The Sagehens (Pt.1)
riding the bus with your synthesizer
I’ll interupt our steady stream of Friday creative prompts to tell you a bit about a new album from a band I’m in.
The band is called THE SAGEHENS and the album is called “Valley Go Home.”
Order it HERE on speckled egg vinyl and digital compact disc!
Buy it HERE Bandcamp today, which is Bandcamp Friday.
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The idea for The Sagehens came about when I finally came back to California after some time in graduate school in Ohio. The itinerant nature of those days mixed with the heady theoretical texts I was reading had me looking at and listening to the world in new ways.
My field of study at the doctoral program at Ohio University was Interdisciplinary Arts. This seemed to translate to: ‘follow the things you are interested in and make it is formatted correctly.’ I took classes in film studies, art history, creative nonfiction, sound studies, philosophy, and environmental studies. I ended with a dissertation about how we build up and experience the natural world through sonic frames: what does the Weather Channel do to aestheticize forecasts with smooth jazz? How does vaporwave figure a kind of technological nature? How has North American new age included the natural world in its promises of healing? …stuff like that.
So I was back in California, living in a small town called Seal Beach: a quiet quadrant of bungalows right on the ocean next to a huge air force base and Don the Beachcomber, the best tiki bar in the world (R.I.P.). I would write from 6am to 12pm then walk on the beach and get a beer. I was also riding my bike up and down the coast staring at all the oil derricks and platforms off the shore. I was also checking out ferraris with surfboards in them.
I grew up in California but I’d left and returned enough times where I could walk the line of critical distance and pure romance in kind of intoxicating way. I was also intoxitcated more than I am now and I’m sure that played a part in things.
Around this time I made an EP called Weekend Forecast which is my take on tv bumpers and the kind of music that graces public television, shopping malls of yesteryear, and the weather channel. It was released on the esteeemed Flannelgraph Records, which Bandcamp Daily did a really nice profile on.
Seal Beach is about 10 miles from Huntington Beach which is where my friend and musical spirit animal Frank Lenz lived at the time. Lenz has played on and produced many many records and a real special sense of how music works.
I started riding the bus with my Juno 106 to his house once a week when he had a day off from Disneyland, where he’d play drums better than the drum machines they’ve hired since. Sometimes I’d ride my bike to his house down the HWY 101 right along the sand.
The ride there and back was really special because it felt like a christmas, a day off, a secret society. I got to go make music with my friend while the world went about its business. That is a special thing that continues to this day. When you carve time out to record, write music, make art, or anything else creative with no stakes, you are involved in an act of rebellion.
We recorded this album by making a song each time we got together. Tess Shapiro put on her beautiful vocals across the whole album and we got some guests to hop in along the way: Eli Thomson (bass), David Vandervelde (recorder), Ryan Richter (lap steel), Casey Foubert (percussion).
Most of the songs have a technicolor theme park vibe happening. I could smell the ocean and see the weird SUVs flying down the highway as I would bike home in the dark dodging suicial squirrels. This was and always will be the mental landscape these songs drum up for me.
I’ll have more to say on the record as it roles out, but I hope you give a listen and even order a copy of Speckled Egg LP or a beautifully digital CD from Velvet Blue Music right HERE.
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As for a creative prompt for this lovely Friday, my thought is simple: keep building that useless and beautiful roller coaster you started in your backyard 10 years ago. Its almost done :)