Sean McPherson 7/7/21 Sean McPherson 7/7/21

It Shouldn’t Be This Hard. It is this Hard. What is Should?

Something started to bother me last night while I was DJing on the Current. Somebody random on twitter shared a photo of the Capitol Building under siege and pointed out that that event was exactly six months ago. We are asking so much of ourselves, and I am asking so much of myself, to just keep on grinding and meeting or exceeding or work requirements, our health requirements, our societal requirements. It seems like an especially important time to exceed expectations, we are in a period of upheaval where our country can come out better or worse, but has zero shot at coming out the same. But I find myself paralyzed towards any action I deem valuable.

I had the chance to interview I-Self Devine for the Current some weeks ago and he said he was so excited to be living through these times. It boggled my mind. But having known I-Self for about 20 years now, he’s been preparing for moments when revolutionaries, forward thinkers, change makers were needed. And they’ve always been needed, but their need is so obvious now, so tangible now. And I’ve had the exact opposite feeling about the past year. . .I am just an honest mouthpiece for how fraudulent our country is but I have no guts to change anything. I am an armchair thinker talking about it, but actual change? Hard pass. Too stressful. Too afraid of being wrong. Too afraid of being killed. Too afraid of being fired.

But that’s not who I thought I was. I did college in two chunks and my second half was probably close to 40% African-American Studies courses to make that part of my individualized degree. I soaked the content up like the adult college student that I was and I saw myself in the shoes of a lot of the activists in those pages. I remember looking at the young blond man holding his teeth into his bloody mouth with the cuff of his suit next to John Lewis. I thought, if this opportunity to speak bruises to power was available in my day, I’d be drying the blood up with my suit. But it’s come, and I’m not. I’m donating money, I’m speaking more courageously than expected for someone who DJs on a major station in a major market, I’m going to protests twice a year. But I’m not bloody. I’m not Heather Heyer, I’m not Deona Knadjek.

But I’m not in my own work in a way that in some sense in my mind would excuse my absence from this opportunity to change the world. I’m distracted at work. I can’t stay focused on the foods I was successfully eating everyday during lockdown. I can’t find my way to practicing bass or exercising after I put my kids to bed. I just deflate, I just clean the kitchen, I read three pages of a book and go to bed. I have so many things I want to do for Purple Current and the Current and I can’t. I can’t bring myself to do them cause I can’t find the hours, or I can’t find the motivation, or I know the support to do them isn’t there.

I float between these worlds of believing that the world is changing and that I can’t be a part of it because I’m raising my kids. I hate it. I hate feeling it and I can’t figure out how to forgive myself for any of it. My wife said she has a new understanding and a better understanding for fat people after living with me and loving me. I wish I had the same from living with myself. I am relentlessly disappointed in me, in what I choose to do and not to do. And that makes me addicted to the external praise, which is why I have worked so hard to excel in fields like music and radio that dole out praise profusely if you do good work. And I am now facing a time at work where I am getting a different sense of my self worth, financially, creatively and frankly holistically. And it is shattering me. It is shattering me to know what they really think of me. And how do you make sure you think of yourself the right way. . .when in fact you never have thought of yourself the right way. So now your self confidence declines further, and now of course it’s harder to not have two cups of cowboy caviar while Scott Van Pelt talks to Mark Jackson. And of course it’s harder to not get the big at Potbelly’s. And you got a job that you always thought was cool, you sit at a desk you always thought it would be cool to sit at. . .and it is cool. But your stepmom doesn’t think it’s cool, and that can stay in your brain way longer than your neighbor saying you have the coolest jobs in the world. Ultimately you are out of phase, you are torn and you just wonder if anyone else is thinking “100 people died of heat stroke in. . . . . . .OREGON, in OREGON” , , ,there are headlines everyday that I think would be the biggest news story of 1995 or of 1925, but they last three days we move on. There are body parts being distributed slowly across parks in Northeast Minneapolis. It’s now bigger news if police aren’t wearing cameras when they shoot and kill a young black man but the verdicts are largely the same, camera or no. We are in a churn of nightmares on a rapidly heating planet and it’s hard to just keep on making plans with friends and deciding who to interview on the radio.

Sean McPherson 6/29/21 Sean McPherson 6/29/21

I Want a Different Relationship With Work

I’m listening to the latest Ezra Klein podcast right now. The interview is with James Suzman and it involves a deep look at why in an era of such surplus we work so much. I also want to be clear that this surplus does not mean that everyone has what they need. It does mean that our problems are related much more to distribution than to scarcity.
I grew up with a dad who was a work-for-someone-else-a-holic. He wasn’t a busy body around the house always tinkering with something and had to keep on doing projects. But if there was work he could do for his employer (Williams College) or his academic reputation (Economics) that came first. Travel, reviewing papers, meeting with students. My brother and I spent a lot of our weekends playing in a weird cement tunnel about 200 feet from Fernald House while my dad worked away on whatever Economics professors work away on. You ask my dad what the most important thing to him in life is and he’ll say his kids. No pause, no stumble. And I think that’s true. He’s a great dad and a great grandfather. But I’m finding that especially in the grandparent department, the love from men, although earnest, is dull and hard to observe. A grandmother loves children—she can attend to those children, converse with the children, engage with the children, deescalate during a mood with the children. The grandfathers in my life, you love them, they love your kids, but their love primarily involves wanting them around and then continuing to attend to their phones, their papers, their devices, their grown up children. (I’m thinking that my experience is not 100% unique, but I recognize there are huge exceptions to this rule).

