Heard this appalling news just now as we were preparing to take the kid to the beach. Had to run off for a minute.

I’m so sorry to all of you who are close to him. Love the man.

CRAP

All my love to Heather and the rest of his family and closest friends.

I am grateful to have known him and for the time he gave me and for teaching me how to lose big at poker. I have been a huge fan of his music since I was 14 years old and always admired his intellect and point of view. In no way were we close, but we were friends and we could make each other laugh and hosted each other at our homes and shared a few meals. He saw my old band the gersch at the PRFBBQ2013 and complimented our performance, and if you knew him you know how special that was and how much it tickled me. I am also grateful for the music he helped make that inspired me so long ago, and keeps inspiring me up to the present day.

RIP Comrade Uncle FM "steve". The mark you left on my life is permanent and I wouldn't want it any other way. Maybe I will see you on the other side someday, Salut!

BrendanK wrote: Wed May 08, 2024 12:09 pm I was reflecting on Steve after hearing the news, and I feel like this was a really important thought (probably summed up better than I could)

That is really right on the money

this so much sucks - the entire course of my life changed because of interacting with steve over the phone when I was 17, which was likely a banal, nothing 30 seconds of his life. I can't imagine how much he impacted, and continued to impact everyone else. And my god he was funny.

Obviously in shock here after the news was confirmed..

I guess one bit of comfort at the moment was remembering what Steve wrote after John Grabski's death, about wanting to die fully engrossed in his work, his art, his writing, surrounded by people he loved. I suppose he got a version of that, though it still seems too cruel. I'm sure we would have all preferred a gradual decline, spending years basking in the glory of a mile long list of accomplishments.

Fuck...

He was exceptionally considerate. I mean that in every sense of the word.

Thanks for the friends, the memories, and the soundtrack to my life.

Many of the things he helped create (including this board) have significantly enhanced my life going back over thirty years. I'm shocked and extremely saddened to hear this.

My condolences to Heather and to his friends, family, and colleagues.

penningtron wrote: Wed May 08, 2024 12:50 pm Obviously in shock here after the news was confirmed..

I guess one bit of comfort at the moment was remembering what Steve wrote after John Grabski's death, about wanting to die fully engrossed in his work, his art, his writing, surrounded by people he loved. I suppose he got a version of that, though it still seems too cruel. I'm sure we would have all preferred a gradual decline, spending years basking in the glory of a mile long list of accomplishments.

Fuck...

Yeah, to an extent true.

My dad died suddenly of a heart attack at 74. He said that's how he wanted to go. Except he was expecting it to happen at 84.

Steve at 61. So incredibly sad. It's not supposed to happen this way.

Time to donate to the American Heart Association again.

I'm so sorry, everyone. I can hardly believe this. Thank you for changing my life for the better, Steve.

In a 2021 interview with the Sun-Times, Albini was asked if he considered himself successful.

“To the extent that I could care about that, I would say yes,” he told Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg. “I’ve lived my whole life without having goals, and I think that’s very valuable, because then I never am in a state of anxiety or dissatisfaction. I never feel I haven’t achieved something. I never feel there is something yet to be accomplished. I feel like goals are quite counterproductive. They give you a target, and until the moment you reach that target, you are stressed and unsatisfied, and at the moment you reach that specific target you are aimless and have lost the lodestar of your existence. I’ve always tried to see everything as a process. I want to do things in a certain way that I can be proud of that is sustainable and is fair and equitable to everybody that I interact with. If I can do that, then that’s a success, and success means that I get to do it again tomorrow.”

https://chicago.suntimes.com/music/2024 ... 1-obituary