I have a natural admiration for the Taurus. In my life I have always admired the steadfast nature of those with a strong Taurus placement. They can be your rock, one that can stand strong through many adverse situations, they can weather the storm. They are ready to go whenever there is a beck and call, or is it buck? They can carry a heavy load with ease, they can spend the day traversing dry barren land eating what little grows only to find water in the runoff of a mountain spring or at the low point of the valley. Their pace is steady, to those who move quickly they may appear slow or lazy, but even when moving slow they are inevitably aware and more cautious of their surroundings. While they can run with the rest of them, they are in no hurry as they examine and explore the land they travel over.

The bull tends to have a love affair with food, although I might say that Taurus has a love affair with grazing, which may have a more philosophical level to it. These creatures can consume, they are big and need a lot of whatever they’re fond of around. Many a bookworm I’ve known has a Taurus placement, they always got something queued up or are starting something before they finish the other. Their appetite never seems quite satisfied as they are always learning, always taking something new in, even if they don’t like it, they’ll try it on just so they can comment on the taste. The bull with its deeply complex digestion system can handle a lot coming in.

Taurus likes to feel like part of a team. These are not loner creatures, they love to go out and carry on with all of their friends. They get along and work in groups just fine because they love being a part of the herd. Anyone who’s worked with a Taurus or played on a team with a Taurus is probably going to enjoy the camaraderie they espouse in any given situation. They will carry the extra weight, they will walk the extra mile and do so quietly or very very loudly if they don’t feel like they are being acknowledged for their contribution. They can get stubborn and stick their hoofs in the ground, but seldom do this for the wrong reasons. A big creature must be sure footed, no cow likes to be tipped.

Let’s get down to the hardest working man in show business, the true legend James Brown. As a Taurus Sun and Leo Moon he was made for an incredible show of music and dance. While the Taurus may show some reluctance to be a lead, Leo is the natural born king of the jungle, ready to lead all of creation into an all out attack. It’s hard to recreate the sheer force that Brown brought to his music, he brought his attitude front and center. Cloaked in an amazing red sequin cape, when the red drops, the show is on. He charges the stage, he owns it, he steps from left to right, a sort of musical dust cloud only exasperated by the organised chaos of his incredibly tight backing band the Famous Flames. Brown ruled his band with an iron fist because he the bull needed to make sure every step was as sure as the last, a bull at full speed cannot lose a step. Brown also knew how to slow down and let a ballad take over, not so quick to not admire what was right in front of him. Here he is taking an intro like only he could performing “Out of Sight” on the TAMI show, hard to miss this bull on a charge, just pure unadulterated energy.

James Brown Out of Sight

Another incredible tour de force of the stage Iggy Pop, not only a Taurus Sun but a Taurus Moon as well. When I first saw Iggy Pop perform at the 2017 Burger Boogaloo he was well into his Senior years and he came running on stage to start the set with “I Wanna Be Your Dog” performing with nerves of steel and zero hesitation and he criss-crossed the stage and connected with his fans. Pop’s undeniably huge presence is something that has been with him forever. The straight ahead onslaught of Pop’s delivery and the way in which he contorts his body feels like a bull charging forward sure footed with zero hesitation. Iggy always kept good company, valued a team and twice worked with a rhythm section of brothers, the Asheton’s and the Sales’s brothers to create some unforgettable music. He has consistently found many collaborators, from Bowie to At the Drive-In to Kesha and everything in between, he has traveled far carving out a huge niche in the music world. Here he is with David Bowie on keys and backing vocals, singing a trail ballad.

Iggy Pop The Passenger

The last powerhouse Taurus I want to talk about is the master Roy Orbison. Orbison, a Taurus sun paired with a Gemini moon, delivers the emotional intensity, with the playfulness of the Gemini that makes it all the more inviting. He is straightforward and you are immediately transported to this landscape where his honest emotion is on display and it creates a profound resonate effect. I think of the song Running Scared, with so few lyrics, his deeply emotive voice creates vivid feelings, open and honest with his heart on his sleeve. There’s no hiding from the bull, they must confront and face the world head on. As the saying goes, you can run but you can’t hide.

Roy Orbison Running Scared

So what more can be said about the Taurus. They are an incredible creature, and if you’ve ever been out in the pasture in the Spring after a heavy rain, you may find that their constant grazing seems to produce the perfect environ for a mushroom, one that might perhaps reaffirm the beauty of simplicity in life.

I’ve recently learned that many of the concepts that have developed in my mind while coping with grief are naive, dumbed-down, baby versions of Buddhist philosophies. I don’t know how my dusty ex-Mormon brain was able to form anything relatively close to Buddhist ideals! Did Mr Sandman whisper these advanced thoughts in my ear while sobbing in my sleep? Did a robin tweetle-dee it from a branch while I stared into a sunrise? Or are their principles based on what is naturally happening if you let yourself be open to it? The idea of ‘all loss is gain’ is a particularly painful one to wrap one’s mind around. At first glance, it feels like a cruel taunt, it’s easy to assume that they mean you get equal amounts of positive things that equal out the loss. But NAY! It’s more about a shift in mindset, a reframe to be open to seeing the new things birthed from the loss. The fresh, tender pink skin beginning to grow under the maggot nibbled gash. Your original skin is gone forever, maimed, damaged, digested, flaked away. The gain is this new, mysterious, different skin coming up from below the surface. The album we made is the ‘gain’ in the loss. It’s not an equal to the perpetual ache of the lack of Joe Haener, but it is SOMETHING that wasn’t there before. It’s the tender fresh pink flesh that doesn’t know how to do anything BUT be itself in this new world. Whether you want it or not, tis a gain.

This album is the most important thing I’ve ever done in my life. I don’t know how the boys feel or our amazing management team, our label, our fans, friends, family… No clue, but it’s my opus. Mr Shanny’s Opus. A gain, something that didn’t exist before for there was no need for it. It’s my reaction, my medicine, my evidence, my treasure, my photo album, my locket…

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What is a Clam? I just looked it up in my trusty old dog-eared dictionary: It’s a bivalve mollusk with shells of equal size; a silent, secretive, closed-mouth person; a dollar; a mistake, specifically a missed note or error in a musical performance; it’s a tired joke; a vagina; a member of a traveling group of odd humanoids who travel around the planet proffering songs to anyone who cares to show up and bathe in their sonic emanations. All these definitions seem fitting and relevant but the last one particularly so. How did I get here? Why am I still here? Read on to learn about my journey!

My first real band was called the Mumlers. We operated out of my hometown of San Jose, California and started playing shows circa 2005. We released two records and toured pretty heavily for a while. I moved to Oakland in 2009 and my path started to diverge from my old band mates. We continued to tour until 2011 but by then it was fairly clear that I was willing to live in the cheapest corner of the sketchiest warehouse I could find in order to tour & devote my time & energy to music while my old bandmates had different priorities and the tethers of their realities were pointing them in different directions. Shannon and the Clams was bubbling around Oakland at that very same time but I never met anyone from the band while I lived there. I did befriend Nate before he was a Clam through overlapping musical and friend circles. I remember seeing him do a slack-key solo acoustic guitar set at a backyard BBQ and thinking his music was nice and he was cool.

While I lived in Oakland I saw the early iteration Clams play exactly once. The Mumlers were asked to do a show at the Rickshaw Stop in San Francisco with the Growlers circa 2010 but I turned it down because it didn’t make sense with other stuff we had going on at the time. I went to the show anyway and the Clams were the opening act. They were in trio formation with the old drummer Ian. My main memory of that show was that they were all wearing In & Out Burger paper hats and I was impressed that they stayed on their heads.

