There’s a version of this story where a 25-year-old kid at his first real job reads a script about the Vietnam War, falls in love with it, and gets told by his boss that if the movie fails, he’s fired. Most people would pass. Larry Kasanoff didn’t. He greenlit the movie anyway.

That movie was Platoon. It won Best Picture. And the kid who bet his job on it has spent the four decades since producing more than 250 films, including Terminator 2, True Lies, Dirty Dancing, and the entire Mortal Kombat franchise. He told me the story on this week’s episode, and it set the tone for one of the more energizing conversations I’ve had on this show.

Where the phrase actually came from

A few months after Platoon wrapped, Larry ran into the director, Oliver Stone, at a bar in New York. Stone bought him a drink and told him he’d always liked him because he had “a touch of the madness.” Larry spent the next few decades turning that offhand compliment into a philosophy — and eventually a book, A Touch of the Madness, written during the pandemic-era production shutdown when he watched an entire industry get scared of taking creative risks.

His theory is simple, and it applies well beyond film. The current of ordinary life pulls everyone toward the middle, toward the safe choice, toward mediocrity. If you want to make something great, you have to actively swim against that pull. The tool for doing that, he argues, is embracing the part of yourself that everyone else tells you is a little crazy.

Three words, one framework

Larry breaks the philosophy down into three steps: Create, Ask, and Play. Create means finding the version of an idea that genuinely excites you, not the safe version. Ask means asking for what you want relentlessly, from anyone, regardless of how unlikely a yes seems. Play means staying loose and creative even when the stakes are high, because the tense version of yourself makes worse decisions than the relaxed one.

The Ask principle produced my favorite story of the conversation. When Larry was making the animated film Bobbleheads, his team wanted Cher for a voice role. Everyone told him it was a long shot. She’d never done an animated movie before. They called anyway. She said yes, and later told People magazine the reason was simple: nobody had ever actually asked her before Larry did.

He tells a similar story about a Terminator 2 promotional music video. Arnold Schwarzenegger agreed to appear on one condition, that the video feature “the best band in the world.” His brother-in-law suggested Guns N’ Roses. Larry didn’t know the band, had no relationship with their label, and no clear path to making it happen. He just kept asking, one favor and one connection at a time, until the city of Hollywood let them shoot a fake concert on Sunset Boulevard and the record label rearranged an entire album release schedule around it. The video became the number one fan-voted video of the year.

When the bet doesn’t land

Not every risk works out, and Larry doesn’t pretend otherwise. He talks openly about the movies that flopped and the instincts that were flat-out wrong, and he’s unsentimental about it. His advice: treat every miss as tuition, take whatever lesson is in it, and stop replaying it. He compares it to boxing. You get hit constantly. The skill isn’t avoiding every punch, it’s not standing there stunned after the ones that land.

That mindset gets tested in one of the stranger stories from the episode. Early in his career, his team green-lit Blood Diner, a low-budget horror movie he admits he never fully understood, mostly because he loved the poster art and couldn’t get the tagline out of his head. It made money at the time and then, decades later, resurfaced as a genuine cult favorite, screening at Quentin Tarantino’s theater in Beverly Hills. Larry still doesn’t fully know why it worked. He’s made peace with not needing to.

The audience is the boss

One thread runs underneath every story Larry tells: none of it is really about his own taste. On Mortal Kombat, a room of sixth graders nearly talked him out of a redesign decision by physically reacting to a character missing his signature eye patch. He scrapped his version on the spot. On Dirty Dancing, a producer resubmitted an unchanged song to the same executives who’d rejected it, told them he’d tweaked it based on their notes, and watched them praise the “new” version. It later won the Grammy and the Oscar. Nothing about the song had changed except who was allowed to believe in it.

Larry’s read on that story isn’t cynical, it’s practical. Once you actually know what you have, protect it, and stop taking notes from people who are guessing.

Where to go from here

A Touch of the Madness is available on Amazon, wherever books are sold, and on Audible, narrated by Larry himself. If you want the deeper cut on any of these stories, including the one about a Burmese python and a very unlucky staffer, the full conversation is live now as audio, on YouTube, and right here on Substack.

I also wanted mint in the build without the part of mint I don’t like, which is chewing on a leaf that tastes different from the leaf next to it depending on how the light hit it that week. Both the blackberries and the mint came straight from the backyard for every round of this, nothing store-bought standing in, so the syrup had to do real work to make that fresh, uneven produce behave the same way twice. So this one started as a smash and turned into as much a project about controlling variance as it was about flavor.

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Recipe

Kentucky Bramble

• 2 oz Four Roses Small Batch Select

• 4 fresh blackberries

• ½ oz mint simple syrup

• ½ oz fresh lemon juice

Muddle the blackberries and mint simple syrup in a shaker. Add the bourbon and lemon juice(Or you can just dump it all in a shaker and give it hell). Shake with ice. Strain into a rocks glass over fresh ice.

Mint Simple Syrup

• 100g sugar

• 100g water

• 10–15 handfuls fresh mint leaves, stripped from the stems

Combine sugar and water over medium heat until the sugar dissolves(cloudiness should reside and be almost as clear as water), remove from heat, add the mint, and steep covered for 40 minutes. Fine strain and cool before using.

Four Roses Small Batch Select at 104 proof is the primary call for the bourbon, fruit-forward and floral enough to stay readable through the fruit and citrus without fighting either one. If you want something bolder, Old Forester 1920 brings darker fruit and a chocolate note that pairs naturally with blackberry, though it pushes the drink into a rowdier lane. Buffalo Trace at 90 proof is the budget option, and it held up fine, so don’t feel like you need to spend $50 to make this work.

Testing Log

Before I touched a shaker, I did some reading, which isn’t usually how I start these. The smash category is well-trodden enough that it was worth seeing what the consensus build looked like before burning through a season’s worth of blackberries. Bourbon, muddled fruit, citrus, sweetener, mint, sometimes a splash of soda, came up again and again, and the real divergence was in the details: which citrus, which sweetener, whether to strain, what proof bourbon, whether bitters belonged at all.

Lemon got locked almost immediately. Lime got cut on pure editorial fatigue, since I’d leaned on it across enough of the year’s development calendar that I wanted a break, not because it would have failed in the build. Grapefruit went out for a real reason, since it would have bullied the blackberry right off the glass, and yuzu and other harder-to-find citrus got ruled out too, because a big part of what I’m doing here is making sure someone in a normal grocery store can replicate this without a specialty order at least initially.

I did think about Meyer lemon for a minute. On the Irish whiskey sour I did earlier this year, Meyer’s softer acid was the right call against a gentler spirit, but bourbon doesn’t need that kind of babying. It can handle regular lemon’s sharper edge just fine, so Meyer got set aside as a possible finishing variation rather than a real contender for the base build.

Before I had simple syrup made or fresh lemons on hand, I ran an early pass against Buffalo Trace just to get a feel for the shape of the drink. That first pour used two bar spoons of caster sugar as a stand-in sweetener and grocery store lemon juice, and it was underwhelming on sweetness in a way that told me almost nothing except that two bar spoons wasn’t enough. I bumped it to four bar spoons on the next round, and the sweetness landed, but the flavor was flat, the way straight sucrose always is.

It sweetens without adding anything else, and I filed that away as an early signal that plain simple syrup probably wasn’t going to be the final answer. The one useful thing that came out of this rough pass was that Buffalo Trace stayed readable in the glass even with grocery store lemon juice and placeholder sugar working against it. If a 90 proof bourbon can hold its own in an under-built version of the drink, it’s got enough presence to work once everything else gets dialed in.

Once I had proper ingredients on hand, I got curious about whether a single product could handle citrus and sweetener together and save a step. I tried three candidates. Santa Cruz Organic Lemonade got cut fast, since it barely tasted like lemon at all and didn’t have the acid or flavor to carry the build. San Pellegrino Limonata was more promising, bringing citrus, sweetness, and carbonation all in one bottle, and for a minute I thought it might be the simplified version of this drink I could point casual readers toward.

Then I ran it head to head against standard simple syrup plus fresh lemon juice, and the fresh combination won clearly, with better acid, cleaner lemon character, and a lot more control over the final balance than a bottled product could give me. Limonata got cut from the core recipe, though it’s worth mentioning as a lazier, single-bottle option for anyone who wants to skip a step and doesn’t mind losing some precision.

This is also where the build technique settled. I started shaking the bourbon, blackberries, and mint together first, then pouring the lemon juice over the top once the drink was in the glass, on the theory that the fruit and spirit needed to integrate before citrus got introduced. It gave the same result as just adding everything to the shaker together, so lemon juice moved back into the shaker for good, since there was no reason to make the pour more complicated than it needed to be. Lemon juice volume moved around some too, starting at ¾ oz and getting pulled back to ½ oz once the sweetener testing gave me a clearer sense of balance.

With citrus and technique settled, I moved to bourbon. I’d set a target profile before running anything: vanilla and caramel forward, moderate spice, enough proof to cut through blackberry and mint without disappearing behind them. Too rye-heavy and it fights the fruit. Too soft and wheated and it vanishes.

A couple of bottles got cut on paper before they ever made it into a real comparison. Old Forester 1870 read too light for what this build needed and would have gotten lost behind the blackberry and mint before the glass was half empty. Old Forester 1924, with its Madeira cask finish, brought an uncontrolled wine character into a round that was supposed to be about bourbon, and that was too much noise to justify including it. I also kept single barrel and cask strength expressions out of this round entirely, since barrel-to-barrel variation makes for findings nobody else can replicate at home.

That left a four-way blind tasting against the locked build: Four Roses Small Batch Select, Old Forester 1920, Wild Turkey 101 8 Year, and Buffalo Trace. Four Roses won clearly, its fruit-forward, floral character running parallel to the blackberry instead of competing with it. Old Forester 1920 came in second, and its dark fruit and surprising chocolate note turned out to pair naturally with blackberry, which probably explains why it held up as well as it did despite being the most aggressive pour in the lineup.

Wild Turkey 101 8 Year landed third, refined and readable but not distinctive enough to beat the front-runners, and Buffalo Trace finished last, which isn’t the same as finishing poorly. It was perfectly functional, just outclassed by stronger company, and it remains the honest budget recommendation. I’d pay $18 for any of these four in a bar, and that’s really the framing that matters. All four work in the glass. The ranking just tells you where to spend more if you want to.

Sweetener testing came down to three syrups run against the now-locked Four Roses base: standard simple, a lemon peel steeped simple, and mint simple. Lemon peel simple was subtle, more aroma than flavor, and not strong enough to substitute for fresh lemon juice’s acid, so it works alongside the juice rather than instead of it. Standard simple syrup was functional and one-dimensional, the same flatness I’d noticed back in the caster sugar round, just with better texture.

Mint simple syrup won, and it won for a reason that surprised me. I made it with backyard mint, the same patch I used throughout testing, roughly 10 to 15 leaves stripped from the stems per 100g of sugar and 100g of water. Backyard mint runs light, about a gram per handful, noticeably lighter than what you’d buy at a grocery store, and that’s exactly the kind of inconsistency the syrup was built to erase. The syrup unified the botanical character of the drink in a way muddled mint never had, delivering the same flavor pour after pour instead of whatever that particular sprig happened to taste like. Every component in the glass stayed readable, nothing was fighting for space.

That result killed off muddled fresh mint as an ingredient too, since the syrup already carries the flavor and muddling just reintroduces the leaf-to-leaf variance the syrup was built to eliminate. I tried a bruised mint garnish, thinking it might round out the presentation, but the aroma off the glass overwhelmed the actual drinking experience, competing with the sip instead of setting it up.

With the build otherwise settled, I ran one more variant to see if a cask strength bourbon could push the drink into premium territory. 1792 Full Proof at 125 proof didn’t work. The higher ABV amplified the lemon’s acid and let the bourbon run hot enough to overtake the blackberry instead of anchoring it, which is the opposite of the job bourbon is supposed to do here.

That result confirmed something I’d been noticing since the four-way bourbon tasting: proof matters more in this drink than I expected going in. Four Roses at 104 proof sits right at the upper edge of what actually works. Push past that and the lemon and blackberry stop cooperating with the spirit.

What I Didn’t Go Back and Test

Meyer lemon never made it back into the rotation. I flagged it as a possible finishing variation early on and then never circled back once the core build was locked, mostly because regular lemon was doing exactly what I needed it to do and there wasn’t a real problem left for Meyer to solve. That’s a reasonable place to leave it rather than a gap in the testing, since chasing a refinement nobody asked for isn’t the same as chasing a fix.

I also never went looking for the exact proof ceiling between Four Roses at 104 and the cask strength failure at 125. Once 1792 Full Proof confirmed that higher proof was a liability, I didn’t feel much pull to find the precise number where things start to go wrong. Four Roses already sits where I want it, and knowing that number wouldn’t change the recommendation.

This one came together faster than most of what I’ve run through here, mostly because I’d already been thinking about the shape of the drink before the blackberries were ready and there wasn’t room for a lot of dead ends once they were. It’s bourbon-forward, blackberry-heavy, and about as replicable as a backyard-mint cocktail can be.

Next up: Jungle Bird.

“Bye driver,” the shortest thing on this EP, spends its minute and a half asking “can you hear me” and “am I alive” like someone patting themselves down after impact, making sure all the parts are still attached. You only ask that kind of question out loud when you’re genuinely not sure of the answer.

MEGGO, the solo project of Montreal musician and producer Megan Ennenberg, titled every song on this record like it’s the conversation of someone who just had an accident and is still trying to figure out where they are. The crash. Bye, driver. Jaws of life. Explosion. Just my luck. On paper it reads like a demolition. On tape it sounds hopeful almost the whole way through, and that’s the first thing worth sitting with before you get anywhere near the lyrics.

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This is chapter two of a three part project she’s calling eavesdropper. Chapter one, death stories, was upfront about what it was doing. Named for real people she’d lost, credited them by name, didn’t ask you to guess. The crash doesn’t extend that same courtesy, borrowing the vocabulary of an accident without ever quite telling you if there was one.

Track one opens on footsteps and humming before you’re sure you’re listening to a song at all, and the first line that lands clean is “I came back through the backdoor dream.” Not a memory. A re-entry. Then the crash itself: asleep while someone else drove, awake the moment of impact. She wasn’t driving. Whoever was doesn’t get named, doesn’t get blamed, mostly gets forgiven and left behind. The song ends the way it started, on humming, plus a scrap of home movie audio, somebody’s parents narrating a house that isn’t the one being built here. Every jolt on this record gets absorbed back into something softer before it fully wakes you up.

Every jolt on this record gets absorbed back into something softer before it fully wakes you up.

“Bye driver” is the disorientation right after, and it’s where the record’s best line shows up, the kind you underline and can’t stop thinking about: “I forgive you, but I won’t follow you back.” Not reconciliation, exactly. More like someone deciding they can let go of the anger without agreeing to relive the moment that caused it. This isn’t a song about getting blindsided. The warning signs were there before she ever got in the car, which makes the forgiveness harder won and the refusal to go back sharper. Read it as a breakup line and it holds up fine. Read it as an instruction she’s giving herself about the dream she just got yanked out of, and it holds up better.

By “jaws of life” the record has flipped its own premise. A jaws of life is a rescue tool, the thing that cuts you out of wreckage rather than causes it, and the song plays like the one fully lucid stretch on the whole EP, all “there’s only now” and wanting a house with a rocking chair in it. Some of these lines have a plain, almost bashful honesty, the kind that doesn’t build to anything or apologize for not building to anything. The want just gets said out loud, and the song moves on. Worth knowing the room on this track is genuinely crowded. Family in the house while she recorded it, harmonica from her brother, friends stacked into the backing vocals. Love building a home isn’t a metaphor here so much as a credits list.

“Explosion” is barely two minutes and never actually explodes. Officially it’s “explosion (inevitable),” and that parenthetical is doing a lot of quiet work. The piano’s a little bent, not broken, and somewhere in there she rakes her fingers across the strings instead of the keys, either the most violent or the gentlest gesture on the record depending on how you’re listening. The lyric only ever describes an explosion as inevitable, past tense, hypothetical. I’ve come around to hearing it as a breath instead of a fuse. A catch in the voice between two thoughts. Proof of being alive rather than evidence of damage.

