I’m on vacation, which means daily postprandial listening sessions of playfully satanic heavy metal.
Today’s gem in Ghost’s latest, Prequelle. I mean, just the artwork alone, my friends. And the power chorus in “Rats.” Tobias Forge is a curmudgeonly genius, and if a genre’s merit can be quantified by the number of beautiful assholes creating within it, look no further than masked Swedish pop/metal.
Billie Eilish and Finneas O’Connell wrote and recorded When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go in Finneas’s bedroom. They’re a lock for album, record, and song of the year at the Grammys next month.
My friends in Delta Rae, after ditching their major label, recorded and mixed their upcoming record, The Light, in home studios.
A buddy just landed a five-figure sync deal for a track he produced in GarageBand on his iPhone.
We can make and share art - shimmering, high-fidelity, potentially generation-defining art - however and whenever we choose. If someone tells you otherwise, they’re an asshole.
There’s a fear surrounding starting over, but you’re never really starting over, not completely.
I can, I think, speak confidently on your behalf, dear reader, and say you’re less of an asshole than you were five years ago, and a half decade of getting your ass kicked by life’s made you a veritable walking Buddha, or at least marginally tolerable company.
We take ourselves with us wherever we go, in all the best ways. We’ve all leveled up. We should give ourselves credit.
It’s never too late to grow into the person we’re meant to be.
Children in airports are a delight, principally because they tell shit like it is and there isn’t a goddamn thing anyone can do about it.
Say, hypothetically, you’re told to stand in a crazy long security line instead of the much shorter one you’ve chosen.
When you ask, in a practiced, measured tone, why you’re being told to stand in the crazy long line, the guy with mustard stains on his uniform suggests, view troglodytic utterance, that you are an ignoramus.
The five year old standing behind you, eavesdropping as all good kids do, counters by saying the guy with mustard stains on his uniform is “dumb.” The child does so loudly, and is met with perfunctory chastisement by his mother, who is simultaneously beaming with pride, much to the consternation of the guy with mustard stains on his uniform.
I remain in the shorter line, humming a whimsical tune.
As I’m standing in line to board my delayed flight, an already tight connection now a virtual impossibility, a friendly reminder that if you’re feeling irritated by a thing, chances are others are feeling similarly, and they, like you, would enjoy nothing more than to channel every un-hugged moment in their childhood as witty vitriol in the general direction of anything with a pulse.
It’ll all be ok. Let’s put our headphones on, stare at our phones, and bask in the upcoming miracle of flight.
Really enjoyed this Billie Eilish and Finneas O’Connell interview, recorded with Zane Lowe in Paris earlier this year.
Billie Eilish, obviously, is crazy bananas cultural icon famous, so there’s a lot I had to sort of nod along with (yes, I imagine not being able to walk around Paris is a bummer), but she and her brother are spot on about the rigors of travel and touring, and both are disconcertingly grounded.
Seeing the thing I do at a cult band, secret handshake level intelligently humanized by people with Drake’s number in their contacts is refreshing. Well worth settling in for the entire conversation.
I’m currently riddled with self-doubt, the discomfort of which is ameliorated somewhat by the fact that I’m writing this while luxuriating in a bubble bath, and that the mental image of said self-indulgence will be, for many, off-putting.
I don’t run from self-doubt the way I used to. Self-doubt, ultimately, means processing, and I don’t want to penalize myself for inelegantly making sense of whatever I’m going through.
Better to continue spiraling outward, sharing art, and existing outside of the vacuum of my mind.
We exist, I believe, in one of infinite universes.
In this one, I’m the Trevor who plays in a soul band and fool heartedly writes songs about his feelings, hoping people will like them and, in turn, him. I maintain a gentleman’s six out of ten in terms of not wanting to hurl himself into oncoming traffic.
In another, objectively more badass universe, there’s a Trevor, no doubt tattooed and drowning in female attention, living out this Trevor’s ultimate fantasy - singing playfully satanic songs in a masked, Swedish pop/metal band.
He’s out there, that faux-demonic, mellifluous son of a bitch, and, in my weakened, cold-ridden state, I’m happy for him.
I should probably mention I’ve been watching this interview with Ghost’s Tobias Forge, which is totally feeding my jealousy.
It was important to take a break, but it feels good writing the MoaT again.
In an era driven by analytics, it’s wonderfully centering having an outlet that has nothing to do with followers, streams, or downloads.
I’m not trying actively to discourage people from subscribing, but I like that this newsletter’s kinda hard to find. You have to double opt in. I don’t promote it, pay attention to numbers, or have any interest in monetizing posts.
If you’re reading this, you REALLY want to be reading this. I love that.
…and others tape bananas to walls. I’m selling this for $120,001.
Kesha’s mom (yes, that Kesha, and no, I’m not making this up) has heard my new band Climb The Sky’s music.
