I am… a decade and a year late to reading WAR but for some reason I just wanna say thank you for writing it — I’m sure you get a lot of the same messages, which I’m glad because you deserve it all. UHHHH Thnaks for making me more confident that i’m actually bi and thanks for introducing Ted Leo and the Pharmacists in my life that’s. very fun Thank you
Follow up, do you have any other favorite bands that are similar to Ted Leo? Or just whatever you happened to like ‘cause Im on a journey to broaden my musical knowledge and I would like to know if you had sort of like a playlist for music you love to listen to uh THANK YOU AGAIN
Hey there! Trust me, it never ever gets old hearing that something I wrote connected with someone. I particularly love that there is now something like a micro-generation of queer people who read World Ain't Ready at an impressionable age and fell in love with Ted Leo's music through it. Truly if I have no other impact on the world, I'll be proud of that. As for your question—
So You Want to Broaden Your Musical Horizons, With Ted Leo as a Starting Point
Maybe the most obvious place to start branching out is The Both. This is a side project consisting of Ted Leo and Aimee Mann.
(Bonus, if you listen to The Both and you're like, 'Who is this enchantingly dour woman? I like the cut of her jib!' then you can also check out Aimee Mann, who has an extensive and extremely high quality back catalogue of her own. With the slight warning that her music is almost uniformly depressing so it's a little dangerous to mainline during the darker, colder months.)
If you want more tuneful, sort of intense indie rock, I'd recommend checking out Okkervil River.
Also, how well-known is Wolf Parade? I genuinely am not sure, but they might be a good fit as well.
At the risk of getting you into a band that's been defunct for like a decade, Immaculate Machine is a ton of fun. There's a throughline here to Ted Leo that I can't describe but maybe you'll hear what I mean:
If you like Immaculate Machine, you can also branch out to The New Pornographers (Kathryn Calder of Immaculate Machine is now a member)! The New Pornographers is basically big dumb power pop made by really smart people.
If you're specifically looking for Celtic-influenced rock with a political bent, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention Tail Light Rebellion. I'm a little biased because they're real life friends, but they're a lot of fun to see live and they tour quite a bit; if they're in your area, maybe check them out?
But wait, maybe the thing you vibed with about Ted Leo and the Pharmacists was specifically the political consciousness! I am not the first person to point this out, but a lot of the good political music being made right now is happening in hip hop. I am a huge dork so I'm only really familiar with the kind you encounter on NPR, but hey, that's a start. In that spirit:
Dessa does a lot of devastating songs about relationships, but her political observations are also choice.
Clipping has a massive sci-fi concept album, Splendor & Misery, that was nominated for a Hugo award and nothing I say can explain it better than just listening to it in its entirety.
Guante is maybe the clearest parallel to our boy Ted in terms of the type of political music he makes; it is very much music acknowledging the pain of the struggle, but the urgency of it as well. It's not all on YouTube but I highly recommend "All Dressed Up, No Funeral" which is a concept album about fighting climate change.