Dr. J

I’ll be taking a little break from the airwaves this week to celebrate something pretty special: 25 years of marriage to my favorite person. Twenty-five years. It’s a simple number, but it carries the weight of a lifetime. It holds thousands of ordinary days that, somehow, became extraordinary simply because we lived them together. Yesterday I celebrated twenty-five years of marriage with the…

Dayton’s own American Whale stopped by the YTAA studio for a great conversation about music and songwriting. The show has already aired—and you can catch the whole thing now on Mixcloud. Turn it up and give it a listen!

One of my favorite things about doing Your Tuesday Afternoon Alternative is discovering a band that somehow slipped under my radar and then wondering how on earth that happened. That was exactly my reaction when a friend pointed me toward Lips Speak Louder. The Minneapolis-based duo—guitarist and vocalist Rachel Brandsness and drummer Angela Lese—make the kind of rock records that remind you…

There are people who become famous, and there are people who quietly change lives without ever expecting to. Dave Kendall belonged to the second category. If you came of age in the late 1980s or early 1990s with an antenna pointed toward MTV, chances are you remember him not because he tried to become the star, but because he never did. He simply opened the door, stepped aside, and invited the…

Or in true Rocky and Bullwinkle, subtitle form: Why criticism has made me a better radio DJ—and a better listener. Independent music for everyone! There is a peculiar vulnerability that comes with opening a microphone every Tuesday afternoon. For three hours, I invite complete strangers into my musical world. I ask them to trust me enough to follow a trail that might begin with a jangly indie…

There is something wonderfully disorienting about “What In The Hell.” The New Old-Fashioned has always occupied that sweet spot where power pop, garage rock, country, and indie sensibilities collide, and this latest single turns the amps up while keeping the hooks firmly intact. It’s a song that feels both urgent and effortlessly catchy, asking a question that sounds increasingly relevant in…

Every few years somebody announces that music is dead. They say streaming killed it. Algorithms killed it. Social media killed it. Attention spans killed it. Artificial intelligence killed it. Radio killed it. MTV killed it. Napster killed it. Vinyl prices killed it. Somebody is always writing the obituary while another kid is sitting on the floor with a cheap pair of headphones hearing a song…

Elephants and Stars have been stalking the edges of the Canadian underground for years, the kind of band that doesn’t so much arrive as accumulate—record by record, show by sweat-soaked show, turning small rooms into minor revelations for anyone paying attention. They’re not interested in being the coolest band in the room, which is probably why they end up being the most necessary. Literate but…

You know what I love about radio? One minute you’re getting your soul rattled by Elephants and Stars sounding like somebody spray-painted heartbreak across the side of a collapsing bowling alley, and the next minute The Linda Lindas come flying through the speakers like they just hijacked your older cousin’s garage band and turned it into a revolution. THAT’S radio, baby. Chaos with a…

Most songwriters spend their careers trying to sound profound. Matt Derda sounds like he’s trying to survive another Tuesday. That’s not an insult. It’s the highest compliment I can think of. Because somewhere between the barroom confession, the self-deprecating joke, the hard-earned wisdom, and the moment where the floor drops out beneath a lyric you thought was headed somewhere safe, Derda…

Today on YTAA, The New Old-Fashioned crashes into the studio, carrying the kind of anticipation that only comes when a band has been quietly building something behind the scenes instead of flooding the world with half-finished updates and social media breadcrumbs. For fans of the Dayton scene, this is a notable moment. The band’s upcoming single, arriving June 6, marks the first new music…

There are reunion shows that feel like exercises in forced nostalgia, half-remembered songs dragged out of storage like old winter coats that still smell faintly of dirt and heartbreak. And then there are reunion shows that remind you why music mattered in the first place. Last night at Blind Bob’s, Charlie Jackson and the Heartland Railway didn’t just reunite — they detonated. They transformed a…

Some songs sound fragile because they’re carefully arranged that way. And then some songs sound fragile because the people making them are actually coming apart in real time. That’s the feeling you get listening to ‘Walking on a Wire’ by Richard and Linda Thompson. The song appears on Shoot Out the Lights (1982), a record that has come to feel less like a collection of songs and more like a…

There are records that sound like they were made for streaming playlists, and there are records that sound like they were made because four guys still believe rock and roll is a sacred, sweaty, half-broken thing that can save your life for three and a half minutes at a time. Still Here by High on Stress belongs violently, gloriously to the second category. This thing doesn’t stroll into the…

There are songs that do not age so much as they sink deeper into the American soil, collecting ash, heartbreak, rusted-out Buicks, and the smell of bars where the neon has been buzzing since the the 1970s. “We’ve Been Had,” by Uncle Tupelo from their last studio album, Anodyne, is one of those songs. It always sounded less like a performance than a high energy Jeff Tweedy penned confession sung…

I conducted this interview several months ago, but its ideas have lingered in ways that feel increasingly relevant with time. Returning to the conversation now, what stands out is not just the detail of Richard Flierl’s creative process, but the clarity of his artistic philosophy—one grounded in patience, emotional honesty, and a refusal to chase immediacy at the expense of depth. In the months…