M. David Hornbuckle

It’s the morning before the PopCanon 2026 reunion. I’ll write more after the show tonight. The week of rehearsals and visiting with old friends has already given me many things to think about.

The rehearsals have been fun and productive and illuminating. There are songs that one or more members of the band have played “wrong” for 30 years, and not just a little bit wrong. Like in a key that isn’t even compatible. I guess that can happen when you have six people simultaneously making screeching noises at 120 mph all the time. We just couldn’t even hear each other a lot of the time. Now with this stripped down 4-piece version, these anomalies are more glaring. But more importantly, we STILL LOVE TO ROCK, and it shows.

Ned Davis is the funniest person on the planet, and he makes me much funnier than I would naturally be otherwise. We’re a deadly combo and always have been. Our group text threads are so baroque that often key information gets buried in a 60-car pile-up of riffing jokes. 

Last night we watched a rough cut of the long awaited documentary about our “last show ever” 26 years ago, and there’s a lot to unpack there. I’ll save my commentary on the actual movie for another occasion, but watching us as we were then, and hearing us in rehearsal now, illuminates how unique PopCanon was and is as a band.

When I moved to Gainesville in 1994, I wanted to start a band. I didn’t know what kind of band, but I knew I wanted it to be unusual, perhaps one might say experimental. And when I met Ned, and we started contriving the bones for what would be PopCanon, I got “unusual” in spades. What has occurred to me this week is that I haven’t changed much as a songwriter, but no band I’ve been in since then has captured that spirit of experimentation that we had. 

The Dixieland Space Orchestra, my big horn-based band in New York, leaned into free-jazz improvisation around a skeleton of song-songs (many of which were former PC songs), but in many ways that was still less experimental than PopCanon because all the songs pretty much got the same treatment. There was little to no discussion of “wouldn’t it be cool if we did this?” or “this might be insane, but let’s try…” Same with my other New York band The M-Word – some former PC songs and some new songs, interpreted for acoustic guitar, bari sax, and trash can. I guess you could say with those bands the experimentation was in the format of the songs, not in the formation of the songs. 

And then most of the other bands I’ve had, including the current David Hornbuckle and the Compartments, have been fairly straightforward indie rock bands. I think I still write pretty good songs, perhaps more cohesive and lyrically sophisticated songs than I wrote 30 years ago. But I don’t know that I’m pushing any boundaries, and this is honestly a kind of heavy revelation, and I don’t know how I feel about it.