Shut Up, Dude: This Week’s Best Comments

we all know what pixies needs.

kim deal welcomed back with open arms. and then one night live on stage, not even a week into the tour, she cracks frank black in the back of the head with her p-bass and it can all be finally over.

there isn't a jury in the world who would convict her.

This last week, I have had the soul destroying realisation that the love of my life is gone and she isn't coming back. We drifted apart, not a huge amount but enough. Someone else stepped in to make her feel special, I spent the last 2 months trying to save us but now she is gone. 5 1/2 years, two children, countless happy memories and a love I will cherish forever are no longer there. In early January I thought I had the perfect life but it was an illusion. I want her to stay with us and continue to be a happy family but I also want her to be happy, even if it is with someone else.

For this week and this week alone, this song is a 10/10 and reflects my world perfectly.

The irony of a crank telling to you to "do your own research" about something as complex as vaccines is that it signals that, despite trying to convince you of the contrary, the crank does not care about you at all. If I knew a supposedly monumental, life-saving truth, I wouldn't be coy about it and give vague, dismissive advice to go out and search for a needle in a haystack all by yourself. It's like telling a starving person to go forage in a distant wilderness.

Everyone should probably do this if they have a spine. Most unofficial showcases have the same impact on a career as the official ones anyway.

I saw an Adrianne Lenker bumper sticker on a sprinter van, a little voice inside my head said “Don't look back, you can never look back”

Hi yall! This is Wren, fka phospholipidbilayer! I made a new account because I deleted the old one after getting dogpiled on by trolls for having the wrong Beatles opinion I guess. I wasn't a VIP so it was just hard being surrounded by the influx of trolls that have come as The Number Ones got really popular. So I deleted that account for my mental health.

I decided I didn't want to let trolls take away my old tradition of announcing my Wren Dove Lark albums on Shut Up Dude so I made this account a VIP account so I could access here to post about it. I'll always be thankful to this place for being the first place where I shared my music and all the amazing feedback and support I got. A lot of the confidence I developed to keep pursuing making music was from the encouragement people here gave me. I've connected with a lot of you on Twitter (@wrendovelark), but I don't know if I'm connected with all of you. In the case that I haven't, I wanted to post my new album here if anyone was interested.

https://wrendovelark.bandcamp.com/album/boundarypush

My new album is called "boundarypush". It's the first part of a double album I've conceived centered around sampling contemporary Christian worship songs. I listened to that music growing up as a kid raised in evangelical christianity, and I remember it for its production tricks that help you feel goosebumps and as though you're spiritually ascending. I loved that music as a kid, but I changed my tune a lot after leaving the church as I started navigating my queerness and transness and came to terms with the trauma I endured in that environment. I wanted to take those production tricks and reappropriate them into a queer/trans-affirming context. I ended up making so many songs that I split them into two camps, the ones that centered around navigating family and daily life and dealing with past trauma and the ones that centered around T4T love/romance/sex/community. This album are the songs in the former camp. I tried to approach this toping by making cathartic dance-pop bops for people to cry to while dancing alone in their bedroom. Think Katie Day meets Charli XCX how I'm feeling now. A listener at my listening party earlier this week described it as sounding like "wrapping trauma in sunlight" which meant so much to me. One of the best compliments I've ever received honestly. That's the album I wanted to make, and I'm glad I made it.

This album became much more diaristic than I intended. I've dealt with so much in the past year and a half... family schisms due to my transness, trying to be trans in a public-facing job that works with children in the increasingly fascistic south, being poor while trying to move across the country for grad school (and to escape antitrans legislation), making it up here and a few days later my stepfather suddenly died in a car crash. My world's been rocked a lot of times recently, but I'm starting to finally feel safe again. I've entered therapy for my c-PTSD and am trying to untangle my incredibly complicated knot of wounds and internalized messages about myself/life/world/sex etc. I'm on a new anxiety/ADHD med combo that's working wonders and I'm in a place where I feel really valued. I'm studying migratory birds for my PhD, something I've always dreamed of. This album aside from the final song about my stepfather's death has been finished since early 2022. But my anxiety and perfectionism kept me from releasing it until it was "perfect". Therapy + my collaborators (4 collabs on the album) + my friends on this private "Gumheads" discord that me and a lot of old school gum people who are cool formed, all of them really helped me to feel confident enough to finally surrender my desire to make it "perfect" & just release it as it is. I'm so thankful that they did. I think this is my favorite project I've ever made. I hope everyone is doing well. If we were friends, I've missed you! If you don't like me, I hope you can tolerate me in this space. Sending love!

In this economy there's a lot of folks who can't even afford to have their first dinner party

I mean, it's not that I don't agree with her or don't understand where she's coming from, but this just feels so incredibly dweeby.

I’m pretty sure Pixies broke up in ‘93 leaving behind an incredible discography, they never reunited, and certainly never made any other albums.

I cannot claim legit expertise in anything--untreatable ADHD and all that--but I know a shitload of actual experts in a variety of fields. "Do your own research" is an invitation to let yourself be led down the rabbit hole by quacks, shysters, and snake oil merchants who always, always have a financial agenda. (Like Andrew Wakefield, for example.)

As a general rule, 100% of the time anyone who tells you "They're all lying to you!" about anything is themselves lying to you.

I did meet someone at Coachella. It was during LCD Soundsystem. They were playing "I Can Change". We talked about how excited we were cause we missed LCD before their "breakup". She asked if I was also on ecstacy (I was not), she grabbed my hand, we started dancing, and she made out with me. She then said, "You should come meet my husband!" I was mortified, and she insisted, "No, no, it's fine, I'll be right back!" She never came back.

Anyway, this looks terrible.