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Interview


How Dinosaur Jr. Learned to Tolerate One Another, Kind Of

For 40 years, J Mascis has quietly led his incredibly loud band into the annals of indie rock. But during his annual vacation in Cape Cod, he opened up about almost everything: interpersonal dynamics, why he has been short with journalists, and the delicate balance needed to keep the band going for as long as possible.


By Grayson Haver Currin


September 29, 2026


Every summer for the last 18 years, J Mascis’ family of three has made a pilgrimage four hours east across Massachusetts, from their home in Amherst to Provincetown, a fabulous vacation spot on the Cape’s northern tip. For three weeks, they ride bikes, swim, and share suppers with a procession of friends and family. If someone asks, Mascis may occasionally play a poolside party for Bear Week, strumming acoustic guitar for the world’s largest gathering of gay bearded men.

When I stopped by in mid-August, Mascis admitted this year’s trip was wearing him out: His two sisters and brother had just spent a week nearby, trying their best to recreate the camaraderie of their childhoods spent in another town on the Cape. Kim Gordon and Chloe Sevigny both have houses a few doors down, too; Daisy von Furth, who founded the fashion line X-girl with Gordon three decades ago, was crashing in the bedroom that Mascis’ son, Rory, recently vacated so he could start his first year at New York’s Pratt Institute. “It’s just social madness, the whole time in P-town,” Mascis told me with a sigh as we walked out of his rental home at dusk, so he could bike to Gordon’s place for yet another dinner. “I’m going to need a vacation from this vacation.”

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When their rental ended a few days later, Mascis and his wife, Luisa Reichenheim, hauled most of their stuff over to Gordon’s to spend a few extra nights by the beach before heading home. They were due, by week’s end, in New York, where Mascis would play several shows to mark the release of There Near, the ninth or 13th album by Mascis’ band, Dinosaur Jr., depending on how you do the math. But the pair worried they wouldn’t be able to squeeze everything into their car, so they asked a friend to haul some stuff to Amherst in his pickup. Mascis loaded the small Paul Reed Smith amplifier and Gibson guitar that had sat beside the dining-room table for weeks into the truck. And then he decided he was going home with them, two days early, like the dog owner who simply goes where it is led.


“The minute that guitar and amp left, J was like, ‘I’m outta here.’ Kim and I were cracking up—take his amp away, and he’s gone,” Reichenheim tells me a few weeks later from her sun porch back in Amherst. Mascis, she confirms, is a few rooms away, playing guitar. “His life is like one giant guitar solo. He watches TV and plays guitar, talks to people on the phone and plays guitar. I don’t know what it does to his synapses, but he hears it all in his head.”



During the last 42 years, Mascis has become an unlikely but reliably invigorating guitar hero. With Dinosaur Jr., he has recast the exquisite ache of Neil Young at obliterative volume, with hooks that seem both effortless and ceaseless. A string of self-made solo records in recent years has showcased an under-heralded folk-rock stylist, too, a gentle singer who understands the frisson of an unhinged electric solo in an acoustic song.

He also helped hoist the Stooges’ Ron Asheton out of retirement before his death, started a band with Widespread Panic’s Dave Schools, and once sat in with Tony Bennett for a taping of MTV Unplugged, taking the lead on a song he admitted he’d never heard. (“The high and low point of my career,” he tells me, “because all my Italian relatives love Tony Bennett. But I wound up on the cutting room floor.”) When Kurt Cobain asked him to join Nirvana in 1989, he essentially shrugged. “I had just graduated to being able to stay in motels and not on floors,” he tells me now, “but they were still in the floor phase. I’m not going back to the floors.”


Mascis, however, avoids the usual trappings of a guitar god. Onstage with Dinosaur Jr., he is largely still, save for his fingers and feet, standing like someone who hopes to be swallowed by the triple tower of Marshall stacks behind him. He exudes no amount of cocksure bravado, admits he doesn’t know how to play anyone else’s songs unless he studies them first on YouTube, and, even at 60, seems to doubt that he’s even a very good guitarist. He tells me about reading a comment after he played with the Roots’ Captain Kirk Douglas in 2023 that suggested Mascis didn’t warrant so much amplification. “I was just like, ‘God damn, you’re right,’” he tells me at the Cape Cod kitchen table late one afternoon, his little amp still at his feet. “Maybe I don’t deserve them, but I have them.”


