Twenty-five years later, there are still certain songs I cannot hear without being transported back to the days and weeks after September 11, 2001. Music was everywhere. It was at memorial services. It was underneath television montages of firefighters walking through smoke and rubble. It was coming out of car radios while Americans were still trying to comprehend what had happened. Songs written years earlier suddenly meant something entirely different. Lyrics that had nothing to do with terrorism, Ground Zero or national grief were repurposed because we needed them. We needed language for something that didn’t have words yet. Some of those songs were explicitly patriotic. Others weren’t. A love…

SKILLET: AFTER THE STORM On paper, Skillet shouldn’t work. That sounds insulting, but I mean it as one of the highest compliments I can give them. Rock bands rarely get 30-year careers, and the ones that do certainly don’t tend to chart a trajectory that keeps climbing. Thirty years into Skillet, I can turn on UFC Freedom 250 and there they are. WWE used “Legendary” to open Monday Night Raw for years. “Monster,” released more than a decade into the band’s career, has become a streaming behemoth surpassing 4 billion streams. The audience is filled with kids who were not alive when Comatose came out, now screaming those songs next…