The Sandy Hut didn’t use to be the sort of place that would make an IG reel or Yelp. It was the kind of place you’d go for the exact opposite reasons. Plus, the drinks were cheap, the pours were long, and no one asked any questions.
It was also relatively close to the airport. In 2001, I was a newly minted crew chief working nights, and it was close enough that we could finish a shift, rush to the employee lot, and make it there in time for last call. If we hit the lights just right, we might get in two rounds.
Late-night drinks after 2nd shift….A pile of new (to you) records in the back seat…. Conversations at the table or on the way home. These things seem minor while they are happening. Then years pass, and you realize they have become important parts of your memory. You might not fully recognize yourself in the scene anymore, but on some level you remember. These memories lie in wait like sleeper agents waiting to be triggered by events like an album bracket challenge or the passing of a drummer.
As some of you know, I’ve been in a Best Record of 2001 bracket challenge, and Jimmy Eat World’s Bleed American is making a (surprising to me) deep run in the tournament. I bring this up because if anything reminds me of that era, it’s this record and the (not surprising to me) hit “The Middle.”
This era has also been front of mind because it seemed slower. Not boring slow, just slower-paced. Look, I know there were rushes and drama and all the other things that speed the clock up, but now we’ve got shiny new synonyms for “hurry,” space-age terms like automation, acceleration, optimization, productivity, and scale. These all meant very different things 25 years ago. Now I see people generating “skills” via AI for things like news briefings, managing Slack channels (what would we have thought about that in ’01?!), and reminders to talk to people. When the end goal is more leisure time, then the bargain becomes less Faustian. Unfortunately, it’s usually used to crowbar more work into the same number of hours: more documents, more projects, more messages. More, more, more!
Companies know people generally like being productive and feeling useful, and they have weaponized it, feeding us the idea that fast/more equals good. It’s never about “new frontiers in tech” or “meeting customers where they’re at.” It’s always about cutting employee costs and driving down headcount while ramping up productivity. Ideally, it would be “work smarter, not harder.” Instead, we’re stuck with do more with less for the same money. My company is no different, having now decided to go all in on AI. Our company website is lousy with notes from the C-suite lauding this “visionary tech” that will revolutionize travel as we know it. Sure, ok. In practice, it really means passengers driven mad by agentic AI replacing call centers staffed with actual people (and real, learned skills), and Copilot making sure I know it’s there to help me type an email. I may type like a cop1, but I assure you I know my way around a keyboard. I didn’t think anything would eclipse Clippy on the annoying scale. Yet here we are. Color me surprised.
Then, as now, my job is to bend a whole lotta laws of physics and make sure no one gets hurt. The machinery has changed a bit, and the systems have changed a lot, but the underlying job is still recognizable: make difficult things happen, move people and their stuff all over the world, and do not let the pressure for speed become a link in a chain that leads to disaster. In other words, make the miracle of flight, well, kinda boring. In this universe, faster is sometimes necessary. But faster for its own sake isn’t. It should never be the default option, and we’re collectively over-indexing on that.
We used to be fed music, too. Radio stations, record stores, music magazines, A&R people, MTV—there were only so many ways for something to reach you. The gatekeepers ran the show, and that power was narrow, arbitrary, and occasionally unfair. On the plus side, we had shared experience. You heard a song because a DJ put it in rotation, or because you’d seen the video. Pop culture had fewer onramps. “Atomized” was definitely the stuff of science fiction and not a descriptor of listening habits. My first ZZ Top record was Eliminator, though the videos came first. You watched the video again (And again. And again). You learned the song before you knew much of anything about the people who made it. Google was still spelled Googol and was a number you only heard on the annual school trip to OMSI2.
Eventually, if you were lucky, you made it to the local record store and grabbed a copy of the album. This was still relatively true in 2001. In 2026, there’s no shortage of access. Every record is available somewhere. Every live performance, B-side, review, playlist, ranking, and recommendation is available on demand. You can have it all, right now. We no longer have to accept what we are handed. We have the weapon of choice.
On the one hand, it’s liberating. Knowledge is power and all that. It’s also really taxing. When nearly everything is at your fingertips, attention becomes a rare commodity. There’s more on the menu, and the challenge is no longer merely finding something good—it’s deciding what warrants your time. The same is true in our work. AI gives us an almost inexhaustible capacity to generate, summarize, research, plan, draft, respond, and optimize. The question is not whether this leads to more work—of course it will! Wall Street demands it. The question is whether we will use that abundance to make room for our lives or use it to appease the C-suite.