Throughout his career, Mascis has said so little to so many interviewers that it has become a punchline. A French journalist once arrived for a conversation with crayons, asking him simply to draw since he was “boring and difficult,” a memory that still makes him grimace. The Guardian called him “laconic, phlegmatic, apathetic, listless” in 2024. He resents all of this. “I’m not experiencing myself like these people. I think I talk all the time,” he says, grinning a little. “Maybe if you ask me a stupid question, it doesn’t inspire me to say anything.”

But I’ve always heard Mascis’ enormous catalogue of songs as his vast emotional repository, the place where a taciturn guy and explosive guitarist has sunk a lifetime of lingering sadness without anyone ever really noticing. I wanted to know if that was right, especially because, in the last 20 years, he has accomplished one of rock’n’roll’s rarest feats: reuniting his classic indie rock band and redoubling its legacy by making some of the most compelling records of his lifetime. From 1985 to 1988, Mascis, bassist Lou Barlow, and drummer Murph issued a series of three unimpeachable records. But they didn’t like each other much, leading to a famously bitter breakup and a public feud that lasted until 2005, when reissues prompted them to step tentatively onstage for a few shows. It turned into six new and very good albums.

They still don’t really like each other. But the original Dinosaur Jr. trio remains one of the true lasting exemplars of indie rock, as formative for alternative rock’s ascent in the ’90s as for the modern mix of indie rock and country exemplified by, say, Wednesday and M.J. Lenderman. Spiral Stairs recently told me there were so many Dinosaur Jr. soundalikes on Slanted & Enchanted he worried Pavement would get in trouble. Stephen Malkmus echoed him: “You’re Living All Over Me gave us ideas about how to handle the classic rock we all grew up with.” Micah Nelson, the country music scion who plays the guitar Mascis helped design for Fender in Crazy Horse, told me Dinosaur Jr. makes “sad songs at full blast.”

So I crashed Mascis’ family vacation in Cape Cod. We swam and biked and picked up a portrait of him with his English bulldog, Candy. We sat at the kitchen table and talked for seven hours, a fact that made Kim Gordon, one of his best friends for four decades, tease me. “I told him he shouldn’t have said all that,” she says, laughing. “But he must have enjoyed it.” He joked about how he might have acquired tennis elbow during an alien abduction, raved about recent additions to a guitar collection so vast he lost count long ago, and talked about how depression had set in when he was a teenager and never quite vanished. An enthusiastic gossip, he told me about taking sides amongst divorced friends and about which White Lotus actors staying in Provincetown were feuding so many times that Reichenheim had to remind him more than once that I was a reporter.

He talked about fatherhood and finding something like peace after his career fell apart in the late ’90s, the frustrations of tinnitus and our collective tendency to overanalyze everything we do, to think about doing rather than simply doing. He just wants to play guitar. “No one said to my dad, ‘Do you like being a dentist right now?’ I’m a dentist. What are you talking about?” he says softly. “I don’t want to spend my life thinking about what I should or shouldn’t be doing. I’m just living.”

As Mascis and I biked down a paved path one afternoon, having swum and splashed in Cape Cod Bay only long enough to get cold, I told him about living on top of a Colorado canyon. Every day, people ride their bikes to the top, climbing 3,000 feet in three miles, then zip downhill and through hairpin turns at unbelievable speeds. He groaned.

“I wouldn’t do that. I don’t like the ups or the downs, ever,” he said as he coasted down a little hill. “I just like to cruise.”

