By Charley Burns, Edie Carey, Bianca Castafiore, Sloane DiBari, Natasha Dracobly, and Kate Weissenberger
You know the drill. Read on to learn what’s kept you on the edge of your seat since Part I.
All photos courtesy of write-ups’ respective authors.
Charley Burns
The theme of my summer ended up being life-changing concerts. I am not a huge concert person. Paying more than $100 for tickets stresses me out to no end, and I really respect the people who go to more than one or two a year, but that’s never been me…until this summer. I attended three concerts by three of my all-time favorite artists, and all of them were mind-blowing.
First off, I got the opportunity to see Aimee Mann with Jonathan Coulton on her Lost in Space 22 ½ Anniversary tour in Nashville. If you know me, you know Aimee Mann means EVERYTHING to me, and Lost in Space is my favorite album of hers. I got to see this show with another Aimee Mann superfan, my mom, and it was really special. Aimee was amazing. Her voice is still flawless, and getting to hear “Pavlov’s Bell” live made my Buffy superfan heart very happy. I’ve been a JoCo fan for years, so getting to see him live was also amazing, and his dynamic with Mann was super, super fun.
I was also able to catch Weird Al on his Bigger and Weirder tour in Michigan, which was so much freaking fun. Even at his age, Al truly commanded the stage, with numerous full-body costume changes, silly pre-recorded elements, and some banging accordion solos. He sounded great, and the level of showmanship was awe-inspiring. I had a ball, and his opener, Puddle’s Pity Party, was hilarious, and I can’t recommend checking him out enough.
My final concert of the summer (and probably the biggest) was Nine Inch Nails and Boys Noize in Detroit on the Peel It Back tour. Now, this tour is about to go on its second leg, and I am not kidding when I say you need to go line up now for tickets because it was incredible. I cannot express how impressive this tour is. Trent Reznor commands the entire arena like it is nobody’s business, with the whole band putting their heart and soul into every number. The addition of Boys Noize to the crew really worked for me, and their set together on the B-stage halfway through the show was sick. The lighting design, though, was really the standout, contributing to the perfect vibey-ness that made the show so well curated.
Overall, a banger summer for Charley and concerts.
Edie Carey
I spent my summer home in DC, officially unemployed because of the impending recession(?) but unofficially picking up odd jobs here and there. So much free time combined with access to my parents’ car made me want to do more stuff in the city, despite how fucking hot it gets. Drain the swamp or whatever. So a few times throughout the summer I headed to an iconic park right near my old high school called Fort Reno. For over forty years the bandstand there has been the location of an annual punk concert series. Maybe this is hyperbole but I think DC kind of invented punk, and the Fort Reno concerts are a big part of the story, particularly as it relates to Fugazi and related acts. This summer only had a few shows, but I went to two of them, the first of which was especially awesome. The three bands that played — Soroche, Sexfaces, and Fat Nave — were all fantastic, and it was so much fun to discover new music not through the internet. More than anything, though, the community at Fort Reno is almost utopic. It’s an all-ages event, so you will see everyone from old-school punks who probably played there in the 80s to millennial families with their toddlers learning how to walk. Fort Reno reminded me of everything I love about DC. Sometimes I hate the place I grew up in, but at the concert I remembered how despite the overwhelming presence of shitty politicians and their staff, Lululemons and union-busting coffee shops, I am lucky to be from a city that has had, and continues to have, such a thriving independent music scene.
Bianca Castafiore
I got really into playlists this summer. Not that I wasn’t in them before, but now I’m really really in them. Before, they were so niche. Driving down 280 after getting into a fight with my dad about his atrocious fashion taste = “I Don’t Want to Be” by Gavin DeGraw. Dramatic, I know. But that’s what it was.
These miniscule and limiting playlists were supposed to dramatize and exacerbate some very specific scenarios and moods. They’re fun to put together, but at some point you’re at 50 long-titled playlists, and you don’t have one you can just vibe to when you’re on the floor of your room. More than anything, though, my core issue was that I was losing the whimsy and fun of not knowing what music was going to play next, of having total control over a form of art that is meant to be loose and expressive. We used to listen to the radio and complain about it and flip through channels. Now, we just run the aux cord. My playlists weren’t a cause of this general sense of hyper-control and loss of surprise — they were a consequence. But, it was one I could mitigate.
So I made a shift (maybe an overcorrection): have giant playlists that switch moods and vibes and just title them the names of the songs that contain the general atmospheric tension I’m going for.
“Brazil” by Declan McKenna became my pre-game playlist.
“Stormy Weather” by Etta James held all of my jazz, some R&B, and even some blues. But hey, the general sense of cohesion was still there so why not genre hop a bunch?
I kept going, kept synthesizing, and kept keeping each playlist as open and free-flowing as I could. You might ask: why didn’t you just listen to the radio? I do (and you should too)! Oh trust, me and WOBC are tight like that. But nonetheless, there is something so rewarding about having all the songs you love in one place, but still allowing yourself to be surprised by what was going to play next.
