Apologies for the slow start to 2025. Yesterday I looked at the date and said, “Oh yeah - I should probably write a newsletter, shouldn’t I?” While I leave this coming year a fresh page, undisturbed by any predictions of what it might bring, I’ll take a glance back at 2024 and see where I came from, and came to.
Last year saw me facing some truths about myself that I didn’t like...
2025-01-06 17:51:49 +0000 UTC View Post
After our show at the House of Blues San Diego, we made our way back up to Los Angeles. We were slated to play the Wiltern again in Koreatown and pretty pumped that it sold it. I remember this was probably the first time seeing vendors on the street selling bootleg versions of our merch. It was actually kinda rewarding that we had gotten to that point, but also a bit of a bummer knowing that ...
2024-12-29 17:00:17 +0000 UTC View Post
About a week or so after getting back to the Pacific Northwest, we started getting ready for our local Seattle show. It was our first time playing at the historic Paramount Theatre downtown, but we had all attended a bunch of shows there previously. I think my dog-sitter for the day fell through, so we ended up taking Beau with us to help out at merch. He was mostly a good boy chill...
2024-12-22 17:00:10 +0000 UTC View Post
The next day after our short residency at Brooklyn Steel, we made our way west across New Jersey towards Philadelphia. It was difficult to get back in the swing of things, but luckily it wasn't a super long drive before the much busier day. After setting up our gear on stage, I remember going out in search of a couple smoothies for the merch crew while they were busy setting u...
2024-12-15 17:00:18 +0000 UTC View PostDec 15 at 1 PM PST: Band's delight: study hour with Will! Get some work done on those exams and papers alongside your Patreon peers.
Dec 19 at 4 PM PST: Solo performance stream with Will. I'll be doing some Christmas carol favorites!
Jan 2 at 4 PST: Archive Sunday stream with the band.
2024-12-11 20:00:07 +0000 UTC View Post
We met back up with Degnan and the van once we crossed back into the U.S. Earlier we had decided to let him hang out in upstate New York with most of the merch because it ends up saving a lot of money and hassle on the import/export taxes. It was exciting to be headed to one of our favorite museums up in North Adams, Massachusetts once again, plus this time we had more time th...
2024-12-08 17:00:12 +0000 UTC View PostMy winter so far has been cold, calm, and quiet. Cold, as I haven’t put up much of a fight against the changing weather. In previous years I’d crank the heat to create a bubble for myself; this year, I’m pushing myself to get more warmth out of exercise and cooking. It seems I notice the cold less every day.
It’s been quiet because I unsubscribed from Spotify, along with a load of...
2024-12-06 18:37:27 +0000 UTC View Post
After a couple years on the sidelines waiting for the numbers to drop, we were excited to hit the road again in 2022 once things seemed a bit safer. It took a ton of preparation to ensure we could provide a relatively safe environment for everyone involved, including stocking the merch table with free masks and establishing protocols for regular testing and isolating. All that aside...
2024-12-01 17:00:15 +0000 UTC View PostTune in tomorrow at 11 am PST for a band delight's stream with Will. We'll decide what we're doing once we get there!
2024-11-30 00:01:50 +0000 UTC View PostI used to write in darkness. “Trapped!”, an old song from the Nervous Young Men era, sums up my typical state of mind during high school, or maybe the whole album it’s on does. Life felt like a series of looming deadlines and fatal pronouncements; the air felt like a tangle of toxic forces I couldn’...
2024-11-28 18:00:06 +0000 UTC View Post“I’m bringing a caterpillar under the umbrella.”
“Nope.”
“Seriously?”
“Here, I’ll give you a hint: I’m bringing under the umbrella, ummmmmmmm….”
“That’s not a hint! You’re just saying ‘um’!”
It’s easy for me to hold onto frames. Having a mental rubric, being able to place what’s in front of me within a setting I unde...
2024-11-18 18:00:07 +0000 UTC View Post
Outtake from MADLO sessions.
2024-11-17 18:00:05 +0000 UTC View PostNovember 26th, at 4 PST: Archive Sunday stream.
