So... Alright - New beginnings and Morphine

Episode Date: January 13, 2026

Geoff discusses New Year's resolution type shit, as well as the band Morphine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

So it's not a ducca, chica, chica, chica, chica, chica, pomep so it's been a while. Let's knock the dust off and see if we remember how to do this. I just got back from my holiday vacation, haven't recorded an episode of So All right in about three weeks now. Obviously, I recorded a shit ton ahead of time to allow myself this break. and now I have the inevitable first time I've done something

in a long time jitters. I'm a little nervous. You sit down and you're like, how does this work again? I had to think for a second about the naming structure when I was opening up and naming my file.

I get a little tongue tied, not sure what to talk about. You start to think like, why was I doing this again? But I know why I was doing this. I was doing it because I love it. And I love talking to you. And I'm excited to have a 2026 of So All Right's where we get to do, as I like to say,

shallow little dives into deep pools. Today I want to talk about a little bit about a band and an album. I don't think I'm going to be able to, kind of like we talked about the Thugazi documentary, not necessarily the entirety of the band and their catalog. I want to talk about a little bit about a band, but a little bit about one of their five albums and just how it's been sitting with me for the last couple of days. But before we do that, it's 2026. I'm not a New Year's resolution kind of guy, but I do like the intentionality behind it. And I do like setting goals for myself, achievable goals, and I do like self-improvement.

And I will say I have been in a bit of a creative rut these last few months. And it's funny, I was thinking about it this morning on my bike ride. This has been something I've been rolling around in my head for a while. But I was thinking about it again this morning on my bike ride. And I was reminded of a so all right I did a few months ago where I talked about how I finally have a routine now. I finally have my week figured out where I'm not, it's not like feast or famine. and I'm not like trying to figure out where to plug holes or what to do when.

I've got it all worked out into an achievable, equitable structure. And it fills a day, fills five days into a week, a work week. And it helps me feel productive and lets me be productive without wasting time, but without like overworking and yada, yada, you get it. I found my routine. Jesus Christ. Fucking word salad with this guy. I found my routine.

And that's great. what I've been feeling since I found my routine. And I don't know that it's because I found my routine, or it's just because I've been kind of burned out over the last year, you know, from the creation of regulation, et cetera, et cetera. But I realized, it was really starting to bug me around November and into December and then through December.

I just felt like a little stuck in the mud creatively. And I couldn't figure it out. that doesn't happen very often. And when it does, I usually attribute it to just being burned out. And, you know, eventually I'll fight through it. But it was kind of persistent. And I realized that I was feeling some sort of an entropy. I didn't feel, I hadn't felt previously.

And I didn't know if that was a thing to attribute to age, which kind of scared me if it was, you know, like I don't want to lose my motivation because my light is dimming, you know, in that way. I don't want to be getting too old to be curious. And I think I boiled it down to creating a schedule for myself and then adhering to and following to it, which has been very helpful. Very, very helpful for me. There is, I guess it comes with side effects. And one of those side effects is there's a certain amount of spontaneity that's lost in a day when everything is structured out. You don't find yourself with an idle moment where you go like, how am I going to fill this time?

and then you go, what if I go across town and do this thing? And that's, you know, or, oh, I should pick this up and play with this or read this or, I don't know, maybe I'll watch it. And you, there is something to be said for the non-structure allowing for moments of distraction or zags in your day that you probably won't get if you're following a set path. You know, if you're on rails throughout your week, you're probably not going to zig or zag off that rail because you're following your predetermined path. And that feels true to me.