The Mumlers quietly fizzled out and I started playing a lot of shows as “Will Sprott” by myself or with an ever-morphing band and working on a solo record. I had decided that bands were a pain in the ass and that I didn’t want to bind myself to an artistic entity that had other peoples’ complicated lives attached to it. This has been one of the struggles of my life: I have deep loner tendencies but also love the collaborative art form of music.

Crowdsurfin’

I moved to Seattle in 2014 to live with my girlfriend Shana. That year Shana’s band La Luz did a three-show tour of the Northwest with the Clams & I tagged along just to hang out. Both bands crammed into the La Luz van and shared gear. There were nine of us in the van: the trio of Shannon & the Clams, the quartet of La Luz, myself & Shannon’s little brother, Paddy. This was the first time I met Shannon and Cody. It was a sweet and easy tour. I remember a lot of laughs and late night drives where Paddy told amazing stories about being in the Merchant Marine. To keep myself busy on that trip I decided I was going to make a tour documentary. This film of wigs, crowd surfing and hijinks can be viewed here:

A short time after that tour I was surprised to get a text from Shannon asking if I played keyboard and wondering if I’d be interested in doing some shows with the Clams. It turned out the Clams, which had always been a trio, had recorded a new record with keyboards crawling all over it and they were gearing up to set it loose. They needed a fourth human to bring that vision to the live concert realm. It sounded like a fun thing to try out so I said I was down and was soon sent a link to the unreleased recordings of what would become the album Gone by the Dawn. I remember hearing “I Will Miss the Jasmine” for the first time and thinking it sounded insane and awesome. Cody and Nate played all the keyboards on that record and some of the weird stuff they did probably still subconsciously guides the way I think about keyboard for this band.

Early portrait

A month or so later I was back in my old Oakland stomping grounds meeting up with Shannon, Nate and Cody to play for the first time at their practice space in a mural-covered building in the Temescal neighborhood. At first I used a Casio keyboard that Nate had and an Arturia Minibrute synthesizer that featured heavily on the record. I was nervous because I thought the band was great as a trio and didn’t want to be the guy who ruined a good thing. We played some songs and it seemed to gel together pretty easily. The band played really loud. I didn’t play keys on everything. For quite a while I played a lot of tambourine and sang harmonies on old songs that didn’t have any keyboards. We were going to do two practices then play a festival in Oakland that was then called the Burger Boogaloo (now called Mosswood Meltdown).

Sometime during that first practice I was informed that we were actually going to play a show that night in San Francisco and that it was going to be recorded and released as a live album on John Dwyer of the Ohsees Castle Face label. I think the band initially thought they’d do that one as a trio but then they thought the practice sounded good so decided to invite me along for that one too. The show was in the cavernous basement of a vintage store in the Tenderloin called Vacation. There was no stage and I was taller than the ceiling down there. It was stuffy and sweaty and rowdy. People were moshing around and bumping into my keyboards. I remember John Dwyer getting in my face mid-song at one point and pantomiming a tambourine beat twice as fast as what I was shaking out. Noone has ever verified this but I remain convinced that that album never came out because I ruined the show by not really knowing what the hell I was doing yet. I would love to hear what we did that night some day. I wonder if there is anything salvageable?

A couple of fellas looking at regular gas station stuff

The next day we played to a huge crowd in Mosswood Park at the Burger Boogaloo. Seconds into the first song of the set someone in the crowd launched a completely full bottle of water toward the stage (not one of those little regular-size waters, but one of those big bopper bottles) and it smacked me right in the face. I was stunned. It was heavy and it hurt. Did they hate that there was an extra person on stage or was it just a chaotic punk show? I’ll never know. It felt like a brutal baptism or like I was being jumped into some sort of honky gang.

Setlists from my first two shows written in Nate’s unmistakeable hand on a drum head box

I couldn’t find a video of Burger Boogaloo 2015 but here’s the same festival a year later:

Soon after we did a couple weeks of touring in the Northwest. There were a lot of days off and that was good because the van broke down several times. We made friends with some people in Spokane and one of their uncles fixed our van on a Sunday because all the mechanics were closed. Cody’s uncle took us tubing on a river in Montana. We played a pizza parlor in Lethbridge, Canada. We broke down in the Canadian Rockies in British Columbia and did a fashion show where we wore trash we found on the side of the road while we waited for the tow truck. Despite all the engine trouble, we didn’t miss a show and had a gay old time. Shana had to drive up to Vancouver from Seattle and pick us up late at night after our last show because our van was broken down yet again.

Exotic jerkys getting out some ya-yas at the spaceship gas station.

Roadside trash fashion show in the Canadian Rockies

Cool Ride, our not so trusty steed

I thought I was just going to do that batch of shows and then go back to doing other stuff. I put out my first solo record, Vortex Numbers, around that time and wasn’t able to do the major US tour the Clams did around the release of Gone by the Dawn because I was touring around my own album but I did do the European tour that fall and from then on it just kept going.

Eleven years and several albums later I am still sending shrill motifs out of my synthesizer into the night air. I did not envision this path for myself but I’m grateful and humbled by all the things we’ve created, people we’ve met, places we’ve been, food we’ve eaten, friendships we’ve sparked, and all the unexpected doors that have been opened to us. What other wonders will emerge from the bog?

The Aries sign depicts the Ram, headstrong and proud! They seldom need an introduction because they are often standing head up and ready to go in any situation. My earliest introduction and still today my most oft reference for Aries has been my sister. She is not only an Aries sun sign but an Aries moon as well. She is self motivated and ready to get a task done whenever something is presented before her. Not afraid to try new things. The Ram is definitely a formidable presence. While they take things head on, it is often the unexpected that can throw this sign through a loop. Aries can get blindsided in the periphery because they are so focused and attentive on a task at hand. They will get riled up quickly but then settle down just as fast. If you are not prepared to deal with an Aries when they have their sights set on something, look out!

Being the first sign of the zodiac there is a youthfulness to this sign that is always refreshing to be around. They often approach the world with an innocence and naivety that makes things simpler than they might actually be, and yes there is a lot of beauty in this simplicity. This sign is ready to dig their feet in the sand, put their toes in the water, and let the wind blow through their fingertips often as if they are experiencing it all for the first time. The youthful excitement and energy that surrounds them will leave you feeling fresh and ready to share in their wonderment.

Aries as the fire sign are indeed the trailblazer, bold and ready to take on the world that appears fresh and ready in front of them. Being ready to go both in competition or collaboration. They often feel best when they have a trusted confidant behind them, their confidence and enthusiasm often rubs off on others, making them extremely valuable in working situations. They might need a little extra reassurance from time to time, a little extra fuel for the fire.

My mind often goes to Merle Haggard when it comes to favourite Aries Sun performers. Merle has a certain directness when it comes to telling a story, in many of his songs by the time he’s halfway into the first chorus I can imagine the character and feeling he’s singing about, that I’m just in it. I’m going to clammer on about “Today I Started Loving You Again” this song written about and with Merle’s wife Bonnie Owens. This song is so simple yet beautiful, it seems to call at all who have felt the fire of love, the die downs and the flare ups, the emotional intensity and vulnerability of being in Love. It’s to my understanding that Bonnie was a key element in capturing Haggard’s poetic moments and encouraging him to write ideas down and help him finish songs. Her harmony vocals at the end of this tune really set it up to soar. The minimal arrangement gets a huge boost when she comes in near the end of the song, providing that male/female counterpoint that just burns the song into ones memory. Merle’s directness and honesty carried him his whole career with countless iconic songs, even his satirical songs like “Okie from Muskogee” were confused because of the honesty he was able to conjure when he sang a song.

