Hi all ~

This coming Sunday is the one year anniversary of Youth Pastoral’s release, which is kinda hard to believe no matter how you look at it.

I played exactly two (2) live shows in support of this record coming out last year - the first a very densely packed gig at a bar in Brooklyn the day of the release and a subdued house show encore the following night. And then we started hearing things about the virus.

Good morning ~

Breaking form a bit today - no writing to share, but I do have 30 blessedly untroubled minutes of new music to offer, constructed entirely from samples from this song. Free streaming and pay-what-you-want downloads on Bandcamp.

Listen:

Good morning ~

Every few Thursdays this email will be for paying subscribers only. Today is one of those! I wrote about an exhaustive and surreal weekend, art handling, loaves of bread, and playing the banjo. Today’s track is made from samples of an old and weary piano I found this weekend - it’s dedicated to the memory of the composer Harold Budd.

…so I grabbed both of their bulks and returned home to my experimental art co-op apartment two hundred dollars richer, the fitted sheet on my mattress on the floor felt finer than silk as I slid downhill in my sleep, the pit bulls in the kennel in the front of the bar across the street barking their exultations.

In January of this year I saw music my friend composed performed in the actual crypt of an enormous church. I walked there from work and listened to an audiobook about George Jones. The crypt was quiet and the instruments bounced off the walls, like ghosts with debts to settle. I felt far, far away from everything, further than I had felt in years. In January of this year I took my dad to see some experimental music at a place with incredibly ornate wooden speaker cabinets and kombucha on tap. We sat on the floor and listened to processed oboe, then we sat on the floor and listened to processed pedal steel. During the second set I realized I had somehow lost my earring, a beautiful gold hoop with turquoise beads hand-made by a friend. After the show my dad and I got on a scooter I rented with an app and rode over to an old bar. We drank a couple of beers while my dad got hit on relentlessly, but they didn't serve any food, so we walked to another bar and got a late dinner, over which we argued about politics but I think I won.

In February of this year we went to a crowded restaurant in the East Village that served Filipino food. The complicated cocktail I ordered came with a little toy pig on a surfboard resting on the edge of the glass and that little toy pig on a surfboard is now on a bookshelf in an apartment in a different city entirely. My girlfriend gave me a new earring to replace the one I had lost, she got in touch secretly with the friend who made the last one and got another. I was very surprised and we smiled wide at each other over across the tiny table. That night we wanted to lose our minds and listen to our favorite DJs but we unexpectedly ran into some friends and acquaintances on the way into the bar who absolutely killed the mood for dancing, through no fault of their own. So we stood on the dance floor for 1 minute completely surrounded by strangers and simultaneously decided to leave. The guy driving the cab on the way home told me about taking acid and seeing behind the veil of reality, then he told us we should check out Dario Argento's movies (which we did the next day). In February of this year I got like a dozen people together to cram onto a tiny jewel box stage to play my songs. There were so many people in the room that people were actually turned away, which as far as I know is the first and only time that has ever happened when I've performed. Truthfully, I don't remember too much about that night, and trying to think about it is a bit like standing under a too-hot shower or staring into the sun. I definitely hugged more people that night than I have in all the days and nights combined since, though - other details are lost.

The year is 1999. You are eleven years old and you contain one multitude. Following in the example of your much older brother you asked your mom if it would be okay if you could maybe dye your hair. She says yes, immediately, as long as it goes back to normal before the school year starts (and the entire time you're a teenager it never occurs to you how fortunate you are to live in a home where this kind of experimentation and self-expression is accepted). It is the beginning of summer and she drives you to the nearest place that sells any variety of manic panic. You quickly chose the color blue. Back at home your mom enthusiastically helps you first bleach your hair light enough to take in the dye. It's a complicated process that involves a barber shop bib and tin foil and sitting on the lid of the toilet but the chemical miasma in the upstairs bathroom fills your lungs and you feel maybe, possibly, cool. The blue dye sets beautifully and you line your scalp with LA looks and watch the now richly yves klein blue, sharply pointed curls set, like waves freezing on a lake. You look in the mirror and imagine yourself playing guitar loudly on an outdoor stage, there is a crowd, there is a beach and they are screaming for you, for you, for you. You have only learned your first few chords, worked out some tablature for a Red Hot Chili Peppers song, but with this look - rebellious and yes, alternative - the roar of the spring break crowd in the afternoon sun feels inevitable, as inevitable as the roar of the waves, breaking at the edge of the earth.

