The Myth of Snugglepuss
Updated: The Myth of Snugglepuss is now available for download (via Bandcamp and all the other usual platforms), streaming (pretty much everywhere) and even on physical Compact Disc technology (through Bandcamp, if you’re in the US/ reach out if you’re somewhere else).
“Support local music.”
-Traditional
This one is about music. If you came by for some grim news about South Carolina, or dense stats about educational politics, thank you for your continued support! And don’t worry— there will probably be plenty of that coming soon. If you’d like to support this newsletter and haven’t subscribed yet, or (better yet) if you’d like to hear some music I made with some of the Southeast’s best musicians, please consider checking out some of the music. If that’s all the sales pitch you need, the new Quark Lepton album is about to come out and is available to preview and preorder here; my other stuff is available to stream/ download/ buy here.
I’ll keep this short1!
The week my wife and I got married, in late 2018, I also, only slightly less importantly, finished and self-released an album called The Double. And then we went to Asheville and didn’t pack warm enough clothing, and it was very cold and also one of the best times of my life.
The title track of that album was very loosely based on a string of incidents I experienced in my early 30s, being repeatedly mistaken for a local artist who was going through some hard times and making some questionable choices. (Weren’t we all!) Long story short, I almost got banned from Columbia’s legendary and sadly-departed dive bar The Whig for misdemeanors I didn’t commit. I also made a few friends along the way who thought I was this guy long enough to get halfway into a conversation.
This went on for months.
I wrote a short story about this doppelgänger that wasn’t good enough to be a short story but was good enough to be a song. I read part of Dostoevsky’s “The Double” and all of Gogol’s “The Overcoat,” and watched two films based loosely on Dostoevsky’s novella: The Double (2013) and Enemy (also 2013!). I think these made their way somehow into the general vibe.
The first couple of lines of the song “The Double” are “As a child, I was bitten in the yard by a dead bat/ And its dead ghost will haunt me all of my days”.
So that should give you a decent idea of the general wavelength of this album, at least lyrically.
Jasper Magazine wrote a very nice review of that album, which described the sound as “richly swirling twang” and pointed out that, almost by accident, I had made something that was kind of like a country album, if you squinted at it (and if you can tolerate lots of spacey synthesizers, and a 1980s Omnichord2, and spiritual yearning, and existential fretting about AI or nuclear winter, and echoes, in your paradigm of “country music”. Around the same time, the Free Times wrote, “Quark Lepton splits the difference — to an extent — between Leonard Cohen and [Flaming Lips frontman] Wayne Coyne.”
I put together a band with some of my favorite Columbia musicians (including this guy and this guy— please check out their music) and played some shows throughout 2019. I started to plan the next album.
And then, of course, the local music scene all but died, it became unsafe to get together to record, and those songs went on the back burner.
Thanks to my patient wife and my friends (most of whom also played and sang on The Double), I finally recorded the follow up to that album, and it’s called The Myth of Snugglepuss. Many of the songs were originally written during the earliest, most uncertain days of the pandemic. (And I wrote many more songs during that time, many of which were too weird, or too depressing to all go on the same album.)
Charles Tomlinson (The Southern Ocean, Code Name: Juan) came down from Virginia to spend a few days with us recording drums in our front room, and the album wouldn’t be what it is without him. Then Ethan Fogus (The Witness Marks, countless Georgia and South Carolina albums) drove down from Georgia to record pedal steel and some baritone guitar. Ethan, too, was indispensable. He knows how to play the instrument in a way that it partly its country-western roots, partly ambient soundscape, and partly a strings section from Mars.
Kelley Porterfield (who was my “best man”) and Brodie Porterfield (her husband), came over and sang harmonies on a few songs. (Their husband-and-wife duo The Water Kickers is a live must-see; check them out if they travel near you). Kristen Harris (Boomtown Trio, as well as every self-respecting Southeastern group with a fiddle in the band), one of the best fiddle players in the state, came over and put some Beatles-y string arrangements down. Kiah Creed added some pathos with his harmony vocals. And Ross Steppling, who has joined me in countless bands over the last decade-plus, added the final touches with some space jazz guitar.
That and some reverb and some singing, and some guitars and synths and mandolin and bells, and some deep thoughts, and some dumb thoughts, make up The Myth of Snugglepuss.
I don’t really believe in explaining songs, but I will say that the last track was written during a pretty scary time almost a year ago, when I had been knocked down a by COVID and had reason to think my heart might be damaged (the tests thankfully came back without showing damage after the last song was written). But also, the album is funny (to me; your mileage may vary)!
For me a lot of The Double, in retrospect, feels like a person in their mid-30s saying goodbye to a certain chapter and nervously anticipating the next. I can’t begin to see the new songs objectively. But I can hear someone who has turned 40, lived through the end of the world (so far), gotten married, left a career (again), (briefly) planted a garden, and tried to grow and evolve as ethically as possible.
I’d love for you listen it, and I hope some of that resonates with you, or entertains you. I think it’s the best music I’ve ever made. (But if it’s not your thing, might I interest you in some holiday music? Or a subscription to a newsletter?)
Thanks for reading, and thanks for listening!
If you like the album, you can buy it on Bandcamp (you can PRE-ORDER HERE, or you can wait for the album to drop online by the end of the week) or (in a few weeks) on another digital music service.
For me!
This is already too long, but in case you want to know more about the Omnichord, I love this description from an NPR review of a Meshell Ndegeocello album: “the handheld, amoeba-shaped electronic instrument first made by Suzuki in the 1980s”. The Omnichord is basically an electronic autoharp, with a built-in chord organ and rhythm machine, and the early analog ones create a sound like a 60’s idea of a harp played by robot angels from another galaxy.