“Every thanksgiving I listen to [Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours] and watch The Big Chill. I feel like it’s made me understand white people a little better.”
 — I can’t argue with this logic.

“While dogs above seven months of age catch human yawns, younger dogs are immune to yawn contagion. Contagious yawning is not just a sign of sleepiness or boredom. Previous research has shown contagious yawning in humans, adult chimpanzees, baboons and dogs, and suggests that it can be used as a measure of empathy. Empathy, mimicking the emotional responses of others, is difficult to measure directly, but contagious yawning allows assessment of a behavioral empathetic response, the researchers say.”
 — Or maybe they aren’t as jaded and bored by the emptiness of existence that the older dogs have, through the brute process of being, learned the hard way. Did you ever think of that, Science?

Photo by YuliaPodlesnova, via Shutterstock

“October has a wind all its own.”

Portrait Of A Witch

Part of a series about monsters and other scary things happening here through Halloween.

My grandmother was a witch: a species of santera from Havana, to be more exact. Not like she was decapitating chickens all over the place or anything, but she did speak in tongues and believe in demons, and in hell and especially, in the Devil, who held a good deal more sway over her beliefs and activities than God or Jesus ever did, as it still seems to me. Only now do I see the intensity of her superstitions, her prayers and novenas, her gloomy foretelling of the future, her brooding certainty about every damn thing — the evil eye, the dangers of lust, the malevolence of the occult powers roaming the world, the corresponding benevolence of saints, the rightness of the iron fist with which she ruled us all — as based in fear. Mimina died of liver cancer when I was ten, so all my memories of her are tinged with my childhood concept of her as limitlessly powerful, awe-inspiring and wise; on reflection, this earlier impression has not been entirely displaced by the later one.

Mimina was a high-drama lady, very beautiful in the face and terrifically fat; Cuban women tend to be generously padded (particularly in the caboose, traditionally), but Mimina really was immense, which only added to her general air of formidability, as if she were a female Count Fosco. She had the most gorgeous skin, clear and luminously pale, though she smoked quite a lot; her eyes were dark, bottomless beautiful pools of dangerously intense emotion; sadness, pleasure, concentration. She had a gravely elegant way of moving, too, for being so big. Everything about her and her little house and garden was modest in its origins but splendidly beautiful, interesting, intimidating, luminously clean and correct. She was a simply marvelous cook, the best I’ve ever known. When we were little, my cousins and I wouldn’t permit our own mothers to fix us so much as a peanut-butter sandwich, if Mimina were around. She had the most beautiful hands I’ve ever seen, white and velvety as lilies, blue-veined and delicately exact in all their movements.

She was expertly skilled at so many things. Embroidery, laundering, ironing. These may be humble tasks but they are also very difficult to perform perfectly; there was such refinement and subtlety in all she did. I don’t believe there can be many people left in the world who can iron the way my grandmother did (though my aunt is one); maybe that kind of attention to detail has diminished with the transfer of women from the prison of housekeeping into the prison of wage-earning.

Everyone in my family basically worshipped Mimina, and was also freaking terrified of her. How come? Because in addition to being a very lovable, affectionate and brilliantly attractive person, she was cruel, a control freak and batshit crazy. If anyone were to attempt to gainsay or cross her in the smallest thing, she would create a living hell for that person in an instant. Even one look of displeasure from her would cause the doughtiest uncle to collapse into a pile of quivering jelly. Nobody quite knows how witches do their thing. But everyone in her orbit came to obey this one without a moment’s thought.

Once in a great while, a tiny little mutiny would break out. I remember one, over Sunday lunches; a terrible business. The whole family was expected to gather for this ritual of Sunday lunch; no, expected is the wrong word entirely, it was a natural law, like gravity or the boiling point of water. The men in the living room would watch the game, the women were in the kitchen, cooking; they would come together for lunch and then afterward hang around together, have a small drink perhaps, listen to records, maybe dance a bit.

I’ve never really understood whether the Devil frightened my grandmother into being such a terror, or whether the Devil was just a name for the terrors that were already in her.

I forget which apostate it was who attempted to make other plans one Sunday afternoon, but I do remember the results being along the lines of those following the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand. There were threats, raging, screaming, angry phone calls, vows, an avalanche of guilt-tripping, expertly deployed, quiet expressions of disappointment (perhaps the worst of the lot) — a reign of terror. Mimina quelled the uprising (as I, an eight-year-old, could have told them in advance was a foregone conclusion) and nobody ever failed to show up for lunch again.