You want very deeply to be different. Both separate from the pack and different from how you are right now (chubby, cherubic, quick to tears, nerdy). You want to be distinct from your peers, noticeable, desirable. These concepts are vague, you lack the words for them, exactly, but you ache for it anyway. At the same time you want to change because you have started to see that the things you naturally gravitate toward are simply not cool. You learn very quickly through the vicious feedback of your junior high peers what is cool and what is not. Partially because of the bullying, partially because of suddenly needing girls to pay attention to you, partially because of the pop punk your cousin is getting you into, partially because your mom loved hard rock when she was a stoned LA teenager and now plays zeppelin IV loud in the car on the way to school, partially because of the influence of your older brother who dyed his hair long before you and used to play in bands in the garage and you could hear the drums from down at the other end of the cul de sac (he once took you to see weezer and the get up kids and reggie and the full effect in San Diego, your cousin had to hide his wallet chain in a bush outside the venue before security would let you in) what you allow yourself to enjoy is changing. Playing the cello is not cool anymore, listening to yo yo ma CDs is even more not cool, crying at your cello lesson regularly is absolutely not cool (although, not your fault: the teacher speaks in a confusingly frank tone and aims every lesson toward eventually getting you a gig. When you tell him you want to play stuff like Smashing Pumpkins he really loses it and says you're wasting everyone's time but you're not sure why). The disco songs you love to shout at the top of your lungs on the way to school are not cool, even though they make you bouncy and happy (you will never admit to a love for Anita Ward in your AOL Instant Messenger profile). Church is okay, not cool exactly, but it is complicated - at school you can never admit you go to church, even though you spend the entire summer there and your mom works there, because no one at your tiny little middle school goes to the same church as you or even the same type of church as you, exactly. At your church the youth pastor shows you how to play counting crows songs (which, not cool, but learning guitar is cool) and he does motocross on the weekends. In the lounge area where youth services are held (which is really far from the choir loft full of old people where you spent a lot of time in elementary school) they have a couple video game cabinets and a wonky pool table and an N64 and before and after services you and your friends play wrestling videogames. All of that is cool, and in this rarefied space loving god is cool, too, so you're much more popular and comfortable at church than you ever will be at school. At church you can sing your little aching heart out during the tear-jerker worship ballads and your wet-eyed conviction demonstrates inner strength, whereas almost everywhere else being too excited about anything shows you to be weak and invested, rather than aloof and dismissive (it's cool to be dismissive). And the one group leader who came back from two years of clandestine ministry work in China takes you to watch wrestling pay-per-view events and eat hot wings at a sports bar once a month. One time he took you and a bunch of friends laser tagging, too, not even a church thing, this was just for fun and he actually broke his foot while he was playing when he took a corner too hard. But he didn't cry out and he didn't stop the game, in fact he kept shooting and ended up winning the match because he was so low to the ground. Afterwards he hopped to his car. You didn't see him as weak or too old to be playing laser tag, you saw him as badass. He's cool, because everyone says that the work of bringing christ abroad was dangerous, he could have died or been put in prison, but he testified anyway and had some success, and one early morning in Santa Barbara after sleeping over in a different church on a summer camp trip he tells you about being a warrior for christ, how his love made you strong, his love was a shield, and how in heaven it's not that you walk the streets of gold but rather that you simply exist in his presence, immortal and unyielding. So you consider yourself a warrior for christ, you imagine defeating satan in a cage match and when you mouth along the words in rage against the machine songs playing on your discman you feel the hooves of the four horsemen rumbling in the distance. Your faith is a secret strength: though it is never to be mentioned to your dad or your brother or especially your grandfather or any of your classmates it simmers inside you, an ever-lit torch. Though at the same time you are also obedient and terrified. You are confused and disgusted by wobbly new body feelings and sometimes wake up from nightmares of underground caverns and sulfurous fire. This tension within you is pulled taut, like a seatbelt on too tight - you feel your faith restraining your movements, at times keeping you apart from your peers or members of your family. But it defines you, too, it sets you apart, and in this you take delight, so that when your hair gel sets into tight, hard, blue curls and you leave the house in a button-down shirt with dragons and flames running down the side you feel celestial, brilliant - an unwavering band of light.

Cold walk home today, I looked up overhead. Sunset starts too early these days, both of the middle-aged strangers I spoke to this afternoon said so and I agreed (one at the springs, one at the library). Pinks starting to ring the clouds, and parallel to me, a tiny jet engine plane, its long tail streaming out behind it, white and just starting to get the dusk colors going. From my perspective it looked like a needle being dragged slowly across the light blue skin of the sky, leaving a just-on-the-verge-of-bleeding scratch. From where I was looking we seemed to be going along in the same direction, at the same speed. I stopped and wondered if the plane would stop in mid-air, too. Who was flying in that tiny plane at 4:15pm today above the airspace of my little city?

