A Big Trouble Flyer

You could be forgiven for thinking that the world is perfect at the end of August when you have some time off from your job and you go camping with your kids. I certainly briefly thought that when I was camping at Afton State Park last weekend. Of course the world is not perfect. Shit, the camping wasn’t even perfect. But it’s a good time of year to clock in a little extra R&R.

I’m writing you while watching the White Sox ground the Twins into a powder at Target Field. I took the bus to the State Fair today and made content with the team from City Cast Twin Cities. I like making content. I hate saying the words “making content”. I also miss the quiet dignity of hosting radio at the State Fair. Pressing play on CDJs feels a little better than asking a sweaty kid from Hastings to write you out a paper receipt for a $13 container of fried pickles and then neither of you can remember today’s date. But also, I walked around and asked people questions in exchange for a cookie and I drank the best lemonade on planet earth with my buddy Sam Choo before he returned back to his house.

Mediterranean Lemonade from Holy Land (City Cast)

It was a beautiful day, wonderful weather, wonderful people. And tomorrow I get to play music with Big Trouble. It’ll be the last gig on the patio for the year. We’ll be out tomorrow in the mid 70s playing from 6-8 at the White Squirrel. And we’re playing Jolene by Dolly Parton to honor her beautiful legacy.

We’ve been having fun and the opposite of fun at City Cast Twin Cities. It’s the State Fair. It’s back to school. That’s fun. We also marked one year since the Annunciation shooting. That’s not fun. That’s tragic. But we’ve been covering it all and I think we’re doing great work. I’ve fielded some compliments from some tough customers lately. I’ve fielded compliments on City Cast from people who have given me under five compliments in over twenty years of friendship. If you haven’t given City Cast Twin Cities a try toss us a subscribe and check out some of the episodes. Hear some episodes and see if you connect with it. Stop going to the same restaurants and reading the same four paragraph stories about local politics. Branch out and dig in.

Jen Wittes

Josh ‘Jellyfish’ Williams

Why would I limit myself to just one podcast? NO REASON FOR THAT. Trivia Mafia is going ham once a week with new episodes and we’ve had some awesome guests on as of late. We had Jen Wittes on last week. This week, we’re dropping a podcast features Josh ‘Jellyfish’ Williams. Do you like trivia? Do you like hanging out. This is your reminder that there’s a podcast for you.

Sean on the porch with a CCCC Vol. 3

Writer Sam Homan who contributed to CCCC Vol. 3 and is also a fly-fisherman

I should also urge you to buy a copy of the Country Cabin Crapper Companion Volume 4. It’s a tour-de-force of cabin writing and you can order it online or buy it at this weekend’s Big Trouble show (that’s Saturday August 29 at 6pm at White Squirrel). Grab a CCCC Vol. 3 to elevate that final cabin hang of the season.

Friends, I hope you’ll give the City Cast Twin Cities podcast a listen or a watch if you are the type of very common and still completely confusing type of person who absorbs whole podcast episodes on YouTube. I am working with an amazing group of people who are trying doggedly to add a new angle to an already amazing town for local media. But every town has blind spots and stories that go untold and we are doing our best to fill in some of those blind spots and also look at major stories with a different lens. I’m really proud of the work and I hope you’ll legitimately check it out, not just a little social media clip, but some full conversations. Lately we’ve talked encampments, Rondo and Low Power FM radio, and Boundary Waters. We are also connecting with a bunch of the individuals running for office in Minnesota. The Hao Nguyen interview is up and we have lots more coming including Angie Craig, Cedric Frazier and more. I’m humbled to be doing this work and so grateful to be having these conversations. I hope you’ll check it out. The YT version of our episode that includes Nguyen as well as chats about Fat Beach Day, Heritage Park and the State Fair is below!

Chuck, Producer Beth and I have also been going hard with our “No Brains, No Lightbulbs” episodes. We’ve hit a stride with some awesome questions and some really fun banter and the guests have just been god damn top notch. I’ve known Amy Siegel for I don’t know. . .23 years? 25 years? I’m old as shit. Amy’s awesome as shit. She was a joy to ‘cast with. Check that one out right here!

And on Saturday August 8 at 5 a.m. we are dropping our latest episode with David Cava. Let the Twins jersey fool you, this dude loves the Twins. David is an amazing dude; he’s a physics teacher, he runs Trivia Mafia and he knows a blinding amount about Prince. Get that episode right here.

The bugs are biting a little bit out here while I listen to Radio K, drink champagne and finish some random loose ends up after an absolutely stunning day off from City Cast Twin Cities. I went back to Jazz88 and talked trivia with Manny, Travis and Yonci and then I got an awesome haircut from Mike at Good Neighbor. Tonight my youngest and I walked to Tono and I got their shockingly good pesto burrata salad. What a treat. Maybe I’ll see you at the Lynx game or the Fort Road Folk Fest my bestie Martin is running at the White Squirrel. Whatever you do I hope you really enjoy your weekend.

Something has me feeling lifted up a couple inches this morning. It was good sleep last night. We had a big meal at Tono after going to temple services. I fell asleep promptly after we started a new Larry David thing on HBO and put myself to bed on the early side. Put myself to bed before Rachel which is wildly uncommon. Rachel had pulled down the blinds. The sun didn’t get through. I slept with no interruption besides for the middle age middle-of-the-night pees until maybe 7:30. After that the kids came into bed and I read a magazine out on the couch.

I fooled myself into thinking the heatwave was all the way over, but it’s a little better. My six year old daughter read me an unconscionable and uncountable amount of jokes from a kid’s joke book, I did my little round of exercises and I started on making pancakes for everyone else and potatoes, eggs and toast for me. Good coffee and music from my favorite, Dee Henry Williams aka the Grand Diva on KFAI. She plays a lot of the same songs every week. She says a lot of the same things every week including “Grand Rising from the Grand Diva”. But I can tell you that it is still fresh and timely. How does she do that? I don’t know.

Maybe all of this good music, and good energy and calmness comes from a huge cocktail of good things. I DJ’d at Berlin on Wednesday and not only did it go great, it was a great time. It’s such a clarifying experience to be with your records that you picked out and you try to share them in an order, volume and energy that speaks to what is happening in the room. I also had a great brief hang with my friend Amy and then an awesome convo with Cecilia and Gabby who are both on staff at Berlin. Also, in holy-shit-the-world-is-small-but-Saint-Paul-is-way-smaller: the soundman and I worked together at Cheapo/Applause the holiday season going from 1998 to 1999. That was a different century. After I played I listened to Deltron3030 on a great set of speakers and just marveled at the instruments that Del and Kid Koala that they share with the world. I love Dan the Automator but I think of his greatness more often. I heard things in Del and Koala’s rhythm and placement I had never heard before. First time I ever saw someone do coke I was listening to that record in Colorado. I’ve never done coke but I bet you guessed that already.

Maybe the good feeling is because I received back the “Country Cabin Crapper Companion Volume Three” magazine run and I’m happy with it. I’m proud of what I wrote. I’m grateful for what Meghan, Sam and Bill wrote. And that project was one uphill after another so to see it through and done feels good. I’ll have copies up for sale on Bandcamp soon and I’ll celebrate the release at the White Squirrel on Saturday July 25 (next Saturday).

Maybe it’s completing difficult thing after difficult thing at City Cast Twin Cities including hosting a really different kind of episode that was quarterbacked by my colleague Tiffany Bui. And after all that I had a half-day on Friday and I spent a lot of it reading the New Yorker while my kids played on an iPad at Makwa Coffee while by wife got work done on her laptop. Makwa Coffee’s Ziigwan Sugar Maple is the best iced coffee in the city.

Magazines elaborate on the terrible things happening around the world in a pace I can metabolize and act upon. This one from the New Yorker laid bare the absolute barbarity of ICE detention camps are. We are painting a new stain on our country’s history methodically and inarguably. If you’re from the Twin Cities here’s one of the sentences that hurts the most:

This appeared to be one of the starker realities of the Eco tent: even by the low standards of Camp East Montana, detainees who’d been arrested in Minnesota were subject to an exceptional level of neglect, as though the unbridled spirit of Operation Metro Surge had carried over to West Texas.

Imagine living a worse life in a detention camp in Texas simply because you were abducted in the most lawless and violent of the surges happening across the country.

——-

Today after all the breakfast was cooked I opened up the Atlantic and read an article by Rose Horowitch about the death of literacy. I thought about all the gifts that reading has given me. All the universes that reading not only invited me into, but let me create. I think about the fact that in a workplace where more and more of the prep work is coming via Claude I was able to quickly reference an amazing summary of the creation of Heritage Park by Justin Ellis in “The Cruelty of Nice Folks”. It was the reading of the book that gave me that. I don’t know that it helped directly when I got the chance to interview him, I just know that reading that man’s whole ass book improved my life, my brain, my world. Claude can kiss my ass while stealing my style!

The one positive in Horowitch’s article was that “literacy as a subculture” is growing. We might never see John Cheever on the cover of a magazine again. Hell, we’ll never really see the cover of a magazine again in the same cultural impact way, but we can keep reading. We can keep loving books and magazines. We can love the way that our perspective broadens by reading in general and the way our attention tightens in specific when our nose is in front of one sentence and our hands are holding onto something. We can love the patience we are forced into having when a challenging song comes on a record but we don’t want to get up and flip it and we can love the focus of the record spinning, the handful of liner notes available on the Deodato record we’ve been listening to for the last 15 years in our hands wondering what happened on September 13.

I don’t know why but as KFAI DJ and culture bearer par excellence Kenna Cottman gets into the set for Mostly Jazz they play one thousand Lakecia Benjamin songs followed by a thousand of Abbey Lincoln. The sounds wash over me and I’m washing dishes I don’t even really have to wash at this very moment just to hear the original of “Throw it Away” when I’ve only heard the Terri Lyne Carrington version. I’m grateful for the afternoons of my life I spent just playing jazz records in a room in North Minneapolis or St. Louis Park and letting the music come out of the speakers, and checking the weather, and writing the news and hearing the jazz and hoping it’s all working.

Today it’s all working again. I take the dogs for a walk. Aaron and Melissa’s garden looks better than it ever has. But they tell me they are just trying to get more work done on the fence they’ve been working on most of the summer since the storms. Luis and his brother let me struggle through my Spanish while we talk about the World Cup finals tomorrow, and who might win (they are rooting for Argentina). Kenna is still playing unbelievable music and then Jon Jon takes over for Sound Verite. I’ve known these humans. I’ve bought records from Jon Jon. I’ve interviewed Kenna. It truly is community radio. Jon Jon plays Equinox, a John Coltrane song in C#m that I’ve heard hundreds of times. But I’ve never listened to McCoy Tyner’s solo quite that way. The way each idea talks to the last one but says something new. I know how the chords move, it’s one of the few songs I can play on piano. Then Jon Jon plays “Like Sonny” again by Coltrane. The band sounds insanely fresh, vibrant, communicative. And then Fela Kuti “Water No Get Enemy”. That’s the song that made the biggest move from Fela’s discography into a favorite of neo-soul stans like myself. I hear a guitar part I’ve never heard before. Never. I’ve listened to this song lots. But I’m older. I’m more patient. I move slower. My ears work better. I hear a lyric I’ve never heard before:

If water kill your child, na water you go use.

