Trying to Stay Positive
This blog is extra for me. I’ve got work doing radio things for Minnesota Public Radio, I’ve got some responsibilities for Trivia Mafia, which I’m a part owner of, I feel like I am on a mostly solo island trying to drag this new Heiruspecs record across the finish line.* I’ve got two beautiful children who have spent about 15% of their weekdays in daycare due to COVID19 positives in their classrooms. I took a PCR test on Monday with my daughter Sadie, she got her negative test back Wednesday afternoon. I still haven’t gotten mine back. It’s just a shit time and it’s been hard to take a breath and reflect on life. I don’t think I’m worth much on this blog unless I can reflect on life.
But yesterday I got to cover the morning show for my colleague Jill on the Current, that took me off of my usual evening shift responsibilities. That had me getting a babysitter and heading out for dinner and dessert with my wife Rachel. And that gave me the opportunity to just breathe and get some distance from things. Here’s some terrible silver linings for the era we’re living in:
The Black Plague
You think in 1350 circa four years into bubo life the folks said “we’re screwed, millions of us are gonna die”. I bet they did! But I’m glad some of them lived and kept on having kids. Cause that’s why some of us are here, raising our kids, using the internet, enjoying coffee and trying to make the world a better place. We are in a trying time in our history. Our country refuses to live up to ideals it has at least paid lip service to in the past. The world is becoming less equitable, wealth is isolating in fewer and fewer spots. Most of us don’t even entertain our kids having a better life than us. And a lot of boomer parents know their kids aren’t getting the same quality of life that they had. But, think about those bubo filled folks in Eurasia in the 1300s! Dying. Dying alone. Dying smelling bad. Dying in the street. The shit still happens today.
We aren’t going to come out better from this. The world is not learning the lessons it should from COVID19. The world is not learning the shortcomings of our current system. We are gridlocked, land wars are starting, we are making it harder to vote. But that doesn’t mean I can’t learn. That doesn’t mean I can’t make St. Paul better, or at least my block better, or my workplace better. 2020 and 2021 have been about raising standards and lowering targets. I want to do smaller things better. I don’t want to shut off the outside world, I want to aim at the things I can make better and measure my results. It might be demoralizing, but it’s not immobilizing. I just keep on thinking about not having a bubo in my armpit, having the ability to share music with the world, having wonderful children and a wonderful wife and having the push to keep on trying.
Sunsets
They’ll still be sunsets. That’s something. They’re beautiful, amazing things and they happen everyday. Preserving the environment in such a way that coastal cities don’t sink is important for hundreds of reasons. But sometimes it helps me to keep it simple. We have operated machinery, driven cars, demanded products and structured life such that there is already less space to enjoy the bounty of mother nature. We won’t change in meaningful ways because this machinery, these cars, these products, they make tremendous amounts of money for people and those people wield a lot of power. But, that’s shortsighted. At some point an oil magnate will be forced to realize that their grandchildren won’t see sunsets, their grandchildren won’t sit on a beach and look at a healthy ocean. And the lockers full of money will be powerless, useless. The opportunity to enjoy sunsets is fading. The opportunity for the power brokers to imagine a reason to change that is just opening.
Racism
Dubois wrote “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line”. It’s true now too. And I bet you a lot of the abolitionists, and particularly radical abolitionists didn’t think this would be the defining problem of the NEXT NEXT century of American life. But here we are. I am watching the PBS special “Reconstruction” right now. It is too easy to forget, especially being white and in the North for my whole life, how much white America came together to keep black people down after the letter of the law sought to right the ship. It is stunning but without the positive connotations of the word stunning. The threat of black people being shoulder to shoulder in opportunity, rights and agency in our country is a nightmare to so many of my fellow countrymen. That hasn’t changed. I don’t see this in the narrative as much nowadays, but I still think that so much of the American Right now is built as a visceral and strategic response to a black President.
Why would I share any of this paragraph in the world of things that are positive? Well, there is a potential for a counter-response that I don’t imagine was as possible in the 1990s. Why? In the 1990s it seems there was an idea that white America should pretend racism is over. If we pretended racism was over it would be hard to fight against racism. It was a racist idea, but it made counter attacks difficult. There was tangible progress; people who refused to acknowledge or simply voice that it was too little too late or unfairly focused on outcomes improving strictly for middle and upper-class black families could be painted as quacks. Racism becoming more obvious in this era is a bad development, but it results in more opportunities to challenge racism. Mitch McConnell separated black people from “Americans” in an interview this week. It was a slip, but he doesn’t even really have to apologize for it because everyone knows that’s how he thinks. The ugly truth is more out in the open and this is the chance to capitalize on it.
See! Black plague, sunsets, racism. The world is doing better.
*For dragging across the line context, The last notes I played on a bass on this record were in 2019. Since then it’s been all pdfs, mix reviews, google sheets, and conflicting criticisms from the members of Heiruspecs. It’s all part of the game, but man it’s a shit part of the game. I’m the leader of Heiruspecs, but we’re equals. That means that I end up shuffling a lot of shit against my will but in concert with the wants of some members of the band. I’m not complaining, I think it works. But at this moment as I’m pulling teeth just to get comments on artwork and masters it stresses me out.
The Day You Took Down Your Black Lives Matter Sign
The summer of 2020 they were going up like “20 is plenty signs” did in the early 2010s. Everyone needed a “Black Lives Matter” sign. A lot of folks got the “Trans Black Lives Matter” signs. Some folks got the “in this house we this and we that” ones. Of course some folks didn’t get the signs. Some folks don’t believe in it, some folks do but don’t want to advertise. I guess I can see plenty of reasons to not put the sign up. . .but what about the day you decided to take them down.
Do you shout out to your spouse “honey, do Black Lives Still Matter”? Do you ask “did we elect the right people? can we take it down now”. Maybe you worry about the weather? Maybe you are waiting to bring the sign back out but don’t want the snow damage? But the scariest part is that none of this is true. The truth is that on some quiet day you looked at the sign and you decided to bring it in. You decided that your feelings changed, that the moment had passed. There are thousands of people who reached the peak of their bad feelings about the police in the summer of 2020. And your mood has changed. You don’t know what the signs did. You read something. You changed your mind. I’ll be honest, I don’t get it. Do you think that the increase of murders across many American cities somehow makes current policing tactics okay? Did you have bad feelings about the police but you developed more sympathy for them after you saw civil unrest rolling out all across the summer of 2020 and beyond? I honestly don’t understand how those are connected. Do you think that the Black Lives Matter sign you own says “abolish the police” in small font? Did you get some grief from a neighbor? Did you take it down right before Thanksgiving?
It can’t just be a sign you pull out for the four months after the most egregious of police actions. The fact that so many people (myself included) were able to buy solidarity at a toy store on Grand and slide it face down onto our porch when the mood struck us is dangerous. The “Support Our Police” guy on the corner isn’t taking down his sign. This is not a fairweather moment. And particularly if you want police reform, I believe you do want to send the front yard news of “the status quo is not working, is not acceptable”. If you wanted that sign up at some point, tell me what made you want it down now.
Cultural Doppelgängers
Bill Pullman, Bill Paxton. That’s the big one, we are all supposed to be confused by these two actors.
I don’t care about this one. Getting Bill Pullman and Bill Paxton wrong doesn’t create any tension at my job or within my social circles. The rest of these are really ones I wish I could keep straight but I just f*cking can’t. Wait? I pay $12.99/month to have this awesome blog. I can swear. The following fucking doppelgängers cross me up at my job on The Current, in my writing of trivia and in my trying to be cool in life. Here we go. PSA: I’m not saying it’s easy to confuse these entities, I’m saying it’s easy for me to confuse these entities.
Graham Parsons
Townes Van Zandt
Graham Parsons and Townes Van Zandt. They are both alt country heroes. They both struggled with drugs and or alcohol. They both come from wealthy families that don’t sound as “countrified” as their songs do. They both loom larger than their discography would suggest. Which one was friends with The Stones? Which one does Steve Earle think is the greatest songwriter of all time? Which one had their body partially cremated at Joshua Tree Park? Which one briefly went to Shattuck-St. Mary’s in Minnesota? It took me a long time to get this all straight.
Ultramagnetic MCs
Stetsasonic
Ultramagnetic MCs, Stetsasonic. Two legendary East Coast crews whose members went on to garner more fame after the dissolution of the respective groups. Which one was the groundbreaking live band? Which one was Prince Paul in? Which one was Kool Keith in? Which one made a big deal out of beat boxing? It took a long time to make sure I had my story straight on these two legendary groups.
Superchunk.
Jawbox
Shudder to Think
This is a trifecta and I need you to bear with me. How many collections of four white people where one to two of the members have shaved heads do you expect me to distinguish from. Plus, these folks are all closely associated with record labels in almost as a big a way as they are associated with their own music. Who started Merge? Who produced all the good records on Jade Tree? Who was signed to Dischord? Who was signed to a major label. I could explain the differences to you right now. You give me three hours I will have it all messed up in my head again.