I can already feel myself slipping the same way into an abstract love for family and things not work. I’m sure my wife can too. You grade me on a curve I’m more involved with the care of my children than my father was with his. But that’s a hell of a curve. My wife doesn’t make a secret to me or to anyone who will listen that she feels like a single parent much of the time. I have a job that I work on weekends, I own a company that operates exclusively on nights and weekends. All I need to do is find a tunnel near MPR for Sadie and Naomi to play in and I’ve completed the cycle. I live in a world where I feel hesitant to ask to hold somebody else’s baby in a way that I don’t see from my women neighbors. I also think almost immediately about turning anything I love into a money making venture. To some extent that is why this missive right here is on a blog as opposed to a massive, annoying facebook post. That means that if I play ping pong I think about hosting a ping pong night at a bar. If I enjoy basketball I think about producing a podcast with people who actually know about the sport to talk. This might seem like complete dumb pointless ambition, but basically my career has been monetizing what I love, I play bass in a hip-hop band, I talk on the radio, I own a trivia company. But we don’t monetize our kids for the most part, and that’s a wonderful thing. I turn my eye at the blogs that feel like they do monetize their kids existence. But if it’s not monetized I look away, I schedule over it, I hold it a lower priority.

But there’s a status quo upheaval in process right now and I want to be a part of it. COVID taught me a different relationship with work. The presidency of Trump taught me a different relationship government. The unearthing of police murders being covered up taught me a different relationship with white supremacy and the professionalization of white supremacy. I use the word taught there because I don’t believe I’ve learned it, digested it and know it. I know my previous relationship with work was wrong. I know my Dad’s was wrong. I know the government is corrupt and faulty to a degree I wasn’t ready to confront. Every stone unturned in the history of policing in this country makes the official story about a death like Sandra Bland’s completely unbelievable. I am reading The New Jim Crow right now and it is pushing my brain to confront a level of opportunistic weaponization of white supremacy in my lifetime that I had not faced before. After reading the lengthy foreword I read about 2/3 of the first chapter, tried to fall asleep and when my youngest started screaming at the top of her lungs in my sleep I imagined that her body was discovering the trauma it carried. It’s the only pain I can imagine eliciting the howls I heard. I think spending your life throwing yourself into the work at the cost of changing your relationship with family, with government, with white supremacy. . .it’s not a defensible position. This is not a time to pinch your nose and take the paycheck. This is not a time to wave off family engagements in order to be fully present at work. This is not a time to hope that someone else is thinking about how to end white supremacy. I want to recalibrate what is essential to me in life, I want to find a more ambitious path for how I live my life. Work is so central to my life that I feel like it starts there, I want a different relationship with work.

Sean McPherson 6/21/21 Sean McPherson 6/21/21

Locking Up Our Own by James Forman Jr.

I recently finished the book “Locking Up Our Own” by James Forman Jr. The book is a deep dive into Washington D.C. and it’s relation with police, lawyers and jails. I love the book because it was so patient to walk back far enough in history to give a real consideration to a time when many black leaders were completely on board with mandatory sentencing and with a large swath of policies that aren’t supported by many leaders period, and certainly aren’t heard often from black leaders. I like the point that you can’t really understand America’s response to the crack epidemic without understanding the heroin epidemic. Being born in ‘81 my reference has always been crack into opioids with little knowledge or focus on what came before. I was also blown away to understand how significant black newspapers were in the framing of the questions of decriminalization, mandatory minimums and more during the 1970s. I know that journalism has been on the ropes for years in our country, I’m glad that the two black owned newspapers from Minnesota are going strong (Insight News and the Spokesmen-Recorder). Getting to see comic depiction of D.C.’s crime issues as well as read from editorials was a really helpful tool in being transported back in to the 1970s and the 1980s.