I want the moment to last forever but I’m also at peace with knowing it won’t. The new neighbors are outside, using a bench I thought they’d never use (pet peeve is people putting seating in their front yard and then never fucking sitting out there). But Ally and shit-I-forgot-her-name are outside cuddling on the bench. Ally is trying to change an appointment. I’m trying to come inside and write it down. By the time I get to this point Jon Jon is playing another Coltrane song, Impressions. The energy has changed, but it’s still good. The kids are on an iPad. They’ll read real books later. They’ll take their guitar and ukulele lessons later. It’s good to touch things, it’s good to write things, it’s good to read things, it’s good to change things. It’s good to be alive compared to the available alternatives. Grand rising from the grand twinkie.

It felt like he was just born to teach jazz. I remember one day playing the maybe-Miles-Davis tune “Four”. There’s some thought that Eddie Cleanhead Vinson actually wrote it. We just played it for conservatively thirty minutes straight. Going through solos, trying double time, walking half notes. There was so much time to try everything. There was Saturdays at 2pm at the old old Walker-West which was in a two story building on Selby that is still there. Some weeks we did so much. Some weeks I thought we did so little, but actually it was the first time we all played bossa, or maybe Kevin played brushes for a long ass time for the first time. Or maybe Kevin played brushes on a bossa for the first time.

Felix would take us on professional gigs that got booked through the school. We played at the St. Paul Hotel to receive August Wilson who was back in town. We messed with an equipment cart in the loading dock and accidentally pulled the top handles off of the cart and slipped them into Felix’s van. When Felix figured it out he was furious. He told us it was just a boneheaded thing to do on a gig. You don’t act like that on a gig. This is serious business. Even if it’s fun.

I don’t know, four months later we are playing at the Mall of America. It’s a Real Book gig with a comparatively small band. Maybe Rob Coleman keys, deVon Gray alto, Martin Devaney tenor, Sean bass, Kevin Hunt drums. We’re in Felix’s white van. I am relentlessly asking about what songs we’ll play. What order we’ll play them. Who will take solos on them. When we will trade 4s? Have you ever traded 8s? Should try it. Felix leans over to Martin: “He asks too many damn questions.” Simply, playfully, but clearly he made his boundaries clear. You don’t act like that on a gig. This is fun. Even if it’s serious business.

If you are a jazz bassist you get to learn to walk twice. And every bassist I know can mainly credit one person with showing them how to walk on a bass. Maybe it’s a piano player. Maybe it’s a bass teacher. Maybe it’s Felix James: stubby alto sax fingers on the low end of the piano simply picking out the notes of a walking bass while showing the elegance, the dance, the tip toe and the hard hit. He looked at me. I didn’t get it yet. I kept on I III V VI b7 VI V III - but bit by bit I got it.

When I got a little better he’d quietly show me how little I actually knew. He’d peel back another layer of chromatics, or 6/8 or some other piece of the puzzle. But the thing was Felix never made it feel like a puzzle. He’d show us how we actually already knew how to do it, we just didn’t the name for it. He never asked us to believe him. He showed us how the new concept worked, how it really was the old concept flipped upside down and still landing.

He’d have the saxophone strap on almost all the time. He didn’t play the sax all that often but oh when he did it reminded you that he wasn’t just a gifted teacher. He’d immediately sound tens of time better than us, smooth, soulful. Like Cannonball, like Sonny Stitt. He’d push us to a different song that would teach us a different thing. He had to meet me where I was at. He had to meet Rob where he was at. DeVon the same. Martin the same. Kevin the same. Tasha the same. Giving us the material. Recommending the OMNIBOOK when it was time. Telling me to work with Laurie Lang. Telling me to try to write something sometime. Looking at it, pushing his fingers around the changes. Asking a question. Pointing out when I wrote it wrong. When it wasn’t a full measure, when it was way more than a full measure. He never asked us to believe him. He let us count it ourselves.

We’d walk in some Saturdays and he’d simply announce that we have a gig. Maybe somebody couldn’t do it, but enough people always could. Just immediately load up the van. The older kids some of them had cars. Yup, we’re going to the Hubert Humphrey School at the U to do something. He gave hundreds of people these experiences. Before Rob, Martin, DeVon, Kevin, Tasha there was other groups, other rhythm sections, in fact sometime they’d come back and say hello. And as college comes, or people move on to different things they might still stop by sometime. Sometime we’d play a “gig” just outside in the courtyard to maybe nobody, maybe a couple people from the neighborhood come. Just playing songs. A guy swinging by to play a little keyboard cause they knew him from church.

It was how we all learned. We’d play in downtown St. Paul for the fundraiser. Polishing off our best openings. All Blues in 4/4. I’m overplaying, there’s a tenth on every note, there’s fills that make no sense. Kevin’s snare is tuned so high with a FIBERSKIN stretched across the piccolo frame. It’s the pinnacle of funk that we knew at that time.

Sure, a lot of the same players would play at Central. But we didn’t sound like we did when it was Felix picking the tunes, calling the solos, setting up the mic if we needed it. Felix, you pushed the tradition along. You gave it to people. You taught it the right way. You raised us the right way. You helped us grow. You guided us. This is fun. Even if it’s serious business.

Lime Toss Olympics is an annual competition of outrageous games organized by myself and Amy Wielunski. These beautiful photos were taken by Casey Peterson.

I just feverishly worked on City Cast Twin Cities and Trivia Mafia stuff on the patio of White Squirrel. I enjoyed the faint smell of cigarettes, the smell of a perfume that only awesome women in their 20s and 30s who dig beers drink and the smell of a an outdoor flat top grill in action making delicious burgers. I smelled summer this evening.
And on Saturday I won’t be sitting at my laptop trying to think of cross streets of Grand Avenue. I’ll be standing on the patio stage at the White Squirrel playing bass with Big Trouble.
God I love playing with Big Trouble. My brother is writing his ass off for the group and we have this awesome schedule going. Practice once a month, play once a month and always add at least one new song. We are, as they say: dialed in.
I hope you will free up your schedule and join Big Trouble on Saturday, May 30 from 6-8pm. The Angry Line Cook is cooking up burgers and more and my god is the food delicious. We are going to have fun this summer and it all starts on Saturday at White Squirrel. I’ll see you there.
Am I allowed to put a little song on this here post and ask you to listen to it? I think I am. This is Steve’s tune Chicane and we recorded it down in my basement. Great solos from both guitardudes and Peter and I channeling our love of The Meters. enjoy!

Couldn’t we have some with podcasts? I host two podcasts. I’m the host of City Cast Twin Cities and the co-host of No Brains, No Lightbulbs. My life is very podcast-centric right now. And I am loving it. The Trivia Mafia podcast is a once a week affair recorded right about the White Squirrel. Our producer is named Beth and we have an awesome guest every week to answer some dumb questions and play some awesome trivia. We are doing our first live event on Saturday June 17 and I hope you can come on out. It’s at the Bryant Lake Bowl in Minneapolis and after the taping we are going to join and play Trivia Mafia out in the bar with Molly. Grab your tickets! They are only $10 in advance. I think it’s going to be a really fun time, but of course I would say that. But of course I actually think that too.

“America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be
false to the future.” - Frederick Douglass, 1852

Let no lemonade, firecracker or tubed meat pass through my hands for the rest of my Julys without thinking about the unkept promises of the Fourth of July. If you are proud of America you should be worried for America. I love America and I fear for its future. We are 250 years in and we are at the nadir of the American experiment within my lifetime. There are many pain points but Operation Metro Surge looms large in my mind. The Federal government waged an invasion of choice against many cities but none with the cruelty and volume they used against our Twin Cities.

There was no justification for the focus on the Twin Cities. There was no unique measure of immigration related infractions that would justify the Twin Cities defending ourselves against a federal force 12 times the size of the one deployed in Chicago, a metro area three times as large as ours.

I cannot compare the modern day cruelties forced onto immigrants and protesters with the cruelties of chattel slavery. But I do compare my disgust with the larceny of my times with Frederick Douglass’s disgust with his.

This summer will be filled with the American flag and with declarations of pride for America. I have no doubt that the Trump administration will be in on the photo shoots, the barbecues, the speeches. They deserve none of it. I hope the first slice of ice cream pie that Stephen Miller eats on the White House lawn gives him sight for the first time. Sight that his campaign of American terror has no place in the path our country should be carving. I hope that Donald Trump sees that the police force he commands is inhumane and criminal. As ICE-related cases make their way through our legal system, their wins amount to a rounding error. The actions of ICE agents will not be defended in our system. The actions are indefensible, immoral and murderous.

In the Twin Cities we now live in the wake of Operation Metro Surge. Listen closely to the people who know it best and the operation is not over, just slowed. The Whipple Building still shuttles immigrants in without due process and ships them off as quickly as possible to circuit courts more favorable to the cause. And we still pick up and drop off our children off at schools that have signs that say that no federal agents are permitted on site without a judicial warrant.

Our Twin Cities fought against Operation Metro Surge because it was un-American, because it was inhumane, because it was antithetical to morality, because it was vicious and because we love our neighbors. In our country’s history, and in our country’s present, we are loaded to the gills with un-American acts, with inhumanity, with droughts of morality. I celebrate our stand against Operation Metro Surge and I mourn the moments I and we have come up short in the past. We can do better and this year we will. And next year we will. If Frederick Douglass had hope in 1852 I will have hope in 2026. And if on this Fourth of July I think only of the fireworks and of the varieties of potato salad I prefer, I have failed.

Let the Fourth of July belong to the people who know this country can be better. I have never been less certain that we will win. The bastards may win. The criminals who further sully the already sullied reputation of the United States may win. I fear that my great grandchildren will be told that Sean McPherson was a part of one of the last generations to fight for a moral world that valued equality and liberty for all. As clear as I can say it, the pursuers of liberty for all are my lot. If my great grandchildren feel differently, I swear them off. The spirit of evil and of white supremacy is too foreign to me to be in one family with it.

I reserve the taste of a hot dog with relish and mustard and the joy of modest fireworks viewed from the parking lot of the Eagan Lunds to those who fought and continue to fight. I would love nothing more than to slap the taste of a well-prepared hot dog out of Trump’s mouth, out of Miller’s mouth, out of Noem’s crooked smirk. The Fourth of July belongs to my lot, not theirs.

The Fourth of July celebrates nothing immaculate. It celebrates the birth of a country riddled with problems and lousy with solutions. The mistakes we made can be acknowledged and can often be righted. The impulse by many Americans is to omit our mistakes from our history or to repaint them as successes. Shame on those who don’t acknowledge mistakes. Shame on those who don’t learn from them.

