Writing this from a taxi meandering out of an LA neighborhood peppered with home studios to The Troubador. This city is neat and weird. I feel simultaneously romanced and spiritually obliterated by the omnipresence of the entertainment industry here. When the latter kicks in, I find solace in a friend like Anna who holds the work of songwriting as an unmoving magnetic north, something that outlasts TikTok trends and parasitic algorithms. Her new album Living Thing is out today; an honor in that it's our third together, and a joy to continue to find new sounds, new emotional spaces - all in service of what I feel are her best lyrics yet. Wow! I'm excited for you to hear it. I've tried to write something for you about it several times and keep starting over… I want to share a lot of nerdy stuff later on, but for now I'll say: thank you Anna for your trust and spirit.
I was honored to mix @orchideaton_ !!re!!_039;s latest EP, Recreational Music. Matt's love of combining holy grail synths with rickety, noisy, lo-fi gadgets makes this music my cup of tea. Add to that one of my favorite rhythm sections (#BMoen and @_patkeen_ ) and I was a kid in a candy store. Mixed metaphors aside, grab your headphones, snag a bag of twizzlers, go sit on a bench at a skate park and dig these tunes.
An evening of stand-up comedy to benefit The Sojourner House in Eau Claire! Your $15 will help provide a safe, clean place for adults experiencing homelessness. Tickets at volumeonetickets.org
@mipsomusic_ !!re!!_039;s song "Green Jesus" is out today! Recorded by @alliblois , mixed by me, mastered by @twwalsh , featuring @seantrischka and @josephdecosimo . 💨 I like to think a little bit of the spirit of @charlieinthequestionmark made it into this one too… Chuck was perched on the couch next to my drum kit while we were chasing down the vibe wayback when.
Most of the records I mix are ones I produced, but it's happening more and more that I get to do my thing with music I didn't have a hand in recording. Such was the case with @iangeorgemusic_ !!re!!_039;s 'A Fair'. What an honor - honestly I thought I'd lost the gig for good when he sent me a single a few years back and I reversed the guitar solo without giving him a heads up. But that's a picture of Ian: open, inquisitive, and wildly talented. Ian's music has a truly magical quality - he sings and plays in a way that recalls the tightrope walkers of yesteryear whom we celebrate but can't seem to emulate with much frequency these days.
Part of my relationship to this music is also that it was psychologically intense to mix. Lyrically, 'A Fair' is as honest and probing as it is playful, and when you mix you often hear lines hundreds of times over, and sometimes those lines lead you away from the familiar. My emotional ballast was the view you see here - Ian on the couch back there, tailoring the next track on his laptop, sipping and grinning, always down for some HASH (Hypothetical Absurd Situational Humor). Puckish. That's Ian for sure. Please take a walk outside and listen to 'A Fair'.
I finally get to tell you that @humbirdhumbird_ !!re!!_039;s newest album, Right On, is out today. It's an unfettered document of the Siri-Pat-Pete trio at that point in time: everything live to my trusty Otari MX5050 8-track, a few punch-ins here and there, a small bit of sonic experimentation but mostly guitar-bass-drums-vocals, letting the song and the singer lead the way. Celebrating the tour tightness and the goofy looseness the road bakes into you. I love this band; I think you will too - if you don't already.
I first met Mipso backstage at the Iron Horse in Northhampton, Massachusetts, and I remember feeling impressed by their collective nature of taking the work extremely seriously while not taking themselves too seriously at all. It was pretty clear they were as down for HASH (Hypothetical Absurd Situational Humor) as I was, and their set was intimidatingly tight. Several years and three albums later, Book of Fools is out today, and I was honored to help guide the ship. At pre-production summer camp we united around the concept of “negative capability” - Keats’ concept re: the capacity of artists to pursue ideals of beauty, perfection and sublimity even when it leads them into intellectual confusion and uncertainty. We jammed on each song in wildly different variations, stepped back to see what emerged, and when the 24-track rolled at Tiny Telephone last August we were fueled by iron oxide, mochi donuts, and the question “where has this band not gone yet?” Book of Fools is the story of Libby as tightrope walker, Wood as merry-go-round center pole, Jacob as unerring arbiter of feeling, and finally Joseph as newly arrived guitar god. Yeah I’m okay with that last one - we still need those, get over it. And we'd be nowhere without @spacemoth__ (engineer) @courtneyhartman (tape op) @twwalsh (mastering) @neon.tumbleweed (artwork)