I think that feels like maybe part of this for me. And so I'm going to endeavor in 2026 to adhere to my schedule and to continue to be productive in that way. But allow myself a little bit of leeway to get up to stuff, you know, to go experience a little bit of life. Even in my bike rides, like I have got my bike ride down to this amazing, perfect route that is exactly what I need. It has none of the frustrations that you have riding bikes. It's all on trails. I know when to ride on the trail so that it's almost empty. I never have to deal with

cars. I never have to stop. I don't really have to deal with construction the way I go. I've got this perfect little like 11-mile loop worked out that feels like about the right amount of bike riding. It's not as much as I used to ride, but I was riding more at a necessity to get to where I wanted to ride back then. Now I'm closer to the place I want to ride, so it makes it easier, right? So I ride less, but it's a better and more focused ride. But even that, you realize, is kind of restricting me from the exploration I used to have when some days I would just take a left and go, well, let's see what's over here, you know? And let's go follow that in that back alley. And let's drive through this parking lot. And oh, what's behind this building? And you end up having

all these little adventures on your bicycle and discovering parts of town. And I really like the meditative nature of my bike route. Like, there's something really powerful in that routine, and I love it. But once again, got to make room to go ride around a different part of town every once and a while to spice things up to keep things interesting. I think I'm going to try my damnedest to do that. I'm also going to try just to be more physical in general. Now that I'm getting a little bit older and everything I read and see just says that, like,

building muscle is the best thing you can do to combat age. So I need to work on that. But also, I just want to be active and moving every day. So I'm going to try to do some sort of physical activity every day this year. And I might even make like a board and give myself silver stars. And then maybe like every 10th silver stars, a gold star. And maybe if I get like a gold star, I could buy a hobby box of tops chrome or something. I don't know. I'll figure it out. But maybe 10's not enough. Maybe I got to make it harder. But I work well with incentive. And they figured out how to get me in line with a starboard in like fourth grade, third grade, and it has worked on me ever since.

I'm also going to try to read more in general. I feel like that's a great booster of creativity and vocabulary. And I read a lot on my phone. And that is reading. And I don't want to discount articles and shit that I read online. But it's different than reading a focused long form narrative. whether it be fiction or nonfiction, and I want to get back into that.

I've really let my reading slip. And quite honestly, I've felt my vocabulary slip as a result of that. And that's a bummer. And so I need to be more active in that front. I've already read a book this year, or at least I finished a book I started last year, and I'm about to start a new one.

Boy, am I about to start a new one? It's called a... Fuck, what is it called? It's called the Horace heresy, which is silly to say. And it is a novel about Warhammer 40K. And you might be thinking to yourself, Jeff, you don't give a shit about Warhammer 40K. Why would you read a novelization of it? And you're right.

But I've been playing this game. It's just an FPS on my streams in the morning called Bold Gun. But I guess it is a Warhammer game. And I found out that half of the people in my community love Warhammer. And so they're always telling me about it. And I have no desire to play the thing or do the miniature. or any of that. My D&D days are over. But something stuck with me.

They said that there's, and I looked it up, there's more than a thousand Warhammer 40K related novels. There are more than this world, this universe that they've created, contains more than 1,000 published novels. and that honestly stopped me in my tracks. So you think about it, and I looked it up. Star Wars has like three or four hundred novels, right?

There has to be something there. Like, it seems rude to refuse to acknowledge that something can be so big that not only can it sustain its board game or tabletop game thing and then the different video games that I know spin off from it, but a thousand novels, a thousand individual stories to tell in written form,

they aren't writing those novels if people aren't buying them and consuming them. And there's a community apparently large enough to support a library full of Warhammer 40K literature. I figure it would be dumb of me not to dip my toe into that world in some way. So the general consensus seems to be, I start with this Horace heresy book. It's a trilogy, I think. And that's going to be the next book I read.

I'll let you know how it goes. Just read one called Rage in Harlem, the 1930s Brooklyn noir crime story. It's incredibly brutal. If you want to just watch people just go through it and have no happy ending at the end, but a hell of a lot of what feels like reality in that book, I recommend it. And I think that's what I'm going to work on in 2026. The usual, read more, work out more, get out more, be more proactive, you know, kind of the hits, as it were.

What about you? What are you going to do this year? It doesn't have to be a New Year's resolution. It could just be a thing you want to improve on in your life or try or explore. Send me an email. Eric at jeffsboss.com. I'd love to hear how you're going to ring in the new year. How you're going to attempt to better yourself or further yourself in 2026?

