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Yeah, yeah, the website is named after a Party of One song, the site started out hosting DiskothiQ stuff, you know about Peter Hughes' time as a musician in the I.E. if you're here. But before Peter started recording himself with a Casio MT-100, his first love was the automobile. He read Car & Driver obsessively as a kid, and he wanted to be an automotive journalist first, if you can believe it. Music happened to take over for a while.

Since his retirement from the Mountain Goats in August 2024, Peter has recommitted to automotive media with a car podcast called Tired: The Car Podcast For People Who Understand That Cars Are Bad. Can you love motorsports, but hate cars? Can you love driving, but hate the car-dependent structure of society? Can you find cars fascinating as design objects, as sports equipment, as part of the broader U.S. American psyche, and acknowledge they're destroying the world? Where can common ground exist between people who find the 24 Hours of Le Mans magical, and people who want everything from Toyota Corollas to Lamborghini Countaches turned into cubes tomorrow? Hello, and welcome to Tired. 

Peter has two co-hosts on the podcast. Rory Carroll, former head honcho at Autoweek and Jalopnik, provides experience as a longtime automotive journalist, home mechanic, and Guy Who Gets Himself Into Situations. The third host, Matthew "Matty" Riley, is the resident non-Car-Guy who provides stupid questions that get good answers, and does all the editing and audio production, which he learned from... running this website. (Hello.) I would have preferred to run this site somewhat-anonymously forever, but that's fallen through recently, and I figure if I'm going to promote the podcast, I should be transparent about it. If you've wondered why Claremont Cometh updates slowed down more than usual in the back half of 2024, it's because your humble admin has been learning how compression works and digging up funny clips of Wayne Taylor instead of running yet another copy of Harmless But Ultimately Unloveable, Loveless But Ultimately Unharmable through the tape deck. Mea culpa. I swear the zine section is coming (I even got published at Jalopnik talking about it). But Peter is a good friend, and I love our little show, so it's my priority for now.  

Y'know those outro clips at the end of Harmless/Unharmable? "Three guys who hate the north!" "Three guys who rehearse too much!" If we were getting introduced, we'd have some stuff like "THREE GUYS WHO HATED TESLA IN 2019" and "THREE GUYS WHO THINK CHINA SHOULD WIN" and "THREE GUYS WHO LOVE TRUEANON." Anyway. People interested in the site will find that the podcast has plenty of anecdotes from Peter's music career. There's a Mountain Goats tour story every few episodes, some DiskothiQ history (in fact, prodding Peter on-air is how I finally got him to clarify that he prefers "DiskothiQ", sans hyphen), even some Nothing Painted Blue stuff. It's also just a fun listen, even if you're not into cars. Half the episodes are subscriber-only, so get in there. 

And if you want something really stupid to demonstrate how our earliest episodes went, I made an animatic with some of our clips. If you like it, you'll have to comment saying so over on YouTube, you know how I am about this place. Read-only web is not a bad thing.

For Peter's automotive journalism career prior to starting the pod, check out the next section. 

Peter's Articles:

Peter Hughes, the automotive journalist, is best known for his contributions to Autoweek, Jalopnik, and Road & Track. His articles have covered everything from the 24 Hours of Le Mans, to Killer Mike's car collection, to playing U2 covers in a band with the then-editor-in-chief of Car & Driver.

You can find most of these links on the firebirdman Tumblr page, but just for fun, I've reproduced them here along with the Peter Peter Hughes material for a cohesive "What's he up to lately?" page. 

Peter was also a guest on two episodes of the old Autoweek Podcast: 

• May 24th, 2019: Peter shares his experience getting two hours on the phone with Mario Andretti. 
• June 21st, 2019: Peter talks about going to Le Mans, and about the passing of autojourno legend and friend of Autoweek Davey G. Johnson.

Peter also spent 2019 to summer 2024 practicing his broadcasting skills on Rochester's WAYO 104.3FM, with a weekly show called Northern Gothic (with Mixcloud backups here) covering a broad spectrum of music, from new independent pop, to ambient, to old-time country, to 80's goth standards. On September 5th, 2024, Peter announced he would be putting the show on indefinite hiatus, with the possibility of coming back to it at a later date. 

