About

I started riding the wave of manhood when I was seventeen. I had been playing guitar for five years, but now I had my heart and eyes wide open, and dreams started looking more like possibilities. Cruising down a pine-lined country road with Summerteeth in the speakers and a naive prayer of fortune on my lips I all the sudden felt like a wellspring of songs. Tall mountains, fierce seas, the truest of loves, myriad colorful adventures and a firmly founded home were all part of a futuristic vision that began to shape my songwriting…. Sadly, this vision was compromised by the inundation of generic late 90’s pop and modern “rock” on the soft minds of me and my comrades via commercial radio and television. Nevertheless, thankfully, the life has shone through the death and we embrace the tambourine, the folk song, the tube amp, the tape machine, the jive, the spread and the waltz. My two younger brothers Carson and Will have pushed me along in just the beginnings of musical maturity, and have jokingly claimed to ride my (nonexistent) coattails. From what I can tell, Carson’s vision is: If it’s a lie, don’t join yourself to it. What I’ve glimpsed of Will’s vision is a lush pasture of high-strung major seven arpeggios… and he’s the drummer. His dream kick drum sounds like closing an old dusty hymnbook in a sparse chapel. Music is spiritual and scientific, like our world, like us.
Getting back to futuristic. Enter Joshua Stauter. If his soul really is half computer as he has claimed, I’d like to meet the programmer.
No one knows the future who hasn’t been to the future, but I would bet a lot of hard rain’s gonna fall. What will we do with this? Will we be rude to our neighbor? Will we ignore the lonely and forsake the poor? Will we care for our children? Will we continue to subconsciously deny that people from other countries are our cousins when in fact every living cell on the planet came from the same holy life spark?
You may wonder what this has to do with music. It has everything to do with it.
-cheyenne 5/08/10