The Surreal End

54 minutes til I’m done at The Current. The music is cranked and I’m done looking at social media. I’ve felt all the good feelings I can feel and I’ve picked all the songs I can pick. I’m gonna get a drink at the White Squirrel on the way home, but it’s so icy I’m not sure any friends will come. The thing for me is it’s right on the way home. And I need a drink.

I’ve changed so much in the years I was at the Current. Rachel and I had kids, Trivia Mafia became a very serious business, I became an adult and I learned how to do radio. I made lifelong friends, learned life lessons. I’ve worked almost every hour of every day of the week on this Current. A journey, I don’t have anything say, I Just need to babble. I learned so much about music, how to present, but also what it can mean, how it can help, how it can be weaponized. I saw musicians who were completely checked out, no interest in being at a radio station, but it’s their job to be there. I saw musicians who exploded with enthusiasm, so eager to connect, not even necessarily because it was good business, because it was good talking.

I love talking with Jill on the air. Doing the Morning Show. I’ve fallen in love with doing radio. I think it’s beautiful. I think it’s a great way to spend a life. I think I’m doing the right thing with my life. And that’s comforting. Truly comforting in a way I can’t explain. That’s all I have. I’m about to walk out of this building for the first time for a long time unless I forget something stupid.

Thank you for the memories. Onward.

8:26 is when I Sit Down

This is my second to last Radio Free Current shift before I move on to become host at KBEM Jazz88 in Minneapolis. I thought I’d lift the hood on Radio Free Current and my emotions right now.

I like to stand up when I DJ. But right around 8:26 most Saturday nights I sit down for about five minutes and get re-centered. They’ll be another rush of calls maybe at 9:15 but between 8:30 and 9:15 it’s more of an email affair and a little more mellow. I look at how the show is going so far. . .am I going down a rabbit hole? Am I stuck in an era? Are the rotation songs fitting with the theme songs? Are there songs I’m skipping for no good reason?

I feel emotional tonight cause it’s the second to last night I’ll be the host on Radio Free Current. This is a gig I slid into unexpectedly. Dave Campbell (dear friend, broadcast legend, someone who stuck is neck out for me at The Current and showed me the ropes, I’ve tried to do the same for folks walking in the door since I got a couple years under my belt), he quit fast and within maybe six weeks I was behind the boards on Saturday night. It’s quite possible in the mind of most staff that the two hardest shifts to pull off from the technical view of things at the Current are the Morning Show and Radio Free Current. Granted, Jill and Jade were doing the heavy lifting during my early era on the Morning Show, but that’s high pressure cause Morning Radio is a big deal.

There’s nothing better than getting tossed into the fire. You learn fast, you fail loudly. In my early years at the Current friends would go “it’s great to get to listen to you learning how to do radio”. I knew it was serious, but I knew it wasn’t a compliment. It hurt cause I wanted to be good right away, but I wasn’t. But I kept on getting better. I accepted a whole bunch of critiques. I had made the mistake of my 20s for confusing success with talent. Heiruspecs was doing good, in fact by some measures we were doing great. . .but I didn’t have my fundamentals down as a bassist. I didn’t grind hard to improve the shortcomings. I thought if the formula was working, the formula was right. I haven’t made that mistake with radio. I’ve practiced styles I would never use, formats I wouldn’t excel at. I took every shot they gave me at MPR. And I’ve gained better radio muscles than I’ve ever possessed on the bass.

And the crucible was Radio Free Current. The crucible was faking it til I made it on artists I didn’t know, front-selling a set of music that I had already played, reading all the underwriting for the 7am-10am hours instead of the PM. I made all the mistakes and now the show rules. That doesn’t mean it’s perfect. That doesn’t mean the next person who takes this shift won’t blow me out of the water, but I know good radio and I know shit radio. I’ve made both. This is good radio.

And I’m scared to leave it because I feel so connected to this shift. I love talking to the folks who request songs. I know there’s plenty of people who listen and don’t request, but I just feel this energy different from a regular shift on The Current. When I’m pressing play on songs I know we’re sharing the adventure together. There are people who think in the Spotify era request radio makes no sense. . .you can play what you want immediately who cares about the radio? I understand that those people have never looked at a sunrise and had a song just appear that they hadn’t heard in twenty years. I know the people who don’t understand request radio have never smiled for no reason. Request radio isn’t for logical people, it’s for the magic people and I love the magic people.