I’m going to next turn my attention to Leon Russell. This man’s unique energy and salvo let him sit next to and collaborate with many of the most well known artists during his era. Leon got his start working with Phil Spector and being part of his Wall of Sound and playing with the first call session musicians of the day alongside such fellow luminaries and Aries like Carol Kaye. By the late 60s he had carved his unique space as a sideman and producer and began to venture out to the foreground. One of my favourite cuts of his is his take on Bob Dylan’s “It’s A Hard Rain Gonna Fall.” Now I enjoyed the Dylan version of this song but from the first time I heard his rendition, I immediately was taken by the freshness and heat that he gave to this song. The way the groove is set up, the way he pushes his voice in the refrain just makes me want to hit the dance floor. Dylan’s version feels like the tale told by an elder around a campfire, Russell’s version feels like a call to action.

Another incredible Aries that always strikes me with their fiery and fierce nature is the undeniable Aretha Franklin. Aries is not afraid to stand up and demand respect. I don’t think Aretha was ever afraid of saying it straight and laying down as she was honestly feeling it. I’m probably not the only one who first encountered Aretha in the classic Blues Brothers movie. I think she delivers an incredible performance both of her classic “Think” and her character, Mrs. Murphy, the wife of guitar player Matt Murphy. She has a directness and ability to speak her mind clearly and loudly about the situation, she doesn’t mince words, she says what she needs and says it with authority. Aries isn’t a personality that can let things slip by, they need to share their mind proudly and bluntly. They don’t need to say a lot for it to be pretty obvious how they feel.

Aries is not to be underestimated as such as their fellow fire signs Leo and Sagittarius, they can take on a lot so long as there is enough oxygen to keep the fire alive. Aries will thrive with someone who can keep their fire burning steady, a delicate mixture of space and combustible energy.

Next I’ll be looking at another horned and hoofed sign, Taurus.

First off, I am shocked to tally up the songs I wrote for this record and count only FOUR total. I did write one additional bonus track which was released later on (Candy, Forget about Me). On later records I wrote so many songs (most of them unused). I guess I found my groove later on.

Secondly, let’s talk about the album title. Around this time I was completely pre-occupied with H.P. Lovecraft. I had heard the name tossed around by goths and cool dweebs for years but never bothered to read any of it. Until former Clams drummer Ian Amberson showed me this huge book of Lovecraft stories that he had in high school and was talking about how wild it was. I was intrigued and started reading them and it was not what I expected at all. I had expected a watered-down Edgar Allen Poe with spooky stuff about Draculas and skeletons. It was instead very cosmic and psychedelic and far out and weird and written in the pre-LSD 1920s and ‘30s. I actually found it hard to believe that it was written in that era. And then I realized that his writing had actually formed the foundation of basically all of modern science fiction and horror literature, and consequently all of science fiction and horror cinema. His influence ran shockingly deep into everything.

It has since been revealed that Lovecraft was a heinous and hateful racist, with both straightforward unabashed racist remarks in casual correspondences as well as more subtle flavors of racism in his fiction - the othering of certain racial and social groups, hateful descriptions of “subhumans”, disdain for race mixing and the pollution of “pure” bloodlines. At the time I was ignorant of all of this and went all in on Lovecraft.

Lovecraft has a very psychedelic story called Dreams in the Witch House. Shannon had written a song called The Rat House for this record, which was about a dilapidated little earthquake shack from the 1906 quake that is still standing on her mom’s property in Napa, CA. When they were kids it was just kind of this nasty little clubhouse, but later on entire families lived in the rat house for many years. So the album title seemed obvious to me; combine the lore of Lovecraft with the lore of Shannon - Rat House + Dreams in the Witch House = Dreams in the Rat House. Duh.

Hey Willy

During Dreams in the Rat House I was very interested in fictional storytelling in songs. I think it was a reaction to growing up in the 90s-00s where pop music was mostly dominated by songs with vague emotional lyrics that were difficult to parse and at best little more than intriguing word salad. When I got older and started looking back at music from before I was born, I found a whole world of storytelling songs - mostly 50s and 60s pop songs and country music from all eras. Country is the genre which I think has committed most successfully to the storytelling method of songwriting. I also understand that the music that came out when I was young was a reaction to the music of earlier eras. Those songwriters likely felt that telling a straightforward story in lyrics was boring and it felt refreshing to instead string a together a bunch of vague feeling-words into a kind of non-specific emotion collage. Similarly, the Clams always dressed up on stage as a reaction to the streetwear aesthetic of bands from our youth (whose style was of course a reaction to corny bands with polished looks and matching outfits that dominated pop music for the previous 50 years). A reaction to a reaction.

So this song was supposed to tell the story of a young man who has a secret romance with a woman but then gets drafted into the military and has to go overseas to war. While he’s away, his younger brother Willy grows up and ends up romantically involved with the same woman. Since the older brother’s romantic relationship was a secret, he can’t protest or even express his pain once he returns from the war and discovers what has happened. Not even Willy knows about their previous relationship. So the lyrics kind of focus on him coming to peace with the idea and wishing his little brother well and encouraging him to love her as hard as he can with all his soul.

Bed Rock

Ok this was a lyrical collab with the entire band. We each wrote our own verse. I remember Shannon noodling around on a terrible late 90s Casio keyboard at her house and coming up with the main riff. I liked it and I remember feeling like, ooh, yeah keep playing that, it’s weird.

I really don’t remember how we decided on this strange concept of singing from a baby’s perspective. I think my verse is actually something about being a full grown lazy piece of shit, infantilizing yourself and being indulgent and bratty and disgusting. Ian’s verse is literal baby POV, talkin trash about baby lyfe. Shannon’s verse I think is more about being a wild ass little feral kid and jumping on your bed and rocking out Nickelodeon style.

Idk there’s not much else too say about this one. Bit of a goof. Though I’ll say this was one of the rare lyrical collabs we’ve done where each person wrote and sang their own verse, and I think we should have done more of this. I remember it feeling really fun and electric to sit around and come up with verses together. We did this on a really early track, Scuffle with the Clams, as well.

In the River

Again I was really stuck on the idea of lyrical storytelling here. And also fantasy and fairy tales and weird fiction and sci-fi. It felt really refreshing to mix these concepts with 60s pop songwriting and production. Juxtaposition. Kinda like Zeppelin and Tolkien, which I believe is now widely derided as extremely cringe and dorked out.

So the story is simple; there’s a young couple that live by a river, the man tells his wife not to wander around and get lost. She ends up wandering around and falling into the river and disappearing. He is distraught, devastated, inconsolable. So he resorts to consulting with the “witch man” who uses weird magic to bring his lady back. The witch man directs him to eat a spider and a black shell and wait for her to come floating back upstream against the current. He waits by the river for a year and eventually he sees a gigantic egg floating up the river. He looks inside the egg and she is there, but she has a “feathered hide” - she is a kind of bird human hybrid.

So … trying to tell a weird story mixing Lovecraft, Bros Grimm, 60s heartbreak romance idk. I guess I did it here. I actually think this song is excellent and I don’t that we ever performed it more than a few times. It’s really simple and hooky, the vocal is right in my mournful nasty desperation range.

Behind the Music - Mikal Cronin plays saxophone on this song. I hit up every horn player I could find and was able to nail down Mikal and Oakland freak artist Cansafis Foote to record before the “deadline” (my own impatience). So I got each of them to come by my house and play two notes on the saxophone into my laptop for the chorus. I’ll say it was clear to me that Mikal had been trained to play saxophone in high school band or something and Cansafis seemed to be more recently self taught lol. NO SHADE CANSAFIS.

