Ode to an Underwood

But enough about me, why don’t you tell me about your day?

Brazil's crowdfunding campaign for "The Philosophy of Velocity" vinyl reissue wraps up this Thursday on Backerkit.

This is a final and more fitting close to an album that has somehow always existed as an open browser tab in my mind. An album of unfinished business and what-if.

So much life has happened since this record's sunset that I have to think hard to remember the sequence of things in The After:

Such as learning how to wear a button-down shirt and make coffee for an office. Taking a kid to elementary school. Teacher conferences. Little League and piano lessons.

It was before all of that.

Such as Dad's cancer diagnosis, mom's near death experience with surgery complications, my dear grandma's peaceful passing and the fiery accidental end of the ancestral family home.

It was before all that.

Such as when I divorced. When I remarried. When I adjusted to a new normal. When I stared up at North Korea from the furthest edges of the DMZ, road the train across a dark Siberian winter, walked through the Banksy-tagged West Bank, sheltered in place through a global pandemic.

It was before all that.

But even after everything, it still feels like we wrote the album a month ago. At practice, the songs come back into the hands with no effort at all. Maybe I was being prescient in the liner notes when I wrote “this is the dream I began having a month ago."

Hey, time delay. Synchronicity is all in disarray.

The old typewriter from "O.S.C.A.R." is as it always was. Built like a tank, from heavy metal parts like everything from the inter-war period was. I always called it The Underwood, but it's actually a Woodstock.

I wonder how many pre-war payroll checks were written on it. How many letters to the editor, memos from the boss, newsletters to distant family.

I wonder how it found its way to me - probably through a business liquidation sale in the 50s, which sent it to someone's home office in the 60s, then decorating someone's den in the 70s and 80s. Possibly inherited by their children after death before finally appearing in an eBay auction ending on my front doorstep in the year 2005.

We recorded with it. Took it on tour, used it in photos. It became sort of an unofficial mascot, at least to me, like Burrough's talking Clark Nova.

And in the years since, it's sat in quiet basements and on coffee tables, sometimes with keys stuck upright because someone's toddler has played with it recently.

But this week, a new ribbon will bring it out of retirement.

Each of the printed Husherville artifacts will be marked with an edition number using this same machine that opened the album. A keystrike compressing two decades of life and story into the symbology of the Double Gothic typeface mark it leaves on a cassette j-card, a lathe-cut vinyl insert, a lyrical compendium.

Like the clapping of a director's slate ending a scene, now closing the loop on a Moebius strip left open for 20 very odd years.

And now, with this done, the only open-ended question that remains is:

Where do we go from here?

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What I’m reading: The Overstory (Richard Powers)

What I'm listening to: The Disintegration Loops (William Basinski)

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