I broke one of the good rules today and played Heiruspecs. That’s the band I play in, can’t really imagine you reading this blog and not knowing that but here I am talking too much. It’s good that people can’t play their own music on the radio. It’s tacky. But I’m one week away from moving on from this gig. I’m ready for tacky. But playing Heiruspecs tonight on the radio, it made my night and I know it at least made Andy Holmaas’s night too. He’s the friend who requested it. I’ve lived a small, magical life making cool indelible memories for a shockingly small amount of people. Regional and magical. And now I’m past the age where you’re supposed to be cool, but I’m cool. I get some love from the younger generation of movers and shakers. Part of that is because I have been entrusted with a platform. But the other thing is that I have used that platform well, I have supported promising artists and found new avenues to get more music to potential listeners. And I’m a joy to be around. So back to my head in my hand and Heiruspecs on the speakers. I feel good about life. I have a wonderful family. I work a job that is cooler than I can possibly imagine and I am leaving that job for one that feels even better to me for my career goals and my musical proclivities. God damn I love that word proclivity. And it’s like I just see little windows of the joy I feel overall about my life. Because everyday there are things to do. Today I bought a car, I drove it home fast, to eat lunch, to start naps, to go to Target, to get a gift card for the family that let us borrow the car, to come home, to marinate the chicken, to warm the pitas, to empty the recycling, to empty the garbage, to load the dishes, to park downstairs, to forget your charger, to pick the music, to read the underwriting. And then at some point you are hearing music you worked really hard on about 19 years ago blast out of speakers at a station you grew up listening to and you breathe different.

For the past 48 hours people I know and don’t know have been saying really nice things to me. They say they’ll miss hearing me on the Current, they say they’re excited to hear me on KBEM. I can’t address every person on social media, not because I don’t have time, god I will cancel anything on my calendar to read nice things about me on the internet, but it gets so vomitty when you see a person who has decided to every person who reaches them. It just gets annoying. But I’m responding to every email. It means so much that people care. I care about who is on the radio. I was there losing my shit when Bob Collins signed off with Mary Lucia. I remember hearing Jade crack the mic for the first time at 10am after The Current let Barb Abney go. A great DJ becomes your friend who you don’t know, that’s pretty amazing. Getting all this positive feedback is amazing, and it’s why people stay on social media forever, hoping they’ll hit a vein and find a sea of people who love them. I’ve tried to stay off of these sites, and as the praise and enthusiasm dries up I’m left with deciding if I love myself. When Heiruspecs’ song played tonight I was able to realize I can tell myself I’ll miss me at this station. I’m proud of the work I’ve done on the Current. I’m proud of the way I connected The Current, YourClassical and MPR News socially. I am proud of the work I did with The Current unionizing (we are unionized and I am soon to be a former member of the Union bargaining committee). I was hear for a significant chunk of time and I made a significant contribution.

I remember being in the photos for the Current’s Ten Year Anniversary and holiday card. A lot of the folks marking the tenth anniversary had been around from very close to day one. It was on that day that I said I would throw myself into my work at the Current and my life at MPR. I served on committees, I volunteered for things. I studied our output even if I wasn’t purely involved. I wanted to make sure that I was putting in the work that I could be proud of on the day that I leave. I wanted to make sure I had helped the station be even better in my opinion. I’m proud and I’ll miss me at this station. And being able to really say that to myself feels amazing.

It’s time to go home. It’s 12:12am and it’s been a long week and right around now I head home and crash.

For Your Consideration

I think this is the funniest help ticket opened in the history of opening help tickets.

What I Did With My COVID19 Summer

I got a pretty manageable version of COVID19, testing positive on Tuesday February 1, being in good shape by Friday and stepping out of quarantine on Monday morning. I was scared shitless regardless of my mild symptoms because this disease does kill people, lots of people, people you know, people I know, people we both love. But, with my double vax and boosted status I started to relax when I didn’t feel any significantly trying symptoms. The first night was rough, but just rough like having a seriously bad cold. I spent that night and the next six nights sleeping on Martin Devaney’s air mattress in my basement. I spent the grand majority of my time in the basement sleeping and consuming fiction based media which was an absolute treat. I also spent a lot of time hearing my wife try to control two kids and I had the sad knowledge that I couldn’t come to help. NOTE: I did clean the shit out of the first floor of the house and prepare a re-heatable lunch every night after everyone went to bed. And turns out you have plenty of energy to clean if you’ve spent the day watching TV. Okay.

