Joe was one of Music Babble’s true middleweight champions: never the loudest, rarely the flashiest, but reliable and resonant, with posts that always carried a little more thought than they first let on. He had a broad, populist taste without ever coming off as middlebrow—like someone who’d rather listen to the Traveling Wilburys than explain why Faust IV was overrated, and who saw no contradiction in loving both. He’d chime in on Dylan or Neil Young or The Band with quiet authority, not trying to win arguments, just giving his take like a guy sliding into the booth at a diner you’ve both been going to for years.

He had a knack for cutting through the noise with a few plainspoken sentences, and while he rarely went long or waxed analytical, he was never glib. He was someone who listened to music the way people used to: often, deeply, and with room for joy. His posts were marked more by warmth than provocation, more by memory than metrics. If Music Babble was a barroom, Joe was the guy on the third stool from the end, nodding at the jukebox and saying, “Now this is a good one,” just before you remembered why you liked it too.

. . .

Joe H. was Babble’s resident formalist—not in the academic sense, but in the way a seasoned craftsman is formal: precise, consistent, and uninterested in fads. He had his critical frameworks, and he applied them rigorously, often giving the sense that each album he discussed was being measured against a permanent yardstick he’d carved decades ago. He leaned a bit rockist in the older sense—albums over singles, substance over sheen—but he wasn’t doctrinaire about it. When he liked something, you believed it was earned.

His posts often had a dry, midwestern clarity to them: no affect, no pandering, no indulgence in irony. He could be blunt, sometimes even curt, but rarely mean. If he shot something down, it wasn’t with flair or vitriol—it was with a kind of weary objectivity, like he was saving you the trouble. He liked the artists you’re supposed to like—Dylan, Springsteen, Neil Young, the Beatles—but his defenses of them never felt boilerplate. He wrote with the conviction of someone who still felt the music in his bones but had no time for pretense. In a room of genre-jumping, taste-mashing iconoclasts, Joe H. held the line. And somehow, that made him radical in his own way.

. . .

Tabernacles E. Townsfolk posts like a man who knows too much and cares even more. Erudite without being pedantic, funny without reaching for it, and stoned in the way Ginsberg might have admired—his voice is one of the few online that feels fully lived-in. He writes long when the mood strikes, short when it doesn’t, always with a sense of rhetorical rhythm that scans closer to early 20th-century essayists than to your average forum rat. Whether breaking down Toscanini’s fidelity quirks or speculating on Afghan cuisine mid-review, his posts wander—but purposefully, with associative logic and personal color that make the digressions half the point.

He shares a lineage with the better old-school rock critics—Christgau if he had a soul, Bangs if he read more. But Tabernacles isn’t trying to write like anyone but himself. He’s the guy who will rate all nine of his Eroica LPs on a weed brownie, but also contextualize each one historically, sonically, and emotionally, and tell you which conductor makes him “give a shit about the scherzo.” There’s a moral seriousness to his playfulness, and a reverence for the canon that never turns into reverence for authority. He writes from the margins of the Internet like they’re a pulpit, or a college quad, or a used record store just after closing time.

In short, he’s Babble’s columnist-in-residence. If he’s posting, read it. You’ll either learn something, laugh, or both.