Hey all, our daytrotter session is finally up! It features a mellower re-arrangement of Can’t Concentrate, as well as one of the first ever performances of our 12 minute jam Song For The Singer.

Enjoy! And support the fine folks over at DT. They do good work.

Suddenly hardware stores have become intensely appealing and I derive a small but very complete pleasure from spackling. Hmm…

This is the most beautiful thing you will ever experience that is even tangentially related to Waffle House, except when they give you free WH paper hats. That’s pretty transcendent. 

William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience.

Replace governments with pretty much anything you want.

Your song where you sing about mortality from the perspective of a sad old man ready to move on from this world is really embarrassing. Sorry, had to be said.

This is so easy and delicious and perfect for late summer when everything is sweet and ripe.

1 honeydew melon

1 cantaloupe

1 bunch mint

1 quart strawberries

put everything in a food processor (minus the melon rinds & seeds and the mint stems) and then chill it in the fridge for 30 minutes. Serve with whole milk yogurt. It tastes amazing.

A few days ago, I picked up The Moviegoer on impulse. I haven’t read it since college, and I don’t remember much of what I thought about it then. I believe I felt that the characters were overly wishy washy, a judgment that came from the certainty of never having really been out in the world and assuming it would simply bend before me like reeds before a storm wind.

Rereading it now I am struck by many things, not least among them the delicacy and accuracy of Percy’s social observations (for example, Binx’s mother’s need to steer every conversational deviation back to normalcy immediately, and Binx’s response to this, which is to constantly slip across that line like a child swiping cookies). 

The thing that resonated with being out on the road, which is where I’m living most of this summer, is the desire to avoid the deadwood of routine at all costs. Binx, waking up in a spot in his mother’s house where he has too often slept, is accosted not by memories exactly, but by a sense of dullness of place. This spot is worn out for him. The life is gone from it. His response to this is to flop off the cot, roll under it, tense his entire body, and endure what sounds to my ears like an anxiety attack.

I don’t know quite where this comes from (neither does Binx), nor how common it is (this is not a topic for polite or sociable conversation, which is almost all the conversation that makes up my life) but it is sometimes what I feel upon awaking in the morning - that the day I am beginning is part of a vast cloud of days begun in the same place, inseparable and intangible as any cloud. It can take hours to escape this feeling. Some days it never leaves.

The road is only a temporary solution to this, but it is some kind of solution. It is healthy to wake in a new place every day, with a crystal clear set of things to do. I have never felt happier than when I am looking out the window at mist curling up from the tree covered mountains of northern New Hampshire as the van riots on towards another show. Nothing tastes as good as the homemade blueberry ice cream you stumble upon at a farmstand in a North Carolina ghost town off the highway. Even lying in the grass next to a highwayside burger king outside of Nashville feels like a blessing. 

There are costs for a life on the road, some of which you can certainly imagine, but there is a great deal in it to be thankful for as well. And so I am.

Yelp review of Gowanus Yacht Club

uh, glass houses anyone? 

Things like this are not exactly the reason I have this Tumblr, but what with all the mental energy/time taken up by music/promo right now this is all I can give you. Thank you for wanting to pay attention to my brain.