Remind me again why people don’t like Lost? I read something years ago that called this particular episode (The Constant) one of the greatest episodes of any TV show ever. Guess what? That article was right. It’s awesome. Daniel Faraday, Locke, they are all delivering the goods in the episode and Desmond, are you kidding me? I watched it, I liked it. I like Lost. I wish we still planned our lives around it the way we used to (I remember watching one of the episodes at the Turf Club and they weren’t going to start the show til the episode finished). Unbelievable.

Station Eleven. It’s on HBO Max, it’s about a pandemic. The pandemic is vastly more severe than COVID19. It was a dumb thing to watch in the condition I was in. It was incredibly enthralling. I watched the whole thing. I listened to the not super good podcast they made about the show while I was trying to organize the absolute mountain of kid’s clothes that we store in our basement. I loved the show. Like Lost, the show moves in non-linear steps between different elements of the story. There is not a time travel element, but it has some jarring similarities. Also, I’m a big sucker for a “play within a play” thing and that goes really well. I would’ve benefitted from a deep knowledge of the Shakespeare play “Hamlet” which I definitely do not have.

I put off seeing this movie for an inexcusable amount of time because I was hoping to catch it in a theatre. As I sat in my basement not even able to see my own family I didn’t think waiting until a larger screening option came up made sense. Wow. This documentary sounds so incredible. It’s some of the best live recordings I’ve ever heard, in any genre. And the 60s wasn’t always hospitable to high quality live recordings, why is this one so good? I don’t know if it was great source material or great modern day mixing or a combination. But man, what a joy to witness these performances. The context, the significance, the defiance with which Harlem organized a cultural concert series that went largely ignored outside of the Black community. It was a powerful story and it was weaved so well. And it was the rare music documentary where the talking heads truly supplemented the performances. I feel bad for not having jumped in and watched it sooner, but I’m glad I caught up with it and dug in.

Every fan of hip-hop is supposed to have seen the movie “The Warriors”. It is constantly quoted, referenced and it is just one of those movies that has become part of the culture. It’s not specifically about hip-hop, and apparently the studio did the studio thing of adding way more white characters to the film than were in the book version. But frankly, it was just magical to see this movie that I have heard quoted for my whole life. It was a treat to see the movie in its entirety. Also, I just never take in whole movies and it was so great to get it. I also rabbit holed deep into the movie and its actors on wikipedia.

Jesus that’s a huge photo of Karl Ove. I’m reading the second installment in his hyper biography “My Struggle”. I still don’t get why the shit it is titled that, but I will say that the first book found me at this perfect time in my life where I needed to understand how trying and confusing being a young father can be. I started to read Book 2 immediately afterwards and I just couldn’t catch the plot, I wasn’t interested, it didn’t grab me. Flash forward five years and I’m ready to hear more about this chapter in Karl Ove’s life. If you haven’t given his a work a chance I strongly recommend you check it out. I find it so calming to read about the mundane details of some Norwegian dude in Sweden as a way to make sense of the struggles in my life.

I have a vinyl collection but I really struggle to listen to it. I have a couple records I go to all the time but I never branch out. During my COVID19 time I was able to alphabetize the whole collection, put it in a nice set of storage and finally I can comfortably thumb through my shit and find things. It sent me to check out records I hadn’t in years or that I never had! I am loving it.

That’s about all I did. I had a couple meetings. I slept a lot. I tried to watch the Scorsese film “Mean Streets” but it was wild violent and I fell asleep. But now I’m back on fiction and movies and I’m loving it.

RIP To Anomaly

Anomaly behind the boards. Taken from his FB page.