In reading this book I am reminded how much I believed in the “War on Drugs” and how much I believed in “Just Say No”. I wonder if my parents knew it was bullshit. My parents were former weed smoking Chicago hippies but they had moved out to rural Massachusetts and my parents instilled all sorts of scare language that was really unproductive in helping me understand the United States. I remember drive through the South Side of Chicago with my mom and she told us that if she said “duck” we were all compelled to immediately duck our head down from gunfire. I understand the principle to protect your children. I also understand the danger of stray gunshots, this year we’ve lost multiple children to stray gun shots. I don’t think that duck command was helping anyone. My dad drove me to Walker-West Jazz Academy on Selby when I was in high school in St. Paul. He said “no matter how close we lived to this neighborhood, I would want to drive you cause this doesn’t feel safe”. I grew up knowing that if we saw a lot of black faces in a neighborhood we weren’t safe. This is a stupid way to live life, it’s also a stupid thing to teach rural kids. My cousins who grew up in Milwaukee were endowed with some modicum of street smarts that involved things as simple as knowing how to take mass transit alone, but also a sense of when it was time to come in to the house cause the energy was getting bad around the block. I think those kids maybe could’ve gotten some nuanced lessons from their family about how to ensure your safety and how to be aware of your surrounding. My parents came from Milwaukee and Chicago. But they were raising boys out in Williamstown, MA. I wasn’t getting smarts that helped me carry myself, I was just getting this knee jerk vibe of “you will fucking die if you go into this neighborhood”. I got the same thing on TV screens at home, pictures of downtown Troy, stories of crack dealers stopping in Pittsfield between Toronto and New York. The Just Say No campaign, neighborhoods being torn apart by turf wars. This book gave me a lot of context both for how the reaction to crack had everything to do with increase of violence related to heroin in the 1970s. You can see justifications from Eric Holder when he was the Attorney for D.C. about indiscriminate searches of cars in poor neighborhoods to shake out guns, drugs and more. But you see this willingness in the policy to inconvenience that average driver on a thoroughfare for the dim possibility of shaking out something significant from a search. It’s demoralizing and it’s a willingness to criminalize black life in total because it is unfairly matched up with criminality. It’s the policy that was the de facto lesson of my travels into black neighborhoods in my youth. And this auto-criminalization of a neighborhood limits opportunity, limits growth and in many ways self-prophesizes the neighborhood slipping. It was all bullshit. It was even Band-Aids on a severe injury. It was Band-Aids on the wrong arm, it was Band-Aids on the wrong person. This book lines up a lot of the foundational views that created the climate ripe for the War on Drugs in one of the cities most impacted by said war. I strongly recommend this book.

Sean McPherson 6/19/21 Sean McPherson 6/19/21

Today

Today has been a special day. The thing I’ve done the longest in my life besides for be alive is play music with Heiruspecs. I started the band with Felix when I was in 11th grade. I’m forty years old. We won best High School Band in the City Pages in the Year 2000. We’ve been doing the shit we do for a long time. I think Heiruspecs is incredibly good at what we do. We are a creative live hip-hop band that embraces all the magic that having a live band permits us to bring in to the genre. We are students of hip-hop, we are students of live music and we bring it together. From my completely biased point of view I think we are some of the best to ever do it in Minnesota. I’ve witnessed bands that blow us out of the water, I’ve been humbled seeing especially what some of the younger generation of players and writers can do, but I’m very proud of what we bring to the music world.

And I didn’t realize how much having that joy of creation, of collaboration, of camaraderie stripped from my life for a year and a half has been debilitating. I didn’t get to run songs, to use bass effects, to argue about how to end a song. One of the things most core to my existence was effectively tossed on ice for a year and a half.

This morning as the members of Heiruspecs filed in and we started talking about what we wanted to get done today. . .I felt so good, I felt so alive. I didn’t realize how important this is to me. I didn’t realize how much this matters to me.

I also got to take my kids on the bus today. Many people have to take the bus as their way to get to work, to recreation, to everything. Most of them had to keep on grinding during the thick of the pandemic to keep their life up. I take the bus as a form of recreation on Saturdays cause my daughter Sadie and I love it. Sadie is four, it is still my dream that she’ll be a bus driver. She seems so fascinated by it all. This was Naomi, my one year old, maiden voyage on the bus. She enjoyed it and honestly running to Music Go Round to pick up a check for some gear a sold, the Trivia Mafia Office for an unexpected bathroom break, Korte’s for some groceries and J&S for an iced coffee. It felt so good. Pop on the bus, pop off. Wait by the bus stop. Make small talk about the fire station across the street. Answer random questions. The bus means you spend time at unexpected intersections. New territory for a four year old means moments of discovery.

I didn’t realize how much I love that intimacy of the bus trip. My wife doesn’t go on the bus trips with us. It’s a thing for me and my kids. And we meet people, we laugh, we stop at random spots, we explore strange little corners of the city I would never take half a glance at if I wasn’t with my kids.

Today was great. Music is a gift. Children are a gift. They are both demanding, challenging and fatiguing gifts, but today I remembered they are a gift.

