Taproot’s new album, The Episodes, is a like a one-act rock opera. It tells a fragmented story that centers around a funeral and examines themes like grief, isolation, loss, and death through a Lynchian lens. “I don’t like throwing the ‘Lynch’ word out there very much because I do admire the dude,” Taproot’s drummer, Nick Fredell, said in an interview with Highbrow Magazine. The Episodes mixes the past and the future with the present, and the result is a harmonious success. 

The  much-admired (and emulated) Martin Scorsese, for one, is an outstanding auteur and easily one of the best directors  working today, yet he cannot rightly be ranked alongside the titans of the golden years when cinema was emerging as a serious art form: Akira Kurosawa, Stanley Kubrick, Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, Ingmar Bergman, Jean Renoir, and the list goes on.  These masters were, and remain, larger-than-life legends.