What's up everybody. If you didn't see – another song from American Pyramid, my album coming out on August 28, was released Tuesday. It's called Riverboat Blues. There's a video for it by Ben Turok. As a Wisconsinite, I've always been fascinated by the Mississippi River. Sometimes I think about how the Midwest was once a thriving economic powerhouse. St. Louis was a metropolis with almost a million people in the 40s. The river was the highway that connected many of these places and facilitated their prosperity. Geography which creates the conditions for economy which creates the conditions for culture. Red brick buildings, steamboats that resemble Victorian houses, and jazz music - these things have always felt aesthetically romantic to me.

I had an idea many years ago to take my old band, Midnight Reruns, on tour down the Mississippi on a boat. We'd dock in every city from top to bottom and have the show right there on the deck. Of course, the logistic and financial reality of this dream made its execution impossible. At the time, I hadn't heard about Grimes trying something similar.

I must have been thinking about this dream last year when I wrote Riverboat Blues. The ramshackle live take that made it on the record was the sonic equivalent of how the words made me feel, a warped fantasy, born out of some geographic myth. My record label allowed me to play that out in part, as we rented the La Crosse Queen for a couple hours to represent the song visually. It was a beautiful day, I had never seen fifty turtles on a log before.

This nostalgic, and perhaps false, interpretation of place is a running theme through this album. Another video I wanted to do involved scuba diving in Rock Lake to find the legendary Pyramid. I had been hearing about it since I was a kid. Was it the remnants of a society? Or was it built by a crazy rich guy like the House on the Rock? Turns out it doesn't exist at all, as confirmed by Logan when he told me he has a friend who wrote a dissertation on it.

However, American Pyramids are real. Advanced Native American civilizations existed all across the continent in the middle ages. 900 years before St. Louis's industrial heyday, another metropolis, called Cahokia, stood in the same spot. It had 20,000 residents, and they built a pyramid which is still there today. It's now called Monks Mound, after the French trappists that settled it in the 1800's, but like so much information about Cahokia, the original name is lost. I often think about what life was like there, but I will never know.

The other thing those two words evoke for me is The Memphis Bass Pro Shop (also on the river) – a celebration of artifice, a grand kitschy statement that disregards what should or shouldn't go together, equally as endearing as it is detestable for its honest representation of America, a place where the god we're all forced to worship, commerce, won't even allow himself to be taken seriously.

But even this era, of malls and stadiums and bustling downtowns in midsize cities, the era of my childhood, is no longer contemporary. The ghosts are taking up residence there just as they did in the Factories of St. Louis in the 70s. I associate these large public spectacles now with things I see in China on Instagram reels.

These very different periods and ideas are inspirational to me as an artist. I don't really know why, but I know the Mississippi River weaves through them all. It may be inadvisable to lean too hard on nostalgia, especially for something you never experienced, but as our current American reality feels increasingly hollowed out, it could be productive to appropriate disparate pieces of the past in order to imagine a future that is interesting.

P.S. - Please hit my PO box with something! The address is right below here. Ask me a question, gimme something that I can use on here. I've gotten a couple really nice letters (which I am planning on responding to) but I need some good material for this newsletter :)

Hey, how's it going? I wanted to let everybody know I have a PO box now – Got a question? Have some kind of grand theory to get off your chest? Wanna send me a poem? If I get anything good, I'll put it in a future newsletter. The address is below, run it up.

Graham Hunt
PO BOX 7201
Madison, WI 53707

The last month has been pretty crazy. If you add moving and an album rollout on top of all your normal obligations, you'll find that you have very little spare time. It's all good stuff, though, and I'm excited to share more with you as we get closer to the release date. Through it all, I've managed to listen to a lot of music. Revisiting the classics is a good way to regulate during chaotic seasons. Vanishing Point, Veni Vedi Vicious, Sticky Fingers, Finally Rich. I don't have to worry if these albums will do their jobs. It's good to have go-tos to fall back on when you don't feel like branching out.

It's also important to hold on to some novelty when the chaos is monotonous. I've been having fun playing writing games with Molly. We've devised a two-person take on exquisite corpse in which one person writes 2-4 lines and folds the paper so the other person can only see the last one. Then that person responds and folds the paper, again only revealing the last line. It goes like this until you fill up a page, and then you read it. It's an easy low stakes way to get the creative part of your brain moving, and we've gotten some good results.

The next single from American Pyramid comes out July 7th, there's gonna be a music video and I'll have tour dates to announce. OK, take care of yourself and talk to you then.

Hello everyone, thank you for checking out my newsletter. Today, I am pleased to announce that my 6th album, "American Pyramid," will be released on August 28. A few weeks ago, Shannon made a video for the song "Waiting For You to Come Home", which is out today. He had the idea to print out every frame, draw on top of them, and scan them back in. I remember seeing a Screaming Females video from a decade ago that did something similar and thinking I wanted to try that one day, so I enthusiastically agreed. Molly and I both put in some hours with pens and paint, too. Each page contained 6 frames, and many look pretty cool just on their own.

Shannon took a more "coloring-in" approach, Molly and I took a more "doodle" approach, but I think it all managed to be pretty cohesive. As you can imagine, the process took a very long time. It was tedious but also meditative work, and it was exciting to see the fruits of our labor come to life when viewing the end result.

