Here.

Why 63108? Well, I’m glad you asked. 63108 is the zip code we all live, work and play in. The Central West End of St. Louis has brought us all together, and while our topics will branch out far beyond that, perhaps even to outer space, we wanted to give it up for our neighborhood.

The idea here is twofold, namely, to learn about podcasting (we’re on itunes for free if you’d like to subscribe [and you do], or you can listen / feed from the website) and also to do something with the massive amount of content we ingest each week that floats around like highly-suspect free radicals until we kinda nail down what’s important, what we thought about it, and how it might be useful to other people or ideas that shape the culture we exist in.

We are open to ideas, critiques, interaction certainly, and guests.

To illustrate,

The Bright Eyes song ‘Four Winds’ (makes my chest heave in splendor) contains the following line: “And it’s the son of man/Slouching towards Bethlehem/A heart just can’t contain all of that empty space/It breaks, it breaks, it breaks”
…mirroring William Butler Yeats’ “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last/Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

Sixpence None the Richer (I know!  Authors of that yucky saccharine chipper courting ballad ‘Kiss Me’ from the effervescent late nineties!  But bear with me…) have, to the great surpise of at least me, a song (on that very same album), Puedo Escribir.  It is unlikely that you’ll ever get over her voice after the kissy track, but it’s a heart-gouging rendition of Pablo Neruda’s poem by the same name in both Spanish and English: “I can write the saddest lines tonight… Though this is the last pain she will make me suffer/and these are the last lines I will write for her.” Burn.

Neutral Milk Hotel’s Album, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is essentially an operatic homage written after lead singer/songwriter Jeff Magnum read the Diary of Anne Frank. Magnum was devastated [1] reading how the Holocaust impacted her: keeping her from falling in love or lust, the unreal disruption of growing up, the waste. He sings “I know they buried her body with others/ her sister and mother and 500 families/and will she remember me 50 years later/I wished I could save her in some sort of time machine.”

There are other, but I think those were my favorite to discover.

It’s really fantastic to be surrounded by people who are making music, passionate about it and are also related to you. Genetically, that’s good news.

Don’t Fear the Sun is my younger brother’s Evan’s band; he plays drums! Findlay (our hometown) could give St. Louis a run for its cash on musicians per capita, likely because there’s little else to do there. Yes, there’s always cow-tipping. In the corn fields of Ohio, I never knew there was such a thing, but St. Louisans insist it’s the biggest pastime in Iowa. Ohio? STL’ans also cannot differentiate between those two states. Someone once gleefully said to me, “Oh well, they start with the same letter!”

No, they do not.

Anyhow, I’m quite pleased and proud that my brother continues to make music and get ever better. I can also now enjoy his drumming outside the hours of 7 to 9 on Saturday mornings.

.con is a new acquaintance, introduced to me by chess IM Irina Krush, and wow, can he craft a great rhyme. Through some conversations and getting into his music this weekend, I found myself wondering what’s going on with St. Louis music.

The erstwhile ‘home of the blues’ seems radically lacking in new, upcoming artists making it big. And that’s not a phenomenon limited to music, but there are some really great artists like .con and David Beeman pulling together solid, beautiful and new music that STL seems hesitant to seek out, promote and throw their fandom behind.

I’ve been at a loss trying to tell friends where to see live music in St. Louis. When Playback went to an all-online format, it took the street-intimate out of finding a show. I’ve loved Off Broadway and the Upstairs Lounge, but I’m not feeling the innovation and energy of a prolific or collaborative culture like I imagine St. Louis once had. The Riverfront Times is typically full of big names coming through to grace us with their awesomeness, but lest my disassociated hackles blind me I’ll be looking for more local music news, venues and secrets.

Please, refute me if you’ve found the pulse to St. Louis’ new music scene gushing somewhere I haven’t looked. Meanwhile, kudos to .con for making good lyrics despite the apathy.