Behind the Behind the Music - While trying to remember how to spell “Cansafis”, I discovered that he has a substack! https://cansafis.substack.com/ I’ve only read one thing so far, but I liked it. It was bitter, critical, existential, angry, trippy.

Side note - this song actually inspired the imagery on the back cover of the album. Ian got a bee in his bonnet to build a pretty large sculpture of a scene of an giant empty eggshell washing up on the banks of a river. He didn’t really complete it to his satisfaction in time, but he photographed it and we used part of it for the back cover. I think it’s actually a pretty confusing image and I’m sure fans have wondered wtf that image had to do with anything. The final plan involved something like a fog machine or dry ice and black lights and moss and dirt and things, more of a complete backdrop. We just didn’t finish it in time. It seems odd to me now, looking back, that there was any kind of deadline at all. Things felt so comparatively DIY and loosey goosey back then.

The Rabbit’s Nose

Awright, once again, another fantastical fairytale storytelling song here. I really did not write anything personal on this record. So the premise is that there’s a girl talking to a rabbit and giving advice about how to survive in the wild. It is revealed that the rabbit is actually her farmer father, who’s been transformed by a weird wicked magic man with bejeweled teeth. The magic wizard man wanted to make some kind of deal to take the farmer’s daughter and the farmer apparently refused and in the ensuing conflict was transformed into a rabbit, and the girl was left behind to take care of the farm on her own (or maybe there are some siblings and a mother, this is never indicated). So the girl keeps an eye on her rabbit dad and tries to give him good advice about how to stay alive.

In this era I was writing a ton of weird fairytale stuff. If you need more evidence of this, my solo album, under the name King Lollipop, is wall-to-wall fairytales. I’m really not sure what was behind this at the time, I was just completely preoccupied with fairytales. And stuff about daughters and wives being taken away by mystical bewitching creatures. Sounds like insecurity about relationships lol.

Fun fact: this song was used in an erotic foot licking scene in the film Dumb and Dumber To. Unfortunately I can’t recommend the film, but it’s almost worth a watch just to see one of our songs in a major motion picture.

Candy, Forget About Me (bonus track)

Ok so I had to go back and listen to this again to remember wtf this one was even about. I don’t think we ever played this song again after we recorded it. So it starts out pretty vague, a narrator who’s telling a woman to forget about him and leave him alone and he can’t love her because of something terrible that he has done (this is kind of a recurring theme for me around this time for some reason; a man who has betrayed or deceived a woman.). So the song leaves us hanging for several minutes until it is revealed that the terrible thing he did was to go the haunted swing and kiss the ghost girl who haunts the swing and now he’s cursed and also haunted by her. And this is why he can never love anyone I guess. Back on my fairytale shit. It’s similar to the plot of It Follows (2014). Must have been something in the zeitgeist as these were only released a year apart.

In this era it felt like all of the bands in our bay area circle were seized with a fever for bubblegum music. And actually this song is pretty clearly aping the Milwaukee power-pop/bubblegum band The Fevers, who were active in the early 00s. There’s a particular drawl that Gavin May (Fevers vocalist) does that I’m imitating here, and which is very unlike me and not used ever again AFAIK. And he likely copped it from some earlier budget rock band. The Burger Records scene was also rife with bubblegum fever around this time. I feel grateful that we did not go all in on that sound, and that we tempered our power-pop love with lots of other weird stuff and kept it balanced. Though I’ll say that my solo project King Lollipop was getting many of those yayas out for me. The song structures and melodies are fairly bubblegum but musically it was more of a hyperactive woodland acoustic romp, and lyrically all witches and wizards and trolls etc.

Perhaps it’s best to give you my back story about my interest in astrology and why I continue to find it fascinating and use it as a filter when observing life. I have always had some interest, if not utter fascination, with the unseen world, the world that exists that can’t be seen, however one may define that. I have always enjoyed repeating patterns, recognizing and enjoying them, whether it’s the repetition of a drumbeat, watching the ocean waves come in sets, or observing the golden ratio in plant life. Patterns and repetitions are everywhere in observable reality. So is it odd to think that the time and date of your birth can have a distinct effect on who you are? It’s a bold sell, and as someone who believes in free will, it’s a hard sell. However, being in touch with yourself enough to know that you are capable of both light and dark is where free will is obvious, and ultimately up to the individual to make that decision. Perhaps now I view the debate that your zodiac doesn’t determine who you are; it determines what questions you ask yourself. We have all most likely been in the situation where you feel completely hung up about something, and then someone else in the same situation is able to completely act like it’s no big deal, like the same questions or worries never even crossed that person’s mind.

I’ll take this as a lead-in on the Pisces. The Pisces is depicted as two fish swimming in opposite directions. The Pisces is a water sign, implying that this sign shares reactions similar to those found in water. Freeze over, ice melting, rushing river, or reflective pool are phrases that find easy placement for my feelings. In contrast, if you are a fire sign like a Leo, you might resonate more with phrases like hot to trot, slow burn, firestorm, or inner warmth. Perhaps if you shared both a water sign and a fire sign in strong placements in your chart, you may find yourself in a lot of steamy situations or find yourself in some hot water. I used water-based analogies to describe my feelings all the time, long before I studied the zodiac. The Pisces, as mentioned above, is the last sign of the zodiac; it is old and wise and quite possibly losing its mind. Perhaps one fish is swimming toward the physical world, and the other is pushing well into the spiritual world; they create a space between those two, which can be calm water or it can rage like a hurricane, it can be dark like the bottom of the ocean, or can reflect and redistribute light in a prismatic way near the surface.

There are many great descriptions already of Pisces, common words associated would be emotional, intuitive, and laid back. The fish has no natural defenses, no stinger or crab claw like its fellow water brethren. The fish is slippery, though, and while even the most aware fisherman may be able to pull a fish out of water with their bare hands, to pull two fish would be a grand feat indeed. Fish move quickly and will disappear quicker than the blink of an eye. They live completely in an aqueous environment; they can feel the vibrations in the water long before one can see anything. Because of this state, they often live by intuition alone or by what they can sense. They live in a world that is constantly humming at them. If you’ve known them to be slightly distracted or distant or off in their own world, it might as well be that they are.

Water is heavy and holds emotions; it can create patterns based on musical notes and harmony. For a deeper dive into this idea, take a look at cymatics, patterns created by sound being transferred into water and other liquid solutions. Snowflakes, as well, are formed into these wild patterns! And perhaps many Pisces, as well as Scorpios and Cancers, will be called snowflakes for their sensitive ways.

If you don’t know any Pisces, let’s look at some of my favorite performers who I find resonate with high amounts of Piscean-type attributes. I’m going to start with Johnny Cash. He famously made a comment about the quality of the water during his iconic set at Folsom Prison. Subtle, yes, but perhaps a fire sign might have mentioned the lack of heat, or an air sign the drafty insides, or the earth sign on the less than hospitable space. Johnny Cash chose water to make the connection with the people there. He tells a harrowing tale of water in Five Feet High and Rising about a family watching the water rise on their property, while the main characters refrain of “How high’s the water, mama?” never ceases to send a chill down my spine.

Kurt Cobain was also a Pisces who just despised being pigeonholed into categories and writing songs that pushed into concentrated emotional outbursts, like waves crashing, the ripples still being felt long after he’s been gone. The iconic photo of the baby in the swimming pool on the cover of Nevermind. The first album, named Bleach, a liquid that would kill life in an aqueous environment. In Utero, theres another reference to an aquatic state, or even From the Muddy Banks of the Wishkah. This man felt the weight of the water, and I do believe it was his duty to completely drain you.