It was the first song I wrote for this record; it almost made it on Timeless World Forever. Ultimately, the demo I made at the time didn't cut it, and thematically it was a little too straightforward for that record. It was fall 2024 and I didn't have a lot going on besides washing dishes at the vegan restaurant, walking to Kwik-Trip, and doing kratom (I'm off that shit now, maybe I'll write more about that later). Every day, I would wait for my roommate Logan to get off work so we could watch a movie. One day, while messing around on guitar, this song just all came out at once. Then a whole lot more came in the following weeks.

I ended up recording them all at Pachadyrm studios in Minnesota 9 or 10 months later. I wanted to get out of my comfort zone and do this record a little differently, marking a clean break from the trilogy of albums I did prior. In order to achieve this, I rounded up a big band of 7 musician friends, and we attempted to record them all live, a very different approach to my usual computer-based multi-tracking. We did a lot of instrument switching, but on this song we have: Neal Jochmann on synth bass, Emili Earhart on piano, Shannon Connor on Keyboard, Isaac DeBroux-Slone on bass VI, Sheridan Connor on drums, Sam Reitman and Stu Manley on percussion, Logan Severson on 12 string, and me on acoustic guitar. Today, you can see the album cover as well, made by Barrett Avner. I'm delighted with how that came together.

Alright, that's all for now, stay tuned and I'll talk to you soon.

Waves of people walked in front of me to exit the cheese steak shop. It was like a clown car - they just kept coming. Coins were rolling out of my inseam from the hole in my pocket. The man with my sandwich was yelling my name. To retrieve it would require violence. Did he expect me to start shoving? I was on tour in Philly, and the sense of urgency left an impression - I gotta start writing again. I'm thankful for the epiphany.

I haven't been listening to much music lately. I want to change that, my life is better when I am. I thought keeping this site updated with what I've been enjoying would be a good strategy. Classics only this time, but I'll start getting into some new stuff soon.

Rain When I Die - Alice In Chains
We were driving through Joshua Tree last month. I had never been there before. Emili Earhart put on Dirt. I had never heard it before. Little details can determine the emotional impact music like this is going to have on me. Tweak the time signature just slightly. Make the chorus really big and simple. Drive through the desert while a long intro slowly reveals the shape of the song, like scattered limbs of a golem crawling back to find its whole. A fact people love to share - the moniker "Butt Rock" comes not from the body part, but from radio stations that play nothing "but" rock. I think hard rock could come back again, maybe it already has. It would be interesting to see people play with the form, putting it in unexpected contexts. Some sort of internet art damaged version of the Scorpions or Living Colour. Later that night, while watching Narrow Head, I thought they were inching the door open to that possibility by replacing Layne Staley with Liam Gallagher. I have some more stupid ideas like this written down somewhere, one just says "Diplo and egg punk". Please don't run that through AI.

All White - Die Kreuzen
I'm no expert, but to my ears, Die Kreuzen's first album sounds more black metal than many of the so-called progenitors of the genre. Venom is in Motorhead world, and in Hellhammer I hear the blueprint for modern deranged Xerox style hardcore. In 1984, the OG Milwaukeeans were faster, more atmospheric, and more demonic than any of that. They were listening to Wire and Cheap Trick, not Slayer. They switched up their style shortly after this, and their hodgepodge of influences became clearer in subsequent albums, as they started sounding more like King Diamond singing for the Replacements. What a strange band. My friend Sahan recently finished a book about them - a decade plus in the making - it's cool to see all the people they had an impact on (Kim Thayil Neko Case and Thurston Moore, to name a few). My favorite story in the book involves an opening slot for the Ramones, whose smoke machine is revealed to be hundreds of lit cigarettes taped to plywood. Die Kreuzen's bass player Keith Brammer and his wife Janet would often come see my old band play. That was humbling and a huge motivator to continue doing what I do.

The Harder They Come - Jimmy Cliff / I am the Resurrection - the Stone Roses
Gonna hit a two-for-one here because it's been a bad week for my musical heroes. When I graduated high school, my dad and I drove the entire perimeter of Wisconsin. We stopped to take a break in Duluth, a logical halfway point. We went to a record store and bought The Harder They Come soundtrack on CD. We listened to it the entire way home, and to this day, it is still one of my favorite albums. Around the same time, I had an Oasis obsession that naturally morphed into a Stone Roses obsession. I took a bizarre pyramid scheme job selling knives door to door. I would give a presentation that involved cutting a penny in half. On my way home, I would blast "I am the Resurrection" and dream about being in a band like that.

Alesund - Sun Kil Moon
About seven years ago, I worked the door at Thalia Hall in Chicago. One night, Mark Koz played and the show went pretty long. Two hours in, a couple walked out and I overheard their conversation - "I told you you wouldn't like it," The man said. His date responded, "Yeah, but I didn't realize how much I'd fucking HATE it". Anyway, the most annoying genius songwriter next to Billy Corgan made up for that night, by providing the perfect soundtrack for my own date to a pumpkin patch last month, where Molly and I watched a pig named Sydney Swine-y win a race, as the other pigs got distracted by eating the flowers growing from the track.

