What is Fake Leather Jacket?

Fake Leather Jacket has been a lot of things over the past fifteen years. At first, it was a blog that I kept up with extremely sporadically throughout college and for a few years after. I wrote mostly about music I was finding on Bandcamp and Youtube wormholes, which were both new outlets for me to discover artists that I wouldn't have found otherwise. But every now and then I'd post about something different - thoughts on politics, life, death, being in a band, being on tour, etc. I had a journalism degree and needed a place to write things out, but now it's gone - thank god.

During that time, there was a literal fake leather jacket that I wore often, verging on daily during the fall and winter months in Indianapolis, IN, where I'm from. It had a pins covering both breast pockets because that was a thing for me then. The buttons varied vastly but depicted my search for an identity within both the world of musicianship and the world of music listeners: The Rolling Stones, Nine Inch Nails, The Germs, Sleep, The Faint, Black Flag, Jawbreaker, DEVO, etc. It wasn't sleek, shiny and black. It wasn't worn-in, vintage and cool either, but something else; a knock-off of an outdated fashion, made of composite bullshit and sold by a store at the mall.

Shortly before moving to Oakland, CA, that jacket left me and I stopped posting on the blog. There were things to do and jobs to work. At one of those jobs I met Max and we started to have these conversations about pop stars, music, history and politics that began to take on a tone that we both enjoyed. We were having fun and finding out that we each come from unique background: Max is an academic from the granola fields of Santa Cruz, while I'm just an all-around badass punk guy who spent a few years writing about music for an alt-weekly. Eventually those four shifts together each week turned into a friendship and a podcast that would happen irregularly over the past seven years, between band practices, dungeons & dragons campaigns, bartending shifts and global pandemics.

We've spent the past year taking it a bit more seriously by putting together one episode per month and organizing a nice mix of guests to help us dive into things. Over time, we've started using a movie to focus our thoughts through a lens of conversation, allowing us to inhabit all of these different eras, genres and musical worlds while critically (and sarcastically) making comparisons to the bleak political universe that we currently live in. That said, it usually ends up being equal parts silly, serious, personal and informative, which is a nice balance. Check out our recent episode on Blues Brothers 2000 to get a sense of what we're up to.

Now, we're starting this blog/newsletter to find a home for the lists, essays and any other ideas that can't quite make it onto the podcast. In addition to the monthly episode of the podcast, we'll be adding another post here that could be a review, a rumination, an interview or something else entirely. If that sounds interesting, or if you'd like to continue enabling the two of us, please subscribe - thank you.

-Jordan