I Will Raise Your Banner Across The Sky...

Blog time. Writing this from the couch, laid up with a sprained ankle, with Maddie and the puppies, binge-watching the 2nd season of Mindhunter. A relaxing Sunday. 

Our 2nd single off ‘Valkyrie’ is out!  “Follow in my Footsteps” is a song I wrote from the POV of a young boy watching his father leaving to war and the boy’s vow to continue his father’s crusade.  I talked a bit about the song in the last blog. But now you can actually listen...

Releasing this song feels great. We have another single coming out next month too. It’s amazing to finally be releasing this music after 10 years. Sharing music is one of the greatest feelings I know. 

Echo Park Rising was this weekend. For anyone outside of Los Angeles, it’s an awesome local music festival that features a lot of great local musicians. Sadly - due to my sprained ankle - I wasn’t able to spend much time there.  But I was able to play an awesome (albeit seated) show with my good friends from Beers for Fears. 

I’ve been playing bass and helping out Beers for Fears for over a year now. I love those guys a ton - Derek, Vicky, and Leon - and they’re a ton of fun to hang and rock with. We’ve been recording a 6-song EP for a long while now, where I get to wear that happy Producer hat. I’m excited to finish the EP this year.

Beers for Fears.

Aside from that... looking forward to the Wheel or Time tv series (love those books), been working furiously with Maddie on Shark Attack projects (our music label services company), and still recording that new Polaris Rose record.

Finally, thank you, thank you, thank you for everyone who has been turned onto JS recently. We’ve been inundated with amazing compliments. We are super excited to share more and more music with you this fall/winter. 🧟‍♂️

'Follow in my Footsteps' is coming soon...

The next single off of “Valkyrie” is coming August 12th. It’s called “Follow in my Footsteps” and - like “P is for Pompeii” - it’s another oldie. But a goodie.

I wrote “Follow in my Footsteps” in Washington, back in 2007. We had just wrapped up production on our 2nd record - “Lucid” - and I had started writing for the next album. I still have all those demos, which I titled “The Glumdumb Demos”. The acoustic demo was sort of a band favorite that we thought we could do a lot with. 

A little homemade cover for a collection of JS demos tracked 2007-2008.

When I moved to Boston in 2008, it was one of the first songs we tried to work on. That and a song called “Annie, Please” (Galacticus 9). The songs were so different that we had a hard time reconciling the heavier style of “Follow in my Footsteps” with the pop bounce of “Annie, Please”. Ultimately, Annie found a home when I dreamt up the idea for “Galacticus 9”, but “Follow” just stood apart...

... until years down the road, when the thematic root of Follow was joined by new songs like “Cleopatra” and “Pharaoh”, all of which will appear on “Valkyrie” when it’s finally released.  With a lot of these songs, there’s a weird kind of path that they go on before finding an album to call home.  Over the course of releasing all the Johnny records, I’m excited for a lot of these older songs to be fleshed out and finally be heard.

In other news, life is perpetually busy.  For the last month, I’ve been tracking another Polaris Rose album. It’s a bit more melancholy than our last record. Very genuinely us, with a bit more of a ‘b-side’ mood. My goal is to track the songs we have (approx 12) by October. At that point, two things happen. 1) I start retracking guitars for the next Johnny Record (album 6) and 2) Polaris Rose starts writing more songs as we flesh out that new album. We have a title, a theme, and an overall sound mapped out. We might just say “we need a song that does this” or “we need a song that does that”. 

Johnny Stranger has some shows coming up that we’re preparing for. The last couple shows (Redwood and Rockers Ball) we performed as a 3-piece and intentionally stripped down (meaning no lights or video production), but we’re planning more elaborate shows in order to better express what the songs are about and the visual side of the band. So there will be announcements soon in the live arena. 

At the same time, I’m excited to be collaborating with my best friend David Walk (or DWalk, as we all call him) on some really exciting new video content for the socials.  If you live in the LA area and are interested in joining in on the depravity, hit us up!

Aside from that, I’m just doing the usual over here. Listening to interviews of George R.R. Martin, listening to politics podcasts, working on a million other little projects… oh, and I’m playing Echo Park Rising here in LA with my best buds in Beers for Fears. So that’s all exciting.

Finally we have a very special release coming this holiday season.  So keep an eye out.  :)

10 years later…

It’s been a minute. 

Ten years ago I moved from Boston to Los Angeles with my (now fiancée) Maddie and our little mini-dachshund Meatloaf.  It was a pretty significant schism in my life. I had gone from obsessively promoting Johnny Stranger in the Northeast with a great band (who have since gone onto greener pastures) but I was feeling lost and frustrated with my own goals in life. Moving to Los Angeles meant starting over and it meant stepping away from Johnny Stranger.  

My time in LA has been both tough and amazing. I started a duo with Maddie called Polaris Rose that’s still going well. And I got into making music in many different ways... whether it be producing other bands or making tunes for sync. The entire time though, I kept writing songs for Johnny Stranger. I didn’t really have the means to bring the project back to life, but I kept writing and planning. 

I want to say unequivocally:  JS is happening again because I started receiving letters... messages from fans and friends from both Washington and Boston... people who knew different albums and different lineups... but all reached out and shared stories about what JS meant to them and that they still listened. These messages were what really inspired me to step back up to the plate and start recording these albums. 

Now, it’s finally happening. The next record (our 5th studio record) is coming in January 2020. It’s called ‘Valkyrie’ and it’s a concept record (like all of them) and it’s a little piece of the planned 12-album series that I’ve written. 

Getting this started again has been tough. I wouldn’t have been able to do it without Maddie. She was the one who got behind it and said “let’s focus on this”, which meant stealing time away from Polaris Rose and our sync music (don’t worry... I’m currently recording a new Polaris Rose record now).  But she believed in me and loved me so much that she saw that I need JS in my life. 

So here’s what’s been happening...

On March 26th, we performed for the first time. We were lucky enough to meet Brad Rickert, fresh off a long stint drumming for Save Ferris.  He is an amazing player, a great guy, and he has given 200% to these JS shows and rehearsals. 

We were also thrilled to have Martin Sarango join us.  For those of you who followed the band back in the day, Martin played for Johnny Stranger circa 2008-2009 in Boston. You can hear his playing on our album “Galacticus 9”. Marty joined us for the night and his playing and energy are amazing. 

That Satellite show took a lot of work to get rolling and was a ton of fun. Since then, we have played a couple smaller shows as a 3-piece.  Sort of a warm up for the bigger shows coming this fall. 

Our first single - ‘P is for Pompeii’ - came out in May and it has gotten a great reaction. It’s July now and we’ve surpassed 50,000 plays. Which I have to give credit to Maddie. It has been her strategy and hard work that has put us there. 

It’s funny to write this blog because most of the work we’ve been doing for the last year hasn’t even come to fruition yet. Next month we are releasing our 2nd single... and a 3rd in the fall. Plus, we have something special coming up this holiday season. Plus more LA shows... but we have plans for shows outside California. 

I’ll be posting here - hopefully - every other week. Stay tuned and thanks for listening! 👌

June 26th - The Rocker’s Ball (Los Angeles)

May 10th - The Rocker’s Ball (los Angeles)