It's blizzarding here and that's all I got the energy to yap about today. Gotta shovel. Lately, most of my free time outside of being with loved ones has been spent touring or trying to finish my next album. I'm sort of trying to find my way out of this early-aughts breakbeat style pop influence that I'm starting to hear everywhere in indie rock now. Or at least trying to find a different direction to take it. I genuinely love a lot of music like that, and I have friends who do it very well, but for my own personal creative journey, it's starting to feel like a wall. Earlier this year, I recorded a bunch of new songs live with a big band of talented friends, and I've been spending months trying to shape them into something that has a perspective. I have more work to do, but my goal is to wrap it up by the end of the year.

To everyone who celebrates, I hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving, and to those who don't, I hope you had a wonderful day. I'll put my upcoming tour dates below, but you'll certainly hear me sound off on here again before then. Love you, talk soon.

Timeless World Forever came out 2 months ago and as I gear up to start recording my 6th solo album next week, I thought it would be nice to have a look back at my most recently released songs.

I Just Need Enough
This song came from a cheap guitar that unexpectedly found its way to me. Shannon Connor and I were on a walk when we ran into an old high school teacher of his. Mr. Gibson had a guitar that he never played and asked if I wanted it. It was a big Ibanez dreadnought. I asked if I could get him something in return. He said beer. When I got home, I decided arbitrarily to tune the guitar to DADGAD. It's not a tuning I've ever used before. I started playing and landed on the riff almost immediately. My roommate was recording a local band called Cause and Control in our basement. They sounded a little mathy and I think that seeped in. I recorded the guitar to a click track and looped it. I went into my voice memos and found a couple chords and melodies I had saved that fit well enough to be used as the other two parts of the song. I lined everything up and played drums over it. It's not my first instrument, so I found one section that was good and looped that. Then I pitched it down so it sounded heavier.

This was all happening in May, when it first starts to get warm out in Wisconsin. I associate that time of year with extreme gratitude. You are so happy to be alive that you start to become thankful for the hardships in your life, because if experiencing pain means you can experience this too, then bring it on. You want to forgive everyone who has ever wronged you, and you want to tell your enemies that you love them. You feel embarrassed that you ever felt any different. When the song was done, I showed my friend John Chiaverina. He said it should be the opening track, but I would need to add an ambient intro.

East Side Screamer
Song number 2 finds Shannon and I walking again. Upon reflection, I realize I missed an opportunity to make a concept album entirely based on events that occurred during our walks.

The lyrics describe an incident where we saw a man screaming into his phone from many blocks away. Somebody yelled "shut the fuck up" at him from a window, and he turned around. The street was desolate except for the two of us standing there. He started sprinting toward us full speed as we frantically tried to explain, waving our arms around and pointing to the house we thought the voice came from. He was getting closer and closer, and we thought we were about to get our asses beat. But he stopped 2 inches from us while continuing to scream before he just turned around and ran away. I never saw him again.

Before this incident, I would often hear various people yelling nonsense around bar close in my neighborhood. I wasn't the only one; my friend Amelia Soth had already developed a personal mythology about the phenomenon. The East Side Screamer – an entity that stalks and possesses hapless bar patrons as they leave, causing them to become angry and yell as they walk home.

Musically, it's built on a technique I've been developing where I record myself trying to play a drum solo to a click. I'll then go back and listen critically to pick out the cool moments while deleting the rest. Then I'll move all the clips around, copying, pasting, and arranging them into something that's about the length of a song. This can yield interesting results. I went through my voice memos to see if there was anything that could fit on top of it and found a couple Fugazi-sounding riffs. I recorded the guitar through a tiny Vox Pathfinder practice amp and layered it until it sounded big. I should probably yell the lyrics to a song about yelling. Having the chorus just be screaming would be cool, like Ego Trippin' (Part Two) by De La Soul. By this point, we had started playing the song live, which made me realize I needed to incorporate that energy into the recording. I got Shannon and Stu Manley to record their live guitar and drum parts on top.

Robot World
I sometimes will pull lyrics from childhood memories that are so fuzzy, I need to invent made-up images to fill in the gaps. There was an old, beat-up "Ripley's Believe It Or Not"-style tourist attraction in the Wisconsin Dells called Robot World. It had animatronic models that immersed you in a surreal vision of the future. Wisconsin Dells is like Niagara Falls or Pigeon Forge – I have a fascination with this specific type of bombed-out carnival town.

I was reading a book called The Twenty Days of Turin at the time of writing this song. It's a Lynchian story about a guy unraveling a supernatural conspiracy. Apparently, it's a metaphor for the years of lead, the period of political upheaval that plagued Italy in the 1970s.

Listening back, the guitar reminds me of XTC. It sounds like I'm trying to do a Robert Pollard impression in parts. I acted as conductor as Isaac and Neal Jochmann both played bass simultaneously. Many elements are pulling against each other, but they somehow all work cohesively.

Spiritual Problems
The song title here comes from something Shannon will say when a recording session gets convoluted. It's also how I felt when I was making this song, as I was going through a difficult breakup. I had regressed to listening to Pinkerton regularly. Not a good sign. I needed to expel this energy somehow.