Maybe something that could inspire all of us. Speaking of inspiring, I was doing something about a week ago. And I don't remember where. I was maybe out at a coffee shop. And I heard a snippet of a song from a band called Morphine. And if you are not familiar, with the band Morphine, you're gonna love them. Hopefully, I convince you over the next few minutes to check them out. They're a posthumous band. They're no longer around. They ended in 1999, and we will get

to that. But they were a, and still are a hard to define band from the 90s. They formed in 89. They ended in 99. Once again, we'll get into that. In that time, they released five albums. and became kind of indie darlings in America, you know, big on the 120 minutes circuit, didn't get a lot of commercial airplay outside of college rock stations, didn't find as much commercial success as they did niche success, you know? They were like, they were, they are often described as your favorite band's favorite band. They were one of those bands kind of, you know, think wire from back in like the 70s in the UK.

But anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself and you don't even know what I'm, what the band is. They were a three-piece band, hard to define genre-wise, because they were unlike any other band. There was a drummer, a saxophonist, and a lead singer who played a two-string bass with a slide. Mark Sandman was the lead singer and the bassist, and a musical genius from the Massachusetts area. I think they were all from Cambridge, roughly. So Car Talk and Morphine, both came from Cambridge, Massachusetts. So hotbed

of creativity there. They formed in 1999, Mark Sandman, Dana Colley at Jerome Dupree. As a three piece, although drummer Billy Conway replaced Dupree about two years in, and then they traded places back and forth because there were some health issues

with Dupree, I think. And then for a while, they were both in the band. And I know like Conway would tour sometimes and Dupree would work on albums. But then they both worked on albums too. So they were just kind of like shared the drumming duties of the band. But anyway, in 1989, they get together. They're musicians from other bands. I think a band called Treater Wright, maybe a band called Three Colors.

And I think Sandman had a band called Sandman and the Hypersonics or something as well. They had been around, all the members had been around the scene for a while. Sandman a little longer than the others because he's, I think, secretly older. He was weird about his age. Didn't want to talk about it. and start this weird avant-garde three-piece. They coined the phrase low rock because everything is bass and baritone, and it has this, it produces this effect that just feels kind of low.

And I don't really know how to describe it. It's not jazz, it's not blues, it's not really rock. I can't give you any sort of sonic comparison. I will tell you that there are elements of Tom Waits and maybe Iron Butterfly, and I don't even know. They're just, you just got to hear them. I think any, even saying those names now makes me regret saying them, and I think I should cut it, but I won't because I want to convey to you how difficult it is

to compare this band to anyone else, because you're going to hear them and you're not going to get those references. I don't think you're not, if I tell you that they sound like certain Fiona, some of the bluesier Fiona Apple songs to me, you're not going to agree with me, probably. But that's the beauty of this band, is they sounded unlike any other band from the jump. They released an album called Good, which was not to be silly, a very good album. You should go listen to it right now. It is great.

But in 1993, just about a year after they released Good, they released an album called Cure for Pain. It was their second album. And this is largely what I want to talk about. This was a big album to me in my life. I liked all of their music a lot, and I recommend all of their music. Their five albums are good, Cure for Pain. Yes, like Swimming, which is a very good album. I think that was their first DreamWorks album, and that one was their own DreamWorks.

I think they were like the second act ever signed to DreamWorks music. And then their posthumous album, The Night, is also very good. But Cure for Pain is the album. At least it was in my world, in my friend group. it came out, like I said, in 93. So this album took me into the Army. I think it came out the first week I was in basic training. And then when I didn't know it at the time,

obviously I was in basic training, but I discovered it when I was in Fort Benjamin Harrison, Indiana, in AIT, learning to be a journalist. And instant classic is an understatement. I had it on tape first, I think. And it was one of those ones where you just play the entire tape and then flip it over and continue. you and then flip it over and flip it over. And there's like, I don't know how many of those

albums you have in your life. Obviously, you don't do that anymore. We have playlists and we have music services and we have the entirety of the history of music at our fingertips at all times. And so we don't consume music in the exact same way we used to. But it used to be annoying to switch out music. And if you're driving and you've got a tape in your Dotson B-2,200 pickup truck, you're driving down I-35 trying to get to Austin from Colleen. And you're listening to the Beastie Boys, license to ill, you pop it out,

flip it over, and listen to it again. Once over, pop it out, flip it over and listen to it again because that album is that good

and it's either that or you start fishing around on your floorboard for another tape and risk killing yourself. There are very few tapes that were good enough not to risk killing yourself

back then. And morphine's cure for pain was instantly one of those albums for me. I could have listened to it over and over and over again and I fucking did. I listened to it so much.