I’ve never really understood whether the Devil frightened my grandmother into being such a terror, or whether the Devil was just a name for the terrors that were already in her, for reasons I won’t ever know. In any case, she seemed to believe that we’re all of us born with the Devil inside us, a dark, bloody, sexually explicit figure, half torment and half pleasure, the source of every appetite, every selfish impulse; we were made to be corrupted, but grace has to be fought for every day of your life and never, ever really attained.

We’d be sent to my grandparents’ house for the weekend once in a while, when our parents would pop over to Las Vegas. In retrospect it is a miracle that they didn’t all paste themselves to the center divider of the freeway, back in the long-ago day. Everybody was drunk as hell back then and they all smoked like fiends and never slept all weekend, as I recall. Our parents were beautiful and entirely unhinged. During these weekends we would play under my grandmother’s gimlet eye and be spoiled with lovely meals and watch enormous amounts of TV. There was a terra-cotta planter outside where we would mix magic potions. Many years later I returned to the house and was amazed to find it the size of an ordinary planter, just tiny; in my mind’s eye it had been enormous. Such is the power of magic.

If any of us got sick my grandmother would do witch things to us. This meant candles in a darkened bedroom, for example if you had tummy trouble. You’d lie down on the narrow bed in the candle-lit room, and Mimina would pray (just regular Hail Marys, in Spanish) and make a cross in oil on the tum or other affected area. You’d be all well in an hour, or maybe two, after a little nap.

The most compact way to explain Mimina’s Devil side might be to recount the story of her oldest daughter’s marriage. This daughter, my aunt, was seventeen on her wedding day; unaccountably, she married a total bumpkin from the sticks in Cuba whom I never was able to stand, because he was so mean to her always. In an access of annoyance with this man, to my everlasting shame I once flippantly advised my aunt, whom I love very much, just to give him loads of extra heart pills because he took a bajillion pills in any case, and who would ever know? I mean, it was pretty obvious I was kidding (angry-kidding) but now he really is dead, and I feel a little bit bad.

Many years later I returned to the house and was amazed to find it the size of an ordinary planter, just tiny; in my mind’s eye it had been enormous. Such is the power of magic.

In any case, my aunt stayed with this man forever, until he died, which was about a zillion years even though he was always horrible to her, and he was the father of my beloved cousin T. so that is something at least, but the point I am at last about to make is that not only did my grandmother send her seventeen-year-old daughter to live with this godawful man, she failed ENTIRELY to supply the remotest explanation as to what would be happening to her daughter that night. As in, at all. My aunt seems to have had a vague suspicion that nudity was involved, though even that is a little unclear. But other than the one unclear-sounding detail, my teenaged aunt was launched forth into the awful majesty of the marriage bed in absolute and total ignorance of what was about to go down.

Which, if that isn’t the witchiest thing you ever heard, worthy of the Blair Witch herself, I don’t even know.

Until you hear that my grandmother was herself fourteen, when she was married.

Except that it was to my grandfather, who was ten years older than she, and who was a glorious person in all respects, who worshipped her, and whom anyone could love.

The point is, they were all crazy. Were they so afraid because they’d left their home in 1958, and everything they’d grown up with was ruined now, a mess forever? Maybe the Devil meant those uncontrollable and malevolent forces that gathered like a wave or an earthquake, far away, and then rushed in to smite us.

There is never a representation of the Devil in a Catholic church, nor in a Catholic household. Even pictures of the ordinary horns and tail type Devil were enough to make my grandmother gasp with anger. She would discuss him as if he were a person. A person with intentions and ideas, whose ways she knew something about.

Santería is a hybrid, as you may know, of the West African Yoruba faith and the Catholic one. Yoruba deities were kind of merged with the saints in order to, what, I don’t know. Okay, your lightning god Chango (or Shango) is our Santa Barbara! Fine, now that’s settled. The best thing about it is the music.

Santa Barbara’s day is the fourth of December (each saint has a saint’s day) and my mom used to have a big party on that day every year and wear a red dress, because that’s Santa Barbara’s color, and late in the evening play this fantastic song which turns me into a starkly Cuban female every time and I dance pretty much just like that, I’ll have you know. No, seriously, I really do. All the women in my family dance in that instantly recognizable Cuban rhythm.