Nick Cave
Nick Lowe
Let me be abundantly clear, I now know the difference between these two men. Why? Cause I don’t think I could keep my job if I didn’t. Also, they are both incredibly talented musicians. They look nothing alike, they sound nothing alike. But you know what, they have some weird crossover. Which one produced the first British punk single of all time? The one who looks like the prince of darkness or the one who looks like he has the best advice about where to get a good scone in some little town called Wiltonshire? Well butthead, it’s Nick Lowe, the mayor of Wiltonshire. So I struggle with these two.
Dazz Band
Brick
This one is pretty understandable. Brick, out of Atlanta, made an amazing song called Dazz. Dazz, out of Cleveland, decided to name their band after the song by Brick. The problem is they are both disco influenced funk bands that made a handful of great jams. Songs you need to have, songs you love when they come on. So to get confused is explainable, but kind of unforgivable if you love funk. And I love funk.
Frankly it feels good to just kind of admit these confusions. I know people in my life who would raise their eyebrows at getting any of these confused, but honestly, it’s the truth.
Guaranteed Smile on Your Face Situation
Just got sent a tune called Time and Love from the Minnesota artist Samantha Moon. Really enjoyable.
This tune uses the Purdie Shuffle. The Purdie Shuffle is the most enjoyable drum beat in American* history. Why don’t you enjoy the Purdie shuffle but even more importantly, listen to Bernard Purdie talking about it.
*When I’ve been around people who really know their shit from Cuban music, I’ve heard some equally amazing stuff.
Well there you go. I’m 100% certain you have a smile on your face. And don’t we all need that?
Maybe We Can’t Make It
The first weekday morning of the year almost always sucks. It’s freezing cold and you are thrown back into a routine that you never liked in the first place. I worked straight through the last two weeks, but with a little bit of family time, having Saturday off since I worked on Monday. . .blah blah. Today I woke up feeling like sleeping for a thousand hours. The family got started late and everyone is in a mood. But this all feels quasi manageable. I’ve been struggling with a car door that has a super loose sealing on it. When it’s real cold it doesn’t open. But this morning it opened.
When we arrived at daycare there’s all the new parents, there’s the classroom changes, there’s the items people forget their kids need cause everyone is trying to get back into it after some days of vacation. There’s confusion, there’s more people than usual. And there’s an incredibly contagious variant of COVID19 floating in the air. I don’t know, maybe 15, 20 people probably have it. Maybe its parents and the kids will never get it, maybe the kids won’t get it. But I’m guessing a lot of rooms will get shut down in the coming two weeks, a lot of schools will get shut down. But right now I’m bringing my youngest daughter to her new daycare room. I meet the teacher and once Naomi sees what is going on, she starts to scream. Naomi won’t scream for a reasonable amount of time. It’s 100% possible she is still screaming now, an hour later as I write this. As Naomi is screaming at what many observers would think is the top of her lungs but I fucking know better, I am thinking about the great resignation. I don’t want to resign from my job, I quite like my job and I feel really positive about the inroads I am making at the job. But, I’m in a room full of masked parents running around dropping their kids off in 6 degrees above zero weather. I’ve been listening all morning to a podcast about fascism in the United States. We are three days away from marking the one year anniversary of an attempted coup against our government. We aren’t going to make it. Is there going to be someday in my life or my daughter’s life where the last edition of the New York Times is printed, or news becomes completely managed by the ruling party? Will there be elections every four years for the rest of my life? Will there be a Civil War? We are tearing apart and a fatal disease didn’t bring us together. Population wise at this moment, the Republican Party can’t want a fair fight. A fair fight means losing. And losing has no grace now. We don’t have a compelling punch your chest reason to stay a country. It’s freezing out. These children wonder why their teachers wear masks and their parents don’t, unless they are in stores. The older children are wondering why some adults never wear masks, even when they’re asked to. I can’t tell my children how strange this is, because for them, the pandemic now takes up at least 40% of their lifespans. Income inequality hasn’t been this high since the 1920s. My daughter’s other boot is still down in the classroom she’s leaving, I’ll bring it up, that will not stop her crying. 1,000+ die everyday in this country. 80 million Americans remain willfully unvaccinated. There’s people who die not from COVID19, but from waiting in a hospital for a bed while people with COVID19 stuff emergency rooms. We aren’t in this together. We die alone. Our babies will face worse. It’s not their job to solve it. The richest companies in the world hawk products that make teenage girls feel worse about themselves. They print money. Everyone is getting COVID. Unemployment is down, homelessness is up. Things are looking up if you don’t look down. People yell on twitter. We all want to focus on the hyper local and part of it is because we can’t beat the Koch Brothers internationally. The billionaires you look at are pulling up the ladders they always denied were helpful or valuable to them. I will buy $300 worth of ads from Mark Zuckerberg today. I will finance teenage girls feeling worse about themselves so that you feel compelled to go to a trivia night that I think might actually make you feel better about yourself. We are on this overheating planet and it is freezing and it’s the first business day of 2022 and every daycare parent is putting their kid’s shit into a new cubby thinking that they might be picking it all up in a week when the kids start coughing, when the teachers start calling out, when the world starts closing up. But today, you bring the boot upstairs from the old classroom. You see your daughter is still crying. You already comforted her once and got her reset and playing with a new friend. That set the teacher Eva in a good direction. If you go in again you just extend the crying. So you walk past quickly, her screaming floating on top of every other instrument in the morning daycare orchestra. You open the door to the cold wondering why you aren’t screaming too.
Justice Kavanaugh
There are a number of thinkers I’ve listened to lately who paint Supreme Court Justice Kavanaugh as a potential ally in certain hot button issues that the Court is facing. I do not follow the Supreme Court closely but it sounds as though Kavanaugh might be less knee-jerk rubber stamp Republican talking points than some of his others Justices. I don’t believe anyone really knows if this is true. But I must say, as a forty year old, I’ve primarily dealt with Supreme Court Justices who were nominated and admitted to the Court without my watchful eye. I remember Justice Clarence Thomas, I remember Chief Justice Roberts. But mostly I know the Supreme Court as a group of people who have held their jobs longer than I have cared who held them.
With Justice Kavanaugh I am quite convinced that he lied about his sexual assault of Christine Blasey Ford. I believe it is plausible that he has no memory of this experience, but if Justice Kavanaugh was a heavy drinker with Squee and his other weight lifting friends to the point where there is documented black out experiences, how can he be so authoritative about this? He can’t be. Do I think Christine Blasey Ford lied for one second? No! Is that strictly because I “believe women”. No! That’s a big part of it. We should trust and believe women about sexual assault in some of the same ways we believe people who say their car was stolen. You have never in the history of carstolentimes heard somebody say “my car got stolen” and had a friend respond “are you sure? were you drinking, are you positive it was your car that got stolen”. You believe and you listen. Might you stop believing at some point? Might you start to have questions about the stolen car? Sure. But you start off believing. I started off believing Christine Blasey Ford. She told a terrible story, she had notes from a therapists from long before there would be any logical claim to someone concocting a story about Brett Kavanaugh cause they had it out for him. Do you remember that lunch break where I thought Christine Blasey Ford had told a completely compelling story to the committee and I thought that Kavanaugh was for sure going to be put on hold as a nominee. And then they came back from lunch and Kavanaugh spit into his microphone a lot, said he liked beer thirty-five times, lost his composure and got the job?
Now that spitty angry guy is a central part of the most revered deliberative body in our country? How are we taking this seriously? He’s unhinged. He had nothing compelling to say. He yelled. And now he’s part of the strategy? Now he’s part of the plan? I just can’t take him seriously. And beyond taking him seriously, I just can’t think of him as a just arbiter. He’s a creep, he’s a liar, he’s a guy who bellyached his way into a great job and wanted pats on the back for studying hard. And man, they dug up some terrible stuff about his past. I can’t do it. I can’t think of this man as a Supreme Court Justice. But here he is, very much a Supreme Court Justice. I send love out to Christine Blasey Ford. She told her truth, she was compelling, she was vulnerable, she was honest. She gained nothing. She was attacked. She was brave. I’m sorry that America let Christine Blasey Ford down and let Justice Kavanaugh in.
Quite The Blooper on The Current
Well, while trying to pay tribute to Archbishop Desmond Tutu I made quite a mistake. All love, reverence and respect to both Archbishop Desmond Tutu and his friends and family.
The Ladies I Worked with at MDH Summer of 2000
My first office job was working at the Oak Street location of the Minnesota Department of Health in the Summer of 2000. I have a collection of facts I’d like to share and memories with you.
This was my first office job, there was also effectively no looking at the Internet because they had everything blocked.
My main job was entering in results from water tests. Including a water test from suspicious liquid found at the Nicollet McDonald’s that they thought might be terroristic and related to some sort of Olympics related event happening in town (it wasn’t).