December 1st at 1 PST: Band performance stream of Twin Fantasy (MTM). (This is still the November stream.)
Band's delight stream TBD!
2024-11-14 23:54:03 +0000 UTC View PostHigh school was, for much of its duration, a drift through frightening and alienating unknowns for me. Throughout it all there was a bright thread, one that brought me a consistency of schedule, of friends, of authority figures: marching band.
In retrospect, I’m surprised I signed up for it. My sister joined on two years before I entered high school, and brought back horror storie...
2024-11-11 21:49:50 +0000 UTC View Post
AK: The infamous 1 Trait Danger tour; the one, the only (literally). We had always wanted to do some sort of tour with 1TD but of course it had always been on the backburner. This was until Will got us a headlining spot at ANE (Anthro New England) which we gladly accepted and built a tour around.
It was fun building out this set, going through old tracks and remixing them then adding them...
2024-11-10 17:00:09 +0000 UTC View PostI was born just outside of what they’re now calling “the anxious generation”, kids who grew up in the era of smartphones. The idea that personalized screens could be a constantly accessible form of entertainment was only just starting to creep into the collective conscious as I entered high school. Before then, there was TV, books, music, and in-between those, a lot of silence, sitting ar...
2024-11-04 17:50:25 +0000 UTC View Post
In the middle of October, we had a few days to lay down some recordings at the now familiar Avast Studios. Most of the live band Madlo takes were recorded there, plus we had a bit of extra time to run some takes of songs off My Head Hz by Naked Days that Will was producing. We also randomly got invited by Fader magazine to attend the MLS cup happening in Seattle around then. I guess...
2024-11-03 17:00:13 +0000 UTC View PostI have a recurring nightmare of clams. I’m on the beach, walking into the ocean, when suddenly I find my feet pinched by thousands of hard, painful objects - a seabed full of shelled mollusks, sinking their hinged jaws into my flesh. These creatures have always revolted me, those unmistakable signs of life from what seems more like an object than a creature awakening a primal dread within me....
2024-11-01 17:21:53 +0000 UTC View Post
Now this is a story all about how....
2024-10-28 22:51:07 +0000 UTC View Post
Starting back in early September, we met back up with Death Cab for Cutie to play some local Pacific Northwest amphitheaters. Our first show was down in Portland at the Oregon Zoo for the tail end of their Zoo Nights series. I remember we all discussed the ethics of zoos on the drive down and while Andrew was firmly against the idea, most of us thought that as long as the zoos focused on educat...
2024-10-27 16:00:11 +0000 UTC View Post
The next day after the Hollywood Bowl show with Death Cab, we caught a flight to Porto with a couple hour layover in Paris. The Paris airport is beautiful, but kinda uncomfortable when you have to spend an extended amount of time there. I remember we couldn't find a spot to sit anywhere in our connection terminal, so we eventually gave up and settled on the floor. The terminal had this impressi...
2024-10-20 16:00:17 +0000 UTC View PostHowdy, here's this month's streaming schedule.
October 20th, noon PST - band's delight stream with Will, content TBD.
October 28th, 4 PST - band performance stream. In celebration of its tenth anniversary, we will be playing all or most of How To Leave Town!
October 30th, 4 PST - Archive Sunday Stream
2024-10-14 17:26:39 +0000 UTC View Post
Picking back up in Indianapolis, we set our sights on finishing off the later part of the tour. So we drove south through Kentucky towards Nashville the next day. We must have listened to some podcast or something about the Kentucky blue people, because I remember discussing our chances of encountering any on our long drive through the state. In the end we mostly saw just endless co...
2024-10-13 16:00:13 +0000 UTC View Post
Later in March we received a last minute offer to play SXSW again to help fill out an artist showcase at Stubb's. We were pleasantly surprised to learn it actually paid something rather than just exposure, so the four of us jumped at the opportunity to return. We arrived the day before and checked out the Fender tent to kill some time. I remember grabbing a bunch of guit...
2024-10-06 16:00:11 +0000 UTC View Post