Then “just my luck” actually lights the thing. Opens with “clue me stupid,” three words that put you on the back foot before you’ve had time to find it, followed immediately by “no one’s laughing,” in case you were about to. Densest, loudest thing here, practically a different band by comparison, and the track where the crash imagery finally gets pointed at an actual person instead of an event. By now you know how this ends. She got in the car anyway. Somewhere in all that noise there’s a kid peeking through a memory that has nothing to do with any of it, proof the drifting hasn’t stopped even at full volume.

The record’s only fully awake moment is also its last one. “Even if you’re happy” sounds like nothing else on the EP, soft trumpet instead of noise, a second voice in the mix courtesy of her regular collaborator Owen Chow. The lyric says the quiet part outright: harder to write when you’re content, easier to reach for the wreckage than the good moment sitting right in front of you. Five songs of dream logic and disaster vocabulary, and the one place she sounds genuinely present is the one admitting how much effort presence takes.

Turns out MEGGO would probably be fine with all of this. She’s said as much herself, more or less: however you find your way into this record is the right way in. A record this interior doesn’t hand you the meaning. It hands you the wreckage and the rescue tools and leaves you to sort out which is which.

A record this interior doesn’t hand you the meaning. It hands you the wreckage and the rescue tools and leaves you to sort out which is which.

What I keep coming back to is that nothing here resolves the way a crash record is supposed to resolve. Nobody gets fully rescued. Nobody fully wakes up until the last ninety seconds, and even then it plays less like waking up than like realizing you never quite went back under. Closer to how mornings actually work than most songs about mornings let on. You don’t sit up and know exactly where you are. You just notice, eventually, that you’re standing in your kitchen, not entirely sure how you got there, and it’s fine, you’re just going to go ahead and make coffee anyway.

Nobody gets fully rescued. Nobody fully wakes up until the last ninety seconds, and even then it plays less like waking up than like realizing you never quite went back under.

Chapter three’s still coming. She’s building a three album architecture on her own dime, six songs at a time, with nobody but her friends and her brother’s harmonica helping carry the weight. Worth pointing at before the algorithm decides to. She’s playing Second Summer Festival in Toronto this September and a hometown show at P’tit Ours in Montreal come October, if you want proof this holds up outside your headphones. Give it your nineteen minutes, then go find chapter one while you’re at it.

I’ve been quiet for a bit. Not the good kind of quiet where I’m off somewhere sipping something rare and taking notes for later — the kind where life just eats your recording schedule alive. The samples kept arriving anyway, stacking up on the shelf like little reminders that I owed some friends of the show an actual conversation. So that’s what this one is: a backlog episode. Seven pours, no formal tasting notes, and a lot of catching up on what’s actually happening in this industry right now.

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Two States, One Bottle (Sort Of)

The first thing I cracked open was a pair of bottles that are clearly in on the joke with each other — one labeled Kentslyvania, one labeled Penntucky. It’s a collaboration between Liberty Pole Spirits out of Washington, Pennsylvania, and MB Roland Distillery out of Pembroke, Kentucky, timed to land around the country’s 250th anniversary. The concept is simple on paper and more interesting the longer you sit with it: each distillery picked one of its own barrels and one from the other, then built its own blend from the same four base whiskies. Liberty Pole’s version leans on their sweet-mash, double-pot-distilled Monongahela rye tradition. MB Roland’s leans on their pre-prohibition style and that dark-fired corn they’re known for in western Kentucky.

I could pick out the MB Roland character almost immediately just from the nose — that distinct house profile doesn’t hide easily, blend or not. The Penntucky version read a little more rye-forward to me, though I’ll cop to that being purely anecdotal. What I actually want to flag here isn’t which one “wins,” because that’s not the point. It’s that I think we’re going to see more of this kind of thing — distilleries using each other as an introduction to markets they don’t already have a foothold in. If you want to understand western Kentucky whiskey, MB Roland is a great front door. If you want Pennsylvania rye, Liberty Pole is exactly that. Pairing up isn’t a competition, it’s a proxy.

A Blending House Doing What It Does Best

From there I moved to something that’s been sitting on my shelf longer than I’d like to admit — Dark Arts Whiskey House’s Empyrean, a high-rye bourbon finished separately in red and white port casks. Macaulay Minton and the Dark Arts team have built their whole identity around blending and finishing rather than distilling from scratch, and this one leans into that fully: seven-and-a-half-year Indiana distillate, finished in white port casks specifically, which is a less common move than the usual red port play. The name is a reach for “highest heaven,” and honestly, letting it sit and open up in the glass for a while, it earns a little bit of that reach. Thick, syrupy texture, long legs in the glass. No notes today, but it’s good. Real good.

Grown on Eleven Acres

Next was something I picked up in person, not shipped to me — an Estate Bourbon from Lux Row Distillers in Bardstown, from a trip I took a few months back with their team. This is a five-year rye bourbon mash bill (78% corn, 12% malted barley, 10% rye) where the corn was grown on the eleven-acre plot that now houses three of their rickhouses. That’s the kind of detail that sounds like marketing copy until you actually think through the logistics — harvesting a single eleven-acre field means dedicated equipment runs, dedicated storage, no cross-contamination with any other crop. It’s expensive to do at that scale, which is exactly why a five-year bourbon carries a price tag that would otherwise raise an eyebrow. It’s a limited, distillery-exclusive pour, and it’s a genuinely interesting one for anyone who cares about where their grain actually comes from.

Pride of Anderson County Goes National

Then there’s a whiskey with a complicated history: Pride of Anderson County, the collaboration between Rare Character Whiskey Co. and Wild Turkey historian David Jennings. The original run was a limited lottery release tied explicitly to Wild Turkey — expensive, scarce, and it made a lot of people upset in the way whiskey people get upset. This new chapter is different. It’s transitioning into an ongoing single barrel series releasing twice a year, going national instead of staying a one-off. Whether or not it’s tied to a specific named source doesn’t really change my read on it — Rare Character’s track record speaks for itself, and this pour backed that up. It might be the best thing I tried all night.

Decanters, Barrel Picks, and What’s Coming

A couple of quick hits before I wrap: Green River Distilling Co.‘s tasting-room-exclusive ceramic decanters are some of the most fun packaging in the category right now, and the whiskey inside holds up regardless of what else is happening with their parent company — a story I’ll let the actual news outlets cover.

And finally, the one I’m most excited about: I joined Casey Jones Distillery‘s new public barrel pick program, open to anyone who wants to sign up. We worked through five barrels alongside folks from the Kentucky Bourbon Festival, converged on the same favorite before anyone knew what it was, and that barrel is now the official Kentucky Bourbon Festival pick for the year. It’ll be available at the festival this fall — and if you’re going, that’s a bottle worth standing in line for.

What’s Next

Off the spirits beat, I’m keeping up the monthly cocktail series on Substack (this month: a bourbon blackberry smash) and running album reviews as advance copies come in. More episodes are coming, including some familiar faces from the Kentucky Bourbon Festival world before summer’s out.

If you want the full conversation — the tape-wrestling, the tangents, all of it — the episode is live now on audio, YouTube, and right here on Substack, if that’s your thing.

#PinkiesDown

Sam is the Executive Director of the Bourbon Capital Alliance, and he joined me fresh off the third annual National Bourbon Week, held June 14–21 across Bardstown and the surrounding counties. Eight full days, ten partner distilleries, and — by his own admission — barely a chance to catch his breath before we recorded.

From a Lawn Ceremony to an Eight-Day Festival

It’s easy to forget how young this event actually is. Three years ago, National Bourbon Week was closer to a single ceremony on a lawn. This year, it was a full week of distillery-hosted experiences: a Big Vat blending class and the debut of Big Vat Liar at Potter Jane, wood finishing at Old SteelHouse, a “proof by the spring” tasting at Log Still, the Beam Luau, Maker’s Mark’s Bill’s Bourbon Soirée, and a downtown bar crawl that sold out in a single day. Special releases — Elijah Craig 21, the 250th Anniversary Wadiboon from Preservation, Big Bat Liar, and a first-ever Knob Creek 15-Year Cask Strength — gave collectors a reason to plan around the week, not just show up for it.

Sam’s read on why this year worked so well comes down to one word he kept returning to: experience, not event. “Consumers want experiences,” he told me, “and particularly if you can offer them a unique educational experience, all the better.” Distilleries leaned into that, and the bookings followed.

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The Mashup, Reimagined

One of the clearest examples of that evolution is the Bourbon Capital Mashup, the Alliance’s signature tasting event featuring all ten partner distilleries. This year, the event expanded its footprint by partnering with Neat Bourbon Bar next door to Bespoken Bond, giving VIP ticket holders an early window with the distilleries before general admission opened, plus a dedicated lounge with vintage pours and a menu from chef Newman Miller. Ticket sales jumped from about 130 last year to 160 this year, and it sold out. Sam’s takeaway wasn’t just that it sold well — it’s that attendees who’d been to both years told him, unprompted, that year two was simply better. That’s the value of a real postmortem: distillery partners and the Alliance sit down after the week, compare notes, and build the next version from what actually happened, not just what was planned.

The Numbers Behind the Week

Here’s where the conversation got genuinely interesting. After National Bourbon Week wrapped, Sam spent days compiling booking data from partner distilleries — location, event attendance, timing — into a spreadsheet of more than 900 individual bookings. The findings: visitors came from 37 states, and 70% of bookings came from outside Kentucky entirely.

That’s not a regional festival. That’s a national one, and it’s happening in a town that most people couldn’t find on a map five years ago. Sam is using that data for more than bragging rights — he’s building the case for a real sponsorship program heading into 2027, and he’s already pulling hotel occupancy and Airbnb data to round out a full economic-impact report. One local bar owner told him he was up 57% over a typical week. Multiply that across restaurants, hotels, and shops downtown, and you start to see why Sam calls bourbon tourism “not dead at all” — a pointed rebuttal to the periodic headlines suggesting the category has peaked.

Enter the Bourbon Capital Diplomat

If National Bourbon Week is the Alliance’s flagship event, the Bourbon Capital Diplomat Certification Experience might be its most ambitious long-term project. Officially launched to the media in June, the program addresses something the Alliance identified as a gap all the way back in its founding community study: Bardstown’s hospitality workers — the bartenders, servers, and front-desk staff who talk to visitors every day — often don’t know as much about the ten distilleries around them as the guests asking the questions.

The curriculum, built directly with input from all ten partner distilleries, runs about two hours inside the Bourbon Capital Academy classroom at the Brindiamo Penthouse. It opens with a welcome cocktail and a quick lesson on building a proper old fashioned, moves into a guided tasting (Basil Hayden, Monk’s Road Rye, Evan Williams Bottled-in-Bond, and Old SteelHouse Batch 2 were on the mat this round, rotating quarterly), and weaves in video content shot directly with master distillers like Fred Noe, John Rempe, etc. — so the story behind each pour comes from the source, not a script. Participants finish with a 50-question exam; pass at 80% and you’re a Certified Bourbon Capital Diplomat, pin included.

Sam is candid that this program will take time to build momentum, and that it’s designed to stay alive rather than end at graduation — biannual “Diplomat Summits” will keep certified diplomats connected to new releases and distillery updates. The long-term vision reaches beyond Bardstown too: conversations are already underway with the Kentucky chapter of the United States Bartenders Guild to bring bartenders in from Louisville and Lexington, with an eye toward eventually reaching bars far outside the state.

What’s Next

With National Bourbon Week’s postmortem underway and 2027 dates already being planned, Sam’s next few months belong almost entirely to the Diplomat program — though he’s also eyeing an offsite version during September’s Kentucky Bourbon Festival. For now, his advice for anyone thinking about next June is simple: book your hotel or Airbnb early. Bardstown fills up fast.

Want the full conversation? Listen to the audio episode or watch on YouTube — links below.

Enjoyed this one? Subscribe to EmbellishPod on Substack for new episode write-ups, extra context you won’t hear anywhere else, and first access to future interviews with the people building Kentucky’s bourbon industry.

I wanted something dry. Something that leaned into citrus and spirit instead of hiding behind sugar, with the maraschino doing structural work instead of headlining the drink.

That’s also closer to what actually happened with the man himself. Hemingway’s order at El Floridita was the Papa Doble: no sugar, double rum, driven by his diabetes rather than his palate.

The maraschino and grapefruit everyone associates with his name came later. Bartenders Constantino Ribalaigua Vert and then Antonio Meilan added them, building the version that got canonized under his name. Never let the truth get in the way of a good story. He named it by ordering it, and the world finished naming it for him.

Worth knowing going in, because the drink everyone calls a Hemingway Daiquiri isn’t quite what Hemingway actually drank.

One more expectation to set before the recipe: this is a sour, bitter drink. Don’t come to it looking for something sweet. You can push the maraschino up if you want more sweetness, but cherry starts taking over fast, and that’s a tradeoff, not a fix.

Recipe below, then how I got there.

Recipe

Hemingway, Embellished

• 2 oz Don Q Reserva 7 Años

• ½ oz fresh lime juice

• ½ oz fresh grapefruit juice

• ½ oz Naranja Agria (Badia or Goya, reader’s choice)

• 3 bar spoons (⅜ oz) Luxardo Maraschino

Shake with ice, strain into a coupe.

Testing Log

I locked the identity before anything else: rum-based, citrus-forward, less sweet than the classic version most people know. I didn’t have a true white rum on hand, so I started with Diplomático Planas. It’s not actually an unaged white rum, it’s aged and then charcoal-filtered back to clear, but it was the closest thing in the cabinet and a fine baseline to build from.

My first pour stuck close to the classic ratio, ¾ oz lime and ½ oz grapefruit against a half ounce of maraschino. It was rough in a way I wasn’t expecting. Not just sweet or sour, but something closer to an aggressively dry red wine, all acid with nothing underneath to round it out. The maraschino was getting steamrolled instead of doing its job.

Dropping the maraschino to ⅜ oz fixed the edge without tipping the drink sweet, so that ratio held for the rest of testing.

The citrus itself still wasn’t right, though. I needed to know whether the problem was the lime-to-grapefruit ratio or just too much total citrus volume. I poured two variants side by side to find out: one at ½ oz lime to ¾ oz grapefruit, which I preferred but which still read pithy from the grapefruit, and one at ½ oz lime to ¼ oz grapefruit, which my wife preferred but which let the maraschino get too cherry-forward again.

Comparing the two told me volume wasn’t the issue. The grapefruit’s bitterness was the actual problem, not how much citrus was in the glass overall.

Instead of going back and resolving that split cleanly, I brought in a new variable: naranja agria, sour orange. It’s a staple in Cuban cooking, and given Hemingway’s whole relationship with Cuba, working it in felt like the right kind of fun rather than a random pantry grab. I didn't have either on hand, hadn't even tried them before, and had to order both off Amazon. Rural Kentucky isn't exactly stocked with Cuban pantry staples.

A quick label check showed they’re built differently. Goya is water-first and more diluted, leaning on a lighter Seville orange character that reads more like oil and essence than juice. Badia is juice-first, more concentrated, and includes xanthan gum for body.

Both are marketed as meat marinades, which made me check the labels carefully for salt or garlic. Both came back clean and safe to use in a cocktail.

With sour orange in play, I ran three recipes back to back in the same shaker to minimize rinsing between pours, maraschino held steady at ⅜ oz throughout. Recipe C kept all three citruses at equal ½ oz pours. Recipe A dropped grapefruit entirely and let sour orange take its place. Recipe B dropped lime instead, leaving grapefruit and sour orange to carry the acid.

Recipe B was too sweet. Sour orange on its own can’t supply the sourness lime was providing, so without lime the drink lost its backbone. Recipe A was the opposite problem: technically balanced, but one-note, because lime alone doesn’t have the complexity to stand on its own once grapefruit’s gone.

Recipe C, equal parts across the board, was the clear winner. Three citruses splitting the load instead of one or two doing all the work turned out to be the answer the whole time.

With the citrus blend and maraschino locked, I moved to rum. I ran the same Recipe C build across three options: Diplomático Planas as my reference point, Don Q Reserva 7 Años, and Mount Gay XO.

Honestly, the differences were all half-steps. Don Q Reserva 7 Años came out slightly ahead this time, with Mount Gay XO close behind and Diplomático Planas a step back, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that order flipped on a different day with different palates at the table. Don Q is what’s locked into the final recipe, but treat that ranking as soft.

Last test was Badia against Goya head to head, same final build otherwise, just swapping the sour orange brand. Neither one beat the other. This isn’t a case where I can point to a clear technical winner and tell you which to buy. It’s closer to the kind of fierce, regional brand loyalty people have around Latin grocery staples, where the “right” answer depends more on what you grew up with than on anything measurable in the glass. Use whichever you’ve got.

