Radio Player, I Fell Asleep . . .

In the late heat of the summer of 2023, I was playing a show in Logan, Utah and I asked my dad if he’d come with me. We lived in Logan when I was young - from kindergarten to fourth grade - while my dad attended USU. We hadn’t been back much in my adulthood, and that place always holds a nostalgic comfort for me that I find myself often coming back to. I also love going on little road trips with my dad. Showing him new music is one of the greatest joys of my life, especially since most of my childhood was him showing music to me, and long drives is the best place to do it. My parents would do their every-other-weekend kid swap in Sardine Canyon, my dad playing Tom Waits and Mose Allison from Logan to the summit, then my mom or my stepdad Mark playing Greg Brown or Paul Simon or Bob Dylan from the summit to Ogden. I love how music feels in the car - you have to make it loud to hear it over the noise of the road. Every feeling can be a song sung on the highway.

On this particular trip, we decided to check out a few of the old places we used to live. Even though it was just a short 5 years that we lived in Logan, they were really formative for me. I had a young, single dad - he was just 27 when we moved up there - and sometimes his college experience felt more like my own than my actual college experience did. There were parties and plays and musicians and drunks and late night kitchen table philosophy conversations. We’d walk to neighborhood parties together and he’d giggle and stumble home next to me on my razor scooter. Though my dad’s college days were maybe not the most ideal happenings for a child to tag along to, I never felt unsafe. I always felt protected by him.

My favorite home that we lived in was in a neighborhood called the Island, which is a lower part of the city nestled between the Logan and Little Logan Rivers. It was a sweet little community of families and college kids. Trick or treating there was the most fun place to trick or treat in the whole country I swear to god - ask me about the Gorilla Lady sometime. The house we lived in was a fairly run down rental with a huge crack in the foundation, but what sold my dad on it was the Logan River literally running through the backyard. Next to the river and behind the house was this old, spooky red cabin/shack with a wood burning stove. I’d use it as a play house during the day and fear it when the sun went down.

When we moved out of that house, my dad swears we accidentally left a painting in that little cabin painted by my stepdad, who passed away in 2017. I have a few paintings of Mark’s hanging in my home now, but the thought of there being a lost one hidden in the rafters somewhere forgotten was enough to make me want to go look for it. As we drove toward the end of the street that this house was on, we got quiet as we realized it was no longer there. Just an empty lot where we used to live. A pile of gravel lay in the place where his drum set was set up in the garage, the spot I stood in front of him at 9 years old and announced that I’d found my singing voice during a particularly soulful rendition of the Star Spangled Banner that day in school. Weeds grew high where our living room was - where I’d been home sick from school watching 9/11 happen on TV. The crab apple tree I’d sit under with our dog Zorro and have him pull the stems off of apples was gone. A fence was up with some no trespassing signs, and we stared at it quietly.

We both noticed at the same time that the little red cabin was still there. The sole structure of something tangible to prove we were in the right place. We saw you could get back there from the neighbor’s backyard, and my dad knocked at their door. If there is one thing to know about my dad, it’s that he fucking LOVES to get scared. We were watching scary movies and going to corn mazes and haunted houses and abandoned buildings and empty cemeteries together from the time I could walk. When no one answered his knock at the door, he just walked back through their gate and behind the fence to the little red cabin. I said that I’d stand watch, but ultimately I was just too scared to get in trouble. I watched from my car with my jaw dropped as he waltzed back there just in time for an older grumpy-looking man to come out of the neighbor’s house and start looking around. It was like a cartoon when my dad came scrambling out from behind the fence just as the man wandered to the opposite side of the house to investigate. My dad hopped in the car and we drove off, my heart racing. He didn’t find the painting.

As winter crept in that year, I felt the ominous presence of a soon-to-be-reached breaking point. I didn’t know the shape that it would take. I didn’t know the direction it would come from. I didn’t know which of my empty cups would slip from my fingers first. I only knew that whatever it was, it was imminent. I felt out of control in such a new way. On the surface I felt that I was going through all the right motions, but inside I felt brittle. Like an old rubber band, no longer elastic but powder-dry in a limp and useless circle. On the day of the winter solstice, I decided that I was going to take a break from drinking to see if wrapping my hands around something I could control would help with the some of the intensity I had been feeling.

I had started writing a song around that time about memory because I had been thinking about it a lot since that day on the Logan river. I was piecing together things my dad and I had both forgotten or remembered differently, thinking about Mark and my mom and my brother and all of these intersecting experiences. My only blood sibling grew up really differently than I did, and I was thinking a lot about that. My brother is six years older than me and after my parents split up, he stayed in Ogden with my mom when I went to Logan with my dad.

My brother and I have always had a fraught relationship because we were always so far away from each other, in location and age and experience. As adults, it’s always felt like trying to build a relationship on unstable ground. It had been in a good place for a few years before this point, but unfortunately it was skidding into another dark place that winter. My few memories with my brother in adulthood are tinged with a drunken haze - one that feels similar to the far-off memory of trying to remember your childhood. Neither of us really knowing how to connect with each other without at least a bit of a buzz, but continuing to try. Both our relationships to substances have found similar safety and comfort in escaping reality, but a big difference between us is that where I try to remember so that I can understand the shape of things that happened and how they inform who I am now, he would rather forget. And honestly I can’t blame him for that. I think neither of those ways of coping is wrong, and we just try to do our best with what we know how to do.

Where a lot of my last record, In the Garden, By The Weeds, was about my relationship with myself, the music I have been writing over these last two years feels much more about relationships with other people. Especially family and friendship. So much of it around distance - both emotional and physical - with people that we love and what we let get in the way. I just released a new song called Radio Player that is the first single from a record Jordan and I have been making with our friend Andrew Goldring. I have a lot to say about the process of making this song that you could read more about here from my friend Teri . It has a lot to do with everything I’ve talked about here and so much more and also the movie Poltergeist which I fucking love. Let me know if you listened to the song and if you liked it. I’m excited to share more with you in the new year. It takes a long time to make a record between three people in three different time zones.

I haven’t written one of these in a long time - I’m not sure why. I think I’ve been out of the writing/creating cycle and more production-minded these last few months, and writing these feels more connected to my songwriting brain than anything. With the days getting shorter and the comfy dark winter arriving however, I’m sure that cycle will be shifting again here soon.

What I have been doing is going to shows. OH I have been GOING TO SHOWS!! Two weeks ago I saw the band Friendship open for Wednesday - Dan Wriggins of Friendship is one of the greatest songwriters alive and I was so happy to finally see them live. Then a couple of days later I had an out of body experience seeing Destroyer at Urban Lounge. Dan’s Boogie will be one of my albums of the year, for sure. A couple weeks before that I had the absolute honor of playing the first ever Hypha Fest, put on by local legend Hal Johnson of Hoofless and Hypha Productions. I’m still weeping and grinning ear to ear after the absolute joy of playing with so much Salt Lake City talent. I love this town.

I have been attempting to play the video game Silksong. I can’t stop thinking about the book Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino. I cannot stop listening to Destroyer, oh my god I’m still so obsessed with Destroyer.

More to come. I hope you are staying safe, I hope you watched a lot of scary movies last month, and I hope you are asking for help when you need it and helping others when you don’t.