A few years ago, my oldest son and I were in Minneapolis for a soccer tournament (a sentence that would’ve very much surprised 2001 Kevin). Before making the drive back to Madison, we stopped at Electric Fetus. It wasn’t a planned side trip or anything. We just had some time, I wanted to go, and he was down. I found several records, including a copy of ZZ Top’s Degüello, which I’m surprised doesn’t get more love. He found quite a few, too.
We each walked out with full arms and lighter wallets, but our haul obviously stayed sealed for the drive home. I mean, it was vinyl after all. The car had Bluetooth, and we could have pulled up any ZZ Top song we wanted in seconds, but we didn’t. Nor did we listen to any of the artists he picked up. In fact, I’m pretty sure we didn’t even turn the radio on. The records rode along in the back while we talked. Something about crate digging had opened the conversational floodgates, and the drive became one of those rare stretches of time when nobody was in any hurry to get anywhere.
That Little Ol’ Band from Texas are the epitome of cool, but the better, cooler thing happened in the front seats. There was no productivity to extract from the miles. No need to turn the extra time into something useful or deliver some grand sermon from the parental Mount. And FFS, certainly no need to lean on AI for talking points.
In the same way that Bleed American reminds me of 2001 runs to the Sandy Hut, in my mind Degüello is that trip to Minneapolis, the tournament (a solid outing, FWIW), and the long drive back made way shorter by conversation that might not have happened in quite the same way otherwise. It’s all a reminder that the meaningful part of choice isn’t what you say yes to, but what you said no to to make it happen. Imagine a table full of coworkers staring at their phones. That’s some next-level suck.
My point is that our ecstatic devotion to these records is really a proxy for the life events they soundtrack. When we mourn the loss of someone like Frank Beard, it’s for him, of course, and the joy he brought untold numbers of us countless times, but it’s also a reckoning—a little earthquake, if you will—that the clock never stops running. Mother Nature’s got us all under pressure.
The ground is always shifting under our feet, whether we notice it or not. So are we.
Right on cue, when I heard that Frank Beard had died, “Move Me on Down the Line,” from Tres Hombres popped into my head. It wasn’t in that first tranche of MTV videos. It wasn’t the red car, the beards, or any of the imagery Viacom or the band’s record label made sure was imprinted on my brain 40+ years ago. It was from a record I came to much later, one I once called the soundtrack to adventure. The title popped up before I had quite formed any thoughts past that initial “Oh, shit.” That’s what songs do after enough time and enough listens.
Move me on down the line indeed.
Frank Beard’s death is sad because of who he was, of course— a lifetime of delivering boogie and mesquite-flavored grooves’ll do that. But again, it’s a reminder that the clock never stops running, and that life’s got one pace—breakneck. Time comes for everyone, and opting out isn’t an option. We can’t freeze the past, refuse the future, or stop the ground from shifting.
But! We can decide what we make room for. We can resist the instinct to give every dazzling tool another slice of our ever-dwindling attention. We can decide when to run and when to stop. We can buy any given record or not. We can play it or let conversations play out. We can use the tools without letting them turn every last empty inch of life into a place for ever more meaningless work.
I do not particularly like Bleed American or even “The Middle,” but I love the memories associated with it. When someone like Frank Beard leaves us, those posts that flood our timelines aren’t just for the musician themselves- in a lot of ways they’re an elegy for our own past lives.
And a reminder that we’re all movin’ on down the line.
I’d love to hear what you think.
Enjoy your weekend!
Drive South,
KA—
P.S. “It’s remarkable to sit down and try and write all about this and look back, and just be like, ‘Jesus, that kinda was unusual, wasn’t it?’” Huge news from friend of the newsletter Tony Fletcher
P.P.S. Think you know Muzak? Think again.
Paid subscribers: This week’s For the Record playlist is here. For new readers, this is a curated mix of tracks suggested by community members on Monday’s discussion threads. Sometimes I throw a couple of other ones in there as well. Not yet a subscriber? Please consider upgrading. Your next favorite playlist is waiting!
All credit to SW Lauden for that term!
The original location had a DC-3 parking next to the building you could walk through. You can probably guess what my favorite part of these field trips was. lol.
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