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CONFESSIONS

The Man Behind the Music

Not every story is about the music. These are the ones about the rest of it — fatherhood, family, and the choices that don’t make it onto a set list. This collection grows as new stories are added.

Featured Stories

Arlo Hennings embracing his daughter

CONFESSION

Return of the Stay-at-Home Dad

When his daughter’s mother dies, Arlo flies home from Bali for a funeral in 48 hours—and finds himself back in the fatherhood he thought he’d left behind.

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Hand-drawn flyer for an Acid Test party, mid-1960s.

CONFESSION

LSD: I Passed the Test

A candid account of teenage LSD experimentation — the Acid Tests, a hallucinated psychiatric interview, and fifty years of hindsight.

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CONFESSION

Grandpa Goes and Gets Some

A lonely widower’s plunge into online dating leads from Cherry Blossoms dot com to Mindanao, a mail-order marriage, and a letter he can’t bring himself to open.

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A bottle of Epclusa, a medication used to treat Hepatitis C.

CONFESSION

The Big Top Diaries

A 16-year-old talks his way into a Minneapolis crash pad of self-styled revolutionaries and stolen goods — and walks out with the nickname that became his name.

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CONFESSION

The Salesman and a Supernatural Loon

A door-to-door insurance rookie paddles into the Boundary Waters and meets a 92-year-old woman who may have been gone for decades.

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A young boy in a cowboy hat holding a rifle, standing beside a large dog in a living room.

CONFESSION

Young Robinson Crusoe

A restless ten-year-old builds spaceships out of moving boxes, runs away to St. Louis by Greyhound, and lands in juvenile court as the ‘kingpin’ of a gang that never existed.

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CONFESSION

A Memoir That Has Teeth

A trade-school scam, a distant father, and a welfare case file with ‘ROCK STAR’ typed across the front in bold letters.

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An old school bus and wrecked cars in a junkyard.

CONFESSION

Homeless on the Rock ‘n’ Roll Highway

Renting a dead school bus in a Minneapolis junkyard for $30 a month, and the Christmas Eve that turned a welfare line into something like grace.

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Validation Disorder: A Personal Experience, by Arlo Hennings — book cover.

CONFESSION

Validation Disorder

A historic corporate co-publishing deal collides with a business partner who was a walking case study in Validation Disorder — and forty years later, the demo tapes get the last laugh.

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