Origins

Way back in the dark ages of the Internet, a bunch of young music nerds got together and formed the Web Reviewing Community, as well as lasting friendships based a shared love of music of all kinds and of slinging (mostly) friendly insults at each other when we disagree.  Almost twenty years later, we've decided to roll with the times and adapt to a new medium, and now our shared creative outlet is our music podcast, Discord & Rhyme.

Concept

Every episode, we pick an album and discuss it song by song, including background information about the band, the making of the album, and how we all discovered it in the first place. We're opinionated and passionate, so there is plenty of both discord and rhyme. You'll find lots of rock here, but also funk, R&B, hip-hop, jazz, bluegrass, and maybe even a symphony or two.

Click on our names to find the episodes we’ve each hosted!

Rich Bunnell

Rich is a Bay Area native who lives with his wife, dog, and cat in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he learned how to pass drivers on the left and discovered beers that aren’t IPAs. He fights climate change by day, devours cinema by night, and devotes what shreds of attention span remain to pop music. He can name the eight Robot Masters from Mega Man 2 in less than three seconds, and has a homemade mural that shows he means business. His brain’s favorite band is XTC and his heart’s favorite band is They Might Be Giants.

Mike DeFabio

Mike is Discord & Rhyme’s expert knob twiddler in residence. He comes from Richmond, California, but wants you to think he’s from space. His day job involves riding around on a brightly colored bus full of books and being annoyed by children. He relaxes at home by listening to an awful lot of different kinds of music and sometimes by making experimental bleep bloop music of his own as The Other Leading Brand. His favorite musical instrument is the Mellotron. He probably likes your dog.

John McFerrin

John lives in Chicago with his wife and two kids (who are currently sleep-sucking vampires) where he works as a financial software developer (despite having mixed feelings on both quantitative finance and programming) and writes (at a maddeningly slow pace) about rock and pop music for a Web 1.0 site he’s had since 1999. He likes prog rock more than most people but thinks most hardcore prog fans are myopic weirdos, and he uses a hexadecimal rating system for his website because decimal is so passe. He likes classical music and jazz a lot and will look side-eyed at anybody who doesn’t like “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun” or “Sketches of Spain.” He listens to a ton of Great Courses sets and will talk your head off on why Henry Clay should have been President. He is a Mormon Democrat, which is basically the real life equivalent of Jumbo Shrimp.

Benjamin marlin

A long time ago, Ben was Cosmicben, and he had the lime-green music review website to prove it. These days, he writes books analyzing his favorite artists - so far The Who and David Bowie. His musical tastes were best summed up by fellow Discord-er Rich Bunnell: "I'm Ben Marlin I don't like Sign o' the Times, blah blah blah Neil Young blah blah blah." Ben grew up in Miami, spent ten wild years in New York City, and is now tackling home ownership in Holbrook, MA. His world is his wife and son and their cat.

Amanda Rodgers

Amanda grew up near Chicago, went to college near Seattle, and now lives near Toronto with a husband, daughter, and dog. She has a day job at a record store, where she spends her time convincing people to buy Moody Blues records. Likes: Mexican food, music biographies, coffee, Jesus. Dislikes: bugs, pollen, roller coasters, opera.

Phil Maddox

Phil lives with his wife in Columbia, MD, where he works as a software engineer. He spends most of his spare time searching for music at various local used record shops, following speedrunners on Twitch as they play ancient NES games, and absorbing as much interesting comedy and animation as he can. His collection of Phish concerts is large enough that it has been described by more than one colleague as “sad.”

Dan Watkins

Dan is the podcast’s resident southern gentleman living in Birmingham, Alabama, with his wife and three cats. When not swimming in spreadsheets at his day job as a CPA, he enjoys filling his house with records, attempting to cook beyond his abilities, marathoning episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000, and brewing the occasional batch of beer. Dan’s endless enthusiasm for music has led to questionable life choices such as planning vacation spots based on proximity of record stores and even coercing his wife into seeing King Crimson while on their honeymoon in Rome. Dan owns an alto sax and a guitar, and he’s lousy at both.

Chris Willie Williams*

Will records smartass electronic-ish-indie-pop music under the name Disclaimer. His most recent album, 2016's They Burned for 18 Days!, is a satire about the end of America that turned out to be weirdly prescient. (D&R cohorts Mike, Amanda, and Ben helped out with the album to one degree or another.) He is married to Bev Williams, who wrote the zombie novel Survival Kit's Apocalypse. Will and Bev live with a dog, a cat, and a bird, but all they've ever done is build half a Learjet. Like, thanks: I'll just fly halfway to Atlantic City, and spend only half the child support money once I get there. Whatever, dog/cat/bird.

*2018-2021