The words and the flow came to me one day while I was driving around at work. I was suspicious of it because it felt familiar and trite. However, the older I get the more I respect the simple ideas – people tend to connect to them more than the ones you think are clever.

A couple of days before, Shannon and I built a groove in which he played a guitar tuner as if it were an instrument. I told him he should use it for one of his songs, to which he said, 'No, you should.' I said, "How about whoever makes lyrics first gets it?" Once I added the chorus, the decision was in stone. I played some live drums over the programming (samples from Wendel, the infamous Steely Dan invention used on Gaucho) and added some big guitars.

I started to get shy about the sentiment. Did I make some sort of incel anthem? Neal snapped me back into reality. "It's just a song about making decisions". The punchline is as sincere as I've ever been. I am eternally grateful for the privilege of experiencing all that I have.

Been There Done That
I had COVID when I wrote this song. I tuned every string on my guitar to a random pitch and put my fingers in different places until it sounded good. I didn't write down how to play it, so I had to do my best to translate what I was doing in my voice memo demo into my regular tuning when I got around to recording the song for real. Shelved in its original form as an Elliott Smith-style sad acoustic song, it got wheels when Stu laid down some funky drums. I had recently watched Practical Magic, and I think the song's atmosphere was inspired by a song in the movie, "Is This Real" by lisahall.

I got the lyric idea while I was walking around my neighborhood at night and saw an entire civilization of spiders under the Barrymore Theater marquee. It was all lit up in the darkness, and you could observe everything that was going on in extreme, uncomfortable detail. At first glance, it looked like chaos, but then you think they must have some sort of system for this to be sustainable. I had been thinking about cycles and coping mechanisms.

Power Object
I had a phase where I was into recording Isaac playing the drums with small cymbals on top of the heads. I made a few loops from that and was able to line it up with another loop frequent collaborator Sahan Jayasuriya sent me. I had a groove going with a guitar riff, but something wasn't right. It sat there for months until one day I decided to obliterate the riff with plugins until it sounded like a sonar. Now we're cooking with gas. I had a strong chorus hook, and I changed the key so it fit the groove. There was a break in the song that needed something, and I asked Neal to play a synth solo; it sounded like Prince. I was listening to the song Cruise Control by the New Zealand band the Headless Chickens at the time.

I collaged some placeholder lyrics to get an idea down, but they ended up sticking. I was reading stuff like Chaos by Tom O'Neill and Programmed to Kill by David McGowan. I was thinking about black magic, politics, and business. I was thinking about talent scouts for sociopaths. I don't really like thinking about that and I'm glad it got hidden in abstraction. You can drive yourself nuts with the conspiracy stuff, and it's difficult to live what I consider to be a healthy and normal life if you spend too much time on it. On the other hand, it would be unwise to write it all off completely.

Frog in the Shower
Last year, my grandfather passed. He loved to tell jokes. His favorite joke was, "Where does a bee go to the bathroom? At the BP station." He had a charming and slow Southern drawl. My grandmother told me the day after it happened, she went into the bathroom and saw a frog sitting in her shower. She said that she had never seen that before and knew it was him telling her it was OK. That stuck with me. It had me thinking about death and reincarnation and acceptance and peace and the old cliché of "everything will be alright in the end, if it's not alright it's not the end," etc.

I was listening to "I Had Some Help" by Post Malone and Morgan Wallen and "Look What Happened" by Less Than Jake. I had been thinking the album could use a "pop hit". One night, one was delivered to me. The song spilled out in one sitting, a rare occurrence for me. It reminded me of my old band, so I recruited Midnight Reruns drummer and longtime friend and collaborator Sam Reitman. I drove to Milwaukee and recorded him playing with a laptop and two mics. Sam hits the drums so hard you could record him with anything and it would sound good.

Cave Art
This was the first song I worked on for this record, months even before my previous one, Try Not To Laugh, was released. Like many of my other songs, it came together through a lengthy trial-and-error process in which I pieced together various disparate ideas like a puzzle, trying different combinations until something fit. I had Neal play the guitar riff on saxophone. I may have been thinking about the Cure and Nine Inch Nails.

Shannon took a clip of me playing drums and turned it into a beat. It reminded me of Linkin Park, who were my favorite band in 5th grade. Isaac remarked that the flow in the verse places the song in the same category as "Walk This Way" and "Shape of You," where the vocal delivery features a familiar rhythm. There are many songs that do that. These lyrics are probably the most abstract of the entire record. I was freewriting and jotting down my dreams, then collaging them together. I was thinking about an interaction I had with someone at a gas station. I ripped off a line from Baudrillard. I was in Atlanta visiting family. It feels like coming to terms with some kind of darkness.

CRC
Local songwriter Ryan Liam Maguire left a keyboard at my house. Some keys were broken, which inspired me to play it more, as I had to work within its limitations. I played a couple of chords, and a melody emerged immediately. Sahan came over and played drums to a click track for about three minutes by himself, and I decided to use what he did, totally unaltered, recording my song right on top of it. I was listening to the band Fishmans a lot at the time and tried to evoke an otherworldly, dub-inspired spacious feeling. Isaac mixed this song and did a good job bringing those elements out. I re-appropriated some lyrics I had from an impromptu hotel recording session Neal, Shannon and I had done during our tour with Narrow Head the previous year.