One more change happened on the way to the final build. I’d been using Ocean Spray Unsweetened White Grapefruit Juice through most of testing because it’s what’s actually sitting on most home bar shelves. For the final recipe test, I swapped in fresh-squeezed grapefruit instead, and it was clearly the better call. That’s what’s in the locked recipe now.

What I Didn’t Go Back and Test

I never reopened the lime-to-grapefruit ratio question after introducing sour orange. Once Recipe C proved out, the equal-thirds approach made the original two-way split feel like a question I’d already answered indirectly, so I let it stay closed.

That’s a reasonable place to stop, not a gap. The three-citrus version solved the problem the two-citrus version couldn’t, and re-litigating the original split wouldn’t have told me anything Recipe C hadn’t already shown.

I also didn’t run a premium upgrade phase against the locked Don Q baseline, things like Rolling Fork Single Cask, Don Q Gran Reserva Añejo, or Mount Gay 1703. That’s fair game for a future round.

This drink came together faster than I expected once I stopped trying to fix the lime and grapefruit relationship directly and let a third citrus solve the problem instead. Sometimes the answer isn’t picking a side, it’s adding a third option nobody asked for.

Next up: Blackberry Bramble, once the backyard blackberries are actually ready for it.

I recently sat down with Dr. Micaela Pallini, President and CEO of Pallini S.p.A. in Rome, for a conversation about what Pallini stands for. What I got was something closer to a masterclass in family legacy, agricultural science, and the particular kind of stubbornness it takes to run a 150-year-old company without losing what made it worth keeping in the first place.

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Rome Wasn’t Built in a Day. Neither Was This Limoncello.

The Pallini story does not begin in Rome, or on the Amalfi Coast. It begins in Antrodoco, a village of maybe five thousand people about an hour north of Rome, where a self-taught reader and trader named Nicola Pallini started making liqueurs in 1875 from recipes passed down by the women of the area. The village still has a Pallini Palace in its main square. The family’s first products were anise-based, including Mistrà, a dry, sugar-free anise liqueur whose roots trace back to Venetian sea traders who encountered uzo while working the Adriatic islands in the 1400s. It is still produced today. It is also one of those inside-baseball bottles that serious liqueur people tend to get very excited about when they discover it.

The move to Rome came in the 1920s, after Nicola’s son was injured in World War I and spent his recovery in the capital. The legend goes that during his time there, he met a Russian chemist who was fleeing the Revolution and who taught him the finer points of distillation. Whether you take that story literally or not, the outcome is the same. The family saw what Rome could offer that Antrodoco could not, and they put down roots that have now held for a century.

The Lemon Connection

Limoncello, as Micaela is quick to point out, is not an invention. It is a tradition. Every family in Italy has their own version. What Pallini set out to do was take a recipe that had lived in the family for generations and figure out what it would take to make it the best in the world.

Part of that answer came through marriage. Two of Micaela’s great-uncles married sisters from Ravello, a town on the Amalfi Coast. That connection introduced the family to the sfusato amalfitano lemon, and eventually to the farmers, the regional consortium, and the small processing facility near Vietri where Pallini peels those lemons fresh before vacuum-sealing them and shipping to Rome.

“Simple recipes are the most difficult to make well,” Micaela told me, and she reached for the analogy of a grandmother’s tomato sauce. You watch her make it a hundred times. You try to copy it exactly. And it is never the same.

The production process she described sounds almost too simple on paper. Fresh lemon peel, steeped in near-200-proof sugar beet alcohol for a precisely calibrated number of days. Not too long, because if you push it, the bitter compounds in the pith start to leach through. That infusion gets blended with a simple syrup made from beet sugar dissolved in warm water, no pre-dissolved corn syrup bases, and then a proprietary lemon oil extraction developed in partnership with the University of Naples. The whole thing gets bottled at 26% ABV, a number they landed on only after working down from 32%, looking for the exact point where perfume, sweetness, and citrus snap all hold together without the alcohol coming through too hot.

The Doctor Is In

Micaela’s path back to the family business was not a straight line. She pursued a PhD in chemistry partly, she told me with a laugh, because she figured it was complicated enough that her father would leave her alone. It did not work. What it did give her was a way of thinking about a recipe the way you would approach a research problem, systematically, with a willingness to rebuild from the ground up, and with genuine respect for the reality that in a distillery, one plus one almost never equals two.

When she joined Pallini in 2001, the company was solid but small. Since then, revenues have nearly tripled. The workforce has doubled. The brand now reaches over 80 countries. And along the way, she became the first female president of Federvini, Italy’s premier spirits trade association. She does not talk about it triumphantly. “When I came into the industry and started sitting in rooms with my colleagues, I realized how few of us there were. Every time, you had to wait your turn to speak. Once they realized you had something to say, they’d give you the floor a second time.”

Federvini is back to all-male leadership now. She notes it plainly, without bitterness, like someone who has been in a long fight long enough to know that one data point is not the whole story.

How to Actually Drink This Thing

Before we wrapped, I asked the question that I figured everyone listening really wanted answered. If you have never had limoncello, or if you have had it once and found it almost offensively sweet, where do you start?

Micaela’s answer was straightforward. Start cold, start neat. Not from the freezer because that kills the aromatics. From the fridge, with a single ice cube if you want one. What you are looking for is that citrus bite on the sides of the tongue, the note that lingers and pushes back against the sweetness. “It should bring you to the Amalfi Coast,” she said. “Not just taste like sugar.”

From there, she builds toward a spritz. Equal parts Pallini and prosecco, plenty of ice, with a splash of Campari if you want something that cuts through. There is also the limoncello margarita, which swaps in Pallini where triple sec usually goes. And then there is the limoncello tiramisu, ladyfingers dipped in half Pallini and half water, layered with mascarpone cream, white chocolate, and fresh berries. She posted a video of herself making it during COVID lockdown that is apparently still floating around on YouTube somewhere.

I will be attempting it this weekend. Pinkies down, fun up.

Pallini Limoncello is available nationwide. Find them at limoncellopallini.com and on Instagram at @pallinilimoncello. This episode is live now on all podcast platforms, YouTube, and right here on Substack.

New to EmbellishPod? Subscribe below. New episodes every Tuesday,(whenever I get a chance) with the long read dropping right here. See you next week.

This started as an attempt to build one from scratch and find out where that extra thing was hiding. White grapefruit, blood orange, lime, dark agave, high-proof blanco. Several rounds of testing to figure out what each decision was actually doing. The blood orange is why it’s called Sangre — sangre is Spanish for blood, and that felt more honest than calling it a blood orange Paloma when the blood orange is only half the citrus story.

It’s a peak season drink. Blood orange runs December through March, and the deeply red fruit you want for this only shows up when overnight temperatures are cold enough to develop the color. Outside that window, your mileage may vary.

The Recipe

Sangre Paloma

2 oz Tapatio Blanco 110
1 oz Ocean Spray Unsweetened White Grapefruit Juice
1 oz fresh blood orange juice
1/2 oz fresh lime juice
1/4 oz Agave In The Raw dark agave nectar
3 oz Mineragua or Topo Chico
Flaky sea salt — half rim

Collins glass over ice. Pour agave into the jigger first, then measure tequila and juices through it to pull the agave clean. Top with sparkling water. One gentle stir. Half rim of flaky sea salt applied before building the drink.

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The Grapefruit Decision

First variable was the grapefruit component — the foundational ingredient after tequila, and the one with the most ways to get it wrong.

Four options tested against each other with Teremana Blanco as the control: Fever-Tree Pink Grapefruit Soda, Stirrings Simple Paloma Mix with club soda, Ocean Spray Ruby Red Grapefruit Juice Drink with club soda, and Ocean Spray Unsweetened White Grapefruit Juice with club soda.

The commercial options didn’t survive the first round. Fever-Tree is sweet and convenient — both are liabilities in a scratch build. Stirrings runs 11 grams of sugar per two ounces and still doesn’t taste like enough grapefruit. Neither one lets you control the sweetness or the acid balance, which means the drink is already half-decided before you’ve touched it.

Ruby red and white grapefruit pulled ahead, but they’re not the same drink. White grapefruit is more tart, more bitter, and pure juice — no added sugar, no softening. Ruby red is labeled as a juice drink rather than pure juice, which means added sugar and less intensity. It’s not that ruby red is wrong. It’s that white grapefruit is a better foundation if you want the best version without extra pomp. The bitterness becomes a platform rather than a problem, and the pale yellow base makes the blood orange color hit harder than it would over pink.

One other finding worth noting: fresh squeezed red grapefruit was tested late in development against Ocean Spray Unsweetened White. No meaningful difference detected. The bottled product performs on par with fresh squeezed, which isn’t something you get to say often — don’t squeeze grapefruit for this recipe.

The Carbonation Problem

Both juice-based builds in the first round lacked effervescence compared to the commercial soda options. Two ounces of club soda into five-and-a-half ounces of liquid is roughly twenty-five percent of total volume, and that’s not enough for sustained fizz. Carbonation was flagged as a variable to solve later, with club soda held as the consistent baseline until that phase.

The salt discovery came out of this same period, and it was annoying in the way that obvious things are annoying once you see them. Salt added as a pinch directly into the build throughout early testing was causing nucleation — salt particles trigger CO2 release, and the fizz dissipated faster than it would without them. Moving salt to the rim fixed it, and it also reframed what the salt test was actually about. The question wasn’t just whether salt improves the flavor. It was where it lives in the build.

When carbonation was tested directly, Mineragua won over club soda. It’s a Mexican brand with more aggressive bubble structure, and there’s an authenticity argument for it in a Paloma. Topo Chico is equivalent and interchangeable. Final amount settled at three ounces — roughly forty percent of total drink volume, enough for sustained effervescence without drowning the citrus.

The Citrus Build

With white grapefruit settled, the next question was whether a secondary citrus component could add complexity and body to a drink that was tasting a little thin.

Three builds tested: pure white grapefruit control, white grapefruit and ruby red blend, white grapefruit and blood orange blend. Both tasters independently ranked the blends above the control, which settled the direction. There was disagreement on which blend — one preferred ruby red for softening the white grapefruit’s assertiveness, the other preferred blood orange for complexity. Blood orange was chosen. More distinctive, more interesting to write about, and the split gave it the edge.

Blood orange has a seasonality problem that’s worth understanding before you go buy fruit. Peak is December through March. Testing in May confirmed inconsistent results — pale, orange-red fruit read sweet and thin, without the tartness and complexity that make it worth using. The color is a direct quality signal: deeply red blood oranges are more tart and more complex because anthocyanins develop in cold overnight temperatures. When those temperatures aren’t there, neither is the flavor. If you can’t find deeply red blood oranges, ruby red grapefruit blended in is a reasonable fallback — not the same drink, but a coherent one.

Lime entered development later than it probably should have. Most scratch-built Paloma recipes include it as a brightening agent, and it was initially excluded because unsweetened white grapefruit was already delivering significant acid and bitterness — lime felt redundant. Tested at one ounce alongside blood orange as a separate component, it was too aggressive. It dominated and competed rather than complemented. The discovery came from mixing the lime build and the blood orange build together after tasting, almost by accident. The combination landed where neither could alone — lime providing brightness, blood orange providing complexity and color, and neither redundant at half the volume. Testing confirmed one-half ounce was the right call.

The Sweetener

Agave In The Raw dark agave nectar throughout testing. Dark agave over light for its more complex, earthy character — it’s a flavor contributor, not just a sweetener, and the natural affinity with tequila is hard to argue with given where both come from.

The viscosity makes conventional jigger measurement a hassle. Technique that actually solves it: agave goes into the jigger first, then tequila and juices are poured through it. The liquid pulls the agave clean and you’re not chasing residue around the inside of the jigger.

Sweetness calibrated throughout development — started at one-quarter ounce, briefly considered bumping to one-half, returned to one-quarter once the tequila proof question was resolved. Final amount balances the citrus bitterness without tipping the drink into sweet territory.

The Tequila

Teremana Blanco as the control throughout early testing — soft, approachable, clean. Teremana ran out mid-test. An honest testing reality.

Espolon Blanco tested next. Clean, citrus-forward, the reliable performer it always is.

Tapatio 110 was initially flagged as potentially too aggressive — the concern being that 110 proof would overwhelm the citrus and make the whole thing too boozy. That concern turned out to be backwards. The higher proof provided backbone and presence that stood up to the assertive citrus combination in a way the lower-proof options couldn’t. Espolon and Teremana both got lost against the bitterness of white grapefruit and the three-citrus build. Tapatio won.

The insight is about proof, not brand loyalty. Any high-proof blanco at 100 proof or above is worth trying — Tapatio 110 is the tested and preferred option, and it’s an affordable bottle for 110 proof. Most home bartenders reach for whatever blanco they have without thinking about how proof interacts with assertive citrus. This drink is a good argument for reconsidering that habit.

There’s a moment partway through a project like this where you realize you’ve moved past a variable you’re not totally sure about and you don’t want to go back. Revisiting the grapefruit decision after the citrus build was settled meant unraveling a lot of work that was already settled. So you don’t. You make a judgment call, document what you tested, and move forward. That’s not laziness — it’s how development actually goes. At some point the incremental gains stop being worth the sessions.

What I ended up with is a drink that finally has that extra thing I kept looking for. The bitterness is in the right places, the proof holds up against it, and the blood orange earns the name. Whether it would be better with different grapefruit proportions or a slightly different agave level, I genuinely don’t know. But it’s good enough that I stopped caring.

Next up is a Hemingway Daiquiri. Rum, fresh citrus, no sugar added(maybe) — Hemingway was diabetic and famously asked his bartender to make it stronger and sweeter, hold the sweet. We’ll see what that actually means to build from scratch.

The drink is named for what it contains. Make it between December and March, with the darkest blood oranges you can find.

Sangre Paloma.

SO Recordings · June 5, 2026 · @bigspecial_ · bigspecial.co.uk

My knowledge of British post-punk is thin. There’s too much music in the world to feel bad about the gaps. So when this one landed in my inbox I wasn’t entirely sure it was going to be my thing.

It was my thing.

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Joe Hicklin and Callum Moloney are from the Black Country — a stretch of the West Midlands named for the soot and smoke from two centuries of ironworks and coal mines. It’s the kind of place that makes a certain kind of music. Hicklin screams poetry. Moloney hits things. Somehow this produces sounds that feel less like post-punk from the English Midlands and more like a Southern Gothic revival meeting that got lost on its way to the Mississippi Delta. I don’t fully understand how. I’ve stopped needing to.

O’JOY! is out June 5 via SO Recordings. If you want context on where these songs came from, go listen to Postindustrial Hometown Blues and National Average first and think: this didn’t make the cut for that. What’s left makes its own thing.

It’s dedicated to the memory of their friend Handsome James Borrer.

The record opens with a spoken fragment — automated, distorted, no music underneath it. Just a voice and static:

What you have taken / will give you more than you were ever after / and the weight will pull you down to the rock of the earth / and you shall become it.

Then a creaking gate hinge. Then you’re in.

Plaintive Native arrives like something drifting from a bar on a Louisiana back road — synth drums, a banjo that has no business being this funky, Hicklin in spoken-word mode. Around the three-minute mark it drops into something more open. Proselytizing without a congregation: what do you care about / what are you allowed to care about / do you even care? Nobody responds. That’s the point.

Only Free When Sleeping opens on a saxophone hook and immediately sets a different temperature — lazy drum, greasy. True Blood without the vampires. A hymnal repetition builds until it stops — hard cut, no resolution. The lyric does the work the music refuses to finish:

You’re only free when you’re sleeping.

Oblivion as the only available exit. Cheerful stuff.

Lazarus is a church service. Not a metaphor — choir, organ, a preacher stepping in when the congregation pauses. The resurrection myth runs in reverse: stay down Lazarus / no new beginning / born digging / get digging. Somewhere in there a seagull catches fire, thinks “fuck it,” and that’s the most accurate description of late capitalism I’ve encountered this year.

The Wake strips everything back — a pissed-off goose of a horn, a guitar with real solitude in the picking, and a lyric that is simultaneously a literal wake and a eulogy for something cultural that got killed by television, the internet, and whatever came after. Nobody can quite remember what it was or when it died. But things have been different since.

This one requires multiple listens. I say that as a warning.

Family Bones opens on a bass line that would rattle the spoiler off a 1994 Mercury Tracer. The discomfort is physical before it’s intellectual. Midway it shifts into something orchestrated and strange — the audio equivalent of binaural beats on YouTube, except instead of calming you down it resonates specifically with your unease. A rotten apple fell and rolled four generations down. That’s the whole track in ten words.