And like I said, I liked their other music as well, but this was the one that got me. It was this amazing. I think looking back on it now, actually, before I go any further, I mentioned being inspired earlier. I was inspired by hearing morphine in that coffee shop to go back

and listen to that song. I think it was, I'm free, which we'll talk about. That's the name of the song. I'm free now, I believe is what's called. And I was inspired to go back

and listen to the song. And then I thought, I should really listen to the album. And I don't do that anymore. And I've talked about this in the past. Like, the way we consume music now, the way it is available to us, it's changed at least my relationship with how I listen to music. I used to go narrow and deep on a band, you know.

You go and you buy an album, whether it's a vinyl or a tape cassette or a CD. And there is a physical tape case or album coverer with liner notes or CD case that you hold in your hand while you're listening to it and you have this connection to it where it's, you're listening to it and you're absorbing it and you're holding it at the same time. And we don't do that anymore with digital music. And I'm okay with that. I'm not sad about it or anything, but it has changed how I listen to music. I don't listen narrow and deep anymore. I don't sit down and listen to an album from start to finish anymore, ever. I listen to a playlist and I throw songs on constantly and take them off constantly,

and it's this ever-evolving cornucopia of noise, you know? And it's just like, it's like a stew. It's like a music stew. And I end up knowing two songs by a billion bands, whereas I used to know every song by 30 bands. And it has its pluses and minuses. And like I said, I'm content with where it is. But I realized I don't ever listen to an entire album,

start to finish anymore. And I was so drawn into listening, that song in my office on my sofa that about halfway through it, I stopped it, and I just went back, and I played the entire album, and I sat on my sofa, and I just, with my headphones on, and I just listened to the entire Cure for Pain album, start to finish, and I can't,

I might have done that with one Pegboy album sometime in the last year at one point and had a similar thought about how I should do it more. I can't specifically remember, but outside of maybe that moment, I can't remember the last time I sat down and just listened to an album in its entirety, start to finish, as it was meant to be listened to. And I was instantly struck by how, well, first off, by how wonderful the band was and how I can't believe it's been so many years since I've listened to them.

And Mark Sandman's that gravely, like Tom Waitsie-style voice is so soulful and just like full of angst. And then like just a deep bass and the saxophone. just like it creates this dreamlike quality. It's like music to listen to in the fog, if that makes sense. It becomes this encompassing fog of sound around you. And you can almost feel it on you. It's fucking crazy what it does to you. And each song is like poetry. And as I'm listening from song to song, I'm realizing that this isn't only a beautiful album and an amazing one of one, this album is the 90s to me. This is my 90s, encapsulated in one complete moment.

The lyrics are self-effacing and self-aware and honest and brutal and painful and poignant and poetic, and they are so clearly inspired by Jack Kerouac. And he even talks about how, in interviews about how inspired by Kerouac he was and also I think by John Grishon, maybe. but there's this and I get the Kerouac comparison but to me I'm reminded of Bukowski in that there is this brutal honesty

in the writing of Charles Bikowski he pulls no punches whether he's punching at you or at himself he is honest and straightforward and there's a beauty in the simplicity of the way he conveys thoughts that I think is naked and honest and raw and unique

and Mark Sandman's lyrics in this album are exactly that in musical form. There is a poetry to every song on this album. This album is raw, and you listen to it, and you can feel it the progression. You listen to I'm free now, and then in spite of me a few songs later, and you realize that both of these songs could have been written on the same day as he's going through the grief of the loss of this relationship. And then you start to feel the stage. of grief and heartbreak and loss through the album. There's this through line that goes all the way.