I found a happy medium. And in this happy medium I listened to my favorite songs on repeat and I also learned about new ones. Some notable 2026 summer favorites: “I’d Rather go Blind” by Etta James, “I Dreamed a Dream” by Ruthie Henshall, “Close to You” by Gracie Abrams, “My Fun” by Sukie Waterhouse, “Lover, You Should’ve Come Over” by Jeff Buckley, and “Current Affairs” by Lorde.
Sloane DiBari
It was a slow, strange summer. I spent three months in Boulder, Colorado — I had never lived in the West before. Had an internship writing copy for Ohio tourism magazines. Wrote about restaurants in Greater Toledo from a café on Pearl Street while listening to Novos Baianos and Atlas Sound. Spent a lot of time in Kirsten’s dark green Mini Cooper: “Love Takes Miles” on the way to Dry Creek, “Wound Up Here (By Holdin On)” through Rocky Mountain National Park, “Cannibal Resource” on I-70. So much sun. 90 degrees most days. Got my first bus pass ever. Listened to “The Catastrophe (Good Luck with That, Man)” on the bus on a great day. Cried to “Sixteen Blue” on the bus on a bad day. Walked around aimlessly downtown, feeling homesick and out of place and really cool at the same time, listening to Springsteen: “It’s Hard to Be a Saint in the City.” Showed my twin brother how to wield a can of spray paint (legally!) with the Grimes song we’d been listening to in the truck stuck in my head. Didn’t listen to anything flying to Newark. “Bitter Everyday” on repeat driving through the fog down to Narberth to see Ben, Zoe, and Micah, Channel Orange on the way back up in the pouring rain.
I saw a couple shows, too. Watched Perfume Genius contort his muscles in the most elegant feat of athleticism I’ve ever witnessed at the Gothic Theatre in Englewood. Saw Car Seat Headrest at Mission Ballroom in Denver and spent almost a month agonizing over how I would write about it, then posted the resulting mess on my personal Substack. After the show, I ordered a set of those official Twin Fantasy dog best friend necklaces to my home address in Jersey so I had something fun to go home to, despite having almost no money at all. I saw LCD Soundsystem at Red Rocks, felt like I was going to have a heart attack the entire time.
But what I’m really going to remember about this summer? I tried to get Lily’s dad into Slint and he basically said they were nerdy and lame. :(
Natasha Dracobly
I’ve never considered myself prone to homesickness, but this summer, when I got on a flight to Armenia for a summer study away program, I definitively proved that assumption wrong. I spent my first few weeks in Armenia crying every afternoon, and my listening choices reflected that fact in both expected and less expected ways. First, the expected: this was the summer I got really, really into Adrianne Lenker. It’s not that I had never listened to her before this summer, but I was a pretty casual fan. As I sat in my room in the Yerevan suburbs, that changed, as I listened to songs a genuinely ridiculous amount.
Now, the less expected: I also got really into 50s-ish jazz. Billie Holiday (GOAT), specifically, but also Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, and more. Something about being pretty much alone — with an 11 hour time difference separating me from my friends, family, and girlfriend, and in a country where I don’t know anyone and speak their second language as my second language — made me want to Return, so to speak, to the American culture of my childhood. I grew up in a primarily jazz-listening household, so all of these singers were familiar to me not only as vague American signifiers, but as reminders of what I heard around the house as a child. On top of that, the jazz standards era of American popular music gave us some of the best songs of love, longing, and loneliness ever. Full stop. Next time you’re across the whole globe from everyone you know in the world, I recommend jazz.
Kate Weissenberger
Like any teenager in an often-disappointing Midwestern city, I spent much of my summer scouring my hometown for a sign of absolutely anything interesting happening in the area.
One day, amidst the free mattress flyers and pickleball posters, there shone an ethereal ray of light; a voice spoke to me, and it said, “Thou shalt learn of the on-stage banter of Brian and Michael D’Addario!”
Okay, maybe it was actually a slightly-damp piece of paper tacked to a disintegrating corkboard. And maybe I almost missed it. And maybe all it said was a date, and, more importantly, a name: the Lemon Twigs.
I knew of the Lemon Twigs through both their concept album Go to School, a musical about a chimpanzee raised in a human family (yeah, this is a real thing), and their reputation as enthusiastic purveyors of 1960s pastiche. Here – finally! – was a band I knew of and liked, set to perform right in Grand Rapids. I immediately overpaid for a ticket and marked my calendar.
It turns out that my money bought me a great deal more than a spot in an ever-cramped bar in Michigan. After the show – composed of a joyful mishmash of Twig originals, songs from Brian’s new record, Till The Morning, and a couple of decades-old covers – I was struck by an obsession with this band.
I was completely blind to the Shadow of Impending Doom before the hyperfixation anvil hit my head. What began with repeated listenings of their 2023 album Everything Harmony eventually manifested as angrily typed paragraphs in defense of Brian D’Addario’s falsetto.
The Lemon Twigs weren’t the band I spent the greatest number of minutes with this summer, but they were certainly the band I talked about the most – much to the chagrin of my friends and family. Even now, two months healed from my battle, I still feel the D’Addario brothers’ faces hovering over my shoulders like Bloody freakin’ Mary every time I hear the word “lemon” spoken in casual conversation.
By the way – I still think Brian has a good falsetto.