Mascis remembers himself as part of the Amherst in-crowd, a smart and popular kid. He resented his family’s Cape Cod vacations because it meant missing baseball games. He was a strong infielder who loved the Boston Red Sox and still sees their 1975 World Series loss to the Cincinnati Reds as a pivotal life memory—that’s how he learned about disappointment. He won a local golf championship when he was nine, mostly because there wasn’t anyone else in his division. And he was the best math student in school. In fact, when Mascis stops to consider it, that might have been why, when he was 13, he decided the time had come to drop out of society. He liked the school’s second-best math student, but she didn’t like him back. “I don’t know,” he says, chuckling. “It could have played a role?”

He’d been strong in baseball tryouts that year, but suddenly a switch flipped. “I had one friend, and I just turned my back on society,” Mascis says. “I was like, ‘I hate all these people.’ I’m gonna grow my hair and listen to Black Sabbath.”

The expectations at home, after all, were low. His older brother, Mike, was a good kid and an altar boy, taking the pressure off Mascis to excel at much of anything. Another brother, born soon after Mike, died at birth. His grave is marked by a tombstone that reads “Baby Mascis.” Mascis himself was born upside down with his umbilical cord wrapped around his neck. “My mom was really happy that I didn’t die,” he says, “because the kid before had died at two hours old. And then she had a few more miscarriages.”

His mom, Theresa, struggled with depression and slept until noon most days. He learned to fend for himself, find his own breakfast, and get himself to school. But she did help him cobble together a drum kit with pieces gifted by a family friend and augmented with parts picked up around town for $30 or so. “I never had a matching kit till I was on a major label,” he remembers. “This kid I know had a bar mitzvah, and he got a matching Ludwig kit: What the fuck? I’ve gotta be Jewish!”

Motley kit or not, Mascis quickly became known as a drumming hotshot in Amherst. Murph, a year older than Mascis, moved to town from Connecticut when he was 14. He’d just bought his used kit from a pawnshop and played along to Jimi Hendrix and Steppenwolf in his bedroom with his mattress propped up against a window to soften the sound. But Mascis had taken lessons, played timpani in the orchestra, joined the school jazz band. Murph used to hide away in the cafeteria, skipping his own classes to witness Mascis play in the jazz band’s public jam sessions.


“I was like, ‘Screw school, man. I’m going to watch this,’” Murph, a jovial 61-year-old, tells me from his parked car one afternoon. “It was fascinating to see this guy who could play jazz just rip into these insane solos, half-jazz, half-hardcore. I would just be like, ‘Who the fuck does this?’”

Murph soon became a groupie for Deep Wound, the blistering hardcore quartet Mascis started with Barlow, another teenage guitarist from a nearby town named Westfield. Murph wasn’t even a punk; he was a stoner who preferred the hijinks of Frank Zappa or the escapades of Mahavishnu Orchestra. “But I could see that they wanted to be the fastest hardcore band in existence,” he remembers. “You could see them practicing, trying to achieve it. And that’s what really impressed me—they were not going to stop until they achieved it.”

Deep Wound did stop after only two years. But they lasted long enough to put out a nine-song 7", appear on a compilation organized by Mascis’ new University of Massachusetts friend Gerard Cosloy, and get savaged by Steve Albini in a zine. When they split, Mascis surprised Barlow by asking him to join his next band, although it seemed Barlow was the only person in Deep Wound he actively disliked. “I assumed I was invited to be in J’s band because Deep Wound’s bassist wasn’t available,” Barlow admits. “And I still believe that.”

Barlow opted to swallow this self-doubt because he believed in Mascis’ musical vision. Mascis had started writing songs in Deep Wound out of necessity, simply because they needed more material. In the new band, he wanted to switch to guitar and do more of that work. “People will be like, ‘How did you learn guitar so fast?’” Mascis says, using the high-pitched voice he invokes for imitating almost anyone. “I was only writing what I could play at the time. I couldn’t do bar chords, so I had to just move my fingers around until something would sound good. And then I could play faster than I knew what to do with.”

This was an era of heavy bands playing power chords and poppy bands playing chords inherited from folk and country. Mascis wanted to do something in between, Barlow remembers, something that was heavy but not metal. The idea was for Barlow, now on bass, to play high up his instrument’s neck, pushing against the guitar’s lead. Mascis would write the drum parts that Deep Wound’s acolyte, Murph, would then play. “The way I play bass to J’s guitar was something that J masterminded, and I completely believed in it. I’ve never had musical differences with J,” Barlow tells me. “The quality was super high, and the personal parts mattered less to me than that quality.”

