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  • Porchanga! 2026

    On the last day of May, the second annual Porchanga took place on a porch in Port Orford. The event was named by host and performer Heather Carpenter – a play on pachanga, the latin American term for a lively party with dancing, music, and jubilation.

    With minimal surprise, the day turned out to be extremely windy. The curtain we’d planned to draw between sets proved impossible. The balloon decorations and tapestries had to be nailed to the porch and nailed again as the party went on. Setup was tedious and time-consuming, complicated by what we eventually diagnosed as dirty power on the east side outlet – whose surges sent a loud pop through the monitors and main PA speakers at random spaced out intervals. After three rounds of redistributing power we finally abandoned those outlets altogether. Close to an hour later than we’d hoped, everything was stable and the show could begin.

    Porchanga was well attended. Inside the house people chatted and looked out to the music through a large window. On the porch itself a handful of seats offered the most direct listening experience. Down the steps a long potluck table held everything from baked goods to salads, fresh fruit, junk food, and a grill set up with meat and fresh tortillas being made from scratch. Further out, lawn chairs, blankets, and dozens of people standing and conversing and watching from a distance. Dogs and children running in the yard and jumping on the trampoline. I had no appetite through the windy setup and technical problem-solving, but I stashed a couple of fresh baked goodies for later – and by the time I’d finished playing hours later and my appetite returned, only fresh fruit and cabbage salad remained. I ate several small plates of both standing by the fire pit and listening to Pigasus Trio close out the night.

    Heather and I have been putting on events together for a few years now. Beyond our many performances together with the band Dry Spell, Heather and our bandmate Veronica Rockstar DeWitt envisioned and orchestrated Minimal Carnival – an annual one-day festival we put on in Port Orford in 2023 and 2024. We’ve hosted other house shows and events together at several locations over the years. In a sense Porchanga is a kind of mini Minimal Carnival – more intimate, centered on her porch. Both Minimal Carnival and Dry Spell deserve their own entries and will get them in due time.

    Theater

    Last year I was hired to shoot some performances at the Rogue Playhouse in Gold Beach, home of the Ellensburg Theater Company. I have been involved with productions at the theater since 2018, taking on various roles from providing sound and lighting to performing as a live musician and providing live foley and music during a series of radio plays. I’ve also recorded and produced radio adverts, shot photos and videos, and even hosted a Halloween film festival one year. For a couple of years before the pandemic we began hosting a regular open mic and jam night on Wednesdays, which became quite a lively event with a dedicated group of musicians and music lovers showing up week after week. Musicians would lineup on stage in a semicircle, passing the opportunity to lead a song one after another with everybody invited to join in as they liked. I spent many nights playing guitar – electric, acoustic or nylon – banjo, electric bass, and even started picking up upright bass under the tutelage of a great local musician Steve Boyer, who would bust out the craziest Balkan and Eastern European jams on his accordion. It was also the place where I first met Scott McTaggart which lead to the formation of The Planet Of. It was a great time while it lasted – but like many things, it ended when the pandemic began.

    I still remain involved with the theater occasionally. Last fall I was setting up to capture video and record the audio of their latest production when Laura Barsalou, who was working stage crew during the play, sat at the piano and played some tasty jams. We got to talking and I learned that she is now the sole music teacher in the Gold Beach school district, single-handedly running the music program between two schools. We exchanged info and kept in touch about collaborating at some point. It had been many months since I shared some of my most recent demos and invited her to help develop them – she expressed great enthusiasm but in the winter months when I expected to be home locked away in stormy weather working in the studio, we instead had the driest North American winter season on record and I spent half of it traveling between California and Oregon. The anticipated storms never came. Come May, Porchanga was on the horizon and I reached out asking if she’d like to perform on Heather’s porch. And so our musical collaboration began.

    I love performing with others. Most performances I’ve done in my life have been in the context of a band and whatever the gig I love to lock in and connect with those I share the stage with – something I don’t get to experience when playing solo. Solo playing is a much more vulnerable and awkward experience for me, something I’m still trying to understand on a deeper level and build confidence in. It’s so much easier to perform when you can rely on those beside you, listen and communicate with them, go wherever the music takes you together.

    One of the largest demotivating factors for performing with a band is simple logistics. Coordinating schedules involves people with different lifestyles, different obligations, different geographical locations. Rehearsing means finding a day and time where everyone can reasonably travel to the same location for long enough to make some progress. Most bands I’ve played with push for once a week rehearsals of no more than a few hours – enough to get some material together and get to know each other for a performance or recording, but hardly enough to go deeper, to build substantially more material. Many bands I’ve played with have fallen into the trap of putting together a bare minimum of material to fill the expected playtime and once that time is filled the gigs get booked and any rehearsals become more about keeping the ship shape than sailing into new waters. I grow fatigued playing the same material all the time. I want to play new songs. I want to take different approaches. I want to experiment. I want to take the same songs and mix them all up. I want every show to be a new experience, an opportunity to try something different.

    For this I’ve been greatly appreciating the projects and performances we’ve been putting together with Ben, Ryan, and Jeff. None of us are precious about a particular branding or style and we’re happy to entertain any idea that comes into the mix. But even then we’re lucky if we can get together once a week. Jeff now has three boys under the age of five. I find myself getting quite busy as the weeks go around, often away traveling or spending time at my alternate home base across the Oregon/California border.

    There’s also my own motivation around pulling together and maintaining a regular project. The difficulty is in reaching out – whether I feel like I might be bothering somebody, or I don’t feel ready or confident enough in the material or the vision, or I just don’t know when I’ll have the time or if the person will even enjoy playing together. I recognize that a lot of the hesitations I have around reaching out and pulling a band together are rooted in my own head. Yet I feel best when I play with others and what consistently pulls me out of these thoughts is playing with the right people. People that are motivated and excited to play make all these worries wash away. I’ve been fortunate and grateful for those I’ve been able to play with over the years.

    Putting It Together, Together

    I don’t look at any instance of a song as being the definitive version. I look at each of my songs as having infinite potential for reinterpretation – different arrangements, different stylistic choices, changes to form, instrumentation, tempo, dynamics. Playing with a band presents an opportunity to take a song to a new place and invite input from the other musicians involved. I will provide demo recordings when presenting a new song, but with that said I take a pretty open approach when it actually comes to putting a piece together. The best experience playing with others comes when everybody is contributing ideas, following their own instincts about what to play and when. I prefer for the musicians I play with to follow their own ear and imagination, to feel comfortable making suggestions, and I’m always willing to try things out. When I have a new idea I will always ask for their feedback and trust their instincts. I don’t believe my ideas are best simply because it’s my song. There will be times where I’ll request a specific approach or specific rhythm/melody, but in general the best collaboration comes when each musician gets to inject their own spirit into the performance. It gives that particular performance and arrangement a unique identity that comes from all of us, not just one person.

    Working through each song with Laura brought the opportunity to explore the harmony written within each piece and explore potential for vocal harmonies, more interesting textures between guitar and keyboard parts. I relied on her and the rest of the band for key decisions rather than having everyone learn the recorded parts to play them as recorded. There was a lot of discussion about possibilities and approach before trying different things out and seeing what worked best. Together with Laura we took a demo like Sweetheart, which starts full on with guitars, bass, and drums, and came up with a new form which introduced elements gradually between sections – making it entirely through the first verse and pre-chorus with just the two of us before everything locked in for the second verse.

    The logistics of rehearsing with four people across different schedules meant we had to be strategic. A series of one on one rehearsals with Laura and I laying the foundation, a single rehearsal with myself, Ben, and Ryan, another with myself, Laura, and Ryan, and finally the week of Porchanga, our first and last rehearsal as the full four piece band.

    The performance opened with Laura performing a piece by Joe Hisaishi, composed for the Studio Ghibli film Howl’s Moving Castle. It was a natural opener given that Sweetheart, the first song of our set, was itself inspired by that film – about wizards and witches, curses, chosen family, war and love. I thought it could be nice to start with a bit of fantasy before moving into more grounded territory.

    One of the things I was most excited about for the performance was a blues vamp I’d envisioned as connective tissue between songs. Rather than filling the transitions between songs with awkward silence, tuning, and pedal fiddling, we would return to a repeating riff that held everything together. It worked exceptionally well even beyond my expectations. Although the vamp was initially based on one chord, during the one and only full band rehearsal as we jammed on it I started to superimpose an instrumental piece I know from the great Big Bill Broonzy called Hey Hey – which introduces the IV and V chord for a proper blues form. People were dancing and reacting each time we went back to it. It became a sort of refrain that people came to expect, almost like the experience of playing a song that everyone knows. There was a familiarity and excitement about it. At one point we went to the vamp quickly and stopped, and our friend Yana from Rogue Strings who had been dancing exclaimed “god damnit Eric!” I was sorry to interrupt her dancing but found it hilarious. Another friend asked me the following week what the story was with that little vamp we kept playing.

    Excluding the vamps the setlist was as follows:

    Sweetheart
    Only Murder
    Perfect Time
    Another Day Another Dime
    The Vortex
    Our Golden Days Have Passed

    This particular set of songs came about in a single night of playing. I didn’t pull up a list or put much thought into the order before diving in. Instead I began with Sweetheart and moved from one song to the next following instinct, playing whatever felt right next. A progression began to reveal itself between songs, beginning with themes of fantasy and love before moving into social tensions and fear, through grief, acceptance, and resignation. In hindsight these may have been heavier themes than appropriate for a party – but they represented the emotions I was going through at the time.

    Only Murder was written in the wake of a series of high profile murders that dominated the talk of the internet over the course of several months last year. I know I wasn’t the only one experiencing the phenomenon of opening up Instagram or Facebook and seeing footage of people getting shot – more and more angles released and shared and scrutinized. Something deeply upsetting about it not only for the sheer violence but for something voyeuristic about witnessing somebody’s final moments, a stranger, and sharing in this as some kind of overnight cultural phenomenon. People watching, analyzing, making judgments, sharing opinions, arguing over the right and wrong of a person getting murdered. Turning murder into political talking points and as I write in the song into fuel for our agendas. Not the ideal subject for festive jubilations perhaps – but man I been feeling it.

    Perfect Time and Our Golden Days Have Passed both have full entries written around them. Another Day Another Dime and The Vortex will get their own entries in due time.

    There were quite a few moments of improvisation throughout the performance. Some of the songs relied on it entirely. I encouraged Ryan to play very busy bass parts throughout Another Day Another Dime. Laura was encouraged to improvise during pretty much every instrumental break in each song, taking most of the leads.

    The set flew by. We all agreed by the end that it went much better than we were expecting and better than it had during rehearsal – there was at least one song we never actually managed to play through in its entirety, only discussing song form and making decisions about parts. Ben expressed that he was happy with the performance and happy to hear the songs sounding more like songs and less like rough sketches or ideas. I couldn’t agree more. There were moments that were rough around the edges and I can’t say I was fully content with my own vocal performance – I couldn’t hear myself too well by the time I came to play and with all the delays I wasn’t going to put more time into dialing that in. But it went well.

    There is always a natural high that follows a good performance – a sense of excitement, even euphoria, that can last for hours and make it difficult to get to sleep. I often go home after a show and stay up late feeling inspired to write, to play, to dream. The decompression after performing is like an essential part of the ritual – chatting with friends and bandmates, getting props and feedback from the audience, and inevitably the least glamorous part – tearing down gear.

    In the case of Porchanga we had no time for any of that. We hopped straight into swapping out gear and places for the Shred band. After a little switcheroo of Ryan heading over to guitar, myself to bass, Ben keeping his seat on drums, and Laura heading off into the crowd to watch us play many more notes, we got set up and started playing. This was only the second performance of this particular project but our set had doubled since the first and we played a solid 40 minutes of guitar instrumentals. There were a few guitar nerds in the crowd but a lot of the attendees weren’t familiar with this type of instrumental rock. The reactions surpassed any expectation I might have had. People were impressed and entertained by the musicality and coordination involved – not easy pieces to pull off, especially not with the wind still blowing hard after several hours and having already played one full set. Cold fingers and all, we powered through and pulled it off.

    By the time we finished and packed down it was Pigasus Trio’s turn to close out the night. I grabbed a plate of whatever was left at the potluck table and stood by the fire pit while they ripped. It was a good night.

  • Finger Wizards

    Over the last few months I’ve been playing in a new band yet to be officially named but currently being referred to as The Port Orford Shreds. The band consists of Ben Horton on drums, my brother Ryan Feliciano on guitar and myself on bass. We’ve been talking about doing this project for several years, a project built around Ryan’s shred guitar playing – covering instrumentals from some of our favorite virtuosic shred guitarists. For me this project represents a return to a style of music and approach that I had essentially moved away from for about 15 years.

    In my early teens, at the time I started playing guitar, I was listening to a lot of punk music and began to be fascinated by more challenging and technical guitar playing. I was taking the obligatory run through classic rock guitar music like Led Zeppelin and AC/DC, eventually moving towards more heavy bands such as Black Sabbath and Metallica, quickly seeking more obscure and over-the-top technical guitar wizardry.

    I remember I was about 13 or 14 when my cousin visited and left me with a burnt CD with the word “SHRED” sharpied on the label. The first song completely blew my mind. I had never heard such over-the-top guitar playing (and singing), and I remember listening to this ridiculous falsetto, trying to transcribe any lyrics I could make out to figure out the name of this song and band. The song was Superheroes by the speed metal band Racer X, featuring Paul Gilbert, who ushered me down this rabbit hole of ridiculous, highly technical guitar playing that became popular in the 80s.

    Other songs I can remember discovering on this CD were the Racer X instrumentals Technical Difficulties and Scarified, Arpeggios from Hell by neo-classical shredder Yngwie Malmsteen, and Concerto by Cacophony, a project featuring super shredders Jason Becker and Marty Friedman. Naturally, with the discovery of these players I only wanted one thing, and that was to shred. There would be many other guitarists, bands, albums and songs I would grow obsessed with on my quest to shred.

    The golden age of shred seemed to have passed in the 80s and early 90s, but in 2007 it was a great year to be a fan, with Paul Gilbert releasing his first instrumental rock album – Get Out of My Yard. This album along with the follow up Silence Followed By A Deafening Roar are two of my favorite albums in this style and direct references and inspiration for the project.

    Sidequest:
    Not knowing better at the time, I used to pick with a strange technique which put a lot of strain on the top joint of my right index finger. As I began building up speed and playing more and more technical riffs and solos for long hours, I began to experience pain in my picking hand, namely in that index finger. This led to me drastically changing my picking technique, which led to a major step back in my speed and picking abilities. At this point in my playing I was getting into college and moving away from this sort of technical music, moving more towards playing in pop bands and original projects which didn’t require any shredding. Eventually I moved away from the electric guitar and picking entirely, taking a break from music to focus on studying and eventually embarking on my first world travels. After about a year without playing much, I picked up a cheap nylon guitar and essentially started over, with a major focus on fingerstyle playing, moving towards more simple, melodic pieces and songwriting.

    I had given up on any dreams of shredding, and up until the last few months pulling this project together, I feel my playing has somewhat stagnated for a number of years. I don’t practice as much as I used to and don’t play nearly as many hours. I haven’t really worked on any pieces that pushed my technical skills for many years, instead just focusing on songwriting, recording and performing original music.

    The songs we’ve been selecting for the shred project have been a return to the playing and practice I would spend countless hours with as a teenager. Many of these songs I had to start learning at around 50 to 70% speed, gradually working out the parts and lines and repeating and building up speed incrementally so I could pull them off with the band. I still have plenty of work to go in building up my chops, but it feels good to be working on material that’s challenging the limits of my playing and giving me the drive to work on guitar technique that I’ve neglected for years.

