​#2: The wooden footbridge was dark, empty and probably not more than 50 feet long. But when one is lustily distracted by a wild and curly-haired man with a dark soul and a fiery passion, a bridge, even a short bridge such as this one,  can take hours to cross...

​#3:  As we sat on the bench in the dark, he told me he was emotionally bankrupt and couldn't give me anything, I said that was OK. But when my lips touched the warm, salty skin on his neck I was hit with a desire I hadn't felt in awhile. I knew at that moment that I was lying to him and that eventually I'd want more....

​#4: The intimacy of my bedroom is rarely shared with anyone. The honor of being in my sacred space is something that is earned, not freely given. But if you find yourself standing next to me near my bed, you can expect that I want more than a kiss.

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.

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. 

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.“