The band’s self-titled 1985 debut, called Dinosaur before a lawsuit forced them to affix the Jr., zig-zagged through ragged post-punk and raging psychedelia, spurred on by the stylistic breakthrough of Meat Puppets II. Homestead Records, operated by Mascis’ new pal Cosloy, released it to mild underground fanfare. But it was the honey-sweet hooks of 1987’s You’re Living All Over Me that signaled a true arrival. Sonic Youth had just left Homestead for SST, so they mailed an early copy of their buddy-band’s tape to California. Mascis had one goal ever for Dinosaur: sign to SST. It was done, even if it cost him a friendship. “Gerard was kind of collateral damage to me achieving my goal,” says Mascis. “I was sad about Gerard, but what are you going to do?”

Having navigated social anxiety since he was a kid, Barlow had learned to be silent in Mascis’ presence for fear of causing conflict. But his transfixing lo-fi montage, “Poledo,” which closed out You’re Living All Over Me, caught the ear of a Smith College DJ, Kathleen Billus. When she interviewed Barlow, he caught her eye, too; he suddenly started to believe in himself. “I had no girlfriends. I had no life,” says Barlow. “She liked me and thought I was cool, because I was in Dinosaur Jr. That was my first girlfriend. I opened up and started talking. I knew it bugged J, but I didn’t care.”

For nearly four decades, Mascis has insisted he liked Barlow just fine until this point—until, as he puts it, the nerd who would have been shoved into lockers began to crawl out of his shell. “It was just a 180: ‘I am Lou. I am everything,’” Mascis deadpans. “It was off-putting to me every time.” I ask him if it still is, and he grins: “Depends.”

Three months after Barlow met Billus, during a December show in Connecticut, he and Mascis fought on stage, lunging and screaming at one another while Murph cupped his hands over his eyes, trying to see this long-simmering situation boil over amid the stage lights. (Remarkably, you can watch the footage online; I always find myself almost cheering.) Mascis believed Barlow was ruining a song on purpose, trying to lash out. “I would never do that,” Barlow insists now. “The only thing holding us together was the songs.” The trio lasted long enough after those fisticuffs to release 1988’s remarkable Bug, which opened with Mascis’ generational anthem, “Freak Scene,” and ended with Barlow singing “Don’t,” a demented six-minute roar during which the bassist repeatedly berates Mascis with one fundamental question: “Why don’t you like me?” The boss took a continuous guitar solo as Barlow screamed, as if trying to drown out the whining.

Two years after finding his first girlfriend, who in turn became his first wife, Barlow was out of Dinosaur Jr. When I ask if he thought he would ever play with Mascis again, he hesitates, sighs, and grimaces: “Not really, no.”


When Mascis was five, he had his first beer. It was a hot day, his father explained, and that’s just what people did. He gave him one. Four years later, when Mascis was nine, a judge hosting a party in town winked at him and a buddy, telling them there was booze in the basement. They got wasted. “It was pretty cool,” Mascis says, voice cracking happily.

After Mascis hit the skids of teenage rebellion, he liked booze and weed for a year, maybe two. But then he became a hardcore kid, so the new rebellion was obvious: He went straight-edge, taking it seriously through the first iteration of Dinosaur Jr. Waiting with our bikes at a stop sign in Provincetown, I ask when he finally broke edge. “Oh, when Lou left the band,” he says, the phrase he always uses for the person he fired. “I wanted to be more sociable, to pick up girls, to talk to them.”

The ’90s were, for Mascis, a weird ride. He signed a major-label deal after Barlow left, finally getting his matching drum kit but strangely dialing back the guitar on their Sire debut, 1991’s Green Mind. “You’re on a major label, and you want it to be cleaner,” says Mascis. “You think that’s how majors sound, but I had no idea.”