There is always the opportunity to be better, to be more righteous, to give more to humanity than we take from it. In “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July,” Douglass celebrated the opportunities our country’s relative youth gave to the 1850s:

May he not hope that high lessons of wisdom, of justice and of truth, will yet give direction to her destiny? Were the nation older, the patriot’s heart might be sadder, and the reformer’s brow heavier. Its future might be shrouded in gloom, and the hope of its prophets go out in sorrow. There is consolation in the thought, that America is young. Great streams are not easily turned from channels, worn deep in the course of ages.

In the Twin Cities we have rallied and resisted against evil forces in our country’s spirit and in power in our capital. The Twin Cities are the tip of the spear in the fight to point America towards its most giving, generous and familial spirit. I will celebrate that fight, that resistance and that future this Fourth of July. My community are those who celebrate in that spirit. And to them and only them I wish a Happy Fourth of July, 2026.

You should head over to my website and vote for some awards in some weird musical categories. I’d love your thoughts. Submit your answers here. We’re calling this list of categories and the attendant award ceremony “The Smallys”.

I also hope you’ll check out some of the awesome stuff we’ve been up to with City Cast Twin Cities. I am so honored to be working on this team and having the awesomest contributors and guests. A huge village of people are making this project really exciting. I am confident we are bringing some coverage and angles that are pretty unique.

Huge shout out to our contributors who are all absolutely enthralling and providing the best stuff/ideas and spirit. Hans Buetow, Denzel Belin, Pavielle French, Em Cassel, Tane Danger, Sam Choo, Winter Keefer. To get to share conversations with these great people every weekday is just a treat. And Kirstie Kimball from Beyond Beurre Blanc just joined up as a contributor and it feels great, she’s given us such great gems already on City Cast Twin Cities.

The staff I work with inspires me every day. Our Executive Producer is Anna Weggel. Our creative producers are Adam Sage and Tiffany Bui. Our Audience Development Manager is James Napoli. And our Account Executive is Heather Hull. This team is full of creative, dedicated, impassioned, humble people who want to do great work and will work diligently to make it happen. Great ideas, great delivery and great alignment on what we should be doing. I haven’t felt this locked in with a team for shit I don’t know, I don’t, there’s great chemistry. I equate it that Three Musketeers stuff I felt when I was traveling with the same Dessa band for years. There was a sense of unity and focus that is hard to have with even a 12 person team let alone a couple floors of people. We have a connection to a lot of national people at City Cast and we get guidance, but there’s a thing with us in the Twin Cities that feels very Voltron-y.

Things are gelling and we are learning and I am learning a tremendous amount. It’s exciting and the work is so intertwined with the absolutely amazing things already happening in town and being able to connect with them. Amazing performers like emmy woods, Crescent Moon and Andrew Broder.

And also “sure I’ll come on, why not?” guests like Emily Fairfax, who advised on Thumpers.

We had an extended conversation with Nekima Levy Armstrong that provided a ton of context to the Target boycott.

A longer runway to actually talk through the saga with detail. We talked to this Ed Hahn character who was an absolute ham and works at the National Eagle Center in Wabasha. Just a great hang plus eagle and OnlyFans information on one episode.

A lot of days the show is very conversational about both serious breaking news items and culture, humor, chatty kathy stuff too. A blend. I absolutely love the neighborhood papers in the Twin Cities and we just had Michael McKinney on. He’s the editor of The Northeaster and had this angle on the way suburbs are responding to the impact of Operation Metro Surge.

What I’m trying to say is that I’m very proud of the work we are doing on City Cast Twin Cities. I hope you’ll swing by and check it out because the caliber of folks I’m working with and what we are collectively bringing is really high.

I have also been having a spectacular time with Chuck and Beth on the Trivia Mafia podcast which is called “No Brains, No Lightbulbs”. Chuck is the co-owner of Trivia Mafia which we started together but he now runs full time. Beth is our producer who helped us start the show. We had the honor to spend some awesome months with our fill-in producer Davis Steen when Beth was on maternity leave and I am so appreciative of everything he did, he really grew the show. Sitting with Chuck we had some really fun hangs.

My guy Casey Peterson came on and wow was that a joy.

We had our Thursday night life partner Amy Woo on.

And Mia McGill came back as our first return guest!

There is so much fun. Today was a lot of work. A lot of file management. A lot of typing bank entries into a software. A bunch of trying to get computer programs to do not quite exactly what they are designed to. But it worked. Made some beautiful work. And I’m so grateful to do it. Right after I turned on one of the greatest Just Blaze produced songs of all time.

The end of the day felt great because of all the work. Great because I did remember to post the No Brains, No Lightbulbs episode for 5am dropping tomorrow. Great because I was able to make a little weekend events update for City Cast’s instagram.

But it went deeper in context when I got to be at a screening of a new series from MNHS and Nubulan, a film studio ran by Central-alum Antonio Richardson. The series is called “The Safe Space” and it tells the story of the Central Touring Theatre at Central from the late 70s to 2015. This was a premiere and there are public screenings to come. The film in the most joyous way possible made me re-explore how spectacular my classmates were at Central. The auditorium at MNHS was stuffed to the gills with organizers, actors, entrepreneurs, poets, elders, fathers, mothers, lawyers, fine artists, social workers. It was filled with people who knew that something absolutely magical was coming out of the Black Box at Central High School. To see the baldly true statement that Central Touring Theatre was a life-changing program actually said out loud in a beautifully directed documentary was so affirming.

It reminded me about the programs at Central, about how special and absolutely… vocational so many of the arts programs felt. These high school students would go on to be stewards and protectors of their community. The art would serve a purpose. This was not a “get signed to a major or bust” feeling. The art may not help you be a superstar, but they will help you be a teacher, a dancer, an administrator, an activist. Making something special at Central felt completely possible cause so many greats had made something special at Central. To see the royalty from the acting community that walked the halls at Central, it’s awe-inspiring.

Tonight I got to feel that awe alongside my daughter. She sat next to me and asked a couple questions, coughed a lot and hung on every word. She said it was one of the best movies she ever saw when we walked out to the car. We took a look at the Capitol on the way to the car and we lingered for a moment. I found a feeling in me at first for a moment and now for quite some time: I know that there is a deep, real good in this Earth that is worth fighting for, worth creating for, worth pushing for. We are miles away from the real good being everywhere it should. We are surrounded by evils. But there is something beautiful and sublime with us in this universe and we would be well-served to celebrate and support and document and share and recognize that it is magic with no trickery, no sleight-of-hand, just the magic of expression.

I’m sweeping up a lot of glitter today which is a medium length way of saying that the youngest had her sixth birthday party today.

I thought it would mean a very particular something. Two years ago my oldest turning six did feel that very particular way I thought today would feel. I had sixth birthdays circled in my head because I’m convinced my mom had done a number on me when I was five. And by done a number I mean treated me wrong. Yelled at me. Yelled at me for being fat. Yelled at me for being loud. Yelled at me for existing. Swore at me. Told me she was going to feed me paper towels instead of food to help me lose weight. Told me I was a dumbshit relentlessly. Really swore at me. Not letting a swear slip around me. Not letting a swear slip at me. Swearing directly at me, on purpose, most days.

So I had today circled, if she blows out the number six candle then I did something better. I gave my kids something better than I got. I’d kick me feet up in my miniature triumph. But I don’t know how I’m fucking my kids up. And I must think that my mom didn’t think she was fucking me up. For all I know she was kicking her feet up at my sixth birthday party thinking she was doing something better than her parents did to her. And I’m pretty sure she was.

I can find and celebrate the triumph if I make it miniature and measured. I think my girls feel more at home in their bodies than I did at their age. I think my girls see their parents relate to their own bodies in healthier, more supportive, more welcoming ways than I saw in my house growing up. I can’t with any great confidence open the lens wider than that. We don’t know what pain will stick. We don’t know what joys will stick either.

I had a series of bizarre and truly beautiful conversations with my Dad a handful of years ago. At some point it was sort of just me sharing different emotional bruises I had from my childhood. The ones that stuck, the ones that shaped me, the ones that I had flipped over and over in a therapist’s office across from the St. Paul Cheapo some years before that. What was strange was how masculine the conversation was. The vibe was not dissimilar to when I show someone the weird fatty bump on my right knee from when I feel down hard on a bunch of rocks at Camp Shane in the summer of 1995. But he was also asking after certain emotional bruises he thought would be there. He mentioned a stressful night we had in England when I was a boy. He brought me to a fancy dinner for a work trip he was on but did not realize the fancy club had a strict dress code that involved ties and maybe even certain shoes and a blazer. I was not up to code, nor did I have anything on that continent that would’ve brought me up to code. He didn’t think they’d make a kid wait in the lobby due to a dress code. He was wrong.

I had to wait in the lobby for a handful of hours while he did his dinner. He would come and check on me from time to time and I believe he made some effort to get me food. It was a long time. . .2 plus hours maybe? It was like having your kid wait outside while you had a whole dinner party. I didn’t find this night to be particularly difficult. I thought the rules of this club were insane, I thought that enforcing them on a boy in low double digits was doubly insane. But the night didn’t wear on me cosmically. I was bored out of my brain but that was just the status of being a kid pre-iPad. I remember spending hours tying knots with blades of grass while lying in my backyard. I was comfortable with boredom. My dad shared that he thought that for sure that night at the dinner club in England would be one of the bad ones for me, one of the ones that I’d be stuck sorting out for years. It wasn’t. Life goes on, let’s get a sandwich on the way back to the hotel.

It’s pointless to guess how you are fucking up your kids. You are fucking them up and you are loving them. You are trying your best and you are failing miserably. You are doing a great job and you aren’t. I thought that on this night of the sixth birthday I’d be lifting off of some plateau, I’d feel like I had entered a new level on the video game.

What do I really feel? I feel happy that the party went off just fine. I feel unexplainably exhausted. The party wasn’t that stressful and it was two hours long but I feel like I’ve been up for 21 hours. There is a small amount of glitter everywhere. There are clear ways I haven’t yet fucked up my kids and they aren’t insubstantial. There are Thin Mints in the house, I read an entire new Karl Ove Knausgaard novel and JS Coffee still had the Guji coffee I’ve been into and I bought a pound of it today. We had kids throw lightning bolts onto a homemade Mount Olympus today and I’ll remember sitting inside in my outside camper chair in the kitchen and handing kids a grape as a prize no matter where the lightning bolt hit; my daughter had found the pin the tale on Bandit to be too stressful last year.

There will be ninth birthdays, and seventh birthdays and experiences, good and bad, that I think that my kids will remember forever but they won’t. They’ll be random trips to the doctor, to Hudson and to KidsHair that I’ll forget about as they’re happening but they’ll be burnt into their memories in deeper relief than most of their adult birthdays. Maybe, a generation from now one of them will be writing about being proud to get to their kid’s sixth birthday, knowing they had sidestepped some mistake that I had not. May they celebrate their miniature triumph, clean up the glitter, and stay unready for the next disaster, even after it happens.