Sean McPherson 6/7/21 Sean McPherson 6/7/21

Why Going Back to Normal is a Trap

Last night, at the 331 Club in Minneapolis I got to host live trivia for the first time in 15 months. Microphone on, chatting to the crowd, not a ZOOM set up in site. I was so nervous leading up to it, not about the reality of being on the mic in front of people, but about setting up the PA, about handling the prizes, about remembering the details. I was also nervous about relating to people. There’s a guy named Erik who has played trivia with me every Tuesday night on YouTube for about 14 months. We interact for two hours online every Tuesday. . .but I don’t see video or hear audio from him, it’s all text. I walked right up to him and called him Dan (the name of his friend). That’s not 100% out of character for me, but it felt so shitty. But getting back into seeing each other is hard, but it’s comforting. For so long, so many people haven’t been able to do the things they do best. I love hosting trivia at the 331, I’ve been doing it every Sunday with the exception of tours since January of 2007. Chuck and I have built this into a COMPANY ASS COMPANY. I am writing this blog post from our reasonably well-appointed office space. We have employees in multiple states. But it goes back to what we were able to get started plugging in the microphones at 331 Club and reading questions. We connected with people, we engaged with people. We do this well. I do this well. It was something and it is something.

But this is just the moment where because I get my normal back and I get the glow of feeling like things are so much better than they were even six weeks ago that it’s time for me to put my head down and not rock the boat. The allure of normalcy is enticing. Why is it so enticing? Normalcy has worked pretty great for my 40 years as a white man from an upper class background. Normalcy has meant access to excellent public education where I was treated with respect inside. Normalcy has meant familial support with tuition and living expenses during college, living expenses after college and either support or offers of support for every big ticket purchase of my entire life. Normalcy has meant reasonable interactions with police for the most part. And anything that was not reasonable with the police was certainly not fatal and not immediately threatening to my physical safety. Normalcy has also meant a willingness to enjoy these privileges and thousands more without dedicating significant time or energy to fighting for these normalcies to be distributed equitably. All of these are normalcies are fraudulent, and on top of that if it’s remained clear and has come into closer focus that so many of my brothers and sisters in the United States live in a completely different normal. It is immoral to quietly walk back to normalcy without an eye toward changing these inequities. What does changing look like? It looks like a lot more than what I’m currently doing. I’m already checking the boxes that lots of wealthy white liberals are checking. . .reading lists, increased donations not just to non-profits but to mutual aid orgs, attending one single protest one year ago, sounding mighty on twitter, black lives matter sign on the garden bed of the segregated neighborhood I live in. That’s the new normal, and the new normal is still not enough. And I’m tired of twitter being the only way I feel I can make changes. I am starting to think of twitter as the new incarnation of second life. I respect the technique of the souls that go out every Friday (seems like every Friday) to either Summit and Snelling or Lake and River Road with their Free Palestine signs. I have no idea how that moves the needle on the cause they are embracing, but I wonder if they feel different than someone doing a solid 2 hour spew on social media before heading home for their dinner. They might just have their actions connected with more of their body, with more of their presence.

We can’t go back to normal. That’s been clear. But as the draw is truly on our doorstep with our first taste of normal, I want to imagine how much better normal can be. Think about how much better it would taste if you lived in a just world. If you lived in a country that ran Truth and Reconciliation, that paid reparations, that severely limited what situations armed police were used. If you lived in a state where police didn’t disproportionately kill unarmed black people. I do think a lot of my fellow white people believe it can never taste quite as good once we have this shit out in the open. And I mean the out in the open to say a societal level addressing: redistribution of wealth, reparations, voting rights, no more trappings of second class citizenry. Why do you think it won’t taste as good? Do you think a world where black people command the respect they deserve in the workplace, in the voting booth is somehow worse for you? How? Why? Do you think there’s one big pie and you have the right amount currently? That’s stupid. There’s no pie. This is not zero sum. I don’t even think there’s cautionary tales in the historical record of a society crumbling under. . .equity. Get out of here. One, you’re wrong. Two, you’ll be proven wrong.

So normal tasted good last night, drank about 8 hop waters (strongly recommend) talked to a lot of trivia players for the first time in a year plus. It felt good, but it can feel better, it can be better and that is where we are heading actively.

Sean McPherson 6/2/21 Sean McPherson 6/2/21

How I Start The Day

With my wife going back to work we’ve been polishing off the morning routine and tightening things up. I imagine you’re very curious how Sean McPherson gets the day started so let’s get right to it:

5:20am - turn off first alarm (which is just a bright light)
5:50am - snooze phone alarm
6:02am - get up, brush teeth
6:08am - do a one minute plank, a small routine of sit ups that go in different directions and a stretch your arms/legs while on your back
6:20am - Take Warren (our dog) for a walk
6:50am - Cook breakfast for the family (oatmeal, eggs, jelly toast for kids, butter toast and egg for wife, eggs peppers onion cheese for me)
7:30am - Put on real clothes, dress children.
7:50am - Leave for daycare
8:05am - Drop kids off at daycare
8:30am - get to work (today at MPR), make list of things I need to do, today numbering 15, some small, some big
8:50am - Turn on yourclassical.org/peacefulpiano (this is also made by MPR but I have nothing to do with it)
9:00am - Start doing things off of my list

When people describe the day as 8 hours of work, 8 hours of sleep, 8 hours for you. . .I think of those people as not having young children. I adore raising kids but it does have such a shape on your day, and in particular your mornings. I find the classical, the list and the coffee can kind of make me feel more connected to work duties.

