Here we are, closing in on a whole year since our lives and our global existence have morphed into different beasts, and I have a feeling things might not go back to what we knew of as "normal." But within that, life does go on; the Earth keeps spinning on its wobbly axis, and music is continuing to be made and heard. 
 
The other day I was sad. I was grieving for the old normal and needed to shut off my brain for a little while. I put on my headphones, spread myself onto my bedroom floor, and pushed play on Kyle Stringer's solo project House Plants (which is both the name of the "band" as well as the title for the album.). I cried for the first time in a while. You may think that a weird statement to start an album review, but in my mind, if music evokes strong emotion, it's an excellent album. The crying led to a smile, which led to a laugh, then onto a small boogie-dance session, which ended with thinking many thoughts and feelings about my life. All that and more are encompassed in the various moods of House Plants.
 
Stringer has grown up playing music, starting on Euphonium (a tiny tuba) in elementary school as well as learning guitar. "My love has pretty much always been the bass, though," Stringer says. "I love how it glues music together. It's really the unsung hero of music! Listening to it and playing it is so rewarding." He also works as a music therapist at a Veteran's Home in Napa County, where he uses music to heal. 
 
Up until the life-sucking shutdowns, Stringer was in Oakland-based rock band Milk For The Angry. But because surviving in life is about making the best of bad situations, Stringer felt that now that he wasn't able to gig, he had the chance to record many of his own songs that he had been stockpiling over the last five years. Like most musicians recording in this particular historical period of time, Stringer created this album by recording in his bedroom on his computer while doing most of the vocals and instrumentation himself (including his Squier Strat and Silvertone Archtop plus lots of pedal effect, as well as his trusty Rickenbacker 4003 bass and more). He had friends on board who filled in various musical parts from their own bedrooms across the country with file sharing. Welcome to the Pandemic Age of recording music. 

Additional Players/Contributors:
Josiah Zimmerman: Drums
Alex Doolittle: Additional Drums
Lara Avery: Vocals, Tiny Keyboard, Scream
Erin Moore: Additional Vocals
Matt Mittman: Additional Guitar
Ben Sauder: Vocals
Chase Horseman: Guitar, Synths, Mixing, Co-Producing
Joel Nanos: Mastering
Nicholas Stahl: Layout & Design 
Josiah Zimmerman: Leafy Collage 
Chloe Breau: Cover Artwork 
 ​

Find out more about Kyle Stringer and House Plants, listen to the album!
houseplantsmusic.bandcamp.com/album/house-plants

When I was in my early 20’s, I was hanging out with a folk band from San Francisco, The Straw Coyotes. Their music was filled with multiple harmonies, lyrics with “thee” and “thou” and they were acoustic in a troubadour kind of way. I was deep in unrequited love with one band member, a lanky songwriter boy with a wandering, gypsy heart. I loved to hang out with the band, party with them, and experience the wonderment of having beautiful songs come to life in my living room (or my bedroom, as the case may be).
 
During the summer of 1992, the band members packed up their vans and cars for an epic road trip. The plan was to jam, write, and make music while communing on the shores and woods of Puget Sound’s gorgeously wild Vashon Island near Seattle. I decided to road trip up to Washington for a few days on my own to visit with the band.
 
I was a lot wilder in those days than I am now, and I was always up for adventures. My favorite road trip ritual was to consume massive amounts of Sudafed and guzzle Snapple Ice Tea.  I would  then leave at night, cracked out of legal uppers and drive till the morning light appeared over the two-lane blacktop. It was so exhilarating to be one of the few drivers on the road at 4:00 in the morning. I could freely drive 90 miles an hour with my mixed tapes blaring, the Sudafed making my scalp tingle, and all the crazy thoughts I had about life flying through my mind.
 
On this particular trip, I made it to Seattle in about 11 hours, stopping only for gas, pee breaks, and more Sudafed. When I disembarked from the ferryboat and headed to where the band was staying, I had been up for over 36 hours. That’s what being 22 years old and a wild child is all about.

Co-written by Carolyn McCoy & William Wayland

The music of Physical Suicide Deterrent System Project (or PSDSP for short) is complicated. We could easily plop them into the genre of “grunge," but it’s more than that. The trio, guitarist/singer Eli Carlton-Pearson, drummer Michael Pinkham and bassist Brian Wilkerson pull from jazz and psychedelic genres while adding some hardcore ass-kicking punk for kicks. The songs the band creates often eschew the typical “verse/chorus/bridge” construction to create a river of sound that takes you on a sonic journey with intelligent and poetic lyrics that uphold deep imagery to tell a story of both darkness and hope.
 
The band’s songwriting process is definitely a collaborative effort. “I write all the songs, though several come about from jams, or at least evolved within them,” states Carlton-Pearson. “Michael and Brian contribute a lot in the way of arrangement, rhythmic conception, and what's perhaps the most significant thing, how much fire they cook up playing. That then permeates the whole ‘thing’; it changes the way I sing the lyrics I wrote; it gives the song more real-life meaning. {The song} has to be a living thing, and that happens because of the band.

