I am a lifelong Depeche Mode fan who got hooked the first time People Are People came blasting through my radio. The song asked a question I did not have an answer to at the time, and I am not sure I have one now. Why do people hate each other when at the root of everything we all evolved from the same tribe? I have been asking versions of that question ever since.
Diary of a Devotee is what those questions sound like forty years later. The site is an ongoing conversation between me and an artificial intelligence about consciousness, the nature of God, Blade Runner, the fate of the universe, and all the things that do not resolve cleanly. The philosophical essays are the spine of the site. They sit with the hard questions instead of pretending to answer them.
Underneath the philosophy runs the music. Cover and remix reviews, vampire and pop culture crossovers, song-specific deep dives. The music is not a sidebar to the philosophical work. It is the other side of the same person. Loving Depeche Mode unironically as a fortunate member of Generation X is not a light thing. It is a thing about identity and time and what gets to count as meaningful in a life.
Same person, different registers. Both honest.