My last example and my birthday twin is the incredibly undefinable Nina Simone. What a personality. She could do jazz, she could do blues and R&B, she could do avant-garde. She was never easy to define, and her iconoclastic nature made her forever hard to pin down, lubriciously smooth, and she had no problem swimming in the colder aspects of the human psyche. She is one of the most unique and enigmatic characters in music. It’s her foray into gospel on “Take Me to the Water” that struck me when I heard it long ago. The lyrics simple, the voice complex and nuanced to create an incredible feel that hits me like a cold river every time.

Well, I think that’s enough for now, I mean, I could probably go on for a while about the fishes. I muse on the symbolism of astrology because I find it to be a belief system that ultimately is up to the user to create. It is no more real than the individual allows for; it is user-oriented and takes the creative mind to fill in the gaps. Next month, I’ll tackle the very start of the zodiac, Aries, the Ram, a fire sign.

-Nate

Anyone who has spent time planting a garden knows just how rewarding playing in the dirt can be. It serves as a place of quiet reflection, an easy connection to the earth as it stains and covers your skin. I hadn’t done much of any gardening while living in the city. My old roommate in Oakland, Amanda, had an incredible green thumb and turned our backyard, with the help of some raised beds, into a tiny wonderland that still thrives to this day. Watching her work within her vision into reality was quite remarkable in a small and limited space. I knew it could be done, but the Bay Area is quite a different landscape and environment than the high desert wind exposed lands of southeastern Arizona.

Amanda left me with the incredible Rainwater Harvesting Volume 1 (see below) which I read front to back probably three or four times. I highly recommend that book to any and everyone who has even a tiny space to create in. In brief, the book shows you very simple ways to catch water on your land. While some folks may automatically think of rain catchment systems with big barrels catching water off the side of the house, this is a very small piece of the equation. The land itself can be built up to increase the overall water table, thus creating more ideal conditions in which life can spring forth.

My land when I arrived, except for the house of course, was just typical high desert land. Burnt looking soil covered with a mix of shrubs, thorny mesquite and acacia plants that catch every loose piece of fabric. Extremely alkaline clay soil that makes the soil pretty unhospitable to new life. I showed up in Spring when the rest of the country is surrounded by new life and blossoms while the high desert of Arizona delivered extremely windy days with the only greenery being the small leaves of the mesquite that grew tangled and tied to the dusty earth below. It was hard to know where to start. At first I did some truly shameful tree planting, little to no improvement to the soil, planted in a small hole, I pretty much made every mistake one can imagine, things died quickly, amendments and top soil blew away in the wind. I put money in the dirt and the dirt just flew out with the breeze. While slightly discouraged, I kept getting up and trying new things.

I often try and recall what I thought about digging a hole before moving to Arizona. I had dug a few over the years doing various kinds of labor, usually just to fill with concrete with something sticking out of it. It was a task – brought satisfaction upon completion but never something I thought much about after the fact. I couldn’t imagine sitting around having a drink going “remember that hole I dug last winter?” Out in the desert a dug hole has a whole lot of effect of the soil. These holes catch seeds that get blown mercilessly across landscape in the Spring and then they get extra water when the heavy monsoons come. Indentation in the ground and berms that slow the water movement create places for all kinds of wildflowers and native plants to pop up and grow without doing much at all.

Digging holes and directing water to certain parts of my property has created this new flux of plant life that pops up every year and every year I see something different. I try and weed out the pokey and thorny plants like the dreaded goat head so that other grasses and flowers grow and go to seed, with the ensuing hope they spread to other parts of the property. After the spring winds spread the seed of the dried out plant I cut it down and turn it into the soil. Slowly but surely I’m creating a more hospitable soil, less alkalising clay soil that has organic matter from many nutrient rich plants.

While I have had some success planting trees and growing a small amount of vegetables, the quality of the soil improving is one of my favorite things to observe. The unpredictability of what grows and appears after the heavy rains is the most exciting, a collaboration between you and nature.

Below are a sort of before and after effect. Showing what the unworked land looks like next to the land that dips and rises and collects.

This is a song that I really love. It floated into my mind when I had a tiny white Toyota pickup. My first thoughts when I pop it on is it’s twice as fast as I wanted it to be. Sometimes in the studio it was hard for me to know if it’s the speed I want or not. I had this same experience with a Hunx and his Punx song called the Curse of Being Young. I wanted it to be slower but didn’t notice because we record drums and bass first. Now I would be able to feel if the speed was off but not back then. Anyway, you learn something on every song, every album, it’s all school if you let it be.

The next thing that comes to mind is how it’s too low for my voice which is fine…but a couple steps higher would have let my voice blast out more. Also, I am sooo nasal and flat because I just had no idea. No one told me!!! Like, Take some Claritin beb, or have an ear out of the headphones so you’re not flat. I have zero formal training in music or voice so it’s amazing I got this far lol. We were recording in Cody’s CLOSET too btw so it’s not like we had a peanut gallery of seasoned rockers at our disposal for constructive critisim. Honestly just typing this makes me feel really proud that we created any of this, wrote any song at all let alone recorded it, made videos, made album art anything. I am so grateful for my friendship with Cody because he was totally fearless and down to figure everything out. I am more of a creative idea man and he is a fear-free accomplisher. He rules. Also I had absolutly crippling anxiety when it came to songwriting and singing. For years Cody was the only person that heard me sing or demo or attempt to song write. When I sang him ideas I’d either give him a recording and leave the room or sing with my back turned under a blanket or in a closet lol. Eventually i got more comfy and wasn’t as afraid of the judgement but that took me a long time.

The next thing that comes to mind is my bassline. It was my first time attempting a tick tack type line, although I’d heard that type of line before (commonly played using a Danelectro which I played for many years! with an upright bass) it’s used in tons of oldies & country recordings. The time I heard where it it tortured my soul and made me want to touch it was in the Flat Duo Jets song called You Don’t Love me Anymore. It has a dramatic entrance and has such a different texture than the metallic strumming in the first part of the song that it really struck me. Made me feel sort of in love and wistful yet broken and defeated lol. Anyway I remember it being sooooo hard to teach myself how to do it & now it’s like second nature. RIP Dexter Romweber.

My final thought is that it always bothered me that people assumed this song is about a breakup with a boyfriend. NOT ALL SONGS SUNG BY WOMEN ARE ABOUT BREAKING UP WITH BOYFRIENDS OR GETTING CHEATED ON! OK thanks for letting me get that out. This song is however, about a friend breakup. One of the most traumatizing and painful things that I’d ever experienced til Joe died. Lot’s of manipulation & deception, growing pains, yearning for our old perfect friendship. I didn’t wanna use her name but the day the song came out she wrote to me assuming it was about her. Welp so much for keeping my secrets!

KING OF THE SEA

This song is a dedication to my little brother Paddy who was a merchant marine at the time. I was pretty devastated that he was so far away and unreachable. I decided instead of being worried about him and fearing the worst I would make him a power pump up song.

TOXIC REVENGE

Cody and I wrote this together and I don’t remember much about it. The music video and the lyrics are so good. We were jamming in the living room of Ian’s old house that became the punk house called Telegraph Beach. Sometimes we would simply say ‘lets try a punk song?’ and then it would come. I especially love the instrumental part. Lot’s weird stuff in there. Kazoo’s etc?