Green Mind barely broke into the charts, but seven months later, the band he’d opted out of, Nirvana, began to dominate them. Barlow ran into Mascis in Massachusetts soon after Nevermind’s release. He harangued Mascis about how Nirvana’s fame had belonged to Dinosaur until Mascis fucked it all up. Mascis disagreed then as now, insisting his voice didn’t sound, as he puts it, like the radio. “And I didn’t want that as a goal. You have to have that in mind,” he says. “My goal was to be on SST, and I achieved it. I didn’t have the burning desire to make it, to prove to those kids in high school I was whatever.”

But the next-Nirvana expectation dogged Mascis through the ’90s, as it did so many of his peers. Where You Been, from 1993, was the closest Dinosaur Jr. ever came, with Spin putting Mascis on the cover alongside the headline “J Mascis is God” and “Start Choppin” almost becoming a legitimate hit. It was also a spectacularly hard year. Mascis’ mom had died in 1985, when he was 19, right as Dinosaur released its debut. His dad, Joseph, Sr., died in February 1993, a week before Where You Been’s release. They had lived together as late as 1992—Joseph even appeared in one of his son’s music videos. “It felt like such a hard time,” remembers Megan Jasper, the current Sub Pop CEO who met Mascis at a Misfits show in Boston when they were both teenagers. “I’d never seen J do anything, but he liked brown liquor after that.”

And then, a month later, well, he met the girl. Reichenheim first saw Mascis in November 1987, when she and her boyfriend went to see Dinosaur Jr. open for the Gun Club in Berlin. She barely remembers it, having smoked so much weed she simply stood in front of the PA trying not to pass out. She saw them again a few years later in Berlin, on the Green Mind tour. “I remember my friend was one of the promoters, and she said, ‘Oh my god, that’s J Mascis—he’s on drugs, and he’s so weird,’” she remembers. “And, of course, he wasn’t. He was straight-edge.”

In March 1993, Mascis sat in with fIREHOSE and Gumball at Electric Lady Studios for Columbia Records Radio Hour. Reichenheim had moved to Williamsburg that very day. She approached him. “I just talked about myself the whole time, basically chewing his ear off,” she remembers. “Apparently he liked it.”

Reichenheim married her boyfriend, Chavez guitarist Matt Sweeney, later that year. Mascis went to the wedding and befriended her brother, inviting him to go on vacation in Alaska a week later. (Reichenheim’s brother, Phillip, made the excellent 2021 Dinosaur Jr. documentary, Freakscene.) Mascis was still living in Massachusetts, but he would often spend his weeks in New York before heading home for the weekend. They remained close friends—“part of this downtown scene,” Reichenheim says. And then, as 1997 began, both of their lives crumbled. Reichenheim’s first marriage splintered. For the first time, Sire told Mascis that Dinosaur Jr.’s new album, Hand It Over, needed a hit; that was the beginning of the end.

The ups-and-downs of a dozen years in Dinosaur Jr. and the ’90s at large had left their mark on Mascis. He’d often been Barlow’s very public target through the decade, from a Sebadoh EP named Asshole with an opening track titled “Pig (Coward)” to a hometown Sebadoh show where Barlow berated Mascis as his own mother looked on. “I was just kind of depressed, and I needed all the help I could get,” he remembers. His therapist suggested he visit Mother Meera, an Indian spiritual teacher who touches attendees’ temples during a silent service. It was helpful if not transformative.

The same person suggested he go see Mata Amritanandamayi, or Amma, another Indian spiritual teacher who has now hugged around 40 million people as part of her practice. He first tried to meet her in New York, but the event was too crowded for Mascis to engage. When he went again to see her in Boston, it clicked. Reichenheim came from a long line of ministers, and she wanted to become a nurse; Amma’s ideas of self-sacrifice appealed to her sensibility. For Mascis, the whole ceremony simply felt good—the hug, the meditation, the music.

Amma’s directive was simple but complicated: “Just be nice to people,” Mascis says, laughing and drumming on the kitchen table, a Carnelian bracelet tight around his left wrist. “I wasn’t the nicest kid, and I’ve never been overly nice. I can be an asshole, but I’m working on it. It’s a constant.”