It was at this job that I learned the technique of taking very long number 2s on the company dime with copious amounts of reading material
There was a deaf woman who I worked with who thought that all the other ladies on the floor hated her, and she hated them. She had worked with them for a long ass time. Maybe they did hate her. I thought she was cool as hell. We communicated on those little yellow pads you grab when you find out a meeting is more serious than you thought it was gonna be and you have to write some
I secretly made of fun the older women I worked with for being so basic. We didn’t have that term yet. But basically the whole day was talking about food with small breaks to actually eat food. They’d show up at 8:30am and start talking about what they had breakfast and whether they enjoyed it. Mind you, they’d be working on their data entry forms while doing this. Then, by 10am at the latest they’d talk about what they wanted to do for lunch. “did you bring something?” “have you tried that new place Chipotle” “the lines are so long” “I don’t like their egg rolls” “they might be closed for the summer” “it’s good pizza, I think it’s great”. I thought it was so dumb and thinking back. . .what else is there to talk about. It’s life and food is a real treat. Talk about it all day. Who cares. But anyway, then they’d go get lunch, sometimes together, sometimes separate. And then they’d talk about what they had for lunch til maybe 2. And then by three o’clock they’d talk about what they were cooking for their family for dinner. “does he even show up for dinner” “he won’t eat spicy” “I made that on Monday but what cares, it’s good”. Dear ladies of MDH in 2020, I’m sorry. Two years into the pandemic I would absolutely shave off all my body hair to hear a long day rolling conversation about food. You are amazing.
Let’s talk about Chipotle. The first Chipotle in Minnesota was at Stadium Village. It opened that summer. You can say what you want about Chipotle, we’ve all had some bad meals there. But oh my god, that summer it was honestly the most amazing food I had ever eaten in my entire life. I’d get that veggie burrito, heavy sour cream presence, oh my fucking god. I think it was also maybe 6 dollars or so. Legendary.I decided to quit early by like two weeks so I could get my head straight before I headed to the University of Minnesota for the first time. My boss, Monica, was uncharacteristically upset. As I think about it now, she shouldn’t have been that surprised that the flaky musician kid was dipping out a few weeks early. You should budget for that Monica.
Any who, the minute I told Monica I was leaving the job early, she dumped all sorts of crap work on me. Namely it was filing and entering paper only STD test results from a solid decade ago into a database. I knew it was just busy work that she was using to make my last couple weeks more difficult. Don’t tell me that in the year 2000 you just upped and decided it was a priority to file test results from 1991 into digital form Monica, I don’t believe it. So I did what any asshole kid would do. I hid the stacks of test results in the upper part of my cubicle storage. And a week before I was gonna be done one of my co-workers did what any nosy lady who talks about lunch all day would day which is open up the cubicle thing and tell me I was going to get in trouble for this. And so I did what any super asshole kid would do and I hid the test results in weird parts of the building where I know nobody would see them. I did not use MDH as a reference for future jobs.
Take it Easy/How To Get Ahead While Others Take It Easy
The message of this pre-Christmas week for so many people is to take it easy and phone it in. I am a) 100% in favor of you doing that if that is how you feel. Get it, you deserve a break. Or you don’t, but even if you don’t deserve a break that’s a lie because we all do this year. But, in case you want a couple weird side takes on this here we go in rapid fire:
1) You put too much time into Christmas. Scale back your expectations and do a portion of work, home or job, that you would really struggle to fulfill if everyone was going on all cylinders. When everyone else is chilling you have the mental bandwidth to do something ambitious.
2) Working when others aren’t feels fantastic. Pre-kids I used to make a solid 3-4 hours at the office on Sunday happen while all you bozos were watching football. I felt so great, chipping at the away at the inbox while it isn’t getting even with me with new emails.
3)This is a great time of the year to be creative. I haven’t sat down at a drumset in months, I haven’t recorded anything into my phone since September but today I just spent about twenty minutes writing on Peter’s drumkit while looking at a picture of a bunch of my high school friends sitting on a bench at Grand Old Day. I heard chords, I felt tempo, I heard arrangement. I have no idea what will come of it, but the emotions of the moment are pushing me into more creative spots.
4)Wayne Shorter recorded one of the greatest jazz albums of all time on December 24, 1964. It’s called Speak No Evil. Listen to it.
There’s something magical about channeling your creativity at a moment when the world let’s you let up on the grind. Think about Wayne, Elvin, Freddy, Ron and Herbie finding the time to make this before they got their Christmas started. Also, I can entertain options for better jazz records, but there is no better set of arrangements of jazz songs than this record, so bright, so imaginative, so powerful.
5) All of my advice is easier cause my family doesn’t celebrate Christmas. We are Jewish. Did you hear talking this mess when in the throws of the 8 day miracle? No. So remember that.
6) Christmas is not two weeks long. A little bit of productivity (for work or at the home) in between Christmas and New Year’s will actually make New Year’s a lot more fun. If you’ve been wearing sweatpants and drinking Windsor Canadian for three days straight and the only reason you know it’s New Year’s Eve is because a ball is dropping, you’re not going to be a happy camper.
7) That’s it. Please do drink eggnog and purchase Heiruspecs new single which we will drop soon!
The Best Music My Musical Brothers Have Made
photo by Mike Madison - This is the band Crescent Moon + Big Trouble. L-R Steve McPherson (my actual family brother), Sean McPherson (that’s me), Alexei Casselle (that’s Crescent Moon), Josh Peterson, Peter Leggett
I had a rehearsal today with the group Crescent Moon + Big Trouble. This is a sideproject of a sideproject but it is one of the most amazing musical groups I play in. Big Trouble is a retired instrumental group featuring my brother Steve on guitar and Josh and Peter from Heiruspecs on guitar and drums. We have an interesting take on instrumental music and playing with them has been an incredible gift for the past 15 years. For as long as we’ve been together we’ve also always played with Alexei Casselle aka Crescent Moon. Me and Alexei are the same age, he came up with Oddjobs/CMI same way I was coming up with Heiruspecs. I love Alexei and getting to have a long running project with him is one of the high notes of my musical career. We practiced today because we’ve got a gig coming up opening for Diane. It’s on Saturday January 15 at the Entry, I hope you come. I hope you buy tickets first, here’s that link.
When you are just practicing music you’ve already written the mind can wander in a really beautiful way during a rehearsal. Today as I was looking at these men I’ve known for so long, I was thinking about what my favorite work they’ve done as individuals is. We’ve played great music as a group, but we all have other groups and individual high notes. So, I’d like to tell about the best musical contributions on planet Earth from us five.
The Best Things Crescent Moon + Big Trouble has Made
I love this band. Here’s our best songs. I’ll get into us as individuals next.
Broken Dishes is a song we made at our first rehearsal which was probably in 2006. I wrote the guitar part. Steve, Peter and Josh made it stunningly beautiful. It is this sleepy understated brush work* by Peter that sits ready to pull up to a boil the minute that Alexei brings up his intensity. Steve is floating around with this absolutely tear jerking slide adventure and Josh and me are in the cut with the fundamentals of the composition. But forget about us, the star is Alexei. He teases out the uneasy conversations that move in strange directions when in a new physical location with a family member. The way the environment just changes the tone. It’s raw, it’s ugly and it’s goosebumping. This is one of Alexei’s greatest pieces of writing.
*brushes are fancy weird things that drummers use instead of sticks to make different textures happen. I have no idea how common that knowledge is.
Streetlights is off of our most recent releases and this is one spot where I think this song kept us together as a band when we had the least energy to keep on going. Everybody in the band but Peter has kids. We’ve all got other bands. This band operates at a deficit so we never make any money. For a couple years it seems like all we did was get together twice a year to play this song. The thing was, the song was good enough that that was just fine. My brother wrote the fundamentals on this one and it shows the magic of what my brother does writing wise. Steve writes full, magnificent chordal things and dares the band to find their way into the world of those chords. In this case Josh worked in some beautiful almost country style stylings in the choruses on guitar and he danced around with beautiful joshisms* in the verse.
When we cut this demo I had my doubts about what Alexei would find in it. It moved along in a weird time signature and I believe in the demo it was kind of arbitrary how frequently the riff actually happened. Alexei came back with this defeated & triumphant at-the-same-time lyric that immediately commanded attention. At rehearsal Steve said he has thought about getting it tattooed on his body and now I’m thinking about it too. The band got in there with precision to bend the riff around Alexei’s lyrics. But somehow, we kept the spirit, the energy. And Peter is an absolute vision on the drums. It is so exciting, so up front and so well delivered. I think this is some of our best playing as a collective. That’s why the shit it’s on this list.
*joshisms - Josh has a way of teasing out the beautiful and subtle in anything musical. He will rarely stick his neck and craft the part that demands your attention. And if he does it’s very rare that it will sound like a GUITAR WITH A CAPITAL G. But the man can find the secret beauty in the movement between any three chords, he’ll thread some needle and he’ll give you something that elevates the piece completely. Let’s move on with these players individually.
The Best Things My Brother Steven McPherson has Made
My brother is a hell of a guitar player and writer. Here’s some of his best work.