    In writing this entry I was reminded that the songs we are covering for this project are not only technical exercises, but each one connects to experiences that were significant in my early musical life. Growing up near Los Angeles meant I had regular opportunities to go watch shred guitarists like Paul Gilbert, Joe Satriani, Steve Vai, Guthrie Govan, John Petrucci, Buckethead and more. Some of my earliest adventures — before I ever traveled the world — were chasing these players down to see them play live.

    Racer X Live

    Paul Gilbert was my favorite guitarist and Racer X my favorite band across those years. My tastes have shifted quite a bit over the years, and it’s been many years since I’ve actively listened to Racer X, but at that point in my life their music meant a lot to me. By the time I discovered them they were inactive for years, and any chance of a reunion, tour or future releases seemed extremely unlikely.

    In early 2009 it was announced that Racer X would be getting back together for a one-off performance, hosted by Ibanez guitars to celebrate Paul Gilbert’s 20th anniversary with the company. The thing is, the event wasn’t open to the public — it was for Ibanez artists and staff, and otherwise only open to badge-carrying attendees of the NAMM trade show. NAMM (the National Association of Music Merchants) is an annual industry insider event. As Google puts it: “The NAMM Show is a trade-only event and is not open to the general public. It is accessible to music industry professionals, business owners, employees, educators, students, and approved media or content creators.”

    I was 16 years old. I couldn’t drive, let alone have any industry connections for a NAMM badge. Word had it that the event wasn’t actually being held inside the exhibition center, but at a hotel ballroom nearby. Still from everything I could find online, there was no way I was getting into this show.

    The morning of, I had a rehearsal with the high school drumline, and the entire time I had this horrible feeling that I was going to miss a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see this legendary band. I just felt that I had to try. As soon as rehearsal let out, I called up the one friend I had with a license, explained the situation, and he was down for the mission.

    We took the long drive out to Anaheim — two awkward little teenagers sneaking around the Sheraton Park hotel, trying not to stand out. We found the ballroom the event was to be held at and there were signs posted that said it would be open to those with NAMM badges. Still no one was certain how strictly this rule would be enforced, with little to lose – we waited. After waiting in line for a few anxious hours unsure what would happen, about half an hour before the show, the staff opened the doors and we were in. I couldn’t believe it.

    The catch was that the room was split in two with the Ibanez insiders up front, with tons of space between them and a barricade that separated the rest of us. This was disappointing but I was happy to be inside. The show began with a live band set by guitarist Andy Timmons followed by a performance of Paul’s solo band. This was great even from halfway across the ballroom, but by the time Racer X took stage, I couldn’t take it anymore. I jumped the barrier. As I quickly shuffled up to the front of the room I noticed that several other fans followed me, and we proceeded to watch the performance from the front row, right up against the stage. All this made for one of the top experiences of my teenage years and one of my all-time favorite shows.

    Here’s a clip from that show:

    The Aristocrats

    In the years after the Racer X show, going to NAMM in Anaheim became a tradition — I got my first badge at 17 and returned several more times over the following years. The show is chaos and cacophony, both heaven and hell for music and gear nerds: hundreds of companies bringing out their teams and endorsed artists to demo the latest gear, as well as offer signings, clinics, and performances from these top musicians visiting from around the world. With the gathering of all that talent in one place, there are many special performances happening all around the event — some public, some, like the Racer X show, (technically) not.

    That brings me to the Aristocrats, whose song “Aristoclub” is in our shred set. The Aristocrats are the epitome of a supergroup — three of the most technically proficient players in the world today. The range of projects, styles and material this trio has performed over the years, individually and together, is mind-boggling.

    I first became aware of drummer Marco Minnemann through my Paul Gilbert obsession. He famously recorded and toured with Paul in the 2000s — including the Space Ship One album and, most notably for me, the Space Ship Live DVD, where the musicians wore orange space suits for their live-in-studio performances. Bassist Bryan Beller I first knew as a touring member of the cartoon metal band Dethklok. I was a huge fan of the show Metalocalypse, particularly the first season, and I listened to their first album countless times in my teen years. Although the band and music is an absurd and satirical take on metal and celebrity incompetence, the creator Brendon Small is a very competent, Berklee-educated musician and a highly skilled guitarist. Besides Metalocalypse, I also love his first show Home Movies, which has tons of great non-metal music. Bryan Beller is a regular collaborator and member of that touring band, and beyond it he’s recorded with countless artists, has a prolific solo output, and has a strong connection to the world of Frank Zappa alumni such as Mike Keneally.

    Now on to Guthrie Govan, who in my perception is the most consistently mind-blowing guitarist I’ve ever heard. An absolute wizard of the electric guitar, his musicality and virtuosity go beyond anything I could ever dream of. His one and only solo album, Erotic Cakes — named after one of my favorite Simpsons episodes — is an all-time masterpiece of the genre. I could never grow tired of listening to Guthrie’s melodic and inventive playing on this album, not to mention the equally inspiring, tasteful and virtuosic playing of Seth Govan on bass (Guthrie’s brother) and Pete Riley on drums. My understanding is that these three performed as a legendary underground jazz band for years called the Fellowship — a fitting name, considering I’ve seen people lately referring to Guthrie, with his greying long hair and beard, as the Gandalf of guitar. Guthrie had written two books, Creative Guitar 1 and 2, both of which were very inspiring and influential for me as a teenage guitarist. Unfortunately I’ve lost both books over the years, so I’m reminded now that I really should find copies of each and start digging in again.

    I’ve had the great pleasure of watching Guthrie perform live a number of times over the years, and a chance to meet and chat with him a few times along the way. Coincidentally, the first time I ever saw him in person was that same day as the Racer X show — just before it, in fact, as we were waiting in that line in Anaheim, unsure if we’d actually make it through the door. I left my buddy to go to the restroom, and as I was approaching, Guthrie was on his way out. I said hello and we had a quick chat. Every time I’ve talked with him, I’ve been overwhelmed by his humility, generosity and good humor. Just one of the coolest dudes ever, and an absolute musical genius.

    All this to say that I experienced a very special event during NAMM in January 2011. At the time I was playing with a band called Cockeyed Optimist, a female-fronted hard rock band based in Orange County, and through them I had my industry insider pass to NAMM that year. I was staying with my band mates at their home in Laguna Niguel during the event, catching excited rides up in the morning and exhausted rides back in the afternoon. NAMM is terribly exhausting — hours of constant noise, standing and walking, not to mention all the mingling, which by this point had an extra element to it, since I was studying music in college and kept running into people I was already playing and studying with out in the world.

    There was a buzz one day about a special performance — word that Guthrie Govan would be playing along with some other legends. So after the show, through my insistence, my bandmates and I drove out to the venue. As fate would have it, we were informed that the show was meant to have separate bands, but for one reason or another that fell through, and so Guthrie Govan, Bryan Beller and Marco Minnemann were left without supporting acts. They decided they would each learn and perform a few original songs together, as a band. The feeling in the room was electrifying. These legends were performing together for the first time, just for us, and the fun and excitement they were having was infectious. We didn’t know it then, but we were witnessing in real time the birth of what would become the Aristocrats — a band that would go on to record, write and perform together to this day.

    At about the halfway point, my friends were exhausted from the day and tired of indulging me, and they let me know the ship was sailing. I was caught with the same feeling I’d had at the Racer X show — that I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I missed this. So, in a time before Uber, with no certain or logical way to get back to their place in a neighborhood not serviced by public transportation, I let them know I would find my own way back. Shocked, they asked me seriously if I was sure, and I said yes. They left, and I enjoyed every second of that performance.

    Afterward, as people were making their way out — many of them surely returning to NAMM mayhem the next morning — I started making phone calls. I didn’t really know where I was, but I knew one of my college classmates and band mate in the college pop band lived somewhere in that general area. I called her, asked if she had any ideas, and she called another one of our class/bandmates. We began a relay — she picked me up and brought me to meet up with the other classmate, who then drove me out to Laguna Niguel. It was a mission, and just great fun hanging out with them along the way. I got there late and was buzzing, and the next day I was exhausted.

    It wouldn’t be too long afterward that I’d see these musicians perform again as the Aristocrats, on one of their early tours at the Baked Potato in Hollywood. And then in February 2024 — a whopping 13 years after that first performance — Ryan and I drove out to Portland to see the Aristocrats perform at one of our favorite venues, Mississippi Studios. It was one of their first shows after the release of their latest album, which I believe had only come out a few days before, so we got to watch some of the earliest public performances of that material. The energy of the band was much like their very first performance — three monster players totally cool, non-pretentious and down to earth, just having such a great time. Mississippi Studios has a balcony with a few seats upstairs and a walkway that goes out over and along the stage, and we watched the entire show from just over the stage, basically a bird’s-eye view just above the action. One of the songs we watched performed from the new album that night has made it into our set — “Aristoclub.” It’s one of their most straightforward and least shreddy songs, thankfully for our sake.

    St0rk

    The last musician I’d like to talk about in this realm of acrobatic guitar is Shane Gibson — lesser known than most of the other names I’ve mentioned, and tragically gone way too soon. In his lifetime he gained the most fame and notoriety as a touring guitarist for the band Korn. For the record, I always thought Korn’s music was dog shit. I remember being in elementary school and seeing the other little rocker kids who were all about Korn and Slipknot — neither of those bands ever clicked with me. Regardless, that was Shane’s big gig, but I was brought to his music through his performance and instructional videos. When I first discovered him, he only had one CD available, which I ordered and listened to on repeat. I believe those recordings were self-produced, and a couple of them were essentially demos for what he’d later release with the band Stork. I bought his instructional DVD, which was just impossible for me — he had an insane technique — but I would work through it anyway.

    For a time he was endorsed by Carvin guitars, which I loved. My Carvin Bolt is the guitar I’ve had the longest. At a time when I sold off all my guitars, pedals, amps and so on to fund a one-way international trip, this is the one guitar I kept, leaving it in the care of a trusted friend for years as I traveled the world. I would frequent the Carvin store in Hollywood on trips to Hollywood Boulevard. Meanwhile, in Covina, California, there was a lonely Carvin store that shut down several years before Carvin eventually closed all their stores and rebranded as Kiesel — but somehow, a little before that Covina store closed, they hosted a clinic by none other than Shane Gibson. He demonstrated his highly technical and inventive instrumental guitar songs, such as “Doooosh” and “Ducksinapond.” I had a chance to meet him then, and we ended up becoming online acquaintances.

    Not too long after, I reached out to him for a private lesson and drove out to his apartment in Culver City, California, where we had some good chats and a good lesson — he guided me on picking and on incorporating arpeggios into my playing. I watched as he grew more popular and widely known for his instrumental work and projects like SchwarzenatoR — an Arnold Schwarzenegger-themed metal band with drummer Thomas Lang, another super shredder, that incorporated samples and a humorous blend of technical metal playing and, well, Arnold Schwarzenegger. I was delighted to hear about the formation of the band Stork, whose first album had the definitive recordings of my favorite Shane Gibson instrumentals. Stork released that first album in 2009, and their second — which saw the band grow from an instrumental project to a vocal one featuring vocalist VK Lynne — was released in 2014, after Shane passed at the age of 35. His death sent shockwaves through the guitar world: a rising figure gone in his prime.

    The last time I saw Shane was at the NAMM show, I believe in early 2012. We ran into each other randomly, and I was touched by his enthusiasm, asking me genuinely how I’d been. We had a good chat and walked through the show together until he got to his next appointment, and then I went off wandering into the noise. It’s been an honor to learn, practice and perform his song “Ducksinapond” — to connect with his spirit and put some of his music out into the world. RIP Shane.

    Our current list of covers are as follows:

    Paul Gilbert – Love is the Saddest Thing, Hurry Up, Curse of Castle Dragon
    Racer X – Catapult to Extinction, King of the Monsters
    Shane Gibson/St0rk – Ducksinapond
    The Aristocrats – Aristoclub
    Nick Johnston – Sandmonster

    I cut together a video with portions of each of these songs from our last performance. You can watch it here:

    We’re now working on an instrumental arrangement of Zomby Woof by Frank Zappa, In the Goo of the Evening by Mattias Eklund — which features some of the most challenging rhythmic figures I’ve ever learned – and Uncle Skunk by Guthrie Govan.

    These days I don’t listen to a lot of shred music — I haven’t for a number of years. My tastes change and shift around all the time, and I’ve got a list of artists I always return to and albums I’ll listen to on repeat throughout the years. But it’s been a pleasure to return to material that brought me so much excitement and inspiration at an earlier point in my playing. The material still challenges and inspires me greatly. And although I’d given up on my dream of playing such technical guitar, even though I’m playing bass in this project, there are still plenty of technical challenges to my playing — it’s demanded lots of hours, focus and attention to learn the parts and keep up with my bandmates.

    Beyond the songs, we’ve got a short list of other covers in mind, but we’re shifting focus towards original instrumentals, of which both Ryan and I have several contributions. I’ll finish by sharing a recording of a very early instrumental piece of mine which I called simply “Crazy Stuff.” I originally wrote it when I was about 15 or 16. Here’s a recording from 2015 done entirely by Ryan. It’s got this feeling of 2000s metal all over it. He recorded it according to my arrangement, but really added some awesome leads and extra guitar layers. Soon we’ll be working out a new arrangement for the three-piece band.

    I’m really excited for this project, especially to be digging into original music. Ryan has a huge catalogue of ideas that would fit this type of project perfectly, and we’re beginning to dig into them now.

    One last note: in the time since I began this entry, a new contender for the band name emerged naturally in a conversation — my favorite name yet, “Finger Wizard.” I thought it was perfect, silly and stupid – but perfect. Unfortunately the band mates disagreed, hopefully they come around. Otherwise we continue as “The Port Orford Shreds”

    Our next performance will be on July 25, 2026 at Mr Eds Underground Pub in Port Orford. Rock on.

  • Website – Visions Revisited

    Hello reader of these words. Over the last week I’ve been making some design and page updates to the website and revisiting a number of older entries where I have made some changes. This will be all about the website with reflections on where it began and how it’s developed so far, along with some goals moving forward.

    In the spring of 2025 I was traveling the US, and I began to really try to come up with an alternative means of sharing my music and my creative projects outside of the big social media and streaming platforms. At that point my website followed a pretty standard model for a musician’s webpage — geared towards directing people to my social media and streaming accounts, set up to have a professional landing page to link when booking gigs. I hadn’t actually shared any of my music or video directly; instead I was embedding YouTube videos, Instagram posts, and a Spotify player.

    Nostalgic for the days of the early internet, when each website had its own unique identity, function and potential, I began to consider rebuilding the website as a means to share my work directly. I remember the experience of surfing the web before social media, even before google. Where finding a new website felt like a great discovery. I remembered the excitement of the website stumbleupon – where with every refresh a new, interesting website would appear to be explored. This was the first exciting thought for a rebuild, what if I set up a website that would provide a new article on every refresh? Each refresh a song, a video, a photo, a story, etc? Then I started considering the practicality of that. If this is all centered around my world, I would need to create dozens, if not hundreds of articles for this idea to work. And so I started scheming on how to achieve that.

    Informed by dozens of interviews conducted for the Songwriting Mind project, I was inspired to start cataloging not only all my songs, but the stories, history, and my thoughts and feelings behind each one. It was during that travel that I began to lay down the groundwork, with a vision of eventually writing articles for each song and building a website with hundreds of entries — covering everything I’ve written and recorded so far, as well as everything to come.

    On September 4, 2025 – about 5 months later – I published my first entry: Website – Visions where I expressed my simple intentions with the new website. Now over 9 months later I am revisiting the vision and intent.

    If I had to explain to someone simply and casually what the website is, I’d tell them it’s just a place where I can share my thoughts, recordings, and videos without using the big streaming and social media platforms. What it’s grown into is a new medium for me to share my thoughts and the things I make. I feel that it’s still in its infancy and still unfolding — with each article I seem to push out a little further, and the scope seems to keep growing.