With the band done in late 1997, Mascis booked solo tours around Amma’s appearances, and he and Reichenheim followed her across the United States and Europe. She recently watched Summer Tour, the Dead & Company documentary produced and directed by two Provincetown regulars, Sevigny and Mischa Richter. She was never a Deadhead, but she identified with the devotional intensity from discovering and then trailing Amma, how it had changed both of their lives.

“Practicing some sort of spirituality came naturally to me, but in New York, that got lost in the shuffle of working, of trying to make things work. And J had been working so hard, coming out of his whole career in the ’90s,” Reichenheim reckons. “We connected in that way—‘Hey, there’s something else out there to explore about the world, about yourself.’”

They began visiting India for weeks at the time, living in Amma’s ashram. Reichenheim volunteered in the hospital, while Mascis worked in the café, making chai, or playing spiritual songs and chants he’d written. Amma officiated their wedding in 2004.

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As Christmas neared in December 2004, Mascis called Brian Schwartz to deliver a tidbit his new manager had craved for more than a year: Murph’s phone number, kind of, and the absolute key to a potential Dinosaur Jr. reunion. “J does this high-pitched voice, so he goes ‘Millie Murphy Real Estate’ and hangs up,” Schwartz remembers, laughing. “I’m like, ‘What the fuck is that?’”

Since Schwartz began managing Mascis in 2003, he’d been working to secure the rights for those first three Dinosaur Jr. albums, hard-to-find indie rock holy grails, and reissue them. As the March 2005 release date for those editions approached, Schwartz kept telling Mascis the original trio should reconvene, only to be rebuffed repeatedly by the guitarist.

“J likes the path of least resistance, and this seemed daunting, because these guys just didn’t get along,” says Schwartz. “But I wasn’t listening, because I’m thick-skulled. So I went out and got a bunch of offers.”

Without explicit permission, Schwartz began piecing together a prospective tour for the original Dinosaur trio, then presented it and the potential windfall to Mascis. He finally told him to call the guys—except he wouldn’t tell him how to find Murph, at least until he called to say “Millie Murphy Real Estate” and hang up. Schwartz searched the business name and learned that Murph’s mom had run a successful real estate firm in Connecticut for decades. He called the number listed, explained who he was, and asked if she knew how to reach her son, who hadn’t been in Dinosaur Jr. for more than a decade. He was home for Christmas. She handed him the phone.

“I knew right away this was about a reunion, but I was still shocked, because I didn’t think it was ever going to happen,” remembers Murph, who was then navigating a rough patch of legal issues and substance abuse. “I just figured J had moved on, and I didn’t take it personal. But right away, I was like, ‘Yeah, this is great.’”

Murph was the last piece of the puzzle. Barlow and Mascis’ uneasy reconciliation had been lurching ahead for years. In 2002, Barlow joined Mascis’ Stooges project with Ron and Scott Asheton in London. (The Guardian noted that the “I Wanna Be Your Dog” rendition was “hardly a love-in”). But 18 months later, Barlow saw Mascis play his own songs for the first time since he was fired, when Mascis followed Sebadoh during a benefit organized by Barlow’s mom for her autism-support program. Backstage, they decided to perform a single Deep Wound song, “Video Prick.” Mascis did the gig because the program had helped his niece with autism and because Barlow’s mom had always been kind to him, even when the boys feuded. “It feels good not to humiliate my parents,” Barlow wrote of the night in a tour diary, “and be grown up with my grown-up friends.”

Still, Barlow immediately chastised Schwartz when he first heard the reunion proposal. When Schwartz called back and mentioned the money, Barlow promised he’d consider it if Murph was in. Four months after Schwartz finally found him, they were back onstage, playing two and even three encores per night to packed rooms on multiple continents.

I ask Mascis if he and Barlow apologized to one another before the reunion began. He shrugs. “I didn’t really. It was more Lou’s deal to figure out,” he says. “He had to apologize for being such a dick for things to move forward.” When I tell Barlow this a few days later, he smiles and doesn’t disagree; he does say, however, that Mascis may be “incapable of apologizing.”

