Mr. Forgettable

Stick Season

Call Your Mom

Skin and Bones

it is what it is

Hero

Breathe In, Breathe Out

going to plan

After 10 years of a regular life in the tumult of a tensioning America, I have re-discovered music left to me by a younger self. Throughout re-inventions of myself as husband, teacher, father, and coach, these songs that I have now begun the work of codifying, laid dormant. I don't think I understood what I was writing, and the vault of my creative self-consciousness aged them. I now expose them to the oxygen of the world. Slowly, thanks to the production and collaboration of Wichita creative treasure, and dear friend, Dan Overholt, I invite you now to the first un-corking of what has been tightly held close to my chest for a decade. More vintages to come - I can't promise they'll all be fine!

Wreckless Boy was written in the summer of 2019. Its lyrical content draws on observations of a world coping with what felt like total unprecedented division, or in hindsight, just the beginning stages of something irrevocable. Following the forward path of an innocent boy towards an imminent danger, its ambiguity - Is this boy in a fantastic apocalyptic end-time or is he in a hellish urban present? - was intended to draw on the common thematic questions of the popular apocalyptic media of the time (The Walking Dead, Bird Box, A Quiet Place): Who will we be when all falls apart? Can we afford innocence in an animalistic world? Stubbornly optimistic, my answer was - and I think still is - that it is the company we carry that will protect our innocence; a quality necessary to maintain our humanity. As the men with inhuman stares hold back his hands, the boy is faced with losing everything as he freezes - his comfort (the pillow), his safety (the knife), his joy (the magazine) - if he does not fight. Not only does this characterize him as reckless, his innocence blinding him from the reality of a cruel world, it also proves him unworthy and unfit for survival at the end of the world. Does it not serve him right that he loses these things? The callousness of a world drenched in rampant misinformation, tribalism, and violent pragmatism might say so (Be a man / throw some hands / Be a man), but his friends decide otherwise. They turn the metaphorical wheel away from the violent wreck he seems destined to experience. Perhaps he loses the things that embody his innocence, but the grace of human companionship replaces them, providing a new lens to see the world through, as he leaves his marks in "aerosol colored gold". 

As we recorded this track, Dan pointed out the hypnotic nature of the repetitive guitar walk down, all leading to the climactic event where everything threatens to unravel. Light treatment of the song's landscape with modulating synth pads, a bass pulse, and vocal distortion further emphasized the folk style through writing in the context of ambiguous urban futurism. 

This is the first unmastered mix in a pair of songs to be formally released later this summer.

Wreckless Boy (1st Mix Sneak Peek)

Tree House Tapes

Tortured Soul

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"Miserable Man" & “Mr. Forgettable” OUT NOW! mgmt: davidkushnermgmt@gmail.com

Skin and Bones

David Kushner

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