S (eattle, ORT RUN, WAM)

Hit a trip out west, been home a week, now (FINALLY finished packing up all the LOW posters for the benefit; thanks to all of you. Some will get them imminently, but the final batch goes out tomorrow, thanks for your patience. I will say– this mailing list got first crack; once they went to the larger internet, they sold out almost immediately. Raised $3k for Doctors Without Borders).

The theme is: people gathering to do not-shitty things, for not-shitty reasons.

So, I went to Seattle for a few reasons: to work on some...music (or something adjacent to music), to try to meet up with some pals, and (as I try to do every year) to attend my favorite weirdo comics/ zine/ art festival, Short Run.

And, frankly, to get out of town a bit. A change of scene seemed to be in order.

Short Run was, as always, amazing. So, i don't do many comics/ zine shows anymore these days. The reasons are many, as are the reasons I still do the few that still make sense to me– seeing pals, from this community i've been part of for most of my life. Kelly Froh has been crushing it with this show for a decade now, and it's the best: the old crew, the new, no stupid corporate bullshit– just real people, bringing the goods.

I ate shit sales-wise (despite attendance being great at the new site for the show; Anders was next to me and it's inelegant to discuss such things, but he seemed to have a fantastic sales day, as did many others. Which is awesome). Again, this is something that used to upset me; these days, it's fine. Expecting anything else, when I put out stuff so infrequently (and when I do I completely forget/ don't care about "promoting" it, and a lot of it only comics-tangental) would be insane. But I got some stuff in people's hands, met some people I didn't know before, and got to hang out with/ see a lot of dear pals (you know who you are).

And I got to see some of you, which was really cool.

But previous 4 days was wrangling sounds. As many as possible.

A year and change ago, me and 2 friends converged on a mountain outside of LA to see if we could make some sounds together. I've known (and loved) Joe Plummer for 25 years (since my Olympia days), and Tim Rutili in a passing/ watching him get peed on way since '96 or so; but in the past 4-5 years dude has become like a brother to me. But we're all pals and all make sounds. The theory was this: that would be fun. Maybe good. We don't know. Nobody come with any songs, riffs, or ideas of what we could or should sound like. We'll set up mics and see what happens. If it all sucks, we'll eat tacos and hang out and that'll still be great, because i love the shit out of these dudes.

Short version: we still ate tacos, but playing together was a total joy. We fell into each other's pockets almost immediately, and recorded 7-8 hours worth of stuff, over the course of 5-6 days. All improv, on the spot, just go with whatever. I think the first thing we did was just pump organ and bowed cymbals. And later, disco songs with a banjo (yeah. none of your business. Or anyone's, ever, hopefully), doom riffs, and amorphous tone things that go nowhere beautifully. But: given the above description, going through all of it (sometimes amazing, sometimes terrible/ hilarious, sometimes great for 24 seconds then terrible for 5 minutes, etc etc) and carving it into something semi-cohesive since then has been...daunting. Especially when you don't consider yourselves "a band", or really have any designs in that direction, and all parties involved have lives and work and stuff.

I thought we should call ourselves Crosby,Stills,Nash and Tongue. But there are legalities there, so Tim joked that it should be SWAM and it stuck.

So we tried said wrangling for a few days before last years drone not drones. It went ok (With a few moments of great). So this time we tried doing it again in Seattle. Same. Progress, but confusing. Making sense of what you did is a lot easier than just doing the thing, sometimes. But it's pretty much all we did. Then we played a show (satellite event of Short Run, right next to the Fantagraphics bookstore, at the 9 lb Hammer).

The first part of our set was a cacophonous noise fest, probably loud as hell. Whether or not it held up is not my place to say. That's often how it goes with making it all up in the moment ("improv" still feels like a pretentious term, to me...). It was, as they say, a ruckus. But at the end of it, we tried something we've never done before: we played an actual song.

Sort of joked (see a theme, here?) with those guys before we all arrived that we should cover the Walker Brothers. And then when we were hashing things out in the studio, it turned into not a joke. So we did it.

And– it's probably still not my place to say, but it was great (hard for it not to be, with that tune). Maybe just for us, I don't know. Doesn't matter. All I know is that from the inside, it felt about as right as right gets these days.

Why do we do these things, when the world is on fire? It's not about avoiding the horror, or pretending it's not happening, or distracting yourself from it.

That session in the mountains was...over a year ago. Before the election. But, like now, there was no getting around the wheels coming off the train. You could feel it.

I wrote something in my journal on the plane home to the effect of "this week felt like being in a fight that you know you're going to lose, and spitting in the eye of that brutality: fuck you, we're making something beautiful."

This trip felt no different.

That's why.