It's almost a linear album, and it's really wonderful, and I hope you will listen to it. It starts off with an instrumental called Donna that's very short, 45 seconds or so, and it sets a tone, but you don't know what that tone is. You listen to it, and you're interested in it, but you don't know where it's taking you, and you're like, you're a little like, hmm?

And then, and then Buena kicks in, and you are immediately treated to Sandman crooning, I hear a voice from the back of the room. I hear a voice cry out. You want something good. And then it kicks into this amazing, jazzy song about selling your soul to the devil and kind of being okay with it.

It's such a great take on that theme, you know, their version of it. And then the next song is called I'm Free Now. And this is my second favorite song on the album and probably the best written song on the album lyrically. If you listen to it, it is somebody going through all of the stages of grief of a breakup at a manic pace, at a fast break, manic pace. And it is how you listen to it and you feel what he's going through and you are

instantly there and you remember being there. And you remember feeling that frantic and all over the map. And it's like, I don't know how else to describe it. Here's the lyrics. I'm free now to direct a movie, sing a song or write a book about yours truly, how I'm so interesting and I'm so great. I'm really just a fuck up. And it's such a waste to burn down all these walls around me, flexing like a heartbeat.

We don't like to speak. Don't talk to me for about a week. I'm sorry, it just hurts to explain. It's like, there's somebody in the span of about 10 seconds who's going, no, I'm fine. I don't need this. I can focus on me now. I'm going to go write my hit play. I'm going to go be a famous musician now.

And they're like, no, I'm going to burn it down. out of the ground. I'm a piece of shit. I can't do that. I've sucked. I've wasted everything. I'm terrible. And then the next breath, he's ruining a relationship with somebody who's reaching out to him and going like, I don't want to talk about it. Leave me alone for about a week. It hurts to explain. I can't talk about it. And he's like burning down, literally burning down the walls around him. And you just watch somebody disintegrate in the span of about 15 seconds. And it's the most relatable thing you'll hear today. And then you hear him saying, honest, I swear, the last thing I want do is ever cause you pain and you fucking feel those words like you feel that he means it and you're

like oh fuck it gets you in the heart you know it's a great song it's a really great song the next is a song called all wrong that is kind of a sexy song about a woman who's a bad idea and it's a bad idea to be with her but uh i don't think it's going to stop them you can clearly see the progression in this story. And then the next song is another fucking awesome song. It's called Candy. And it is another kind of sexy song about a woman who is trapping him and dragging him down. It's a really bluesy, really fun song. And you can tell that he's like, he's going down a road. He probably shouldn't be going down. The next song is called A Head with Wings. And it's a good song, too. if anything, I think it may be about having clarity in the moment and being able to see the

forest through the trees. But then the next song, which I think is probably the most popular song on the album, if I had to guess, at least in, like I said once again in my friend groups, a song called In Spide of Me, which is one of the saddest songs you will ever hear. It is pure poetry and it is him accepting the loss of the relationship and accepting that he's going to watch that person go off to be wonderful without him, to do it in spite of him, and that he was just lucky to be a part of the journey. He sings it almost more poignantly than I explained it,

but it's a heart-wrenching song because you feel heartbreak, just like three minutes of heartbreak. Last night, I told a stranger all about you. They smiled patiently with disbelief. I always knew that you would succeed no matter what you tried, and I know you did it all in spite of me. And there's a later line that is just the saddest thing. Last night I saw you in my living room.

You seemed so close, but yet so cool. for a long time, I thought that you'd be coming back to me. Those kind of thoughts can be so cruel. Man, if that doesn't encapsulate the horror of not being in charge of your own thoughts and emotions, I don't know what does. Just being a captive to your brain and the shit that it decides to make you go through in your brain, you know? Oh, it's just a sad, sad song. The next song is, it's another bad idea song.