My brother writes big. He’s not gonna bring a song in that goes from I to IV. There’s gonna be something. He’s into the big shit. And Forecast is the big shit. It’s like if the band Chicago fired their horn section but kept on trying to sound like they had a horn section. This type of writing makes learning Steve’s songs both challenging and rewarding. A lot of great songs aren’t hard to play. This f*cker is hard to play. I’m not on this recording, but I did learn to play this song when I was with Catfish Blue. It’s majestic, it’s ambitious and it’s joyous. Well done Steve.
Like I said, my brother writes big. Because hip-hop has never been dead center in Steve’s musical universe I feel he has a unique gift to just be working in his rock and roll centric world and then every once in awhile discover something that would lock up perfectly with what we were all doing in Heiruspecs. In this case it is again this full beautiful, unruly 6 measure long pattern that sounds amazing. The best hip-hop music comes from things that first weren’t designed to be part of a hip-hop song. In this case, this guitar part just explodes with energy and Felix responded with a hilarious song about the downsides of being a superhero. God damn this song is so fun.
The Best Things Josh Peterson has Made
Josh has been a great guitar player for years. On the low he’s also the sound of the second half of Heiruspecs’ career. Here’s some of his best work.
I knew Josh forever as a guitar player. We’ve been playing together since we were both in high school. I took up way too much oxygen in early Heiruspecs to really let any other music writers shine. I thought the writing work was mine and everyone else would just respond and play. By the time Josh got back in the band we had become much more democratic. But there was a real hierarchy. I had the easiest time getting musical ideas across. I had history on my side plus I write good jams. DeVon had written some of our best tunes and we were just starting to get Peter in the mix as a writer. It is a complete tribute to Josh that as the door opened to contribute more Josh seemed to bring in these gems that the band immediately latched on to. Josh’s batting average of having his demos turn into songs is easily the highest in the group. This was the tune that made me realize that Josh was no joke with the pen. The chords move so strangely to me during the verse. The verse seems to break a lot of rules about what is supposed to work as far as chord movement, but when you hear it is as smooth as butter. Also, for Josh to write these comparatively mellow beats that still command the attention and passion of our emcees, it’s a tribute to how awesome the writing is.
Had to go with the video link on this one because the video is just us recording this song. What the hell Josh? How do you write stuff like this? This song is basically impossible for us to play live, but it packs such a punch without ever swinging a punch in the studio form. And the new record from Heiruspecs that’s coming out next year? It’s got so much Josh writing all over it. Josh can deliver great solos, Josh can do a lot of great guitar player stuff, but I think ultimately it’s what he does as a writer whether he’s on your song or his own. That’s where he shines. And boy does this shine.
The Best Things Alexei (Crescent Moon) has Made
Alexei is one of the best emcees I’ve ever had the honor of working with. Here’s some of his best stuff.
The center of Crescent Moon’s musical output is his collaboration with Steve Lewis, Kill The Vultures. They came out of the ashes of Oddjobs, a group that was doing relatively centrist hip-hop: punchlines, throw your hands up, prominent scratches. The work of Kill The Vultures was this move to provide something a lot more singular. Challenging, angular, strange percussion, challenging subject matter. Steve Lewis is one of the most relentlessly creative producers I’ve ever been around. He seeks to challenge himself, he seeks to challenge his collaborators. I enjoy everything about their catalog. But the first time I heard this song I felt it brought something out into the universe didn’t exist. It was epic, without ever screaming out “this one is epic!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”. And when Channy comes in towards the end of the song with her vocals, it’s game over. It’s just the right amount of everything. God damn. I haven’t made music this courageous, this unapologetically singular.
The song’s good. Alexei’s verse is great (he’s second at about 2:45). Oddjobs certainly had some of the ambition of Kill The Vultures buried within their production even while using a more traditional canvas. The drums on this song are provided by Tim Glenn, who at the time was a member of Heiruspecs. Okay, Alexei is now rightfully celebrated as a great songwriter. That’s great! Good shit. Sometimes I feel like when we celebrate a rapper for being a great songwriter it is code for them not being great at both the technical side of rapping. I also fear that it’s code for them not having skills at the shit talk element of rap. This verse just throws highlighter on the fact that when talking shit and having skills was at the center of the culture, Alexei was right there. He’s out of control on this verse. And the production answers.
The Best Things Peter Leggett has Made
Peter Leggett is a world-class drummer and his creativity is off the charts.
One of the great joys of my life is making music with Peter Leggett. At one point we were wildly close as people. Played in 2-3 bands together, were roommates on tour and managed the day to day affairs for Heiruspecs. We’ve grown up, grown apart in expected ways, but there is this shared language of spending a couple years basically smothering each other. We were able to take a lot of the magic language we developed with Heiruspecs of arranging, of different feels of different tricks and smash it over our friend Bill Caperton’s songs. He was the songwriter in Ela and he won the god damn lottery with us taking his already magical songs and putting all of these hip-hop/reggae tricks across the tracks. Peter refuses to do normal shit. He will not phone anything in ever in his life. But for this genre, this Jade Tree indie rock, Peter was born to bring his magic to this sound. Peter knew what would work in this environment. He was student of the rock bands we were emulating. He was also just massively over qualified for adding power to rock tracks. He had heart, groove and a massive technical facility to deliver it. In the build up in this song you can hear Peter artfully just expand the universe, the hi-hat keeps on opening up the fills build a bit and Bill screams over it. I am so lucky to have witnessed this song’s birth and played a part in making it work. But man, this track is all about Peter's arranging and playing and Bill’s writing and singing.
I didn’t think I was going to include this tune. Peter wrote all the music for this amazing song from Heiruspecs called “skyisfalling”. It’s an incredible piece of work and it’s one of our most popular songs. But I forgot about Peter’s work all over this tune Broken Record with I Self Devine making a cameo. It’s how the two drum parts work, how they bounce and answer the lyrics (and the conversation goes in both directions). And it’s classic Peter because the conversation that exists between the two drum parts bounce across the two distinct harmonic parts as well. So you get to hear drum part A against harmonic parts A + B and you get to hear drum part B against harmonic parts A + B as well. Right at this moment I’m writing well into the night just smiling thinking about all the great moments I’ve gotten to make with Peter. This is one of the high points. I love this music. DeVon Gray, our magical keyboard player wrote this song, it has a ton of joshisms (see above!!) but the funky beauty of DeVon’s writing sets the groundwork for the magic that comes out of Peter.
The Best Things Sean McPherson (that’s me) has Made
People who think I have a high opinion of myself will continue to feel that way after reading this.
I’m a songwriter trapped in a bass player’s skill set. And starting around my thirtieth birthday I decided to try to push out the music I wanted to make as a writer. The first big result of that is my work with the Twinkie Jiggles Broken Orchestra. We had one particularly magical day of tracking that involved Graham O’Brien on drums, me on bass, DeVon Gray on keyboards and Chastity Brown on vocals. You are likely familiar with Chastity Brown as she is quite a big name. I am so lucky that she agreed to sing these songs. This song is not popular, people don’t listen to it. But for me, writing a good angry song is one of the hardest things to pull off in the music world. We’ve got a lot of love songs, we’ve got a fair amount of fun songs on planet earth. We have few songs that capture that anger. This one captures the anger, the love, the bitter end of relationship. It landed where I wanted to land lyrically and I am still very proud of the tune. Scott Agster wrote the horn chart and it’s beautiful.
This is the song that I thought was going to catapult Heiruspecs to that next big level. I’m very proud of the groundwork I laid for this song, but I have nothing to do with the three best things about this song:
Felix’s Lyrics - This a great slice of life yet larger than life narrative that Felix is so good at crafting. It’s a day in the life and it also shows how that day is emblematic of a whole universe.
Actually Good Vocal Scratching - The grand majority of vocal scratching is garbage, hot shit. Muad’dib puts something on this song that improves it, intensifies it. It gives something to the tune.
Tasha’s Keyboard Part - Tasha Baron, an earlier keyboard player, brought in that beautiful, soulful keyboard part that plays so well against the rest of it.
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But coming in fourth in the “cool thing about 5ves Olympics” is that bassline. You haven’t heard a bassline quite like it before. You’ll remember it. And I had the good sense to write a drum part against it that was also original but obvious. There should be a hundred songs like 5ves, there aren’t. I don’t really hear songs like 5ves ever. I’m so proud of the tune. If you ask Spotify, Heartsprings is by far our biggest and most successful tune. If you ask Heiruspecs and the audiences at our shows, it’s this tune. It’s 5ves all day.
Thanks for reading this long. I can only assume if you’ve read this long you are either Josh, Peter, Steve or Alexei. You guys are great. I’m lucky to play music with you. Thank you for being amazing.
The Celebrities of the Midway YMCA
Like other COVID dad’s who are radio DJs I live a uniquely repetitive life. I go to work. I go grocery shopping at Korte’s (they changed their name but I just stopped calling them Knowlan’s a couple years ago so they’ll have to wait). I drop my kids off at daycare. I run trivia at the 331 Club and I go to the YMCA. Let’s give some shout outs to the celebrities of the Midway YMCA.