    So far I’ve been doing a lot of retroactive work, reflecting on songs I’d written over the last years and reflecting on travels. There have only been a few entries written from the present moment or with more recent updates, but there’s a lot of work to capture. I still have this goal of eventually writing articles about a lot of the songs I’ve written, but beyond the songs it’s expanded — I’d like to share stories and experiences from my life, largely because the events in my life are so closely connected to what I create.

    I feel that a lot of this work is just for my own records — in a way that I might write a song to reflect on and process events from the past, getting all my thoughts out and publishing them in a coherent way feels like a means to process and let go of something that has no other container besides my own memory.

    The more entries I complete, the more I realize this process is similar to songwriting. I set the intention to write an article about one thing, but in pulling that thread I often find myself reflecting on or piecing together history I hadn’t even considered when I set the intention to write in the first place. In this way, this project has been providing me with time to reflect deeply, to piece together and trace back these moments in my creative life — an unintended and welcome practice that I hadn’t pursued outside of conversation and songwriting in this sort of depth and frequency before.

    I have always felt conflicted around using traditional modern means of sharing and publishing the things I create, and it has been an extreme demotivator for years now. I don’t want to use Instagram to promote my music. I don’t want to release songs on Spotify. It doesn’t feel right, and it never did. And so, in seeking some kind of alternative, this website became a new medium to explore.

    I recognize that this long-form, blog-style writing is essentially out of fashion, and I don’t see too many others doing this type of writing, especially in the context of a songwriter sharing their work. I’m sort of doubtful about the interest and potential for engagement in this kind of pursuit, but I carry on with the consideration that for someone interested in this type of content, it can provide entertainment, insight, food for thought, inspiration and understanding that they wouldn’t find otherwise — if I had just made a post on Instagram with a Spotify link in my bio. I hope that people find inspiration in what I’m doing here. Some songwriting friends have expressed their own interest in pursuing similar writing to reflect on their songs, and I hope that others do pursue alternative approaches to sharing their work and thoughts to meaningful ends.

    So far I’ve been doing this in stolen moments, when I have the focus and time — this archive obviously isn’t my main project. I stay quite busy with lots of other activities; I have a very active life, I’m involved with my family and my local music scene, I’m regularly traveling and taking on money gigs, and so my personal creative projects will often take a backseat. Yet in the nine months since I published my first entry, this entry marks the 30th published entry, which feels like an impossible accomplishment to me, and still only covers a fraction of the entries I’ve conceived and wish to write.

    I’m interested in sharing the process along the way, because it always surprises me when I look back and I see what my vision was versus how things actually turned out. I very quickly lose track of where an idea began, since it is constantly changing and I’m inside of it the whole time, and it’s only in looking at reflections of notes from the past that I can get the perspective of what I was thinking previously. I’m always interested to see what stuck and how it transformed, what was dropped and forgotten, and what unfolded that I wasn’t anticipating.

    That last piece has become a major tenet of existence, of my life and approach to living — that the greatest things come as discoveries that I was not looking for and thinking about. They lie in the unknown, beyond the edges of my imagination.

    I began pulling on a thread of a website that would randomly provide an article from my musical and creative world. Instead what I’ve found is a new medium to explore and express. I’m not sure where or how far it will go, but I have some goals and visions. I want to keep writing entries, keep sharing songs and stories. I want to find a way to make the website more fluid, make the entries and pages more interconnected and easier to navigate. I want to implement an audio player, and video player. A photo gallery and a soft version of the random entry generator – exploring more tactile/interesting ways to explore the content of the website. These are just a few ideas and intentions I have moving forward. Thanks for being here, dear reader of these words. Enjoy

    epd

  • Updates: Redwoods, Studio, Cornfield Blues

    It’s been a couple months since I’ve published any new entries on the site. I’ve got a few big entries in the works that I’ve yet to sit down and finish. For now, some updates from the last few months.

    Over the last months I’ve been spending a lot of time with family and dividing my weeks between my home on the Oregon coast and the new home of my dad and grandmother at the foot of the redwoods just outside of Crescent City, California. I was still a teenager the very first time I traveled up to see the redwoods. Walking in the redwoods and hiking coastal trails in Humboldt County deeply expanded my awareness of the diversity and vastness of nature and life on earth. Over the years I began to take regular trips up north and held a dream of living amongst the great coastal redwoods. My first realization of that dream was in my 20s when I settled on the Oregon coast, where I live just over an hour from the most northern coastal redwood growth outside of Brookings, Oregon. But now, in spending time with family, I also spend time in the redwoods two or three days a week on average – the dream of my late teenage years feels more real than ever before.

    It’s been about a year of taking regular trips to Crescent City, exploring the town and neighborhoods in a quest to find a suitable living situation for my family moving up from down south. But along with the time in the city, I’ve been exploring the beaches and trails along the coast, discovering nooks and trails through the redwoods along the Smith River. Throughout the fall, winter and spring I visited the Smith River countless times, and just last weekend, as we turned our cheek toward summer, I finally enjoyed back-to-back days of swimming the Smith.

    As I mentioned, my visits to Crescent City have been more about spending quality time with my family and exploring and discovering more of what the surroundings have to offer. I haven’t been so productive when it comes to my creative projects. I might do some editing or mixing, and I’ve been practicing and playing quite a bit down there, including on visits to the Smith, but overall I’ve been saving my music projects for home.

    At home, I’ve been working every day in my new home studio space. This has been a project in the works for nearly two years, since an existing structure on our property became unlivable due to serious storm damage. We spent close to a year just working on construction projects, and it would’ve been just over a year ago that the goal to dedicate space to recording first occurred to me. By the time the autumn rains began I had moved the majority of our equipment into the space, where there were still active projects of drywall, painting and attic/roof work to be done. I would spend several months shuffling gear around to accommodate projects, keeping a stripped-down recording space available throughout — the majority of all the demos I’ve recorded since fall 2025 were done in this space.

    Yet it wasn’t until about three months ago that I had finally removed all construction materials from the space entirely and had it set up for a live band rehearsal. Even then, it would still be a few weeks until the space was ready for live recording, as I was still putting up sound panels and generally unpacking and organizing gear throughout. There were so many tedious little projects along the way, and I’m still not on the other side of them. In the span of a week I must’ve spent over 20 hours organizing cables — wrapping them, adding velcro cable ties or twist ties, sorting them in piles and then crates, boxes and bags, and finding places for them. I still have a small box with miscellaneous cables that didn’t fall into simple categorization. With all that said, the space is now pretty well set up for recording and rehearsing, and we’ve got a few active projects happening within it. I will get to those across my next couple entries.

    My focus for a couple of weeks was a room where I’m setting up an analog work desk — a space for digitizing VHS tapes, playing, recording and reproducing cassette tapes and CDs, and playing back a variety of physical media. I’ve got a couple of boxes of home movies that I’ve been caring for for many years and only now have the space I could dedicate to setting up the equipment for digitizing them. That space is mostly together, but I’ve still got to figure out some solutions for shelving, storage and organization. What was previously a kitchen in this space is now the main working space, with a computer desk, studio monitors, access to our main recording console and so on. This space connects to the large area where we have a drum kit set up, guitar and bass amps, and a vocal booth in the corner of the room.

    Next door to the analog room is the space that is still the most in shambles, which I intend to use as a dedicated video space — shooting against a green screen or other backdrops.

    While I was still moving around and organizing boxes of records, cassettes and CDs — and trying to figure out some hi-fi humming issues in the setup, opening up a massive can of worms — I received a call from a local musician, Steve Montana. He was looking for some assistance in capturing a video performance of one of his original songs at the request of some documentary filmmakers. He specifically asked if I could do green screen, and I let him know he was in luck, as I’d been setting up a space for doing just that. Although the room was still being used as a transitory space for gear that needed to be sorted out, the one thing that was set up in the space was two walls covered in green fabric. I asked him to give me a week or so to tidy up, and when I did, he came over one afternoon to record Cornfield Blues.

    The song was written by him back in the 70s when he was a student at Maharishi International University in Fairfield, Iowa. It’s a humorous folk song that talks about the school, moving to Iowa, and — among other things — corn. From what I understand, it was an essentially forgotten part of his original catalogue until he was contacted recently by a documentary filmmaker who had just completed a film about the school.

    The documentary is called When Maharishi Came to Town and it covers the period in the 70s when Maharishi International University came to Fairfield, Iowa – including the time the Beach Boys came to record their M.I.U. Album at the school. The filmmaker, Dick DeAngelis, spent months trying to track down Steve before they connected and the filmmaker requested a video of Steve performing the song. That’s where I came in.

    In the aforementioned unfinished video room I set up lights, two cameras, two microphones, and one DI for the guitar. We probably spent close to an hour dialing in the lighting and camera placement and the audio, and then he did three takes. The last take was the one submitted to the filmmaker. For the green screen background, Steve requested a video of the Oregon coast if possible, and after looking at our options, we found a short video on Pexels that he was happy to use as a simple repeating loop. Within just a couple hours the video was ready, and that was that.

    This was a special event because it was the first project I worked on for somebody else in the new studio space. This is something I really want to do more of — making videos and recording for others, other friends and musicians in our coastal community.

    You can watch the full video, with the filmmaker describing the background for this song, and Steve’s performance at the end. Note: I tried everything to embed the video on the website but facebook is non cooperative. Link here: https://www.facebook.com/reel/856519317517536

  • The Challenge: July 2017 Pt. 3 – Songs 14-26

    Continuing from Pt. 1 (& the unfinished Pt. 2) – this entry contains all the songs and stories behind the songs I wrote and recorded during the second half of the 30 day song a day challenge in July 2017.

    No Body

    No Body, like many songs, came from a dream. There was one specific dream during that month of July where I was less interested in the events of the dream and more in the position from which I experienced it. Generally speaking I dream with a body that feels much like my familiar human body in waking life – I’m still human when I’m dreaming. But what use do I have for the body in a dream?

    A friend once told me that the coolest dream he ever had began with him in the sky flying, and when he looked from side to side he recognized that he had wings and that there were birds all around him. He was in the body of a bird, flying with the flock, with the awareness of a human being. I’m so envious of that dream. Occasionally I’ll have dreams where I am just an observer – not even an active participant, just watching events play out, like watching a movie. I always enjoy and find myself fascinated by those dreams.

    In the dream that inspired this song I was just an observer, but as I write in the song – still I could feel, and I felt everything I was observing. When I woke I was reminded that I do have a body. I am a body. And in those days I was dealing with some chronic pain, particularly in my ankle and my hip – tracing back to a skateboarding injury from several years before. I’d had some medical attention and physical therapy and the condition had improved, but I still live with some chronic and recurring pain and soreness.

    So I wrote two movements into the short song – one from inside the dream, an escape and vacation from the body, a place where I could still be conscious but free from the difficulties associated with having one – and then I wake up, feel the heaviness, feel the pain, and recognize that although my body is not doing very well, I still have the will to go on.

    “No Body”

    Dreamt that I had
    Had no body
    Still I could feel
    And I felt I didn't need it

    I had no head
    I kept thinkin
    I had no eyes but I did see
    The whole scene

    I woke up
    Felt my body falling apart
    Felt my wrists aching down to the bone
    I've got the will to go on
    I find my bod falling apart
    My leg aching from hip to toe
    I've got the will to go on
    I'll push at all costs

    Tinder Babies

    After years of performing with The Planet Of this has become essentially my most well-known and most requested song. It has to be one of my most ridiculous songs, written from one simple premise -a question I had been asking for years before writing this in 2017: how many Tinder babies are there in the world? By Tinder babies I mean babies born from parents who met on Tinder.

    I first learned about Tinder in Bethlehem, Palestine of all places. I was staying at the site of an eco farming project where I met a new friend from Brazil who was volunteering with the farm. I remember we went out for dinner in a small group and as we waited for food he took out his phone and told us he had been collecting pictures from Tinder of women whose profiles had machine guns in them. In Israel it is a requirement to join the military and for those doing their mandatory service it is a requirement to look after your assigned weapon at all times. What this leads to in day-to-day life is seeing groups of young people in and out of uniform gathering at cafés, restaurants, walking down streets, waiting for buses – with their assigned weapons on them at all times. As my new friend had discovered, it led to young women on their dating profiles posing with their weapons. Think the Israeli equivalent to dudes with big fish. He must’ve had close to 20 screenshots of women in their late teens and 20s taking selfies in uniform with their weapons. This was the first time I ever heard about Tinder. We had some good laughs about how casual the automatic weapon had become – like an accessory in otherwise cute and attractive photos. This would’ve been back in early 2014.

    By 2017 when I actually wrote this song, the question of how many Tinder babies there were had become less funny and absurd, and more of a basic reality. More and more people were meeting their partners through dating apps. I knew many people having regular hookups with people from Tinder and heard a few stories about people sticking together – and/or getting knocked up. It seemed like the main means of meeting people for a time. I began to imagine a future where kids would talk about how their parents met, and it would become the exception for a kid to say that their parents met organically or “IRL”.

    One thing that greatly inspired writing the song when I did was one of my roommates at the studio – a musician who kept his lockout where he practiced and lived full-time. I would regularly see him on his way in or out with a new lady by his side, sometimes two or three different women in a week. At some point I asked him what the deal was and he said Tinder. For sociological reasons I asked him how it worked. He explained it simply: when he would match with somebody he’d ask them if they were down to meet up. If they wanted to meet up earlier in the day it meant they wanted to get to know him first. But if they were down to meet up at night it essentially meant they were open to a hookup – He said “Most times when you meet you can just start macking on them” His words on the mechanics of Tinder hookups inspired the middle section of the song. Essentially direct quotes.

    The song begins with a mom and dad-to-be swiping right on each other and meeting up to dance all night – then asks the question: how many Tinder babes are there in the world? The bridge explains the rules as spoken by my Tinder-expert friend. Then the song takes a turn – my sonic vision in the section where I repeat “swipe swipe swipe” and the ‘babies’ begin to cry was that as people swipe, babies are born. The more we swipe the more babies are born. Ending with the repeated calls of the babies, children, and adults of the future who are all Tinder babies. “I’m a tinder baby”

    Again – this is my most well known and requested song. What does that say about me as an “artist”?

    “Tinder Babies”

    Lady swiped left
    Homie swiped right
    How will you swipe
    When you get the chance

    Mama swiped right
    Daddy swiped right
    They met up
    And they danced all night

    How many tinder babes in the world today
    How many tinder babes in the world today
    How many tinder babes in the world today
    How many tinder babes in the world

    If you're gonna meet a babe
    And y'all set the clock late
    You know what they want (they want it)
    You don't gotta ask (they want it)
    If they set it to the afternoon
    First they wanna get to know ya
    But most times when you meet em
    You can get straight get straight to just 
    Macking on that tinder babe

    Tinder babes
    Tinder babies
    Swipe swipe swipe
    Swipe swipe swipe 

    How many tinder babies in the world today
    How many tinder babies in the world today
    How many tinder babies in the world today
    How many tinder babies in the world 

    I'm a tinder baby (x many)

    The Challenge

    Another short song, clocking in at 1:22. At this point we were getting into the later part of the challenge and I had time to understand just how much it had come to consume my time and energy. It truly became my main focus – the last thing I would think about before I fell asleep and the first thing I thought about in the morning. Whatever song I was working on at any given time was at the forefront of my thoughts. If I wasn’t playing or writing actively then I was listening – listening to a voice memo, listening to an early demo on repeat until more ideas came. It definitely began to feel unsustainable. Attempting to do this for a few weeks is one thing, but I could not live my life this way. Everything in moderation, including songwriting. Before I had any music I wrote out most of the lines. It’s a song written about the thing it was written for.


