Welcome to Every Thing After, where we talk about all the Things we love, and some of the Things we don't. 

We might talk about Ben "The Thing" Grimm of The Fantastic Four.

It's clobberin' time. 

When The Fantastic 4: First Steps comes out this July, there will have been three actors to rock that role -- Michael Chiklis, Jamie Bell, and now Ebon Moss-Bachrach. Who wore it better? We'll talk about that another time. 

But that's just one of the many Things, with a capital T, that we will talk about on this podcast. 

You'll hear us talk about how Back to the Future is unnervingly a lot like The Wizard of Oz, how Director Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises might have been intentionally bad, what Willy Wonka has in common with the Jedi, and whether or not the Matrix should have been a quadrilogy. 

But first, a little background on the "origin story" of Every Thing After, or as we also call it ETA. As in, what's your ETA? That's important because we want to hear from you -- if you have a Thing (capital T) to talk about, whether that's a movie, TV show, concert, album, play, book, game ... I'll let you know later how you can reach out, and possibly be a guest on a future episode. 

The title is also a nod to one of my favorite Things: Counting Crows, whose debut 1993 album was titled "August and Everything After." It's also the title of a song that was supposed to be on the album, but was left off for fear of the album being overly-ballad-y. Much later, in November 2018, the band recorded the song with the London Studio Orchestra for an Amazon exclusive. Thanks, Bozos. But fuck you, Bozos. 

You'll be hearing much more about Counting Crows over the life of this project, but I promise, there will be many more Things to talk about, too. 

The project originated, actually, as an idea I had about trying to leverage my 30-plus years as a journalist to possibly get access to photograph the band on their upcoming summer tour with The Gaslight Anthem. That spun off into an opportunity that I jumped at -- to be "Almost Famous" myself. Of course, I'm talking about the 2000 semi-autobiographical comedy drama written and directed by Cameron Crowe about a young aspiring rock journalist who follows a band on tour. Except, in my case, it'll be more like taking photos at concerts within a hundred mile radius of where I live, as many as I can, and writing reviews. You'll hear more about that later, too. 

This project has been a thrill to start to realize, as it's led me to reconnect with a lot of not-former-friends, because of course I'd like to think we're still friends, but friends I haven't talked to in a long while, just cause life gets in the way, you know? I realized, I know a lot of cool people who should have a podcast, or at least be on one frequently. They're photographers, writers, editors, musicians, filmmakers, artists, cartoonists -- all creatives. And they're a lot of fun to talk to about stuff like music, movies, shows, and books. You'll hopefully get to know many of them. 

Over the course of explaining this project to some of them, I found myself posing the rhetorical question more than once: Can a mid-life crisis be a podcast? I'm sure that the answer is yes. In that sense, maybe the extended title of this podcast is "Every Thing After My Midlife Crisis." But as another friend, who has his own podcast told me, a podcast is also just a good excuse to kick back and talk to your friends maybe once a week. I like that idea a lot. I hope you will, too.