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broadsoundmag.com
Broad Sound
@broadsoundmag.com
170 followers 52 following 240 posts
A journal of arts and culture. Posts by editor-in-chief Ethan Warren
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On the podcast feed: another E Street Shuffle—in fact the first of TWO Born to Run episodes! Join Greg McGrath and @ethanwarrenauthor.com to discuss…the greatest album of all time? We’re just asking questions. Get it where you pod! (🎨: @vanessamckee.bsky.social!)

www.buzzsprout.com/2389600/epis...
The podcast tile for the E Street Shuffle (by Vanessa McKee) The cover of Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run
August 9, 2025 at 2:17 PM
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New today on the podcast feed: @justinh94.bsky.social and @ethanwarrenauthor.com talk through chapters 4 and 5 of Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland! Search Broad Sound Podcast wherever you pod! www.buzzsprout.com/2389600/epis...
The cover of Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland
August 2, 2025 at 1:41 PM
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Coming soon: we made you a mix tape
The title of a Spotify playlist: the Broad Soundtrack - August 2025
August 2, 2025 at 10:21 AM
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New today on the podcast feed: on the E Street Shuffle, @ethanwarrenauthor.com is joined by Morris Shamah to discuss The Wild the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle. Search Broad Sound Podcast wherever you pod! www.buzzsprout.com/2389600/epis...
The podcast tile for The E Street Shuffle: A Broad Sound Podcast The cover to Bruce Springsteen’s The Wild the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle
August 1, 2025 at 12:57 PM
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New today: on the podcast feed: the premiere of the E Street Shuffle, a Springsteen listen-through podcast, with Frank Falisi and @ethanwarren.bsky.social discussing Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ. Search Broad Sound podcast wherever you pod! Art by @vanessamckee.bsky.social
The cover for the podcast The E Street Shuffle The cover for the Bruce Springsteen album Greetings from Asbury Park NJ
July 25, 2025 at 11:30 AM
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New today on the podcast feed: another Eye of the Beholder with @eyeoftheduckpod.com co-host @adamvole.com discussing the perfection of the Unicorns’ Who Will Cut Our Hair When We’re Gone? Available wherever you pod! www.buzzsprout.com/2389600/epis...
The cover of the Unicorns’ Who Will Cut Our Hair When We’re Gone?
July 23, 2025 at 12:21 PM
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The sky is dark, because all the stars are on the Broad Sound Book Club this week—join @justinh94.bsky.social and @ethanwarren.bsky.social plus special guests @danklain.bsky.social and @dodgyboffin.com, to discuss Chapters 2 and 3 of Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland! www.buzzsprout.com/2389600/epis...
A variant cover of Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland
July 19, 2025 at 12:23 PM
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New today on the podcast feed: Jameson Draper joins @ethanwarren.bsky.social to discuss the perfection of American Movie on a new Eye of the Beholder www.buzzsprout.com/2389600/epis...
A still from American Movie (1999). A stocky man with long curly hair and a mustache plus tie dye shirt reclines in a lawn chair next to a tall man with long hair, big glasses, and a goatee. The second man sits cross legged in his own lawn chair.
July 15, 2025 at 12:52 PM
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New on the podcast feed: a new Eye of the Beholder in which Greg White and @ethanwarren.bsky.social discusses the perfection of Sideways (2004) www.buzzsprout.com/2389600/epis...
In a still from Sideways (2004) four people picnic in a field at dusk
July 9, 2025 at 9:30 PM
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New today on the podcast feed: on a new Eye of the Beholder, @cmcrockford.bsky.social joins @ethanwarren.bsky.social to discuss the 1986 miniseries The Singing Detective www.buzzsprout.com/2389600/epis...
The cover art for the BBC miniseries The Singing Detective. It shows a painted hardboiled noir tableau.
July 1, 2025 at 12:18 PM
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New today on the site: another selection from our The Sunset Tree at 20 special edition - it’s the Broad Sound interview with John Darnielle of @themountaingoats.bsky.social - art by @vanessamckee.bsky.social

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A pencil portrait of John Darnielle
June 30, 2025 at 1:02 PM
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Today on the podcast feed: @mr-e-motion.bsky.social and @ethanwarren.bsky.social wrap up their White Noise miniseries with a deep dive on the adaptational choices in Noah Baumbach’s White Noise (2022)