ICE REENACTMENTS

I am already thinking about how this moment we are living through and fighting back at will be positioned in history. First, I am an optimist, but I want to be clear, I cannot comfortably envision the side that supports the Constitution, the rule of law, the rights of ALL HUMANS inside of the United States not winning. It might be that I lack the imagination or endurance to imagine a loss that severe and paralyzing. I hope the reason that I can’t imagine the side that recognizes masked police officers asking people for their papers is because it is not going to happen here. This is not because of any particular direction that I believe the moral arc of the universe is bending towards a long timeline sense. I no longer have faith in things generally moving in the right direction. But in this instance there are more of us. And there are people who have been aligned with Donald Trump and the Republican Party who are repulsed by what is happening in Minnesota. Proximity has a lot to do this. If you have seen what is happening it is almost compulsory to say, at a bare minimum, that this is not being done the right way.

More than most moments of wrong-doing by law enforcement officers in our country, the bad apple analogy just will not play. AND IT HAS BARELY PLAYED IN THE PAST. Three sworn police officers watched Derek Chauvin murder George Floyd. They all failed humanity and the professed values of their profession. Shameful, depraved, soulless shit. Many thought police couldn’t be reformed. I thought the Minneapolis Police Department couldn’t be reformed. Many thought otherwise.

So can we just briefly play out a moment a handful of years from now when ICE is done, dismantled, renamed, repurposed? Maybe DHS is done too. But for, imagine ICE is done. Our Immigration Enforcement officers are part of INS as they were before 2003. Are the agents who worked for ICE blacklisted? Are they inside of the government? Are they a failed insurgency? Did they fail but they’re revered by 50% of the country? Will there be ICE re-enactors? Will the unjustified killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti be reenacted? Will there be a Minneapolis 2026 historical site, with reenactors and a miniature Phillips, a miniature Powwow Grounds, a Whipple Building. Will this moment be a museum? What will the thesis be?

I have always thought positively of educational sites that feature characters from past time periods. I know they are difficult to execute, but as a child I benefited greatly from historical reenactors. BUT, I am quite suddenly thinking negatively about reenactments. People voluntarily reenact the military maneuvers of a side that defended chattel slavery over country. The sight of a Confederate Flag reminds me that the dispute of the Civil War is not resolved. Shameful, depraved soulless shit.

So in some 100 years will there be people who muse about the lost cause of ICE? Will people pretend that ICE was actually about immigration enforcement when it already seems clear to me it’s about mustering a secret masked police force to manipulate the public in general and elections in particular.

If you, like me, had diluted yourself into thinking that there will not be large contingency of our country that is ready to give up on democracy, on the Constitution, on the ideals that are supposed to differentiate America from autocracies and dictatorships, you’re as dumb as I am. WE AREN’T HONESTLY UNANIMOUS ON SLAVERY. Are there going to be January 6 reenactments? Is there some potential future where January 6 becomes observed as a holiday? Is there some potential future where my great grandchildren regret my position and align with the spirit of ICE?

There might be ICE re-enactors in our future. Better than ICE I suppose, but so terrible, too terrible, to imagine.

——

MY RETIREMENT DESIRES
I’m 44 and I’m already thinking about my retirement which is at a minimum 20 years away and realistically bound to change and be mediated by many different circumstances in that time period. But, I can’t get it out of my brain so I’d like to share what is important to me. Sort of in order.

I don’t want to be a snowbird. I want to be a bird. I love Minnesota, but I want to retire to a place that is warmish year round. Like a place where you shovel snow less than five times a year.
Water. I want to be by water. If I had my choice I would be by fresh water.
Neighbors or Best Friends. I love my neighbors. I love my brother. I love Martin. I love Chuck. I want to retire right near some of these people.
Busses/Metro Transit. As I envision my retirement at this point I’ll be enjoying a cocktail before 4pm 5-6 days a week. I’ll also be consuming marijuana. I also already drive slow. I would like to live in a place where I can get to a grocery store, coffee shop and fun bar with a walk or a single bus ride.
Jewish. Rachel wants to be in a pretty Jewish place. Saint Paul is Jewish enough for her. When I briefly wanted to move to Durham, NC for a grad school I did not get into she was not into that. So we need a place more Jewish than Durham and at least as Jewish as Saint Paul.

That’s really the top tier shit. It seems like a lot. But I think it’s doable. If you have some thoughts about what places would fit the bill please do let me know. sean@triviamafia.com

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DO I HAVE RADIOHEAD ALL WRONG?

So I like Radiohead fine. And I think when you like Radiohead just fine you still hold them in high esteem. And there’s plenty of moments where I’ve listened to Radiohead and I thought it was absolutely incredible. But I never became a huge listener. I bet they’ve never been in my top ten most listened to bands in a calendar year. I like Radiohead, I think they are elite. But, we are playing the song “All I Need” from “In Rainbows” and it’s brilliant. So subtly brilliant and also just clearly one of the great collaborations between Greenwood and Yorke. It feels like one of those bands that just does exactly what they want. Places things in the right places. They are actually what Wilco kind of says they are. They are terminally better than Wilco. I think I would fight about that in the right environment. They are not Stevie Wonder. I would fight about that too. The Beatles are better. The Band are better. I think they might be better than Pink Floyd. This is spicy.

———-

GREAT CDs TO HOLD AND ENJOY ARTWORK

How bout Combustication from Medeski, Martin and Wood? This is a record that has had a huge impact on what I think good instrumental music is. And frankly it feels so good to hold a digipak CD in your hand especially when there is some sort of layered cut out paper letter situation. It just feels great. The interesting thing about the record is that most of it is pretty understated. I think it has less ambition than most MMW records and that’s sort of to it’s credit.

SOME FAST UPDATES ABOUT SOME WORK I’VE DONE RECENTLY

• I interviewed the great poet/activist Tish Jones and we had an excellent conversation.

• A lot of folks want to give mutual aid and might struggle to know someone they directly can support. I trust Andrew Broder deeply and he is getting money out to families in need for rent in the north metro. His venmo is @andrewbroder and his appeal is here. I sent some money. I recommend you do too if you can.

• I am also impressed with Neighbors Helping Neighbors. I’m involved with helping and I’ve donated. I donated here.

• I recently had a conversation with Saint Paul Mayor Kaoly Her and it’s worth a listen

• I would like to underline in general that I think the work that the team I’m on from City Cast Twin Cities is featuring valuable perspectives from this moment and you should consider reading our newsletter, following us on social and listening to our podcast

• I personally hit a bit of a rut with the Trivia Mafia podcast. I wasn’t happy with the questions I was writing and I wasn’t jiving with Chuck the way I wanted to. But I snapped out and the last couple ones have been awesome. We just had Keith Harris on and it’s super fun. Check it out right here!

Chuck Terhark, Keith Harris, Sean McPherson

• Big Trouble recently put together a fundraiser at the White Squirrel and while we were there we did a rendition of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young’s Ohio and it turned out awesome. Here’s that link.

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LAURIE PRITCHETT

I think it’s a colossal mistake that the first city the Feds tried something remotely this big in was the Twin Cities. That one might end up being discussed for generations as a tactical mistakes. The networks existed here. The networks largely existed here because of Black activists. That networks exists here because terrible things have already happened here. But this isn’t the first time the city has had to soul search while also building alternative modes of communication and gathering. We aren’t about backing down. It is not going well for Trump in the Twin Cities. His chosen leaders look incompetent because they are incompetent. His infantrymen look incompetent because they are incompetent. The federal government has unlimited money to wage an unjust war against these great cities, but his goodwill is running out faster than his budget. Ultimately, the techniques are working.

The attached-to-ICE-at-the-hip group of patrollers is proving to be something ICE can’t solve for. They can’t continue their work under filmed, observed circumstances. And the checkmate move of these Constitutional observations reminds me of Laurie Pritchett. To let the MLK Jr. biographers like Taylor Branch describe it, Pritchett was the only Southern police chief who tactically succeeded in quieting King’s impact. King had damning criticism for Chief Pritchett, faulting him for using “the moral means of nonviolence to maintain the immoral ends of racial injustice.” I also disagree with Pritchett’s position, but his tactics were light-years ahead of his fellow police chiefs.

When King came to Albany, Georgia, King had a plan to do what he’d been doing. Bring enough people that they can’t all be arrested. The police would have to make different and often terrible decisions when arresting people wasn’t an option. Pritchett talked it out with all the prisons in 50 miles radius. He simply wouldn’t run out cells. You couldn’t get in the paper if everyone was locked up efficiently and with proper accommodations.

Pritchett had read King’s writings. He had even read Gandhi’s book to check out the principles even deeper. That means Pritchett was ready for it. He knew the techniques and the pressure points and he met the moment. When King refused to pay a fine and instead elected to go to jail, Pritchett would tacitly organize a group of business people to pay the bond. There isn’t a photo op when King is released on bail. Pritchett was on the wrong side of history, but this is an example of how you can study your enemy. The people of the Twin Cities know how ICE operates. I don’t think the agents of ICE will figure out how the people of the Twin Cities operate fast enough to have it matter.

Did the quiet organizers, the leaderless cells, the unified messaging and distinct communications position a grassroots counter-insurgency to neuter a well-funded arm of the federal government? There is a level of humble study that the protestors and resisters against Operation Metro Surge have given to ICE. Knowing how they handle plates. Knowing how they handle stops. So it’s there. Know your enemy. We are learning our enemy and we are keeping us safe.

My All Time Bests

Remember when I told you that this would be all over the place! Don’t worry it’s still all mostly masturbatory! At the same Big Trouble gig where we raised money for the Immigrant Law Center we also played my brother’s tune “Tiger Tiger”. And you know what? I think this recording is the best I’ve ever sounded on a recording ever. I’m super happy with my playing, my feel and my groove with the spectacular drummer Peter Leggett. If I gotta tell someone I’m an awesome bass player I’m playing them this performance. Check it out.

Steve McPherson · Tiger Tiger

That had me thinking about my best performances in different categories. Maybe it’s just the Olympics talk that has me thinking that way. Let’s run it down!

BEST SONG I EVER WROTE ALL ON MY OWN: Achilles by Our Weird Thirties. I came into run trivia at the 331 Club and Chuck told me that one of his good friends was getting a divorce. The dude getting a divorce came up to me and said “man, hug your wife and tell her you love her and treat her right, cause I didn’t do that enough and now it’s all the way over.” This was probably the first semi-close friend divorce. I went home and wrote this song and dammit I think it’s very good.

BEST SONG I HELPED SIGNIFICANTLY AS AN ARRANGER/BASSIST: I Don’t Know If It’s Helping by Ela. I am/was a member of Ela and sometimes that just means playing the root note while Bill sings amazing music and Peter plays the hell out of his drums. But I had a big part in making this song work and boy howdy does it work.

My Best Writing - I wrote this one thing when I was at a nadir of parenting and on a family trip to Denver in 2024. I wrote a piece called Dispatch Denver that I am still very proud of. Sharing a vulnerable moment from parenting is really difficult and I think I caught something that I might not even be in touch with now that my kid’s are older but holy shit it felt real then.