HALF RAT

Cody and I wrote this together. My first thought is how scared and unsure and flat my voice is. I love her though, that version of me that was so scared to try, so afraid of people thinking she was trying too hard. The only time I didn’t feel that way was when I was scream punk singing. But all the soft tender moments I always felt so scared and embarrassed. I love this song! This was probably a moment in time where we realized how obsessed we both were with Disney songs from the 50’s and 60’s. Also us experimenting with doing rounds, singing opposing leads like in the bridge. That is such a weird cool way we wrote this song. I’d love to re-record it just to do how my mind sees it. That will piss off all our fans though (I know it would have pissed me off if i was a fan!) I think Cody wrote a lot of the lyrics, it could be based on a short story he wrote? I hope he pipes in sometime and clarifies. I hope he comes and writes about his songs on this album like Old Man Winter and the Woodsmen. Cody is an amazing short story writer and that really comes through when you read the lyrics to his songs. I’m still obsessed and think of the scary stories he wrote when we were in college together. Someday we will execute our early friendship plans of him writing a collection of short stories and me illustrating them

SLEEPTALK

Interesting choice for us to end the album with this one. I remember really wanting it to be SLEEPTALK not Sleep Talk but I lost the battle. You need to watch the music video for this too, also done by the gifted Hannah Lew of Grass Widow. We have so many cute friends in the video! It begins with the end of a sold out show we played at Bottom of the Hill that was also a record release for Sleep Talk. We played with Hunx and his Punx and Grass Widow and our friggin records didnt make it on time! The next day we were leaving for a joint tour with Hunx and it was a while til we got the albums in the mail. I drew up the costumes from the video and our pal Collin made them for us. We were supposed to wear them as stage wear but the boys rebelled and they were nixed beyond the record release. I thought they were cute! We filmed the beginning and end of the video at the punk warehouse run by Greg Ashley called the Creamery and on the beach in Rodeo, not a typical California beach destination! Our friends Melissa Dale Neal from Sweet Nothing and Micah Warren from Glitter Wizard play the punk mermaids. All the bedding and stuffed animals were taken from Codys actual bed, except for my beloved teddy bear Beary, who is still on my bed today. The critters on the bluffs in the background are wearing Ewok costumes my aunt Corleen made in the 80’s! Shoot I can’t remember who is inside them, but you may recognize those costumes being used again in the video the Rat House by the skaters. During the bridge, the large cowboy on the bed with the whip is played by my brother Paddy (the King of the Sea.) He is wearing chaps (normally worn assless) that we borrowed from some large leather daddies. That began my strong desire to use a whip sound on a song and eventually I got my wish! MANY TIMES

Clams at the Summer Bummer in Portland at FKA Plan B, now the White Owl. This is where we first played with the Intelligence and I became pals to this day with Lars Finber

Super fun warehouse show put on by Burger in a warehouse. It was the first time I remember there being moshing and crowdsurfing outside of Oakland. We played with Audacity & Crystal Antlers. Photo by my pal Suzy!

I made us knock off star trek costumes but again, the boys didn’t want to wear them!!!

Caveman costumes I made for us! We only wore these a few times because they were pretty revealing lol. We played a show curated by our good friends Guantanamo Baywatch (Jason and I were illustration students together) They made the stage incredible with massive colorful paper maché dinosaurs and plants at Revolution Hall in Portland.

a rare glimpse of Cody with an alcoholic beveragino

for a while I made all my own band tees out of cheap v necks from Wal-Greens and a bleach pen. I also had a Butthole Surfers one as well as a Wizzard Sleeve one!

fuzzy sketches of the costumes I designed and Collin made for our SLEEPTALK looks

BTS of SLEEPTALK shoot

our first show (and most recent) show in San Pedro! This was a super fun DIY spot

Check out this old set list!

Hair post cover shoot for SLEEPTALK. Not sure why we went curly but it’s a great cover!

Clams somewhere in LA. Blaque Chris right in front! RIP!!

Quick reminder – you can snag a Sleep Talk vinyl, along with the rest of our records + fun Clams merch on our web store!

Clams Merch

This song is a favorite of mine. It’s so simple and concentrated. This is a song that came to me in a dream and I was actually able to tease out the melody and vibe. I remember waking up at my moms house on a super hot summer day and trying to capture the song from my dream, I grabbed this cheap little acoustic guitar my dad bought me from a garage sale the day before. I didn’t know how to play guitar but at some point figured out the top strings are the same as bass so I slowly picked out the melody on the guitar as though it was a bass and sang over it. I recorded a voice note on my phone and eventually worked it out with Cody. I ended up writing most of my songs on those top strings of that guitar and it became the ‘SLEEPTALK guitar’ you see on the cover of the record.

Whenever I get a chance to perform this song the visuals from the dream still are so powerful in my mind. I imagine running on this dark, damp, slick, rocky cliff, chasing someone I love trying to stop them from doing something terrible. The stress and fear from the dream are still so present when I call it to my mind.

You Will Always Bring Me Flowers:

Ha, the chorus of this song came to me when I was super caffeinated and exercise high off doing a big hike in the Berkeley Hills with my bestie Laurel. I was so hyper and pumped up. My boyfriend at the time had told me he would ALWAYS bring me flowers (which was true for the duration of our relationship) and those words just resounded in my mind. The pumping blood & coffee coursing through veins made me start singing the chorus in this reeeeaaaaallllyyyyy sassy over the top Tom Jones kind of voice. I couldn’t stop singing it and eventually she started singing it with me. I recorded a little voice note and then worked on it with Cody. I thought it was a joke song but came to love it as just a song. He wrote the verse melody and of course that signature guitar part. I love this friggin tune. I still feel the energy I had high off my sack on java pulling into my driveway with Laurel. She and I later wrote a jingle for McDonalds called ‘chicken nugget.’ It didn’t leave the mini van we were in but perhaps i’ll finish writing it and share with you all.

The Cult Song:

This one I had more of a concept for and Cody did a lot of the writing. I had the idea for a music video first, which just consisted of me at a breakfast table with my family (calling back to my memory of the Cindy Lauper video for Good Enough from the Goonies featuring Capn Lou!) mixed with the beginning of Mommy Can I go Out and Kill Tonight? by the Misfits. Ok ok I’m back at the kitchen table and I look at my family and say, ‘mom, dad….I don’t wanna be in a cult no more.’ Then the kick and guitar come in with chanting. It’s a really silly song with some stupid ass lyrics that I don’t love but it still pumps me and the people up. Something else I love about this song is my lyrics ‘sick of Moroni sick of Nephi’ got me connected to some really rad Mormons, ex Mormons, Mormons on the fence. I am an ex Mormon and it’s the closest thing I have to culture. I think no matter where you are in your faith, we understand each other more than many so it was nice to have them reach out over the years and either commiserate or have a conversation.

Done with You:

I strangely don’t remember much about the birth of this song. I remember I felt ashamed because I was beating a dead horse by singing about being done with my shitty ass ex. I’d already said this in other songs but I guess sometimes you gotta say it a lot and for a long time before you are really done. I also criticized myself over the generic lyrics. However now, sometimes the concept is simple, why force it into being something more complex? My feelings were clear and simple!

Tired of Being Bad:

This song is about drowning with guilt and hating who I was. I was making a lot of stupid decisions that hurt someone who was very good to me always. I think I was having some serious self worth growing pains and If I ever write a book about my life maybe i’ll reveal who and what but for now it’s still all mine.

I love this song, I love the backups. Ian and Cody could rip that Flo & Eddy/Muppets/Tammies sound I’ve always been obsessed with. I also like my voice. I think I was successful at capturing the feeling I was having. That’s not always possible but it’s always what I trying to do lol.

