DL;BR: Year One.

10:01AM Sunday.

Back to the desk.

The back half of December is a mad dash of studio cleaning, plugin updates, planning and last minute gear buys before the tax deadline so I can spent the first day of January in a haze of sleep, movies, and bit of a reflection on a year that has seen:

• 49 blog posts 

• 1 Autobody single

• 1 Peculiar Order of Harmonic Convergence full album release

• 3 Fixation Arc singles

• 1 merch shop soft launch

• 1 Weedian compilation appearance

• 1 web art collaboration with Bill Drummond

• 1 98,000-word memoir manuscript

• 3 Spotify playlist collaborations

• 2 unreleased collabs with friends

I knew if I set something up and kept digging no matter how long, boring or awkward it was, I'd hit a rich vein underneath. I don't know if I've hit the mother lode quite yet, but I'm seeing promising bits of ore wash out in the pan. And it's been fun.

But sometimes I think of the tragic story of Margot Kidder (Lois Lane in the Reeves-era Superman films), who spent three years writing her autobiography only to have a virus wipe out the contents of her laptop. She spiraled and was ultimately placed in a psyche ward just prior to her suicide.

Thankfully, I'm not in that place, but I don't know what I'd do if years of my life on record were wiped out by anonymous script-kiddie malware. Probably spiral in my own weird way. (Or who know, it might be liberating.)

Hence, this blog.

I watched a movie years ago, 2046 I believe it was. There was a character monologue about a Chinese legend of tree whispering. In the old days, when they had secrets they didn't want to share they'd climb a mountain, find a tree, carve a hole in it, and whisper the secret into the hold and cover it up with mud.

I guess you could say DL;BR, or at least this blog part, is my take on the mountain tree, one that I cut weekly holes into to spill the latest tea. There's, of course, not much in the way of keeping secrets, but I do think of it as an autobiography in real-time. A weekly, public whisper, as it were.

But, as you may have seen, there's more. My online vault is like a virtual hoarder house of creative bits I'm constantly trying to organize, catalog and generally make sense of across myriad Bandcamps, Threadless accounts, ad infinitum/nauseam.

It's confusing, even to me.

Ergo, things will change up a bit in 2025:

The other accounts - Young Tobacco Records, Nap Factory Records, Threadless, et al - are going to become simply Death, Love & Broken Records.

This change marks the end of me trying to hide behind anonymous projects and musical personas. It's a re-org in the name of clarity and focus, except no one is getting laid off over the holidays.

It'll be the same warehouses, but with a new skin and DL;BR-dot-com as the showroom. One entity with a new cataloging system and a focus on editioned physical artifacts and a backlog of audio-literary projects. To borrow the words of the Numero Group, DL;BR will be an art project masquerading as a record label.

This will all be described in detail in a future blog with subsequent emailings and social media updates. But to drive the point home:

In 2025, everything is going to become Death, Love & Broken Records.

In the meantime, thanks for a solid 2024.

This has been Death, Love & Broken Records, year one.

------------------------------------------------------ Substack coming soon...

What I’m reading: The Best Short Stories 2021 (Edited by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie)

What I'm listening to: In Spades (The Afghan Whigs)