My week in music included: Steve Moore lecturing on the harmonic series to a somewhat patient (&/or exactly crossfaded enough to be into it) crowd before retaking the stage with Earth to play Hex; Or Printing in the Infernal Method (2005) in its entirety; leaning into Jenn & Gina to whisper-shout that Mark Arm’s voice sounded great in 2025 surely at least in part because he’s an unproblematic man (ask me how I know, just so I can tell you about going on a double date with him & his wife in Seattle); and, of course, the November edition of this series!
Track Changes 002 playlist: Gina Myers & Ryan Skrabalak
Non-exhaustive list of topics discussed: MC5 getting dropped by their label for being in a feud with a department store, how Joe Strummer actually stayed punk forever, a Brazilian psych concept album about the four elements that was almost lost to time in a flood or fire (depending who you ask), why crying to the Magnetic Fields doesn’t get old, & the only guest selection on this series, so far, that prompted my musician partner to say, in horror, “Oh no, everyone’s just going to completely talk over that.” (That is exactly what happened, but a thing I believe about music, &/or poetry sometimes, is that if you’re in the room when it’s happening, at least some of it gets lodged somewhere in you.)
Some lines from this month’s guests that are definitely lodged in me:
Gina Myers, from Works & Days: “I like to know the real work of living / The things you do not for a paycheck / What is it that keeps you alive”
Ryan Skrabalak. from Universal Cop Avoidance: “O panic sized world / Which I never truly understand”
Though I think that in both of their cases, excerpting doesn’t get at what’s most compelling about their work—the poems are best experienced as an accumulation.
Coming up very soon!!! The final Track Changes of the year will be on December 2. It’s time to hear from some non-poets, both with recently-published books.
✧ ✦ Tickets & more info ✦ ✧
Sam Heaps is the author of the essay collections Proximity (Clash 2023) and Enlarging Grasps of Disorder (FutureTense 2026). They teach writing at Temple University in Philadelphia, and study philosophy at NYU. Their debut novella The Living god was released this October from SARKA Publishing.
Austyn Wohlers is a writer from Atlanta, currently living in New York. Her first novel Hothouse Bloom, called “strikingly original” by the New York Times, is out with Hub City Press.
See you there, I hope!
♡ Alina