It took me some time to find a vocal style that suited the song. I tried singing it in a few different ways before I landed on a Chino Moreno-type sultry whisper. The cherry on top was wrangling local poet Thax Douglas to close it out with a reading. Thax has been around a long time. He attends shows and asks bands if he can write a poem based on their music. If they agree, he'll read it over the microphone before they play. He always makes 2 copies and numbers his titles based on how many he's written for the artist. I have about 8 or 9 at this point. He used to live in Chicago and would read for Wilco. He came over and listened to the song once before writing a poem right there on the spot. Then he recorded it in one take.

Movie Night
Movie Night came from something I saw on tour: a big TV and a bunch of movie theater seats in a gas station Subway somewhere in Nebraska or Kansas. I imagined that in this small town, where there's no entertainment infrastructure, the community comes together to organize something fun that brings people together in the closest thing to a third space that exists there — the gas station. This probably wasn't true, but still, I liked the idea. The way things are going it's easy to imagine this being the case sometime in the near future. I've always been interested in people doing what they can, where they are, with what they have. That's how I've approached my entire music "career", and I've found it's usually the best way to approach everything.

I wrote the song as I was wrapping up the album, and I thought that musically it really fit, and thematically it was close enough. I decided to make an ambient intro to make it feel like you were being teleported somewhere else before the song started.

In my mind, the rest of this record, along with the previous two, all take place in a sort of magical realist version of Madison, Wisconsin. They were the first 3 records I conceived of and recorded entirely in this city, and to me, that really shows. There are numerous subtle references that people familiar with the area would likely pick up on.

There are two other connecting threads that link these albums as a trilogy. 1. A concept about balance - IYKWYBI represents identifying with the spirit of the times, TNTL as the spirit of the depths, and TWF as the unity between the two, the process of individuation. 2. The recording techniques and location. I'm doing something different with the next one, and I'm excited to show you all.

Til next time

It's been a long time since I rapped at ya - But I'm back with an update and some ramblings. I have a new song coming out next week and a bunch of shows coming up.

03/2 Milwaukee, WI @ Cactus Club w/ Dusk, Misprints and Innuendo
03/14 St. Louis, MO @ Skatium w/ Soup Activists, Abi Ooze and Hot Joy
04/02 Lakewood, OH @ Mahall's w/ Dazy
04/03 Detroit, MI @ Edgemen w/ Dazy
04/04 Toronto, ON @ More Reality 2 w/ Narrow Head, Glitterer, Dazy, 9 Million, So Perfect and Canaries
04/05 Montreal, QC @ Cabaret Foufs w/ Dazy and Liquid Mike
04/07 Brooklyn, NY @ TV EYE w/ Dazy and Liquid Mike
04/08 Medford, MA @ Deep Cuts w/ Dazy and Liquid Mike
04/09 Philadelphia, PA @ Johnny Brenda's w/ Dazy, Liquid Mike and Good Flying Birds
04/10 Washington, DC @ DC9 w/ Dazy and Liquid Mike
04/11 Pittsburgh, PA @ Bottlerocket Social Hall w/ Dazy, Liquid Mike and Ex Pilots
04/12 Fort Wayne, IN @ The Brass Rail w/ Liquid Mike

In the last couple of months, I finished mixing an album for Helsinki's Ghost World (the first single is out Friday), saw an inspiring documentary about a musical hero, and made a painting for my dad. I also recorded the debut album by Milwaukee metal band Force. Their drummer, Sam Reitman, and I have been friends playing music together since we were 12. His dad worked at the Guitar Center that I was sniffing around and told me his son played drums. I wanted to start a band and didn't know any drummers at my school. I showed up at his house the following weekend, and he was wearing a shirt depicting a cartoon bird whose beak was puncturing a 2x4 that read, "My pecker is stuck." We tried Basket Case by Green Day and he played the drum fill flawlessly. Impressive for a 7th grader. Anyway, I was a little nervous because I had never recorded a metal band before, but luckily they were so good I didn't have to do much. I set up the mics, and they blasted out 10 "...And Justice For All" style ragers in 4 days. Sam hadn't used a double pedal since our salad days, but it was time to bust it out again. At some point, our friend and local piano prodigy Emili Earhart came over and laid down some spooky organ.

For some reason, I've been thinking about the Clash. Around the same time Sam and I met, my dad sat me down in front of the stereo to play me their first album. Clash City Rockers came on and sounded like it came from another planet. It didn't map to my conception of what rock music was at the time. It was all scratchy midrange. Decades of recording tech innovation, and they couldn't get a band to sound as exciting as that. I would pour over pictures of them, imagining wearing clothes like theirs. Zippers and patches sewn onto military shirts that were splattered Jackson Pollock style with paint and bleach. There was an unknowable sophistication that transcended their look, their sound, and even their songs, an alchemical reaction that was specific to all three. At some point, culture no longer agreed with me. I remember in my early 20s getting into a Facebook argument with an older, hipper Milwaukee garage rock dude about it. Their deification by boomers, white-boy reggae affectations, and all the crap they inspired had in the 2010s rendered the Clash uncool.