The Old Guy Who Recently Started Being a Lifeguard
Dear sir. You are an attractive older man. You look like you probably did a lot of mouth to mouth in your younger lifeguarding years. I bet you saw the sign for the 1k signing bonus to do aquatics jobs and you figured you could dust off the silver whistle, do a little CPR training on Annie and get back in the mix. Well guess what? You can! Looking good! Keeping us safe! Even sassing the the 7 year old who was swimming way to close to my daughter’s swimming class. You always wear your mask around your ear but not your face, you know that doesn’t help right? But, man, if I had a sharp jawline like you, I might risk it and just toss on the mask when I’m interacting close with somebody. Sexy old lifeguard, what a life.
The lady who reads a Kindle that is strapped to her neck in the Vortex Pool
I salute you. I don’t know what you’re reading. I hope it generates income for you cause I don’t see how you can hold down a job while also rocking that vortex pool/hot tub a solid three hours a day. But honestly, what are you reading. You get high points for commitment. You have one demerit on your record though. One time, a mom and daughter walked in ready for their swimming lesson, but the teacher was nowhere to be found. Me and you were watching the whole thing play out from our hot tub perch. And after it was established there would be no lesson, you stepped up and told mom “she should still swim today, you came all this way”. FACTS! That’s a reasonable idea. But it’s garbage advice. Let the mom and the daughter decide, it’s their call. And if what you want is for the girl to swim, I think your best bet is just to send positive energy in that direction, I don’t think the decision of the kindle strapped hot tub attendee is the make or break. Also, for real, what are you reading?
Fancy Ray
Fancy Ray, you’re famous. And when I see you in the sauna I say “how are you Fancy Ray” you always say “top of the world man, top of the world” and you smile. I love you Fancy Ray.
The Guy who works out in athletic shorts and a Cities 97 shirt with the sleeves cut off
I am so incredible scared of you. I imagine that you can beat the living piss out of me and then kick it back in. You don’t even lift heavy weights. But you are dressed like you enjoy a Michelob, a pack of Marlboros and some ribs. Don’t kill me. If you want to use a machine, just go ahead and look at me. I will run into the bathroom and sit in the fetal position until the Y closes.
To Every Fat 18 Year Old Boy
My nutritionist suggested I never get on a scale again. She’s been on this for awhile, and I’m trying to warm to it. She’s all for metrics, I’m all for metrics. But the scale is such an overbearing, singular measure of health. And it’s misleading. And I would say that people overweighing themselves also results in more loss and gain than just carving a path towards pursuing a healthy relationship with food. But, when I was at my worst self-confidence, my most down about myself, I was scared to get on the scale, and I was 18. I had no pride, I just had fear. I had to get a physical that year. I went to that Health Partners over on Eustis to get my physical. Anna My then spectacular girlfriend, and now spectacular friend Anna took me to the appointment and waited for me. The scale couldn’t weigh me, I weighed too much. I could hear two nurses on the phone with some other person trying to figure out how to weigh me, making jokes about getting two scales. I get tense just thinking about it. Fuck them. I weighed 390 lbs. I felt horrible. I just felt worn out, misunderstood, I felt no control over my body, over my weight gain. Anna was supportive, she was loving, she was everything she could be, but you can’t protect a fat 18 year old boy from the way the world treats you.
So I weigh less than that now. I weigh 340 pounds. Scroll down and you’ll see I write that I weigh 330 pounds. I was lying to you then. I am carrying a bit of Hanukkah weight. When I told my nutritionist that I had lied about my weight on my wildly successful blog she gave me the slightest eye roll. She’s a smart woman, she knows her shit and she thinks even the positive feedback from the scale might ultimately be a negative in my life. She asked me what I would miss about weighing myself. I first told her about this 390 thing. I told her how it was rock bottom, it was the worst. I felt like utter garbage. I measure my success in weight often with the idea of “stay as far away from 390 as possible”. That involves some scenario where I see some number sneaking towards 390 and I am some able to pump the brakes on my life and white knuckle me weight back to a more comfortable position. This is all based in fiction. The improvements I’ve health I’ve experienced in my life have come from the following: giving up sugar sodas and giving up a fair amount of other shitty carbohydrates, sleeping more, exercising more, cooking more, traveling less, loving myself, working on my mental health. I’ve never lost weight by scaring the shit out of myself. Fuck the scale, I don’t need it.
But, as you know, I am a celebrity. And I want to be a brave, fat, sexy celebrity and part of that is being comfortable not just talking about my size, but about my weight. I don’t know why. I remember Questlove saying some 20 years ago that he was 290 or maybe 275, I don’t know what, but I thought, “wow, he’s so comfortable with himself he can talk about his actual weight”. It inspired me. It gave me balance. It gave me a sense that you could be fat and cool. I don’t know if I need to get on the scale to do that for any fat 18 year old boys who might be looking up to me to any degree. So here’s my note to all the fat 18 year old boys (if you’re aren’t a fat 18 year old boy you are still welcome to read it):
The hardest shit about being fat is going to happen outside of your body. People are going to treat you so different that you’re going to start treating yourself different. DON’T. Don’t think shit will be all better if you lose the weight. You’ll still struggle. You’ll still have bad days. You’ll still have health concerns. Your weight is not keeping you from a good life. A fat boy can have sex. A fat boy can have sex with thin people. A fat boy can flirt. A fat boy can be serious. A fat boy can be funny. A fat boy can fight. A fat boy can skate. A fat boy can rock climb. A fat boy can have a family. A fat boy can work a job that requires uniforms. There isn’t a thin boy trapped inside you. There’s just you. You aren’t trapped in anything. You are you. Love your body, do things that make your body feel good. Move your body in ways that you like. Love your body. Answer the hate you receive with love. I hope people don’t call you names like they called me names. I hope people don’t make fun of you the way they made fun of me. Cause I hope the world has gotten a little better in this regard. But whatever you face, you can do this. For me, I’m not gonna weigh myself anymore. I’ve learned a lot about my health, I know what I should eat, I know when I slip, I know what brings me to a place where I sleep better, where I feel better, where I know I’m living my life the right way for my health. The scale is not gonna be a part of that anymore. Blood pressure monitoring is, at some point maybe blood sugar will be too. But for right now, I’m going to find my path towards always improving my health without the scale. That might not be right for you. That’s a decision that you will make. I love you. I love me. I even love the people who hate us. But I love you more.
No More Think Pieces About COVID
I briefly turn my phone off of “do disturb”
and pretend childhood days spent on another planet where a 60 degree December day was Nothing’s Shocking
Normal
Saint Cloud by Waxahatchee won’t be my COVID album
Joe Biden won’t be our Pandemic President
Warren won’t be my only COVID dog
This will continue, if we did have a shot at shutting it down
We lost it. If we did have a shot at learning great lessons from this,
We punted.
On the night I find out that 800,000 is the American death toll
We start to pick out flights to Florida
I find a babysitter so I can play music on a radio station in the evening on ladies night out
They don’t make think pieces about herpes. They don’t.
They make think pieces about the common cold but you only ever read the first paragraph.
It’s COVID and it’s forever.
The daycare lady tells me she’s nervous about the tornado tonight.
I want to tell her about the candle factory where the boss made them stayed til they died.
I hope I get the email to pick my kids up early.
I hope people know they aren’t testing alarms if they ring them tonight.
In Minnesota they test the weather alarms on the first Wednesday of the month.
It’s December 15. It’s COVID and it’s forever.
My Concept of Longevity is Heavily Skewed
The things I do, I do for a long time. I’ve been in a side project of Heiruspecs for 15 years. I started the band Heiruspecs with Felix in 1997. Ergo, I’ve been in a high school band for 24 years. It throws everything off. Q: “How long have you been with your wife?” A: About 42% as long of a time as I’ve played the song 5ves at concerts.
Minnesota is also a complicated place to deal with longevity. Some people stay in the same jobs here for 20+ years. According to basically everyone I’ve talked to from coastal cities, that’s just unheard of, that isn’t how people build careers there. My thoughts on longevity tonight aren’t so much about how long you should stay in a job. It’s that desire to have a bit of a mission statement for what you’re going to do at a spot that I want to talk about.
When I had just started really grinding hard on Trivia Mafia LLC with Chuck Terhark in 2009/2010, nothing made me feel more like a boss than reading the Corner Office Column in the New York Times. I’d be reading it on my daddy’s subscription (and still do) and thinking about what it will be like when I run a huge ass company. Most of those interviews are just management porn. The column is filled with “answers” like “how do you change the culture? it starts in the fibers, in the very infrastructure that powers the decisions you guide from the C-suite”. The subject of the interview is wearing a tightly tailored suit and gesturing in a way that accentuates their elbows (that’s for the young people), or it’s a head shot and something like a moustache or unfashionable glasses tell us that they are old-school. It’s hilariously useless stuff, even for people at that C-suite level. The column is mainly designed to be read by idiots like I was in 2010.