A fixture in the Minnesota music scene just passed away. His name is Jason Heinrichs and for quite some time he was known professionally as Anomaly. Anomaly had a recording studio in his basement in South Minneapolis and a lot of folks recorded some of their first work there (Atmosphere, P.O.S, Oddjobs et cetera). Jason’s biggest impact in music is likely his work in the dance world where he was a force as a DJ and a producer. I always knew he knew what he was doing in the dance world, but I’ve never been very conversant in those scenes. Beyond a couple basslines for other artists, I never recorded at his studio, but when Heiruspecs was strictly a high school band he spent a couple months as our drummer. It was a really wonderful experience for me, and I hope for him. The older musicians (he was probably 23 at the time) who took the time to be a part of Heiruspecs’ story were really important to me and the band.

A solid 70% of being in a band when you’re young is actually just learning how to be an adult being sifted through the process of learning how to be in a band. Some of the stories I’m about to tell you can only really be understood if you remember the information desert that was the world before the internet. If you never survived without the internet, there is a world of things you learned in front of a computer screen by yourself that me and my generation learned looking like complete total losers in front of other humans. Jason was a guiding hand towards me not being a total fucking asshole musician. It helped me immensely.

Jason was the first person I ever interacted with who had roommates. I’m so glad I was basically an adult before cell phones came into my world. I booked my first tour without a cell phone. I booked my first 300 rehearsals without a text message.It was a different time. If you liked somebody’s music you got their phone number, there wasn’t even really email yet. I dug how Jason sounded on drums and he dug what Heiruspecs was doing musically. I asked him if he was interested in doing something with Heiruspecs. I frankly had been thinking more along the lines of him doing a remix or playing one special show with us. He just mentioned he’d love to play the kit more and I was elated. This resulted in me parting ways with our drummer (and my neighbor) Alex in a hasty, rude fashion. But I loved what Jason did on the kit. I wanted to connect.

Jason gave me his house number and told me to give him a call. I called him and a woman answered. I asked for Jason and she ended up just taking down my phone number and letting me know he’d call back. I learned that that was his roommate. A roommate? A woman? In a house? I was blown away. I knew about roommates like in college, but I had no idea that people had roommates in real life post college, I thought that was just in Friends. We ended up connecting and making plans to play music together. But I just remember being in awe of this WHOLE ASS ADULT, who lived with a bunch of people in a house, wanting to play music with me and my ragtag group of friends.

I Didn’t Know That People Drank a Lot on the Night Before Thanksgiving Until Jason Told Me

Jason came from up North in Minnesota, I’m not sure where. We were standing outside before some gig and he mentioned that he’d head home for a couple days around Thanksgiving and offhandedly he mentioned “and I’ll see everyone from my high school on Thanksgiving eve cause there’s only one bar in town”. WHAT? I had no idea. Since he was already in his mid 20s he had to tell me it was overrated, that it wasn’t very fun. But, I asked him if it was cool to come back to Northern Minnesota and be the cool guy who produces records and plays in bands and he said absolutely. He kind of gave me a look like “if you keep on playing music, you’re always going to be the cool guy at the bar the night before Thanksgiving”. He was right.

Jason Taught Me To Loosen Up Just a Little

I ruled Heiruspecs with an undeserving iron fist for the first 8 years of our history. I thought the only way to be a good bandleader was for me to be a relentless asshole. But I couldn’t be an asshole to Anomaly, he was old and he was cool. I would tell him exactly what I wanted him to do on drums and he would do about half of it. And he just didn’t care. He cared sincerely about making good music, but he didn’t care about stopping for a dotted 1/8th note on measure 29 of Felix’s verse. Didn’t care. If he did it, great, if he missed it, who cares? Nobody cares. This attitude was only acceptable to me because he sounded great on drums, he was old enough to have roommates and what the hell else was I going to do about it.

First Time I Played on Stage at the Mainroom was with Jason

The first time I ever played music on the stage of First Avenue’s Mainroom was on January 1, 1999. Rhymesayers had a big ass event called Soundset (obv. later it became an outdoor festival) and they had Heiruspecs play. I can’t remember if we played criminally late or criminally early. But we played to very few people and we played through like two microphones. Since the club thought it was a rap show they hadn’t rented the necessary microphones to accommodate a live band. We made it through and I remember being so elated to be throwing down on this legendary stage where I had already seen some of my heroes play music. That memory was with Jason. I get the feeling like it was far from the first time Jason had ever played the Mainroom but he seemed happy to match our energy.

