I have a new album out called Capistrano. I’ve written about it here before, mostly in terms of “it’s still coming” and “honestly, I know it’s been years but I’m still working on it”. Now, however, it’s out in the world and can be listened to on any major streaming service you care to mention. Pretty soon it will be able on vinyl and CD and if you ask nicely I will happily tattoo the song lyrics on the body part of your choosing.

One of the really cool things about the olden days of physical media was that you could have liner notes and lyric sheets and other groovy stuff like that which helped you connect with the music on a deeper level. This is mostly lost in the modern streaming era, and for many songs and albums that is no big, but an album like Capistrano is an Album in the !960’s/1970’s sense of the word and it is intended for that older style of listening. We live in a world of ephemeral singles with mayfly shelf lives but since I am a contrarian I went ahead and made a sort of concept album about life.

The first two tracks on the album, Ulven and Monkey Mind were the first two recorded, but not in that order. Monkey Mind was first and I recorded it all the way back in November of 2014, before I had even released my last little EP before disappearing musically for nine years. The song starts with these words:

I keep on playing the same old station in my car
the one that always plays that one damn song
there might be something broke at the transmission tower
somebody should go and see what’s wrong
cause I’m sick of always singing along

I was aging, I was feeling like I was in a rut, and I kept having the same mental dialog happening day in and day out. It was like my brain was tuned into a radio station that only played one song and I was tired of it. The vibe of the song was tired. I was feeling run down by life and I put it into words and I recorded it but I tried to cheer myself up by ending with a hopeful note:

no matter how it feels there must be hope
cause I’m sick of always running out of rope

The song sat for a month or so and then I had a flash of inspiration/moment of discovery and another lyric popped into my head:

the wolf is at the door
let’s invite him inside
it’s getting cold out there

I was feeling very connected to canines at the time, having just adopted the better part of a pack and working with my wife with a local animal rescue group called Safe Hands. We were bringing dogs up from Kentucky who had come from terrible conditions, cleaning them up, getting them healthy, fostering them, and finding them homes. It was really satisfying work. What had started with adopting a dachshund name Chi had turned into not only 50+ foster dogs, but also the adoption of Finn, then Capistrano (“Cappy”), Rosita and ultimately Buckley although he hadn’t arrived yet. The wolf at the door is a metaphor for there being some impending personal tragedy or calamity and I was at a place in my life where I did, indeed, feel that was possible but at the same time we were rescuing all of these dogs and it just felt like, ok, face life, let it in, let whatever is going to happen happen. Let the wolf in and take care of it.

It didn’t arrive in my head as a song, but as a declaration. A statement of intent about the next phase of my life. It felt like a reply to the questions raised in Monkey Mind. So, I decided to take all the instruments I could find in the studio, have them all play the same opening note, and make that statement. Dozens of tracks later I had the opening wall of sound which I later augmented with the addition of my very dear lifelong friend Jenn Sveigdalen reading the “wolf at the door” poem in Norwegian.

And then I wasn’t quite sure what to do. The first two statements had been made but the rest of the album was a mystery. I thought perhaps I could record a few EPs in different styles/genres as ways of finding out what I had to say and I thought of them as “Wolf Pups”. So, I hit the studio in December of that year with the idea of creating the “acoustic Wolf Pup”. I shut myself into the old basement coal room for a day and I recorded The Coal Room EP, a modest little six-song collection that would stand as my last solo release for over 9 years. It is absolutely a companion piece to Capistrano but I had no idea at the time where the actual album was going to take me and despite plans for three more, I never recorded any more “Wolf Pups”.

Instead I got active in other musical projects and allowed the album to come to me on its own terms and in its own time. I joined a band called Robots From the Future as their keyboard player and then I left that band but I soon joined another one, a 90’s cover band called Fistful of Datas also, weirdly, on keys. I have always been a guitarist and bassist, primarily, but playing keys in a band is a good way to get better at keyboards so it was great experience, plus I had a lot of fun, played a lot of shows, and became a better musician. All the while, I was recording songs for the album I thought of simply as “The Wolf”.

Ostrich on side B was one of the earlier tracks to join the party as well as Seagulls (Mostly Water) which closes out side A. It was at that point that I had started to notice a theme. Monkey, ostrich, seagull, wolf, there were a lot of animals making their way into the lyrics. This wasn’t some sort of intentional decision, it just kept happening. Songs would pop into my head and they often had animals in them which is weird because if you look at literally my entire recorded musical output over the course of decades you would be hard pressed to find animal references. Something was going on.

What it felt like was that I was coming to grips with the hard biological truth that I am an animal, just like the dogs and cats and wolves and birds. We all are. We are pretty much just neurotic bags of mostly water, blundering around in the natural world, uniquely gifted among our animal brethren with existential dread and ennui. What else was there to make music about? Religion? Politics? Lust? Ideas? I mean, sure, people do that, but who makes a concept album about how weird it is to be a sentient animal? I realized that seemed to be what I was doing, once I was a year or two into it.

