Music My friend Dave Depper has contributed a lot of good to my life, like the one time that me and him played an informal set at the Roadside Attraction in Portland that consisted of nearly half the songs from the White Album, done spontaneously as best we could from memory, switching off between gu...   More

Music
We play music.

We live to play music.

We play music to live.

And we are so blessed. We drive in a Pontiac Montana, a mini-van that is literally the size of Montana. We sleep in abandoned mansions, with refrigerators full ...   More

Music We played one of those shows in Phoenix, Arizona, where you get on stage and you're just astounded at how few people are there. Where you think that it couldn't possibly have been worse, even if you had told everyone that if they came to this venue on this particular night that they would undoubtedly contract smallp...   More

Music I had never been to Idaho before, so I was surprised when—three songs into my set at Pengilly's Saloon in Boise—the bartender walked up and put a napkin in front of me that someone at a back table had given him. The napkin said, "Request: ‘Wrecking Ball.'" I'm of the disposition (I like to call it "...   More

Music Touring the country, every town you go to you hear a variation on the same thing: "This local band with a great draw was gonna play with you tonight, but they couldn't do it because the bass player had to work." Or, "I would have brought out all my friends, but they each came down with a different ailment that preven...   More

Music Let me describe to you my medical condition:

I am only satisfied with myself when I am moving along briskly. When I sit still for a few hours, the darkness seeps in. I think about mistakes. I think about a girl I love who doesn't want to talk to me. I think about how scary the ignorant people in the w...   More

Music As soon as I arrived in Finland, everybody wanted to know whether or not the Mexicans would arrive in time.

I was to play at a festival in Helsinki called SuoMex. The festival was organized by my friend Anna, who grew up in Portland and lived and went to school in Finland. Her brother Eric also g...   More

Music Our second trip to California came less than two weeks after the first. A quirk of scheduling had us going back down to Davis and Santa Cruz after just a short stay in Portland. And yet still, even those few days that we were back home were hard to deal with. (We were like the Breakfast Club, with what we'd exper...   More

Music Don't trust writers. Don't EVER trust writers. They'll tell you that they're searching for the truth, but they're really just searching for a story. The truth is that the truth is boring. A STORY is more interesting. Maybe a writer wants to tell the truth, but when it comes down to it and they have to decide bet...   More

Music Has anyone ever thought this:

Clouds are so quiet.

You know?

I mean, clouds, right? They're like an enormous species of graceful, legless white buffalo that migrate all across the world. They're like a family of acrobats, tossing each other across the sky, catching eac...   More