    “The Challenge”


    The challenge
    Is my day job
    Is my tether
    The challenge
    Is my lover
    Is my muse
    The challenge
    What tucks me in at night
    And springs me out of bed in the morning
    The challenge
    It consumes me

    Elemental

    An example of grabbing an interesting thread and pulling on it even if it doesn’t reach a particularly satisfying conclusion. The song is in five and has an interesting groove – I enjoy the odd time riffing – but I never felt too attached to it. I always felt I would return and get it more fleshed out, particularly the last section, but I never got there and I’m not sure I ever will.

    What these challenges do is muster a different kind of focus – one that allows me to take one idea and go far with it, often to surprising places. Elemental didn’t quite get there. It stands as an unfinished idea, and that’s fine. Not every song needs to be something.

    “Elemental”

    




    




    Where The People At?
    




    Across this entry I talk about how consumed I was with the challenge, but I was still getting out and about – socializing, playing a couple of gigs, remaining with some presence in the world. One day a friend invited me out for a hike in the Claremont Hills. We enjoyed a hike on a beautiful sunny summer day and at some point we stopped and looked out over the neighborhood below – almost entirely still, empty and motionless. Hundreds of homes on the most picture-perfect beautiful day, not a single person walking on the street, riding a bike or walking a dog, no kids playing outside. From what I could tell every door and window was shut, blinds drawn. The only sign of life was one mail truck driving slowly down the road. It felt surreal. The neighborhood looked like a model – a facade, staged.
    




    This was something that would often occur to me while living in the Inland Empire, between Upland and Ontario. Driving around on a beautiful morning or afternoon, seeing green parks with benches and playgrounds entirely empty. Most everywhere else I had ever spent time, good weather was treated like a luxury, a fleeting gift not to be squandered. People would gather in public spaces, sit and talk, play outside their homes. No park empty, no street still and lifeless.
    




    During the challenge I would take breaks and go walking around the streets of Ontario at any hour of the night or morning, listening to whatever song I was working on on repeat, writing or editing lines and taking notes to continue when I returned to the studio. I still do that. These days I’m more often in the forest or at the beach while I’m editing, listening and writing- but the process is the same. I remember working on this song specifically – I took a walk around Ontario and had that same feeling- where are all the people at?? Sure it was nighttime but knowing that tens of thousands of people were living all around, and seeing not one car, not one person on the street but me. It always felt a bit dystopian and apocalyptic.
    




    That night feeling made itself into the lyrics and the vibe of the song. I went out and recorded night sounds from the empty streets around Rad Pro – crickets, buzzing from power lines. You can hear it in the middle breakdown section and the ending. Where are all the people at?
    




    “Where Are All The People At?”
    




    




    Long wide streets
    Quietly
    Buzzing only with the sounds of electricity

    One car strolls down
    Down the boulevard
    Lonely post man
    Delivers to nobody

    Where are all the people at
    Where are all the people at
    Where are all the people at
    Where are all the people at

    Where is everybody
    There isn't a soul outside

    Cars all parked
    In their right spaces
    Houses painted many shades
    With windows shut and doors locked up

    Sky is mighty clear today
    A calm breeze sweeps through the valley
    Making trees dance in their plots
    And their leaves blow through empty parks and playgrounds

    From our perch
    On sunburnt slopes
    We view the suburb
    Countless homes
    Sitting calmly
    A silent neighborhood
    We must wonder
    Where are all the people at
    




    




    Clip Show
    




    Nostalgia is a hell of a drug. I can be very nostalgic and spend plenty of time thinking about the past. I definitely spend much more time thinking about the past than the future.
    




    This song was written almost in a similar vein to Been Missing except in this one instead of getting together with a friend to reminisce and get caught up – we’re strictly getting together to indulge in our shared past. I think this was written in response to a feeling that would come when I got together with old friends from the distant past. At times I would get the feeling that the person seeing me was expecting me to be the person they knew then – not really interested in getting caught up with the last years, wanting to receive me as they’ve always known me and play out this clip show. Telling old stories, speaking about people we knew in common, as if to resurrect ourselves and feel that our past meant something.
    




    The song was written in this dark, dreary tone to express the dull monotony I feel when I find myself in this type of dynamic. I don’t believe we should be defined by our past. I’m much more interested in what’s happening now. I am not who I was. When all we can connect about is the past it’s a sign that our connection is essentially lost – or at least that there is an unwillingness to connect in the present, as we are today. This song is the anthem for those who choose to live in a state of suspended past.
    




    “Clip Show”
    




    




    Let's get together and tell old stories
    Shut our eyes and slip away with portraits from our history
    We'll narrate the pictures as they play out on our eyelids
    Open up and let a comfy ache seep in

    Let's get together let's get reminiscent
    Picking out the details and dusting off our memories
    With a thousand words each we can go hog wild
    We could live fully in the glory of the past

    We could be a clip show
    We could be a picture book
    We could be the keepers of the story of the past

    We could be a clip show
    We could be a picture book
    We could be the storytellers
    




    




    Don’t Talk To Me About Pizza
    




    This is a total joke song. Eventually it became a staple in the live sets with The Planet Of. I would often introduce it as the anthem of an angry straight edge vegan, which is essentially what it is – in the song I’m just pissed off about people talking about and posting about beer and burgers and pizza and all the things that everyone seems to love except me, the non-meat-and-cheese-eating, non-beer-drinking grump.
    




    I love the riffs in this song. Maybe someday I would rewrite this with some actual lyrics that have more sense or purpose, but as it stands the silly ‘straightedgevegan’ anthem remains.
    




    For the music I was inspired by a sort of psychedelic surf punk band that I saw at some late-night speakeasy a few months before the challenge. I decided to do a parody performance of angry punk vocals which I didn’t put a whole lot of effort into – you’ll hear it on the recording.
    




    In general I hang onto the basic assumption that music does not have to be serious. I would even go so far as to say that music is not serious, and further than that, neither is life itself for that matter. I don’t believe that a joke song has less value or validity than something written earnestly. I find it’s a healthy practice to tap into different parts of my psyche and emotions and write from different places. Especially in doing such an undertaking as writing and recording a song every day, there isn’t a lot of room for doubt. Find a thread that feels interesting and follow it to the end, even if it’s absurd and ridiculous. It’s relieving to write from a place of fun, experimentation and humor without any pressure to create something serious.
    




    “Don’t Talk To Me About Pizza“
    




    





    Don't talk to me about pizza
    Don't talk to me about cheese
    Don't talk to me about pepperonies
    Don't talk to me

    Don't talk to me about burgers
    Don't talk to me about ground meat
    Don't talk to me about bacon
    Don't talk to me

    Don't talk to me about donuts
    Don't talk to me about dough
    Don't talk to me about soda
    I don't wanna know

    You are what you eat
    Please try to keep it down
    You stuff it in your face
    Turn your diet into sounds
    Turn your pizza into pictures
    And your pictures into posts
    I don't want to see
    What you're stuffing in your throat

    Don't talk to me about liquor
    Don't talk to me about beer
    Don't talk to me about pizza
    I don't wanna hear
    




    




    Face Stealer

    This one is a bit of a departure. It stands with only a couple other songs in my catalog as being inspired not by events of my life or observations, not by dreams or my internal world, but from a character – in this case a character from a show.
    




    I don’t spend a lot of time sitting down and watching TV but I’m often working through a show – maybe just a few minutes at a time when I stop to eat or at the very end of the night before I fall asleep. During the time of the songwriting challenge I was watching Avatar: The Last Airbender for the first time. For any Avatar fans – I watched Legend of Korra first, which apparently is sacrilege. A friend was watching it, I got into it, finished it, and immediately started The Last Airbender right around the start of the challenge.
    




    This song is written about, Koh the face stealer, a spirit that does exactly what the name suggests – steals faces. 
    




    “The spirit’s name is Koh, but he is very dangerous. They call him the Face Stealer. When you speak with him, you must be very careful to show no emotion at all. Not the slightest expression, or he will steal your face.“
    




    




    Something about this character and the idea behind its powers really interested and terrified me. I was asking myself how I could manage being in a situation like that – facing a powerful and dangerous entity without being able to show any kind of emotion, no fear, no worry, no shock or surprise. I can be stoic but as a matter of life and death I can’t mask my emotion that well.
    




    


    




    I watched this episode during the challenge and it inspired me to write this song. 
    




    “Face Stealer”
    




    




    Beware
    The face stealer
    Show no worry
    Show no fear
    Show no worry
    Show no fear

    Beware
    The face stealer
    Show sadness
    Show no tears
    Show no anger
    Show no fear

    Show no joy
    Show no surprise
    Show no joy
    Show no surprise
    Beware
    The face stealer
    




    




    Forty Thousand Spirits

    I grew up in Los Angeles County but never lived in Los Angeles proper. Over my years in Southern California I was mostly between Los Angeles and the Inland Empire, primarily around the San Gabriel Valley.
    




    I remember in my early travels meeting people who didn’t know too much about the realities of life in the United States. One woman I met at a pub in London said “you’re from LA so your parents must be pretty wealthy then?” I was surprised – my mom is a lifelong waitress, my dad worked in a factory that produced baked goods. She said all she knew about LA was Hollywood and celebrities so she just assumed anyone who lived there must be rich. On the other hand, I’ve heard from multiple people who were shocked on their first visit to the US to arrive in Los Angeles and witness the extreme level of poverty on display. An Australian man told me he had been traveling in Asia just before arriving in the US and the level of homelessness reminded him of what he had seen in countries that would be referred to as “Third World.” He was not expecting that at all from one of the most powerful and wealthy countries on earth.
    




    Growing up there I guess it’s a thing you take for granted, but after traveling – especially in Europe – and returning, it became very clear. I noticed it more and more over the years, in places I hadn’t noticed it before. Not only on Skid Row or around the streets of downtown Los Angeles, where parks and public spaces are fenced up for “construction” in areas with high volumes of people living outside, and high-rise buildings keep security employed to push away unsavory characters from their doors and steps. The cities I spent the most time in – Pasadena, Arcadia, Temple City, Glendora, Azusa, Ontario, Upland – always had some homeless population, but as the years went on, I see more and more every time I visit. People lined up on freeway off-ramps, asking for money and assistance. Tents along the freeways. Encampments anywhere people can be left alone.
    




    I talked with social workers who worked in LA on programs in education and public health and heard firsthand accounts where when homelessness was brought up the topic was quickly dismissed – as if it were too far gone, broken beyond repair, the funding isn’t there, no viable short or long-term solutions to the reality that tens of thousands of people live without permanent shelter. I spent time on the street, had conversations and interactions with unhoused people, shared food, drink and smoke with them. I heard stories of addiction, prostitution, abuse at the hands of police, other unhoused people, and civilians. I heard stories of tragic life circumstances that led people to survive outside.
    




    I’ll admit that I’ve been quite sheltered over the last decade. I live in a small town with a low population – even then there are people living outside, but the entire population in my area is still a fraction of the homeless population in Los Angeles.
    




    During the challenge I was inspired to write about all of this, to put some of my feelings about everything I had seen into a song. I was looking at articles to get a number of how many people were living on the streets in LA and one article estimated around 40,000. A quick search right now still shows around 40,000+ in the city of Los Angeles, up to 70,000+ across LA County.
    




    There were people I saw during that time who directly inspired scenes and images within the song – the sun-soaked man with the hat, squinting as he picked through a large mound of trash, seen while exiting the highway around the city. A woman with a sign that said exactly what I wrote into the song: anything helps, even a smile. I smiled at her. When I was doing well – even when I wasn’t – I would often stop and offer food, change or whatever I had.
    




    I don’t have a nest egg or 401k, I don’t have money in savings. What I do have is family, friends and community – and with that there is some buffer. If I lost my place to live I know people would take me in. I’m in good health. I can work many different jobs. I’m not addicted to drugs. My mental health is mostly sound. I don’t view any of these things as great achievements fought for and earned – they are circumstantial, brought on by the good graces of chance. And good luck always runs out. Time and time again I’ve been disturbed by how little acknowledgment or empathy some people will extend to those living with less. I’ve heard people speak so badly about the homeless population – with genuine disdain, maybe even hatred. “If they didn’t want to be homeless they should’ve made better choices.” “It’s not too late for them to get a job and clean up their act.” “If they had only worked as hard as the rest of us.” We speak like this and worship politicians and celebrities as models of success, ideal versions of ourselves, of what our lives could be – but I see that we are so much closer to the woman on the side of the highway with a sign in her hands than to the people we put on pedestals. My theory is that there is a subconscious understanding of this – that to see so many people in such desperate situations leads to a sense of insecurity and creates a scarcity mentality and predatory nature in people. We cling to what we have, our precious resources. But as I wrote into this song – they’re just a bill away.
    




    During the challenge, with all these thoughts and feelings in mind, I wrote Forty Thousand Spirits. Nearly ten years later, no closer to any solution or widespread initiative to prevent and end homelessness – here it is, still as relevant as the day I wrote it.
    




    “Forty Thousand Spirits”
    




    




    A skinny man sits utop a pile of trash
    His eyes won't open all the way
    The suns got him squint-in he's wearing his hat
    As cars try to pass without making contact

    King of the mountain
    Mountain of trash
    Being burned by the sun

    In their cars, the drivers believe
    They've got places to go
    They've got places to go people to be and so little time
    People to be so little time and so little money
    While they try to merge they avoid eye contact cause they can't afford it

    How often we witness our brothers living out on the street
    Sleeping in boxes and tents all around the city
    In parks and tunnels off highways and roads
    At least the sun shines year round
    You spend winter sleeping on the ground

    Forty thousand spirits
    Left out on the streets tonight
    Those who stay inside fear it
    Life without their sweet delights

    Security
    Precious resources
    A bill away

    On the local off ramp
    A woman stands with a sign in her hands
    It says God bless anything helps
    Even a smile
    If these parts were happy
    She'd be in business
    Most folks look away
    One day I stopped
    I gave her some fruit
    She said let me tell you a story

    There is a saltine that broke the soup
    It's got salt that feeds who eats
    Yet forgets and forsakes the hungry
    It's got a hand that stirs the slop
    Some spills out over the top
    And goes beyond where we can not reach

    We can swim to the edge to hold ourselves up
    Give rest to our legs to gather our strength and take a breath
    To sail back to the spoon

    There's a spoon that picks us up
    Blows on us to cool us off
    It gives us kisses and some day will eat us whole
    Hmm is that so
    Yes and sir do you have a cigarette

    Forty thousand spirits
    Sleep out on the streets tonight
    Those who stay inside fear it
    Life without their sweet delights

    Security
    Precious resources
    A bill away
    Can't pay
    No water for you
    Can't pay
    No shelter for you
    Can't pay
    No power for you
    Can't pay
    You'll be out on your own
    




    




    Hicks
    




    I have yet to write about this in the archive, but I am a massive fan of comedy. As an audience member I’ve likely attended more live comedy shows than concerts in my life. My older brother has performed in improv for decades, and one of the great highlights of my generally miserable teenage years was tagging along to improv and sketch comedy shows around Los Angeles – most notably at the Groundlings Theater and UCB, the Upright Citizens Brigade where I would go to laugh my ass off weekly. 
    




    This song is inspired by the stand up comedian Bill Hicks. I wouldn’t put him at the top of my favorite comedians these days – I find some of his material hasn’t aged very well and I think a lot of it would illicit more clapter than laughter. But I find him to be an inspiring, if not tragic, figure. He was younger than I am now when he died, and he died just before a massive explosion of opportunities and recognition that came for comedians in the 90s. He didn’t really live to get his flowers. In his short life he held strong positions and took a stand against what he viewed as inauthentic and corrupt in our culture – entertainment, commercialism, politics, the social and political topics of the time. Coming from a conservative Southern background he traveled far down his own path pursuing stand-up, but also writing and recording songs, writing poetry. I found his material very cathartic at a time where I was very angry with the world but hadn’t yet escaped into the freedom of adulthood. Some bits still hold up. He seemed to lean harder into bitterness as the years went on, but I love some of the material he put out at the end of his life, especially when he pulled back the angry facade and spoke about truth and goodness in this world.
    