Anyhoo. Ugh, I shan’t bore you with the things that drove everyone nuts about my grandmother, that wicked witch whom I loved so dearly. Why should I dwell on all that? The humiliation and fear, the refusal to let my beloved cousin T. go to UC-Irvine because girls are meant to find a nice man and have babies and maybe work at a bank? The tears. Instead, I shall tell you that when you went to my grandmother’s house you would find on various surfaces, on tables and shelves, little wasp-waisted shrimp cocktail glasses full of water and sometimes roses from the garden, set before photographs of the dead. There were many painted plaster polychrome saints with coins piled before them. One had a boat filled with supplicants beneath her, struggling through plaster waves. Coins in the boat. The scent of flowers and food, the sound of voices. The warm and perilous embrace of a witch.

Previously in series: The Monsters Of Classic Hollywood

Maria Bustillos is the author of Dorkismo and Act Like a Gentleman, Think Like a Woman. Photo by northern green pixie.

Let’s look on the bright side for a moment and watch this video that director Aaron Rose made for the song “Nothin But Time” from Cat Power’s recent album, Sun. (Well, actually, Rose is calling this a “trailer” for a longer “short film” he will set to the entire 11 minutes of the song as it appears on the album. That will be good because we’ll then get to hear Iggy Pop’s wonderful cameo at the end of the song.) The video stars Jade and Hazel Altheide, teenage sisters who live near Albuquerque, New Mexico and ride BMX bikes in sun dresses.

It’s very beautiful. (We know that it’s nice to watch kids ride bikes in the American southwest from E.T. and from Awl pal Tim Sutton’s Pavilion.) And, man, that song is just excellent. Sun is my favorite Cat Power album since The Covers Record came out 12 years ago. Cat Power has not made an album that I do not like. But that’s where the bright side ends, unfortunately. Thinking about Cat Power these days makes me sad.

I used to go see Cat Power every time she played in New York. This was in the 90s, around the time she was making her first great string of albums, What Would the Community Think, Moon Pix, and The Covers Record. Some of her concerts were terrific — one of the very greatest live performances I’ve ever seen was Cat Power singing “The Colors and the Kids” on a little toy piano in the community garden at 6th Street and Avenue B, while pictures taken by the photographer Michael Ackerman were projected on a movie screen above her. That’s my favorite song of hers, “The Colors and the Kids.” It is one of the saddest songs I know.

Sometimes, that night being one, Cat Power would send her voice to a place that I’d never heard anyone’s voice go before. Just soaring, keening, transcendently beautiful. But other times, her shows would fall apart. She’d fall apart. She’d stop her songs in the middle, and talk about how she sounded terrible and looked ugly, and nothing was right. She’d crouch down on the floor, or curl up in a fetal position. She often looked scared, and anguished and deeply, deeply disturbed. It was not fun to watch. She became as famous for this, at a certain point, for being a human train wreck, as she was for her music. And it was a mystery: She could be so great, so riveting and gorgeous, why did she so often crumple?

We learned some of what had been going on a few years later. She was a big drinker, she told the Times’ Winter Miller. A fifth a day. But she knocked it off. And continued to make great albums — though with a very different sound, more traditional southern soul music, with a band led by the great Teenie Hodges, who had played guitar for Al Green. They were not as great, I didn’t think, but still great. And her live performances were much better. The two times I’ve seen her since, she sounded gorgeous and smooth, if a bit restrained and measured, and she seemed calm and confident. She seemed happy.

Then, earlier this year, she released Sun. It sounds more like the old stuff: weirder, more jagged, fractured. Less restrained. And excellent. Like I said, I like it better than anything she’s done in twelve years. But it worried me to read, in August, in Amanda Petrusich’s profile at Pitchfork, that Cat Power was drinking tequila and whiskey. Steve Kandell’s piece in Spin was more explicit: she was wasted. It worried me more to learn, late last month, that she’d been hospitalized in Miami for undisclosed medical reasons.

Her concerts have been falling apart again, too. Two weeks ago, the Miami New Times’ David Von Bader described a show at Grand Central Miami:

With a golden beam of light shrouding her silhouette, the songstress rallied and got through the song, swaying and itching a bit in what could only be described as a mime’s imaginary box, set in the corner of the stage.