I always suspected this would change. The term Indie Sleaze is often criticized for being revisionist, retroactively lumping together unrelated things that at the time weren't even recognized on their own. I lived through the era and agree with the assessment; however, making the mistake that two observed phenomena had anything to do with each other creates circumstances for the new and exciting to manifest. In high school, I tried to dress like Johnny Thunders and was not understood by the kids who liked Crystal Castles. Retrospectively, it's easy to see the inherent "rock-n-roll"-ness of both. There's a DIY popstar from Western Mass who goes by Lucy (Cooper B. Handy), and his music has been a recent obsession of mine. It's somehow equally as tip-of-your-tongue familiar as it is baffling and singular. He makes beats that make me feel like a kid watching cartoons. When I heard that his favorite band is the Clash it clicked for me. He's got a Mick Jones flow! Does synthesis give you a unique perspective, or do you need a unique perspective in order to synthesize two things successfully?

It's hard to separate the Clash from the political climate in which they came up. Trump's first couple months in office conjure images of Margret Thatcher huffing galaxy gas. Recently, a friend asked me about a line in my song "Taste" - "If you hate it/accelerate it." Often, I'm not sure what I'm trying to say when I start writing lyrics, but as I work, the process will begin to reveal a feeling or intention. As I put the words together for Taste, I started thinking about little glimpses of possibility that poke through the veil of everyday drudgery. The ability to honestly imagine a different world for just a moment before whatever bestowed that vision upon you quickly snatches it away. Sometimes, these thoughts are utopian, and sometimes, they are the opposite. At the time, I was reading about the CCRU, the Warwick University academic club headed by Nick Land. Interesting stuff, but I wouldn't take it too seriously. Unfortunately, we now have people at the levers of power who do. It's hard to imagine enthusiasm for that from your average Trump voter, but if there's one thing I've learned, it's that nobody is your average anything. You can hit the gas on AI all you want but it won't get you closer to that conclusion. I still feel like a humanist, even if that means my scope is limited. There's a lot of cautionary tales in mythology about what happens when your scope gets too wide.

Peace and Love

I didn't mean to start making my fourth album right away. Making "If You Knew Would You Believe It" consumed all my free time the prior year, and I was ready to feel leisurely about creativity again. It was late summer 2022, Shannon Connor, Isaac deBroux-Slone and I were driving north to the upper peninsula of Michigan in my 1995 Chevy Astro Van to do a couple shows with Liquid Mike. I was playing them voice memos of the only 2 new songs I had at the time, a sketch of something that became "Rosemary Fabian" and "Emergency Contact." Shannon stated bluntly, "You're making a new album." I winced at the thought. I had a full-time job in a warehouse, and I just wanted to come home and relax every night for a while. "What about an EP?" I suggested. Met with disdain. "When we get back, we're getting in the lab." The lab was to be my new home, a small house on the East Side of Madison where Isaac and Logan Severson had built a studio in the basement and needed a roommate. For the past year, I went down there a couple times a month with a thumb drive full of bedroom-recorded stems that would get molded and shaped into IYKWYBI. The new proximity of the workspace quickly changed my attitude.

Eventually, my job moved me to a customer service position, and I kept a small guitar by my desk. When things were quiet, I would sneak some chords in and free write, creating the well in which I would tap for lyrics. There, I got "Taste" "Zoomed Out" and "Seeing' the World." After work, I would go straight down to the basement to lay down some acoustic guitar to a click track and start building the songs from there. Isaac and Logan had Ableton on their computer, unfamiliar software to me, but I was persuaded to try it. I started pitching sounds up and down, stretching and squeezing them, embracing the digital distortion that comes with that. Their band Disq was on tour a lot around this time, so there would be weeks at a time of free rein. I was feeling a sense of freedom that reinvigorated my ambition.

I was spending a lot of time with Neal Jochmann of the band Combat Naps. Neal is an inspiring person; get a cup of coffee in him and he radiates possibility. His sensibilities began to rub off on me, and they continue to. Tashmere Anthill started as a jam at his house, with him providing its signature synth bass and keyboards. He would encourage me to write down my dreams, and in one, I was instructed by a nebulous messenger to "Go to the Tashmere Anthill." He started playing bass in my band shortly after that. The playful atmosphere he brings to every show makes me feel like I could never get tired of playing music for the rest of my life. Aware of his literary aspirations, I asked him to write a prose poem inspired by the album to put on the back cover.

I remember one of those "Try Not To Laugh" compilation videos perpetually parked on our TV's YouTube suggestion page. At some point, Shannon suggested I call the album that. One day, I hit on some chords and a melody I liked. The stars aligned, and an impromptu band was put together spontaneously to record it live. Our friend Rhea Martinez happened to be in town, and she came over to play the trumpet. It was the last song we made and had to be the title track.

At some point during the process, I intuited this would be the second installment in a trilogy. I somehow knew I would make three albums in this basement, using a similar cut-and-paste method for much of the production. I knew that even if I went back to making records like this, I would try something different after three.