    During the 2017 song-a-day challenge I wrote a song inspired by my favorite comedians, ultimately dedicated to Bill Hicks. I’m sad to see the state of comedy today where the concept of the truth-telling comedian has been co-opted by corporate-sponsored right-wing comics such as Joe Rogan, who actually seem to be influencing social and political thought in favor of those in power. I imagine Bill Hicks would have had extreme contempt for that. I have respect and admiration for anyone willing to go onto a stage and try to make people laugh – and to do it in a way that challenges us, makes us look at things a little differently, and invites us to laugh at the absurdity of our human lives.
    




    “Hicks”
    




    




    Truth can be a pain
    In our distorted world
    In the quest for truthfulness
    Some minds go beyond

    With a reach that has no bounds
    With a reach that has no bounds
    Some minds go beyond

    They learn the fact from fiction
    They bare and fuse the pain
    With sharp communication
    They turn our misery to comedy

    They become ambassadors
    Champions of honesty
    They become ambassadors
    Make us laugh our asses off (Ha ha ha)

    Dear Bill
    We miss you
    In this crowded world
    So full of bull
    You cut straight through
    Speaking truth
    Without fear
    Without regret
    We thank you
    Dear Bill
    




    




    Unplugged (Unfinished – finished July 2018)
    




    This is a song I didn’t feel settled with at the time of the 2017 challenge. I submitted a demo that was underdeveloped and felt unfinished to me. I no longer have that demo — I brought it back during the July 2018 challenge and finished it then. That’s the only version that exists now. (Link to July 2018 entry will go here later)
    




    




    Expressing Frustration At Soundcloud
    




    I had always thought of this as a throwaway and considered not including it in the article at all. But I found the audio file, listened through it, transcribed the lyrics and actually like it more than I remembered. It works as a time capsule – reminding me just how bad the SoundCloud app used to be.
    




    In 2017 I couldn’t check messages, comments or lyrics on the iOS app and would need to log into the browser version on a computer to access any of it – which was very frustrating, especially when I was using it daily and there was a big social component to the song-a-day group. People were constantly reacting and leaving comments on each other’s SoundCloud submissions. Also at that time I was reading articles talking about how SoundCloud was potentially going out of business, and that Chance the Rapper was in talks to purchase it and revive it. My commentary on the track includes nods to that, as well as a handful of user requests for an app update and the scripted responses from SoundCloud agents saying they were working on the updates – despite it having been years with no update.
    




    The robot voice you hear in the middle of the song was generated from copying and pasting a typical SoundCloud spam message of the time.
    




    SoundCloud these days is not perfect. It never really returned to its glory days. The ads are frustrating – I stopped using it for a couple of years and recently began uploading my demos there again. There’s a convenience I’m willing to pay for, but I find that for others sitting through ads to listen to my music is very off-putting. I’ll probably move away from it again once I can figure out another means. In any case, I’m shocked that after all these years they actually updated the app and I can do lyrics and comments now – although I don’t think I can check messages, but that’s okay because most of the messages I receive are spam anyway. That hasn’t changed.
    




    I don’t think it’s one of the better songs from this challenge or my catalog in general, but it serves as a time capsule for something I had entirely forgotten. For that, I appreciate it.
    




    “Expressing Frustration At Soundcloud”
    




    




    I stay up all night
    Writing tunes singing to a cheap mic
    I am a lonely engineer
    Been hoarding my tunes for many years
    Now I’ve broken my silent spell
    And sent some tunes to float in the soundcloud
    SoundCloud in the soundcloud

    SoundCloud app for ios
    Is a pile of shit/ish
    Without steam or a fly on it
    Just a plain old shit

    Can’t comment can’t leave any messages
    Can’t even read these words
    On the SoundCloud
    (It was meant to be updated three years ago) 

    Most my likes are spam likes
    But i keep posting songs
    Is there anybody with a body listening
    Why should i go on

    SoundCloud app for ios
    Is a pile of shit/ish
    Without steam or a fly on it
    Just a plain old shit
    




    




    Destination Fever 
    




    The last song I completed for the challenge. After nearly a month of obsessive writing and recording, I went out with one more instrumental – very guitar-heavy, definitely inspired by the kind of instrumental guitar music I became obsessed with in my mid to late teens. Namely Paul Gilbert.
    




    There’s a story behind the guitar I used to record it. I bought it cheap off OfferUp – maybe $150 – and it was one of the only guitars I’ve ever had with a tremolo on it. Some kind of knockoff Bigsby. For anyone who doesn’t know, the tremolo on a guitar is a piece of hardware that lets you make the notes go WEEOOHWEEOOHWEE and WAHWAHWAHWAHWAHWAH. Great fun.
    




    I started playing with the tremolo and the song just started pouring out one riff at a time. Sadly, not long after getting the guitar I had the bright idea to upgrade the neck – bought a nice Fender neck off OfferUp – which led to me taking the guitar apart less than two weeks after I got it, dropping it off at a friend’s house to set up, and then discovering the neck didn’t fit the body. By that point I was already off to Oregon. The original neck got lost. I wouldn’t see the guitar again for almost ten years. Even now I have the body and that neck but it’s never gone back together because the original is lost and I haven’t found a proper replacement.
    




    That guitar was used for exactly one song and one recording session. Then I took it apart and ruined it.
    




    Destination Fever was the final song I completed for that challenge. And just days later I would begin one of the greatest voyages of my life – the one that led me to Port Orford, and eventually to this.
    




    “Destination Fever”
    




    




    

    


    


  • 


    The Challenge: July 2017 Pt. 2 – Songs 1-13
    


    

    




    Continuing from Pt. 1 – this entry contains the songs and stories behind the songs I wrote and recorded during the first half of the 30 day song-a-day challenge in July 2017.
    




    




    Ten To One
    




    This is a historic song for me — the very first song of the very first song challenge I ever attempted. One thing I discovered over the course of that first month was that in order to keep up with the demands of the task at hand, I would need to take the following approach: every day start something, and every day finish something. With that said, I had actually started working on the song I would submit for day two — Following — the day before the challenge began. But I decided that to start off right I should hold myself to writing and submitting something completely brand new on the very first day. So essentially both Following and Ten To One were written and completed within a 24-hour window, but I would wait until after I woke up on July 1 to begin work on Ten To One.
    




    The title refers to the period in which I slept that day — going to sleep at 10 AM and waking up at 1 PM. I can’t remember what if any reason I had to stay up until the day was already underway, but truthfully it’s not out of the ordinary for me. I believe I was up working on Following, and the excitement of this new songwriting venture surely had something to do with it.
    




    This song and a few others are tied in my memory to the house in Arcadia, California that my mom rented for about a year after leaving our house on Acaso Drive. It was there that I stayed up all night, slept just a few hours, and woke up to write this song. It’s a short and simple song — I employed some jazzier 2-5-1 type progressions that I wouldn’t typically reach for, especially these days. There’s really not much to it. I think I wrote and arranged it within just a couple of hours, went into the garage, set up a couple of microphones, and ran through it until I got a take I was happy with. Sleep deprived and excited for the month to come. This recording would be the very last time I ever played this song — really just a song for the moment, for the challenge, something I wouldn’t have written otherwise. And with that, we were off.
    




    “Ten To One”
    




    




    One Two
    Three hours of sleep
    How I rest my eyes
    Three hours of sleep gone by

    Stayed up for the sun
    Went to sleep alone
    Woke up spooning this new tune

    Thought I'd catch up on Z's
    I woke up to Saturday
    What happened to the week?

    One Two
    Three hours of sleep
    How I rest my eyes
    Three hours of sleep gone by
    (And the day waits)
    




    




    Following
    




    Following would have been the first song I actually began writing going into the challenge, but I bumped it with the decision to start something new on the day itself. With Ten To One out of the way and Following mostly written, I had a chance to dedicate the day more to the guitar arrangement and recording. I have a faint memory of recording this not in the garage but in the spare bedroom — I believe it may have been my grandma’s bedroom. I’m not sure where she would have been at the time, most likely visiting with some uncle or my aunt, but I seem to remember recording the vocals in the middle of the night, almost at a whisper, sitting on her bed along with the guitars.
    




    If you know me or if you’ve read other entries on this site, you may know that I don’t have warm feelings about social media and the influence it has across the world. From my first exposure to Instagram and Facebook I felt that they were deeply rotten and threatening to our minds and behavior. I had become pretty fixated on the idea that our relationships and social skills were being tarnished — social life being reduced to symbols on a screen, the meanings of words like friend, follow, share and like being slowly reassigned away from their original meanings into abstract digital concepts. I would elaborate on this in Unplugged, which began during this challenge and was revisited during the 2018 song-a-day challenge. Whereas Unplugged focused on that reappropriation of language, Following was written from a more satirical place.
    




    What pushed the song was how often at the shows I was playing and attending there would be this obligatory moment where the band would face the crowd and say “follow us on Instagram.” I never felt any deep enthusiasm behind it — mostly desperation, and some embarrassment. It is a desperate situation that essentially the most viable path to connect with an audience runs through services designed to be as addictive as possible, to engross as many people as possible, to generate as much revenue as possible for grotesque companies. Not to mention around that time I remember at any social gathering, a party or after-show hangout, it seemed like people couldn’t wait for the moment where they go to say “do you have Instagram, can I follow you?” Passing their phones back and forth and calling it “connection.” 
    




    The song is written as a parody — from the perspective of someone who has fully given themselves over to the platform, maintaining a curated false reality, following the trends, maximizing their engagement, telling themselves they don’t need to go outside because they can see the world through their phone. By the end the narrator asks with some desperation if you’ll follow them back.
    




    I’ve gone through cycles with this over the years — spending months or years at a time with no social media presence at all, deleting accounts entirely, which in some cases meant losing contact with certain people forever. A ghostly presence as only a lurker, not a poster, which is roughly where I’ve been lately. And at other times actually posting updates and sharing music, which truthfully has been positive in the periods I’ve taken that route — which I find all the more conflicting.
    




    Unlike Ten To One, this silly sarcastic song found life after the challenge as an irregular but frequent enough appearance in the sets of The Planet Of, where it took on a heavier and more rocking tone. I’ll include an alternate demo featuring my brother Ryan on bass and Scott McTaggart on drums. I’ve always imagined a music video for this one. It still lives in my head. Someday, perhaps.
    




    “Following”
    




    




    Following the leader
    Following the path
    Who carves @ my name
    I'll laugh when yer lookin'
    Like it's all a gas
    Who will pick me up
    When I'm cryin' when I'm lyin'

    I could see the world
    Don't even have to stand
    I could be a man
    I could take a pic I could
    poke it in my hand
    I could be a brand
    Would you buy, what I'm supplyin'

    I don't really know you
    Still I adore you
    I've looked into your wall one thousand times
    I may never see your eyes but I'll
    look at whatchu let me
    Baby I'm subscribed

    I'm following you
    Will you follow me
    I'm following you
    Are you following
    I'm following you
    Will you follow me
    I'm following you
    Are you following
    




    




    Will Hide
    




    I have such a vivid, dream-like memory of the day surrounding this song. Just the third song in and I already felt fully in the throes of songwriting obsession. I was back at Rad Pro, back in my little recording space in Ontario, and one of the key moments that sparked this song came when I was walking through downtown Ontario and a black SUV passed me with music blaring. Meanwhile I was in my head, trying to dig up an idea for the next song.
    




    I began to imagine a song that essentially haunts me — something that comes from outside and finds me anywhere I go. I meant for it to be the story of an earworm. I was imagining a melody I cannot stand, maybe just something playing from that car, now playing in the store, now playing in my mind wherever I go. An inescapable force.
    




    It felt like a natural meta exploration of what was already happening during this period of intense writing. When I’m working on something I will listen to it over and over and over — headphones on, walking laps around downtown Ontario, taking notes on anything I want to change or add, then going back in to keep pushing. These days I do the same thing on the road or at the beach or walking through the forest. That pattern never really left. In the story of Will Hide though, the separation is that usually when I’m working on something I’m excited about it — I want to develop it and see where it goes. But in the story of this song, the melody is something I’m trying to escape. Something I don’t like. A torturous earworm that follows me everywhere.
    




    The chorus is really the most direct commentary on what was happening during the challenge — another day, another song, another chance to do it all wrong. The rest of the song follows the listener trying to escape this melody before ending in a kind of resignation, an acceptance: I’ll be better off if I just learn to love it, and whether I love it or hate it doesn’t really matter. That resignation was a key realization that came to me during this challenge — that perfection is impossible, and the kind of thinking that tells you something isn’t good enough yet will take something exciting and turn it into nothing. Dust. Working through a song every day meant I couldn’t be too picky. I had to take something good enough and follow it to the end.
    




    Between working on new songs day to day I would also return to these ideas and develop them further — and in this case, having the demo done gave me the opportunity to collaborate. My brother-in-law Andy Egyud sent me a pass with many different bass ideas, I asked him to experiment, try melodic parts, try different things throughout the song — and what you hear is a composite, heavily edited from the original take he sent. I’ve always wanted to return to this one to record live drums, fresh vocals, and remix the track. I believe I did do a remix around 2022/2023 and that’s the version included here. It’s a strange song but I still enjoy it, and I’m particularly fond of the vocal harmonies — which was very new territory for me. Just a few days into the challenge and I was already stretching beyond anything I had written or recorded before.
    




    “Will Hide”
    




    




    Walked outside wasn't feeling very happy
    Wasn't happy happy at all
    I heard a tune playing in a car driving by me
    I didn't like it didn't like it at all
    That feeling that stain on the street
    I think I'd rather have stayed inside

    Another day another song
    Another chance to get along
    Another jam another lesson
    One more blind experimentation

    I kept walking I went to the store where
    On the ceiling I heard that same blasted ear worm
    Then I went to the park and I heard it on someone's phone
    It follows me everywhere I roam

    Everywhere I roam it follows me
    Everywhere I roam it follows
    Outside sounds so loud
    Can't turn em off
    Outside sounds so loud

    So I
    (will hide) In a basement
    (will hide) With my guitar
    (will hide) Behind the glass
    (will hide) From the mess
    (will hide) From my enemies
    (will hide) From my friends
    (will hide) From beginnings
    (will hide) From the end
    (will hide) from the tunes
    (will hide) in my head
    (will hide) in the night
    I will never go to bed
    (will hide) From my demons
    (will hide) Or I will try
    (will hide) From all the sounds my ears don't like

    When I come out of hiding I'm stuck to the street
    I'm stuck to the sounds inside and outside of me
    Hiding or not a song will play on
    Love it and hate it I must tolerate it
    If I learn to love it I'll feel a lot better
    If I love to share I'll get along anywhere
    If I learn to love it I'll feel a lot better
    Love it or hate it doesn't really matter

    Another day another song
    Another chance to do it all wrong
    Another jam another lesson
    One more blind experimentation
    Another day another night
    Another chance to get it right
    Another jam another session
    




    




    Bad Kitty
    




    Ft. Ryan Feliciano (Bass, shred guitar)
    




    Bad Kitty represented a major shift from the previous songs I had written for the challenge. I had spent the day and night pulling together Will Hide — a lo-fi, almost trip-hop inspired track — and before that I had kicked things off with Ten To One, which is basically a jazzy folk song. I wanted to push myself to write something very different. I decided I wanted something heavy, with scorching guitar solos, leaning into some of my earlier influences in heavy rock and metal.
    