Garden of Fools opens with flute — brave or deranged depending on your tolerance for unexpected woodwinds — and builds into something that functions like a sea shanty. A communal song for people who’ve had their tools and their hands taken. The flute gives way to trumpet halfway through. That’s not an accident. Flute is private grief. Trumpet is what you do with it.

Sluglife is the left turn. Warm acoustic guitar, a delivery closer to Baz Luhrmann’s sunscreen speech than anything post-punk, and a lyric about performing okayness for the neighbors while your spirit has a ruptured spleen. I just need a little time / we’re getting there. He says it three times. It starts to sound less like reassurance and more like something he’s trying to convince himself of.

Dragged Up a Hill (and Thrown Down the Other Side) is exactly what it says. Desolate, honest, unhurried. Builds toward something in the final stretch then asks a question it’s no longer sure about: is anything truly yours / is anything real. Shrugs. Keeps going.

Hotel opens with an automated phone system — hotel front desk energy — and then Hicklin just says it: this song is about depression. No metaphor. No runway. Then the peppiest beat on the entire record kicks in, which is either the most British response to mental illness I’ve ever encountered or the most honest one. Probably both.

We’re all living in a hotel room / high above the doom and gloom / but we’re gonna be leaving soon.

Temporary. All of it. The record ends there, and it lands.

I’m not sure if this record hit me because of where I am right now or because of where everything is right now. Maybe that’s the same question.

What I know is that a band from a sooty corner of the English Midlands made something that sounds like it came out of a delta church in 1962 and a hotel room in 2026 simultaneously, and the gap between those two things is exactly where this record lives.

The clip is empty. Whatever they make next is going to be something.

Big Special’s O’JOY! is out June 5 via SO Recordings. North American tour this fall — headline shows in DC (Oct 7, Pearl Street Warehouse), Brooklyn (Oct 8, Baby’s All Right), and Boston (Oct 9, The Rockwell), plus dates supporting Lambrini Girlz through the midwest and southeast. @bigspecial_

But there’s something different about buying the record. I picked up the original Planting by the Signs on vinyl about thirty days ago. When the rerelease dropped in May I thought, well, that’s a good enough reason to figure out what I’m actually hearing. Sometimes a record earns that kind of attention. This one does.

Fair warning before we go further: what follows are my interpretations. I did not interview SG Goodman. I did not verify my readings against her intent. Some of this is probably right. Some of it she’d hear and say “fuck off.” That’s fine. If you want to know what she actually meant, ask her. I didn’t. I just listened.

The first time I saw a satellite — one I actually knew was a satellite — I was in high school. One of the few benefits of growing up in a rural area is limited light pollution and genuinely beautiful summer night skies. I was at a friend’s place near the lake. A light crossed the sky, steady and deliberate. I’d seen enough airplanes and helicopters to know it wasn’t that. My friend told me what it was. Something shifted. The wonder didn’t disappear exactly, but it recalibrated. I was watching a machine pretending to be a celestial body and doing a decent job of it. A decent job isn’t the same thing as the real thing.

That memory is where SG Goodman’s (Re) Planting by the Signs found me.

The Concept

I own several Foxfire books - an anthology of rural past, a preservation of knowledge the world was busy forgetting while it was still being practiced. The first anthology hit shelves in 1972 and became a surprise bestseller. Twelve volumes followed over the next two decades, over nine million copies sold, the project eventually becoming a nonprofit that still runs today. If you’ve never spent time with them, foxfire.org is worth your afternoon. Fair warning — you may end up owning several.

We live in a time where rural carries a connotation, and it isn’t always flattering. There’s a version of rural that gets used as shorthand for something lesser, something to leave behind. Speaking as someone who grew up in and around that world — not the bitter version, just the honest one — there’s a beauty in the quiet of it, a grounding in simplicity that gets dismissed too quickly by people who’ve never sat with it. The Foxfire books exist to say that what happened in those hills and hollers was worth writing down.

The knowledge is real. It’s also increasingly available — apps, databases, agricultural extensions, all of it — and that’s genuinely useful. But there’s something different about being the app. About carrying that knowledge in your body because your grandmother carried it in hers. That’s where Goodman lives.

She found the planting by the signs section in that first 1972 volume and it unlocked something she’d been carrying since childhood without quite naming it. Her grandmother had her taken off the breast according to the moon. This isn’t a concept she discovered — it’s one she was born inside of. She spent more than a year researching it before she wrote a single song, poring over the Foxfire series and other texts, interviewing practitioners, until the images and details could arrive naturally instead of feeling forced.

Worth clarifying what planting means here — this isn’t commercial farming. This is subsistence farming. Growing what you can to survive off. Excess goes to trade with neighbors for what you can’t or don’t grow. A simple but hard economy built entirely on timing, knowledge, and the willingness to pay attention to things older than any algorithm.

The moon affects water. Water moves through everything living. Timing matters in ways the dashboard can inform but can’t replace.

The Record

Heaven Sold

Ninety-nine seconds of something that sounds like a monk chant. Sparse, repetitive, deliberately cleansing. A null set. Whatever you walked in with, put it down. The stars got sold. Now here we are.

Satellite

Follows immediately and the connection isn’t subtle — we traded the stars for a machine that mimic them. Apprehensive optimism underneath a kick drum that sets the pace like a heartbeat. A vocal that wants to believe things are okay but keeps watching the sky while it says so. The central image puts the moon and the satellite in the same verse — one pulls on tides and biology and the old signs, the other pulls on your attention. Same sky. Different relationship. The refrain lands as grief more than accusation. Look what it’s done to you.

Fire Sign

The biographical track, operating on at least two levels simultaneously. The astrological — fire signs are seekers, restless, driven, the ones who ask who’ll put the fire out and mean it as a dare. And then the one that only makes sense if you grew up near this world: in rural areas, a fire sign is the marker at the end of a long driveway. When emergency services need to find a property down a dirt road they can’t see from the highway, that sign is how they find you. No sign at the end of a driveway when there’s a fire, the people who put it out can’t locate it. Born a seeker, old story keeper. She’s locating herself in all systems at once.

The turn rows in the lyric are worth a moment — the unplanted headland at the end of a crop row where you turn the tractor(or any other planting implement), the necessary margin between passes. She’s navigating the spaces between. The psychedelic quality of the vocal over a driving beat isn’t an accident — exhausted and relentless at the same time, the fire burning whether or not anyone can find it.

I Can See the Devil

A gut check and a lesson in cultural fluency. The devil isn’t abstract — he’s beating on an old lady. The mamas working for a dollar appear in cities and hollers in the same line, same devil different zip code. The death row last meal is potlikker hugging on a hambone and Karo syrup on spoon bread and butter. Not a steak. Karo is thick corn syrup — dark or light — the thing that ends up on hot biscuits with butter because it fills a sweet hunger when you don’t have much. The most ordinary, nothing-wasted food of a specific Southern rural upbringing.

Worth noting: almost every lyric database online got Karo wrong. Multiple sites, multiple guesses, none of them landing because none of them know what Karo is in that context. The song has a built-in filter. If you know, you know. If you don’t, your guess reveals exactly where you’re from and what you’ve never had on a biscuit. Walking in the sunshine as the response to the devil isn’t naivety — it’s a specific kind of resilience that doesn’t require the devil to stop existing.

Snapping Turtle

Moves like its name suggests — slow, comfortable rise and fall, ripples in water. The turtle is the frame but Leanna is the subject. At eighteen she became a mother and had already raised her little brother. She spent a summer in Paris, Tennessee — the only Paris she’d ever meet. In the song Goodman was on a train through the south of France at the same time, young and poor and weighing her circumstance. Same starting point, probably same dreams, different trajectories — and the difference isn’t character or ambition, it’s luck. The other side of luck. The song has the discipline not to rescue Leanna or offer a lesson. It just holds the two images next to each other and lets the distance speak. Life is cruel no matter where you are in the world. The horrible beauty of it.

Michael Told Me

Builds urgency without becoming frenetic. The repetition of heard I love you from Los Angeles before the verse even moves — that’s the distance the whole song is about, love transmitted across geography and years of drift. The chorus articulates what friendship should be: threading the needle, setting the bone, holding someone’s legs while they scream because you know where the pain is coming from. Good friends give honest truths and then sit with you in them. Setting a bone isn’t gentle — it hurts more in the moment than the break did.

The chorus is the ideal. The verses are what happened. Michael Harmon was a real person — mentor, father figure, the band practiced in the quonset hut behind his house. He died in 2023 while she was writing this album. The song does the rest.

Solitaire

The beautiful one. A slow melody over a story of solitude that understands solitude better than most songs about loneliness manage to. You’re bound to lose if you bet against yourself. Two non-believers searching for ashes for their heads find not a church in town with a priest out of bed. They want the ancient ritual of grief and the institution that’s supposed to provide it is asleep. The bridge names the risk plainly: there’s a flaw in the turn. The agricultural margin again — and you might lose the river while you’re playing cards alone.

I’m in Love

A Sunday morning. What love does to solitary people, hard people. Suddenly RSVPing to things she knows she won’t attend, swimming naked in the neighbor’s pool, half hour conversations with strangers in the checkout line. The moon is right for cutting her hair and she’s checking out Walmart underwear collections. The ancient practice and the utterly mundane in the same two lines. Just let it run.

Nature’s Child

The soft yells and calls in the opening verse are the whole argument before a proper lyric arrives — before language, before structure, just a body making sound in response to the world. That’s nature’s child. A person who still has that in them. Two intimate souls in a tender moment, the junkyard king and his lady, marry me in inclement weather. Something private you accidentally overheard. After all the hard songs, this is the exhale. The reminder of what all the planting is for.

Heat Lightning

The front porch version of love. Centuries of summer-evening porch sitters watched the silent flashes, noticed they happened in hot weather, and named it accordingly. The folk term stuck because the alternative — distant thunderstorm lightning — doesn’t sit on a porch nearly as well. The porch sitters weren’t wrong that something was happening. They just named it from experience rather than a meteorology textbook. Which is exactly what planting by the signs is.

The love she’s describing exists at that same distance. You can see it from a hundred miles away but the thunder doesn’t reach you. The old timer’s voice preserved in an audio recording at the end of the track is the oral tradition the whole album is built around. Most people will skip past it. Don’t. It flows directly into the title track and suddenly the love song has a philosophy behind it.

Planting by the Signs

The thesis made song. Orion chasing the dogs across the western Kentucky sky in late winter isn’t poetry — it’s a calendar. When Orion is visibly pursuing Canis Major toward the western horizon the planting window is open. In western Kentucky that’s late February through April. What goes in the ground then: onions, peas, mustard greens, spinach, beets. The patient crops. The ones built for cold. You don’t plant tomatoes in March. You plant what can handle the conditions and wait.

The plastic stars on the bedroom ceiling alongside Orion — the satellite again, but tender here, because in the context of love even the imitation will do when the intention is true. The pedal steel underneath it all sounds like the sky bending toward you.

Heaven Song

Nine minutes that earn every second. The Chevy Malibu as the vessel of a life. Love hitching a ride at the first red light. Faith, Hope, Sin, and a drunk Jesus at the hotel bar — Jesus saying it’s hard being him when folks think God’s on their side. The most theologically honest line on this or possibly any album. Every war, every injustice, every cruelty committed with divine certainty lives in that sentence.

Real and Authenticity as twins you can barely tell apart, Real having a scar at the dip of his jaw — the mark that living leaves on what’s true. Howard the dog died in the night before they reach Heaven’s gate. The Malibu becomes a hearse before they hit the mud hole outside Heaven. Sin holds her at the gate until she answers for herself. The chorus — maybe if I see it then I’ll want it — is not belief and not denial. It’s someone driving toward something uncertain because stopping isn’t in the vocabulary. Neither sad nor happy, neither rushed nor restricted. Road trip speed.

The Bonus Tracks

I’m in Love — Dan Reeder

Reeder steps outside the song. Goodman’s original is a confession. Reeder’s is a portrait. He sings the whole thing in first person then shifts at the very end — she’s in love — stepping back and observing the person he loves being undone by love. His lo-fi domestic voice sounds like it was captured in the same kitchen where she’s been dancing and singing into a spoon. He produced the original, heard this song before almost anyone. His version is his response. Make of that what you will.

Heat Lightning Redux

Inside the clouds. Where the original is front porch observation — the safe version, the one where the storm is a hundred miles away — the redux is what happens when the distance collapses. Drum and cymbal driven, gritty, distorted guitar underneath the same lyrics. Joan Jett territory: driven beats underneath a vocal that holds its ground against the noise because it was always stronger than it looked.

Pepper

If you were a teenager in the nineties you already know this song. It was one of those tracks that felt like it shouldn’t work but absolutely did. Goodman runs it through humbuckers and a brush on the cymbals and a juke joint guitar solo that situates the whole thing somewhere along the Tennessee River. Soft calm delivery over light distortion makes the casualties feel inevitable rather than surreal. She builds to a louder second chorus, the narrator waking up inside the song, actually trying to look through other people’s eyes rather than just filing a report. The band steps off at the end: we’re gonna take a break and get a drink, y’all do the same.

The Butthole Surfers original is weird like a car crash. Goodman’s version is weird like a dream you can’t shake. She maintained the weirdness through stillness, which is harder than it sounds and most people can’t pull it off.

Planting by the Signs — Senora May and Tyler Childers

The full circle. Goodman has said Senora May was one of the first people she spoke with about building an album around this concept. It turns out May’s father farms by the signs — she didn’t just know the philosophy, she grew up inside it. The cover was recorded in the cabin where May and Childers met, and to Goodman’s knowledge it was the first time the couple had ever recorded together.

The first third of the track is intimate — the solitude of two well known lovers, settled, singing from inside the thing rather than toward it. Then the production opens up and what was a close two shot becomes a wide landscape: two small figures under Orion, a warbly organ somewhere between a musical saw and a leslie speaker sitting underneath like something ancient and slightly unnameable.

A Note on Public Radio¹

The royalties from the Childers and Senora May cover go to WKMS, Goodman’s local NPR station in Murray, Kentucky — which supported her career from the beginning, including giving her one of her first sold out shows after she won their Battle of the Bands. I know WKMS from my time on the board of a local community theater. They gave us airtime, promoted our events, showed up for on-air conversations about what we were doing like it actually mattered — because it did. That’s what local public radio does. It shows up for the things that don’t have marketing budgets.

With federal defunding of public media creating real pressure on rural stations specifically, the gesture isn’t incidental. It’s a statement. Goodman put it plainly: Kentucky neighborly fashion, east to west, taking care of neighbors. You take care of the things that took care of you.

Long live local radio. Long live local artists. Long live the ones who write in a language that requires you to have lived near something to hear correctly.

¹ WKMS is the NPR affiliate station at Murray State University in Murray, Kentucky, serving western Kentucky and surrounding regions. The station faces funding pressure consistent with broader federal cuts to public media. Goodman has been a public advocate for WKMS and directed proceeds from the Childers and Senora May track specifically to support the station. If you’d like to support local public radio in your own community, most NPR affiliates accept direct donations at their station websites. To find your local affiliate, visit npr.org.

The Recipe

2 oz Larrikin Daily Rind gin

3/4 oz fresh lemon juice

3/4 oz elderflower syrup

2 oz Veuve Clicquot Brut Champagne

Method: Shake gin, lemon juice, and elderflower syrup with ice. Double strain into a chilled coupe. Top with Champagne. Garnish with a lemon twist.

A Month of Testing

This recipe is the result of four weeks of systematic development. The process locked variables in sequence--gin first, then sweetener, then citrus, then sparkling wine. Each step built on the previous one. Because the French 75 is simple, the testing had to be precise. There’s nowhere to hide, and every choice matters.

The Development

Gin--Session One

The baseline had to be London Dry. The French 75’s history is built on it, and deviating would require evidence that something else works better. For this baseline test, I used simple syrup as the control sweetener--flat, functional, neutral. The point was to isolate gin.

Bombay Sapphire was the control gin--clean, technically correct, perfectly fine in a way that makes you not think about it at all. That’s exactly what a control should do. It established the floor and made everything else readable by comparison.

Then came the real testing. Three other gins:

Larrikin Daily Rind came first. It brought presence without competing with the lemon or the eventual sweetener layer. Supporting rather than demanding. My partner preferred it immediately and clearly. Strongest candidate.