Nowadays, I am tangentially involved in a company that I think has an excellent culture. I am 50% owner of Trivia Mafia LLC and I can comfortably say that our employees have generally good feelings about how the company is run, feel comfortable bringing up the the things that upset them and anticipate being treated fairly throughout the course of their time at Trivia Mafia. I can’t claim a lot of credit for this continuing to be true, but I can claim some credit for it being true in the first place. Chuck, the other owner, and I have a decade long history of putting being true, fair and considerate ahead of short gains and generally of running a company in a fashion that is smart in the long run. The one full-time employee we have, Brenna Proczko, is really talented and very good at making the principles and attitudes of Trivia Mafia LLC easily exportable to new employees and clients who have less knowledge of what we are all about.
Back to me reading The Corner Office back in the early 2010s. I did come across one interview where the woman criticized the culture of people coming to jobs for a year and a half and then sailing for greener pastures. Specifically she made this explanation that the first year and a half on the job in the grand scheme is the orientation. Where are the bathrooms? Which bathroom do people use for number twos? How do you get reimbursed? What do we do for a holiday party? How do we structure events? In that first year and a half you are getting the answers to those questions. Her pitch was as follows: once you know where everyone shits, stick around for awhile and change some things. Move on after you’ve tried to execute the change that you believe the place deserves. The pitch was that you have a duty to a place, after you learn your way around, do something good for the place. We can all spend a lot of time feeling like we work for our bosses because. . .shit, we do. Our bosses have the biggest say in deciding if we continue to work for whatever place employs us. Writing this column made me realize we have a duty to our institutions that is somewhat independent of our bosses. If you see a lane to make where you work better, stronger, provide a better service et cetera, you have a duty to make that happen, as long as it doesn’t endanger your livelihood.
So what do you do for a place once you know where the bathrooms are? What do you for a place when you feel acclimated, comfortable and ready to rock? I think the main key at that juncture is figuring out your ambition for changing a place. Some gigs, you might have a role where you possess very little without power to change, so you nibble around the corners. At other spots, you can make a big impact with minimal friction. I think this is relatively easy to understand for companies you didn’t start.
This whole logic gets a lot harder to navigate when it is all about a company or a band you started. . .right? What do I want to change about Heiruspecs? What do I want to change about Trivia Mafia? I have real answers to both, but they are muddied by the fact that every mess I want to clean up at those organizations is in some obvious fashion my fault. It’s different with a spot like MPR/APMG. Fresh sets of eyes walk into our orbit at my day-job on a monthly basis. These individuals kick the tires, see where we’re going. They ask questions that weren’t obvious to us, they point out the inefficiencies that seem mandatory to us. But you can’t just kick the tires. Some of the most impressive people I’ve worked with at MPR have left pretty fast. Frankly, they’ve often left for completely logical reasons; great opportunity for them or for a spouse elsewhere. But we can’t just kick the tires to greatness (goddammit that’s my pull quote when I’m wearing the sensible glasses and answering questions in the NYT Corner Office in year 2037). I’ve been at MPR for about seven years in some remotely professional capacity. My ability to change the culture, to bend the arc the way I personally feel it should be is certainly dulled by the fact that I am not remotely in management. There is no one in the business of bending the culture at MPR who have me on their short list to do that bending. But what matters for me is I can see the slow progress. It’s not front page stuff, but I feel MPR has made modest changing in what I think is the right direction and I have been a part of those changes.
Longevity and legacy. With COVID, with your 40s, with kids, your mortality creeps into your thoughts a bit more. I want to be really proud of the work I’ve done on Planet Earth. I also want to be proud of the energy I’ve offered my spouse, my kids, my block, my community. I don’t want to have moved from company to company every year and a half and feel like I never sunk my teeth in and changed a company, turned a page. I feel really great about the music I’ve laid down with Heiruspecs, but I don’t know what is next for me in the musical realm. My life has moved to some extend in slightly constructed half decades of focus:
Ages 20-25 - Heiruspecs
Ages 25-30 - McNally Smith College of Music/Trivia Mafia
Ages 30-35 - Dessa/Trivia Mafia
Ages 35-40 - MPR
It’s oblong, but that’s the arc I’ve got going. I’m trying to figure out how to take that step and see 40-45, 45-50 et cetera actively being about MPR. A longer arc than I’ve offered any project in my life. Q: How long have you been at MPR? A: About 125% as long as I was in Heiruspecs.
How do I stay engaged? How do I stay hungry? How do I stay longetive. That is my new Corner Office word for channeling the spirit of longevity in a society that doesn’t value. Eager to learn, focused on improving my craft, not looking for greener pastures to the detriment of the field I’m in. It’s easy to stagnate, it’s also forgivable to stagnate in the midst of trying to raise kids at the same time. I’m realizing that I need to actively sort out where I’m putting my energy, how I’m pushing myself. What can I bring myself and my energy that will result in more good down the road for everyone and more happiness for me right the f now?
Grateful For Some People I Don’t Know
I have a lot of folks that are directly in my life to be thankful for. But I’ll take care of them on texts, with gifts and with love. I want to give some public love to the people who have helped me get through this year with tremendous lows and only modest highs.
Larry Mizell Jr. from KEXP
I’m a radio DJ, that’s what I do for a living. A couple years ago I realized I wasn’t doing the research I should be to try to get better at my job. When I was making a living as a bass player I studied other bass players and I would’ve done well to study more. I didn’t dig in deeply enough to my craft, instead, I was focused on making my band successful and partying. Fair enough. But I want to make legendary moments happen on the radio. I want to listen and study the folks that are doing elite programming in the spoken voice space (I know that’s clunky, but I study plenty of podcasts when trying to get strong at radio). Larry has the midafternoon spot if you live in Seattle, but in Central time he’s 3-6. In the middle of the summer of 2020 I was knocking out some work and I flipped on KEXP in my pursuit to have some radio on. What I found was a conversational DJ who was still incredibly economical with how long he talked (I think most DJs are one or the other, either conversational or brief). But Larry is both. He’s got tremendous knowledge of music, but frankly, that isn’t that rare. What he has is knowledge and favorites! Though he knows the landscape, I can hear a deeper affinity for Parliament Funkadelic, for MF DOOM, for Thin Lizzy. Does it help that some of these are my favorites as well? Absolutely. But, he’s got favorites that aren’t mine. He gets me excited for house music in a way that I can’t create naturally without him. He keeps track of the birthdays, he makes Thursdays and Fridays more fun than the rest of the week, cause they are.
(Larry’s producer is Charlize. Like most great radio shows, I have no idea where Larry starts and where his team begins, from every indication I get from the outside, the whole crew is on point, delivering great research and awesome music).
Listening to the Afternoon Show lifts me up, it makes me feel like I’m in a room with a bunch of friends picking out records and talking about the goings on of the day. It’s what radio should be, and I’m studying.
It’s hard to know if you’re doing the job well when you’re a DJ on the radio. You can get some feedback from listeners but let’s be honest, the grand majority of us are not contacting radio hosts, whether they are doing a good job or a bad job. The amount of time I’ve been absolutely floored by a DJ and not reached out to them. . .there’s plenty. So realizing how much The Afternoon Show matters to me helps me imagine how maybe what I do on the Current could matter to somebody else. I’m proud of the music I play, the artists I feature, the collaborations I have with Sani, my co-host on the Message, and others. I can imagine what I do having an impact on how good of a Saturday people have, because of how much Larry' and his crew matter to my afternoons.
Political Gabfest from Slate
Every Thursday three friends and influential journalists/journalist adjacent folks get together to talk about a couple big stories of the week and a little bit of bullshitting about lighter news stories. It’s magical because it has the informative qualities of a scripted show, but it also has the human connection qualities that I really only find off of unscripted shows. I have no qualms about saying it’s the best podcast ever. In the final three episodes of a well constructed whodunit I will briefly forget about a show like Political Gabfest, but week after week, I come to this show and get something really rewarding.
The Right Time with Bomani Jones on ESPN
I don’t watch football. I don’t understand basketball but I love it. But I love Bomani Jones. He’s what I think everyone who talks for a living wants. . .when something happens in the world I’m curious what Bomani thinks about it. His angle is always interesting and I might not agree with every take, but I see the path, I get the idea. I also find him to be crazy fast with digesting a moment and predicting how it might look a few months out. He’s got great vision for sports, for music, for the world in general. There’s one particular episode where Dominique Foxworth and Bomani Jones talks about what it takes to do jobs like theirs well and it floored me. Such an inspiring conversation.
Trivia Mafia Thursdays with Chuck and Co on Twitch
Do I own Trivia Mafia? Yup, 50% of it. Do I know Chuck, yup! Am I comfortable telling him how much his weekly trivia night means to me? Nope! That’s why I blog. I’m not super involved in the day to day for Trivia Mafia. I bet if you ask the day to day people they’d say “he’s super not involved”. But here’s the deal, we had to make a big ass pivot for the pandemic. And friends, we did it. We aren’t where we once were, but we are making our way back and we have a new identity as an online trivia company. We’re awesome. People use us for parties et cetera. Our calling card in the digital space is our Thursday night on Twitch. It was handled for more than a year plus by Chuck, the other owner of the company. It is now hosted by a rotating cast, but it’s always magic. Maybe about 200+ viewers, representing more players than that come together and play on their screens. There are inside jokes, there’s alliances, there’s special offerings. Basically, it’s a magical weekly trivia night, online or otherwise. I got together with my wife, neighbor, colleague, old friend and a couple friend of friends and we forged this bond that now lasts into the real world. It gave me something social, something fun and something awesome to get through.