On Monday, in Toronto, she was described as seeming “scattered and frail.”

Here’s a video of “3,6,9” from the Miami show.

Ugh. I don’t think that she is feeling fine. Or, if she is, I don’t think that she’ll be feeling that way for very much longer. The connection between musical genius and drug and alcohol addiction will not be news to anybody, but this instance is striking me as particularly depressing. Here I am, enjoying one of my favorite artist’s new music, celebrating its return to a level of brilliance previously achieved — quite possibly at the expense of that artist’s well-being. The knowledge that she has in fact fallen back into self-damaging behavior doesn’t sit well with the enjoyment. I mean, it doesn’t cancel the enjoyment, it doesn’t ruin it. Great music comes into the world in lots of different ways, and I think people should enjoy it regardless of genesis.

But, disturbing: I apparently like the music Chan Marshall makes when she’s in a less healthy state than the music she makes in a healthier state. I like it when she feels like she would like to be a different person, a better person, than the person she is. I like the expression of pain. I like it because it reminds me of times I’ve been sad myself, and times when I’ve wished I could different and better. I find it comforting, like a sympathy in the purest form of the word. Rendering those feelings is a wonderful gift an artist can give to the world. But how much is it worth to the world? Is it worth the pain an artist suffers? How much pain would we be willing to have our favorite artists suffer in order for them to be able to make our favorite art? Would I want Cat Power to kill herself if in so doing she made the best record she’s ever made? I would not. And yet, I’m like the fans that Mick Jagger sings about in “It’s Only Rock ‘n Roll”: teenage lust unsatisfied even as he sticks a knife in his heart and bleeds on the stage.

Cat Power is playing at Hammerstein Ballroom tonight. Tickets are still available. Maybe it’ll be great. I hope it is. Let me know.

★★★★ Would a paper cup of coffee have given the morning some complement or completeness it was wanting? A man held a small cup in one hand, steering a stroller with another. Across the avenue, a woman had a large cup in each hand, while the child with her pushed its own toy stroller. It was certainly clear; you couldn’t fault the clarity. What did it want of a person, though? On the rooftop next door, the astroturfed boutique-hotel roof, a shirtless man bared his shoulders to the sun, a disproportionate response if ever there was one. In point of fact, the shadows were spreading across the boards of the office roof deck. They were the salient thing. The sun wasn’t getting there anymore. A late chill crept inside the knees and ached there, a little. But there was nothing wrong with the evening airplane — livery still lit by the sun from below the horizon — crossing just over the bottom point of the white half moon. And after dark, the air loosened its bite. Now it made sense to be out in it.

“Can heterosexual men and women ever be ‘just friends’?” [SPOILER: The women can.]

by Jon Blistein

“You’re getting a real behind-the-scenes look,” Patrick Stickles deadpanned as he steered a blue whale on wheels down Rock Road, the main drag of Glen Rock, New Jersey. It’s mid-afternoon on a dreary Monday. The lunch crowd (presumably made up of people who don’t commute to NYC) were sitting at scattered tables at scattered restaurants on either side of the drag. Storefronts looked abandoned rather than empty. The air was suburban-still — listless. We were en route to Rock Ridge Pharmacy, which Stickles noted I might remember from the song “No Future Part Three: Escape From No Future” from his band Titus Andronicus’ second effort The Monitor. Also: There was the Glen Rock Inn (from “Theme From Cheers”), and later, on my left, came Central School, the elementary school Stickles attended, as detailed in “My Time Outside The Womb” from Titus’ debut, The Airing of Grievances. Over in the passenger seat, I played the kid in the candy store trying to conceal a chocolate-stained grin. All my “Oh cool, yeah for sure”’s were just camouflage masking the fact that that each landmark Patrick pointed out triggered a play button that sent the corresponding song through my brain. Because I’m one of those dudes: The kind that’s chiseled each riff, chant, hook, rallying cry, even dramatic reading from those first two Titus Andronicus records into, well, not really my brain at this point, more like into the fiber of my being. This trip was bringing on unprecedented levels of geeking out: Fifteen minutes sitting shotgun in the Titus Vandronicus, next to the musician responsible for some of the most thoughtful rock-and-roll songs of the past few years as he navigated through the band’s hometown, the place Stickles shouts out before every gig, “We’re Titus Andronicus from Glen Rock, New Jersey!” This was ridiculous. Absolute fandom manifest. Like, get the fuck out.