I’ll do the rest of the album soon! LMK if you enjoyed this <3 Shannon

TOP SIX WEIRD BUGS I TOOK PICTURES OF WITH MY PHONE THIS YEAR

by Will

I like bugs. I’m constantly amazed that I’m encountering new little freaks that I’ve never seen before. My bandmates will tell you I’m not a fan of cellular phone applications but one app I do like is this one I have where I can post a picture of a bug & some citizen scientist will tell me info about it & sometimes send me specific little notes or comments. This here was a cicada I saw on a hike that was just chilling next to its own old exoskeleton. It didn’t look identical to other cicadas I could find pictures of. Someone named Pablo told me, “I think it’s because you found one that’s still hardening after a fresh molt. The colors will be ‘off’ for a bit, while everything is still soft & ‘puffing out.’ This is probably one of the more delicate moments in any bug’s life, so good job finding it!” Thanks Pablo!

Tussock moth caterpillar. I don’t remember where I saw this. I think it was Wisconsin or somewhere in the Midwest. I often think about how much weirder bugs look than common aliens.

Buprestis aurulenta, AKA the golden jewel beetle. I’d never seen one before. I was hanging out at a lake near my house & this guy landed on my hat & hung out for a long time. This thing looked like a magical iridescent scarab visiting from the shores of eternity.

My 80 year old mom lived at my house for the last year & she keeps vampire hours. She sleeps all day & stays up all night messing around. The room she stayed in has French doors with no screens & she would leave them wide open with all the lights on while she was listening to audiobooks & making pasta. In this manner she accumulated incredible quantities of bug friends that would hang out on her walls & listen to her British spy novels. I always called these mosquito hawks. This one was gigantic. Apparently they have many other names: crane fly, skeeter eater, gallinipper, gollywhopper, Jenny long legs, skinny Phillip & more!

Strikingly gorgeous beetle my son spotted on a telephone pole in downtown Grass Valley. This thing was also very large.

This isn’t a bug. It’s a pretty normal lizard. One day I walked into my living room & it was hanging out on my couch. I live up a set of stairs & have well-sealed doors so have no idea how he got there. Sometimes I find weird creatures though. One time I found a dead scorpion on the bristles of my toothbrush... Anyhow, I caught the lizard and set him loose. I loved his weird feet & brilliantly iridescent scales.

INs & OUTs for 2026

By Cody

OUT

• Chunky curvy cursive lettering for branding. The NA beverage Ghia was the first one that I saw using this kind of typeface a few years ago. Now it feels like 1 out of every 5 hip young consumer brands is using this exact font or an extremely similar typeface. Maybe hip & young is not correct; maybe new and targeting Millennials is more accurate. It’s about one breakout hit brand away from being completely played out.

  

• Loud tough rock bands with a wild female fontperson in amazing outrageous outfits, a la Amyl & the Sniffers. Every time I dip into browsing music photography or lists of up and coming young music acts, it seems to be overcrowded with bands derived directly from the Amyl mold. But that’s what happens when you break the mold, like Amyl + crew did; you get a tidal wave of imitators. A&tS seemed to come out of nowhere perfecting a sound and an act that almost nobody was trying to do at the time, and they did it harder and better and louder and with more style than anyone in that moment. They deserve every accolade and every fan and every dollar that they have earned. But this reminds me of the early 2010s when we would tour and EVERY opener on every show sounded like a tribute band covering Ty Segall or the Oh Sees or the Black Lips. Or the years of Coneheads runoff that followed the coining of the term Egg Punk in the mid 2010s. Every group of musicians in that scene who lacked direction or a point of view just became egg punk because they didn’t know what else to do. Again, Coneheads absolutely shattering the mold coming out of nowhere with a sound like nothing else at the time. Anyway I think the Amyl knockoffs are just about overplayed and decidedly OUT.

• AI. It seems to be purely simply pretty bad for society. It’s too powerful of a tool to just hand out to any average person who wants to use it, or any random business for that matter. IMO It should be reserved for medical and scientific research, tightly controlled. The best case scenario for AI is that it pollutes social media so severely that it completely collapses when the users get sick of looking at slop and the advertisers realize that most of the viewers are bots.

• Meeting people at restaurants to socialize. What a pain in the ass. All the restaurants are closed M-W, or only open from 12-3 on weekdays, or they DO NOT take reservations but there’s always a big ass line, VERY FEW of them are actually good enough to be worth the trouble. Prices are insane, tipping is out of control, the tables are cramped and bad, it’s loud in any decent restaurant, just meet at your house! Or in a park!

• TV shows. There are just way too many and they are almost never good enough to be worth the 12 hours of your life that they claim. Imagine all the other things you could be doing with that time! Skip TV altogether in 2026! Do something else! Anything!

• Music streaming. It’s just so unsatisfying. The lower the effort you spend to get something, the less you will appreciate. Streaming is everything from every era instantly. It’s destroying music appreciation IMO. Listening to music by volume, by quantity, is bad for your soul. It should be thoughtful and intentional and limited. You should remember what you listened to and which parts you want to hear again.

• Social media. What a mess. Where are my friends that I follow? They’ve been replaced. I will probably find myself using it more in the near future, not as a consumer but a producer, to promote things.

IN

• Vintage technology t shirts. This is a largely untapped, underexposed fashion niche. Think Sun Microsystems world conference 1997, Comdex 1991, Gateway Computers booth staff t shirt, Compaq, IBM, Netscape swag, Lotus software promotional giveaway sweatshirt - brands nobody thinks about anymore, but many of which are still behind the scenes, possibly in a rebranded, restructured capacity, very much involved in the infrastructure of Silicon Valley. To me this harkens back to an era of psychedelic techno-optimism, where the people building the internet were LSD-fried dreamers who were still hungover from the Summer of Love and who fantasized about a cyber-utopia where people were free from government and judgement and class and race and money. Unfortunately it did NOT turn out that way, but it’s fun to dress up in a nostalgic fantasy for a bit.

• Weekly casual dinner parties. People are struggling to socialize regularly. Just host a very unfussy dinner at your house every week, or once a month, whatever, and invite as many people as you can. Tell all your friends it’s every Friday at 6, or every first Saturday of the month, tell them to invite anyone they want. Don’t try to cook something amazing or have perfect place settings. Just make a big pot of stew and get a really nice loaf of bread, even paper plates if you must. Just make it doable and not exhausting. Set your personal stakes LOW. Do not expect it to be perfect. Just SEE PEOPLE.

• Paper. Doodle on paper, read a paper book, write someone a paper note, keep a journal on real paper. Get a very nice pen that inspires you to put it on paper. Get a fancy notebook that feels good in your hands. Get some weird markers or watercolors to play with.

• Live music. Do I need to explain this? This is what it’s all about. This is what people have been doing for tens of thousands of years; gathering around in small groups and performing and listening. When it’s good, it’s powerful, it’s raw it’s real. It feels like people are forgetting about this feeling, losing appreciation. There’s an essay by John Phillip Sousa (the composer of all of those annoying patriotic songs that they play at 4th of July parades etc) called The Menace of Mechanical Music. He comes off like a bit of an old crank railing against the tides of progress. And people sometimes point to this essay as an example of how wrong someone can be. “Look at us now? We’re fine! Recorded music didn’t destroy society!”. But I actually this Sousa was right. I think we are … ok as a society, but we have lost something very primal and fundamental and deep. Imagine that the only time you could hear music was when it was being performed live. It would feel so rare and magical. Instead of records, people bought sheet music and needed to know how to play the piano and sing in order to hear the latest songs. The value of music was cheapened by the advent of recording. It’s still good, but not as good. I’m in 2026 and I participate in society and streaming and all of it, and I’m fine, it’s all fine, but I think music is best when it’s live.