My Best Promo Move - I’ve tried a lot of different stuff to promote my work in the Twin Cities and beyond but when I locked it down with Pizza Luce to have a Heiruspecs sampler delivered with every Pizza Luce pizza delivery that went out from Saint Paul or Uptown was the highlight. That was back in 2008 and the end result of all that work was Heiruspecs selling out the First Ave Mainroom in December of that year. Sonia from First Ave wrote me an email after that said “maybe you should be teaching the classes about how to promote your band” and it made me really proud. That was a wild era and it was a great show. But that promo move was elite.

The Prettiest Music Moment I Curated - I struggle with joining pre-existing projects in meaningful ways. My heroes in the world can add so much in with their subtle touches. I do a broad brushstrokes and am often on the ground floor of the things I’ve worked on. I’m not as useful on the third floor based on my specialties. But I definitely came in on the third floor of the Dessa tune “Sound the Bells” and added some solid shit on the third floor. Like a balcony and a little ballroom. This ended up being the foundation of a pretty damn epic outro in Dessa’s discography.

My Strongest Interview - I’m thankful for my time at Jazz88. I got to do a bunch of interviews and the grand majority of them I also conceived of, scheduled and edited. It was a whirlwind and a joy and a lot of them blend together. But, I mean, I got to interview Ron Carter. Ron Carter is quite possibly the greatest bass player of all time. He’s up there. And he was a total gentleman.

That’s what I’m sharing at the moment. I hope you have a beautiful week, I hope we all keep fighting for the things we believe in.

The whole week has been a blues song. Repeating the words you believe in twice, over different chords. Closing each complaint with a different conclusion. Finding new ideas in old repetitions. Watching an invasion of your city while also watching a bonding of your city. An ability to meet the moments and the needs with care and efficiency. And haunting, physical, unavoidable reminders. Tonight on Randolph almost to 35E by the Trader Joe’s. A car haphazardly parked with hazards on. Six weeks ago it was someone picking up a friend who hadn’t seen the text message so you had to go knock. Tonight maybe it means someone isn’t coming in to work tomorrow, isn’t going to see Minnesota again, is not going to be the one to turn the hazards off on the car.

Earlier today I got the elusive “down time” hang with my father. He’s in town for the weekend and he spent the afternoon with my family including a guitar lesson. He got to see my daughter vivisect a heart shaped boston kreme donut. We returned home and the afternoon played out with “down time.” Screens. Dog walking. Some talk. Mostly silence punctuated by cartoon characters. We talk about the response to Operation Metro Surge. It floats out there. You know that even if you change the subject, it will change back. There’s a comfort in that knowledge. If we do veer away, we will be pulled back. For certain. We will not be distracted for long, nor do we want to be.

We played at White Squirrel and all the money from our tips went to Immigrant Law Center. All the profits from the bar sales also went there. Everyone does what they can, and there’s a lot more we can do, and many things we already do, than playing music, but it feels special. Music serves a purpose and we served it beautifully tonight. It wasn’t that we played perfect. I’m glad we didn’t. But when we were dialed in correctly on a song I felt like I was in a Spike Lee double dolly shot as I navigate the scene. We ended up raising close to $1500. Josh is kicking the money over now. I felt a purpose in my fingers. Our drummer Peter’s birthday. I’ve made so much music with him. I’ve made so much life with him. Happy birthday. Thank you for the gift of your work on the drums, of your work in the music, of your sounds.

I had snuck the volume on my bass amp up just a little. Maybe more than just a little. The music felt like talking to people. Things like arrangements coming naturally, the spirit of the songs showing up kind of bright and undiluted, more like my younger years of playing. Less thinking and more just feeling. Holy shit there’s Greg Norton from Hüsker Dü here to check it out. Holy shit.

Greg Norton, Sean McPherson (Steve McPherson)

I want to tell you how good it feels to play and play at a moment where nothing else works the way it used to. And the music works so good in a sense you have to agree it doesn’t work the way it used to. But the amp, like I said, is just a little loud. And the snare just cracks. And the solos always start a weird note that starts to feel normal. And no matter how somebody counts it off it’s exactly where you want it to be, come to think of it. And in a tune called Cloquet Then you play this one bass fill in Bb pentatonic that was just so fast. And you’ve never done it before. You hope you’ll do it again.

After the show the producer Lucky Tiger gives me the new tape/USB he made with Muja Messiah. I love Muja Messiah. I guess Muja told Lucky Tiger to make sure to get me the tape tonight. I like rap. I like rappers. I like Minnesota rappers. We have amazingly talented rappers and Muja is at the top of the heap in my opinion. Load out is easy every month, I use the house amp.

After the set my family goes to Burger Dive. My dad orders a perfect manhattan. That’s a real drink. You didn’t know that. You’ve never ordered one. Or you certainly haven’t ordered one twice. It’s perfect cause it’s equal parts both types of vermouth. Half sweet vermouth, half dry vermouth. It looked delicious. I got a Cobb salad. Me my dad and brother Steve were joined by Matt. Matt brought a lot to the conversation. A lot of questions. A lot of comments. A lot. Dad and brother saw their way out and I focused on Matt.

We ended up sitting at the bar, talking, enjoying karaoke. We tried the fried cauliflower. At the end of the night a party comes in from a different era. Ladies night celebrating a 40th and some of the women are old Heiruspecs fans. Fans I remember. They remember me in a different era, and I remember them in a different era. It is ludicrous to think we could have even imagined a 40th birthday party when we last saw each other, 2003 probably, a show probably. We would have been thinking of 30 as impossibly old. But these women were bona fide fans. We didn’t have a lot of them. But we remembered them. Even the markers of coolness are from a completely different era. They bragged to me that we had a picture of them on our website. Just a website. Pre IG, Pre FB, Pre Myspace, Pre Friendster. They mention a set of monthly shows we did called First Fridays at the Quest. Wild turnouts actually. Like 300 people. Very special memories for me and for these women I believe. One of the women also sees me prepare fish with my family on the internet on Sunday nights. That’s a sentence. That’s the now era. We are talking and they are all dolled up. Matt is still just pouring over the details of a relationship that is ending. We engage in conversation with neighbors or people I run into and after two minutes of conversation Matt goes back in: “do you think they’re all crazy? Every woman I’ve ever been with. . .some level of crazy?” I am sucking down half tonic/half soda with bitters. I get the text about the amount of money we raised. I’m grateful. I hope people go home after the concert and do something good for their world tomorrow. Some will. Some won’t. I will and that’s what I can do.
But tonight as these blast-from-the-pasters arrive at Burger Dive and hold court they have an energy. It’s about six girls. They have walked in to a bar and owned it before. It’s been some fucking years since the last time they did that sure. Like 12 years. But they’ve done it. They know the routine, the requirements, the basic outline. Somehow their karaoke song is the unbelievably long Ja Rule Jennifer Lopez song “I’m Real.” I didn’t know what the most perfect song to communicate that it was a 40 year old birthday party until the tune started. Three years in either direction and one of your homegirls does not know the words. BUT THIS IS THE GOD DAMN JA RULE SWEET SPOT. YOU HAVE HIT THE MAIN ENGINE ROOM, NOT A DRILL, IT’S JA AND J-LO AND THEY ARE THE FUCK HERE FOR IT.

I think the birthday girl might’ve dated someone who was really close friends with Eyedea. This was St. Paul bar-goers of a certain age. If you think you’ve heard of DJ Duz It before, or if you were a host at Ferns or Dixie’s, you understand the scene. Have you knocked a cue ball off the table at Costello’s? Do you always reference a coffee shop on W 7th called Rudy’s? Did you date a boy who went to Open School? Have you smoked a cigarette outside of Green Gecko on Grand? Did you ever smoke Kamel Reds? You can fill in the blanks, skip ahead please. For those of you who can’t, I’ll do my best. There is a lot of karaoke observers doing the mom age lady-at-a-wedding dance where the core down to the feet stay almost motionless, the hands go up in the air and go from left side to the right side on quarter notes. You have to have a huge smile on your face. The song is mercilessly long. Four minutes and fifty-eight seconds. So much repetition. To no one, except for possibly me, a woman in a snug, curvy dress announces “here I am drinking a grape ape, doing Ja Rule karaoke.” It’s all factual. It’s all happening. The world is not okay and tonight is not okay but tonight was good and people got together and M. turned 40 and M. wanted to sing Ja Rule and M. did. And M. might be about to sing Tenacious D. but I am going home. Radio K is playing Alice in Chains and then Bomani Jones discusses Kobe’s 81 point game on his podcast. I will open my eyes tomorrow knowing that we are in the still fight of our lives, but tonight I finish the blues song with a 12/8 outro and I see what song is next.

My days are clogged with pain, sorrow and also just straight up busyness. I am the host of a daily podcast during a time of utter crisis in the Twin Cities. These months will become part of the forever stories about our country. We had big name Kara Swisher on our podcast today and she mentioned the images from the Twin Cities carrying the same valence that the Kent State photos did in the anti-Vietnam War movement. That tracks but it’s hard to process. I’ve been hearing about Kent State my entire life.

One thing about the uprising of 2020 after the murder of George Floyd. . .that entire time was surreal. COVID lockdown had already made the day to day surreal. There was less of a before to juxtapose the uprising to. The world was completely out of sorts before George Floyd was murdered on the street in Minneapolis. And the world remained completely out of sorts for months and months afterwards.

Given that prior to Operation Metro Surge in the Twin Cities there was a life that resembled normalcy. . .I’m not sure what will signal this end. I drop the kids off at school right now in a car because it’s too cold to walk. They have four or five adults in vests posted up around the school at start time EVERY DAY. We got volunteers on walkie-talkies at the two daycares closest to my houses. I am not asking you to let that sink in. I am asking me to let that sink in. Volunteer parents and community members are keeping our daycares and schools safe from highly paid and outfitted roving bands of dumbshits who couldn’t follow the law for a day if they tried to. EVERY SINGLE DAY I DRIVE BY AND THINK “what the fuck”.

Am I to believe that on the day that Tom Homan says that Operation Metro Surge has come to an end that these folks are going to pull their headphones off from the Signal audio conversations they are in and say “well that was weird, where do I send my check for federal taxes in April? Glad you’re done terrorizing my children for a spell!”

I can’t see it. What is the end of this? The end of this has to involve charges for leaders and agents. The agents who shot and killed Alex Pretti are now on leave. That is a very distant step from them being charged, but it is a change in their working conditions. Even in a world where you think that shooting is justified (population. . .three people), those agents shouldn’t be on the street for everyone’s safety.

I’m just gonna rail on this one thing and then tell you about the show we have on Saturday where all of our tips go to the Immigrant Law Center.