Of course, for Stickles, who’s 27, it was just another trip down the roads he’s traveled for years. And he can’t wait to get the fuck out, again. He’d been back in Glen Rock for about two months, moving back from Brooklyn, he told me, pretty much on his own, the days ticking down to tonight, October 23rd, when Titus Andronicus plays Philadelphia’s First Unitarian Church. The concert is the first stop on a national tour behind the group’s third LP Local Business. It’s not that Stickles gave off a sense of hating or resenting his hometown. Far from it. But this was not, he said, where he belonged. “I feel pretty alienated from it at this point,” he said. “I was kind of forced into this position. I mean, there were things about it that I could’ve controlled, but this wasn’t exactly.” A pause, then, “I’m not leading the life right now that I would’ve chosen for myself. But that’s life.” Where the Garden State was a looming, driving presence in the first two LPs, a force that propels Stickles, a.k.a. “our hero” (as the narrator of many Titus tracks is referred to), away from itself and then back into its arms, Jersey has receded to a far more minor role on this third album. It shows up on the lyrics sheet twice by name, once as “one side of the river.”

The ten cuts that make up Local Business were written while he lived in Brooklyn. “I just wasn’t around so there wasn’t really much to say about New Jersey,” Stickles said. “And furthermore, I kind of flogged a dead horse about it over the course of those two records. I just sang about it as much as I possibly could.”

On the day of our interview, he was wearing a zipped-up black hoodie stuck with a So So Glos pin and gray pants, matching the color scheme of his Vans. His distinctive burly beard was long gone, but stubble showed. His right hand sat on the wheel, a lean left arm holding a cigarette out the cracked window. There wasn’t much for him to do here in Glen Rock, he said. Businesses have come and gone. It was a different town, but not really. Old friends and new were elsewhere. I knew what that was like, I told him; told him Lower Merion, the suburb I’m from, looked just like this place, same kinda main drag; told him — and maybe I shouldn’t have added this part — I can’t imagine going back. When Stickles responded, a slight air of exhaustion floated underneath the nicotine husk of his voice, a far, calmer cry from the yawps he puts to wax. Exhaustion from maybe the monotony of home, or because this interview was two of six for the day. “You can’t go home,” he said, almost absentminded. We drive towards his mother’s house.

***

The credits on 2008’s The Airing of Grievances and 2010’s The Monitor read almost like the program for a high-school orchestra concert. Local Business features just three guests — Owen Pallett on violin; Steven Harm, drummer Eric Harm’s father, on harmonica; and Elio DeLuca, who played on the other two albums, returns on keyboard — not counting longtime producer Kevin McMahon, who added guitar, percussion, and vocals during the overdub phase. But the whole LP was recorded pretty much exclusively by the latest incarnation of Titus’ line-up: Stickles, Harm, bassist Julian Veronesi, and guitarists Liam Betson and Adam Reich (the group’s newest member). Back in March, these five dudes honed Local Business on a short tour; then they headed to New Paltz, New York, to record, doing upwards of 100 takes for each track; and when they hit the road with Ceremony, it’ll be these same five dudes again.

Such line-up consistency is new for Titus Andronicus, but it’s one reason why Local Business is the band’s tightest, most concise and riff-rife record yet. Upon first few listens it noticeably lacks the Springsteen-ian bombast of the previous two, which — for those of us who attenuated our angst on chants of “It’s still us against them!” or “Your life is over!” — is initially kind of a bummer. But where those tracks often took sprawling seven-plus minute journeys towards some sort of cathartic annihilation, Local Business, with its stripped-down style and condensed arrangements, is much more immediate in feel. This shift in sound was in part a product of the line-up changes, Stickles noted, but Titus’ heavy load of road work over the past few years also led to an emphasis on playing live both on stage and in the studio.

“When we were recording, the guy we listened to the most was Neil Young, and a couple of us had just recently read his biography too,” said Stickles. “And Neil says, ‘If it’s not in the room, it’s not gonna be on the tape.’ That was a big thing for us. Just trying to create real-life moments that actually happened as opposed to trying to construct a fantasy moment like we did on the first two records.” Hear, for instance: Harm’s thunderous tom-tom rumbles towards the end of “My Eating Disorder” that cushion Stickles and Betson’s dueling guitars; Veronesi’s steady, supple bassline that sinks as “In A Big City” readies itself for rousing conclusion; the guitar two-steps that drive “Still Life With Hot Deuce On Silver Platter,” a lick so simple, potent, monstrous it drew screams of approval from a Stone Pony audience.