Jason Flaking on Heiruspecs Was How We Got to Record Our Album Antidisestablishmetabolism

I think pretty quickly the polish of playing in a high school band as someone in your mid twenties wore off for young Jason. He politely quit the band and gave me the numbers of many drummers he thought could fit the bill if we needed. The shitty part was, we finally had studio time booked. We had at first tried to record in a church in Woodbury with some agemates doing the engineering. They couldn’t get keys to the Church on the night we were supposed to record and when we finally did get into the Church their equipment wasn’t working right. Jason was unimpressed with this whole situation and spent the majority of the non-session sitting in his SUV presumably wondering what the fuck he was doing in front of a Church in Woodbury with a bunch of 17 year olds. So instead, Heiruspecs booked some discounted days of the week over at the Terrarium (when it was on Washington Ave). I ended up having to fly my drummer friend from Massachusetts in for the sessions cause we didn’t have a drummer. Conor Meehan, the drummer, was a masterful player and that record is really the sound of a brand new drummer being dropped into a band that was incredibly well rehearsed and then Felix freestyling on top of it. It doesn’t always work as a sound, but man when it does. Check this one out.

My Positive Take on Jason

I don’t know much about Jason’s passing. Felix from Heiruspecs, who stayed in closer contact with him said it might have been an unexpected heart attack. Regardless, my biggest comfort for Jason is that he got to do music professionally for his whole life. I don’t know if he held other gigs, but whenever I ran into him he was talking about licensing music, making new beats and loving DJing. I fielded a call from Zach Combs shortly after Jason’s passing cause he wasn’t sure I knew of his death. I shared with Zach my optimism about Jason and also about myself and so many of my fellow musician friends of a certain age: we didn’t become household names, we didn’t attain the fame we at one point were certain was coming our way; but well into adulthood we were able to make money from making music. We were able to share music with audiences, to record albums, to travel with the music. It’s a beautiful thing and so many people just want that, and Jason got that, and he was damn good at it. And he had a roommate.

Welcome to Minnesota

I Care A Lot About Comfort

In the last eight years, I’ve thought a lot about comfort in many different settings in my life. I’ve thought about comfort because I find it’s a word I don’t lie about. I tell a lot of people I’m good when I’m far from good. But if I say I’m comfortable, I legitimately am comfortable.

And in the last couple years I’ve been hearing more and more about people who aren’t comfortable doing basic things I feel comfortable doing. That might be something like trying to buy an expensive item in a store without getting the third degree from a clerk that doesn’t think you have the money because of your race, or because of the way you dress. That might be something like me correctly being referred to as a “he” because I look to a great percentage of the world as a he. I think feeling comfortable leads to being able to be a more productive member of society. So I care.

At some point I realized that the comfort of the people around me is a paramount concern. Is my friend having a good time at this event? Does my friend wish another friend would stop using the word “bitches” all the time about women? It’s my hope to make people comfortable. Mainly this shit is simple, if you’re doing something that makes someone uncomfortable and it’s not a central tenet of your life, just stop it. If it’s a central tenet to your life, you gotta fight for it. If it’s a truly defensible position, I think that makes sense. If the main goal of your action is to create discomfort for people, you’re an honest to goodness asshole.

I really like listening to a podcaster named Mike Pesca and his podcast “The Gist”. He is one of those commentators I disagree with all the way to the bank. I disagree with a lot of his views. I disagree with a lot of his tone. I think he’s an incredible broadcaster and thinker and I value listening to him. For many years he was with Slate. He got fired. One of the primary reasons for his firings was he that he came to the theoretical defense of the science editor Donald McNeil who got fired from The New York Times for saying the n-word in a conversation with a teenager on a NY Times sanctioned trip. Pesca didn’t type the “n word” in the company Slack, he was questioning whether it was reasonable for Donald McNeil to get fired. Ultimately Slack and Pesca parted ways. I don’t think it was exclusively about Pesca’s communication on Slack, but I think it was the clarifying moment. I can’t really know if it was the exclusive reason Pesca got fired, because neither side will share all of the juice. Having been around some high profile firings in the last couple years, the “big event” is usually the last straw not the first occasion for worry.

