late teens, I started to hear my peers talk more and more about the dreaded age of 25 as though it were a milestone marking the end of youth and the beginning of old age. As my own 25th birthday crept closer, along with the 25th…

Record Store Day is back for its 15th year, this time back to normal — or as much as it can be, given the circumstances. While the past two years of RSD shifted to designated “drop” days rather than one dedicated day, RSD is moving back to one day only…

Warped Tour is back! Or, well, kind of. Emo kids of yore lost their minds earlier this week after the announcement of When We Were Young, a festival taking place Oct. 22 and 23 in Las Vegas dedicated to the scene that for so many of us is synonymous with…

We all have different stories of how we spent ours days in a pandemic-induced lockdown, but musician Andrew McMahon wrote a book. For over two decades now, McMahon has been making music for a legion of fans through a variety of projects, starting with pop-punk Something Corporate in the genre’s…

Many people think of a concert’s opening act as something to suffer through before their beloved headliner or something to skip altogether. This is a mistake. Look, if you were into the emo scene in its heyday 20 years ago, I don’t need to tell you. If you wore skinny…

When Anberlin made their triumphant return in the summer of 2019, no one could have anticipated that a pandemic was months away from spreading across the world and that it would put stop to the concert industry for over a year. …