Dinosaur Jr. had whimpered to an end in late 1997 while Mascis made do with a different touring trio. As soon as the original lineup reconvened, he realized this was the band he’d always needed, the best iteration of Dinosaur Jr. that had ever existed. “It’s annoying, because you’re saddled with these guys—god dammit, what the fuck? But it sounds better, so what are you going to do?” he says, laughing. “We came up together, learned how to play together, have a certain sound that is interesting. When we play now, kids are into it, because they haven’t heard anything like this. And maybe they don’t know why.”

Barlow thinks he knows why: The mold that Mascis built when he first started the band, with Barlow prowling high on the bass’ neck and both he and Murph pushing past the meter, as if trying to punch through every song’s rhythmic pockets. That is, Dinosaur Jr. sounds a little like classic rock but still moves a lot like punk. “We play heavy music without the macho,” Barlow says, “our greatest strength.”


For a long time, the reunion was a personal struggle for Barlow. He worried that everything would end just as it had the first time, that, as he tells me, “I would be hurt again.” That hasn’t happened. More than 21 years have now passed since Mascis, Murph, and Barlow reconvened. In that span, they have made six albums that don’t feel as wild or risky as their early work but are instead consistent and cohesive, somehow built every time on a half-dozen of the best hooks it seems Mascis has ever written. Really, they feel like exactly what they are—three people who have seen and endured the best and worst of each other gathering in Mascis’ upstairs bedroom every three-to-five years to pick up the kind of rapport they’ve only ever shared musically, never personally.

“We’re not distant,” Mascis says, “but we’re more like relatives than friends.” Barlow echoes him: “I was not in J’s sphere from the beginning to be J’s best buddy. I was there to make music with him, and that was a huge gift to me—and, you know, maybe to him, too.”

Dinosaur Jr. tours hard, having played nearly 1,300 shows since reforming. Still, Murph reckons that, during that span, the three of them have dined together without someone else joining them as a buffer approximately once. “We wanted to eat, but nobody else was around. It was weird. It was awkward. It had an Addams Family vibe,” Murph says, laughing so hard he closes his eyes for a while. “I don’t think it was awkward for those guys, because they can handle awkwardness. But for me, it was freaky.”

When I tell Gordon about this meal, she grins and nods. “Bands aren’t always friends. They’re more dysfunctional families, and they don’t talk to each other. Our band was like that,” she says, remembering how surprised Jim O’Rourke was at just how bad Sonic Youth’s communication could be when he joined. “But sometimes you just commit to something, commit to each other.”

Schwartz tells me that he used to think about one Dinosaur Jr. tour or album at a time. But Murph got sober in part so this trio could continue, and Barlow and Mascis tell me they intend to keep it going for as long as possible. Schwartz now has a decade-long vision for Dinosaur Jr. “I’ve told J this plan. He doesn’t say, ‘OK, that’s my plan, too,’ but he doesn’t say no,” Schwartz explains. “That’s how we operate. That’s enough license for me to try.”


Before he followed his guitar back to Amherst in late August, Mascis left Provincetown one other time. Toward the middle of their vacation, he, Reichenheim, and their son, Rory, headed home to pick up his stuff, then turned south to New York to drop their only child off for the start of college. As we stand on the beach, mocking Rolling Stones outtakes and disagreeing about the last quarter-century of Nick Cave’s output, I ask Mascis about becoming an empty-nester during summer vacation. “It was sad, sadder than I expected,” he says, frowning in neon pink swimming trunks as he pulls his long white hair from his face. “I couldn’t believe how quiet it was.”

Mascis never thought much about being a father, because he didn’t think he would live long enough to become one. “I thought I’d be dead already. I was never really convinced I wanted to be alive, I guess,” he says a few hours later, staring at me over his glasses at the kitchen table and chuckling. “I’d be like, ‘If this thing gets any harder, I think I’ll cut out.’ And it wasn’t even too hard, but I was on the fence from the beginning.”