I am in general glad that Pesca got fired. At the time of his firing I read almost everything I could about Pesca and he seemed like someone who liked to ask all the right, needling insightful questions on most topics and couldn’t deal with the third rail that is the N word. I believe that needling curiosity makes him great on his podcast, but I find it harder to accept that spirit in a Slack channel at work. Some topics are profoundly asymmetrical in the potential trauma they can pose. That doesn’t mean they can’t be talked about, but I think we can safely recognize they are asymmetrical. Joel Anderson, a great sports and beyond writer/podcaster and Slate employee was quoted as saying: “For Black employees, it’s an extremely small ask to not hear that particular slur and not have debate about whether it’s OK for white employees to use that particular slur,” he said. I find this to be a reasonable position. Slate is trying to provide a rewarding, challenging work environment and I don’t think it’s some sort of paternalism to do what it takes to keep that word and the defense of that word out of the work Slack. Do I think it is a reasonable argument position to say that Donald McNeil shouldn’t have been fired if his sole offense was saying the n-word in a clarifying sentence once? Yes. Do I feel like this is an okay thing to discuss in a newsroom Slack? No, I don’t. And I’m not going to jump to the defense of someone who did think that. That’s a scary tip of the iceberg. And I do believe that is one of the reasons why people don’t come to the defense of the Pescas of the world. I honestly think that going hard on being able to use the n-word is a really bad indicator of what else you are in support of.

So back to comfort. Not having come up as a journalist, not having sharpened those skills, I don’t have this same knee jerk defense of the idea that “all ideas are open, nothing is forbidden”. I understand the value of this as the default but I don’t believe that carve outs within private companies are unreasonable. Again, I think I’ve experienced pretty fantastic levels of comfort in my life and it’s given me the space and support to share my music, my feelings and myself with the world. Why not try to extend that comfort to as many humans as possible? There’s an obvious counterpoint here: who am I to decide what makes other people comfortable? I think this is a reasonable concern. I know that John McWhorter and other thinkers are arguing, often convincingly, that the mandate to police certain words is infantilizing for the groups it claims to be policing on behalf of. I think this is a gray line issue. I think it is possible for overly enthusiastic ally folks to go too far, to create an environment where pins and needles are required for every sentence uttered. But I don’t think it’s reality. I don’t think we are there. I also don’t think we’ll get there because generally, being able to speak freely is what makes most of us comfortable. So, the couple limits that private organizations put on speech won’t balloon beyond reason. Or at least, the stakes of controlled speech that will balloon won’t be on the level of a fireable offense.

Again, if Pesca had some angle where he thought he could advance the culture or his work if he got the green light to say the n word that’d be one thing. But I think he just did it cause he wanted to keep his brain sharp. It’s just so asymmetrical when one person is arguing for sport and the other party is arguing for safety or comfort. I’ll never know everything about Pesca’s situation, neither Slate nor Pesca seem keen to talk in formal ways about it. Pesca talked about it a bunch here. But really, I think Pesca wanted to poke around cause he wanted to poke around. I don’t necessarily think Donald McNeil shoulda been fired, but I also don’t think I’ll ever know the whole story. It’s also not the biggest deal if someone gets fired. It’s not the worst thing on Earth. Don McNeil and Pesca have been introduced to new guard rails, to new concerns and how to navigate them. They’ll survive, they’ll be comfortable, and I think they’ll be more attuned to others’ comfort. And that’s a good thing.

You Need Some Trusted Barometers

The input of other humans you trust is one of the most valuable things you can have on this Earth. You cannot be swayed by the random opinions of buttholes on the internet, but you also can’t be one of those “I only answer to God” people. The input of the humans you trust should be central to how you move in this world.