That’s my morning. Posting this thing was #3 on my list. Gotta get cracking. It’s already 9:38.

Sean McPherson 5/29/21 Sean McPherson 5/29/21

What You Can Control

You have to do what is right for you. And that means making hard decisions. Supposing you got somebody in your life who doesn’t mean to make you feel bad, but they sure as shit do. They make you feel bad for the way you exist, for the way you raise your kids, for the way you keep your house, for the way you relate to the world. If you can control it, you can’t have them in your life. I have somebody like that in my life, and I don’t think there’s any getting around it in my life. But I’m done trying to make it different, and I’m done trying to pretend that isn’t how they make me feel. Maybe I make them feel great, maybe I’m neutral, but they make feel terrible. So remove your actual feelings from the equation as much as possible.

Sean McPherson 5/28/21 Sean McPherson 5/28/21

In Defense of the Rough Mix

I’m taking a break from watching Steve Ballmer’s red ass face every time the Clippers sink any kind of basket. I’m listening to the second mix of the new Heiruspecs record (I’m thinking December for release and the working title is “Low Key Whatever Happened to the Heiruspecs”. I’m feeling this raw excitement that comes basically only from the feeling of rough mixes. You’re gonna end spending a lot more of your listening life with the version that is almost the final mix. Have you ever thought about that? Probably once you dial in the song, and send it to mastering, and get artwork? I bet you you have listened to 75% of the total amount of times you listen to your own track before you get the mastered version.

The world? The world, if they do hear it, will hear the final version, and hopefully it will connect with people. But your memory will be the unmixed version, the version where the cymbals ring for a long time. Like a weird long time. Where DeVon’s keyboard goes on for a weird long time. You might remember the CDR with the sharpie more than the final artwork. And there’s a camaraderie about it right? You’ve got your own version. And shit, you might always grab that version even when the new one is out.

Having now spent 5 years doing DJ work full time, you connect with the music differently. I used to bring a advertising oriented musician into some workshops I ran at McNally Smith, great dude named Richard Werbowenko. This guy said that usually the thing the clients are drawn to is the thing with the mistake in it, the thing that is a bit jarring. I don’t want everything smoothed out. I just listened to a record from Pinegrove on vinyl that is basically a bunch of rough mix throw it up on bandcamp jams. This song Need 2. Are you kidding me? I just played along with it on bass, there’s something so exciting about the way the two acoustics at the top work like a bass drum and a snare. It’s such a percussive treatment of the guitar. I absolutely love it. There’s something so compelling it.

We’ve got a tune on the new Heiruspecs record called “Thunder Sounds”. It has relatively unlikely lengths to the verses, it’s got something that I’ve been missing for so long in hip-hop which is just the 8 bar shut the fuck up section. The beat’s not crazy different, it’s not a solo, it’s just a little breather. Those breathers were so well put in I’m gonna say ‘87-’95 era stuff. It was refreshing, it was resetting. It helped create some more appreciation for the stuff on either side of it. I’m glad we got one of those worked in. Those are sometimes hard to pull off live. We are kind of a little too grown to do heavy heavy crowd response. But we are a little too young for the rappers just to linger. But we find our way. I’m excited about so many of the tunes on the record.

We are also doing a tune called “Four Werewolves Forever Ago”, there’s these incredibly quiet guitar parts that are absolutely goose bumping quality stuff that happens during Muad’dib’s verse. I mean so quiet that it doesn’t cut through in the car, even cranked. But if you get your ears next to the speakers you get these way understated Steely Dan meets The National spots. It’s exciting. I think Heiruspecs has had some amazing songs, but I don’t believe we’ve always cooked in enough ear candy stuff. There’s some serious ear candy stuff on this one. Can’t wait to share it with you.

SoundCloud Block

Enter a SoundCloud track, playlist, or profile URL. Learn more

Sean McPherson 5/28/21 Sean McPherson 5/28/21

Arlo Parks Prediction

Arlo Parks is the first post COVID artist to have a show moved from the Entry to the Main Room.

Sean McPherson 5/26/21 Sean McPherson 5/26/21

Collapsing Under the Work

I’ve clocked in a lot of good situations in the past couple weeks, minor wins, but still good wins. I have successfully changed my relationship with social media. Everything is off my phone. The posts I do for myself/trivia mafia and theoretically Heiruspecs on Instagram are done on my wife’s phone. I’m not scrolling past your beautiful lives anymore. I use twitter actively when I DJ. When I do other work on twitter I schedule it in advance so I’m not hunting for likes constantly.