Lowell George Has Me Messed Up
Do you know Lowell George? He was the centerpiece of the first incarnation of the group Little Feat. They are the best Southern rock band to come out of Los Angeles. Lowell George is a great writer and he died in 1979. He died at the Twin Bridges Marriott in Arlington, VA. It was an accidental cocaine overdose. But I was reading about George last night while listening to some Little Feat and it briefly mentioned that in addition to speedballs and tons of alcohol Lowell George gained a bunch of weight at the end of his life weighing 308 pounds.
I weigh more than 308 pounds. I weigh 330 pounds. I don’t do speedballs. But seeing my weight listed in a paragraph that could be labeled as “reasons Lowell George died” had me feeling frustrated. I believe it is fair to mention Lowell George’s weight gain when talking about the deterioration of his health. I understand that Lowell George near his death and I are both morbidly obese. I feel that weight is a valuable part of a metric of health. I think most people agree with that. The fact that it’s become effectively the only metric is frustrating. On top of that, we make other people's weight our business in a way that is unfair. A lot of the bad health decisions that others make don’t show up as visibly as weight. Thus we all feel the freedom to cast judgment in a way that is really unfair.
I deserve love and support even if I was throwing down a whole large pizza in the back of my tour bus before cooking up a speedball (does one cook one of those?). Lowell George deserved love and he probably deserved someone to check in with him, help him get his life on track. That didn’t happen. But, I just don’t think that is a fair description of everyone who is morbidly obese. I hate what I would think about myself if I just walked past me on the bus. I’d think, that dude needs to start exercising, he needs counseling, he needs a supportive partner. The hard part is I’ve got that, I have a fitness regiment, I’ve seen mental health counselors in the recent past and currently do couples counseling. I have a wildly supportive partner. I have the ingredients I need to lead a healthy life. I get more sleep than I used to. I am more comfortable with my feelings. I eat better. I sleep better. I show up better. But I don’t live a thin life. I don’t like a chunky life. I live a morbidly obese life. And I have this monstrous desire to understand every detail of George’s drug abuse, so I can divide my life from his. I didn’t really understand drugs in high school so when Chris Farley died I figured fat people just doubled over and died at some point. I lived in fear and inaction for years. Lowell George, I hope you rest in peace, I hope your soul is good. I’m sorry you died. The path that I’m on is not a straight line to the grave, I am taking care of my body, I am taking time for myself and I am doing it on my terms. I slip, I fail, I have goals I haven’t met, but I love myself and even if we share a scale reading, we are facing different things, and we are facing them differently.
Towards Heiruspecsness
There are joys you only earn through time. Things you can’t hurry through, last pages you can’t skip to.
I’ve been in the band Heiruspecs since fall of 1997 when Chris ‘Felix’ Wilbourn and I stopped just putzing around in our high school music class and started putting together a band. I’m forty years old now and it’s been clear to me since when we second tried to break up in 2006 that this was going to be the most important professional thing I’ll do in my life. By important I mean important. I certainly don’t mean remunerative, it’s possible I’ll make more in a half year working at MPR then I’ll ever have made with Heiruspecs, but that shit truly doesn’t matter. What does matter is that for 24 years, with waning justification, Heiruspecs has been committed to each other and to our community.
Last night we played a show at the Turf Club in St. Paul. The show is called our “Holiday Classic” and it’s the only reliable thing on our live show calendar at this point. We couldn’t do it last year because of the state of the pandemic and so this year it feels particularly special. We had a young rapper named Juice Lord on the bill who Felix and I are both really supportive of. I have no idea how I’ll fair as a tastemaker of any sort, but the first time I heard Juice Lord rap I just immediately felt he had the skills to bring him some level of fame. There’s only so much advice you can dole out as 40 year old musicians with dayjobs who busted their ass to get 269 paid tickets into the Turf Club. Heiruspecs has reached some high levels at time in our careers, but our career isn’t a likely one most young musicians would copy and paste into their own future.
But here’s what I’ll tell you: we’ve earned it. We’ve earned the downsides. At a time in our career where I think the next level was ten really good songs away. . .we couldn’t get into the rehearsal space, we couldn’t walk out with something we were proud of, too much fighting, to many wandering eyes pushing us towards other projects as individuals. At a time in our career where I think another year of grinding very humbly might’ve brought us into a different level of income on the road, we couldn’t get back in the van. We’ve earned the lows. We’ve earned the highs. We made a song that still stands as one of the best of our catalog back in 2008, “We Want a New Flow”. We practically broke up after that rehearsal. I also think we broke the fight into two parts, taking it from our rehearsal space and moving it to Hamline and Thomas, where Muad’dib was working at a coffeeshop. I don’t remember everything we fought about but I remember Peter Leggett, our drummer, saying to Felix - “I’m a utility in this band, that’s all I am”. The larger fight I believe was about inspiration, ratio of created beats to full on songs and more. But I just remember thinking, “wow, we just made an incredible track and we can’t even get out of our own way today.”
I’ve been the leader of the band for the duration of the group. Felix is the front person, it’s not Heiruspecs without Felix, and it’s not Heiruspecs without any of us, but we’d all agree I do a lot of the running of the band. I’ve fucked up enormously. I fired my two best friends from the band in what I thought was the worse way possible, until I fired a keyboard player even more sloppily about three years later. I stumbled through it all. And now we own it in a way I don’t own anything else in my life. My 10,000 hours aren’t as a musician, they’re as a member of Heiruspecs. We step on stage at the Turf Club and I cash in the years I spent listening to music with Peter, the times we just spent in hotels being young men together, finding our way.
Now we’re old. We’re not kind of old, we’re not on the old side. We’re old. We have a fanbase, we have a profile. We know how limited it is but it seems like all of us are dead set upon preserving it, protecting it, advancing it and using it to make this a better scene for the people coming up. It’s important that Heiruspecs isn’t our whole life, it’s important that Heiruspecs is a warts-and-all project, we are relentlessly true to ourselves. That sometimes means we practiced too much and lost the heart of a song, sometimes that means we’ve practiced too little and lost the chart of a song. We struggle through it, but there’s a magic between us that you can’t dilute with time. We earned some sort of chemistry, some sort of 7th member that is the spirit we all poured in to this. When we navigate our next steps with music or business I feel like we are all certain there is a decision that Heiruspecs is supposed to come to, it’s our job as individuals to just carom it pinball style from our points of view and trust that the sum of all these strokes will be towards Heiruspecsness. And that’s our new motto: towards Heiruspecsness.
We Could Treat Police Like Subprime Loan Officers
Too often when the discussion of police abolition comes up one of the first roadblocks is “there are some great cops” or “not all cops are bad”. I sincerely agree with this statement, but I don’t believe that fact should be a dealbreaker for the idea of police abolition. By the way, one of the most helpful resources I found in thinking about police abolition is the MPD150 website, check it out here.
These arguments about “there are some great cops” didn’t come up when our country decided that we needed to get rid of sub-prime loans and thus we needed to get rid of subprime loan officers. We saw that subprime loans were designed to prey on black people in particular and disenfranchised people in general. The country as a whole sadly might have just pinched their nose if subprime loans just kept on handing the financial hardships to black people. But subprime loans started hurting “Main Street” which is often some sort of shorthand for the white middle class. So we promptly said that we couldn’t have that. We didn’t say that the individual loan officers should go to jail en masse, we didn’t say they should never work in loans again. We said “you can’t sell subprime loans anymore, if that’s what you do, stop, we won’t insure those loans”. These subprime loan officers become regular ass loan officers, and some probably started working at other jobs.
Why can’t we say the same to police officers? The history of policing in the United States starts from slave patrols. One of the next big pushes in the “professionalization” of police came from a desire to control immigrant communities. And, according to the CDC, Native Americans are more likely to be killed by police than any other racial or ethnic group. It has been documented for over 100 years that black people are also disproportionately likely to be arrested, prosecuted and found guilty. Police are a locally controlled group with a national problem. I don’t know of an example of an organization with that type of design being reformed. Who reforms it? With whose blessing? Sometimes the Fed comes in and shakes things up. They did that in Ferguson. They are doing it in Minneapolis right now. Will it work? I don’t know. And what does “working” mean? I often feel that police are just the weaponized version of the racism that all Americans carry, black people included. Police are the weaponized version of a distrust a hiring manager has about hiring a black person, that a father has about his child marrying a black person. Police at times seem to me to be armed, embodied versions of this same distrust and fear that so many share.
We got rid of subprime loan officers because it was an affront to the American way. We keep police because they are an insurance policy on the American way. We revere home-ownership. We fear black people.
