Dead Dad Club: On Grief & Tom Petty is my audio memoir, published by Audible in June 2022. The book seeks to collapse the distance between personal narrative of coming-of-age through grief and close examination of defining popular music. What are the limits of what the past can return to us--and can we make the record jump the loop? 

"The Elvis Room" is a personal essay, published and featured in New England Review in fall 2022. It was listed as "Notable" in Best American Essays 2023 and anthologized in A Flame Called Indiana: An Anthology of Contemporary Hoosier Writing. It is included in my essay collection in progress. "The Elvis Room" traces my quest to listen to the last existing recording of my father's voice, preserved on a rapidly decaying cassette tape from 1978. In doing so, the essay explores the nature of voice, echoic memory, material devotion to loved ones and pop icons like Elvis, to whom my parents maintained a shrine of kitschy ephemera. 

"There's a difference between absence and loss. There is a way we can pretend that Elvis is just in the next room, that the man is somehow contained in his ephemera and vinyl. But this cassette tape could mean another death for my dad and me...What if I listen to the tape, and what I hear--that voice, unknown, unfamiliar--replaces whatever remnants of him I hold in my mind? Would he be reduced, and therefore lost again?"

Part of my work is reported cultural journalism, often centered on our unlikely searches for meaning through material objects. This piece, "Purchasing Powers: Luxury Healing Crystals and the Pursuit of Placebo," was published by The Believer and featured at an artist talk in Mexico City. What began as an examination of a particular product within the booming "wellness" industry took me crystal-digging in western salt flats, on a reporting trip to New Orleans, and sitting with a medium in a Tulsa hotel ballroom. This piece is included in my essay collection in progress.

"Generation Brightside: How Wedding Reception Playlists Predict Future Nostalgia" is a selected presentation I delivered at the 2023 Pop Conference, the premiere annual music writing and pop music studies conference.

The talk uses The Killers' unexpectedly enduring hit, "Mr. Brightside," to explore how songs/artists that dominate multi-generational venues like wedding receptions, where the "mainstream" is adapted to the personal, determine what music gets preserved and passed on.

Part of my practice is to contribute to public discourse as a pop-music critic and journalist. I share work and moderate panels with professional conferences and organizations like Pop Conference and the World of Bob Dylan, appear as a podcast guest, and publish essays and articles in print and digital with outlets like Salon, Consequence, No Depression and elsewhere.