When White’s tour rider leaked in February, the music blogosphere erupted over its extremely specific guacamole guidelines. Not only did the document include a guacamole recipe, it provided instructions for how to slice the avocados to achieve perfect chunkiness. (White has said he had nothing to do with the guac recipe, calling it an “inside joke” with show promoters.)

D.C.’s Jason Mogavero, who’s in the band Jack on Fire, got to mocking the tour rider’s specifications with pal Sam Sherwood at local watering hole Showtime.

“It was sort of like the obnoxious 2015 version of ‘remove the red M&Ms,'” says Mogavero, 30.

That conversation led Sherwood and Mogavero down a culinary rabbit hole: They started comparing their own takes on guacamole, then moved on to their chili recipes. Mogavero realized he had a lot of friends who both play in D.C. bands and possess “serious cooking chops,” he says. Then it hit him: D.C.’s music scene needs a chili cookbook.

D.C.’s most famous chili is the stuff ladled out at Ben’s Chili Bowl. But after Mogavero began reaching out to friends and folks in the music scene — soliciting both recipes and songs for a paired music compilation — he found a surprising variety of concoctions.

“At first I worried, ‘There’s probably going to be a bit of repetition…  it’s chili, how many different variations could you get?” Mogavero says. “[But] we just naturally got this wide breadth of chili recipes.”

Called the DC Rock’n’Roll Chili Cookbook, the collection includes both meaty and vegan chilis, chilis centered around beans and some that don’t touch the legume. There are also sides and soups — i.e. cheesy biscuits and butternut squash cornbread — that would make excellent foils to the hearty main attraction. Recipe styles also run the gamut, from straightforward to silly, like the footnoted, joke-heavy one submitted by the people behind parody Twitter account Fort Reno Rumors.

Together, the recipes compose a 40-page physical cookbook. The book comes with a 15-song compilation of songs by D.C. artists, including two previously unreleased tunes from indie rockers BRNDA and Mogavero’s Jack On Fire.  (Stream the entire compilation below.)

“Beat the Rich,” which formally arrives on Jack On Fire’s new album out Dec. 4, is a sardonic take on pricey craft cocktails and other trappings of gentrification. Thematically, it piggybacks on the band’s fiery 2014 cut “Burn Down the Brixton.”

Proceeds from the cookbook and compilation benefit nonprofit Bread for the City, which just made sense for a food-themed benefit, Mogavero says. He also points out that the release’s timing — shortly before Thanksgiving — was intentional.

“I deliberately said, ‘Let’s get this out in the first two weeks of November so that the money can help [Bread for the City] with the push for Thanksgiving meals.'”

Mogavero plans to host a release party for the DC Rock’n’Roll Chili Cookbook Nov. 8 at Showtime, the bar where the chili cookbook was born. The musician says he’ll have 50 copies of the compilation for sale — in cassette form, for $5 — along with 100 copies of the cookbook.

If the cookbook proves to be a hit, Mogavero says, he’s happy to satisfy people’s appetites for more.

The DC Rock’n’Roll Chili Cookbook is available for preorder on Bandcamp and will be for sale, along with cassette copies of the compilation, Nov. 8 at Showtime. Top photo by Flickr user jeffreyww used under a Creative Commons license.

Released on Year of the Manatee, the quartet’s forthcoming full-length tape on Babe City Records, “Go Bi” (listen below) finds singer/guitarist Dave Lesser rethinking his sexuality, prompted by complex circumstances — specifically, two difficult relationships. One of his previous girlfriends moved back to the Midwest. Another died of cancer.

“I was thinking… this is really hard,” says Lesser, 30, in a phone interview. “Wait a minute: there’s a whole segment of the population [men] I haven’t even considered. What would it be like if I were to write this character and sing a song about this character?”

So “Go Bi” finds its narrator considering his options. If women aren’t working out, what about men?

“Relationships with women always seem to end in disaster/Some run home to Ohio, others, they die of cancer,” Lesser sings. “I do not know which is worse, but my friends have found an answer/Master my fears of the other gender and put in for a transfer.”

Lesser says that while all of his lyrics originate from some personal truth, his characters can take on a life of their own. That is to say, he didn’t actually fall in love with a guy as the song imagines. But he did explore the idea.

Written in 2011, “Go Bi” was originally supposed to appear on BRNDA’s first album, but it didn’t make the cut. It also had different music at first, according to the band’s bass player, John Gardner.

“It’s the second incarnation of the song,” says Gardner, 35. “[Year of the Manatee] is also a transitional album because it has older songs written by Dave but also newer songs that were written more collaboratively and organically.”

As for the lyrics, Gardner says he knows a lot of bi people who feel a bit disconnected from the straight community as well as lesbian and gay communities. He’d like to think of “Go Bi” as a sort of “bi anthem.” (Though, not all band members agree the song could be called an anthem for bisexuality or anything else.)