Schools. Daycares. We have volunteers posted up on the streets to keep our kids safe at school. Our kids walk by these people. Our kids are getting to know these people. Our kids are learning who keeps them safe. And they are learning it’s not the masked maniacs who are responsible for 66% of the homicides in Minneapolis in 2026. Our kids are wholesale learning a distrust of the federal government that was rare in my generation. It can’t all go back after that. You can’t think, “well, I had to protect my child’s school from safety every day for weeks on end and the threat was from my own federal government but you know. . .that’s okay.”

We aren’t going back. But we all said we weren’t going back in 2020 and in so many ways we want back. I don’t want to go back. I want people in jail cells for this. You can’t force people to protect their schools and their neighbors from roaming bands of thugs and then call it even.

I can play some baller bass for you on Saturday and donate all the money we make from tips to the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota. Big Trouble is a happy to be a break even pursuit and if we can send some money into what I hope is a huge pot of money for this organization we would love to do so. There are more efficient ways to raise money for the Immigrant Law Center, but if you want the healing power of music and also want to kick some money to a good cause it’s a pretty good Saturday. I hope you’ll come through and I hope it’s better on Saturday than it is now.

Please do give a listen to City Cast Twin Cities’s podcast. I think we are doing an awesome job.
Please check out standwithminnesota.com and send some money around to people/orgs in need.

We’ll get through this and we’ll put some people in jail.

The community is out on the streets. If you follow Elliott Payne on IG you see him and State Senator Doron Clark out on Central, following ICE, slowing them down, supporting their neighbors, making shit hard for ICE. The man who might’ve detained fewer people today is wearing a Coors hoodie and a mask. Wounded, cowardly, under-trained power is wearing a Coors hoodie and driving through our state for nothing. For no purpose. This is the largest deployment of ICE agents in the history of the agency. The largest deployment to the 16th biggest metro area. They had less agents in Chicago. This is fatal theater. This is scare tactics. Your traveling domestic terrorist is wearing an almost-khaki Coors hoodie he probably won at a bar.

Realistically, if you were going to protest, you would’ve already. If you are goldilocks for what you’ll protest about, this is the perfect porridge. If you were going to donate, you would’ve. If you were going to run to ICE raids and observe, you would’ve. But it’s a long winter. And there’s a lot of agents. And there’s more flying in. And it’s not getting better. Jonathan Ross is not going to jail. More residents will be killed. Like most Sundays I spent the morning talking with Martin over coffee. But there wasn’t any bright spot to linger on. Our communities are stepping up. We are seeing mass protests. Danielle at the coffee shop prints out the “this is private property, ICE not welcome here” cards and puts them up on the window.

We are seeing a mobilized force gumming up the works for ICE. Good. Slow this useless and inhumane work down. It’s young men, in Coors hoodies, poorly doing a job that doesn’t need doing. All of this will not put a dent in any actual immigration problems or numbers. None of this advance a remotely measurable goal at scale. This is a war inside our borders. We are at war with a young man in a Coors hoodie, being supervised by a slightly older man in fatigues, all the way up to an old man in Washington D.C. pretending to be king.

Right when COVID hit, my brother-in-law in Seattle called me and told me that he was calling from the future. Seattle was getting COVID a couple weeks early but here’s what was going to happen. That’s where Chicago was two months ago and where the Twin Cities are right now. We have now what you have coming. Poorly trained agents are going to come fuck shit up and kill people and move on. Our communities are slowing them down. Our communities are making them look like clowns. But they are a disgustingly well-funded secret police force. The enemy is staying at Hilton Hotels. The enemy watched Training Day last night. The enemy stood in front of a waffle maker and looked at his phone before a day of banging on the doors of innocent people and fucking up their entire life. The enemy is wearing a Coors hoodie and on the day he kills you he’ll sleep in the same hotel that night.

For years Rachel and I would meet for a humorously serious late-spring breakfast meeting where we would plot out things we wanted to do that summer. The things we wanted to do devolved with our age and our parenting responsibilities. We focused on the achievable, yanked the piece of paper out of Rachel’s notebook and shook on it. She’d put it up on the fridge and we’d chip away at the fun throughout the summer. On a pre-kid summer we’d probably knock out 90% of the fifteen or so things on the list. In the throes of the pandemic we’d list eight things and maybe do three.

I find raising children to be a tremendously rewarding and overwhelming deal. It overwhelms a lot of the rhythms of childless marriage. It overwhelms the rhythms of one’s personal life. At some point the overwhelm is the rhythm. The previous rhythm is an afterthought or is just a weird pulse like when you realize the acoustic guitar from a quiet part of the song is still strumming all the way even though now all the distortion pedals and choir have been flipped on.

This year we changed things and we came out with statements. Statements about who we are as a family that could inform the smaller choices we made for activities. It all felt a little Jon McTaggarty. Jon McTaggart was the head of MPR for the lion’s share if the time I worked there and was a real piecharts spreadsheet values summit direction guidance type o’ leader. But boom, the meeting with Rachel was a success. We walked out with a nice little list: We are Jewish people, we are reading people, we are boating people, we are biking people.

What did that look this summer? We biked to breakfast a lot of Sunday mornings. I took two Fridays off from the job to actually go do temple stuff, not just drop the kids off at temple and go get coffee with Martin. I took two days off from the job to spend about thirty minutes on a canoe at Lebanon Hills. With reading. . .well more problems there. Even though I am not Jewish, that does not present as tangible a challenge to the “Us” being Jewish as my youngest not reading presents to “Us” being reading people. But we are getting there. And I am happy to say that now halfway through kindergarten, my youngest is well on her way to becoming a reader.

Why am I telling you any of this on December 26th, 2026. I don’t like New Year’s resolutions. I don’t like New Year’s resolutions because for too long I loved them. I loved the idea of a line in the sand. That line in the sand could be that I now take pictures of every receipt in my life. The line in the sand could be that I only drink on the weekends. The line in the sand could be that I’m vegetarian or that I practice bass an hour a day. But all these lines in all this sand don’t recognize that I am a beach. I will cross back across a lot of these rules and change them and evolve them and I like the image of progress, not of failed resolutions. And I am not even against resolutions, but parking them somewhat arbitrarily on December 31 seems defeatist.

As I was nearing the end of my time with my dear old therapist Kelly it was probably November and I told her that I thought I might wind things up with her by December and try yoga in the new year. Kelly said “why wait, if you think we’re almost done just start doing yoga.” I popped into Gentle Yoga with Laura at the Y that next Tuesday and I haven’t looked back. Life requires resolutions. Life requires north stars to follow, but I don’t think affixing those to just the turning of the year is wise. I write this now to think about some identity things that I either aspire to, or believe are already true about me.

I switched from Jazz88 to City Cast Twin Cities in the fall and the new job is much more self-reflective than the last job. It’s the first job I’ve had where on any given Wednesday at 9am somebody might say “Sean do you want to talk about Italian food in the Twin Cities at 10?” “Sean do you care about cross-country skiing?” “Sean do you want to talk about gift giving?”. It’s weird. It’s great. And my conections to these things need not be thorough, but it must not be fake or scripted. My integrity relies upon me being true about my level of connection, enthusiasm to any given topic. This has been clarifying and frankly, it is doing for me what City Cast Twin Cities aspires to do for our listeners and readers: be a better neighbor. It’s working for me. I’m doing things I wouldn’t have done before, I’m connecting with people I wouldn’t have connected with before. But it also has me thinking about what are my personal statements akin to the family statements that Rachel and I put togteher this summer. These values are all different sized but they matter to me and on this strip of non-work days ahead of me (not making a podcast again until January 5) I am thinking about them.

I read. I’ve been on magazines and newspapers and off phones for my night reading for years. But I never read in the daytime and struggle with books in general and fiction in particular. But every time I do read fiction I am grateful and I am enriched. I read fiction. I read in the daytime.

I am a James Baldwin completist. I’ve read I think three James Baldwin books and I loved them all. He is also the best clip artist of all time on social media. James Baldwin clip shows up? I’m watching. I’m forty-four years old. I can read every major word James Baldwin wrote before I die and why not? I think he is one of the world’s great thinkers and writers both in fiction and non-fiction. I’ll be chipping away.

I am active. I am an active motherfucker. My best friend Martin was pointing this out when we were talking about physical activity. But this is one of those things that I have to recognize isn’t in the process of changing for me, it has changed. I am generally involved in some amount of aerobic activity most days. Might just be walking the dogs. Might be my legendary slow one mile runs. Might be some biking. But this is not a plan, this is not an aspiration. This is a reality but it’s one I want to keep up with. I love moving my body. I love lifting weights with my trainer Michael on Thursdays. I am active. I am saying it now to stay active as other things shift.

I tell the truth. In a self-reflective job like being a podcast host I am expected to tell the truth. I acknowledge there will be editing, there will be self-censorship, there will be times when I keep my mouth closed. But I can’t actually keep my promise to myself and to the life I want if I lie in meaningful ways. Not every view I have is out in the open, but I know my truths and omitting them, adjusting them or ditching them when it’s convenient is not an option. I’ve known this for years but you have to re-teach it to yourself from time to time as you age and soften.

I music. Being a DJ gives you this direct relationship with music, multiple hours a day. Pick the song, listen to the song, hear the song next to another song. And now I’m not a DJ. I listen to the radio a ton. But I listen to a lot of podcasts too. This is undoubtedly the least music I’ve listened to in my adult life. Right now my primary connection to playing music is working with Big Trouble once a month over at White Squirrel. Heiruspecs is retired or on a monster break. I need music in my life. I need it in my life even if it makes no appreciable impact on my finances. I need it in my life even if it makes no appreciable impact on my public facing identity. When I am closer to music I am closer to the cosmos and I am better for it. I need to pursue music and I need to not make excuses for why I don’t.

I improve. I need to get my hands dirty in making my home and my community better. I have the capacity to learn how to improve things in my home. I have the capacity to improve things in my community not as fancy Sean McPherson but just as someone who cares and who wants the world to be better. I have enough of a moral compass to know what I think will help and I don’t have the excuse of being 100% overwhelmed by my schedule and my parenting duties. People far less resourced than me have helped far more than I have.

That’s my Ted Talk. Happy new year! Let’s celebrate the end of the year over at the White Squirrel on Saturday December 27 from 6-8 with Big Trouble.

And please give some listens to City Cast Twin Cities and No Brains, No Lightbulbs during your winter break!

Amy in a turkey suit, me in a Soul Bounce hoodie, both very cute.

I ran with my friend Amy who I love. I bring that up cause I’m about to dunk on one of the things she likes so I’m giving a nice layer of love in this compliment sandwich. Awesome turkey hoodie too Amy. While we were freezing our asses off before the race started Amy mentioned that Lake Street Dive shows up on her top five bands of all time. I like Lake Street Dive but I believe they have no business on your top 5 bands of all time list. She also mentioned Barenaked Ladies which is a group that shouldn’t be in your top 5. I understand that Lake Street Dive is quite good. I even got to interview Rachael from the group, primarily to talk about her jazz group. I told Amy that I thought Lake Street Dive was ‘Diet Coke Soul’ and although certainly a great group to enjoy live and love, they aren’t aiming for the type of music that belongs in a music lovers top 5. The conversation kind of fizzled there and we started our 5k. I had an epiphany later that day in a hot tub while drinking a light Mexican lager listening to Van Morrison. Let me expound Amy.