But of all the things we talk about, he is more voluble about fatherhood than anything else, aside perhaps from recording There Near with a vintage Mesa/Boogie Mark 1 amplifier. He tells me multiple times about the clothes Rory makes. When he mentions that Rory already hates college a few weeks later, he sounds excited, as he didn’t finish either. (“Four years down the drain,” he shrugs.) And when he remembers meeting some of Rory’s childhood friends, he seems proud that he and Reichenheim hadn’t raised an entitled kid. “They were like ‘I’m going to be in the NBA!’” he remembers, his voice high and mocking again. “How do you come to that conclusion? Where do you get the balls to think you can be in the NBA? Me and my friends never had a thought like that.”

Rory was born two years into the second life of Dinosaur Jr. I ask Mascis if marriage and then fatherhood made that all easier, but he deflects, reminding me that the main issue was Barlow’s apology. When I later ask Reichenheim if those life changes might have helped, she nods and grins. “J was pretty feral when I met him—the fourth child who could do whatever he wanted to do. He was a prodigy, and it was clear he had no other plan than to do what he is doing,” she says. “Being in a partnership and having a family, you have to adhere to other people, to me and his child. He’s changed a lot in that way.”

Nearly everyone tells me about some surprising way they’ve seen Mascis soften in the last two decades, how he’s deprioritized himself. When they reunited, Mascis put one of his amps on Barlow’s side of the stage; when Barlow protested, Mascis moved it immediately without issue. When I tell Murph that Mascis says Murph is now the best drummer in Dinosaur Jr., he’s so surprised I wonder if he’s going to cry. Mascis hung up on Schwartz, his manager, for years; they now play a game they learned from Howard Stern to see who will hang up last. And Jasper, the Sub Pop CEO and one of his oldest friends, beams when she tells me about how Mascis became a devoted basketball dad simply because Rory loved it, sending her photos and updates from games.

Mascis admits he has more “social graces” now, because Reichenheim, an extrovert who has seemingly never met a stranger, has instilled them in him. But he will turn 61 in December, and he is content knowing that he’s simply set in some of his ways. He remembers a stranger approaching him and Reichenheim at a restaurant in Provincetown a few years back, a fan just asking if he could shake hands with a hero. The food was arriving, and Mascis had just washed his hands. “I’m like, ‘Dude, I’m eating. I don’t want to shake your hand.’ Luisa got really embarrassed and bought the guy a drink,” he says, laughing as hard as I’ve ever seen. “He was a little bit put off, but Luisa couldn’t handle it. I didn’t feel bad.”


This may be my favorite thing about Mascis, the thing that makes him one of indie rock’s most interesting singers and songwriters four decades into it: He is neither particularly well-adjusted nor maladjusted. He is simply adjusted, moving in his peculiar way through a world that has made him ill at ease since the second-best math student in his middle school rebuffed him.

Mascis doesn’t like to talk about lyrics and has long insisted that they don’t mean that much to him, that they are often other people’s stories or just syllabic games meant to fill out a melody. But the person who sang “I’ve got the guts now to meet your eye/Those guts are killing, but I can’t stop now” in 1987 is much the same narrator who sang “I got no friends to speak of/Feeling so weighted down/I got no way to come back now” in 2026. At one point, he tells me about some of his favorite lines he’s written. He smiles as he recites the first one, from the heartbreaking and beautiful “See You at the Movies”: “I don’t peak too early/I don’t peak at all.”

In an era obsessed with infinite self-improvement, with maxxing every element of oneself, Mascis simply wants to keep doing the things he does, to keep moving through a life he didn’t really know he wanted to live at all. “Well, we swam, and we biked,” Mascis says as we pedal back from the beach, cruising across a flat, shaded stretch of asphalt through a quiet grove of trees. “If I do that in a day here, I feel like I’ve done what I am supposed to do. Oh, and play guitar.”

Grayson Haver Currin has written for Pitchfork since 2006. For a dozen years, he was the music editor of INDY Week; his work has also appeared in The New York Times, NPR, Spin, and Rolling Stone. He once ran a music festival and a record label