"If you want to know if he loves you so, it's in his kiss"...or so the song goes. But the reality is, that's a lie. We all know kissing, especially a really good kiss, is all about a chemical connection via hormones found in spit.

​The mouth is a sensual place if you ask me. Warm, inviting and chock filled with chemicals in the saliva that will set the heart pattering during a kiss. The mouth and lips contain over 40% of the nerves connected to our face, so the lips respond intensely to every kind of stimuli, which, in turn, triggers a massive response in the brain. During a passionate kiss, our blood vessels dilate; more oxygen is routed to the brain; our breathing quickens and becomes erratic; our cheeks flush; our pulse quickens; our pupils dilate. We are inundated with dopamine, serotonin, norepinephrine, oxytocin, and our adrenaline levels spike, leaving our bodies awash in a chemical bath that is equivalent to an amazing drug high that often leaves us addicted and wanting more.

So, a good kiss really means nothing in the grand scheme of commitment. It doesn't mean he loves you, it doesn't mean he'll stick around, but it does mean there is some seriously good sexual juju that may or may not lead to love. 

​#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....

​#5: It had been weeks since I saw him last, as his other girlfriends and a hefty drug addiction kept him busy. We drove together to the coast to talk about his desire to finally try to be with me; maybe, just maybe, he was ready to commit.  But as we sat in the car staring at the sea, I realized that I didn't want to be with him, I wasn't in love with him anymore, and I knew I could never truly trust him. So I kissed him instead. I knew then that I only wanted his body because that was the only thing he could give me that wasn't a lie...

#7: He was only offering me a shoulder to cry on, as two days earlier another man broke my heart. He was kind and sweet and listened to me as I emptied my heart. I felt such comfort in his attentions. So when I found myself with him on a dark basketball court feeling my heart beat fast as my tummy did flip flops, I knew it was ok to forget the heartbreaking bastard who hurt me...

#9: I don't do public make outs on public sidewalks, that is not my style. Though when he asked if he could kiss me goodnight as I unlocked my bike I was hesitant for only a moment. I really wanted his kiss and I wanted him, so I wrapped my arms around his neck and decided not to care for once what other people might see or think about my actions in this small town of mine.
 

​#10: Rewind: I was 14, he was 13 and I have no real recollection of how we paired up, how things began or how I ended up laying under him on the damp grass of the golf course, but I was somehow making out with a boy for the first time. It was kind of cool but kind of weird as we slid our tongues around each other’s mouths. I got the hang of it quickly and decided I really liked kissing. I would like to say he influenced me profoundly, but he didn't. He was just the first boy I kissed in a long line of boys I would end up swapping spit with...

#14: His sexual bravado was easily seen in his swagger and smile as he came over to me in the crowded bar and whispered in my ear, "If I ever got you alone, I'd have to kiss you." I looked him in the eye, my whole body in a vice of desire and replied, "Well, when it's time for you to leave, I'll follow you out the door." We walked to the bleachers at the ball field where he wrapped me in his arms. I leaned in to kiss me and then BAM! He ignited a fire within me that I sorely needed to feel again.

#17: Months ago, while sharing a joint outside the bar, he started to ask me questions about my Making Out With Boys photo series, as he was curious about it: How many men was I dating? How many boyfriends did I have? And, more importantly, he asked if I had ever kissed anyone at this particular bar. "No, not yet," I stated. So when I ran into him recently at this particular bar, after our greetings and hugs near the bathroom, he leaned towards me and planted a quick kiss on my lips. I was simultaneously shocked that he made such a ballsy move but not surprised either, as I sensed he wanted to kiss me for a while now. It was a chaste kiss and as I didn't have time to respond, all I could do was laugh and say, "Now I've been kissed at this bar!" But I'll never say never to another kiss, maybe more, within the walls of this particular bar...

#18: When we first started our short but intense love affair, we were all over each other, all the time. With our electrified physical dynamic, there wasn't any place that was off limits to the ravenous joy of turning each other on. As I loaded my laundry into the dryer, he grabbed me from behind, turned me around and kissed me hard and passionately, wet towels falling to the floor as I engaged him in kind with my desire. At that point in our romance, I was still in the mindset that we loved each other, as that is what we agreed on. If I knew that "I Love You" meant something different to him than it did to me, if I foresaw the reality that he would leave me soon, I would never have desecrated my laundry room with my lust.

#19: "Look up!" he says as the convertible roars along the winding roads of West Marin. We enter into the grove of eucalyptus trees on the way to the coast and I catch myself in a moment of freedom within my heart as I lift my head and observe the dappled light. He holds my hand and looks at me with soft eyes and I fight with all my might not to fall into them, but I do anyway, regardless of the fortress of barbed wire around my heart. He's creeping into my soul, and I am simultaneously scared and elated by the possibilities...

Check out all my photographs from the night:

While you're at it, check out the Still Photo movies I made:

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