Music can be used for many things. You can curate performances to make your classmates down the hall at New England Conservatory chuckle. You can write songs and do videos that are designed for the share, for the punch line, for the moment where the room laughs. And I believe doing those things is worthwhile, but I don’t think it’s the highest potential for music. The highest potential I know of for music is to go somewhere more cosmic than anything else will give you on Earth. You spend time with the life you’ve lived, the chords you know, the keyboards you can program, the violin players you can afford and you craft something that might talk to the ages, something that might bring you, your listeners and perhaps the universe in general closer to each other and to the very essence of our existence. You adjust your pedals, write your outros and plan your performances in hope that the skies open up and together you find something that can’t be found without music. Cause I can make you laugh without music. But there’s things only music and poetry can do and those things are cosmic. Right when Amy said one of her favorite bands was Lake Street Dive my knee-jerk reaction, which I did not say at the time, was “you can still listen to D’Angelo.” You can pick whatever you want to put in your ears and Amy I wish you’d put something that might push us closer to the cosmos because it’s special.

I don’t mean to tell you that cosmic music is better than terrestrial music Amy. I mean to tell you that it is more than terrestrial music. It has a higher goal, it aims for a higher power. It comes up short all the time, but I love that it aims. I saw Lake Street Dive live at Palace Theater a couple years ago. They killed. They had the audience in the palm of their band but it was all linear, it was all measurable, it was never cosmic. It was great players, great sounds and spectacular production. But no cosmos. And there are people who fight toward the cosmos every night and they belong in your headphones and your top 5.

Do you know Phil Hey? Phil Hey is one of the greatest drummers and music educators in Minnesota history. Like the grand majority of players in town I spent some time with Phil at the University of Minnesota in ensembles. Playing world class music at 11am on a Wednesday with a truly qualified practitioner. One day Phil Hey talked about the principal of a walking ballad. A brisk moving ballad that breaks into almost a mid tempo groove for solos. And Phil says “allright let’s try it” and no one hops to it. No one jumps on it. No one counts it off and he said something to the effect of “we might be wise to remember we are playing the world’s greatest music in a comfortable room on nice instruments at 11am on a Wednesday and we might be well served to stay positive, energetic and dedicated to this music and remembering that it is a gift from heaven and our duty is to honor that with our playing and our spirit.” I’ve never heard a ballad counted off with more urgency than after that diatribe. Music is a gift. If you think of music as a product, as a punchline, as “content” you’ve missed something. It’s not that it’s wrong, it’s just that there’s more.

I fear I sound like a snob and I promise you I’m not. I adore music that doesn’t shoot for the cosmos. I love it love it love it. But I just think those artists that muster their definitionally limited skills to try to speak to the ancestors, the planets and existence itself are on a different plane. And I want you to spend some of your time on that plane Amy.

And I know you do Amy. You are immersed in choral music, a music that I think of as explicitly focused on transferring a room of people to a different place, to a different experience. Music is more than the nuts and bolts. More than the notes and tones. And more than the yucks and the scales and the runs and the drum fills. It is all of those things. . .but it’s more than those things.

Music is a gift, music is a vehicle. Music is things the rest of the world is not. Music is not completely of this world. Let all the music shine, but put a thumb on the scale for the musicians who aim to bring it higher, deeper and further. Long live our cosmic heroes.

This weekend on Saturday Big Trouble is hitting at White Squirrel. I’m certain we’ll aim for the cosmos and come up short frecuentemente. But I hope you’ll join us for the journey. A little Thanksgiving weekend instrumental music from 6-8 might be just what you need to keep the vibes at a steady low boil. Come join us!

Next

Happy late Sunday night! Best music I listened to this weekend was definitely the new live album from Hiss Golden Messenger. He’s getting all the money out to the North Carolina Foundation for Public School Children to help students who are facing a loss of SNAP benefits. But this is a solo live concert and it’s reminder that Hiss Golden Messenger is a gifted writer and songwriter. He opens with this tune “Drum” that I played about fifteen years ago with Dessa and Ben on a run of very intimate shows we were doing. Listen to this please.

Strong recommend to go buy this music, get some money going in the good direction. And I have to say, it felt wonderful to buy something and then listen to it. It is also not only true that Spotify is an awful organization that I pay $16 a month to, guitars also sound like shit on Spotify. It feels great over there on bandcamp.

Music is spectacular. Music is moving.

Next weekend I have the honor of making music with Alexei, Josh, Peter and Steve as Crescent Moon X Big Trouble. That’s at the Bryant-Lake Bowl on Saturday, November 22. Everyone including you would be very happy if you bought tickets in advance. That’d be a great idea. Here’s that flyer!

I should also mention that Alexei (Crescent Moon) made a great new record with Andrew Broder. What a treat to hear those two together again, plus they have I Self Devine and Davu Seru along for guest appearances.

Got to take in the Trivia Mafia Tournament of Champions on Saturday at Amsterdam which was such an honor. We’ve been doing the tournaments for a long time and they started at Amsterdam. Tournament days used to be all clipboards, rail liquor, minor arguments and major laughter. I went down to this year’s tournament with my friend Amy Woo. Former Trivia Mafia leader, permanent awesome friend. We went and sat in the back, chatted up Brenda Karunya, the heart and soul of the Amsterdam Bar and Hall. Ordering drinks and laughing and everyone being a little bit old to be doing this and a little young to not be.

We walked around to say hello to the Trivia Mafia staff making it all happen. This is 25 teams, most teams 6 players, who dedicated a couple weekends to playing trivia. Granted one team makes $1000. But most teams are out there doing it for love, doing it for fun, doing it for trivia. It’s just such a rush to see something I helped build flourishing. And it’s good to see people hanging in downtown Saint Paul. We were far from the biggest game in town. . .the Wild were playing down the street. But the vibes were good and the trivia was excellent. One of those little moments where I got a sense that everything was going to end up alright. I don’t know how everything can end up alright while I’m sitting here at 11:07pm on a Sunday. . .but I promise you when I had two drinks in me and the trivia teams were walking out and laughing I thought things might be heading in the right direction.

I’m holding on to that as I head into this week full of podcasting, cooking, parenting and preparing for Saturday at the Bryant-Lake Bowl with Crescent Moon X Big Trouble.

I listed a couple questions I’ve been wondering about lately. . .please answer ‘em! I’ll get you the results next week!

It’s going. The City Cast Twin Cities podcast is going. Music is going. Parenthood is going. Ever since daylight savings time ended it feels like the holidays already. I feel the wintery energy. I am also running frequently. Just a mile, but I’m doing it most days available unless I’m doing something else physical. After some hard stressful transition months it’s going. It’s really going.

Why is this post called “What About Soups With Chicken?”. Well, it’s because I told one of my absolute favorite “Sean’s an idiot on the radio” stories and I hope you’ll give it a listen on the Trivia Mafia podcast No Brains No Lightbulbs. Here’s the spot it’s at, five minutes into the episode!

I love the story and I love knowing that it makes Chuck laugh. Chuck has been an absolute gem in the past couple weeks as I’ve been swamped with City Cast Twin Cities stuff and he’s been shouldering a lot of the duties for No Brains, No Lightbulbs.

City Cast Twin Cities is now heading into our third week of making daily episodes and it’s exhilarating and also blinding. I don’t even know what to highlight because I’m so excited about all of it. But I think the post election episodes hold up better since before that we were talking so much about politics.

So on top of all that yapping into microphones. I’m also getting ready to play some bass with Big Trouble and Crescent Moon on Saturday, November 22 at the Bryant-Lake Bowl. You can grab tickets for that one now, and you’d be well served to do so. BLB is so small that even some schlubs like us could sell it out. Here’s the ticket link.

After all that babbling, here’s some actual writing.

Top fifty night of my life on Thursday. It was the City Cast Twin Cities launch party at Berlin in Minneapolis. The room was full of the writers, influencers and others who work a lot of the media in the Twin Cities. It was a lot of great people, some who I was meeting for the first time, some who I’ve been sending press releases to since I was seventeen years old.

I’ve been in this kind of world for decades now. I know that comes with some level of baggage. . .I’m certainly not the shiny new object but on the other hand. . .I’m no fluke. I played vita.mn’s launch party as the bassist for Heiruspecs. And now I’m hosting the City Cast Twin Cities launch party. I want to do great work in the world and have that work be valued by my community. And being around a bunch of other human beings who fit that bill for me reminded me of my goals. Marianne Combs, who is the arts reporter of this century was in the house. She’s the first person whoever let me in to MPR. She interviewed me back when I was a freshman in college about Heiruspecs. I have learned so much about trust, integrity and all the other shit from Marianne Combs. Marianne Combs did her job right and when she couldn’t do her job right because of bullshit above her, she bolted fast. The morning that she Keyser Soze’d her career at MPR she said on Twitter that she was leaving because there was troubling accusations against a male member of the Current’s staff and that she was being limited in what she could report. THAT WAS A SPICY MEATBALL. Next time I saw her, Marianne said “sorry I had to put you out there like that. . .folks could thought it was any man on the staff.” But she was sweet about it. She did what she had to and she risked her livelihood cause she knew she wouldn’t be worth a damn if she stayed and pretended shit was cool. To be sitting with a woman I met 25 years ago and she’s toasting me on the new gig. It was beautiful. I also got to spend some time with my old co-worker Nina Moini from MPR. We did a show called “The Warming House” together and I’m positive that if that hadn’t been such an awesome experience I’d have a lot more worries stepping in to my new role at City Cast.

It was a happy hour situation at Berlin. Soon, an awesome saxophonist would be stepping on stage and she probably didn’t want to play her heart out to a room of stragglers from an industry happy hour. So the crew made our way to Cuzzy’s and it was an absolute delight. Cuzzy’s is one of comparatively few places that belongs to the Warehouse District. Sure, now the neighborhood is called the North Loop, but it used to be the Warehouse District and I bet there are still bottles of Heinz 57 available at Cuzzy’s from that era. It’s a well-run popular as shit dive bar. I sat at a table with some old MPR and MPR adjacent friends plus the absolute power thrupple of Minnesota writers: Keith Harris from Racket, Cecilia Johnson from freelance vibes and formerly MPR and Andrea Swensson from everywhere. I was chatting with both crews and just feeling so wonderful to be in a world with these talented people who care about what we are up to at City Cast. Steve Nelson was at the table. He’s audio royalty in this town and I believe that maybs 4 out of 9 people at the table had been rejected for jobs by Steve. What a treat. But Steve knows some old radio people from my world and I was sharing! I recalled a Cuzzy’s meet up I had maybe nine years ago with BT, a radio legend in this town who wanted to meet with me for Trivia Mafia related stuff. I’m rambling cause I’m trying to tell you that while I was in this booth I felt connected to my whole career trajectory, my late night drop offs at City Pages’ weird 24 hour dropbox in the pre-email days, my moments trying to get trivia up and running at Darby’s in the same building as City Pages, my weird cigar hang with BT and now my night at Cuzzy’s with this crew.

