Chris Stafford is twenty-five and he has fronted the Cajun punk band Feu Follet since he was eight. In that time, he has mastered every instrument that has crossed his path. Stafford is overqualified for punk rock, which rarely admits professional musicians, much less prodigies.

No matter how meticulously I planned for the upcoming SXSW music festival, I couldn't guess what it would be like returning for the first time to the city I used to call home. With an overwhelming sense of regret for having left Austin (for Little Rock, AR) and, conversely, for having stayed as long as I did, I couldn't imagine a more appropriate or grander finale than seeing Big Star live in concert, the band that wrote the soundtrack to youthful ambivalence and dislocation.

Amid the visual noise of digital billboards and lighted logos, hand-painted signs stand out as relics of a bygone era of commercial signage. Shaped by the mechanical limits of a paintbrush, they are individualized, material objects — attributes that make them easy to fetishize in our digital age.

Indecent musings on Leon Bass’s Love-a-Rama