​PSDSP has just released their latest album, Luddite, on vinyl, an old trend that seems to be resurfacing as a common practice among musicians lately. The album culls from new and old songs that have never been recorded before. Inline with the definition of “Luddite” (one who eschews or is mistrustful of technology when creating), the band decided to record in analog, raising funds via a Kickstarter campaign so that they could make the sound they were looking for.

​The band traveled to New Paltz, NY, to work with Tom Deis at Pineapple Room Studio. “I've known Tom for 16 years now. We've been in bands together and worked together a fair bit, but moreover, we're just really good friends,” says Carlton-Pearson. “Tom worked so fucking hard on this record it's ridiculous. He signed up for one of the gnarliest hazings an engineer could go for, going into a 100% analog recording process from a largely digital workflow and buying several pieces of equipment specifically for Luddite. All the technical limitations we experienced just wound up being the magic on the tape at the end, which is why we chose to do the whole thing as we did.”
 
“I wanted to work with Tom basically because I trusted him. I trusted him musically, and I trusted him personally. He gets it. He gets that music is a spiritual entity you access through the physical world. I guess this whole recording was way more intense and vulnerable than I'd like to admit. I trusted his understanding of how to use technology to capture the spirit of things.”
 
When asked why the band decided on analog, “Because it sounds better,” replies Carlton-Pearson, “It just does.“ 

It’s one of those warm, early autumn evenings here in Northern California; the crickets chirp away, the stars sparkle in the sky, and summer begins to drifts off into the past. In the wake of the vast West Coast fires, we now have a respite from smoke and fear, and I breathe in the fresh night air. As I sit and experience all this, Marin County singer/songwriter Jeremy D’Antonio’s new album Spinnin’ Wheels wafts softly from my room, seemingly in conjunction with the multi-faceted songs of local crickets. It’s a fitting venue, the night, to listen to this fantastic EP.

D’Antonio is most known as part of Marin County’s Americana band, San Geronimo. His first solo record is a refreshing breath of fresh air in a time of fires, lockdown, pandemic hell, economic collapse, and political upheaval, yet has nothing to do with any of that. It’s a journey unto itself that helps one forget the woes of the world for a while. For D’Antonio, Spinnin’ Wheels is a detour from San Geronimo’s sound in many ways, taking a healthy dose of Country and mixing it in with D’Antonio’s hard-hitting songwriting. 

“I never intended to write a country song or have a ‘country vibe’. I actually mostly listen to old soul music,” states D’Antonio. “Only recently have I dug into some of the ’60s and 70’s country classics, mostly because people assume I know all that music and request me to play it live. I think any music that is honest is good; you can immediately hear the difference. I grew up in New Mexico and Colorado, and I guess there is something about that landscape or the blue-collar lifestyle that comes out in what I do.”  

“Lyrics stem from feelings more than physical experiences. A feeling can make you experience a thousand different emotions without ever physically doing anything. I think this allows me to write about scenarios that have happened in my head but not in the physical realm,” D’Antonio states on his songwriting. “I know a lot of people write a story and put down the words first, but I usually start with a feeling. I get so deep that it is hard to be around others, and I am able to dive down pretty far and extract what is most honest about whatever “funk” I am in. From this usually comes a melody and the words follow.”​

When a musician channels music and brings it into the corporeal world, sometimes there is no rhyme or reason for what kind of music they create. When Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter Zephaniah OHora
started his musical career, it was Country music that somehow manifested itself through his being. I am sure Zephaniah will credit his spiritual upbringing as well as the circuitous circumstance and available opportunities to play music in NYC for maneuvering his career towards traditional Country. But whatever fates drove his train, he is now on the fast track towards becoming a star in the Country world. 
 
“I’ve been influenced by so much music because I listen to quite a variety,” states OHora. “But as far as Country music artists, I’ve spent many hours studying Jimmie Rodgers, Ernest Tubb, Lefty Frizzell, Marty Robbins, and more recently Bobby Bare, Don Williams, and Merle Haggard.”
 
OHora has just released his second album, “Listening To The Music”. It upholds classic, old-school Country in the true tradition, but with the flavors of modern New York tossed in for kicks. “Listening To The Music” is a great album not only because of OHora’s songwriting skills, but the album hosts such big-time players as harmonica player Mickey Raphael (Willie Nelson) and guitarist Norm Hamlet (Merle Haggard). 

What do you do when your life falls apart, loved ones die, and you find yourself in a place of loss? Do you succumb to the demons at hand; let them pull your sanity apart? No, you don’t. You use that energy to create. You put forth all that you feel into your art, making something immensely positive when all else is going to shit. Within that, you’ll not only survive, but you’ll come out with something incredible, most likely.
 
North Carolina-based songwriter Kenny Roby has had a crazy couple of years similar to the scenarios described above. He lost his longtime friend and fellow collaborator Neal Casal (Chris Robinson Brotherhood, Circles Around The Sun), dealt with the demise of his relationship, and realized his life was changing in ways that were difficult beyond measure. Yet he didn’t let all this craziness get the better of him. He channeled that loss and made a record; a really incredible and beautiful record, no less, in the form of The Reservoir, his first solo release (outside of albums with his main band 6 String Drag) since 2013.  The songs on this album reflect his recent experiences, drawing the listener into the story in profound ways.
 