    It was within those first few days that I was sharing my demos to SoundCloud and sending them to a few friends and close family outside the group. My older brother Richard made a request — after listening to the first couple of songs he asked if I could write a song about a terrible cat. He was referring to his cat Judy, whose Instagram handle was @judytheterrible. I’ll note that the account is still active — she just hasn’t posted in a while, as her admin team has been busy raising my niece for the last five years.
    




    I had this in mind already and almost instantaneously, when I resolved to write a hard rock and metal jam, the concept of Bad Kitty just clicked. I conceived the ending before anything else — it would all lead toward some over-the-top, absurd grand finale, a chorus of cats just singing meow meow meow meow like the demented metal cousin of the Meow Mix jingle.
    




    I wanted to lean into the 80s metal that influenced me as a teenager and I think that guided the tones and riffs that started to shape the song. It was honestly difficult to record a lot of the guitar parts — it demanded a type of playing I hadn’t done for years at that point, which in itself made it more challenging than composing the piece. The lyrics are simple and tell the story of a bad kitty, a cat that bites. Judy loved and still loves to bite. I think she’s bitten me almost every time I’ve seen her since she was a kitten.
    




    As I was putting the song together I realized the scope I wanted to take with it was beyond what I was fully capable of technically, so this was the first song in the challenge where I brought in my brother Ryan for collaboration. I had already recorded the overall form — the first guitar solo you hear was composed and performed in chunks by me, channeling my inner Yngwie Malmsteen — but by the time the lyrics hit “baaaad kittyyyy” and the ferocious harmonized guitars begin, that’s Ryan’s contribution, along with his soaring shredding guitar solo at the end.
    




    I’ve never been married to genre. I’m constantly moving between different influences and I love lots of music. Across the song challenges I’ve really enjoyed doing genre shifts, setting the intention to lean into something different for a day. If I didn’t have that openness I wouldn’t have managed to compose such a ridiculous rock anthem for my brother’s cat. And there would be no fun in that.
    




    




    Razor sharp claws
    Biting is her game
    But she's not playing
    There's terror in her name

    Terror is her business
    Business is good
    Business is damn good
    You better watch out

    If you've got a back
    Don't you ever think about turning around
    Beast out for the attack
    She is built to tear you down tear you down

    Kitty
    Kitty

    Bad kitty
    Bad kitty
    Terrible kitty
    Terrible terrible kitty
    She sings!

    Meow meow meow meow
    (ad infinitum)
    




    




    Young Love
    




    Young Love is a song about exactly that. During the challenge I was constantly fishing for ideas and this one started with just a few riffs I had arranged in a GarageBand project. Something about the quality and flavor of those riffs took me back to a sort of preteen state, reminding me of bands like Coheed and Cambria — never a favorite of mine, but one I listened to occasionally in my early teens. Once those teenage years were evoked I started digging into feelings around a high school relationship.
    




    I had a conversation with a friend recently who expressed how much he misses the feeling of being in love the way we experienced it in our youth. We talked about whether that intensity comes from naivety, lack of exposure, immaturity, or just pure hormones — but whatever it was, we both agreed that it felt so consuming, even just having a crush as a kid or teen. And how relationships as adults feel more measured, less all-consuming, more subtle.
    




    With that said, the phenomenon I’ve experienced is that as time goes on my understanding and capacity for love seems to grow. With every relationship, every experience, something expands. I had this idea that the relationship of my teenage years represented the maximum amount of love I was able to give and feel at the time — but as I went into more mature relationships and experienced greater depths of connection, so too did I experience greater depths of love, and that capacity kept growing. Yet when I think back to that young love I can still feel that part of me. It’s like that love is still there. It was the strongest I had known at that time, but in looking back it was just a cup in a well of love there is still to know.
    




    One more thing worth noting: the intro to the song is actually one of the earliest pieces of music I ever wrote, from my teenage years — a small instrumental that came out one day, which I notated in transcription software and managed to hang onto all these years. I wrote it at that time with my girlfriend in mind. So there’s a little piece of 16-year-old me at the top of this song.
    




    




    Young love
    Passed sure
    But never lost
    I remember how I filled my cup
    And overflowed with you
    Since then
    I tipped the cup
    I dove into a full on pool
    Filled with other souls with whom
    I've sunken into tenderness
    So deep now that I can swim
    In love so deep now that I swim
    I still remember the young love
    I still remember the young love
    Still remember how I filled my cup
    And overflowed with you
    And overflowed (still remember young love)
    Still remember the young love
    




    




    Insomniac Stupor Rag
    




    This was the first instrumental I wrote for the challenge and came from a desire to pivot again — I remember feeling a little burnt out, or at least struggling more than I had the previous days to come up with a lyrical concept I felt strongly about. In a song-a-day challenge the rules are pretty loose, as I covered in the background entry, and plenty of participants don’t submit lyrical pieces at all.
    




    As the title suggests I was essentially living as an insomniac at this point, sleeping very few hours, spending most of my days and nights developing and recording songs for the challenge. Even a song like Bad Kitty demanded an all-night session to piece together and record. I usually record through the night anyway — so that’s what inspired the title. Sleep deprived, I decided to write a simpler piece for guitar in a ragtime style.
    




    This kind of fingerpicking style represented a significant shift in my playing. It was later that I would really dive into it, getting turned onto the ragtime blues of artists like Blind Willie McTell. And probably the first piece in this style I ever learned was one of my favorite songs — These Days, written by Jackson Browne and recorded by Nico from the Velvet Underground. It was in my traveling years around 2013 to 2015 that I was really learning pieces like this, playing around with this bouncy picking that combines bass, chords and melodies all at once — it greatly changed my approach to playing guitar. I enjoyed putting this piece together as a way to connect with those influences.
    




    




    




    Sister
    




    I believe this is the first song from the challenge where I lifted some lyrics I had written previously. A few months before the challenge I had gotten into an argument with my sister, who was in her late teen years at the time. What I had hoped could be a constructive conversation quickly turned into a communication breakdown and came to an abrupt end with no resolution. I wrote a few words then but hadn’t really considered it as a song until this day.
    




    The song moves from those feelings around the miscommunication into something much warmer — ending with some kind words to clarify that I love her, that I think she’s brilliant and capable of doing anything she wants in this life. Both success and failure are guaranteed, but there is nothing to fear. When I played it to her she said she was put off at first but ultimately thought it was sweet. I couldn’t ask for much more than that.
    




    The song features Ryan on bass, who really nailed the poppy, punchy feel that tied it all together. It’s a musically strange song, and it featured what I think was the most ambitious vocal melody I had written up to that point. This ended up being a regular song toward the beginning of The Planet Of performances.
    




    




    Sister
    Can you step outside
    With me
    Absolutely
    You can
    But will you please

    Please listen for meaning
    Not implications sis
    Meanings are here now
    Implications will become
    Much later on
    I'm here with you now
    Where is your mind?

    You've run away from home with your implications
    You've run away and you left all of your potential
    You've run away from home with your implications
    You've run away and you left all your potential

    You are beautiful you are smart
    You can do anything
    Just as you please
    No soul to come of the earth
    Can stop you
    So long as you believe
    You are powerful
    You are smart
    And clever to do as you please

    You will run far with your intuition
    You hold the world in your hands with great potential
    You will run oh so far with your intuition
    You will take the world on with your boundless spirit

    You will succeed don't be afraid
    You will also fail please don't be afraid
    You will succeed don't be afraid
    You will also fail don't you be afraid
    




    




    The Witch & The Wizard
    




    This was the second instrumental I wrote for the challenge and another stylistic departure. Here I was leaning into the kind of guitar instrumental music I listened to a great deal during my teenage years. My playing is nowhere near the masters of this style, but a clear and direct influence here is the album Erotic Cakes by Guthrie Govan.
    




    Once I started piecing together the backing track I had a strong feeling that I wanted the song built entirely around a couple of solos, so I reached out to Ryan and asked him to write a solo over the form. We recorded our solos independently and I pieced them together with a short bridge in the middle, and an intro and outro to sandwich them. In my mind the Witch and the Wizard are real characters – I could see and hear them in this song.
    




    




    




    Sharks Not Sharks
    




    This song has very clear inspiration in real events. The day I wrote it was the day of a long event at a legendary DIY venue in downtown LA called The Smell. I was performing with the band Xinxin for an event being put on by my dear friend Karen Joyce, who publishes music under the name Take Kare. Take Kare – Bloom music video
    




    There was drama that unfolded over the course of the event that I wasn’t aware of until near the end of the evening. Essentially there was a conflict between Karen and a friend who had been co-organizing the event. As I understand it, the friend took serious issue with a piece Karen was performing — an avant-garde jazz performance in which improvised music was played while Karen read out the names of individuals who had been killed in instances of police brutality. I thought the piece was poignant and deeply compelling. But the co-organizer, who Karen had considered a close friend, accused Karen of using the names of these victims to seek attention, and told Karen that if the piece was performed, she would have nothing to do with the event.
    




    This was sprung on Karen the day of a major event they had planned together for some time. After going back and forth, Karen made the decision to perform the piece. The co-organizer performed her own set early in the evening and left with some attitude, leaving Karen to handle everything the two of them were meant to do together. The event went well. The performances went well. But once I heard what had happened it seemed clear to me that this was less a moral objection and more something ego-driven — some kind of competitive instinct, a drive to sabotage. I got back to the studio that night and wrote this song.
    




    It’s essentially an acknowledgment and rejection of those who claim to be friends, collaborators and supporters, but ultimately act from bad intentions brought on by their own insecurities. I started calling them sharks, then quickly realized that was unfair to innocent sharks. As I wrote into the song — a shark would never tell you what not to do, especially not to do something good for you. This one’s for Karen, and for anyone who’s got haters.
    




    




    Don't be discouraged
    We live in a shark tank
    Where everyone feeds on blood
    They try to cut you
    Compulsively
    So they can feed

    I'm being unfair I shouldn't compare
    Them to sharks
    A shark would never tell you what not to do
    Especially not to do something good by you

    But somehow these folks have it in them
    To dominate you while they call you friend
    These days friendship is only a click away
    They hold up their bodies to lurk in the clouds
    Think they look down with great understanding
    But they're only looking down
    On the world
    On themselves
    On the world and on you and I

    They say stay woke
    But they only stay home
    They sleep on the same mattress
    Every night and every day
    They treat us like screens
    They be projecting
    They want to push us sit back and escape

    Masters of manipulation, worshippers of death
    They prey on words, to lay good to rest
    Make any case to halt progress for they want us idle
    But we know the depths of pain, that come with feeling
    We know the stress of being, gracious yet painted as villains
    We know how pretentious, the sharks of this land can be
    But we know not the misery, of wanting so badly for others not to succeed

    I'd hate to imagine
    Don't get discouraged
    We are evolving
    We are on the rise
    This is why
    They try to gut us

    We'll make our own cuts
    We'll keep our hearts open
    We'll feed the world
    We'll keep our minds open
    And our feet in the ground
    Where the sharks can't bite us
    The sharks that ain't sharks
    




    




    Bar Rats
    




    This song is essentially an instrumental, although there is some singing at the end. I started writing it with a concept in mind — a bar band. My understanding of what a bar band is has changed a great deal since living in rural Oregon for nearly a decade, but at the time I was going to a lot of bars and hearing a lot of bands around LA, particularly in the San Gabriel Valley and Inland Empire music scene. I had this image of a band that only plays bars, doing some kind of retro psychedelic surf rock, and I thought it would be funny if at the end of an instrumental jam the whole band sang a gang vocal of the words we are bar rats. So I wrote the piece — different melodies, a guitar solo, all leading to that final chant.
    




    Ryan contributed bass to this one, and came up with the great idea to record a bass being tuned at the very top of the song — that’s where I added the ad-lib “come on man, start the song” in the intro. My favorite thing about this recording is the way the vocals came together. I took a walk through the studio and started asking anyone around if they would come sing on a track. I ended up with myself, Mikey, and a trio from a band called the Frick Fracks all crowded around a single pair of headphones. It was the Frick Fracks who suggested the additional vocal harmony at the end, which made the whole thing. 
    




    Check out The Frick Fracks – Parallel (Music Video) 
    




    

    




    

    




    




    Chasing Cars
    




    This is a very sad song about a sad day and a sad event. It’s about death — I witnessed the hit-and-run death of a small dog, which in hindsight followed what was essentially the death of a relationship. I didn’t even realize it when I wrote it.
    




    The events unfolded like this: I went to visit the gal I was seeing at the time and everything just felt off, the way it does sometimes toward the end. We hadn’t spelled anything out, just had a detached and awkward meeting. When I was saying my goodbyes at her front door I heard a commotion down the street. She had told me previously about a neighbor’s dog that would roam the street and come visit with her and her grandma on occasion. Across many visits I had never actually seen the dog — until this day.
    




    I walked out and looked down the road. I could see the dog lying in the street and an SUV driving off. I walked up the road and as I got closer I could see he was still moving slightly. He was a small dog, some type of terrier mix. I knelt down and said something to him and he let out his last exhale. I looked over to my right and a young woman was walking out of a house looking concerned. I asked if it was her dog. She said no, he’s my uncle’s, and asked if he was dead. I looked at him, then back to her and just shook my head.
    




    It was just a day or two later that I wrote this song. Within a week she and I would meet again and make clear it was the end. That visit to her house was the last time I went to see her with the idea that there might be something between us. In a sense there were two deaths that day. RIP.
    




    




    I heard a screech, I heard a cry
    So I took to the street
    I saw an SUV driving
    I didn't realize
    It was a getaway

    Left behind in the road
    I saw a shape I saw a twitch, I saw a tail wag
    I rushed over but in that time
    He stiffened up, he had leaked out
    I said hello asked are you there
    But there was no response
    He had gone, he had flown

    Little dog
    Chasing cars
    Little dog chasing cars
    Til he got too close

    Saw a woman asked is he yours
    She said no he's my uncle's, sir is he dead
    I touched his head, and sadly shook my own

    Dogs chasing cars
    Dogs chasing cars
    They get so close
    Dogs chasing cars
    They will run they will bark
    Til some day they catch one
    Little dog
    Chasing cars
    He ran and he ran
    Til the day he caught one
    




    




    Flower Man
    




    This song was inspired and informed very much by my friend Enrique — who I will undoubtedly write several future entries about. We are from different countries, him from Spain and me from the US, and we met in Cuba, where we had an instant musical connection and began an adventurous friendship that took us across Cuba, the US, and Spain together. He is still making great music under the name Caro Raro. Check out Caro Raro – Cora De Papel (Music Video)
    




    The idea that initially inspired this song came from a story he told me about his childhood and his dad. He said that as a child his dad would tell him — and I’m translating from Spanish here — essentially, son, you were born with a flower in the ass. His dad said this because as a kid everybody loved him and life just seemed to work out. He was lucky from birth. There are a couple of close English expressions — your shit don’t stink, sunshine coming out of your ass — though they tend to carry a more negative connotation. This was the positive take. Another expression Enrique taught me was comeflor — literally flower eater — a somewhat derogatory Spanish term for hippies. I love it. I’ve been called a hippie in a derogatory way over the years and it still happens occasionally, and I don’t mind it at all. There are much worse things to be called and much worse things to be. As an old hippie friend once told me, being a hippie is just about being free.
    




    Instead of writing about Enrique’s anointed childhood I wrote about my own life as a hippie — traveling with minimal worries, trusting in nature, trusting existence to provide what I need, preferring a life in nature over material pursuits and the world of man. The song becomes an account of wild animal encounters I’ve had around the world: walking amongst wild boars in the hills near Barcelona, interacting with monkeys in Costa Rica and Israel, walking up on rattlesnakes several times over the years including in Joshua Tree, feeding raccoons near Montreal — and most notably, after a long day on a beach in Puerto Rico, sitting on a blanket by the shoreline playing guitar when a sea turtle appeared next to me, stopped for a moment, then made its way up the sand to nest and back to sea when it was done. That whole saga deserves its own entry.
    