It's a song about him meeting with a woman every Thursday. afternoon, a married woman, and playing pool and drinking and then having, being kind of happy with that routine that they had and then decided to take it a step further, you know, physically and getting caught and having to flee town to escape the ramifications of it. And it is a, it's a fun song. It's basically the story of James Hurley in season two of Twin Peaks. The next song is the title track, Cure for Pain. It, uh, another bluesy, jazzy, really good song. This one got some radio play as it deserved to. The next song is really fun. It's called Mary, Won't You Call My Name, and it's real catchy, and it's easy to sing along to,

and you'll like it. And unfortunately, the next song, Let's Take a Trip Together is the one song on the album that really just doesn't resonate with me. I've just never gotten into it. It's a little slow and meandering for me. But the final two songs, Sheila, is the, that's a little bit. It's a little bit. song about a witch and her cat, I guess. I don't know. It's a good song. The final song is Miles Davis Funeral, which is an instrumental, which is, I think, a great way to end the album. And since I was inspired last week to sit down on my sofa and listen to that album in its entirety, I have done it two more times. I did it once over the weekend. And then this morning, I got on my bike after streaming, and I just listened to the entire album over and over again.

to it about one and a half times. And I got to say, if you're, if you haven't listened to an album start to finish in a while, if that's not the way you consume music anymore, or if you've maybe never consumed music that way, give it a shot. It's great to listen to the complete thought. It really is. And I'm inspired to do it more in 2026 because of Cure for Pain. So thank you to the coffee shop, whichever the fuck coffee shop I was at that was playing that song, because it inspired me to, reconnect with a band. I really loved when I was growing up and one that I still have some exploring to do. I know all five of their albums, but I don't know the other four nearly as well as I know Cure for Pain. And I'm going to rectify that. But now that we've talked

about how inspiring that album was and how I'm going to listen to music differently in 2026, and I'd recommend you give it a shot too if you're not already doing it. I should probably talk about how things ended. Unfortunately, on July 3rd, 1999, Morphine was playing a show at the Nell Nome de Rock Festival at the Giardini del Principi in Palestrina, Italy, which is just outside of Rome. And Mark Sandman had a heart attack on stage in the middle of their set. He was rushed to a hospital, but was pronounced dead in the ambulance on the way. The band immediately broke up, obviously. And a great genius was taken from us

at the tender age of 47 years old, far too young. I never saw morphine play live, but I did have the absolute honor to see the orchestra morphine perform at Lazzona Rosa in Austin. About a year after he died, Collie and Conway created Orchestra Morphine, which was a group full of Sandman's friends and colleagues, and they toured to celebrate Mark Sandman and the music of Morphine, and they raised funds for the Mark Sandman Music Education Fund.

I got to go to the show. It was wonderful. All of these incredible musicians got up and they sang songs from the Morphine catalog and celebrated him and talked about him. And it was a really wonderful thing to get to participate in. and I have heard that since then, I know orchestra morphine, I think they may get together and play occasionally still, but not tour,

just wherever they live, which is probably, I would assume, Massachusetts. But I do know that the other members of the van at some point reformed as members of morphine, and then I think they changed that to something called the ever-expanding elastic waistband, but that eventually may have culminated into

them being called vapors of morphine, yeah, which I think is the current iteration. Unfortunately, Billy Conway, the drummer died in 2021, but Dana Colley and Jerome Dupree, I believe, are both still involved in vapors of morphine and they perform, I think, pretty regularly in Boston and maybe even tour a little bit. So there is some sort of lineage of morphine out there still performing and celebrating their music and that feels pretty cool to me because they were, I know I said it earlier, but just an absolute one of one. No one, at least that I've ever heard, sounded like them before or since. I think they're almost impossible to categorize. Or maybe we should just use Sandman's words

and say that they were low rock, I guess. Also, in my research, I found a cool quote from Mark Sandman about the name of the band that I thought I would lead you guys with. The word morphine comes from the word Morpheus, who is the god of dreams. And that kind of appealed to us as a concept. I've heard there's a drug called morphine, but that's not where we're coming from. We were dreaming. Morpheus comes into our dreams, and we woke up and we started this band. We're all wrapped up in this dream message, and we were all compelled to start this band.

And I think that's kind of how it feels to listen to it. Go prove me right or wrong. Let me know what you think of morphine. Send me an email to Eric at Jeff's boss.com. Song of the day is going to be a tofer. No, yes. Yeah. It's going to be a twofer.

Listen to I'm free now and then listen to in spite of me. See you next time. All right.