Like I said, I was letting it come to me while I was piling up some new musical experiences.

Eventually I was honored to be invited to join a very cool local band called Awkward Bodies as their bass player. I was already a fan of their music and we all clicked really well from the first practice. Around the same time I became involved in the making of the Witness Underground documentary, a feature film that is centered around my old Nuclear Gopher record label and the whole thing that happened there with all of us (if you want the story, go watch the movie, it’s really good and the soundtrack is to die for and I’m not going to spoiler it for you). That process took a few years and again broadened my musical and personal horizons.

As expected, songs kept arriving at unexpected times and in unexpected ways. There were many that never made it past the demo stage. At least another dozen or more. The world got weird when the country I live in collectively lost it’s mind when a minority of the voters somehow managed to elect their cult leader to the presidency* and then we got a pandemic and man…. Those were some weird years.

I wandered a bit. Moved out to the country, built a new studio, raised the dogs, traveled to Uruguay and India and Portugal and drove around the US. I had experiences, I had a life. My new musical connections and experiences made their way onto the album. I Hate July was a remake of my acoustic version of the same song from my 2012 album Blood and Scotch/Valentine. It came about as a result of Awkward Bodies learning to play some of my songs to support a showing of Witness Underground at in Minneapolis and then made it onto the album when James Zimmerman listened to an early iteration of the record and said it needed more energy and a “rock song”. I also met local musician Chris Holm and when his sister Jamie was battling cancer I recorded a cover of her song Shine Again for what ultimately became a tribute record in her memory, Strange Medicine: Volume 1. Finally, I had recorded Never Replace You for the WU movie soundtrack in honor of my dear friend Derek Helland, who passed away during the recording of the album and it felt like a perfect fit for the album.

What no longer felt like the perfect fit was “The Wolf”. The album was cohering around a thematic tone or life and loss and longing but there also felt like a note of hope was in there and that felt under-represented by the provisional album title. It was then that a piece of serendipity occurred.

During the COVID lockdown I had decided to revisit my dormant interest in analog photography. Like most rational people I had transitioned to digital photography so many years ago that I couldn’t remember the last roll of film I had shot. I picked up a few elderly cameras at estate sales and auctions, read the Ansel Adams books, relearned how to develop film at home, and started snapping away. An early roll of film I shot was with an old folding camera from the 1920’s in an empty office building. One of the photos from that roll graces the back cover of the album in a colorized form. After shooting some black and white 120 film I decided to branch out into color 35mm and one day, several months and many rolls later, I was out with my trusty Nikon F and I looked up and there was Capistrano, looking up at a bird and smiling.

Snap.

When I developed the roll and scanned the photo I felt something. It was like I had taken a picture of joy. That was the missing ingredient to finish the record. Hope. Joy. The Wolf was now a smiling dog. I decided to name it Capistrano. After that decision, the rest of the process to finish the album began.

I started by revisiting all the Wolf songs and making candidate mixes. When I started to do this I had some different songs present and quite different versions of the songs that made the final album. BLJ didn’t have the horns or spacey guitars, Seagulls was missing the strings, but I had enough that it felt like an album. I thought I was mostly done. That was around 2-3 years ago. But try as I might, certain songs didn’t feel right and I tried to make them fit but I couldn’t find the shape that worked. By that point I had Flying Through The Frames and I knew what I needed to do to finish Brenda and Seagulls. I had a major revision in mind for Monkey Mind and things seemed tight but something was still missing. I kept promising the album would be done soon but soon kept moving into the future.

Finally, in January of this year, I had spent a few days wrestling with a particular song that wasn’t working and I thought to myself “I think I need to ditch this song and write something else, it just doesn’t work.” And that was what I did. I went down stairs into the Nuclear Gopher and that cover photo of Cappy popped into my head and in about 20 minutes I wrote the title track. It was hopeful, it was upbeat, it was catchy, and it was the perfect bookend to the wolf at the door, a song inspired by a dog taking his favorite toys to the door so he can go play in the yard.

A bit later I tracked the song with Jesse Miller and then I was on to the final mile: tweaking, mixing, mastering, etc. I got the final kick in the ass I needed to call it done when Nuclear Gopher labelmates Sakura and Kero finished And Then You’d Burst Into Fire Forever and I realized that they had beat me to the new album finish line. I had Capistrano in the can the next day.

And that, my friends, is the backstory behind the album. There are easter eggs hidden in there, little flourishes and ideas that I love, but I’ll let you listen and figure those out for yourself. Hopefully the album speaks for itself but I figured maybe some people might find this an interesting companion piece to the listening experience.

Thanks for reading, thanks for listening.

Peace!

* Despite him being a thoroughly corrupt, morally repugnant, sociopathic, criminal. I mean, come on, his opponent had the audacity to be competent and female so of course they had to vote for the blathering idiot with the fake hair, fake tan, fake fortune, fake competence, and track record of fraud and sexual assault. Jesus clearly prefers a criminal with a penis over a hard working woman who tries to act like she is above her God-given station in life. I swear I read that in the Bible somewhere…..