    And so if I’m a comeflor, if some people look down on my lifestyle, my lack of grooming or presentation or status — you can call me a hippie, you can say I was born with a flower in the ass, and I will laugh.
    




    This basically became the anthem of my life as a traveling hippie, and it became a staple in The Planet Of live performances — providing a more chill departure from the otherwise high energy rock sets. The live arrangement was extended for a tasty guitar solo from Kevin Miller. Soon I’ll share a live take alongside the original demo.
    




    Flower Man (Original Demo)
    




    




    Flower Man (Live with The Planet Of)
    




    NEED TO FIND IT!
    




    Some say I was born with a flower in the ass
    I laugh 'cause I know just what they are getting at

    I've been broke I've been traveling the world
    I'm still broke still traveling home
    With or without coin, just a flower in the ass
    I will keep my cool to sip the water from gas
    With or without shelter I sleep well
    With or without certainty I trust in nature
    I know she will protect wherever I go
    I know she will provide if I'm immersed in flow

    I don't worry, I don't sweat
    The littlest things

    I can't say I'm a fan of the world of man
    The endless quest for power and hunt for paper
    I dropped out of the race, I won't play it safe
    I'd rather chase the happiness I find in nature

    I'm not worried, I won't sweat
    All the littlest things

    I'm a lucky duck and a naturalist
    All my tunes make reference to the animals
    Sharks rats dogs n cats I love them so
    I could write for 30 days about the beasts that I've known

    Monkeys and raccoons who've eaten from my hand
    Wild boars I've ran with in the night
    The sea turtle that came to me playing on the beach
    Coyotes owls and rattle snakes that startled me

    Bats lizards humming birds and flower man
    Bats lizards humming birds and flower man
    Flower man
    Flower man
    




    




    Cynics In Love
    




    Another song that became a staple with The Planet Of — I’ll include the live arrangement alongside the original demo.
    




    This song had some lyrical content written over a year before the challenge, but the concept came from something I had felt in a relationship. The dynamic was this: a partner and I had built a kind of cocoon around ourselves where we would connect and indulge in shared criticism and critique of the world. It brought us closer in a way — created a sense of dependence, a safe space for vulnerability that felt closed off from the outside. It wasn’t too bad, honestly. But I recognized it wasn’t ideal for me. I want to grow in love, be more vulnerable, more open — not more sealed off.
    




    The song takes that dynamic and pushes it to an extreme. It’s written about a couple fully given over to this — two people who indulge so deeply in shared negativity that it becomes the thing that holds them together. I really indulged in the negativity of it. There’s more I could write about this one, but I’ll leave it here for now.
    




    The image that anchors the whole song came to me during a Vipassana meditation retreat — ten days of silence, no entertainment, just walking a path in the desert between meditations. One day I came upon other retreat participants gathered around something on the ground. Ants eating a bee. The bee was still alive, barely, moving in pain as it was being swarmed. The line came immediately: ants tear a writhing bee apart / that’s them / the ants their minds / and the bee their heart. I hung onto that until the retreat was over and I could write it down.
    




    




    Ants tear a writhing bee apart
    That's them
    The ants their minds
    And the bee (is) their heart
    They share the nutrients and pain
    They share the passion
    As they share the blood lust
    Like rabid beasts, two cynics in love
    They hiss and spit at anyone who comes up
    Meanwhile they sit back and watch
    With a sour spot they sit and curse the whole lot
    Misery loves company
    The worst wine is more bitter shared
    The abused become the aggressors
    These victims can't stop with each other
    On and on two pessimists in love
    They gather and laugh at how the worlds fucked
    Though they're knee deep in the shit
    They just happy, they each created half of it
    Two cynics in love, that's them
    They gather and laugh at how the worlds fucked

    




    




    

    


    


  • 


    The Challenge: July 2017 Pt. 1 – Background
    


    

    In July 2017 I was living full-time at Rad Pro Studios on 123 W. D St. in Ontario, California. I had built out one of the smallest rooms in the building into my recording space – a place to practice, write and record. I slept in a long hallway in the basement, which was an echo chamber made entirely of concrete. I would drop a mattress on the floor when it was time to sleep. At one end of the corridor we had rigged up a makeshift shower – a garden hose with a drain. Rad Pro took reservations 24 hours a day and as a late night owl I was always on call, setting up and cashing out bands at any hour of the night and early morning.
    




    Outside the studio I was doing occasional solo and band performances and playing with my dear friends in the early days of Xinxin. In my family life there had been an upheaval. I had spent the first half of 2017 facilitating the sale of our family home and the separation of my parents – months of work on the property, selling and trashing things, moving decades of accumulated stuff out piece by piece. Four shanty dwellings my dad and I had built over the years had to be demolished. A lot of history was taken apart. I wrote about this period in the entry for Acaso.
    




    Through this work I ended up with some cash in my pocket, which I used to buy a laptop, interface, a couple microphones and a few other recording and music making items – all found and haggled for on OfferUp. I had gone about five years without a laptop or any means to record outside of using the Rad Pro facilities when I was in the area. Most of that time I had been on the road traveling with just a nylon guitar and eventually a very heavy resonator I bought used for $200. I had just started recording rough demos in late 2015/early 2016 on borrowed gear, and once I had my own setup I was recording every chance I had.
    




    By July things had settled down at the family home and my dad and I were hatching a plan to leave California and look for land in Oregon. By the first week of August we would arrive in what would become my new home. But down in California the hard work was done and the keys had been handed over to the new owners. I was waiting for the next move.
    




    Sometime in June I caught wind through the local music community that there was going to be a songwriting group. The goal was to write a song a day for 30 days. I was intrigued, excited and scared. Like many others I was prolific with starting songs and ideas but not very skilled with finishing them. But I was up for the challenge and the timing was just right – I was able to dedicate the month of July entirely to writing and recording every day.
    




    The group was hosted on Facebook and had many members – there had to have been over 30 at the start. The guidelines were laid out as such:

    “A song can be anything! The point of this is to make a habit of tuning in to the universal creative force… so do whatever you want! Just do something, and don’t judge yourself! It doesn’t matter at all if it’s good or not. It can be a completed song idea with parts, or it can just be a looped beat idea! Quality is unimportant, and collaboration is encouraged. All genres are welcome! Hip-hop, metal, ska, trippy soundscapes, funk, folk… EXPERIMENT!”
    




    “We’re working with this premise: Listen to the universe, come up with an idea, and get it out of you! Stop being a perfectionist! This challenge forces you to stop judging what you make. If you show up every day and write 30 songs, there’s a good chance some of them will be really great.”
    




    A handful of participants were peers from the Inland Empire and San Gabriel Valley music scene – people I’d played shows with, seen around the studio, had the occasional jam with. Many others I never met in person but got to know online through the challenge. The structure was simple: the first person to complete their song each day would share their link in a new post, and everyone else would reply with their own submission. If you fell behind you were invited to jump back in at any time – you’d just pick up from wherever you left off and try to catch up. By the end it came down to a hard core group of diehards, as all challenges do.
    




    One of those diehards was the late Chris Swanson. Chris was part of the Inland Empire scene and his songs always pushed and inspired me. He participated in 2017, 2018 and 2019 song-a-day groups. His song Woman on his final release with the band Bodegas began as a demo submitted during the 2019 challenge. He passed away in 2023. I think about him often. 
    




    The challenge consumed my life. It was the last thing I thought about before I went to sleep and the first thing I thought about in the morning. I began to seek inspiration in everything – every conversation, every sight, every dream, every walk. I would stay up until the sun came up almost every night recording. Some nights after recording until sunrise I’d feel so inspired for the next song that I’d push through another hour or two making progress on the following day’s tune. I could barely sleep because I was so excited to continue.
    




    One morning I fell asleep around 7 AM after recording and woke up to the lights coming on – one of the other residents was starting his day and needed the shower. I pulled the blanket over my head and told him to go for it. I couldn’t imagine getting up at that point. A few hours later when I woke up, I got right back to the challenge.
    




    The philosophy that unlocked during that month was simple: good enough. Previously if I didn’t have the perfect line or the perfect riff I would hit a wall, put a song down, maybe never pick it up again. The challenge changed that. There was a huge sense of urgency. I started to realize I couldn’t always finish a song in one day – I could, but I was getting so into the arrangements and the recording process that I wanted more time with a piece. So I decided that every day I would start something and finish something. I wouldn’t always finish what I started that same day, but every song I finished that month began during the challenge. I would record a guitar part to the point it was good enough and move on. The lyrics would get to the point of good enough and I’d move on. Keep moving. Keep writing. Onto the next section, onto the next instrument, and when I got to the end – good enough. Submit it and start mining for the next song. It was the only way to stay on top of the wave.
    




    I was mind blown by people like Chris who were able to balance their busy schedules and still put songs out day after day. I had almost nothing but time and I was barely holding my life together outside the challenge. Others were banging them and making it look easy. This type of communal effort really boosts the accountability and inspiration.
    




    In the end I wrote 26 songs that month. Some never went anywhere and I’m happy they exist as what they are. Others found new life – Forty Thousand Spirits, Flower Man, Don’t Talk To Me About Pizza, Tinder Babies, Cynics In Love and Following became live staples with The Planet Of, with Tinder Babies being a fan favorite. This was the challenge that brought the most significant breakthroughs in my writing and process. It ushered in the last decade of writing, which has been the most prolific time of my life- so far. 
    




    




    July 2017 Part 2 & 3 will contain the stories behind these songs 
    




    

    

      

    • Ten To One
      • 




    • Following
      • 




    • Will Hide
      • 




    • Bad Kitty
      • 




    • Young Love
      • 




    • Insomniac Stupor Rag
      • 




    • Sister
      • 




    • The Witch & The Wizard
      • 




    • Sharks Not Sharks
      • 

    

    




    

      




        

      • Bar Rats
        • 




      • Chasing Cars
        • 




      • Flower Man
        • 




      • Cynics In Love
        • 




      • No Body
        • 




      • Tinder Babies
        • 




      • The Challenge
        • 




      • Elemental
        • 




      • Where The People At?
        • 

      

      




      

        

      • Clip Show
        • 




      • Don’t Talk To Me About Pizza
        • 




      • Face Stealer
        • 




      • Forty Thousand Spirits
        • 




      • Hicks
        • 




      • Unplugged
        • 




      • Expressing Frustration At Soundcloud
        • 




      • Destination Fever
        • 

      

      

      

      


      


    1. 


      Dust / Been Missin’
      


      

      In October 2023 we began the first round of Tim Bulster’s song-a-week songwriting group. This came at a perfect time – I had resolved to dedicate the fall and winter to writing and recording, stepping away from other obligations to hold space for that. I was also on the mend from a rough break-up that happened a few months before and coming out of a depressive spell that followed (and preceded).
      




      Writing became the main engine for processing everything I was feeling. There was one evening where I was trying to play guitar and felt so disconnected from the instrument – there was a huge emotional block and I couldn’t stand it. I started playing with the intention of letting out anything and everything I was feeling. I spent the next couple of hours improvising a handful of songs and this unlocked something in my process. From that point forward I began to put more intention into externalizing what I was feeling, which meant connecting with my body and tapping into whatever emotions I was feeling at the time.
      




      Dust started on October 9th, 2023 – the very first day of the writing group. I began the song that morning after reading Tim’s first email. I began singing “I’m sorry” and then it started to pour out from there.
      




      I was reflecting on the past, reflecting on the period of my life spent traveling, on the people that I met and places that I went, the places that I hadn’t returned to and the people that I have lost touch with over the years. These reflections… hurt. 
      




      I have a basket filled to the top with journals, trinkets, things I found along the way and wrote and scribbled – sketches, doodles, notes, lyrics, contact information on places I traveled, phrases and translations in a number of languages, and other things which I’m scared to look at. At the time of writing this song, the basket was under my bed, and I thought it was a good reference point for how I felt about this period of my life and about this past.
      




      I was envisioning the dust-sealed old box of notes, physical material artifacts from this period, and I feel cowardly, too cowardly to return to them. It just hits something deep – longing, regret – the emotions that come with a past lost, a connection lost, a friend lost, with the words that haven’t been sent or said yet, the things I’ll never get the chance to say because it’s too late. These artifacts carry all of it – and they’re from some of the simplest, most wild, most ambitious, most dangerous and reckless and careless and carefree and wonderful and rewarding times of my life. I loved those days.
      




      “Dust” starts here:
      




      Under my bed
      Tucked away are pictures and notes
      Written by a ghost and left for someday
      Someday I have the strength to reconnect
      




      The ghost is a past version of me. There was simply too much happening all the time, every day – too many adventures to remember it all, too many periods of motion without stopping to reflect or write regularly. Even if I went through every note and drawing, there may be more lost than recovered. I still haven’t found the strength to dive into the box.
      




      More than 10 years have passed
      Haven’t taken one glance
      Just let the dust take it over
      The words on the pages
      Places and faces
      Phases and names
      Feel so far away in the dust
      




      Going into the chorus:
      




      I know someday I’ll go back to the places
      As they remain, everything else seems to change
      Some friends have passed and gone
      I know now how I was wrong
      Not to connect while I had the chance
      




      I have returned to many sites of my early travels. I love to return to places just to soak them in – to see what I see, think what I think, feel what I feel, remember what I remember. There are places I’ve yet to return to which I still intend to. And even more so I hope to reach out and find some of the people I’ve lost touch with out in the world. Those I still can. Others are gone now – people I can only connect with through memories, photos, dreams, or if I’m lucky, their art and music. I regret not reaching out to them more while I still had the chance.
      




      When I’m really struggling, I tend to withdraw, hide away. I won’t reach out. I remember in some of the worst of times grabbing my phone and looking at the contact list, stopping on names for a moment, but not being able to bring myself to just ring them up.
      




      It’s so simple. It’s such a simple action – just pressing a button on the screen. But what if they answer? I will have to acknowledge the difficulty that I’m facing. I will have to acknowledge that I’m not doing well, that I need help. But if they’re not doing well? And what if they’re not available? What if they don’t answer and never call back? More pain on top of what I was already feeling.
      




      I don’t know that these thoughts would even go through my head in that moment. It’s more of a general feeling of paralysis. There’s this part of me that wants to reach out, but I just cannot bring myself to do it. And instead, I isolate. It ain’t good, but that’s where I was at and that’s where I was writing from in verse two:
      




      Heavy in bed, I lay awake
      Thinking of you and all my mistakes
      All the dreams I didn’t share
      The words I didn’t say
      The songs I didn’t sing
      I wrote them for you and I locked them away
      To pick up the phone, look at your name
      I wanna press my thumb
      But I’m paralyzed by my aching heart
      My heart aching, but I know that someday we must reconnect
      No matter how much it hurts, I know it
      Someday we must reconnect
      I can’t lose you like the rest
      I want so bad just to tell you I’m sorry
      




      The song moves from the dusty past which I’ve hidden under my bed to the present where I’m lying in bed struggling, wanting to connect, feeling unable, and recognizing that I just need to do it – I have to, before it’s too late. By the end of the song, I still haven’t accomplished the task. I leave this song as a declaration of love, of hurt, of regret, of accountability, of genuine apology. If not a request for forgiveness, at least an expression, an explanation, and hope for understanding.

      The last chorus:
      




      I’m sorry I didn’t call
      I had no good reason at all
      I love you with all my heart
      I’m just hurt by the distance that’s grown between us
      That’s left us in the dust
      That’s left us in the dust
      




      Interestingly, one of the friends I had in mind when writing this actually reached out to me for the first time in a couple years that morning while I was finishing up the recording.
      




