Broad Sound

@broadsoundmag.com

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A journal of arts and culture. Posts by editor-in-chief Ethan Warren

The podcast tile for the E Street Shuffle (by Vanessa McKee)
The cover of Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland
The title of a Spotify playlist: the Broad Soundtrack - August 2025
The podcast tile for The E Street Shuffle: A Broad Sound Podcast
The cover for the podcast The E Street Shuffle
The cover of the Unicorns’ Who Will Cut Our Hair When We’re Gone?
A variant cover of Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland
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.
In a still from Sideways (2004) four people picnic in a field at dusk
The cover art for the BBC miniseries The Singing Detective. It shows a painted hardboiled noir tableau.
A pencil portrait of John Darnielle
The central family of White Noise (2022) dances through a brightly colored supermarket
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
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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
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.”
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Flares Into Floodlights Briar Greenwood When you live in a house with all the lights switched off, your eyes conjure visions in the dark. Kaleidoscopic bursts of color and pattern push out all other senses, a hypnosis the body inflicts on itself. But they aren’t real—and they don’t stop the bruising on your skin when furniture strikes out at your shins. Since I moved out of my family home, I’ve begun shaking off those illusions and reminding myself that they were false from the start. A liberated childhood; a healthy capacity for emotional regulation and relationship building; an authentic and guiltless grounding in faith—all were gifts I thought I’d received in my upbringing. It’s not a mirage I could’ve blinked away on my own. Sometimes you need someone who’s stepped into the light to look back and find you in the shadows, especially when those shadows get too comfortable.
The Confessional Turn Richard O’Brien John Darnielle never checked into a bargain-price room on La Cienega—or if he did, he didn’t write a song about it. One online database, the Annotated Mountain Goats, laconically notes that “John has clarified that the motel in this song, the Royal Hawaiian, is not actually located on La Cienega,” a major road in Los Angeles, on at least four separate occasions. The Sunset Tree, the album that “You or Your Memory” introduces, is often billed as the songwriter’s most overtly self-revealing. It opens with a stark a cappella vocal run—an exposed singing style that itself sets up the idea of intimate disclosure—but what the first lyric we hear tells us is not exactly the truth. It’s a small decision that immediately complicates the idea of “confession,” creating a space for larger questions about the mysterious processes of both art and healing.
A pencil illustration of John Darnielle by Vanessa McKee
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
A bearded Nic Cage grimaces while wearing by a lightly blood-spattered T-shirt that reads “Willy’s Wonderland”
A square tile sporting a black and white watercolor portrait of 1975 Bruce Springsteen and the words "The E Street Shuffle: A Broad Sound Podcast"
A black and white drawing of Jim Cummings’ protagonist in Thunder Road (2018). He wears a police uniform and points his arms upwards with impressionistic blobs swirling behind him. A black and white drawing of Jim Cummings’ protagonist in Thunder Road (2018). He wears a police uniform and points his arms upwards with impressionistic blobs swirling behind him.
A collage portrait of 1975 Bruce Springsteen
A black and white drawing of Jim Cummings’ protagonist in Thunder Road (2018). He wears a police uniform and points his arms upwards with impressionistic blobs swirling behind him.
A still from Duck Amuck. Daffy looks weird.
The theatrical poster for Sideways (2004)
A hardcover edition of Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland
The cover of Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland
A still from Phineas and Ferb—in a backyard, various cartoon children jump in the air while a teenage girl looks on disapprovingly and a platypus stares into the middle distance
A line drawing of a tricycle in front of the partially cut-off words "Penguin Classics"
The cover of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel The Remains of the Day
A paperback cover of Don DeLillo's White Noise, depicting a car abandoned in a hazy downtown intersection
Judas (Carl Anderson) and his backing angels sing in front of ruins wearing white and silver regalia with big bright shining crosses illuminated behind them
The cover of a hardback book. It reads Broad Sound Spotlights, then features a watercolor of a bare tree at sunset, and then reads The Sunset Tree at 20
A paperback cover of Don DeLillo’s White Noise
Ryan carries Marissa in his arms down a Tijuana alley in The OC
A concerned family rides in a car
Tyrese Haliburton shouts in some sort of moment of intense basketball
Lee Pace in The Fall stands before a red backdrop with a blood-soaked hand
The theatrical poster for The Fall (2006)
The words “white noise” appear over static
A page from Dr. Suess’s Green Eggs and Ham
The penguin of Penguin books engulfed in a toxic cloud
An illustration of Bruce Springsteen by Lydia Silver
A segment of the cover to the paperback edition of Don DeLillo's White Noise
An aged John Cage sits on a box wearing a party hat and smiling
A screenshot from Over the Garden Wall. It has a big towering pumpkin monster.
The title and author listing for Don DeLillo’s White Noise - Penguin Great Books of the 20th Century edition