The Congregation Staged a Harvest Festival
My New Halloween-Inspired EP & a JPW/Dad Weed Playlist
Tuesdays used to be the universal release day for most music. For some reason, I always sensed a certain poetry to it. The weekend rules, sure, and Mondays are the pits, right? But Tuesdays? Tuesday is a signifier for the ordinary, a workaday, uh, day. But new music Tuesdays felt special. When I worked at Zia Records, we’d allow people to purchase new releases right as Monday turned into Tuesday, at midnight when the store closed up so we could schlep over to Casey Moore’s for a few rounds. Those Monday night heads were some of the most dedicated listeners I ever met, queuing up for Tool, I.C.P., Pearl Jam, etc.*
One nice thing about music’s digital age is that you can release shit whenever you want, really. People default to Fridays, but there’s no rule. So this Tuesday, my musical partner Zach Toporek and I staked our New Music Tuesday claim, releasing a new three-song EP on Fort Lowell Records. It’s called Two Against Nurture, a Becker/Fagan nod for those in the know.
For a decade plus, Zach and I would get together every so often, meeting every couple years to spend a day knocking out a song in his home studio. Eventually, we realized, “Duh, we need to do this for real.” It only took a couple apples falling on the head to get the point, that and a global pandemic and Becky Bartkowski, my most trusted advisor, saying point blankly: “You need to make a record with Zach.”
The songs have various origin points; the lead track, “Everybody’s Talking (Again),” will actually be featured on our forthcoming full-length; it was mixed by Sam Cohen and mastered by JJ Golden. We recorded it in 2022, when sessions for my debut solo album, Something Happening/Always Happening, morphed into marathon studio hangs spent writing, arranging, recording, and editing what will be released next spring as Amassed Like a Rat King. The other two, “When I Get Lonesome” and “Big Wave,” are alternately newer and older than the Amassed number; both are loose and not fussed over, pretty rollicking, vulnerable, and honest if I say so myself. They were mastered by sensei Michael Krassner.
“Everybody’s Talking (Again)” takes place in a scene in my imagination, in the suburban Chandler church my family attended when I was young, for a Halloween alternative harvest festival. It’s a love letter to my younger self in a lot of ways, validating his doubts, hopes, weird dreams, ideas, anxieties, and energies. Though I’m playing a lot with binaries—life, death; arriving, leaving; real magic vs trickery—I hope it’s less dualistic than that. I think it’s mostly about imaginational power, especially heightened during the Halloween season. Zach’s ebullient “Summer of 1999” production and playing help me express it, a kind of innocent but earnestly fueled rebelion.
*Juggalos were usually the most polite.
“free-flowing, gnarly power pop…This is very much a release for music geeks, who will have a field day dissecting all the references Woodbury and Toporek managed to sneak in.
—Here Comes The Flood on Two Against Nurture
The Congregation Staged a Harvest Festival
To celebrate, Zach and I made a playlist of just some of our inspirations.
JPW & Dad Weed, “Everybody’s Talking (Again)” | The Traveling Wilburys, “7 Deadly Sins” | Steely Dan, “Only a Fool Would Say That” | Fleetwood Mac, “Hold Me” | Elvis Costello, “Lip Service” | My Morning Jacket, “Wordless Chorus” | U2, “Mysterious Was” | JPW & Dad Weed, “When I Get Lonesome” | Astrologer, “Heart of Mine” | SURESON, “Can’t Complain” | Gordon Lightfoot, “The Watchman’s Gone” | Electric Light Orchestra, “Sweet Is The Night” | Todd Rundgren, “Love of the Common Man”| Paul & Linda McCartney, “Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey” | Sinéad O’Connor, “Mandinka” | Link Wray, “Rumble” | Leonard Nimoy, “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town” | The Roches, “Hammond Song” | Judee Sill, “Apocalypse Express” (or, in the Spotify playlist, “There’s a Rugged Road”) | Dwight Twilley, “Why You Wanna Break My Heart” | Cornershop, “Brimful of Asha” | Thee Midniters, “Dreaming Casually”| Donnie & Joe Emerson, “Good Time” | Jon Brion, “Meaningless” | Richard Swift, “The Bully” | The Bees, “I Love You” | Gin Blossoms, “Til I Hear It From You” | The Flaming Lips, “Race for the Prize”| JPW & Dad Weed, “Big Wave”
I think im more convinced that labels convinced artists to mostly release on Friday than anything else. Although we know some artists, like yourself, who gladly break from the norm.