In general during the pandemic I’ve been successful in keeping my health up. One of those metrics is my weight. I find being overly sensitive to weight, especially for people who may be close to their goal weight, is super dumb and can only hurt shit. I feel I have a good relationship with the scale and a nutritionist who is really supportive of that healthy relationship. But I know that when I had my first daughter in 2017 I ended gaining a legit 20 lbs across a year and a half. I didn’t go to the gym, my schedule changed, my energy for myself waned. I slept less. I wanted to see something different with my second child. And in that account I succeeded. I peeled off about 12 of those pounds. But I’ve been struggling the last couple weeks. Returning to life, returning to gatherings, entertaining, sitting down at restaurants. These activities bring me into some bad habits. But I don’t even want to call them bad habits. They bring me into some situations in which I enjoy the fuck out of a plate of food. But, I have to relearn limits, listen to where my body is. There was a time where two bottles of champagne and some plates of food was a great situation or so I thought. I eat different now, I drink different now. And, I need to recalibrate in regards to my father. He changed how he ate when he got diagnosed with diabetes, and he changed even more after my mom died. He changed for the better but I felt it was an abandoning of how our family ate. Seeing him split a fish entree and a garden salad with his new wife made me feel like an exchange student with some strange new family. But it’s his business, and I’m sure those fish entree splitting nights are part of why he is in good health now even though he’s getting up there. I can change how I eat and not change who I am, and so can my dad.

I didn’t even come here to write about food. I came here to write about collapsing under the work. I took on more work during the pandemic. Trivia Mafia was and is profoundly broke, so there was little outsourcing. I took on a YouTube trivia night, I took on a short IG video duty on Thursday nights. But there wasn’t much work to go around, we weren’t doing much trivia. You’d be amazed how easy it is to do payroll when you aren’t paying many people and it’s the same folks every two weeks. The Current had more work for me after a while in the pandemic. At first, it was thin times. No interviews, no live shows, no action. But working from home was a learning curve, I took on Wednesdays when Mark Wheat left. I started doing The Warming House on MPR News, I started doing more interviews, I took on the Local Show when Andrea Swensson left. I lost supports and help for Purple Current when other schedules got full. I volunteered to do cool shit cause a radio station should do cool shit and I had some cool ideas. So I get that all together, and where am I. . .I’m collapsing under the work. I work 4 days a week and one night for MPR. I work 1 day a week and one night for Trivia Mafia plus a little IG thing that doesn’t take more than 1 hour total. I am going to back to weekly live trivia starting next Sunday. I have two daughters, they are both in full time daycare but you know it’s still a lot. I am lucky to be in a healthy relationship with my wife, we share a lot of duties, but there are a lot to go around. I want to do this work, but I can’t enjoy any of it, I am doing things I always wanted to do, god I wanted to do the hip-hop show on The Current, now I get to with Sanni. I wanted to be the guy reading underwriting on MPR News, and now I am. I dreamt of getting to do a show on MPR News and I got to do that (and I hope to get to do it again). But, I don’t have the time to do it right, and I don’t have the time to think on it. It’s just keep firing, keep moving. I’m double booked and missing events I heartily endorse that I know I’ll never be able to go to. I work 48 Saturdays out of the year in a normal year. That leaves one date, one vacation, one Heiruspecs show and one wildcard most years. One of my days off is a Monday, so all those holidays on Mondays, I’m already off those days. Why am I telling a blog this? Cause I’m pretty sure nobody reads it. I need to just type it out and say that it’s so frustrating. I took a lot on to try and make it work during the throws of the pandemic. And now I’m navigating how to live that, while also having family to come visit, and concerts to attend, concerts to play, rehearsals to have. There was this steadiness to pandemic life, it was monotonous, but you didn’t miss the good stuff that you had scheduled. There was a regularity to it. I’ve carved a schedule that is just kids and work. They’re fun kids, it’s fun work. But that’s it. I see Martin for coffee on Sunday mornings. I see my neighbors on Friday if things are decent at the homestead. That’s more than some people get. That’s more than Rachel gets some weeks. But that’s it. The rest of it is work. Most of it for MPR, plenty for these kids, some of it to help Trivia Mafia lose less money, But I’m collapsing, I feel my spirit draining cause I don’t have time to process. I think changing the relationship with social media is helping, but only to a point. Ultimately, I have to get realistic about what I can take on and still make quality work. But I’m so scared to ever take something off my plate cause entertainment and entrepreneurship is cutthroat. I have to take it, if I can do it I should do it. I trained in on what I consider two of the hardest shifts in the week for The Current. Morning radio is damn hard. Request radio is damn hard. Those were my first two shifts. I can handle a lot of different shifts on the Current. I’m proud of that, but it means I get called a lot. I’m proud of that, but it’s a struggle. I’m proud of all of it, but I can’t front, it's a struggle.