To see some of his car photography, you can check out the above Firebird Man tumblr account or his Instagram, though at the time of this page edit, his most recent post (his immediate, permanent, amicable resignation from the Mountain Goats, which I wrote about here) has probably flooded him with notifications and DMs and made the platform slightly more difficult to use. Hopefully car posting will resume pretty soon. 

Okay, Here Are The Tunes:

I know, I know. This is a music website. So, here's the sum of the Peter Peter Hughes output in its digital form, which you can also read through on the Bandcamp page. Click any thumbnail image to open the Bandcamp page where you can hear the song and support the man himself.

2010 - Fangio 
Album

tags: alternative; commie synthpop

The digital version of the album starts off with both songs from the Fangio 7" ("Operational Detachment Juan Manuel Fangio" & "El Narcoavi​ó​n") and follows with all the songs from the 12" Fangio LP. (For full scans of those on this site, you'll want the main Fangio page)

• Fangio Listener's Guide, Part 1
• Fangio Listener's Guide, Part 2
• Fangio Listener's Guide, Part 3

When I was seventeen, for reasons that will remain forever inscrutable, I wrote a song for my Casio-powered solo project Party of One which imagined the 1950s race car driver, five-time Formula One World Champion, and Argentine icon Juan Manuel Fangio piloting a then-current 1980s-model Saab 900 Turbo across the Andes mountains on a covert mission to assassinate the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.

Twenty-three years later I bought a well-traveled example of the ingeniously versatile car that accompanied the hero of that song, and began writing songs for an album that would pick up where “A Fangio for the ’80s” left off.

The real-life Fangio died in 1995, long retired from racing. On the track he’d been known as El Maestro—the teacher—and a legendary bad-ass. Off it, he was El Chueco—most commonly translated as “bandy-legs”—short, squeaky-voiced, the very essence of good-natured humility and universally beloved for it.

The Fangio of my imagination is slightly different. He’s still alive for one thing—though by what Borgesian mechanism it’s never made clear—and so haunted by his own refusal to speak out against the atrocities of Argentina’s Dirty War that he’s gone underground as a sort of international rogue agent, beholden to nobody and determined to clear his conscience by evening the score: against the CIA, against the cartels, against every agent of oppression that conspired to terrorize and exploit the people of Latin America over the last half century. This album should be properly read as one part DC comics, one part Tom Clancy novel, and one part Marxist revolutionary tract.

Fangio was recorded entirely at home, by me, using GarageBand—which, in its ubiquity, cheapness, and user-friendly simplicity, I regard as the clear 21st century successor to my old Casio MT-100. And it sounds like New Order because I’ve always wanted to play in a band that sounded like New Order. I make no apologies. 

2011 - Class War Right Now
Song

tags: n/a

From Peter's blog post on the song's release: 

They say parenthood changes the way you see things, and it’s true. You look around and think about the kind of world you want your children to grow up in, the future you’d like to imagine for them. If you write songs, it almost can’t help but inform your work in some way. Say, like this.

First song and title track from an album that might be a little more slowly forthcoming now, but it’s coming. In celebration of the birth of my little girl, and in full solidarity with occupations everywhere. I’d be joining you, but we’re going to be occupying our house for the next little while. Meantime here’s a song to rally the troops. Let’s do this.

2017 - Three Weeks In Sicily 
Song

tags: alternative; autojournowave; italo disco; pressercore

2020 - Suicide Cult
Song

tags: alternative; coronacore

Recorded at home, July 2020. Final exhortation by Natalia Castro-Hughes. Mask by Trudymade.

2020 - Everywhere, Forever
Song

tags: n/a

Recorded (to 4-track cassette!) in March 2017 apparently. I'd forgotten all about it.

If you find yourself overly invested in the result of a presidential election, take heart: administrations come and go, but U.S. foreign policy is eternal!

2023 - Smile
Song

tags: alternative, Rochester

Recorded at home.

This concludes the formal output on the Peter Peter Hughes account. There's also a free release of a Minutemen cover on his Fivetools blog and a redux of "Highway 71 Revisited" for a Fayettenam comp, also on Bandcamp. 

any images on this page are pulled directly from Bandcamp and resized to 250x250 pixels by me. this is a fan site without ads, trackers, or even so much as one of those site counters from the late 90's. if you work for a gutted auto mag without a print edition anymore and have some problem with there being links here, email away. thanks. peter if you want me to put a bunch of book urls on this one too just hit me up.