Why am I bringing this up? Because Neil Young should be one of those artists for Spotify. Is Neil Young always right? Hell no! Has Neil Young generally aimed towards improving the world, raising money for good causes and pushing the best artists on the planet to be better and do better? Yes. Does Spotify not realize that cool points can cost you some money sometimes? Spotify is decidedly not cool. Have you looked at the playlists on Tidal? They are better programmed, with better names, with better artwork and with a musician’s touch. It really does feel different. I’m a current subscriber to Spotify, it is integrated into my family’s life, across our speaker systems et cetera. I pinch my nose and send Spotify way more money per month than they send me through royalties. But, they clearly have gotten too big to follow their trusted barometers. If you are trying to be the biggest, most universal music service in the world you have to listen to people like Neil Young and Joni Mitchell. They come from a generation that doesn’t push as many streams as younger generations but they have the respect of their peers. Spotify’s claim to fame was getting all the music. They got the Beatles, they got Pink Floyd. They got all the bands that were reluctant about streaming. And now they are losing them to appease a single cash cow. No doubt, Rogan will make Spotify more money in the next year than Young will make them in the next twenty-five. But they aren’t looking at barometric nature of an artist like Neil telling your service to go fuck itself. And they aren’t looking at the fact that Warner Bros. will ride with Neil on this. And Joni’s label is riding on it too. They don’t have to. They could stay loyal to Spotify, who has lined the major label pockets for years with piles of money that the indies aren’t getting. But I think the major labels are, contrary to what we all say all the time, willing to play the long game for some artists.

So Spotify, you need to listen. I’m not saying you need to move. You might look at your business and realize that appeasing Joe Rogan is more important than being able to advertise yourself as having an almost complete collection of recorded music in your collection. You might not be risking your cash cow, but you’re risking your brand identity. If your catalog starts to get Swiss cheesed by the artists with morals, you’re gonna keep losing subscribers. But Neil Young’s disapproval should be a red flag, get the team together and make sure you’re making the right decision. To me it seems like you’re playing a short game which is never a good move for a company that has employees. You’ve got yachts to buy, small time musicians to screw over, dumb playlists to secretly profit from, you ready to lose all of that over what is clearly already a middling stance re: COVID19 misinformation.

I’d like to shout out some of my barometers. A good barometer is frustrating cause they tell you the truth or at least their take when the others in your circle aren’t.

Peter Leggett - Peter’s the drummer in Heiruspecs. Peter is also in charge of press for Mayor Melvin Carter. In my music work with Peter he can often deliver a lot of nos. He’ll look at a pretty well constructed beat and tear the whole thing apart. He will tear stuff down to the studs long after the rest of the band is planning an arrangement. But Peter won’t let bad stuff get out of the door. Peter will make sure it meets his standards. If Peter is liking it, I know it’s good. If Peter isn’t, I know it isn’t, even if I disagree with him in the moment.

I-Self Devine - I Self Devine is an elder statesman in the Twin Cities music scene. He has a history that goes back to the mid-80s as a visual artist and as an emcee. We aren’t particularly close but we’ve worked together a number of times and have spent time socially as well. A couple times he’s gone out of his way to let me know his negative thoughts about some way or another that I was moving within the hip-hop scene. The critique was always clear but was never absolute. But I knew that whatever I was doing was at least worth reevaluating if it wasn’t sitting right with him. Did I always change my plan after his guidance? No. But I always massaged it, always reevaluated it. I just don’t believe Spotify is doing that with Neil & Joni.

Derrick Stevens - Derrick is the production manager at the Current. If you make a mistake or are coming up short on something he’s got no problem letting you know. If you are doing incredible work, he’s got no problem letting you know. That’s the barometer I’m looking for, someone who will give you an honest read on where you’re at with something. The compliments I’ve received from Derrick mean so much to me because I’ve gotten the sober, clear critiques as well. God bless a barometer.

You have to ignore these barometers sometimes. I want to be doubly clear about that. You do have to chart your own course, but you need those trusted advisors, the circle that you believe in. And man, if Neil Young isn’t in that circle, and you’re trying to be the biggest music service on Planet Earth, you need some new barometers. If you’ve lost touch with your barometers you need to think about why. Imagine going back time-machine style to a meeting with the managers of Spotify in 2010: “you’ve lost access to the catalog of Neil Young because you paid $100 million to the guy from Fear Factor to do a podcast and he frequently questions the safety of a life-saving vaccine for a global pandemic”.

*I’m not taking Heiruspecs’ music or my own music down from Heiruspecs. I have a couple reasons.

1: I have no idea how the rest of the band feels about this stuff.
2: I actually think Spotify might get their shit straight about this and taking music off and back on of streaming service is expensive
3: I do believe Spotify has the right to support Joe Rogan over legendary artists with high morals. I feel a clear mandate to walk as a consumer, but I feel more conflicted as an artist, I surrender my spot on this platform because of other providers on the platform? I am working on my views there.

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.

—

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.