Sean McPherson 5/17/21 Sean McPherson 5/17/21

The Best Reading I’ve Done About Israel/Palestine

The news has probably reached you that there is a hot war goin on yet again between Israel and Palestine. The asymmetrical warfare that is leaving a death toll 20 times in Palestine than in Israel is unforgivable. Sovereign countries have a right to defend themselves, they do not have a right to commit war crimes and many (not all) believe that what Israel is doing is a war crime. It is also shallow to believe that any critique of Israel’s actions is a form of anti-Semitism. What a sad and illogical defense. Here’s some of the articles I’ve read on this topic:

Bernie Sanders - Senator Sanders recently wrote an Op-Ed for the NY Times that I got a lot from.

I’m sorry to say that the other compelling NY Times opinion piece I read this morning is no longer online. I’ll try to find it and re-share it when I can. Thanks for reading.

Sean McPherson 5/3/21 Sean McPherson 5/3/21

The Sum of Us - The Most Inspiring Book I’ve Read In Some Time

Last night I finished the book “The Sum of Us” by Heather McGhee. A couple months ago McGhee made the rounds on some of my favorite podcasts, Ezra Klein and The Political Gabfest. The book captured my interest primarily cause it felt like adding a new angle to an old problem. The book also did an incredible job speaking plainly and persuasively and helping me see some new angles on an old problem.

Old (and accurate) Angles:
Ending White Supremacy is Morally Sound - I believe this premise is accepted by the grand majority of people in the United States. Being willing to take steps to end it or sacrifice to end it is quite a different story.
The Responsibility of Ending White Supremacy Falls Squarely on the Shoulders of White People - I think there are less people who agree with this statement. I agree with it and find it hard to offer an alternative. If your claim is that it is dead white people who created white supremacy and they should’ve taken care of it. . .well they’re dead Elizabeth. So if a group is responsible to end an evil, it ought to be the beneficiaries of that evil.

New (at least to me) Angles:
White Supremacy hurts everyone - Though I have believed this in an internal way for a long time, I have never read an academic book that lays out clear data to establish it. At the policy level white voters will tighten their own belt and starve their communities of services to make sure they don’t have to share those services with black people. This is frankly worse than zero sum. This is a willingness to suffer to maintain white supremacy. The actions outlined in this book show the willingness of white leaders to limit their offerings to maintain a racial hierarchy.
The absence of white supremacy helps everyone - Black people struggling because of laws that are enforced differently on black bodies, loans that are not offered to black people, job opportunities that are never extended - none of this helps me whatsoever. None of this makes my life better as a white man for one minute. It makes my life worse, here’s why. 1) Everything I do achieve in life, no matter how hard I worked for it, is asterisked with this idea that I did it all on an unfair playing field. I can certainly still be proud of my achievements, but I can feel that asterisk in every step I take. (worked with my therapist a lot on this one). 2) People winning is just good. People getting a raise, people getting a job, people buying a house, people releasing a song. I love to see people win, that absolutely 1000% includes black people. What horrible kind of person are you if you don’t want to see EVERYONE win? What is wrong with you? Who taught you that?

When you read this book you’re going to love it. The last 50 or so pages were just clear point after clear point delivered with optimism and honesty about what we are losing everyday by supporting white supremacy. Thank you Heather McGhee for this awesome book.

Sean McPherson 4/30/21 Sean McPherson 4/30/21

Rest in Peace - Milford Graves

Some months ago we lost the music legend Milford Graves. Milford Graves was a master percussionist and healer. He taught at Bennington College in Vermont. I went there for one year in 1999 and I had the chance to study with him. It was one semester but he connected me with a musical energy that has fed me throughout the next 20 years. On registration day I was trying to get into his improvisation ensemble. As a freshman that was a dicey proposition, but during orientation I had already endeared myself to some of the older players at the school and they knew that I wasn’t a total newbie on the bass. When I got up to Milford Graves in line I told him I’d like to register for his class but that it generally doesn’t include freshmen. He looked at me and said “can you play"?”. I said yes confidently, which was true, I could play. He registered me right there. I was very excited about the class.

The first session was such a rush. With a really large group of musicians on different instruments with different skill levels Milford Graves both conducted, reacted, suggested and encouraged. There was an openness and a joy in that room that was really different from the musical spaces I had been in. High school and college musicians can be relentlessly competitive, often to the detriment of the music. This was different, it was much more collaborative and inspired.

At the end of the first or second session Milford Graves held my electric bass and said this was the first time he had touched the instrument. He laid it on his lap, contemplated for a moment and coaxed sounds out of it I had never heard. He had a sense of harmonics, of physics that was audible. He understood music to the point where understanding feels like the wrong word. There was no friction observable to me.