• Micro social media. Group text chats, small Whatsapp groups, or small intimate Discord servers or Slack servers with 5-10 close friends and no one else. NOT a group chat within another social media platform; that’s too distracting. Needs to be separate. Can’t recommend this enough. Especially if you have friends that live in different cities. It’s like social media except there is no one that you didn’t explicitly invite, no ads, no one being pushed into your feed, it’s always chronological, most days there is nothing new and no posts to look at, no reason to scroll. Anything posted there is something that your friend put there just for you to look at, not for any other reason. There is no incentive to pander to anyone or please an algorithm. In my experience the effect is that everyone feels much more comfortable and casual because they know exactly who will see what they post, and they know this small group of friends and what their values and tastes are. Everyone becomes more open and the interactions are more intimate. There is no incentive to perform.

• Touring Australia

• Singing at King Tuff’s going away show

• Opening up for Alabama Shakes on tour

• Learning how to make my gramma’s pie crust recipe

• Performing solo songs opening for the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s

• Attending Cruel World festival and seeing OMD

• Seeing DEVO twice this year

• Going to Jacumba Hot Springs for my bday & leading karaoke

• Doing pickleball at YMCA twice a week

• Hunx & His PUNX record release and tour

• Oktoberfest party at my moms with Double Dare and a play

• Catalina Island for for my sisters bday with my niece

• Camping on my brothers property property in Northern ca. my nephew is a shredding guitar player and it’s been fun to watch him blossom

• Attending Joe’s dad Delbert’s 80’s bday party in Oregon

• Mosswood Meltdown

• Seeing Pulp twice

• Going to the Joe’s mom Nannett’s bday beach house trip in Oregon

• Having my grief group every Tuesday has been a seriously helpful thing for me

• Moving into my new house and all my new room mates. I was scared to move and they’ve made me feel really loved and cared for

• Jacumba Breakdown festival

• Learning to two step in Austin this December

• My new band VOILA! And my friendships in that band

• Being accepted into a book writing program called Parakeet and receiving a scholarship

• Finally reading my first book since Joe passed away. I read Lapvona by Otessa Mosvegh and am almost done with Cannery Row by John Steinbeck. Both might be my favorite books

Nate’s Top 5 Live Shows of 2025

1. Enmore Theatre - Sierra Ferrell

We started the year in Australia and did two support shows with Sierra Ferrell, at the Enmore Theatre in Sydney and the Forum in Melbourne. Watching Australia soak it in and sing along brought big smiles to everyone there.

2. Punk Rock Bowling - Lynval Golding supported by the Aggrolites

The Clams were scheduled to play the same venue but I showed up to Vegas early to catch Lynval. I had missed the Specials before Terry Hall passed and to get to hear some of those old Specials tunes was pretty magical. Rooftop pool bar in Vegas had optimal chilled out vibes. After Roger Rivas nailed the keyboard tone of Jerry Dammers on an amazing rendition of “Do Nothing.” I was settled in and loving every minute of it.

3. Mosswood Meltdown - Devo

It’s pretty amazing this band still rips and gets out there and puts on such an incredible show. Energy domes off to the band for maybe being one of the longest enduring rock bands in current existence. RIP Bob II and Alan Myers.

4. Muddy Roots Festival - Pokey LaFarge

Pokey set the night into a fine stir up in the Tennessee hills with his troupe of excellent musicians. Spent most of the set dancing on an elevated cage platform with a bar in the center. Keep boogying.

5. Hollywood Bowl - Alabama Shakes

Hard to pick any one show with the incredible Shakes! But hard to not be stricken by the beauty and size of the legendary Hollywood Bowl. The Shakes were well missed by their fans and it was great to be able to sit back and watch the band groove the audience into a magnificent hip sway in the cool Southern California evening.

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I’m trying to pinpoint what set me off tonight…

Could it be the “Sleepy Sunset” Delta Binaural Beats that I put on to help me get sleepy? But it sounds like Angelo Badalamenti’s Blue Velvet score. I am imagining Laura Dern’s character ugly crying in a party dress superimposed over a white picket fence and roses.

Maybe because today was my first tv appearance on CBS & I hated how I looked so much it hurt. I still automatically think to send him a text for support and then have to remind myself… I can’t.

Is it my quickly approaching tour where I have to summon an ogre’s strength and pretend as though I’m adjusting well, so healthy, so positive. Holding a light for others to see in the dark, sometimes it’s to guide them but often it’s actually so I don’t feel so alone.

Tonight the ogre is in the dark clutching a damp and crumpled Jean jacket. Bulbous and hairy fingers check to see if the Nesmith pin is still fastened on tight. Clumsily using its beefy hand, it wiggles open all the pockets for the thousandth time, in case it somehow missed a love note. Or a clue. Or a grocery list.

I don’t remember what Neil Young album he couldn’t listen to anymore. It was either After the Gold Rush or Harvest but I don’t have a record to find out now. Those little details make me mad and remind me that life really isn’t fair. Maybe that’s the thought that is keeping me up and making me cry. Sometimes a song FEEEEELS right but the lyrics are wrong for the emotions you absorb from it. I’ve always felt that way about I Believe in You from After the Gold Rush. I’m afraid that’s the album he couldn’t listen to anymore but I know he’d want me to listen to anything that made me feel better. Anything to help me feel less alone. Make me feel the strength of an ogre in the dark.

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TICKETS

This week’s Bog brings a murky, bassy and blown out early recording of our song “Heartbreak”. AFAIK this is the first ever recording of this song. Despite the sludge, Shannon’s voice cuts through quite well. I’m not exactly sure, but I don’t THINK I’m even playing guitar on this recording. It was either the original guitar player, Chris, or possibly both of us playing together. The Edirol, I believe, was rented from our art school media center. We were all students at CCAC (formerly CCA (formerly CCAC (formerly the California College of Arts & Crafts))). I bailed after my first year because it was so expensive and the writing program was pathetic and severely underdeveloped. I’m pretty sure they admitted anyone who applied and there were still 10 or fewer total students in the program. I wonder if that program still exists.

At the time me and our first drummer, Ian, were living in a big house on 53rd & MLK in Oakland with 5 roommates (one of which lived inside of a fabric partition of the living room on an air mattress), which was called “The Fanny Shack”. My room at the time was a 36 sqft closet with a 6”x6” window across from the door. A 7” 45rpm vinyl single in the sleeve would have blocked all of the light from that window (except maybe the pinhole where the turntable spindle sits). I mounted as many things as I could to the walls so as not to occupy floor space, and I slept on an Ikea futon. I suspected that in the early 1900s it was some kind of cold storage room before refrigerators were common.

When we moved out of this house, our landlord Richard Fox, has us go to Starline Cleaning Supply on the corner of MLK & Grand just north of downtown Oakland (future site of the Starline Social Club bar & music venue) and buy a bunch of floor wax and furniture polish and apply it to the interior. This is the only time in my life that I’ve been made to do anything like this when moving out of a rental. I’ve been asked to clean and sometimes paint, but never polish all of the wooden fixtures and floor. I remember having no idea what to do with the stuff and the smell being quite overwhelming and toxic. What can you do when a landlord is dangling your deposit over your head? Back then we all needed that money badly. To be fair, we painted the kitchen a hideous bright orange color and had insane massive parties with hundreds of people. I’m a little shocked Richard never overheard them and called the police; he lived just down the street. A few years later when I was living nearby, Richard Fox helped me jumpstart my minivan randomly and he didn’t recognize me at all.

-Cody