      




      




      Been Missing
      




      “Been Missing” is the sister song to “Dust.” Where “Dust” is the somber snapshot – reflecting on the past with regret and heaviness – this is a song of triumph. When I’ve managed to overcome that disconnect, let go of the regret, and make the connection.
      




      I was truly inspired after writing “Dust” to actually reach out to some friends from the past. I started writing “Been Missing” after a very long and deep conversation with an old friend I hadn’t talked to in years and seen in even longer. It was a sunny day and I was just getting to the beach when I took her call. We walked and talked for close to two hours – catching up, going through all the motions of reminiscing about the past, joking and laughing and getting very serious, sharing the difficulties we’d gone through and the good things in our lives. The dogs were running around on the sand. The sun was shining. After the conversation ended I took that feeling of goodness and put it into this song.
      




      I tried to write in the motions of that kind of catch up conversation. The questions that come with it: How have you been? Where you at these days? What have you been up to? How did that one thing work out? Have you seen so and so?
      




      I want to know that the people I care about are doing well. But it’s not always that way, and if it’s not, I want to hear about that too. I want to know what their struggles are, what their dreams and hopes are, what stands in the way of those things. I want to know if I can help.
      




      And eventually it’s my turn. Where have I been? What have I been up to? Where do I begin… There is always lots to catch up on. Many of my old friends don’t even know where I live. People will ask me how Portland is and I’ll say I don’t know, I haven’t been there in some time. It’s five hours away from me. Sometimes I’m catching up with people and I realize my life is crazy – weaving between periods of intense travel or isolation, of staying home, relationships in and out, being intensely focused on family, or music, or work, or just being far, far away for extended periods of time. So much happens in this life and I’ll often lose track along the way.
      




      The part I love most about reconnecting with old friends – the discovery that though much has changed, much is the same. One friend says “No time passes in the hearts of good folk” and I am so grateful for this. When I can reconnect with someone and it feels like we’ve just picked up from where we left off. Sure there are things to catch up on, but the understanding, openness and love has been there all along – across great distances in space and time. We can still be ourselves, silly and ridiculous, deep and thoughtful. And receive each other as friends. I cherish these connections.
      





      Been Missin (Original Demo)
      




      




      Been Missin’ (Live from home)
      




      


      




      Where you at 
      These days 
      I’ve missed you 
      Since I been away 
      Tell me now
      What’s changed 
      And what’s remained the same 
      Let’s take our time
      Catching up
      Before we get to reminiscing 

      Have the years been kind to you
      Have you done the things that you wanted to
      And when you did how good was it
      Take me there I want to know what 
      I been missing 

      Where have I been
      Where do I start
      Some years happened to someone else
      And I lost touch along the way
      Between everywhere and nowhere

      Do you
      Remember the last time
      Last time it was just you and I
      I do

      In the grand scheme of things
      It was less than a blink
      But in these brief human lives
      It was a long long time

      Now talk to me I want to know what
      You want today everything that
      Stands in the way of your dream
      I love you and you know I believe

      Though much has changed
      Much is the same
      Our bits are as dumb as ever
      One second we’re on the ocean floor
      The next we’re in an uproar
      Our laughter scores the night
      And sleepless voices jam til sunrise
      You don’t stay up like this 
      But you’re not surprised
      We did the same thing last time

      Last time it was just you and I
      And when we did 
      How good was it
      We’re here today I’ll never forget
      What I been missing
      What I been missing
      




      




      P.S.
      




      I still struggle. I still withhold and isolate. It all goes in phases. I still haven’t opened up those notebooks, revisited those trinkets, revisited that past. And I still haven’t reached out to some of those whom I dream about and write about and think about. Some of them are gone. Some of them I’ve lost touch with, lost contact – I don’t know how to find them. And others, I just have no good reason at all. But sometimes I pick up the phone. Send a message or make a call. And when I do, it’s good. No time passes in the hearts of good folk.
      

      


      


    2. 


      The Challenge(s) – Overview
      


      

      Something that comes up across many entries on this site are songwriting groups and challenges. What this means is essentially an organized period of group or individual songwriting with set deadlines and accountability. Participating in these groups and challenges has been essential to my creative development over the last decade.
      




      Writing requires that I maintain a level of close connection with myself. More specifically, writing songs has become a process of connecting with my emotions – allowing myself to feel deeply and reflect, while opening up to whatever creative ideas come through that connection. Often I am too occupied, stressed, exhausted or distracted to allow this process of feeling for long enough to externalize it in a meaningful way. These groups provide a gentle but firm push to return to feeling and creating. The accountability, the community, the deadline – together they consistently push me beyond what I could usually summon on my own.
      




      I do write all the time and finish songs occasionally on my own. But I’ve found that doing regular blocks of intensive writing like this brings a necessary balance to my creative life. I can go months without the focus to sit down and finish things, and then reach a point where all the inspiration, insights, little notes and voice memos I’ve been accumulating come to a head and make their way into raw material for these intensive periods. Something about the group brings enough of a social atmosphere, spirit of support and accountability that changes what I’m able to do.
      




      Over the last decade I have participated in the following challenges and groups:

      Note: I will be updating this list over time with hyperlinks to entries detailing the background behind each of these challenges and each of the songs. Some of the songs have their own entries already and will be linked in the list below. 
      




      July 2017 Song A Day Challenge  – Pt. 1 Background – Pt. 2 Songs 1-13 – Pt. 3 – Songs 14-26
      




        

      1. Ten To One
        2. 




      2. Following
        3. 




      3. Will Hide
        4. 




      4. Bad Kitty
        5. 




      5. Young Love
        6. 




      6. Insomniac Stupor Rag
        7. 




      7. Sister
        8. 




      8. The Witch & The Wizard
        9. 




      9. Sharks Not Sharks
        10. 




      10. Bar Rats
        11. 




      11. Chasing Cars
        12. 




      12. Flower Man
        13. 




      13. Cynics In Love
        14. 




      14. No Body
        15. 




      15. Tinder Babies
        16. 




      16. The Challenge
        17. 




      17. Elemental
        18. 




      18. Where The People At?
        19. 




      19. Clip Show
        20. 




      20. Don’t Talk To Me About Pizza
        21. 




      21. Face Stealer
        22. 




      22. Forty Thousand Spirits
        23. 




      23. Hicks
        24. 




      24. Unplugged
        25. 




      25. Expressing Frustration At Soundcloud
        26. 




      26. Destination Fever
        27. 

      




      July 2018 Song A Day Challenge 
      




        

      1. An Uplifting Indie Pop Song 
        2. 




      2. His Royal Mop 
        3. 




      3. Little Dreams 
        4. 




      4. Easy Quick Song 
        5. 




      5. 13th (Unlucky Day) 
        6. 




      6. Monster 
        7. 




      7. Unplugged 
        8. 




      8. Eight Plays (For the Ukraine) 
        9. 




      9. We Thirsty 
        10. 




      10. Water > Gold 
        11. 




      11. UFO 
        12. 




      12. Hearing Loss 
        13. 




      13. Missed Connections 
        14. 




      14. Men And Ladies 
        15. 




      15. Trash Day 
        16. 




      16. Mind Game 
        17. 




      17. Tails 
        18. 




      18. Stanky Town 
        19. 




      19. Our Lucky Ears 
        20. 




      20. Crow 
        21. 




      21. Expiration 
        22. 




      22. I’m Silent (As CO) 
        23. 




      23. Tree Sap 
        24. 




      24. Tongue Dry As A Bone 
        25. 




      25. Songwriter’s Hangover 
        26. 




      26. Casual Encounter 
        27. 




      27. Milk & Cookies
        28. 

      




      February 2019 Short Songs – Song A Day Challenge – 
      




        

      1. Not Doing Anything
        2. 




      2. Ol’ Moon
        3. 




      3. People (Scary)
        4. 




      4. A Walk In The Park
        5. 




      5. Dreamer
        6. 




      6. White Glow
        7. 




      7. One Way Staycation
        8. 




      8. Been Here Too Long
        9. 




      9. King Struggle
        10. 




      10. Man Children
        11. 




      11. Wah-Wah
        12. 




      12. Demon Girl
        13. 




      13. Jet
        14. 




      14. V Day
        15. 




      15. Me & The Gang
        16. 




      16. Everybody’s Band
        17. 




      17. Birds N Bees
        18. 




      18. Somewhere New
        19. 




      19. Da Hero & Da Foe
        20. 




      20. Something Different
        21. 




      21. iBabies
        22. 




      22. Go On
        23. 




      23. Om Busted My Lip
        24. 

      




      July 2019 Song A Day Challenge
      




        

      1. New Moon In June 
        2. 




      2. Salt Of The Earth 
        3. 




      3. Arms 
        4. 




      4. Them Good Days 
        5. 




      5. Keanu Shrinks 
        6. 




      6. Big Goals 
        7. 




      7. Family Tree 
        8. 




      8. God Damn Those Dudes 
        9. 




      9. Shortie 
        10. 




      10. Bane 
        11. 




      11. Let Me In 
        12. 




      12. Fickle Tickle 
        13. 




      13. Little Cocoon 
        14. 




      14. Walk Far (You’ll Find Him) 
        15. 




      15. It’s A Trap 
        16. 




      16. Dirty Bleeding Heart 
        17. 




      17. Rude Bear
        18. 

      




      Tim Bulster’s Song-A-Week Groups
      




      Round 1 – Fall 2023 (Oct 8 — Nov 27)
      




        

      1. Dust 
        2. 




      2. Mints 
        3. 




      3. Undertow 
        4. 




      4. Halloween 
        5. 




      5. Another Day Another Dime 
        6. 




      6. Acaso 
        7. 




      7. My Opinions 
        8. 




      8. Been Missin’
        9. 

      




      Round 2 – Winter 2024
      




        

      1. Gutter Baby 
        2. 




      2. Pretzels 
        3. 




      3. The Funky Jake 
        4. 




      4. Paradise 
        5. 




      5. Can’t Abide 
        6. 




      6. Summer
        7. 

      




      Round 3 – Fall/Winter 2024 (Sept 8 — Dec 21)
      




        

      1. Off The Wall 
        2. 




      2. No Box 
        3. 




      3. Climb And Fall 
        4. 




      4. Ring Any Bells 
        5. 




      5. Heaven Is Wasted 
        6. 




      6. Bringer Of Badness
        7. 

      




      Round 4 – Winter 2024/25 (Dec 8 — Jan 13)
      




        

      1. Past Times 
        2. 




      2. Perfect Time 
        3. 




      3. Good Company 
        4. 




      4. Venom 
        5. 




      5. We’re Sinking
        6. 

      




      Round 5 – Fall 2025 (October – Nov)
      




        

      1. Only The Lucky Grow Old 
        2. 




      2. Needle Out 
        3. 




      3. Sweetheart 
        4. 




      4. Gregory 
        5. 




      5. Nazare 
        6. 




      6. Heart
        7. 

      




      Round 6 – Winter/Spring 2026 (Feb 1 — Mar 9)
      




        

      1. Only Murder 
        2. 




      2. Something Beautiful 
        3. 




      3. Fallen Giant 
        4. 




      4. Werns 
        5. 




      5. Maytag Land 
        6. 




      6. Our Golden Days Have Passed
        7. 

      

      


      


    3. 


      Ring Any Bells
      


      

      In our song-a-week group there are no rules about what we can submit each week other than it cannot be a previously completed song. Otherwise anything goes – an instrumental, a set of lyrics, a one minute acapella sketch or a fully fleshed out five minute production. The point is simply to write and submit something new. But in week four of the fall 2024 group, Tim brought a surprise. That Monday he sent this:
      




      “Here’s something I’ve always wanted to try — this week, we’re all going to write a song with the same title. I opened one of the internet’s finest random phrase generators, clicked ‘generate’ and it gave me, ‘Ring Any Bells?’ as in ‘recalling a memory; causing a person to remember something or someone.’ At the end of this week, we’ll have 14 different versions of a song called ‘Ring Any Bells?’ I vowed not to spend too much time searching for the perfect song title. This is what the void has bestowed upon us. Rejoice and be glad.”
      




      I was blindsided – I was already working on the song I intended to finish that week – but I took on the challenge just as many others would. My first reaction was that the title felt a bit too cliché for my taste. But I’ve found before that constraints can push you somewhere you wouldn’t have landed on your own – I talked about this in the Maytag Land entry – and this was no different. I sat with it through Monday and eventually my mind landed on past lives, which sent me back to a memory of a gal who once told me she’d had a vision of us together in a past life, in which we had held some importance. In her vision we were a king and queen and ruling together long ago. Then, as hippies do, we performed a crystal ritual in the back of a van to verify the vision. The results were inconclusive.
      




      I’m skeptical of past life recall – I haven’t heard anything particularly compelling to suggest we’d carry memories across lifetimes, and personally I don’t have any indication of having lived before this one. That said, I’ve lived enough of this life to feel like I’ve had several in one. I find the territory interesting to write from. This was also a period where I was reading and thinking a lot about death, mortality, and the nature of consciousness – you can see that thread running through Fallen Giant and Undertow. 
      




      I wove in some core memories from my own childhood – sitting out in the sunny front lawn pulling petals one by one, she loves me, she loves me not, and an old birthday photo – then let myself wander into fantastical territory, imagining past lives, ancient temples, a kind of epic and magical existence I can’t claim to remember. It was a fun departure before returning to my earliest memories of this life, which are not particularly epic or magical – watching too much TV, playing video games, playing in the yard. From there back to the present, musing on the possibilities of a distant life and ultimately landing with focus and gratitude on the simple things we have today – a vision, a dream, a conversation, a connection.
      




      It’s quite a different type of song than what I normally write, and I’m grateful the challenge of the title pushed me there. I wouldn’t have found this one on my own. Not everyone in the group took on the title that week but in the end this was just one of ten songs written around the title “Ring Any Bells”. I always enjoy listening to the submissions and reading lyrics every week but that week was particularly interesting, what with the collective bell ringin’ and all. I’d like to share some quotes from other submission emails:
      




      “I gotta admit, when I read your assignment I definitely said, ‘(sigh of exasperation) goddamnit, Tim’, but I made myself have an open mind and I actually had fun with this.” — Theresa Bird
      




      “I too was chafing a little bit this week with the assignment but it kind of put the screws on me in a good way.” — Lazarus Pearl
      




      “It made me nervous and excited, which I enjoy leaning into. The lyrical theme constraint made me musically constrain as well.” — Micha Silvius
      




      “I love hearing all the different creations generated from the same seedling of an idea. I feel like it also pushes me to write my best songs because I know there are listeners on the other side who are going to really dig into my songs because they are songwriters themselves. It adds a little pressure to sort of bring my A-game.” — Jack Isenhart
      




      Here’s my “Ring Any Bells”
      




      




      You say you remember what came before
      What you stored in the core when you were four
      Before picking daisies and tearing them apart
      Saying he loves me he loves me not
      Before the melancholy gaze you gave
      That camera on your birthday

      Were you something else entirely?
      Were you the first to crawl up out of the sea?
      Seems like something you would do
      Were you a cloud before the sky turned blue?
      And whatever you were
      Were we together?

      Tell me does this ring any bells?
      Am I on the right track? Have I gone too far back?

      Yes you say you had a vision of me
      In an ancient temple I was a king
      When I spoke folks listened
      When I stood they kneeled
      You stood by my side and we lived a long time
      You were my queen and my guide
      Into the afterlife

      You ask me does this ring any bells?
      Tell me to ask a crystal if it recalls
      Me being a king and all
      I have to laugh
      Still I ask

      You say we were in a temple, I was your king
      But I was just a kid from Temple City
      Raised on TV and video games
      Before that I can't recall a thing

      I can't say that it rings any bells
      But I love to hear the stories you tell
      I know just as little of before life
      As I could ever know of after life
      But speaking on the in between
      I'm grateful you're my queen
      Hey when I call you my queen does it ring any bells?