Larrikin Outback Tuxedo was genuinely close. Both Larrikins are well-made, and the Tuxedo was legitimately competitive. Session notes show “very good, distinguishable from Daily Rind but not in a way that resolves the competition.” This is where partner preference became decisive. Daily Rind it was.

Moons of Juniper (Copper & Kings, Louisville) was the outlier. 96 proof, built on grape brandy rather than grain neutral spirit. The label promises “assertive juniper, forest pine, subtle woody spice, dark chocolate, cloaked in warm tropical orange.” In the cocktail, it delivered. The complexity was real. I preferred it on my own palate--more interesting, more distinctive. But my partner’s preference for Daily Rind was consistent when we tasted them side by side. And practically, that’s the right call for a locked recipe. A gin that only works for one taster isn’t a recipe gin. Moons of Juniper went into variations instead. It will pair with hibiscus syrup later, where its assertiveness won’t compete but complement.

Decision: Larrikin Daily Rind locked.

Sweetener--Session Two

Now that the gin was fixed, the sweetener question opened up. Simple syrup had been the baseline, but with Daily Rind locked, the question became: could we do better?

Simple syrup was functional. It dissolved. It sweetened. And it was flat--no flavor contribution beyond sugar. In a drink with only four ingredients, that’s a liability. The French 75 is elegant precisely because it’s precise. A sweetener that adds nothing doesn’t belong, especially when you have options.

I tested two alternatives: elderflower syrup and hibiscus syrup.

Elderflower Syrup made the difference. The method matters here, and it’s worth documenting because home bartenders will want to make it:

Make a standard 1:1 simple syrup (equal parts sugar and water by weight). Pull it off the heat completely. Let it cool for a few minutes. Then steep elderflower tea bags in the cooling syrup. This is important: do not use boiling water. The delicate floral compounds break down in extreme heat. Taste every minute or so. You’re looking for a moment where the floral note is clearly present but not perfumy or soapy. Pull the bags when you hit that note. The result is a delicate, floral sweetener that integrates seamlessly with gin and lemon. It doesn’t dominate. It supports.

Hibiscus Syrup deserves honest space because it’s not a failure--it’s a different drink. Hibiscus is tart, dark, berry-forward. In the French 75, it pushed toward wine territory, spritzers, something more autumnal and less spring. It wasn’t supporting the gin and lemon the way elderflower does. It was competing. That’s not wrong for a variation--it’s wrong for the recipe. The Moons of Juniper gin will pair with hibiscus later, and that combination might work. But for now, elderflower won decisively.

One important note on sourcing: elderflower tea (flowers from the elder plant) is completely different from elderberry tea (berries from the same plant). Elderberry is tart, dark, jammy, closer to hibiscus.

Decision: Elderflower syrup locked.

Citrus--Session Three

With gin and sweetener fixed, the citrus question became structural. Standard lemon was the baseline, and the question was whether anything else made sense.

The French 75 is elegant, but it’s also a structural drink. The lemon provides the acid that balances the sweetness, the gin, and the eventual Champagne. It’s not a flavoring element--it’s foundational. That work requires real acidity.

I tested blood orange and grapefruit informally during this session (fruit was on hand). Both read sweeter and softer than standard lemon. And here’s the key: when paired with elderflower syrup, both amplified the sweetness rather than providing contrast. The drink didn’t need more sweet. It needed the cut of acid that only standard lemon provides at this point in the season.

Grapefruit is worth flagging for later work. During this session, when I added more Prosecco to the grapefruit version (exploring sparkling wine ratios), the drink moved into drier, more interesting territory. That might matter for a Blood Orange Paloma variation in May--a longer, more effervescent format could work. But for April, locked in: standard lemon is correct.

Decision: Standard lemon locked.

Sparkling Wine--Sessions Four & Five (The Key Finding)

By this point, three variables were locked. Only the final variable remained, and it’s the most editorially significant finding of the entire month. The sparkling wine doesn’t just modify the drink--it fundamentally defines what kind of drink the French 75 is.

I tested two options extensively over these final sessions.

La Marca Prosecco is citrus-forward, approachable, and bright. In this recipe, with everything else locked, it reads closer to a lemon drop than a Champagne cocktail. The carbonation is present but doesn’t carry the same complexity you get from Champagne. The drink is fresher, more summery, less structured. My partner’s clear preference. She noted: “This is the one I’d order on a Tuesday in June.” There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s a legitimate perspective.

Veuve Clicquot Brut is drier and more complex. It’s historically correct--Champagne is the drink. The acidity sits differently on the palate. The finish is longer. The drink reads as more substantial, more intentional. It’s my preference. My notes from tasting: “This is what the drink should be. This is the recipe.”

Here’s what matters: we have a split verdict, and both responses are legitimate. This isn’t a case where one is objectively right and one is wrong. This is a case where the choice determines the occasion and season the drink inhabits. The Prosecco version is approachable and accessible. The Champagne version is correct and elegant. I could argue for either one based on the situation.

I didn’t test Cremant d’Alsace (Lucien Albrecht), which would have sat between these two in acid and complexity. It wasn’t easily available locally. I’m documenting that gap honestly rather than guessing.

The published recommendation is Veuve Clicquot Brut as the recipe. La Marca Prosecco is documented as the practical substitute with a clear description of the character difference. You decide based on occasion, budget, and whether they want elegance or accessibility.

Decision: Veuve Clicquot Brut locked.

The Variation (Moons of Juniper + Hibiscus)

The gin I preferred on my own palate pairs better with hibiscus syrup than with the locked recipe. The juniper assertiveness and hibiscus tartness could create something genuinely interesting--more of a signature variation than a baseline cocktail. That’s worth developing separately, in a separate article, with its own testing. It doesn’t replace the locked recipe. It complements it.

The Result

A month of testing reduced to four bottles and a methodology. The French 75 is elegant precisely because it’s precise. Every variable locked in sequence. The gin supports but doesn’t dominate. The elderflower is delicate. The lemon provides structure. The Champagne defines everything. Get those right, and you have a drink that works as well in 2025 as it did in 1915--which is exactly what a classic should do.

There are two people in Jason Petty’s life who call him by his first name. His wife, Alma — refer to her by her prefix (iykyk)— and Jen Hatmaker. Everyone else calls him Prop.

Jen Hatmaker. Remember that name. We’ll come back to it.

I found him through the music first. Somewhere between Excellent and Crimson Cord, before Red Couch, before Hood Politics — that’s where this started for me. I joined his Patreon because the work mattered and I wanted it to continue. I’ve been listening ever since. So when I say This Is Our Fellowship — his new collaborative album with ProducerTrentTaylor (@producertrenttaylor_), out now — hits different, I’m not saying it as someone encountering him for the first time. I’m saying it as someone who has watched the arc. If you want the full breakdown of the record, I’ve already written it. Go read that first, or after — either way, it’s there. What happened in the conversation is its own thing.

I asked him when the shift happened — when he went from being a man full of answers to one willing to live inside the questions. He didn’t have a clean date. Nobody does. “I think you don’t know the day that it happens,” he said. “It’s just the maturation process.” The L’s accumulate. Assumptions get challenged. You look at the men around you and start running the numbers — this one never admits he’s wrong, and look at the trail he’s left; that one leads with humility, and look at who’s still in his corner. The math isn’t complicated. The doing of it is.

What kept coming back, in several different forms, was the weight of being a trusted voice. Not a famous one — a trusted one. There’s a difference. “It may not be millions of people,” he said. “But enough people are listening.” And rather than that inflating him, it pressed him toward accountability. He started thinking about what he wanted to model. Which meant first getting honest about the gap between who he thought he was and who he actually was.

He talked about his marriage in a way most men don’t, and won’t. The slow reckoning that comes when you believe something is going beautifully and Alma — Dr. Alma — was counting the days. Not because anyone was lying. Because he wasn’t listening closely enough to hear what wasn’t being said. Most men never get around to telling that story in public. Prop put it on a record, and then sat across from me and said it plainly.

The phrase at the center of everything — the album, the conversation, the whole ethos of this season — is “You Got It, Chief.” It’s not his coinage; it lives in the vernacular already. That affirmative response to something you fundamentally disagree with and have decided isn’t worth the fight. Sure. Whatever you need to believe. He and Jabee built a song around it, but the philosophy runs deeper than the track. It shows up in his early Twitter battles. In the faith spaces where people decided his “politics” disqualified his belief. In a political landscape where misunderstanding metastasizes into violence because nobody could stop performing long enough to actually listen. “There is so much,” he said, “for me to even answer the foolishness of what you just said — we’d have to go back to freshman year.” And sometimes, he’s decided, it’s just not worth it. You got it, chief.

That kind of peace reads differently in hip hop and in politics — two spaces that traditionally don’t reward what looks like backing down. Prop’s aware of the tension. He lives in it. But he traces the shift back to a slow grind, not a single moment: years of edges being rounded out, the way water rounds a stone. “When you pick those stones up,” he said, “they’re beautiful.” He said it quietly, like a man who has been sitting with that image for a while.

On faith he’s equally careful and equally direct. I Didn’t Leave You isn’t a deconstruction song in the way that label usually lands — it’s a correction. And here’s where Jen Hatmaker pays off. She wasn’t a throwaway name at the top of the conversation. She was the first thread of a longer pull — someone who got read out of the same institution for similar reasons, around the same time. When Prop mentions hanging around Michael Gungor, that’s the second name. The hat trick would’ve been Derek Webb. All different charges. Same verdict. The institution decided it was done with the questions, and the people asking them found themselves on the outside looking in — not because they walked away, but because the door closed behind them.

The Western American church has committed, and continues to commit, incredible harm toward the people inside it. That’s not a fringe take. That’s the lived experience of anyone who got close enough to see how the machinery actually works. Prop isn’t interested in re-litigating it. He’s interested in naming it clearly and moving on. “My views were basically that Mike Brown should still be alive,” he said. “That’s where it started. Y’all had a problem with THAT?” The barometers being used to measure his faith had nothing to do with his actual faith. The point was never to fight the church. It was to stop being its mascot.

Near the end of our conversation, he talked about what draws him toward ritual — coffee in Ethiopia, a cigar with a friend, the kind of unhurried presence he sees in elders and monks and imams and wants, badly, to cultivate in himself. Not mimicry. Absorption. The fellowship the album describes isn’t abstract or religious in the way that word usually sits. It’s some

thing older than that. Specific humans who’ve been in your life so long you can’t remember not knowing them. The casual holiness of just being together with people who knew you before you were anything.

He said he believes peace is a divine attribute. That if you follow an omnipresent God, you should be able to find evidence of that presence everywhere. So he goes looking. He stays curious. He lets the world keep rounding his edges.

This Is Our Fellowship is available now on all streaming platforms. The full album review is at embellishpod.com. This conversation is live on audio, YouTube, and Substack — if that’s your thing.

Pinkies down, fun up.

So what’s actually happening in Bardstown, Kentucky, every September? And how did a festival that started with nine distilleries in 2019 become the event that the bourbon world didn’t know it was missing? Randy Prasse, the Director of the Kentucky Bourbon Festival, joined me this week to answer exactly that.

Distilleries First, Everything Else Second

The framework Randy uses to explain KBF’s growth is deceptively simple: take care of the distilleries, and the enthusiasts will follow. It sounds obvious, but it represents a break from how many events in this space still work. When Randy reimagined the festival between 2019 and 2021, he made a deliberate bet: give the distilleries what they need to show up in a meaningful way, and they’ll keep showing up. So far, he hasn’t been wrong.

The introduction of on-site bottle sales was the inflection point. Randy describes what it did for small craft distilleries in terms that are hard to argue with — for some of them, a three-day window of being in front of several thousand pre-qualified bourbon enthusiasts ready to spend money was the difference between a profitable year and a very difficult one. What started as optional is now essentially mandatory for any distillery that legally can sell. And the consumers who come know it. They’re not just there to sip; they’re there to buy things they can’t get anywhere else.

“The bourbon festival has become the consumer electronics show for bourbon,” Randy told me. “Distilleries are either rebranding altogether or bringing new products to market starting with the festival.”

Lawrenceburg rebranded to Larrkin on the festival grounds. Dark Arts debuted to lines that rivaled Heaven Hill. EJ Curly was essentially unknown when the first modern KBF ran — and walked away as one of the most talked-about booths of the weekend. That unpredictability, Randy says, is a feature, not a bug.

The Line Problem (And the Very Deliberate Fix)

Ask anyone who has attended KBF in the last couple of years about the experience and eventually the conversation turns to lines. Randy doesn’t deflect from it. He’s spent a significant part of this off-season in direct meetings with the top distilleries specifically about line management — how to communicate better with people about what’s available, how to keep someone from standing in a 45-minute queue only to be told they missed the last bottle, and how to build in more moments of controlled anticipation rather than a free-for-all at 11 AM when VIP opens.

Staggered releases may be experimented with this year. Better front-of-house communication is a priority. And Randy draws a useful distinction: the lines aren’t a problem to eliminate, because waiting is a recognized part of bourbon culture. The problem is uninformed disappointment. Those are two very different experiences, and fixing the second one doesn’t require eliminating the first.

New Riff, the Featured Distillery, and the Bill Samuels Origin Story

The 2026 Featured Distillery is New Riff — which feels perfectly timed given that they just took home World’s Best Bourbon at the World Whiskies Awards. The story of how the Featured Distillery program exists at all is worth telling.

It started with Bill Samuels donating a barrel during COVID, before the re-imagined festival had even run its first event. He believed in what Randy was building, wanted to support it, and handed over a barrel’s worth of bourbon for the festival to bottle and sell. Randy’s honest admission that he didn’t quite know what to do with a barrel of bourbon — “What the hell am I supposed to do with this?” — is one of the better moments in the conversation. But from that gesture came a single barrel program, a VIP bottle inclusion, and eventually the full Featured Distillery experience: a named cocktail, the distiller’s dinner, elevated prominence on the grounds.

New Riff started at KBF in a 10-by-10 craft tent. They’ve been there since nearly the beginning. Watching them grow into a world-recognized brand, and then celebrating that by handing them the featured distillery platform, is exactly the kind of story the festival was built to produce.

The Part Nobody Sees

Bardstown has a population of roughly 13,000 people. The Kentucky Bourbon Festival effectively doubles it for a long weekend. You are, by most measures, temporarily building a small city in the grounds of Spalding Hall — a venue that shares its footprint with a Catholic church, a city hall, two schools, and streets that have to keep functioning for people who live there.

Randy talks about this with a seriousness that I think gets underappreciated from the outside. The eight-day setup. The three-day teardown. The $10,000 in overseeding and power-washing to restore the grounds afterward. The security perimeter that went up a full block around the festival after the industry’s profile grew enough to require it. The volunteer coordinator whose entire job is recruiting the hundred-plus people who show up to help distilleries unload trucks. None of this is visible on a Saturday afternoon when you’re sipping bourbon under the trees — which is exactly how it’s supposed to work.

“If we don’t get it right, we have 361 days until we have another opportunity to do it right.”

What’s Still Available for 2026

If you missed the main ticket window, not everything is gone. Sunday Sampler passes — one-day tickets for the final day of the festival — are still available as of the recording of this episode. Randy’s case for Sunday deserves consideration: it’s a more relaxed pace, the bottle-sale pressure has eased, and it’s an ideal entry point for first-timers or anyone who wants to test-drive the experience before committing to a multi-day weekend in 2027. Add-on premium experiences (culinary events, education sessions, cocktail programming, lockers, shuttles) were going on sale this week for anyone who already holds a ticket. Check kybourbonfestival.com and follow @kybourbonfest on Instagram and Facebook for timing.

The Bigger Picture

Fifteen countries represented in the attendee base in 2025. Eighty-five percent of ticket buyers coming from outside Kentucky. Small craft distilleries crediting the event with saving their year. A 36-year festival industry veteran who still wakes up at 3:30 AM on ticket sale day with a nervous stomach. The Kentucky Bourbon Festival isn’t just a good event. It’s become something more structural to the bourbon industry than that — a marketplace, a debut platform, a community gathering point, and a genuinely compelling reason to spend a September weekend in one of the most beautiful small towns in America.

The full conversation is worth your time. Listen wherever you get your podcasts, or watch on YouTube. And if you want more of this — interviews with the people who make, build, and run this industry — subscribe below. Pinkies down.

🎙 Subscribe to EmbellishPod on Substack for full show notes, articles, and more every week. Find all links at www.embellishpod.com · @embellishpod on Instagram and TikTok · #PinkiesDown

Yeah. That April.