I also felt that, thematically, IYKWYBI represented the opposite end of a conceptual pole to TNTL. On one end, you have disillusion, a grounding in material reality, and characters tied to geography. On the other, you have total enchantment, love so intense it induces schizophrenia, the obliteration of subjectivity. On the one hand, you have maps, buildings, transportation, and climate; on the other, you have ghosts, numbers, dreams, infinity, and a preoccupation with abstraction so all-encompassing you literally do not notice when you're driving past a flaming power grid. On IYKWYBI I derided "dealing in air" but that's exactly what I do with TNTL. The third record in the trilogy represents this balance. It is all done and will hopefully be out by summer. I'm excited to share it with you all.

Happy New Year!

Good afternoon, thanks for your patience on this one; it had to stew for a little bit. I played a show with Wishy last week, a band I love. Half their songs sound like coming home from school, your parents are still at work, and you eat ice cream right out of the tub 2 feet away from TRL on the TV. The other half of their songs remind me a bit of the hyped-at-the-time but now maybe underrated band Yuck. However, I think they write material that transcend the nostalgia of both these descriptors. It's been following me around all week. I played solo with an acoustic guitar, sample pad, and electric kazoo, which I had running through a data corrupter pedal. I thought that would be a funny subversion of the harmonica trope, and people seemed to enjoy it, so I might do more shows like that. Also - the first anniversary of Try Not to Laugh is coming up, so I'll write about that record for my next post.

Today I want to write about some recent reading: The Klf: Chaos, Magic, and the Band Who Burned a Million Pounds by John Higgs. I'll share some of my opinions, but more importantly, I want to see if I can wrap up my personal understanding of the book in a coherent package because it is a labyrinth of many connecting and dead-end doors.

The KLF were a British dance music duo consisting of Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty. In 1994, they set one million pounds on fire and filmed it. Before that, they made a string of number-one hit singles in the squat where Cauty lived, one in which they recruited Tammy Wynette to sing about the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu, a secret society of anarchists hell-bent on destroying commerce.

The origin of that fictional group is Robert Anton Wilson's Illuminatus! Trilogy, a series of novels from which the KLF borrowed much of their thematic material. Outside of his literary career, Wilson came up with the "reality tunnel" theory that states people psychically cope with daily existence by adopting an all-encompassing worldview that informs their thoughts, actions, and general perception - where all loose ends are neatly tied up, and an answer exists to every question. Wilson believed that developing awareness of your bias could allow for flexibility - you could pick up and drop aspects of different models depending on their usefulness to various situations. You could accept the contradictions in doing this because you would know that a single model's consistency exists only because it conveniently ignores or molds outside information.

Here we are reminded of Carl Jung's understanding of consciousness - thinking, feeling, sensing, and intuiting in relation to the ego, that which is aware of itself and its problems. But Jung also held the more esoteric view that a "collective unconscious" existed. In this metaphysical other dimension, everyone's instinctual shared ideas swirl around, creating the psychic atmosphere in which we all live. This makes me think about the original definition of the word meme. Jung famously claims to have predicted WW1 when he had an apocalyptic dream he thought was a visit to the collective unconscious. He saw the pressure valve in the danger zone.

The comic book writer Alan Moore took this idea a step further. He theorized that when a shared concept has had enough time to evolve in the collective unconscious (what he calls the "ideaspace", to him a very real non-metaphorical place), like a biological entity at the same level of complexity, it can start to develop a consciousness of its own. Taking one more logical leap would bring one to the conclusion that reality tunnels are sentient and self-perpetuating.

We all know our lives today are totally dependent on commercial relationships with strangers. This is not how the world worked for most of human history. The wobbling crutch of usury precariously props up progress. The dominating ideology of the 90s espoused that the final stage of human development had been reached, and markets were free to expand into infinity. But if this worldview was an actual tunnel, say through an aquarium, you'd start noticing water on the ground. Many cite 911 or the 2008 financial crisis as the first cracks they saw and those cracks get bigger every day.

Cracks or not, we're still living in this world, and when the KLF burnt a million pounds, an alternative one couldn't have been further from anyone's mind. They were derided as cynical attention seekers. Many people were understandably disgusted that they didn't give the money to charity, although those people probably wouldn't be bothered if they had blown it on excess. It was impossible to see money outside of its own logic, which dominates everything, the only real determining factor in a culture that has abandoned any spiritual meaning beyond it. You can't get rid of it by spending it; it wants to be spent. Ironically, I see the KLF, before their notorious act, as representing a time when some artists made decisions that disregarded financial practicality, an impossibility now as no one has the means. I would explain that by offering the metaphor of a dictator relaxing a bit at the height of his power. He might get comfortable and let a few things slide. They committed an act that might not have been considered the ultimate 20th-century taboo until it was actually performed. But once you break a taboo, it loses power.

The KLF's music was great. Massive hi-fi house songs sometimes peppered with funny 80s-style rap. They also made a pioneering ambient house album called Chill Out. But music never really seemed to be the point for them. They had quit the industry right before burning the money. Aleister Crowley defined magic as "the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with will." However, The KLF were interested in something other than their own will. They were interested in making exciting things happen. What those things were and who they benefitted didn't really matter.