“I think it’s less difficult to put (challenging experiences) into words than it is to get out of the way and not censor yourself too much,” Roby states. “To be as honest as you can about what you are experiencing. It’s also riding that fine line of sharing the human experience but not getting bogged down too much in the details. This record is more a sharing of what my experience was of being ‘one of us humans’ than it was a memoir, as far as I can tell.”

Check out more on Kenny Roby:
http://kennyroby.net/

His single "Old Love" is gorgeous: Check it out!
​

I think it’s genuinely brilliant that one may go into their bedroom, turn on their computer and record an album. I think it’s incredible that with the technology we have at our fingertips in this day and age, musicians can be in complete control of what they produce with a flick of a mouse, some good lyrics, and melodies inside their heads. BAM! Magic happens, and songs are made and digitalized for all to hear.
 
Bay Area musician and songwriter Colin Schlitt has done just that. Schlitt’s side project, Peppermint Moon, is a complete DIY one-man-band that has produced an airy and grungy album, A Million Suns. Schlitt is best known as the bassist for the Marin County band El Radio Fantastique, but his talents range far and wide when it comes to music. Schlitt is an accomplished musician on not only bass but also piano and guitar starting at a young age.
 
“I started writing songs in my early 20’s. That’s also when I started playing bass in bands where a lot of the songwriting was collaborative. I focused mainly on the bands I was in, but my own songs were more of a hobby at that point”, states Schlitt. 

Check out the music and more info on Peppermint Moon
Bandcamp:
http://peppermintmoon.bandcamp.com/

​Spotify:
​http://open.spotify.com/album/2vV0M13iYva7vJkKJB1htA?si=pSQ8CAGaQGWC8-n5KdwK4A

Marin singer/songwriter Darren Nelson is a striking presence. He is plastered with tattoos, has a long and wild mane of hair, sports a scruffy, mountain man-style beard, and a heart-melting grin. In any given song, his expressive face may go from a wide-mouthed scream to a peaceful Buddha. His songs are lyrical stories telling of runaway convicts, drinking, love & heartbreak, and how a hard life can turn out to be a fun adventure. His onstage presence is both dynamic and genuine as he sets his focus on making epically awesome rock and roll with any one of his numerous bands that include Honeydust, San Geronimo, and now, the 421’s.

At this point in time, most of us are experiencing a bit of the Lockdown Blues, and even though it seems as if we are coming out of it, we are entering back into a world that has changed drastically. It is sad to say that the music scene in the Bay Area may be in a state of a significant overhaul with massive shutdowns and closures of all music venues, bars, and clubs. Most of us have not gone to a live show since mid-March, and bands and musicians are struggling to find a place (and an income) in the new paradigm.
 
The future of our local music scenes is uncertain. Will we ever be able to gather in large groups again? Are small clubs and bars a thing of the past? Who knows? But the truth is, we still need live music in our brains, and we still need to rock and roll, so how do we do that when we can’t gather? Well, kids, welcome to the New Age of the music industry, Live Stream shows via the Internet.
 
I like to say, “When the going gets wacky, the wacky people get creative and innovative.” It seems that the new version of a “live music venue” is in our own backyards, literally. Backyard (or garage, front porch or front yard) live streams are the new clubs, the lawn or patio is the latest idea of a stage and countless viewers sitting at home with their computers are the modern audiences. The simplicity of cell phone technology has made it massively easy to bring people together to experience music, now that’s what I call making the best of a bad situation.

Here we are, Lockdown day number “whatever”, and by this point, most of us are cranky, broke, scared, and frustrated. Every one of us has seemingly let go of “the old normal” and we are fast embracing “the new normal”. Sadly that means that we are no longer going out to experience live music in our local clubs and bars. But, alas, there is still music being made and released, probably even more so now than before. And so with that segue, I will tell you a story about this exact subject of making music.
 
Many moons ago, deep in the heart of West Marin, California, a young man named Frankie Bourne discovered his calling; music. It was in the small town of Nicasio that this man first heard music coming out of the local roadhouse that would greatly influence his life. “I grew up regularly exposed to rootsy, blues-rock bar bands playing at Rancho Nicasio. I loved the sass of blues music, the soul in the stories, the crunchy telecaster guitars, and the attitude-driven grooves,” states Bourne. “A turning point for me was when I was 15. I saw Jackie Greene play a dinner show at Rancho. It was a trio, just Jackie and a cocktail kit rhythm section. I remember having a moment of reverence that night. I was so inspired. This light turned on. It was a moment of monumental clarity. I said to myself: “that is what I want to do”.
 
Bourne started his musical life on drums and taught himself guitar. As a teen, he began writing songs and has since become an amazing and prolific songwriter. “Lyrics have fortunately always flowed very naturally for me,” states Bourne. “I guess you could say I cull from personal experiences about the basic human condition, about personal experiences that we all share. It's about the shit that makes us human, and characteristically imperfect; relationships, friendships, family, loss, anger, love, curiosity, confusion, envy, jealousy, identity.”