Half My Life: In the Studio 20 Years Apart
Three months before I turned 20, two friends and I — we were a band called Black Spiral — loaded up a car in Houston, drove to Austin and crashed at a stranger’s house, then went into a makeshift studio early the following morning to try to make a record. That was June 20, 1998…twenty […]
The Morning Breaks: My Life in Music
I just released a new video from our album The Ghost of John Henry, for the song “The Morning Breaks.” It goes like this:[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOx2HokCCwg]This an intensely personal video for me, and I have to be honest it feels a little weird putting it out into the world. The earliest footage in here dates back […]
How Important is Fidelity?
When Hi8 seemed like an impossible dream I’m not talking about matrimony, here, but how well an audio or visual recording resembles the real-world phenomena it seeks to capture. High fidelity sounds and images used to be both a mark of professionalism and a barrier-to-entry for hobbyists in the temporal arts (film, video, music, etc.). […]
Road Stories: The Show for Nobody
As I’ve said extensively elsewhere, I used to play in a metal band called Black Spiral. When we first started playing together, we were about 16, in high school, and just doing covers of Metallica songs and such. Our first gig ever was at a Catholic church Spring fair, where we played two nights (my […]
Road Stories: The Bombed-Out Whorehouse
Maybe the best sustained musical experience I’ve ever had was playing drums in the band Black Spiral from about 1995-1999. I was in and just out of high school, and the band started as Chris Crowson, Ryan Dawe, and I were just starting to learn our instruments. The first songs I was ever involved in […]
So when you say “Death Metal…”
I’m quick to let people know that I used to play drums and do backing vocals/growling for metal bands. The most prominent of these — not that any were terribly prominent — was Black Spiral, and we put out our one-and-only album, Defeat, back in ’99 or 2000. Something like that. I played in other […]