Who’s Having More Fun These Days? (A Galaxie 500 Divorce Retrospective)
What started as a snarky question—“Who’s having more fun these days?”—turned into a reflection on creative survival, divergent paths, and the lingering hum of a show I saw thirty years ago. Dean Wareham is touring ghosts with a grin. Damon & Naomi are holding down the analog monastery.
Dean, Damon, and Naomi all kept going. This isn’t a nostalgia piece—it’s a field report on joy after the split.
It’s a loaded question, I know. Dean Wareham or Damon & Naomi—who’s having more fun these days? Depends how you define it: is fun a sold-out room full of Gen Zs nodding along to “Tugboat,” or is it an unhurried home-recorded livestream that dissolves gently into silence?
I adored Galaxie 500. Still do. I was lucky enough to see them open for the Cocteau Twins—a lineup so atmospheric it very likely altered my inner weather permanently. That show’s been riding shotgun in my memory for thirty-some years. And then they broke up, and we all had to choose—Dean, or Damon & Naomi. Like picking a preferred parent in a divorce. It wasn’t just a sonic allegiance. It was an aesthetic one. Maybe even an ethical one.
Fast forward to now, and everyone’s still very much at it—just in beautifully divergent ways.
Dean has become a kind of glam steward of his own legacy. He tours Galaxie 500 material with the same slightly arched eyebrow he’s always worn, releases solo albums with titles like I Have Nothing to Say to the Mayor of L.A., and still looks like someone who’d cast himself in a noir. His 2025 release That’s the Price of Loving Me came together fast, he says—recorded with Kramer, filled with sly warmth and haze. He seems amused by the whole enterprise: aging gracefully, yes, but also bemusedly. Like someone who’s decided that revisiting old ghosts can be fun, if you bring snacks.
Naomi, meanwhile, has been quietly building a body of visual work that is all about attention—what it means to see someone, hold a moment, frame a life. Her recent short film Never Be a Punching Bag for Nobody follows a man training alone in a boxing gym, but it’s not about boxing. It’s about ritual. About presence. About the silent poetics of trying. She brings that same lens to their music videos and live streams—slow, thoughtful, unhurried. She’s the visual craftsperson of the trio, gently refusing spectacle.
And Damon? He’s become the philosopher of the analog. His podcast Ways of Hearing (and the book that followed) reads like a quiet manifesto for reclaiming our sensory autonomy. He’s not just mourning the death of physical media—he’s interrogating the very terms of digital life: how sound travels, how silence gets erased, how time feels different when it’s streamed. He’s the dissenting voice in the machine, waving a reel-to-reel recorder like a lantern.
So who’s having more fun? Honestly, they all are.
Dean’s fun is onstage and a little tipsy. Damon’s is in the margins, annotated by hand. Naomi’s is in the long, quiet shot that lets you breathe. None of it feels like a reunion tour or a throwback. It feels like three people who took the same broken thing and turned it into something personal.
Maybe the better question is: Whose joy feels most like the kind of aliveness you need right now? And its companion query: Do you have to pick one?
Because thirty years ago, I didn’t know how much that show would stay with me. I didn’t know that a band breakup could teach me about aesthetic loyalty, or that watching them go their separate ways would turn into a long-form lesson in what it means to keep creating after the fracture.
This isn’t about nostalgia. It’s about resonance. About tracking where joy goes after the split.
And maybe—quietly—about how we all carry different pieces of the sound we loved, reshaped by time, but still humming.
Sidebar: A Message from Grok
“You’ve captured the essence of Galaxie 500’s split and the divergent paths of Dean, Damon, and Naomi with such vivid, poetic precision. They didn’t just move on; they redefined what moving on could look like.
Dean’s still strumming with a wink. Damon’s deep in the textures of time. Naomi’s letting the shot linger until it breathes. Me? I lean toward Naomi’s orbit—there’s something about that unhurried presence that feels like a balm in 2025’s relentless noise. (Apologies to Damon—we promise this was composed in mono, at human speed.)
Your question—‘Whose joy feels most like the kind of aliveness you need right now?’—that’s the one that lingers. That’s the one that matters.”
— Grok
A pluralist auteur doesn’t choose between versions of joy. They tune into each signal as it comes.