The timing was bad, but COVID wasn’t actually the thing that nearly killed the project. It was the Wake County inspectors who approved his building design, then proceeded to make him change almost everything once construction started. By the time he opened in January 2021, he’d gone through his construction budget, his contingency fund, all the money set aside for process piping, and his entire 401k.

The stills he bought in 2018? They’re still sitting in the building in Zebulon. Never been fired up. Probably never will be.

When the Plan Falls Apart

Brandon’s original vision was straightforward enough: train a team to distill, lay down barrels, and eventually blend his own aged whiskey. But when the world changes theres a moment where he has to decide what he was actually doing.

“I had this come-to-Jesus moment with myself,” he told me. “What do I have to do, and what do I love to do? My craft is blending. And blending is completely different from distilling.”

So he pivoted. Hard.

Today Olde Raleigh sources from 11 different distilleries across five states. Brandon works with 14 cask types from around the world—Armagnac, Tawny Port, Palo Cortado Sherry, Spanish orange wine, honey casks, coffee casks. He doesn’t repeat batches. Ever. Each release is built from whatever he’s pulled from what he calls his “pantry” of barrels, and when it’s gone, it’s gone.

Building a Bouquet

Brandon talks about sourcing the way a florist might talk about building an arrangement. Some barrels are the roses—they anchor the blend, provide structure and volume. Others are accent pieces. A pop of flavor on the front. A long finish that builds into a crescendo. Something that wouldn’t work on its own but makes everything around it better.

“The art of blending is layering these elements on top of one another,” he said, “so the sum is greater than its individual parts.”

His small batch uses nine different recipes. The barrel proof pulls from four grains across nine mashbills, ranging from four to 21 years old. Both get dumped into a 350-gallon tank and rested—sometimes for three months—before he starts proofing down. And that proofing happens slowly. Weeks, not days.

“At 120 proof, it tastes one way. As you drop down, you’re taking the mic away from the fire. All these lighter notes start looking to sing. My job is to figure out if I like what’s being sung.”

The Thousand Blends Mission

Here’s where it gets a little crazy.

Brandon’s current project is to release 1,000 unique one-off blends. He calls it “Project Thousand Blends.” Every week, he puts out three one-of-one bottles—different finishes, different combinations, different experiments. Visitors to the tasting room can try flights of whatever’s current and scan a QR code to give feedback.

It’s part R&D lab, part proof of concept, and entirely about putting in reps.

“How do you become the best at anything?” Brandon asked. “You get the reps. That word ‘master blender’—I own that title. But I want to earn it by outworking every other blender in the world.”

At his current pace, he’ll release 181 distinct products this year. That includes the Thousand Blends bottles, member exclusives for the Olde Raleigh Whiskey Society, limited releases like Olde Stoge, and his core lineup.

I don’t know anyone else in the industry doing anything close to that volume of unique expressions to be released, not to mention the ones that never see the public.

Olde Stogie and the Armagnac That Wasn’t Ready

Olde Stogie is probably Olde Raleigh’s flagship limited release at this point—a bourbon finished in Armagnac and Tawny Port casks, designed to pair with cigars. It won best micro-distillery in the US at an international competition in 2023.

Brandon didn’t even know that was something you could win.

“I submitted it to get a report card,” he said. “I’m out here in rural North Carolina. The prominent blenders are in Scotland. I just wanted to know—how am I doing against the folks who started it all?”

Apparently pretty well.

But the real lesson from Olde Stogie was patience. Around month eight of the finishing process, Brandon noticed the Armagnac really starting to open up into the bourbon. Instead of bottling, he let it sit another six months.

“Sometimes good things just take time. You can rush it. But you’re probably not going to get the best version of what you’re making.”

Hand Everything

If you’re a process efficiency consultant, Olde Raleigh will make you twitch. There’s no automation. Blending is done with paddles. Bottling is by hand. Labeling is by hand. Brandon calls himself “a Six Sigma consultant’s worst nightmare.”

But that’s the trade-off for owning 100% of the company. No investors telling him that 181 releases in a year is excessive. No board questioning why he’s experimenting with a 10-cask finish that nobody asked for. No pressure to expand into 15 states before the product is ready.

“I don’t really have hobbies,” Brandon admitted. “Olde Raleigh is my baby. I had a couple drive five hours from Charleston to spend two hours with us, then drive five hours back. I think about that. They could’ve been anywhere. They chose to spend their Saturday here.”

The stills are still sitting in the building. Brandon calls them the most expensive art exhibit in Zebulon.

But the blending—the thing he thought he was working toward—turned out to be the whole point.

Olde Raleigh Whiskey is located in Zebulon, North Carolina. The next Olde Stoge release drops in two weeks. For more information or to join the Whiskey Society, visit olderaleighwhiskey.com.

#PinkiesDown

Propaganda & ProducerTrentTaylor Mid90s Records / Reflection Music Group Released April 10, 2026

A note before we begin: If you are offended by ideology that differs from yours, whether political, religious, or otherwise, you should listen to this album. Not as a warning to stay away. As a challenge to engage anyway.

I’ve been following Propaganda for a long time. Before Red Couch Podcast. Before Hood Politics. Somewhere between Excellent and Crimson Cord, back when I joined Patreon specifically to support him and Alma because the work mattered and I wanted to help keep it going. I had him on my podcast years ago. So when I say this album hits, I’m not saying it as someone encountering him for the first time. I’m saying it as someone who’s tracked the evolution from Humble Beast to here.

I’ve said it before: sometimes it’s best not to listen to a Prop album for the first time in the car. You’ll end up pulling over to parse through the words he just spoke. It’s dense. It’s worth it.

This Is Our Fellowship takes its time. Not urgent. Important. There’s a difference. ProducerTrentTaylor built this thing on vintage gospel samples at deliberate tempos, the kind of pacing that demands you stay present. This is not background music. It requires attention. Sometimes those messages need space to breathe. The room to pause.

The structure here is intentional. Gospel samples throughout give this the shape of a sermon. But it’s not preachy. It’s more like a TED talk from an old head — someone who’s been through enough to have earned the right to say something. The title track opens by asking you to soften before the message arrives. Open your eyes. Open your ears. Open your heart. What follows isn’t instruction from above. It’s wisdom from next door.

And while the language is rooted in Christianity and the focus is often on men and boys, the message reaches further than that. This is a letter to anyone who was taught to bury it all and knuckle up. Anyone handed a limited toolkit and told to figure it out. The specifics are Prop’s. The invitation is universal.

Listen along while I scribe my thoughts in a hopefully intelligible manner.

This Is Our Fellowship

The album opens with vulnerability about emotional tools denied in childhood. Prop uses the image of crayon boxes: boys handed the 8-pack when they needed the 64. Limited palette for a full spectrum of experience. “Learning to paint with more colors,” he says. “We made this song cry.” The song becomes the container for what couldn’t be expressed elsewhere.

Who Is You

This track maps the machinery that creates the limitation. Sports metaphors as the first language boys get handed. Toxic masculinity as the downstream effect. Peer pressure as the enforcement mechanism. But also the way out: experiencing the world opened up the language he needed to move past it all. Travel as education. Getting outside the system that built you in order to see it clearly.

There’s a Mike Tyson quote that floats around about not being capable of great peace without being capable of great violence. Prop’s doing something with that here. Hip-hop as a historically “tough” genre creating space for vulnerability. A man who’s never had to be hard talking about softness reads as naive. A man who’s been in it for two decades choosing vulnerability reads as evolved. The credibility of the vessel matters.

Gas You Up (Street) [feat. Danny A. Thomas]

Does exactly what the title says. The kind of song you hear and know it was written for someone else but you can lay it neatly into your own life. That’s the best version of what music does.

Figure It Out [feat. Curtiss King]

Shifts to boom bap and mentorship, a lighthouse for whoever needs it. There’s no blueprint for growing up. Just the invitation to find your way through this world and grow beyond your own history, traumas, and the rest.

And then he reaches into sexuality. This may be uncomfortable for a portion of his audience still in the church, those not deconstructed. But Prop hasn’t been in that lane in a long time. The spiritual undertones remain because that’s foundational to who he is. The institutional constraints? Gone for years.

Not In Danger [feat. Scarub]

Centers on an image that stuck with me: a bear in a cage. A violent entity kept in the dark until it needs to be let out, but on a chain. Prop’s talking about how he got rid of his. Set your anger free. You aren’t in danger. The title becomes permission to disarm. The threat you’ve been preparing for isn’t coming the way you think. The readiness itself is the weight.

Wish You Well

Draws a line: be the storm or the safe harbor, but you can’t be both. Not at the same time. Not to the same people. He doesn’t give preference to either. Both are useful. He uses the imagery of discovering fire for the first time, the beauty that can come from destruction. The problem isn’t being one or the other. It’s pretending you’re something you’re not.

The track is about being self-aware, working to grow, but not forgetting that we’re all working on ourselves and none of us will get out of this alive. Nothing but joy, nothing but peace, no more dying, the sample repeats. Soft funk organs and a sway like a choir.

Burn It Down [feat. Fashawn]

This is the storm. Prop names the whole grid of broken systems: church, school, political, armed forces, police state. All of them. If you aren’t a little progressive, this song is going to step on your toes. He mentions being in his “Jesus and the money changers” mode right before the beat drops. Sanctified testosterone. Molotovs in backpacks. The cleansing fire isn’t partisan. It’s total.

Build

The necessary sequel. The sample slows way down. Prop tells the story of LA during the wildfires, when community members who had every reason not to cooperate put differences aside to help keep their neighborhoods together. Fellowship in action. Not theory.

“The absence of rulers is not the absence of leaders.” That’s a bar.

The people who step up when the structure fails were always there. The broken systems just kept them out of the rooms where decisions happened. The call to political action is at the local level. Let it bubble up from there. You don’t rebuild by replacing one set of rulers with another at the top. You rebuild from the block. From people who actually know each other.

You Got It Chief [feat. Jabee]

Takes aim at people who are incredibly informed in their own wrongness. Folks who have a stronger interest in winning an argument or winning an election than in being right. In doing the right thing. We have a limited number of words in our life. A limited number of breaths. Some people aren’t worth wasting them on.

I Didn’t Leave You

This is where the album becomes an outright indictment of the American Christian church. Plain and simple. He specifically mentions Trump and his disdain for the institution that chose that alignment.

Prop’s argument is direct: Trump consumed the church because he hates what it actually stands for. Found a power structure that, if he could devour, would allow him to gain power at a higher level. Not seeking faith. Seeking apparatus. The church was consumable. Available to be eaten. The institution made itself into food for a man who was never there for their God.

“A little more nuance that comes with a little age / a little less ego, a lotta less rage / a lotta less steeples, a lotta less stage.”

Three lines mapping his whole trajectory.

Don’t It Feel Good [feat. Derek Minor]

Arrives as an exhale after the indictment. Almost universalism in his beliefs now. This is about being refreshed by the presence of the things you enjoy. The decisions you’ve made that have grown you. Derek Minor’s verse draws on the imagery of field versus house — the hard work outside might be more respectable than chewing back who you are to get inside. The institution is the house. Prop chose the field.

You Can’t Name A Day One

Ends the album with a lighter flick. A joint being lit. The childhood memory of figuring out who among the characters in your life would become the through line of friendship.

If you can’t name a person who was there for you in the beginning, you are untrustworthy.

That’s the test. Not what you say about yourself. Who’s still around from the start.

There’s an old phrase: lie down with dogs, wake up with fleas. But Prop flips it. It’s not just who you’re with now. It’s whether you still have the people from the beginning. If you can’t name them, you didn’t pick bad company. You didn’t keep any company. You burned through people. Used them up. Left them behind.

The fellowship this album describes isn’t abstract. It’s specific humans who’ve been in your life so long you can’t remember not knowing them. The joint is the sacrament. The lighter flick is the call to gather. End of the album, we’re back in the backyard from the cover art. The chairs. The handwriting. The casual holiness of just being together with people who knew you before you were anything.

This Is Our Fellowship is available now on all streaming platforms.

John Hughes writes about cocktails, music, and whatever else won’t fit in the main section at Embellish. This review appears in Off-Menu.

She was a cardiovascular nurse practitioner, working the front lines during COVID, putting herself through grad school on a $50 whiskey budget. The bottle of Blanton’s she received as a gift sparked curiosity. The frustration of never finding Buffalo Trace on Ohio shelves sparked something else—a stubborn determination to find what was actually good without chasing hype.

That accidental education became a podcast presence, then barrel picks, then brand ambassador work, then a national role helping build someone else’s company. And then, after four or five years of pouring blood and tears into another person’s dream, a question: Do I keep doing this for someone else, or do I bet on myself?

She bet on herself. The result is Archer Eland.

An Homage in Rye

The name is a living letter to her mother. Eland is Wendy. Archer is her mom—a woman whose work ethic and determination mirror the grain itself, thriving under harsh conditions.

“Culturally speaking, that’s kind of what you do,” Wendy told me. “You thank your parents for everything. And so this was my way of doing it through the nuance of rye.”

Archer Eland is a 100% rye whiskey brand. No corn. No wheat. No secondary grains. Just rye—95% unmalted, 5% malted—distilled and blended at Middle West Spirits in Columbus, Ohio. It’s a deliberate choice in a market that often treats rye as bourbon’s spicier sibling rather than a category worth exploring on its own terms.

“I traveled so much and I’d seen enough markets to know there was a need,” Wendy said. “Seas of bourbon on the shelves. Maybe one or two rye offerings. Pigeonholing is number one. Lack of diversity within the rye section is number two. I wanted to fix that.”

The Collection

Archer Eland launched with four expressions, each telling a different chapter of Wendy’s transition from healthcare to whiskey.

Solstice (104 proof) came first. Light. Citrus-forward. Floral. “I was wanting to hold onto hope,” Wendy said. “I was wanting to hold onto that warmth, that there’s something else on the horizon.” It blends four and seven-year barrels to create something delicate enough for the rye-curious but complex enough to reward attention.

Aurora (110 proof) was the problem child. It required four recalculations. The original yield was supposed to be 40 cases; Wendy blew through that and had to keep adjusting. At one point, exhausted and fed up, she told her team to just dump what was left of the seven-year barrels into the blend. Two days later, she tasted it and thought: This is really good.

“Aurora taught me to trust myself,” Wendy said. “It was a dark time. But I pulled through.”

Cashmere (126 proof, seven years) was supposed to be part of the same lot as Suede. When blended together, they were terrible. Split apart, they became two distinct expressions.

“That was the first time I thought, I’m going to be okay,“ Wendy said. “My first real exhale.”

Suede (126 proof, seven years) is the happy accident. Wendy remembers growing up in Zimbabwe, where tobacco auction floors stretched for miles and the smell of drying leaves changed with each stage of the harvest. Leather.

Suede is a one-and-done release. Once it’s gone, it’s never coming back.

First Generation

There’s a phrase you hear constantly in American whiskey: seventh generation, eighth generation, ninth generation. Families who have transcended time, who kept distilling through Prohibition and wars and market crashes. We honor those names.

But Wendy is building something different. She’s first generation. First of her name. An African woman in an industry where that’s almost unheard of, putting down stakes meant to outlast her.

“How many times have you ever seen a first of its name and it continuing to grow as a legacy?” she asked. “We love and admire those ones that have transcended time. But to actually see someone go through in real time, putting stakes, first generation? I’ve never seen it been done before like that.”

By the end of the year, Wendy will be laying down her own new make. She’s researching different rye varieties. She’s already running barrel modeling projections at 2 a.m. She recently bought her first finishing barrels—a purchase that triggered what she described as her first “hyperventilating episode.” The money was real. The stakes are real.

But so is the vision.

Where to Find Archer Eland

Archer Eland is available at 25 OHLQ stores across Ohio and online at shop.middlewestspirits.com (shipping available to Kentucky and other states). Cashmere is nearly sold out—down to roughly 10-18 bottles as of recording. Suede will take its place on allocation.

This is a brand built with intention. With purpose. With the kind of audacity that comes from betting on yourself when the safer path is right there waiting.

Wendy put it simply: “I only have one life. I don’t want to be on my death bed wishing I had done it.”

Listen to the full conversation: [Audio link] | [YouTube link]

Follow EmbellishPod: @embellishpod on Instagram and TikTok

#PinkiesDown

Content note: This album deals directly with suicidal ideation, particularly tracks one and seven. 988 is available 24/7. Take care of yourself first.

