I'm putting a team together

I hope you consider subscribing to my newsletter.

I mean, I hope you dig what I'm doing enough to want to subscribe to my newsletter. But maybe you just like newsletters. That's cool too.

I want to have a space to keep in touch with my audience that isn't owned by some billionaire freak somewhere or part of VC portfolio. I grew up in a web that was personal and valued ownership and I think independent music needs to be find its own audience and cultivate a space to do that.

To celebrate the launch of the site, I'm psyched to debut a new song off A Painting You Can't Afford To See, "Spain's First Astronaut". I wrote the first two verses of this song last summer after falling into a deep Nick Cave's Murder Ballads hole and as an exercise in genre more than anything specific. But I was stuck at the final verse for months: "What can we learn?" What, if anything, is the point of an admittedly entertaining story of a fascist getting got?

The song kept gnawing at me as my social media feed helped me track the smooth transition from election to inaction to decimation. The last place I wanted to be was telling anyone, least of all myself, what kind of resistance is advantageous, what tactics are effective. In short: what do you do with a fascist? And the only answer I could arrive at was at least you don't play by their rules.

I began writing A Painting You Can't Afford To See after the release of last years WIENER DEMEANOR EP. The original intent was for it to be another EP addressing the overwhelmingly wienerish behavior from most of our cultural, political, and financial elite. The songs I was writing at the time were a lot darker, dealing with the efficacy of political violence and instability which started to inform the record as a whole.

As 2024 wore on and The Horrors increased, the project started to feel bigger. For starters, I wasn't positive anymore how I personally felt about it. It's one thing to position yourself as a neutral observer of societal stupidity and to feel that you can comment on it. It's another to view yourself as an active participant in the sort of shit you only ever read about in history books. I cleaned up some demos and previously released tracks and put out Junk Drawer '24 at the end of the year and tabled this record for the future.

One of the realizations I had about this album was that if solidarity is my aim, it doesn't make sense to make it alone. It's absolutely a Cheer Captain work but I wanted to collaborate with the talented friends I have and bring other voices into the project. Suddenly, recording and mixing alone in my office sounded... kind of isolating.

Hence this newsletter. It's going to cost some cash to make the album the way I want it to be. I wanted to use this here as a way to provide updates, demos, and thoughts throughout the project. Occasionally shake the tip jar. Open up a line of dialogue with my audience.

So that's the pitch. I don't have plans for regular newsletters or a subscription tier at the time. If you're interested, signup with your email. I promise I won't flood you with too many emails and you can always unsubscribe with no hard feelings. But if you are interested in DIY power pop, if you're also struggling to make artistic sense of the world, if you just like what I do and want to see more of it, I really hope you'll consider tagging along on the journey. I have no idea where it's going but I'm excited to get underway.

Thanks for taking a chance on independent music. You can hear my previously released songs on Bandcamp, Ampwall, and anywhere else you stream music.