I spent a lot of time with Heather McGhee’s book “The Sum of Us” last year. I am beyond convinced that America will accept collateral damage to white people in the war to keep black people down. McGhee’s book doesn’t spend much time on why Americans are willing to do this, but I have an idea. If we keep black people down through policies that can be viewed as colorblind then we can believe that there is some moral defense for the centuries where we kept black people down through slavery and Jim Crow. When it becomes clear that there is no grounds for an irrational fear of black people, policing will be different, but also going to get a license will be different, swimming in a pool will be different. Many things will be different because we will be living under a new American paradigm. Keeping black people down has been around longer than the Constitution in this country. When I started writing this entry I thought it would make it easier to get rid of policing based on its links to slavery. It is sinking in that this might be the reason we can never get rid of police. Police are here to keep “us” safe. As long as we walk around with that understanding, police are here to stay. It is almost secondary if they do keep “us” safe. If we agree their purpose is to keep “us” safe, they stay. Once subprime loans stopped being profitable they didn’t do much good for anyone, it wasn’t easy to move on from them, but we knew it was the right thing to do. We were able to get rid of subprime loan officers because we were ready to get rid of subprime loans. We know that when the needs of societies change, people have to find new careers. We aren’t ready to get rid of police officers because we aren’t ready to get rid of the myth they defend. We pretend it’s an abomination when young unarmed people are murdered. We pretend it’s an abomination because to recognize that it’s collateral damage that we don’t endure equally is to reveal how bankrupt we are. These killings aren’t abominations, they’re collateral damage. The collateral damage is focused in certain neighborhoods, on certain bodies. The “safety” is everywhere. So we pinch our nose. We pinch our nose also cause we truly want safety. And we want safety for every family but not bad enough to create it. If the cops provide a safety tangible for our own families, we keep them.
Police may be an imperfect avenue to safety, but there are no viable alternatives and we are in the middle of this stream of violence. We’re never going to change the police if we won’t change more than the police. We gave up on subprime loans, cause we can imagine a world without them. We can’t do the same with policing yet.
Pre Lockdown Tips
Omicron is either going to be a big deal or it won’t be, but let’s not all go buy toilet paper. Here’s a couple things you actually do need in case we move in to some variety of lockdown:
Go Cut Your Hair - do it. Don’t spend this winter looking super shaggy. Dudes over 35, if you haven’t grown a beard yet, there’s a reason. Don’t let this shutdown winter push you into a beard thing that isn’t working for anyone.
Be Charitable and do Mutual Aid - Lockdowns impact different people differently. So does cold weather. All signs point to me and my family staying warm this winter in our home. We have some money to get out to people in a more trying situation. Maybe you do too.
Read Out of Your Bubble - I found in the real shutdown that I just never received news from outside of my self-selected liberal bubble. You don’t have to read every 4,000 word article in the New York Times about the Trump voter who also believes in psychedelics. But, seek out some inputs of information that are the equivalent of the lunch with the across the aisle colleague, something similar to grabbing the WSJ cause it was all that was left en route to your ceramic throne.
Routine ZOOM Hangs - If we get to the “no social” thing and I sincerely hope we don’t, I’ll be scheduling routine, recurring ZOOMs. The more you do ZOOMs the closer they get to human connection. They are still woefully far from human connection, but that regularity helps. So seek that out in your schedule.
Do Things Arounds The House - I got a bunch done in my house during the last lockdown and it really started cooking after I got a list set up and started knocking things off of it.
Listen to the Radio - Obviously you listening to the radio is good for me. I’m a radio host. You listening to the Current is even better. And I love what happens on the Current, I start my mornings with Jill Riley, I bump Mary Lucia on the ride home and my Sundays start with United States of Americana with Bill Deville. I think The Current is pretty great to listen to most any hour of the day. I also swear by Rhythm Revue from WBGO on Saturday mornings out of Newark. I listen to Larry Mizell Jr. on KEXP a couple afternoons a week as well. Radio is great, it gives me room to think that I don’t get from podcasts, but room to connect and engage that I don’t get from streaming or my record collection.
Be Awesome to Your Partner - These lockdowns are hard. I didn’t really understand how hard the first one was on my unemployed, newly given birth wife until after. I knew it wasn’t wonderful, but I didn’t digest how hard until later. Huge mistake. Ask questions, voluntarily take things off your partner’s plate. Don’t assume things are cool.
Know the First Things You’ll Get Back To - A light at the end of the tunnel helps. If we are facing this lockdown what is the first thing you’re going to do when it’s done?
Attend the Heiruspecs Show on December 3rd at Turf Club - The Turf Club requires everyone to be vaxxed or pass that negative test. And our show is going to be great. Buy tickets now, good idea!
Normalize Having Favorites
When you were a kid you had a favorite color and a favorite food. And now it’s like, beneath you, to have a favorite food? Why? Don’t you like food?
I host on the radio on Saturday nights. It’s the highlight of my professional week. I love doing it, I love connecting with the listeners and I love the experience. Listening to music is a joy, doing it with a large audience and discovering music together, it’s one of the most rewarding things I’ve ever gotten to do in my life. Most night it’s requests. That’s very active work. I don’t slow down. The phone rings, I pick out music, I check tweets, I pick out music, I research the music. The whole deal, it’s active. I’ve started to work a little physical exercise into the routine too. It can help slow your brain down to do 25 squats, or do a one minute plank. My guy Scott Blankenship who hosts on “Your Classical” while I’m on “Your The Current” saw me doing exercise and now we run out and do some of these routines together. It brings so much joy to my shift.
Today we got started earlier with our workouts cause I wasn’t doing requests. And I had a moment where I finished my exercise, went and grabbed some smoked salmon, cream cheese and crackers from out of the fridge and put together some little crackers. We’ve got Steely Dan’s “Bodhisatva” blasting out the speakers and I’m spreading world class smoked salmon from Northern Smokehaus onto an elite cracker. Ok, fuck it, that’s my favorite food. It’s a great answer, you see. It’s specific enough to keep a conversation going.*
*God bless you if you’re a grown ass person and your answer is something like “pizza” or you say “I’m a big fan of ice cream”. That’s a kid-ass answer. I want us to have favorites, but you need an answer that has some meat on the bones.
What I want to see from you is an answer that has some specificity but is something you could try anywhere. For instance, if your answer is “the fettucine at this one place in Spain you’ll never go to” I feel like your telling me a story about your favorite dish, not your favorite food. What I want is answer like “If I ever see chicken parmigiana, I get it, it’s my go to” or an answer like “I always like to try chicken wings, I’m into that”. That gives us someplace to go. And folks, I’ve got my favorite food. It’s that Northern Waters Smokehaus smoked salmon on some crackers with cream cheese. Rachel and I have gotten it a bunch of times. I’ve gotten it with my friend Steph from Duluth. It’s a special food experience but it’s built on pretty normal stuff, grab a piece of smoked salmon of any quality and frankly you’re 60% of the way there. So that’s my favorite food. When you eat it you feel like a rustic king, but you can also enjoy the cream cheesy smoothiness of it. You can definitely have a little for a snack. You can fully have it as its own lunch. When you order it, your friends might make nice little yum yum noises from the first bite of their sandwich, but ultimately they’ll see the uniqueness of the cracker/salmon/cream cheese continuum and the specialness of it, the uniqueness of it. And they’ll look at their sandwich with that ping of jealousy: I should’ve ate a story for lunch. And that goddamn smoked fish next to the Saltines is a story, a bona fide story.
Scene reset: Walter and Donald from The Dan delivers peak “guitarmony” out of loud ass speakers, I’m spreading cream cheese on crackers and fielding phone calls from fans of music who are so into the whole thing that they are calling up to suggest particular songs from particular years. This needs to be overstated, this a really cool, amazing indication that radio still has this valence. It is possible that you have forgotten the simple joy of getting your request on the radio. I sure as fuck have not. Being a part of that moment for people, it’s humbles me. It reminds me that there’s a downside to hearing everything all at once. Radio can dole out information, scene backgrounds, insider tips, but it moves linearly. You’re not going to hear the 2 seconds on “who sampled dot com” and then move on to another thing, quickly. They’ll be no random ads and scrolling for your to focus on the rest of the grooves for 6 minutes after you’ve heard the sampled moment. You’ll exist in that Grant Green song for the majority of it’s eight minute length. I love the patience and natural discovery opportunities that come from the radio. The guy I listen to is named Larry Mizell Jr., he’s on KEXP. He takes me on a journey. And friends, this god damn salmon takes me on a journey. I slow down, I remember other times I’ve had, I crisp on the cracker. I feel connected to this experience. I feel connected to Duluth. I feel connected to social food.
And I have a favorite song too. It’s “Coyote” by as done by Joni Mitchell and the Band. I’m gonna go listen to that song. Here’s some favorite categories to sort out for yourself:
Favorite Movie Villain
Favorite Sports Franchise
Favorite Comedy Made Before You Alive
Favorite Music Documentary
Favorite Coffee Shop Order
Favorite Artist to Dance To
Favorite Film Director
good night!