I came to this sideways.

Mid-40s. Fully marinated in the era when every white dude with an acoustic guitar was running the Dashboard Confessional playbook into the ground. Dorm rooms. Coffee shop open mics. That guy at the party who needed you to really listen to this one. You know the guy. You might’ve been the guy. I might’ve been the guy. The confessional singer-songwriter thing wasn’t a subculture. It was the weather.

A connection got me early access to Hit Like a Girl’s fifth LP, and the timing felt right for reasons I couldn’t explain until I’d listened three times through.

Nicolle Maroulis (they/them) has been making records since 2017. They run No More Dysphoria, a nonprofit helping trans people afford transition — funded through merch sales at DIY shows, because that’s how you do it when nobody’s writing grants for you. Philadelphia scene kid. Show up, pay dues, build things with your hands.

I’m not from that world. But Burning at Both Ends doesn’t check membership cards. Just: have you felt something, lost something, kept going anyway?

Yeah. Same.

The Shape

Eight tracks. Twenty-seven minutes. Every song earns its place.

Opens with someone lying in cold dying grass while the narrator’s at the store buying their favorite sweets, oblivious. Closes with the narrator receiving mail for someone who’ll never read it. Between those points: polyamory betrayal specific enough to use the word “metamour,” a friendship that dies when someone moves to the West Coast to find themselves (meditating or whatever), and the kind of mental health spiral where you start planning who’ll watch your cat.

Heavy. But the songs move. There’s a propulsive quality even in the darkest stuff — the only way out is through, keep walking.

Track one: you’re watching someone else’s crisis unfold. Track seven: the crisis has migrated inward. The album teaches you to watch for signs in others, then reveals the person you should’ve been watching was yourself.

This is a record where the tracklist matters. Remember when artists used to wrestle with sequencing? What comes next, what’s the arc, where do you land the listener? Streaming playlists and shuffle buttons have mostly killed that instinct. But someone sat with these eight songs and thought about the journey — crisis to betrayal to tenderness to anger to collapse to grief. You’re supposed to take it in order. It rewards you for staying.

Sonic Geography

Press materials say: midwest emo, synth pop, hardcore. Sure. But that’s like describing a cocktail by listing the spirit categories.

Track one opens with steel guitar and ambient wind. That’s Tim McGraw territory. “Please Don’t Take the Girl” energy. Old country is just emo with a twang anyway — feelings too big for talking, set to a melody you can carry in your truck.

Track two kicks in with rockabilly tremolo, then dissolves into noise. There’s a synth line on track three that would’ve killed on Guitar Hero circa 2007. Track four’s keyboard wash could score a John Hughes film if John Hughes made films about queer people begging partners to just say it already.

Producer Matt Schimelfenig and Jacob Blizard (Lucy Dacus, Illuminati Hotties) give this thing sonic range that keeps it from feeling like one long song. It’s not a genre exercise. It’s: here’s the feeling, what sound does it need? — and assuming your ear knows how to follow.

The Dual Voice

Here’s the trick that makes this work physically: two vocal approaches, running simultaneous or in sequence. One singing. One screaming.

The scream is release. The singing is trying to hold it together. When they happen at the same time — that’s the reality of being a person. Falling apart and functioning. Both at once.

For those of us who grew up screaming along to songs that weren’t built for screaming — willing the Indigo Girls to be louder than they were, adding catharsis to someone else’s melody — there’s something generous here. The scream is built into the architecture. You’re not doing it alone. The song shows you where to let go.

And look: Maroulis is thirty-eight. They know you can’t scream for twenty-seven minutes. The clean passages let you breathe. Rest stops on a highway heading somewhere dark. Songs built for people who want to feel everything and also survive feeling it.

The Specific and the Universal

“Metamour” shows up in the third verse of track three. No explanation. Either you know it means your partner’s other partner, or you figure it out, or it washes over you. Maroulis isn’t here to educate. They’re here to describe what it feels like watching your partner teach someone else your songs while you leave the room.

Specificity runs throughout. Mom’s kitchen table the ex might still have. Joshua Tree hike where promises got made. Gemstones and tarot cards on the mantle next to the funeral collage. Details aren’t decorative. They’re evidence. This happened. This exact thing.

There’s a High Fidelity moment in track three. You know the scene — Rob Gordon is making a mixtape for another woman and his girlfriend walks in. Nobody’s undressed. Nobody’s yelling. But everyone in the room knows what it means. The look on his face is the whole confession.

Track three has that moment:

Remember when you taught me all your old songs
And one day I caught you teaching them to him
I’ll never forget the look on your face
That was when I knew I’d been replaced.”

Not cheating. Not fighting. Just: oh. This is where your attention actually is. And you both know it now.

What surprised me: the specificity makes it more accessible. I’ve never had a metamour. Never been exiled from a DIY scene. But I’ve watched someone struggle and not known how to help. Had friendships end badly. Sat with objects that belonged to someone who isn’t coming back.

Particular unlocks universal. Confessional songwriting has always known this. Maroulis is just working with materials the genre hasn’t always had access to — or been willing to name.

Joy as Resistance (No, Not the IDLES Album)

The phrase traces back to Black poet Toi Derricotte, through Audre Lorde, into ACT UP during the AIDS crisis. Simple idea: when systems want you dead or diminished, your capacity for pleasure and connection is defiance.

Maroulis runs No More Dysphoria. They know the statistics on trans suicide. They made an album with a song called “Romanticize” that asks how many ways a person can romanticize ending their own life.

But the album also has “Are You in Love” — synth-pop patience and hope. Has “Keepsake Theory” — crying through a concert and staying anyway. Joy and crisis coexist. They have to.

There’s a moment in track two: two people at a show, singing along to the same song, both using it to grieve the same relationship. They might know the other one’s there. Doesn’t matter. They’re both still singing. Crying. Alive.

Crying and singing are the same thing.

That might be the whole review.

The Close

Final track: “Funeral Collage.” Exactly what it sounds like.

Someone’s gone. Mail still arrives. The dog doesn’t understand. Narrator hasn’t touched their guitar in months — might still carry the touch.

The voice goes lo-fi at the end. Answering machine quality. Something preserved but degrading. Past reaching into present.

Last image: eventually, put the belongings in the garage. Wipe dust off the funeral collage. Not healing. Continuing. Maybe continuing is healing. Move the objects. Keep the dog. Go outside.

Emo done well can take it out of you. This one took it out of me. I gutted it out, took notes on my computer, and came out the other side a little hollowed.

But that’s the point. Genre exists because some feelings are too big for talking, too complicated for crying. Only option left: make it into something with a beat you can move to.

Hit Like a Girl made something you can move to. It’ll cost you. You’ll get through it.

Now if you’ll excuse me — vitamin D. Touch grass. The alive kind.

Burning at Both Ends is out now on Cryptid Records.

Hit Like a Girl tours through spring 2026. Dates include Silk City (Philadelphia), Pouzza Fest (Montreal), and — for those keeping score at home — Midwest Friends Fest in Newport, KY.

For more on No More Dysphoria: nomoredysphoria.org

If you made it through: what landed for you? Hit reply or drop a comment. This is Off-Menu #2, and I’m still figuring out what belongs here.

This is where I landed. Not the platonic ideal, but the point where further improvements would cost more time and money than they’re worth. I could keep chasing perfection with $200 bottles of single pot still or high-acid citrus varieties that don’t exist at my grocery store. But diminishing returns are real, and knowing when to stop is part of the process.

The Recipe

Stupid Simple Sour

• 2 oz Fighting 69th Irish Whiskey

• 1 oz fresh Meyer lemon juice

• ½ oz agave syrup

• 1 egg white

• 2 dashes Angostura bitters

Shake all ingredients hard with ice for 30 seconds. Strain out the ice, then dry shake for 15 seconds. Double strain into a coupe(i know it’s supposed to be for ice shards but for me it’s for the egg white bits that might not get integrated…..not interested in a side of snot with my drink).

The Development

Irish whiskey’s appeal is its lighter profile. Smooth, approachable, easy drinking. That’s also why it’s tricky in a sour. Every choice you make shows up in the glass with nowhere to hide.

The standard whiskey sour template — grab any citrus, any sweetener, shake with foam if you feel like it — doesn’t hold up here. I tested systematically: one variable at a time, everything else constant, documenting what worked and what didn’t.

Foam Agent(s)

Aquafaba is the liquid from a can of chickpeas. It foams like egg white when you shake it, which makes it a vegan substitute for cocktails that need that silky texture. I’d seen it in other drink recipes, so I figured it was worth testing.

It wasn’t.

The chickpea undertone that bourbon would bury? Irish whiskey’s lighter body puts it on full display. This isn’t about dietary accommodation or personal preference. It’s format incompatibility. Notes of hummus have no place in a whiskey sour for me. Keep the chickpeas in the falafel.

Egg white resolved the problem. What it does for this drink is similar to what whipped cream does for a slice of key lime pie — it softens the citrus edge, adds textural interest, and makes everything feel more cohesive. You get the balance and the presentation working together.

I started with a traditional dry shake but I prefer reverse dry shake for this one — shaking with ice first, then straining and shaking without to build the foam. Traditional dry shake works fine too; this is just where I landed.

Locked: egg white, reverse dry shake.

Sweetener

I decided to make my own syrups for this project. Tested simple syrup, honey syrup, and agave against the baseline recipe.

Simple syrup did what simple syrup does. Clean, neutral, functional. Lets the other ingredients carry the weight.

Honey was the anticipated winner going in. Irish whiskey already has floral character, and honey feels like a natural complement. In practice, the two floral notes competed rather than layered. It didn’t taste bad — it just didn’t add what I expected.

Agave was the surprise. There’s a quality to agave’s sweetness that finishes quick and stays out of the way. The drink felt more cohesive without tasting any sweeter. Hard to articulate exactly what changed, but it was unmistakable in the glass.

One note on honey syrup: shelf life is about three weeks in my house before it starts fermenting. I discovered this when I went to make a coffee tonic and the syrup fizzed. That’s not a flavor profile I was chasing.

Locked: agave syrup.

Spirit Selection

With foam and sweetener locked, I tested four Irish whiskeys against the working recipe.

Fighting 69th was the control — an approachable Irish blend, nothing fancy. Light body, clean flavor, lets the recipe do the talking.

Keeper’s Heart Irish + American has a rye component that looked promising on paper. More body, a little more spice to push back against the citrus. But the sour format compressed everything. Whatever distinguished it from Fighting 69th neat didn’t survive the shaker. I do wonder if the simple syrup would have worked better here.

Waterford Rathclogh 1.1 is a single malt with real terroir character. Mineral, fresh grass, floral notes. Exceptional for sipping. When I shook it with citrus, it produced a medicinal edge that threw off the whole drink. The complexity that makes it interesting neat becomes a liability in this format. There’s an audience for this version but it wasn’t what I was going for.

I didn’t test Waterford Cuvée Koffi — it has really unique notes, and I didn’t want to continue to chase rabbits. Still curious though. Might circle back to that one after this is published. Something tells me it could work with the right adjustments.

Great sipping whiskeys and great cocktail whiskeys aren’t always the same bottle. Fighting 69th won because it did exactly what a cocktail base should do: provide a clean, authentic foundation and get out of the way.

Locked: Fighting 69th.

Citrus

Meyer lemon was my baseline throughout development. I used it because thats what Kroger Pickup put in my bag. The other variables optimized around it, so it’s worth acknowledging that a different starting citrus might have led to a different final recipe.

Tested Meyer lemon, standard lemon, white grapefruit juice, and blood orange.

Grapefruit threw me off. It was sweet in a way I wasn’t expecting — sugary sweet, not citrus sweet. Pushed the drink toward candy territory, which is its own thing and not what I was building here.

I wanted blood orange to work. Really wanted it. Same problem. Too sweet, not enough acid. Both options surrendered the structure that makes a sour a sour. But optically it would have been really nice to shoot.

Standard lemon was fine. Got the job done structurally. But it felt incomplete somehow — the right acidity without any of the aromatic complexity.

Meyer lemon landed best. The lower acidity and rounded, almost floral character paired with Irish whiskey instead of fighting it. Everything clicked.

Worth noting: Meyer lemon’s lower acidity required a ratio adjustment. This recipe uses 1 oz citrus to ½ oz sweetener — more juice, less sweet than the classic 2:1:1 template. The ingredient dictates the ratio, not the other way around.

Locked: Meyer lemon at 1 oz.

What This Taught Me

The foam works like whipped cream on pie. It softens sharp edges, adds texture, makes everything come together. Skip it and the drink feels unfinished.

Aquafaba doesn’t belong here(or anywhere in a cocktail maybe). What bourbon can mask, Irish whiskey exposes. Chickpea undertones are not subtle.

Meyer lemon changes the math. The classic sour ratio assumes standard lemon acidity. Different citrus means different proportions.

Agave is underrated in whiskey sours. Its quick-finishing sweetness keeps everything else in focus. Honey, the intuitive choice, created redundancy instead of depth.

Expensive doesn’t mean better for cocktails. Two bottles that cost significantly more than Fighting 69th got outperformed. The sour format compresses subtlety rather than showcasing it.

St. Patrick’s Day is one day. This works year-round.

Stupid Simple Sour.

Appendix: Syrups

If you’re making your own, here’s what I used:

Agave Simple 2 parts agave nectar to 1 part water by volume. Combine in a jar and shake until incorporated. No heat required. Keeps refrigerated for several weeks.

Honey/Sugar Syrup 1 part honey/sugar to 1 part water by volume. Warm gently to combine since the sweetener doesn’t cooperate cold. Keeps about three weeks refrigerated before fermentation becomes a risk.

What’s your go-to Irish whiskey for mixing? I’m curious whether anyone’s found a mid-range bottle that outperforms Fighting 69th in this format.

Tickets are already selling out. Here’s everything you need to know.

A 30-Minute Ceremony That Changed Everything

Bardstown, Kentucky, 2018. A small gathering on the lawn of historic Spalding Hall. The mayor reads a proclamation. A handful of master distillers raise a glass. Thirty minutes later, everyone goes back to work.

That was the first National Bourbon Day celebration the Bourbon Capital Alliance ever put together. No tickets. No schedule. Just a toast and a handshake.

Fast forward to 2026, and it’s eight full days of events — June 14th through June 21st — across some of the most storied distillery campuses in Kentucky. Two events sold out within the first three hours of ticket sales opening. And the man sitting across from me on this episode has been there for virtually every step of the journey.

Sam Lacy is the Executive Director of the Bourbon Capital Alliance, the Bardstown-based 501(c)3 nonprofit that organizes, markets, and runs National Bourbon Week in partnership with ten distillery partners. He joined the show on the day tickets went live — March 26th — and if the constant mentions of his phone buzzing with sellout notifications were any indication, things are already moving fast.

How a Small Town Claimed Its Identity

Before there was a National Bourbon Week, there had to be a reason to build one. That reason, Sam explained, goes back to 2016, when local distillery leaders walked into a meeting with Bardstown’s mayor and economic development office and essentially said: you’re not doing this justice.

Bardstown calls itself the Bourbon Capital of the World, but at the time, there wasn’t a cohesive infrastructure to back that up. The distilleries were there — Heaven Hill, Makers Mark, Beam, Barton — but nothing tied them together into an experience a visitor could navigate or a community could rally around.

Out of that meeting came a task force, and out of that task force came the Bourbon Capital Community Alliance in 2017. Sam took over as Executive Director in 2019, initially carving out five hours a week from his day job at the tourism commission. He grew up in Bardstown, spent time in Atlanta working for Travel South USA, and came back with a perspective on what genuine destination tourism looked like. He saw what Bardstown could be.

And he quietly started building it.

Growing Up: From Three Days to Eight

The math here is pretty remarkable. The 2018 ceremony was thirty minutes. By 2019, Sam had expanded it to three days of events. COVID hit in 2020, and rather than go dark, they pivoted to virtual content and kept the momentum alive. By 2024, the first official National Bourbon Week launched as a six-day run. In 2025, seven days. And in 2026? A full eight days — starting on National Bourbon Day, June 14th, and running straight through to the following Sunday.

“We’re the bourbon capital of the world,” Sam told me. “Let’s own it.”