Stickles parked the Vandronicus and we headed inside the house. It’s his mother’s, small, quaint; a calm blue seemed to dominate the color scheme; all the lights were off and daylight came through the sliding porch door. It was in the basement here that Stickles hosted a handful of PatStocks, a concert he put on every year through high school that featured bands from Glen Rock and the neighboring Ridgewood. A lot of those kids play in bands these days, too — Liquor Store, Liam the Younger (Betson’s solo project), Ducktails, Julian Lynch, Vivian Girls, and Real Estate.

Seated in the living room, Stickles said that he never really expected to get to this point, to Local Business. He calls The Airing of Grievances “kids’ stuff,” made when the band was still kind of a hobby and by a line-up that has dispersed entirely, save for the frontman. No one thought a second LP would come, and even after it did, Stickles wasn’t thinking of a future beyond that. “Now to make a third one is like really wild,” he said. “Hopefully, we sound grateful, and that we’re not resting on our laurels and we take what opportunities we have seriously. The opportunity to rock. Hopefully, we rock hard.”

A kind of rawktimism — to use a term I made up ’cause I needed a way to express that sense of unconditional hope or universal goodness that sometime takes over in the face of all neuroses, crises, girl problems, et al., which I’ve always experienced most powerfully in the perfect combination of power chords or the moment of temporal transcendence in the burst of a hammer-on or pull-off — has always permeated Titus Andronicus’ music. With less fuzz and kitchen-sink clutter, the power of Local Business rests in the subtleties of each song’s sectional shifts (Titus has never been one for verse-chorus-verse structure), the idiosyncrasies of interweaving and -acting hooks and riffs, or the righteous onslaught of individual feats of fretboard funambulism from Stickles, Betson, and particularly Reich — as Stickles put it, “I love bitchin’ solos, what can I say?”

Solos are indeed crucial, and they’re at their most powerful when they accompany brutal, crippling examinations of life’s most brutal and crippling anxieties and fears. It’s a dysfunctional relationship — these solos and the recursive examinations they accompany. But rock-and-roll ecstasy has always paired nicely with anguished existential contemplation, and vice versa. Titus Andronicus obviously isn’t the first band (nor was rock the first genre) to marry the two, but this interplay is what defines their losers’ carols and barroom singalongs; it’s what carries the bagpipe dirge of “The Battle of Hampton Roads”; it is “Cause tramps like us, baby we were born to die!” And it reaches new heights on Local Business: The Side A closer “Titus Andronicus vs. The Absurd Universe (3rd Round KO),” that’s literally just bitchin’ solos and the lyric, “I’m going insane!” Effectively blunt, for sure, but the record also carries bouts of shrewd introspection: The final moments of opener “Ecce Homo” as our hero stews in life’s impossible contradictions, drums pounding and guitars piling up on each other, building, building, building only to subside as if that grand realization just slipped away — till suddenly he’s overwhelmed by an uproar of guitar and the loneliest uncertainty: “But I know it’s a lot more than just being bored / I know it’s nothing more than just being bored.”

***

Some of the tracks on Local Business were not easy to write, Stickles told me. He labored over what to say on “In A Small Body,” while closer “I Tried To Quit Smoking,” a no-holds-bar admission of selfishness, was emotionally draining, as was “My Eating Disorder,” in which Stickles confronted his battle with selective eating disorder — which prevents him from eating certain foods — for the first time: “I find in art, if you’re afraid to talk about something, then that is usually a pretty good indicator that it is the thing you ought to be talking about. The fear of it kind of validates it as a worthwhile point of discussion.”

Asked how his lyrics have changed over time, he said, “I like to think I’ve gotten a little more self aware. Hopefully, it’s a little less of a two-dimensional ‘woe is me.’” Which Local Business is. The album dives and circles deep into multiple dimensions of ‘woe is me,’ fording into the kind of self-analysis that if you embark on it gets so in depth you start having anxieties about having anxieties — this inability to communicate all your weird neuroses, crises, girl problems, et al, cause, c’mon, all that’s nothing compared to the real mountains of shit other people deal with, and you fucking know it, because more than anything you don’t want to come across ungrateful.

