In this edition: Bad medicine, imperfect sound forever, know when to fold ’em, brainiacs, and a call of the wild.

What defines success when it comes to music? For Hrishikesh Hirway, who wrote four albums under the name The One AM Radio, it meant commercial attention. His interest in making music cooled after sales and airplay failed to materialize; he went 15 years without releasing an album. In this essay for The Bitter Southerner, Hirway looks at how he overcame perfectionism to write and record In the Last Hour of Light, an album heavy on collaboration.

“But Phil was echoing something I’d heard in the interviews I’d conducted and read about in books on writing: separate your creative, generative side from your editing, critical side. They push in opposite directions, and as soon as you start to edit, you’re no longer as free to play.”

“It was two days after my 47th birthday, which had left me feeling melancholy about reaching middle age and still feeling so far from my goals. I sat on my couch, put my headphones on, and played the album. Something had shifted for me. Somewhere around the third song, I felt something for the first time: I loved what I was hearing.

The music brought back memories with perfect clarity: what it felt like to write each song, to record them, the long journey to transform a part of myself into this music. It was no longer a question of the music’s worth. I can say to myself: this album is a document. And in it —listen!—you’re alive.”

In this edition: loving a killer; GRASE under fire; the marvelous mundane; Texas on two wheels; and the man who would be T. rex king.

He dresses up for his labor of love, always wearing a white shirt, a silk tie, and a blue four-pocket French work coat as he documents Nashville, Tennessee, moment-by-moment behind the lens of his Leica. Ray Di Pietro started photographing people and events in the city nine years ago and uses precise composition and framing to tell the story of the city and its people.

Di Pietro’s inspiration comes from a surprising place. Andy Warhol, one of his favorite artists (he has several authentic Warhol works), kept a meticulous record of how he spent his days for the 10 years leading up to his death. In 1989, the pop artist’s secretary-turned-collaborator, Pat Hackett, published the notes in a book called The Andy Warhol Diaries.

Warhol, of course, was famously obtuse and provocative. But stories of the flash and dash of the artist’s fame — the crazy parties at The Factory, Warhol’s legendarily debauched, silver foil-papered studio and clubhouse — weren’t necessarily what interested Di Pietro about the conceit. Nor did Warhol’s habit of recording appointments or expenses of the day, including doctors visits, meals, even the price of cab rides. Di Pietro admires Warhol as an accidental historian who documented global figures while recording his daily routine, whether his subjects were Jimmy Carter and the empress of Iran or Mick Jagger and Lou Reed. “He’s writing world history without knowing that it’s world history,” Di Pietro marvels.