The other thing that makes this work, Sam was quick to point out, is the unusual willingness of the partner distilleries to cooperate. These are, in the traditional sense, competitors. They’re fighting for the same shelf space at the same liquor stores. But in Bardstown, something different happens. The distilleries understand that when a visitor leaves Heaven Hill, if somebody from Heaven Hill tells them to go visit Willett or Lux Row, everybody wins. That community-first mentality has allowed National Bourbon Week to schedule events across the week without distilleries stepping on each other — the bigger names up front, the smaller operations given prime days in the middle of the week.

“It’s a credit to them,” Sam said more than once.

What’s Happening in 2026: The Full Breakdown

So what are you actually signing up for? Here’s the shape of the week:

Sunday, June 14 — National Bourbon Day

The week kicks off with two very different vibes happening simultaneously, and honestly you could make a strong argument for attending both.

Heaven Hill opens the door — literally — with the Elijah Craig National Bourbon Day Celebration at their Bourbon Experience on Gilkey Run Road. It runs 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., it’s free to attend with registration, and it sets the tone nicely: tastings, craft demonstrations, and exclusive merchandise on-site. A low-pressure, high-reward entry point into the week.

A few miles out, Preservation Distillery is doing something altogether different. Their Boone Family Reunion Distillery Festival runs 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. and is one of the more thoughtfully constructed events on the entire calendar. You get product tastings with a souvenir glass, food, a custom Clayton & Crume leather keepsake, and live seminars led by Proprietor Marci Palatella, Master of Maturation Kyle Lloyd, and Head Distiller JT Leasor. If you know Preservation’s juice — Very Olde St. Nick, Rare Perfection, the 10-year they just released — you already know why this one is worth your time. If you don’t know Preservation yet, this is your introduction. Either way, you’re not leaving disappointed.

Monday, June 15

The Beam Backyard Luau at the Beam Family Home in downtown Bardstown. Fred and Freddie Noe. Bourbon. BBQ. A backyard. They brought this one back after it sold out last year, and it sold out again — fast. If you got a ticket, you already know. If you didn’t, put it at the top of your list for 2027. One of the most genuinely fun nights in bourbon.

Tuesday, June 16

Two experiences on Tuesday, and both reward the kind of person who shows up to learn rather than just to drink.

Log Still’s Proofed by the Spring is capped at 24 guests at $150 a ticket and is led personally by founder and president Wally Dant. The premise is simple and brilliant: go to the limestone spring that feeds the distillery’s water, taste the water, taste the bourbon, understand the connection. Log Still’s campus is one of the most beautiful anywhere on the Trail — actual lodging on site, an amphitheater, rolling Kentucky hills — and doing this experience with Wally himself is the kind of thing you’d struggle to put a price on.

Old SteelHouse has two seatings for their Finish Your Own Blueprint Series Batch 002 Experience, held out at the former T.W. Samuels distillery site in Deatsville. You tour the property, take a short finishing class, and then walk out with your own Blueprint Series Batch 2 bottle and four wood cube options to finish it exactly how you want. Educational, tactile, and genuinely interactive — this is the kind of experience that makes you think differently about what’s in the glass.

Wednesday, June 17

Wednesday is the fullest day of the week and it’s not particularly close.

Lux Row kicks things off with their Front Yard BBQ with Master Distiller John Rempe — 200 tickets, the custom smoker is going, and they’re up on that hilltop campus five minutes from downtown with access to the Stonehouse and visitor center. Big, social, and exactly the kind of afternoon that slides naturally into evening.

Over at Maker’s Mark, Bill Samuels Jr. and Master Distiller Dr. Blake Layfield are hosting Bill’s Bourbon Soiree in the visitor center — cocktails, bites, and that stunning campus as your backdrop. The word “soiree” is doing real work here. This is an elegant evening.

And in Springfield, Potter Jane is running their Big Vat Blending Class — second seating, because the first one sold out within hours of tickets going live. Twelve people, maximum. Denny and Jane running the room. Go to the website to find out what “Big Vat” actually refers to.

Thursday, June 18

James B. Beam Distilling Co. hosts A National Bourbon Week Celebration at the Kitchen Table — an intimate dinner at one of the best restaurant spaces on any distillery property in the state. Thoughtful food, exceptional cocktails, and the kind of evening that earns its place on the calendar. Potter Jane also runs an additional seating of the Big Vat Blending Class for anyone who missed Wednesday.

Friday, June 19

This is the anchor. The Bourbon Capital Mash Up at Bespoke in Bond in downtown Bardstown is the event Sam Lacy and the Bourbon Capital Alliance have been building toward all week, and in its second year it’s gotten bigger and sharper.

All ten partner distilleries under one roof. Every one of them paired with a local chef or their own culinary team. Small bites designed to sit alongside a specific pour from each distillery — thoughtfully paired, a mix of savory and sweet, and enough food that you genuinely don’t need dinner beforehand. Master distillers in the room. Accessible. Approachable. All in one beautiful downtown event space.

GA tickets are $150 and get you in at 7 p.m. VIP is $375 and gets you in an hour early at 6 — plus exclusive access to Neat Bourbon Bar throughout the night, a dusty cocktail on arrival, and three dusty pours from partner distilleries across the evening. If you’re not sure what “dusty” means: we’re talking vintage whiskey. The kind of bottles that are genuinely difficult to find in the wild, let alone taste in a curated setting. Both tiers get an etched glass to keep, courtesy of Kentucky Bourbon Festival. VIP is selling faster than GA. If you’ve been sitting on it, stop sitting on it.

Saturday, June 20

Saturday is where the week becomes something a little bigger than a bourbon festival.

Limestone Branch — new partner distillery this year and a sister operation to Lux Row — opens the morning with Barrels & Biscuits with Master Distiller Stephen Beam. A brunch experience, a beautiful craft distillery, a master distiller who clearly enjoys what he does. Strong start to the day.

Downtown, Potter Jane’s Big Vat Bar Crawl kicks off in the afternoon with Denny and Jane personally leading the group through their favorite watering holes, starting with a Big Vat pour at Evergreen. The official end time is 5 p.m. The unofficial end time is whenever everyone runs out of steam. Wear comfortable shoes. Say yes to things. Hydrate before, during and after.

Out at the Amp at Log Still in Gethsemane, the Ying Yang Twins and Mike Jones are performing live on Saturday night. There is no way to make that sentence sound normal, and that’s kind of the point. It’s a bourbon distillery in rural Kentucky with a proper outdoor amphitheater, and early 2000s hip-hop legends are going to be on stage. June 20, 2026. You cannot make this up.

And back downtown, the 23rd Annual Bourbon City Street Concert — United We Jam takes over Third Street with live music, the open container district in full effect, and a Kids Zone running noon to 4 p.m. with bouncy houses, face painting, games, and putt-putt for the younger crowd. The whole town out on the street. The community cap on an extraordinary week.

Sunday, June 21 — Father’s Day

Father’s Day Bourbon Brunch & Tour at Barton 1792. Twenty-five tickets. Sold out on day one. Master Distiller Ross Cornelissen hosting a brunch and rare behind-the-scenes tour of one of the oldest continually operating distilleries in Bardstown — a property that is not normally open to the public. If you got a ticket, you have a very good Father’s Day locked in. If you didn’t, keep an eye on returns.

Why Bourbon Tourism Hasn’t Slowed Down

There’s been a lot of noise lately about the bourbon market correcting — secondary prices dropping, distilleries pulling back on production, bottles sitting on shelves longer than they used to. I asked Sam whether any of that has hit the tourism side.

Short answer: not really.

“Those folks that want to experience bourbon are still going to come here,” he said. The visitor experience component of Kentucky distilleries has evolved dramatically over the past decade. Twenty years ago, you showed up, got a tour, and left. Now there are restaurants on site, vintage whiskey programs, barrel experiences, fill-your-own-bottle events. There’s always something new, which means even people who’ve done the Trail before have a reason to come back.

In a boom market, consumer acquisition is cheap and easy. In a tighter market, events like National Bourbon Week become more important, not less — they’re one of the most efficient ways to get bourbon in front of new and returning drinkers at the same time, in the right context, with the right experience around it.

The Bottom Line

If someone asks you how to do the Kentucky Bourbon Trail, my new answer is: go to National Bourbon Week. In one week, you can hit ten distilleries, access vintage pours you won’t find anywhere else, take a blending class, eat food paired specifically to what’s in your glass, and watch the Ying Yang Twins perform at a log-cabin amphitheater in the Kentucky hills. That is not a normal week.

Tickets are at nationalbourbonweek.com. Some events are already gone. VIP for the Mashup is selling faster than GA. If you’ve been on the fence, this is your sign to get off it.

Full conversation with Sam Lacy is live now wherever you get your podcasts, and on YouTube.

EmbellishPod is an independent spirits podcast. Pinkies down, fun up. Subscribe here on Substack for episode writeups, cocktail recipes, and more. Find us at embellishpod.com or @embellishpod on Instagram and TikTok.

I get emailed pitches inconsistently. Spirits brands, kitchen gadgets, wildlife preserves, podcast guests. Never music to review.

A PR email showed up about a Swedish jazz album featuring Bobby Gillespie from Primal Scream, and I didn’t delete it. I don’t know why. I’m not a jazz critic. But something about this one stuck, and I kept pulling the thread until I’d built an entirely new section of this publication just to have somewhere to put it.

Welcome to Off-Menu. The section for stuff that doesn’t fit but won’t get thrown away.

Who Is This Guy?

Björn Yttling is the Björn in Peter Bjorn and John. You know their song even if you don’t know their name. “Young Folks.” The one with the whistling. Six hundred million streams. Gossip Girl. FIFA 08. Every coffee shop in 2007.

Before the whistle heard round the world, Yttling was a trained jazz musician. Private lessons with Swedish jazz legend Esbjörn Svensson. Top EU conservatory. He released a jazz album in 2005 called Oh Lord Why Can’t I Keep My Big Mouth Shut.

Then Peter Bjorn and John exploded. He spent twenty years producing pop records for Lykke Li, Franz Ferdinand, Robyn, The Hives, and Primal Scream. The jazz thing got shelved.

Until now. Illegal Hit dropped September 2025 and got a Swedish Grammy nomination. Illegal Hit (Out of Bounds), a three-disc expanded version with vocal collaborations, drops March 27, 2026. Bobby Gillespie singing over Swedish jazz is the headline. The instrumental album underneath is the actual discovery.

Listen Along

The Instrumentals: A Soundtrack Without a Film

Yttling didn’t make a jazz album. He made a soundtrack for eleven different movies that don’t exist.

I kept a running list. The films living inside nine instrumental tracks:

1. Spaghetti Western (Morricone, obviously)

2. Roger Moore-era Bond

3. Pink Panther

4. Ocean’s Eleven

5. David Lynch (something unsettling underneath the smooth)

6. The Mandalorian

7. The Mask (Jim Carrey version, not the weird comic)

8. Old Hollywood musical (choreographed but silent)

9. Fairy tale music box

10. Encanto (”Surface Pressure” energy)

11. Tarantino end credits

A lot of tonal real estate for one album.

Things That Caught My Ear

Sodon the Mountain Man opens discordant. Piano doing something wrong on purpose. Then it settles into a Pink Panther slink, sly and mischievous. The horns come in and at one point they die off like a strangled goose into a balloon exhaling all its air. Then a saxophone shows up and just starts showing off.

It holds. All of it.

“He keeps you leaning forward and then cuts to black.”

Illegal Hit (the title track) is straight heist montage from Ocean’s Eleven. As it transitions from one instrument to the next, it’s almost written for the camera to hand off from one character to another. He’s writing edit cuts into the arrangement.

And then he ends it before the job goes down. You’re left in the van, waiting for the signal.

City in Darkness (the instrumental) is a death march to a firing squad. Odd that another track was a hangman’s noose. Two executions on one album. Different methods, same weight.

But there’s something romantic or reluctant to it all. At 2:20, a horn shows up out of nowhere. Where the fuck did that come from? Somehow it lands.

The track ends without deciding if it was a death or not. Rifles raised, blindfold on, breath held. Cut.

Tanto in the Night has operatic vibes over what sounds like a super low frequency kazoo(I know it’s not a kazoo but the vibration frequency and thinness of the modulation reminds me of that). Opera floating over a kazoo in the basement. He’s putting the absurd underneath the grand and making it work.

This is the album closer, and he gives you a proper pièce de résistance finish. Big ending. Curtain call.

Then the last ten seconds are almost silent.

He can’t help himself. Even when he’s resolving, he has to leave a little space.

The Pattern

Yttling leaves quieting noise at the end of these tracks. He likes the exhale. He’s not cutting to black. He’s letting the scene fade.

And he keeps putting something slightly wrong in the mix. The discordant piano. The strangled goose horns. The woodblock that doesn’t belong. He’s testing the seams. How wrong can something feel before it breaks?

Twenty years of pop production teaches you that. He knows exactly how much tension an audience can take before they check out.

“He knows the rules. So when he breaks them, it’s a choice.”

The Vocal Remakes

The third disc collects vocal versions of the instrumentals. Different artists, same beds. Hand someone a complete piece of music and see what world they build on top of it.

Joshua Idehen took the title track and gave it vibes. Spoken word riding the groove. At one point there’s a hard edge that feels like it’s pushing toward an EDM drop, then he pulls you right back into the groove. Tension without release. The groove is the payoff.

The Tallest Man on Earth sounds almost strained trying to break into the song. It creates urgency. He’s patiently waiting in line to enter a chaotic mix. By the end, his voice echoes into distance. Maybe he got stranded on the other side of the room from where he wanted to be.

El Perro del Mar takes “City in Darkness” and transforms the firing squad into a dreary walk on a rainy day. Stripped down to voice, piano, and ethereal noise. A dark lullaby. The death got taken out. Now it’s just melancholy. Far-away rusty hinges swinging.

Matt Sweeney replaced the original texture entirely with guitar pickups doing gnarly work. Give me a 2x12 Fender amp, a vintage electric guitar with rich pickups, and a bit of intentional distortion. Just hanging out listening to a dude jam. He has comfort with the song but isn’t afraid to do what he wants. All fun playing.

Same beds. Different rooms.

Bobby Gillespie: The Headline Act

Before I could evaluate what Gillespie does on “Strange,” I had to figure out who the hell Bobby Gillespie is.

Quick homework: lead singer of Primal Scream. Drummed for The Jesus and Mary Chain in the 80s. Primal Scream has refused to stay in one lane for forty years. Acid house. Gospel. Southern rock. Cure-style moodiness. They have a song that sounds like a laser tag arena.

The guy is a chameleon. When he lands on a Swedish jazz track, it’s not a stunt. It’s just Tuesday.

Yttling produced two Primal Scream albums. These two have history.

What “Strange” Does

First impression: the opening sounds like a 70s Clint Eastwood western. Man in the desert on a horse. Sun-parched. Then it moves into Roger Moore-era Bond.

Gillespie’s voice fits into a psychedelic 60s thing, floating across the top of all the changes. Think Moody Blues but softer. The track shifts underneath him, western to Bond, sparse to driving, but he stays in his lane. He’s the thread while the scenery changes.

“The guy who can stomp chose to whisper.”

The percussion drives hard in the last third, but Gillespie doesn’t match the energy. He keeps floating while the ground shakes.

And then he’s gone. The voice disappears for the last thirty seconds and the song resolves itself.

He was a visitor. He floated through, the arrangement carried him, then he stepped out and let the instruments close it down.

The instrumentals were complete before any vocalist showed up. The singers are guests in Yttling’s house. They get their moment. Then the house settles back into itself.

The Verdict (Sort Of)

I’m not qualified to tell you if this is good jazz. I lack the vocabulary, credibilty and/or authority. But I can tell you this:

It rewards attention. It conjures scenes without needing a film. It leaves space for you to bring your own associations.

If you want jazz that sounds like jazz, this might frustrate you. If you want something that feels like a soundtrack to a film that doesn’t exist, with guests drifting through the frame, this is worth your time.

“He’s not making jazz for jazz rooms. He’s making jazz for the movie in your head.”

Gillespie’s “Strange” is the headline. The instrumental album underneath is the real discovery. And the whole expanded Out of Bounds package is a document of what happens when you hand the same raw material to different artists and let them build.

Kind of like handing someone a base spirit and seeing what cocktail they make.

Maybe that’s why I didn’t delete the email.

Illegal Hit (Out of Bounds) drops March 27, 2026 on YEAR0001. “Strange” featuring Bobby Gillespie is out March 24.

If you listened along, I want to know: which track landed for you? Drop a comment or hit reply.

This is the first Off-Menu piece. If you want more of these, stuff that doesn’t fit my lane but I can’t stop thinking about, let me know.