Milford told amazing stories, including talking about saving a Cuban band that was struggling with nothing but a cowbell. Apparently the band couldn’t get their groove right and the bandleader asked Milford to stop their gig after Milford’s gig and help the band out. All Milford brought was a cowbell, but he said that was all he needed. He brought the right feel in and Milford said the dance floor filled up, the solos got more rambunctious. I didn’t understand the power a cowbell can over a have a 12-piece band or a dance floor but now I have no doubt.

Many of Milford’s guidances were very loose in the class, a little guidance to just get this or that started. On a night when the improvisation had kind of run dry Milford told the class “play like the cops are coming, play like you know the cops are coming”. He asked a drummer named Paul who was one of the more senior players in the class to set it off. Paul started smashing the cymbals and cooking up the loudest sounds we had probably heard since the class started in September. The class looked please with this development and we were ready to let rip. Abruptly Milford halted the class, “no no no! that’s not how it’s done”. This level of binary authority wasn’t common in this class. Milford simply added “when we were playing in New York, we didn’t want the cops to find us. If we knew the cops were coming we played as quiet as we could, but we had to keep playing”. For the next twenty five minutes we all played at this whisper level that’s unlike anything I’ve ever done. Solos came and went with saxophonists whispering into their reed, guitar players found out the volume knobs on their amps went down.

My story is one of the smallest ones. So many musicians connected with Milford Graves throughout his life and I am so thankful for the energy that he put into the world. I’m glad I got a chance to spend a semester studying with him. Rest in peace to you Milford Graves.

Sean McPherson 4/29/21 Sean McPherson 4/29/21

Heavy Joni Period

I’m on vacation from my radio job at The Current this week and I’ve been taking a break from listening to the radio for the most part. That’s pushed me back into album’s and I decided to do some Joni work this morning. Why? Well, on the final episode of Season 1 of the Warming House I played the record The Last Waltz from The Band. I had never really taken in the majesty that is Joni’s background singing (from backstage no less) on Neil Young’s rendition of Helpless.

And then seeing her do Coyote, I think she’s the best guest of the whole show. It’s incredible.

Then of course I went to the wikipedia page for the tune and found this amazing comment about the tune for Ruth Charnock: "either the most flirtatious song about fucking or the most graphic song about flirting ever written." That line comes from Charnock’s book “Joni Mitchell: New Critical Readings”.

I love this song. But it comes from one of the album’s from Joni that I wasn’t as connected with. As a bass player I should love Joni’s work with Jaco and with all the great players in the late 70s. But I have always preferred Joni pre her connection with jazz players. But, I knew it was time to give Hejira a listen after reading this entry on Princevault.com about Prince’s amazing fretless bass work on So Blue.

(from Princevault.com)

According to André Cymone, So Blue was inspired by Joni Mitchell's album Hejira released in November 1976 while Prince was working on his first album, and specifically the song Blue Motel Room which Prince has covered during the Nude Tour in 1990. The cover of Hejira can also be seen briefly during a scene in Under The Cherry Moon. This album has also been mentioned as one of the six records bought during the 2016 edition of the Record Store Day at the Electric Fetus along with a volume of Swan Silvertones' Inspirational Gospel Classics, The Chambers Brothers' The Time Has Come (1967), Stevie Wonder's Talking Book (released in 1972), a 1987 Best Of Missing Persons and Santana's Santana IV (the latter being released on 15 April 2016, the day before the Record Store Day and a few days before Prince's passing).

So I gave Hejira two run throughs this morning and it’s stunning. The arrangements are incredible, I probably didn’t like it as much the first time I tried cause I thought the fretless bass was cheesy. I was just wrong. The guitar work, the floaty energy, the vibe of the record is wonderful. But since the last time I listened I’ve learned to listen more closely to the lyrics from a song. And no surprise here, Joni doesn’t disappoint.

Why not go listen to Joni Mitchell, Prince and other amazing music today?

Sean McPherson 4/28/21 Sean McPherson 4/28/21

40 years old today

Today is my 40th birthday. I am doing some very 40 year old man things today. First, writing on a blog as opposed to twitter feels very gen X aspirational. I’m finishing the trim on painting the porch. I am going to buy some plants. On my 30th birthday I was driving in to Seattle with Dessa on her first headlining tour. I had no kids, no wife, no house. Life feels really really different and there’s no doubt that this period: global pandemic, glaring clarity over the disregard for black life by our government that has been with us forever, a louder and more public reckoning with how men abuse women. . .can’t really make this one a sentence. Our world is facing immense change right now. There’s no doubt that I am in a dark period right now, I have optimism about a lot, but the missteps of our country and of more specific communities I’m a part of are in broad relief right now. It is easy to see that we are facing a period of immense change. I believe we will come out better for it. But at this moment, I recognize that belief doesn’t do enough. I can take steps to be a part of this world getting better. I am taking those steps. 40 years old, a lot to learn, a lot to share. A lot of work ahead, and some porch to paint.