But Lesser’s thoughts about the lyrics are still evolving. He says he probably wouldn’t write the same song today; he’d be more nuanced and careful about his implications. It wasn’t until a recent conversation with Gardner — who identifies as queer — that he gave the tune more thought.

“One thing that never occurred to me was that I could be subtly implying that it is a choice to ‘go bi,’ and that was never my intention at all,” Lesser says. “I would actually feel very bad if it was assumed that someone could just choose to date men or women. But at the same time I was writing it I was thinking, ‘Hey, this was a hard time in my life. What if I tried something different?’”

BRNDA plays an album release show July 30 at Black Cat.

This post has been updated to add that not all members of BRNDA agree that “Go Bi” could be called a “bi anthem.”

That’s what I asked Bandwidth’s contributors to help me do last month. Our writers sent me their picks for their favorite D.C. music of 2015 thus far, and the result was this extremely awesome playlist (stream it below).

One limitation, though: I had to pick songs that have been uploaded to Soundcloud. As it turns out, not everybody puts their music on the service. A lot of rock and punk bands, in particular, use Bandcamp, and some artists — for reasons my under-30 brain is still struggling to understand — don’t even put their songs on the Internet for free.

So this playlist still isn’t as exhaustive as I wanted it to be, but it’s still pretty freaking great. Give it a listen on your computer or chosen mobile device, and be sure to chide us in the comments, on Twitter or via email for missing your favorite D.C. music of the year. (Seriously! Send me your nominations — we want to hear it all.)

For more coverage of D.C. music, follow Bandwidth’s Track Work series.

Warning: Explicit lyrics.

Image, clockwise from top left: April + VISTA, Kali Uchis, Young Rapids (partial image), Ras Nebyu, Prinze George (partial image), Visto.

D.C. acts Baby Bry Bry & The Apologists, BRNDA and The Sea Life have more or less cornered the city’s market for noisy, oddball pop that delves into all varieties of other stuff, from The Sea Life’s hazy lo-fi to Baby Bry Bry’s throwback garage punk. They’ll be playing with kindred spirits What Moon Things, the “dreamo” ensemble based in New York.

For Sunday’s show, the bands and their cohorts at The Sea Life’s label Chimes Records will release an eight-song cassette (plus a download card) with two new songs from each of the bands. The label produced 200 tapes for the show, which will be given out free to the first 200 folks who turn up. All these bands plus a tape for $15? Not bad.

“All of the bands on the bill this Sunday are buds, so our excitement about finally getting to play together made us want to make the show feel as special to the audience as it is to us,” says Baby Bry Bry frontman Bry (Bryan Gerhart). A tape giveaway is also a pretty good way to fill up a club on a Sunday night.

Today Bandwidth premieres four songs from the limited-run tape — one from each of the bands. But don’t let that excuse you from hitting up the show this Sunday and nabbing your own copy.

Warning: Some explicit language.

Baby Bry Bry & The Apologists, “Reluctantly Inspired”

BRNDA, “Serious Band”

The Sea Life, “Let Me Out” (Live Demo)

What Moon Things, “Insturment”

Baby Bry Bry and the Apologists at Jam Jar:

The Public at St. Stephen’s Church:

Loud Boyz at St. Stephen’s Church:

Hold Tight! at St. Stephen’s Church:

State Lines at St. Stephen’s Church:

Meridian at Paperhaus:

BRNDA at Paperhaus:

What Moon Things at Paperhaus:

When D.C. punk gets to feel too serious, a band like BRNDA reminds us that fun is an option, too.

Now it has a whole album full of those fun songs: Today, BRNDA (formerly Brenda) debuted its new full-length on Bandcamp. Tonight it plays a release show at Rock & Roll Hotel with fellow locals The Walking Sticks and The Sea Life.

My favorite song from that March show is also my favorite on the record. It’s “Super Dave,” a song whose ridiculous chorus you probably shouldn’t sing absentmindedly in public: “Dave, we’ve got a crack pipe if you want it.” I asked the band’s drummer, Leah Gage, to tell me what that’s all about.

“Certain members of BRNDA are acquainted with the difficulties of being tempted by certain substances, and we wanted to write a song about it,” Gage writes in an email. “We were in Baltimore and talking about a time Dave [Lesser, vocalist and guitarist] fell off a cliff in Pittsburgh, and before we knew it the story of a superhero trying to save potheads from being thwarted by crack and the evil Dr. Freebase was born.”

A key verse from the tale of Super Dave:

“Dr. Freebase flies up in the air, he gives me a look, a comic-book stare/He’s got the potheads all smoking crack; I know what I’ve got to do to fight back/Rose clenched between my teeth, I plunge into the darkness beneath.”

The addicted masses might want Super Dave to suck from the malicious crack pipe, but Dave isn’t bending. “Dave, we’ve got a crack pipe if you want it,” goes that chorus. His defiant reply: “No way—Super Dave is here to stay.”

Listen to the entire album on Bandcamp.