“Yeah, I think about that stuff a lot,” Stickles said. “That’s one of the more invalidating features of our cultures — we have a tendency to look at people’s problems and brush them aside because what’s your pain compared to somebody else’s pain. But I don’t really believe in that stuff. I think that everybody’s pain is valid.”

For all of the doom and gloom, for every confrontation with a personal flaw or shortcoming, Titus Andronicus has always been a band out for validation — not just personal validation, but particularly now acting as a conduit for the validation of others. Countless interpretations of “local business” exist, but at its core the title seems to express the necessity of community, of inter-human relationships happening in an impossibly huge world that, even with so much interconnectivity, can still feel infinitely alienating. We exist within these communities, in all their forms from neighborhoods to friend groups, and therefore must exist for them — using our energies to better them, those around us, and ultimately ourselves. This is not easy. It requires selflessness from a species that’s inherently selfish, a deceptively difficult balancing act.

As an entity, Titus Andronicus isn’t static, probably never will be. Over the course of its three records, the band has relocated a few times, seen various line-up changes, and ventured out into the world while continuing to develop and evolve its own set of values and ideologies. But some things have stayed the same. The first “hit” Patrick Stickles wrote was “Rock and Roll Jesus” for his high-school band Seizing Elian (which you can hear at the 1:33:00 mark of this radio show) and at PatStock, that was the cut that sent everyone into hysterics. That was years ago, but when we talked about the song he said, “I don’t know, I think it’s kind of the same, it’s working on the same set of instincts. My values about what’s important in music haven’t really changed that drastically.”

“So what is most important in music for you?”

“Just to rock. Just to be intense. Both in music, like being very rocking; and intense, like thinking about extreme states of consciousness.”

“Rock music does seem to pair itself well with crippling existential anxiety,” I suggested.

“Yeah, yeah” he said. “More so than like doing your laundry or something I guess.” This might have been a bit of a dig, maybe not. It didn’t really matter to me, because as I fumbled around trying to think of my next question, Stickles grabbed the harmonica that’s been sitting on the coffee table in his mother’s living room in Glen Rock, New Jersey — the town he has no interest in being — and starts tooting out the “Final Jeopardy!” theme. So I asked about the elder Harm’s harmonica spot on Local Business and an explanation of the playing style cross-harping follows. “It’s more about the sucking,” said Stickles. He inhaled into the instrument, but didn’t quite get that heartbreaking moan. “It’s more bluesy, the blues guys do it.” And he goes at it once more and there hitting my ears is an approximate recreation of Harm’s solo on Local Business closer “I Tried To Quit Smoking.” That song. The gut-wrenching admission of selfishness — “Not a lot of happy thoughts about oneself,” as Stickles said earlier, “never fun but necessary sometimes” — into the album’s last stand: A transcendent rock-and-roll jam chock full of what else but bitchin’ solos.

Related: A Q&A; With Amy Klein Of Titus Andronicus

Jon Blistein spends about half his week typing stuff for RollingStone.com, while the other half is devoted to finding a balance between that whole freelance thing and finishing “Buffy The Vampire Slayer.” He’s also written for places like Billboard, The L Magazine, and OneThirtyBPM.com. Top photo by Jason Persse, band photo by Kyle Dean Reinford.

“US TV bosses are working on a new family sitcom titled Smells Like Teen Spirit, it has been confirmed. CBS has bought the rights to the sitcom, which was created by the writer behind The Big Bang Theory, Dave Goetsch. According to the Hollywood Reporter, the sitcom tells the story of a teenager who ‘forgoes Harvard and instead opts to launch a multibillion-dollar Internet company from his garage with the assistance of his sister, best friend and his 1990s indie-rock parents’.”

Every rap act should be lucky enough to have the Roots back them live. (Whose drums thump like Questlove’s?!) Last night, Wu-Tang Clan was. I’ve been enjoying the soundtrack to RZA’s The Man With the Iron Fists this week. But not as much as I enjoy the soundtrack he made for Jim Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai back in 1999. If you’ve never listened to that, you should check it out. It’s the sound of a musical mastermind throwing a party, inviting a bunch of friends over, recording it, and editing together the good parts. Like a Wu-Tang version of James Brown’s Funky People albums. Which, if you’ve never listened to those, are like the best thing in the universe.