Mad About Madi Diaz
A fatal optimist finds a home in Nashville
Plucks intimate songs from her journals and shapes them with her friend Steph, who cowrote Sabrina Carpenter’s ‘Espresso’
Begins every morning with a Blink-182 song
Sinking into a corner chair of Cafe Roze, a longstanding Nashville spot known for avocado toast and quinoa bowls, Madi Diaz is reflecting on her years of touring, which, at this point, feel like a blur. She’s just finished up an 18-show run across the States, and in a few months, she’ll turn back around and head off to Europe. These long tours are a fact of life; Diaz is 39 and shows no sign of slowing down. She orders black coffee and a side of bacon, what she calls her “cowboy breakfast.”
Touring reconfigures the body and mind like no other experience. It disconcerts one’s working hours, one’s relationship to travel, one’s understanding of time and place. Days are spent in Sprinter vans, tour buses, or chartered planes; nights are spent waiting in makeshift dressing rooms for a few hours onstage. A physically taxing affair, it becomes nearly impossible to decompress while doing the same routine …
Furious George
The Borg Is No Match For This Naughty Monkey
Often renowned for their intelligent use of tools, one marauding Capuchin fancied himself a Luddite
Chaotic scenes of pursuit and capture were faked by AI.
With rising apprehensions about the grip of technocracy tightening upon our creaturely society, it was only a matter of time before defenders of the natural order launched a primal assault on the machines. But which targets would be struck first, and who would mount the early attacks? Would data centers be bombed by eco-terrorists? Would corporate headquarters in Silicon Valley be raided by cadres of unshaven anarchists? In the looming war of carbon-based life forms on our silicon would-be masters, such violent possibilities abounded — until this year, in January, when at last the fated battle was joined in a most unlikely spot and by a most unlikely rebel.
Dateline Morristown, Tennessee, a sleepy Appalachian town of 30,000 people — and one courageous Capuchin monkey determined to exact vengeance on the Borg. “Furious George,” as this nameless simian vandal seems destined to be called by future …
Which Doobie You Be?
From biker bars to yacht rock, Jesus was there.
What red-blooded American male doesn’t want a pretty mama to take him by the hand?
Jeff Baxter sat with his ass perched on a stool for the entire concert and played like a motherfucker.
Rock ‘n’ roll is not a thing anymore. Maybe Jesus isn’t a thing, either. If you were to step up your game and insert Jesus into your music with faithful, distorted-guitar energy, and dare to claim that Jesus is your friend, it’s hard to imagine that your efforts would make a dent in the culture. Yet there was a time when this two-pronged attack could elevate a band into the limelight (and no, the recent acclaim for “Geese” doesn’t count in my book). There once was a time when you could wear a leather jacket and turn your amps up loud in biker bars, and not a soul in the grimy, tattooed, drunken crowd would raise an objection or toss empty beer bottles in your direction when you claimed that Jesus is alright.
My three teenage daughters aren’t exactly heathens, and they love rock ‘n’ roll. I’m fairly certain that they haven’t met any bikers of the well-worn-leather-jacket variety — the guys who ride …