Their first major hit was a song about the TV series Doctor Who, a franchise that had, at that point, jumped the shark. The show made a comeback when "Doctorin' the Tardis" hit number 1 in the UK. What if the abstract concept of "Doctor Who", dreamt up by British TV writers but now taking on a life of its own, intentionally used Drummond and Cauty to achieve that? Subscribing to a self-referential reality tunnel is like having a conversation with someone, you have to block out all the noise in the room in order to focus on the exchange of information. Drummond and Cauty went looking for the noise in the room and came back with hits.

I find this all endlessly inspiring from a creative standpoint. I love the idea of the artist as a vessel for something greater than us as individuals. I love (and am terrified) by the idea that concepts could be actually existing entities, able to grow and multiply and have desires of their own which affect era-defining human breakthroughs and limitations. I love the idea of mythology as psychology and vice versa. Maybe one day, the KLF burning a million pounds will be the stuff of fable, taking their place as trickster archetypes alongside Eris, the Greek god of chaos who inspired Wilson and his satirical religion Discordianism. Or maybe neuroscience will one day progress to a point where it will entertain serious explanations of metaphysical phenomena. If it's all just fiction and useful metaphor, I can live with that. All I know is that I still gotta pay rent next month. As Phillip K Dick once said, "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."

Happy Holidays :)

Welcome to the first installment of my newsletter. This will henceforth be the main vehicle through which I will bestow upon all willing participants information about my music "career", and maybe a little extra.

We played in California this week. My friend Kora put some shows together and I flew out. Joining me was Shannon and Sheridan Connor. Shannon is a big "behind-the-scenes" guy in Huntworld, contributing many invaluable ideas to my recorded output as well as joining me in my live band when he's not on the road with Disq or working at the north side Willy St Co-Op. This was his 21-year-old brother's 2nd go-round in the traveling circus, his debut being 3 years ago when he played his first ever (in his life) show. Sheridan also plays in Tollbooth, one of my favorite local Madison bands. Kora is from Indiana and has been around the scene for years. He plays in Narrow Head now but I first saw him in a basement in Milwaukee in 2018. He makes understated, tuneful and streamlined American music as a solo artist and played bass with me for these shows.

The trip was hectic and funny - losing my boarding pass in a hot dog bag set the tone for the entire weekend. At one point we saw a cartoon-style burglar with a giant over-the-shoulder sack burst out of a nondescript warehouse building door, setting off the alarm as he ran across the street and hid behind a bush. We forgot the World Series was in town. The show in Hollywood was in a Chinese restaurant and was preceded by a crowd of transplants in Dodgers hats screaming at the TV. I heard the ghostly whooping of coyotes and was told you need to "haze" them so they won't attack your dog. We walked through a movie set downtown and weren't shooed away until someone said "Is that Chris Hemsworth?" There are street vendor flower ladies and burnouts speaking in tongues outside the donut shop and Tesla's on every block. In Long Beach we played in front of a Warhammer style terrain table as the crowd took turns driving remote control trucks on it. There's a specific movie genre that teases a big reveal of what's really going on in LA, but when the red yarn is yanked to the surface it's just a tangled mess. I'm thinking the Big Lebowski, The Long Goodbye, Chinatown, Inherent Vice, Under the Silver Lake, the list goes on. The more time I spend there the more it feels like one of these stoner noirs. Something strange exists beyond the periphery, but it wouldn't make any sense if you tried to figure it out.

The band was tight after a warm-up show and it was fun to watch Kora's second set every night. His music is like him. Lived-in nonchalance coexisting with total sincerity, the type that usually gets beaten out of people so naturally disaffected. I like to imagine that combination only exists in a midwesterner. The last night we played in a skate shop in the suburbs. During Kora's set I danced and smacked my empty water bottle against a clothes rack like it was a cowbell. He said "I thought you were making fun of me." Someone was shocked when he told them he was cramming us in his apartment, setting up the shows and playing 2 sets every night. "We do things on the cheap in the Midwest."

Some housekeeping and points of interest I am excited to talk more in detail about in future posts:

I have a new album, the third installment of a thematic trilogy, mastered and in the can. Hopefully it will be out early next year.

I recorded a solo album for my pal Jacob Duarte of Narrow Head back in February and it's all done too. It rocks and hopefully will also be out early next year.

I just finished mixing an album by the Helsinki based Ghost World and I think it's absolutely enchanting. Maybe that will be out early next year too, who knows!

I am reading a fascinating book about the discordian prankster hit-makers the KLF and how they burnt (set on fire) one million quid in the early 90s and the many occult implications therein, and I have a lot of thoughts on it.

I can't stop listening to the 2002 album Details by Frou Frou.

I have 4 shows in November:
Playing guitar in Combat Naps:
11/2 - Madison, WI @ the Set at Union South w/ Disq

My solo band opening for 9 Million:
11/15 - Louisville, KY @ Spinellis
11/16 - Indianapolis, IN @ Atomic Bowl
11/17 - Detroit, MI - Parts and Labor

Thank you to everyone for listening and reading, every day I wake up and am beyond grateful for the ability to prioritize my creative pursuits and make other people happy with them, that wouldn't be possible without you. I'd like to publish here at least a couple times a month so stay tuned.