(It’s breaking my heart that no one’s uploaded Ted Leo’s “Version: To Decline” to YouTube so I can embed it for this post. Ted’s first solo record is criminally slept-on and/or disliked, which is crazy. Don’t make the mistakes your peers make. Anyway.) In the latest (and not-yet-online) CTC Sentinel, Philip Mudd, formerly a counterterrorism [...]

Speaking of tomorrow’s Ted Leo show, how desperate am I to sign up to drum for his possible karaoke challenge? “Tommy Gun” — man, I have Topper Headon’s face tattooed on my right shoulder. The day I can’t play that song is the day I should be murdered in awful ways. I regret that my [...]

Two years ago I wrote a long reported thinkpiece for the American Prospect about an animating-if-nascent vision of America’s role in the world coming from the Obama campaign. I was proud of it. But it’s the sort of piece that either stands up or doesn’t, and so, nearly a year and a half into the [...]

Old friend Elliot “Young Elz” Aronow has like an internet-latent TV show or whatever; I don’t really understand it; but it’s good and it features artists and songwriters and gad-abouts that you’ll enjoy. In this one, Elz hosts Max Silvestri for an interview with Ted Leo. Twitter is involved. (For more on the Misfits cover [...]

As I mentioned last night, The Brutalist Bricks by Ted Leo, officially released yesterday, is glorious. I haven’t listened to it more than three times through yet, but that’s about to change. One of the things I love most about this track from the record, “Ativan Eyes,” is its Easter Egg for all us aged [...]

So in 2006 I go to Chicago to help my girlfriend’s brother move into his new grad-school housing. Before I head out, my friend tells me I should hang out with her college friend, this In These Times writer originally from the Bronx who puts together sterling stuff about, say, class issues in “Veronica Mars.” [...]

Ted Leo wrote this as a birthday present for his friend Tom Scharpling (he of WFMU fame). It’s wonderful: “Though I could believe in God/and don’t think that I should/ I’d like to live as if I could.” That works so well as a lyric that you browse past, because if I thought about it [...]