Kesha’s mom has heard Climb The Sky’s music and does not care for it.
“You guys need to take drugs,” she told our bass player, the impossibly sweet Gideon Klein. “And you need to fight more. Like, really fucking HATE each other.”
This is what Kesha’s mom said.
My friends, how do you know when your band’s on the right track? When Kesha’s mom does not like your band.
Onward and upward. TO VICTORY.
One advantage of a national TV look is Flexin’ for the Gram.
Kimmel was fun. I’ve just discovered, tragically, that the mobile blogging app I use doesn’t allow for linked text, but I’ll post a link to our performance tomorrow when I’m back in laptop land, or you can stream it pretty much everywhere now, which I don’t imagine will be challenging given you figured out how to subscribe to this bozo’s daily newsletter.
The cat’s name is Cheeto, btw.
I’m watching Jimmy Kimmel dissect every line of dialogue for tonight’s show - he runs a tight ship, and it’s inspiring seeing someone who could easily scarf shrimp cocktail all day be this hands on.
The stereotype is creatives are flaky, played into with gusto by people masquerading as the real thing, but successful creatives are about as dialed as they come, and this morning’s a welcome reminder not to mute one’s personality just to fit in.
The Al Stone Electric Experience plays Jimmy Kimmel Live tonight. Tune in, stream, and rejoice in my wearing a turtleneck on national TV.
There’s something about LA on a cloudy day, when all the influencers stay indoors and it’s just regular people walking their dogs, talking about quotidian things.
The city’s disconcertingly sleepy, the claustrophobia subsides, and I’m reminded that even in the greatest dens of iniquity, places where we’re encouraged to be anything other than ourselves, it’s mostly people just trying to get by.
Here’s a shot from the Al Stone Today Show performance a few days ago. Only four tires are pictured, but twenty four were used as set dressing, each sourced and painted by our tour manager, Ryan “Bear” Drozd, and transported into Manhattan via terrifying logistical gymnastics.
To the casual observer, it’s a neat prop, but several dozen man-hours went into bringing just one detail of the set to life.
Day of taping, I showed up, sound checked, ate donuts for six hours, then played for three minutes - 100% of the time, the people off camera (and often making the least money) have the most difficult and important jobs.
I live in Nashville and currently am on a flight to Los Angeles, and I’m thinking about how daunting breaking into either scene can feel.
At some point, virtually every major artist/producer/whoever was an oblivious newbie with a crumpled bus ticket in their pocket, every bit the odd one out.
Regardless of how large, a music scene’s just an amalgamation of whoever happens to be making art there at the time, and trends, such as they are, simply reflect that.
There’s no reason why your vibe can’t find a home, or perhaps even start a movement.
Everyone is posting their Spotify numbers this week, and while it’s important celebrating successes, metrics like these can be misleading, even potentially destructive.
Sharing art is not about numbers. It is not a competition.
If you must attach a reward to it, have it be the satisfaction derived from being the kind of beautiful lunatic courageous enough to follow a dream.
To every artist reading this, myself included - I hear you, I see you, and the world’s a better place with your music in it.
I’m in the capable hands of Local 1 this morning, explicitly forbade from touching anything and currently hiding behind pipe and drape somewhere in the basement of 30 Rock. Given that call time was 3 freaking A.M., I’m happy to embrace my uselessness, and that, for the next few hours, it’s legally required.
My Hurry Up and Wait National TV checklist:
one minimally intellectually taxing book of moderate length.
a can-do attitude unaided by narcotics.
A reflective surface in a well-lit room, where I can look at and audibly reassure myself that I haven’t wasted my life.
The Al Stone electric experience performs live on the Today Show, well, today, and our three minutes and twenty seconds of glory will be available on all streaming platforms for the next little while.
The greatest gift of the past eight years of my life has been travel.
The world feels smaller, and I’m a better human for having sought out the front lines, embracing dissonances and ecstasies in hand.
I’m lucky to have experienced my fair share of Bourdain-approved romps, but travel needn’t be expensive or impenetrable. It can be a head-clearing day trip, or exploring different neighborhoods. Travel, of a sort, happens through the pages of a good book.
Travel, at its essence, is endeavoring to discover truths about ourselves outside of our echo chamber’s cozy confines.
My neighborhood coffee shop now boasts a little community library, to which I just contributed some on-brand nerdy sci-fi - judging by the number of bespectacled weirdos in tracksuits within anachronistic iPod throwing distance, I imagine my contribution will go down a storm. And when was the last time you read the phrase “go down a storm”?
Nashville can be a tough town. Commoditizing art is confusing, and the spirit governing uninhibited creativity becomes muted out of sheer self-preservation.
Today, what can I - can we - do to encourage community, and reinforce that sharing is paramount to growth?