www.buzzsprout.com/2389600/epis...
The central family of White Noise (2022) dances through a brightly colored supermarket
June 28, 2025 at 1:04 PM
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For anyone conscientiously objecting to our provider of physical copies, both "The Sunset Tree at 20" special editions are now available as downloadable PDFs at broadsoundstore.com
The cover of Broad Sound Spotlights: The Sunset Tree at 20. It features a watercolor painting of a tree at sunset against a tan background The cover for Broad Sound's Come Come to the Sunset Tree at 20. It features a color-inverted black-and-white image of a tree at sunset against a white background
June 28, 2025 at 11:34 AM
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@directorsclub.substack.com writes on “Song for Dennis Brown” and the day his own lung collapsed
Song for John Darnielle Jim Laczkowski On the day my lung collapsed, a doctor told my parents that despite removing the basal segment of the left lower lobe of my lung, the disease was still spreading and could reach my heart. I might not survive despite their best efforts. My father fainted in the hospital hallway, and my mom began trembling as she attempted to catch his fall.
June 28, 2025 at 3:46 AM
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And as a final note, Emily Worrell presents a play in one act inspired by The Sunset Tree
What We Remember A Play in One Act Inspired by the Album The Sunset Tree by the Mountain Goats Emily Worrell CHARACTERS DYLAN — 32, M. The oldest sibling. Drunk, sad, and angry. MARGARET — 29, F. The middle sibling. Trying to keep everyone and everything together. THEO — 24, M. The baby of the siblings. The only one who had anything good to remember about their dad. SETTING Exterior and interior of Margaret’s house, the evening after their father’s funeral. NOTE When dialogue is blocked off by side-by-side rectangles, like this… CHARACTER A What? CHARACTER B Seriously? …this signifies that the dialogue on the left and the dialogue on the right are being said at the same time.
June 27, 2025 at 3:08 PM
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And wrapping up the track list, @bebravebird.bsky.social offers a raw, riveting epistolary piece
Elegy for the Garden You Made Me Melissa Hayden When you died, a part of me did too, but not in the way you think. I have a lot of rotting pieces, bits I needed as a kid but don’t as an adult, so they just kinda hang there. Most of them you helped plant, taught me to water, showed me the way to fertilize. Most of them want me dead, the way you talked as though you wanted me dead, the way you are dead now.
June 27, 2025 at 3:06 PM
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For "Love Love Love," Emmy Brett offers a short memoir
Despedida Emmy Brett King Saul fell on his sword when it all went wrong The night the largest migrant shelter in El Paso shut down, I was next door at a karaoke bar listening to “Party in the U.S.A.”
June 27, 2025 at 3:04 PM
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Next, @carmenchloie.bsky.social takes a shot at undressing the metaphors in "Magpie"
One for Sorrow Carmen Paddock In a 2005 interview with Willamette Week—one in which all answers took the form of haikus—John Darnielle was asked what the titular Magpie, in the tenth track of The Sunset Tree, was. His answer: Only a traitor undresses his metaphors As if they were whores
June 27, 2025 at 3:01 PM
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Sam Dauer considers "Hast Thou Considered the Tetrapod?" alongside "Wolf in White Van" and more
Me, God, and the Tetrapod Sam Dauer And then I’m awake and I’m guarding my face Hoping you don’t break my stereo Because it’s the one thing that I couldn’t live without And so I think about that and then I sorta black out — The Mountain Goats, “Hast Thou Considered the Tetrapod” In 2010, at a show in Leeds, John Darnielle introduced the song “Hast Thou Considered the Tetrapod” as one of tentative optimism—of living in a home marked by violence and “not knowing for sure that that’s how it’s going to turn out, but hoping nervously that it will.” At a 2012 show in Sydney, he described it as “a true story about how you learn what things you want to protect from a catastrophe that happens every four or five days.”
June 27, 2025 at 2:52 PM
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After that, a stark and vivid comic by @goblins.download interpreting “Lion’s Teeth”
A comic featuring the text of the first lines of the Mountain Goats song “Lion’s Teeth” against the image of a young person before the wall of a suburban home
June 27, 2025 at 2:44 PM
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Our second pseudonymous piece is written by a political opposition researcher, who sees a lot to howl about professionally, and in “Up the Wolves”
Howling Kalyani Rao The Ancient Roman story of Romulus and Remus goes something like this: their birth mother, Rhea Silvia, was forced by an evil king to give up her children to the river Tiber. The river god saved the twins, floating them to safety, where they were found and suckled by the she-wolf Lupa. Eventually, a shepherd and his wife, Acca Larentia, adopted the twins and raised them.
June 27, 2025 at 2:42 PM
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Then we have @mr-e-motion.bsky.social on “Dinu Lipatti’s Bones” and John Darnielle’s falsetto
John Darnielle’s Falsetto Danny Cohen John Darnielle sings most of “Dinu Lipatti’s Bones” in falsetto. “Falsetto” is one of those terms like “hip-hop” or “polyamory”; ask ten people to define it and you’ll hear ten definitions, all stated with total confidence. I’m not interested in trying to nail it down, or in speaking with any kind of global authority. I’m going to use the term here to mean anything that isn’t chest voice. It’s high up, it sounds different, don’t overthink it.
June 27, 2025 at 2:23 PM
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From there, Nick Anderson finds the resonance between “Dance Music” and “Stoner”
A Tonic for the Special Secret Sickness Nick Anderson In the 1965 novel Stoner by John Williams, young William Stoner has a conversation with a cynical acquaintance, Dave Masters, who’s getting his doctorate in literature alongside Stoner at the University of Missouri. Masters says that Stoner is damned to be unfulfilled because he wants something out of the program, and the world, that isn’t there. “You think there’s something here, something to find … Because you’d always expect the world to be something it wasn’t, something it had no wish to be.” He thinks what Stoner wants is a spiritual rebirth, a dive into the stuff of meaning, whatever that is, that can be removed from the reality of Stoner himself. Masters proceeds to join the army on a lark during World War I, and gets killed in combat in the first wave of casualties.
June 27, 2025 at 2:19 PM
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Next is something very special: a “Dilaudid”-inspired work of short fiction by @dodgyboffin.com
Stay Sweet Sarah Welch-Larson The reception’s gotten fuzzy I’m dreaming about you the way I have all summer, the way a thirsty man dreams about water, the way a drowning man dreams about solid ground. I didn’t know what a firm foundation felt like before I drifted into town and found you. Maybe there hasn’t been much of a foundation here, either, but it’s the best I’ve known in a while now.
June 27, 2025 at 2:11 PM
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From there, @ludditerobot.bsky.social took on the daunting task of writing the "This Year" essay and hit it out of the park
Something Even Like a Prayer Rick Kelley Since its release, The Sunset Tree has played an outsized role in my life. As with any record that stays with you, my relationship to the Mountain Goats’ masterpiece has shifted over the years. This is even more true of fan-favorite track “This Year,” a song that trailed me across the country, through relationships, across addictions and into sobriety, and accrued layers of meaning along the way.
June 27, 2025 at 12:46 PM