The needle that drags across the platter of plastic accepts the vibrations of the audio information embedded in the plastic. The embedded music shakes the needle just so, and a series of devices take the information from that shaking needle and broadcast it into a room. In my case my turntable sends signal to a receiver that then sends audio to two big speakers up on milk crates, speakers I bought from a guy's garage on a street with no streetlights or cell service after I saw them listed on Craigslist. He'd only accept cash so I had to drive back into town and get 200 bucks out of the ATM at the Stewart's and when I got back to the garage he popped in a U2 cassette to show that it still worked ("I still haven't found what I'm looking for," the anthem of craigslist). The needle that drags across the plastic only lasts so long, they wear out, and the records that vibrate the needle get scraped again and again, each time the record is played. The needle, however microscopically, rips up the plastic bit by bit. And the plastic blunts back. So every time you listen to an LP you destroy it a little more, until one day you hear the backside of the flip side of the record, the ghostly impression of it, the topographic mirror image of the music on the other side of the record now detected by the needle, which is also ever degrading. In high school I eventually wore out my mom's already worn out copy of everybody knows this is nowhere. I'm on my third copy of it now, and there's nothing more spectral than hearing the backside of music, like seeing the inside of your face.

The last time I slept in a building that no one else was sleeping in was this summer while I was in Georgia for that residency, unless you count camping, in which case the last time I slept alone in a tent was at my friend's pre-wedding sorta-bachelor party thing last summer, that weekend that a few of us got tick bites. I don't sleep alone often these days, not even in a separate room or a separate bed and for this I am very thankful. Those two weeks of total isolation felt so strange to me, like walking the surface of another planet entirely. Almost every other night of my life (while not camping) has been slept in an apartment shared with other people so that even if the roommates were gone or out of town there was probably someone in one of the other apartments on one of the other floors. Although it's possible that apartments I've lived in were empty besides for me, it's hard to tell - I'm not in the habit of taking attendance before going to sleep each night. Once on Christmas I stayed home in NYC, no plans to celebrate, and at the time I was living in this pretty wild loft apartment building and it certainly felt like I was the only one sleeping there. On Christmas morning it felt a little bit like everyone had vacated the city entirely when I first woke up but later I walked 60+ blocks up Broadway and could feel the warmth coming from both the apartments filled with crammed in families and the Chinese restaurants, they were throbbing like hot coals. And I came home late that night from working a shift at the movie theater I worked at and drank alone in the light of our apartment's little christmas tree and not a creature was stirring. Are your dreams more or less powerful if there are people sleeping near you? A sleeping person seems to exert force on a space, wouldn't that force be exerted on someone else sleeping and dreaming? If you were to gather 100 people together for one night and have them sleep as close as possible while still comfortable would their dreams be more extraordinary? Would they have greater fortune telling powers? Would the unusual situation of having 100 people sleeping side-by-side in comfort prevent people from sleeping deeply? Or would their dreams talk to one another, would their dreams rhyme? Would one person dream of 100 floating hot air balloons filling an airplane hangar while another dreamed of 100 balloon animals coming to life while another dreamed of a zoo for watching people who are sleeping? Do we savor a dream of isolation? Or is that a terrible thing to experience, solitude in dreams? Do people who are locked up by military-adjacent government agencies and institutions ever get peaceful sleep? Is it comforting or unbearable to sense someone else sleeping in a cell? Does our breathing link up in some way? If 100 people were breathing air in and out simultaneously would it be possible to accidentally suck all the air out of a room? Would sleeping in a room with 100 plants be, well, a nice thing to do? That answer seems obvious to me. Etc. I've slept a lot of nights in someone's house, sometimes on a couch or on a spare bed or straight on the floor. When someone is hosting you for the night they are allowing you to enter the magnetic field of their sleep. Do you remember what it used to be like staying at someone else's place? Trying to figure out how to use their shower, that moment when they tell you where the extra towels are? Wondering if you parked your car correctly? One that I do less of these days is "where can we get something to eat around here" at any time past 10pm. It's a fun thing to do because that's one way to get to know a town but also encouraging your host to do things they take for granted about where they live is an excellent way to repay their kindness. If you weren't there crashing they wouldn't think to ever go to that diner, but now they're here enjoying disco fries or whatever with you at 2am. If you were there on a weeknight when you would wake up in the morning you might have no instructions at all besides "help yourself" and so you look around for the coffee, look around for the filters, look around, look around. You would truly behold someone else's kitchen. They might leave a note, though, or a plate of food out for you (help yourself, an amazing thing to encourage someone to do, one of those phrases we say all the time but never think about what it truly means. Help yourself. Another is you are welcome, what a beautiful thing to say to someone. Try to really mean it the next time you say it). They might not have told you the WiFi before they left for work so you take your hard won cup of coffee over to a bookshelf and read the titles, you truly behold the titles. Or better yet they have a stack of magazines and so you read something from a New Yorker from like 9 weeks ago while you have your coffee in their space. It's a precious thing because the people that live there don't get to experience this place in that way hardly ever, if ever. Most people you crash with are not in their homes at 10:15am on a normal Thursday, but you were there, half paying attention to a graphic novel while sipping on a second cup of coffee, watching the dust motes swirl in that particular slant of sunlight in that quiet way that midmornings have (negative space, people having left, rare these days). It is holy, in its way. Now we see 10:15am in our Thursday apartments all the time. It's nothing special, really, although lately the radiators have kicked on which makes the place feel new and exciting. Do you remember what it was like, slipping the spare key under the front door?

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