Three tables away the producers and a couple contributors from City Cast Twin Cities were having drinks with fellow recent journalism school graduates making their way at different spots. Maybe twelve years from now I’ll be the BT in one of their stories as they find a table at Cuzzy’s to celebrate a new, new venture. If print journalism is dead it seems to me you can resuscitate it with a pretty modest spend on drink tickets and on Thursday we did just that.

Toward the end of the night Tiffany and Adam, the two City Cast producers, walked up to my table with a couple whiskey shots and pickle backs for us to share. I hadn’t been drinking much and I wasn’t driving. I was in prime shape to accept a shot even though god dammit it has been awhile since I’ve had a shot and I figured I might never have another. But what a nice gesture, just pulling up a shot on the first night that we can celebrate this thing we’re building. I took the shot and I felt it all. I felt the way that this new adventure fits in my journey, I think I even felt the way it might fit in to Tiffany or Adam’s journey. I felt the journey and I felt grateful for the Cuzzy’s, functioning as this glue for memories, this backdrop for life developments. We lingered outside. . .my friend Amy would be back to drive us back to Saint Paul in a minute. But as we were there on the corner, checking texts, calling rides, saying goodbye I felt grateful. Grateful for every press release I dropped in that stupid mailbox, every show I went to where the opener went on two hours late and the headliner never even showed, every trivia night I ran where it was the bartender vs. the one team that always comes no matter what. All these things aren’t pretext to this night at Berlin. But so many things have turned out alright, I am in the zone to do some great work and offer what I think will be a beloved podcast and newsletter. But for that night, I was just glad to get into Amy’s car and chat, and laugh, and toast to our years together, trying to tell great stories and make great experiences. Cheers.

photos by James Napoli from City Cast Twin Cities.

I am catching my breath after a long week of work. I make light of the work I do pretty often. It’s funny to be tired after a long day of talking between jazz songs, or writing trivia questions, or doing interviews. But, it’s pretty exhausting and I work pretty hard. And even if it’s easier work than installing tennis courts in a mid-day Cape Cod sun, I don’t have a memory of that level of exhaustion.

Okay you might wonder why I chose tennis court creation in Cape Cod as my stand-in for trying blue collar work. Well, back in the summer of 1996 I was in Massachusetts playing gigs with Catfish Blue. While band members Steve, Conor and I played Road Rash, billiards and grab-ass all day in Western Mass. our singer, Todd Stentiford, was making well over $2000 in one summer laying down tennis and baseball courts for the richest of the rich in Cape Cod. He would talk about the sun as this physical presence, like a demanding boss, bearing down over Todd as he toiled away making sure the doubles lines were just so. As a tenth grader who hadn’t worked a real job before, I just hoped I would never be making tennis courts in Falmouth with the sun trying to kill me.

And no, I’m forty-four now and I’m not making tennis courts. I’m thankful for the demanding work I have done in my life. Working group homes in my twenties was both the most demanding and most boring job I’ve ever worked in my life. Doing shifts of parental observation was pound for pound the most mentally trying job of my life. But at this point I’ve been in dream job territory for about 10-12 years. Traveling around the country getting paid decently to play bass with Dessa and smoking weed at gas stations with Joey and Aby was a pretty great job. Writing trivia questions and convincing bars to hire Trivia Mafia was a pretty great job. Talking between songs on the Current and taking requests was pretty great. Programming music and handling afternoons on Jazz88 was the shit. And now I’m sitting in a basement having conversations through a computer monitor with amazing human beings. I’m going to events/sites of interest in the Twin Cities and taking videos/doing interviews and covering it. I’m also putting flyers up around town and trying to drum up interest in what City Cast Twin Cities is doing. My day job is being on a podcast. My fun job is being on a trivia podcast. I play bass in an exciting instrumental band that gets on stage once a month at the White Squirrel but also gets down once a month in the basement and works on new music. I handle the skeleton of Heiruspecs, shipping out records and t-shirts as the orders trickle in from bandcamp. I have a beautiful professional life.

But today I’m tired. The only thing that did get cancelled for the week was going to involve me drinking a Sazerac down at Meritage and getting some video of said Sazerac downing. I’ll have to get back to that because god damn it a Sazerac sounds tremendous at this moment.

City Cast Twin Cities just launched our first episodes of the podcast this week. I bet you want to listen. I can help with that.

Three episodes out to the world. This morning as we started working I told the collected team on ZOOM that I was pretty confident that working at City Cast Twin Cities was going to be a dream job. . .I told them the surprise was that it was a dream team. I’ve never worked with a more tight-knit, dedicated, talented and imaginative team in my life. This should be an out and out good thing. . .but I’m also second guessing myself trying to make sure I’m doing enough and I’m doing the right things. It’s a lot to navigate and I know I’ll find my way. As I type this is the first time that I’m 150% confident that I will find my way.

I’m at Luminary Coffee in Saint Paul on Selby. It used to be Cahoots. It’s where I met the first love of my life. It’s where I was the first time I ever heard my music on the radio (Radio K roasted my high school band Hailbop on Off the Record). It’s the first place outside of Central High School that Heiruspecs ever played. A couple songs ago on the speakers it was the J-Live tune with Handsome Boy Modeling School. That’s a great tune.

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I am catching my breath to realize that a lot of the things I’ve been working on to avoid laying down tennis courts in 1996 has come to fruition. I got so high last night that I wasn’t able to spell the word jealous. I couldn’t even spell it well enough to convince the spellchecker that I was trying to spell jealous. THE PROBLEM WAS THAT I thought it started with JEL. I sat in the hot tub and put it on Jets Max and listened to Grandaddy, Goldlink, Prince, J. Cole, Kendrick Lamar and D’Angelo.

It was a spectacular Thursday night. I hope you’re jeleaous of it. I’m catching my breath and getting ready to make some more awesome stuff next week. Happy Halloween to you and yours.

I don’t have a lot of firm firm firm favorites in my life. My favorite rapper will alternate between maybe two or three answers. Favorite prose writer. . .I’m not even certain I have a roster. Favorite musical artist? There’s a handful. But D’Angelo’s “Voodoo” is always the favorite album. Always. It came out my freshman year of college. I was already deep into the world of Questlove, neo-soul, et cetera. But I don’t think I thought D’Angelo was all that at the time. Of course I loved “Brown Sugar.” Of course I loved singing along with “Shit, Damn, Motherfucker” cause I was a young kid. But I didn’t know that D’Angelo was about to recalibrate my life.

He made me take music much more seriously, and metronomes much less seriously. I would look at D’Angelo holding that rooster in what looks like a voodoo ceremony and I would understand that this music I was falling in love with was much deeper than what I had understood it to be. I think Jimi Hendrix had a lot of it, but the generational difference made it less salient. Voodoo helped me treat Black music with reverence. There was a deep level of mysticism, eroticism, revolution, telepathy and more floating all over songs I had listened to before, but never with that lens. In songs like “Chicken Grease” and “Untitled (How Does it Feel)” I heard these very bluesy chords I thought of as the domain of old blues tunes and I heard them popping up inside of these songs. Suddenly they weren’t just chords that belonged to my Dad’s music. The thing is those chords always belongs to Black music at the vanguard of culture but I was deep into the minor, skeletal sounds of the Roots, Wu-Tang, Mobb Deep and more. To hear those full chords floating over Jeep-approved rhythm tracks was a revelation.

I’m telling you this cause he’s gone. I’m telling you this because for everything that record did for me, seeing him live at the Orpheum in the summer of 2000 maybe did more. It is the best show I’ve ever seen. It’s not even that close and I’ve seen some great shows. I’m sure they were giving it all they had for Minneapolis. That cadre of musicians loved Minneapolis in ways I didn’t understand. I didn’t care about Prince yet. I knew he was great but his music hadn’t hit me deeply yet. But when D’Angelo was up on the Rhodes for almost the first time in the show as he was mainly just singing and he said “how does it feel Minneapolis?” I knew I was seeing something special. The whole day had been a nightmare. I had invited a girl I was on the record as having a crush on to crash at my house on her roadtrip across America on the same night I had also bought tickets for me and my girlfriend to see D’Angelo. Just absolute 18-year old bullshit. Wildly amateur. Oh, and I also bought a ticket for my friend Kevin! It was like I asked an AI how I could take my girl to D’Angelo but be certain to not get laid. So me and Anna had been fighting the whole day, didn’t talk the whole show and Kevin is just spinning that third wheel. And when “Untitled” came on of course me and Anna had to sway, we had to touch. It was unavoidable. D’Angelo’s keyboard brought me back into Anna’s good graces that night. Thank you D.

A couple years later when me and Anna were breaking up I was walking around the West Bank of the U of M crying the most I ever have in public. The soundtrack was the under-appreciated masterpiece “Break Ups 2 Makeups.” That day D’Angelo’s voice kept me out of Anna’s good graces and that’s exactly where I was supposed to be. Thank you D.

I saw D’Angelo and Questlove again for that celebrated duo show at First Ave. I then skipped the Vanguard show cause it was only a couple months later. That was a mistake. I don’t know how many more times I would’ve gotten to see D’Angelo. It’s him and Questlove as the ultimate heroes. But Questlove is so accessible. I’ve watched Questlove DJ to 75 people at the Skyway Theater. I’ve shaken Questlove’s hand. I love Questlove, but there’s no mystery. There is admiration, there is profound respect. But there’s something different with D’Angelo. I just think there’s no real ability to explain this in prose. D’Angelo had a soul so deep it deepened mine. Questlove taught me things. D’Angelo just imparted. His existence taught me.

I don’t know if another one will hurt like this one. Eddie Vedder will hurt. Erykah will hurt. She might hurt the most. Her soul is deep like D’Angelo but there’s so many records to spend time with and I’ve seen her live so many times. I wish long, healthy lives for all these beautiful artists who have made this music that means so much to me.

This weekend Big Trouble will play “Untitled (How Does it Feel).” My brother jumped right into action after D’Angelo’s passing and charted it out and passed it around the band. After getting our hands around it at rehearsal I spent a little bit of the day today really digging into Raphael Saadiq’s bass part. It is just a stunning song, production, video, everything. It felt wrong to play it. The music is so sacred, and I know we aren’t adding something significant to the conversation. But today, as I was running the bass part, finding the parts I wanted to cop, I just felt so connected to these notes to these sounds. He’s gone. He died younger than Prince. He gave us some amazing albums, some amazing tours. He was very selective on what he released, but he only released masterpieces. I’ve got Black Messiah on now and it is amazing. It didn’t hit me like Voodoo did, but that’s about me, not about the record.

D’Angelo, thank you. I would not be in the universe I’m in without you. You connected me deeper to the root of Black music. You connected me deeper to the root of humanity, of love, of lust, of life. I hope your spirit is comfortable, I hope your family is comfortable. Thank you.