Every day is Bandcamp Friday if you toss in a couple extra bucks.

I've said this before, but it bears repeating. Anyway, if you're new here, hi! Bandcamp Friday is when that platform waives its revenue fees so that artists/labels can pocket the change. I churn out 20+ short recommendations of albums/EPs released on or around Oct. 1, categorize them by silly/obscure ideas instead of genres, and then y'all spend a stupid amount of money on new music.

I don't believe in guilty pleasures…

… but there are some songs that I only share with close friends. Songs that demonstrate certain qualities intrinsic to understanding my taste — how it's changed, how it hasn't, and what early influences remain part of what I look for in music.

This is not the artwork for Sixpence None the Richer’s This Beautiful Mess.

An oolong brews differently than a white peony than a pu-erh than a jasmine. And even within those varietals, soil and air give them distinct personalities from their region (and, thus, another way to approach preparation). Like collecting records, tea is a ritual that comes with a certain amount of research and love… know where your leaves come from and how best to experience them, and the tea leaves will reward your palette and sense of being

But this is not how to make a cup of aged Liu Bao.

Buying trash snacks with your partner is romantic as heck.

We scanned the chip aisle of our corner store, recently under new management (they now sell shisha behind the counter!); it looks like they’re about due for a restock: missing were Takis, plain Utz potato chips. But in quarantine, with a toddler, you take 20-minute dates when you can, debating the finer points of Pop Tart flavors (them: brown sugar, untoasted; me: cookies & cream, frozen) and why Lays just doesn’t cut it anymore.

The first time I told a girl that I (platonically) loved her, she kicked me out.

This was my mid-20s, which I have come to call the second coming of my teenage years. Everything sucked, nothing made sense, relationships held on by a thread, drinking was fun (but also wasn’t) and I had no freaking idea what was to come. The future (and present) was terrifying, but sort of exciting because it’s one drama after another (hey, I watched a lot of Bravo reality shows in those days).

Summer’s usually got me in three modes:

“Children love the meat tank.”

“It’s been a wild ride, motherfuckers!”

Camae Ayewa (aka Moor Mother) opened Irreversible Entanglements’ set with an exclamation. Over a sprawling improvisation that pushed at the edges of the free-jazz band’s ’60s-inspired fire, Ayewa spit without her book of poetry in-hand, shouting and growling about time, isolation, the Sisyphian task of “building wreckage,” survival. Could’ve been about the past five days, five months or 500 years.

It’s 6:39 a.m.

And I still haven’t written a pithy or emotional or silly intro to this thing, yet, so here’s an assortment of links:

Nature is healing; I went inside a record store.

Among the many things I have missed during the pandemic — shows, hugs, friends, family, browsing nerdy beers at a liquor store — is the time spent flipping through vinyl at a local haunt. So after more than a year (and a second dose of Moderna), I hit up Red Onion Records in Hyattsville, Md., to meet up with and Kenny visiting from Richmond.

“It doesn’t even make sense!”

In the dorm rooms and on the streets of downtown Athens, Ga., that was the common refrain about Patrick Dean’s comic. , some silly freshman deep-thinker would muse (read: me). “That’s dumb. Why would anyone read a comic you don’t understand?”

I’m still messed up about DOOM.

Few musician deaths have hit me as hard and as long. Scott Walker comes to mind, as does Geneviève Castrée. Each one speaks to a culture, aesthetic and ethos passed down — their creations as totems of taste and outré expression. MF DOOM is not only my favorite rapper, but might as well be my favorite producer, too — his cartoon-y bouncing-ball flow enmeshed in drifts of spider-webbed soul samples and synths. That’s not a knock on other producers who’ve put their mitts to his voice (shouts to Madlib and Jneiro Jarel), just that the Villain knew his dirty deeds best

What started as a way to help out musicians and labels beset by the pandemic (by Bandcamp waiving its revenue fees for 24 hours) has become a monthly tradition of surprise album drops, gratuitous spending and just a whole lotta music nerds sharing their wares online. There hasn’t been an announcement about the future of Bandcamp Friday — maybe like everyone else, they’re just waiting to see how the world opens back up.

So maybe there’s another Viking’s Choice Guide to Bandcamp Friday in June, maybe not — in any case, here’s the 8th iteration! This month, I’m grouping the recommendations by what I think characters from would jam! I’ve been reading , a truly engrossing re-telling of the TMNT origins with original co-creator Kevin Eastman at the helm for the first 12 issues (he contributes as the story develops in further collections, too). As someone who grew up on the animated series and the movies from the ’90s, these comics not only weave a complex, ancient mythology but also present multi-dimensional characters I’d never seen before.

I love dumb action movies.

So after my first Moderna shot, I started rewatching the series for the first time in years. In a haze, I took notes on my phone. Names of characters and the actors who portray them are mixed together with no rhyme or reason. I make no apologies for spoilers. Here’s a fast five of the first five, so far:

Music comes to you when it should.

I’ve said something like this, in one form or another, for over a decade now… to young interns and music journalists just getting their feet wet, tentative about their limited knowledge… to friends and peers who didn’t have the same experiences growing up… to folks older than me overwhelmed by the sheer amount of music available within a click. I don’t completely shuck authority out the window — the opposite is actually true, especially when it comes to historical context — but that’s not what drives me when I stumble across a beloved record or artist, often decades after the fact.