Kaleb Horton RIP

A farewell to my friend Kaleb Horton, a great writer who died unexpectedly this past weekend.

After finishing Tom Piazza’s lovely Living in the Present with John Prine late at night a while back, I made a note to self: I should tell my friend Kaleb Horton he needs to read this book when it’s published.

I never sent that message. Life got in the way. The mundane subsumes the heavy stuff until the cycle begins again. You never can tell where somebody else is in their own personal rotation, particularly if they live half a continent away. That distance is the reason why I saw Kaleb in person only once, nearly a decade ago at this point: hours spent wandering through Burbank and North Hollywood in a day orchestrated by our mutual friend, Conrad Flynn.

I met Kaleb a little bit before he began acquiring justified boutique bylines, publishing articles that earned him the reputation as “The Last Magazine Writer,” as Matt Pearce put it in a Substack post published shortly after Horton’s sudden, unexpected death on September 26, 2025. This framing plays into the online persona Kaleb cultivated through his articles, photography, and posts. Combined, his creative output made him appear older than his years. Up close, his youth shone though: his passions were deep and earnest, he still showed signs of being in the process of figuring himself out.

One of the great themes in Kaleb’s work is how the past can still be perceived underneath the garish clamor of the present. He was so keenly attuned to the ghosts howling through decaying roadside attractions, so aware of the folklore lining blues and punk, that it was easy to think of him as the last chronicler of the 20th Century. Look closely, and there’s no mistaking he came of age in the 21st Century. He understood the form and intent of online trolling, he had a podcast and a Tumblr, he wasn’t above writing long on Facebook (Ned Raggett uncovered this 2017 piece where he saw the end of an era within the collapse of Toys ‘R’ Us). He also needed to take whatever work came his way, whether it was obituaries, political commentaries, or album reviews.

One of those record reviews was of The Tree of Forgiveness, the 2018 album by John Prine, which Kaleb covered for Pitchfork. The singer/songwriter complimented the review, which delighted Kaleb. Prine wasn’t the only one of his idols who offered praise. Norm MacDonald notably Tweeted “you’re a great writer, Kaleb” in 2024 (Horton later eulogized Norm for Rolling Stone). My favorite occurrence of these celebrity compliments surrounds Hell’s Been Empty, a March 2016 essay that was his first lengthy piece for MTV News. Back then, Kaleb and I shared a fascination with the grift and cons of right wing talk radio, particularly the song and dance of Michael Savage on The Savage Nation. The key passage in Hell’s Been Empty captured Savage’s operatic showmanship:

“Here’s how a regular conservative talk radio host might operate: Take a recent clip of a known liberal or other political enemy of the show, play it a couple of times, and then sort of go, “Oh, I don’t know, folks, that statement, er, doesn’t really fly with me” and take a couple calls, on with the show. But here’s how Savage does it: He’ll play the same clip. Exact same stock clip. But then he’ll take a beat, an off-mic breath, and yell “LIAR!” over and over again. His riffs escalate in out-of-body fury on borders and language and culture and all these liars, until he exhausts his creative energy and starts talking about what he had for lunch, spent and disoriented, like he ran a marathon and is sweating out the muscle shakes under his finish-line space blanket. Savage makes Fox News, at the molten core of its belligerence, sound borderline Victorian.”

Wonderful, vivid prose that Savage wound up reading on an episode of The Savage Nation. After sneering at the MTV News association, Savage quickly got sucked into Kaleb’s rhythm, stifling a chuckle before chortling, “this is good writing,” or words to that effect. His laughter gave away the game: this was indeed a game to the talk show host and Savage appreciated that Kaleb ignored the words and concentrated on the music.

His ear for idioms and understanding of the peculiar rhythms of the working class gave Kaleb a chance to work as a political commentator, especially since he started amassing notable bylines during Trump’s ascendency. Writing about politics made him uneasy, though. He couldn’t find fresh angles, he didn’t like the kind of attention it brought him. The work did build his reputation, helping him land bigger pieces, leading to the 2021 masterwork The Ballad of the Chowchilla Bus Kidnapping and his ode to The Pioneer Chicken Stand, an article for theLAnd that touched upon so many of his enduring obsessions: the fading icons of the 20th Century, unexamined lives lived on the margins, and Warren Zevon.

We talked about music often. Kaleb loved flinty singer/songwriters, the kind that told short stories in songs. Zevon, to be sure, along with Billy Joe Shaver, Tom Petty, and Shane McGowan, who he eulogized in GQ. His editor Alex Pappademas wrote of that piece, “He was never sure about anything he wrote and everything was always this good when it came in.” Pappademas rightly emphasizes the consistency but that anxiety was palpable. In casual conversation, Kaleb did diminish his talents, dismissing his prose and opinions so obsessively it was clear it wasn’t self-deprecating shtick. He certainly was a victim of circumstance, existing in a time where there were few outlets for writers of his caliber, but he also inflicted some pain upon himself. He talked himself out of deals, letting his self-doubt push him away from opportunities until there weren’t many left.

The last major article he wrote was about George Harrison’s love of Formula 1 racing, originally published in Esses and appearing in Rolling Stone earlier this year. Our last discussions were spurred by this piece. Kaleb reached out to me to contribute some thoughts on “Faster,” a 1979 tune from George which, as the title suggests, is about racing; he also asked Andy Zax to opine and his acid commentary is much funnier than mine. I was happy to participate, delighted to hear that he had a new feature in the works. We last talked in March, when he told me that he might be able to send me a hard copy of the article. I haven’t had the stomach to read these or any of our years of messages and emails, so I can’t give the details of the conversation, but I know that we talked about work and health, the kinds of things you discuss with a friend you haven’t heard from in a while.

Because so much of our friendship did exist at a distance, it’s a bit hard processing the fact that he’s no longer out there wandering through California, playing Joe Strummer & the Mescaleros along the way. I’m sure his death will sink in eventually, once I realize he’s no longer there to chat about the little things and nonsense that make up a life. All I can say now, is that the conversation that keeps playing in my mind is one we had a year or two ago, when I mentioned that I can never make a quick breakfast on the weekend without my young daughters insisting on cracking and whisking the eggs. Kaleb said something about cooking being spiritual when it’s with other people. I have thought of those words every time the kids insist on helping in the kitchen.