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January 2025 Newsletter: 2024 Review

Apologies for the slow start to 2025. Yesterday I looked at the date and said, “Oh yeah - I should probably write a newsletter, shouldn’t I?” While I leave this coming year a fresh page, undisturbed by any predictions of what it might bring, I’ll take a glance back at 2024 and see where I came from, and came to.

Last year saw me facing some truths about myself that I didn’t like, coming to terms with blind spots I had in how I was treating others. For years, working as a creat...

FINAL Archive Sunday Stream

The past is dead. Future only.

Archive Sunday #79

After our show at the House of Blues San Diego, we made our way back up to Los Angeles. We were slated to play the Wiltern again in Koreatown and pretty pumped that it sold it. I remember this was probably the first time seeing vendors on the street selling bootleg versions of our merch. It was actually kinda rewarding that we had gotten to that point, but also a bit of a bummer knowing that their operation didn't pay any of the artists involved and ignored our efforts to print on sustainab...

Archive Sunday #78

  About a week or so after getting back to the Pacific Northwest, we started getting ready for our local Seattle show. It was our first time playing at the historic Paramount Theatre downtown, but we had all attended a bunch of shows there previously. I think my dog-sitter for the day fell through, so we ended up taking Beau with us to help out at merch. He was mostly a good boy chilling in his backpack, but I remember him barking at our booking agent in the green room haha. It was ...

December Livestream

come on in!

Archive Sunday #77

   The next day after our short residency at Brooklyn Steel, we made our way west across New Jersey towards Philadelphia. It was difficult to get back in the swing of things, but luckily it wasn't a super long drive before the much busier day. After setting up our gear on stage, I remember going out in search of a couple smoothies for the merch crew while they were busy setting up the stand before doors. I eventually found a food truck that had some good options and after deliv...

December Streaming Schedule

Dec 15 at 1 PM PST: Band's delight: study hour with Will! Get some work done on those exams and papers alongside your Patreon peers.

Dec 19 at 4 PM PST: Solo performance stream with Will. I'll be doing some Christmas carol favorites!

Jan 2 at 4 PST: Archive Sunday stream with the band.

Archive Sunday #76

   We met back up with Degnan and the van once we crossed back into the U.S. Earlier we had decided to let him hang out in upstate New York with most of the merch because it ends up saving a lot of money and hassle on the import/export taxes. It was exciting to be headed to one of our favorite museums up in North Adams, Massachusetts once again, plus this time we had more time than ever to check it out. We arrived in North Adams the night before the show and checked into this o...

December Newsletter: Watching and Waiting

My winter so far has been cold, calm, and quiet. Cold, as I haven’t put up much of a fight against the changing weather. In previous years I’d crank the heat to create a bubble for myself; this year, I’m pushing myself to get more warmth out of exercise and cooking. It seems I notice the cold less every day.

It’s been quiet because I unsubscribed from Spotify, along with a load of other streaming services and apps I barely used. My habit of filling the space of silent hours with...

TF stream

hop in!

Archive Sunday #75

  After a couple years on the sidelines waiting for the numbers to drop, we were excited to hit the road again in 2022 once things seemed a bit safer. It took a ton of preparation to ensure we could provide a relatively safe environment for everyone involved, including stocking the merch table with free masks and establishing protocols for regular testing and isolating. All that aside, it was still our most ambitious tour to date with an elaborate lighting setup and stage design. Wi...

Band's Delight stream tomorrow!

Tune in tomorrow at 11 am PST for a band delight's stream with Will. We'll decide what we're doing once we get there!

Gratitude essay: the Car Seat fanbase

I used to write in darkness. “Trapped!”, an old song from the Nervous Young Men era, sums up my typical state of mind during high school, or maybe the whole album it’s on does. Life felt like a series of looming deadlines and fatal pronouncements; the air felt like a tangle of toxic forces I couldn’t understand. Anxiety, insecurity, and physical discomfort combined to create an overwhelming feelin...

Archive Sunday Stream

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Can't Cool Andrew Down

More quality content from MADLO.

Gratitude essay: Comedy

“I’m bringing a caterpillar under the umbrella.”

“Nope.”

“Seriously?”

“Here, I’ll give you a hint: I’m bringing under the umbrella, ummmmmmmm….”

“That’s not a hint! You’re just saying ‘um’!”

It’s easy for me to hold onto frames. Having a mental rubric, being able to place what’s in front of me within a setting I understand, reads as safety to me. If I don’t understand the order of what’s going on, I either jump...

Exodus (Take What You Can Carry)

Outtake from MADLO sessions.

Stream schedule

November 26th, at 4 PST: Archive Sunday stream.

December 1st at 1 PST: Band performance stream of Twin Fantasy (MTM). (This is still the November stream.)

Band's delight stream TBD!

Gratitude essay: Marching Band

High school was, for much of its duration, a drift through frightening and alienating unknowns for me. Throughout it all there was a bright thread, one that brought me a consistency of schedule, of friends, of authority figures: marching band. 

In retrospect, I’m surprised I signed up for it. My sister joined on two years before I entered high school, and brought back horror stories of the band director’s rigor and abrasive treatment of students. Yet he chilled out quickly, and...

Archive Sunday #74

AK: The infamous 1 Trait Danger tour; the one, the only (literally). We had always wanted to do some sort of tour with 1TD but of course it had always been on the backburner. This was until Will got us a headlining spot at ANE (Anthro New England) which we gladly accepted and built a tour around.

It was fun building out this set, going through old tracks and remixing them then adding them to be functional on the Ableton Push as triggered samples. We also recorded special intro tracks sp...

Gratitude essay: Patience

I was born just outside of what they’re now calling “the anxious generation”, kids who grew up in the era of smartphones. The idea that personalized screens could be a constantly accessible form of entertainment was only just starting to creep into the collective conscious as I entered high school. Before then, there was TV, books, music, and in-between those, a lot of silence, sitting around, and waiting. It was far from an idyllic, carefree time; I remember encountering intense surges...

Archive Sunday #73

  In the middle of October, we had a few days to lay down some recordings at the now familiar Avast Studios. Most of the live band Madlo takes were recorded there, plus we had a bit of extra time to run some takes of songs off My Head Hz by Naked Days that Will was producing. We also randomly got invited by Fader magazine to attend the MLS cup happening in Seattle around then. I guess they had bought a bunch of tickets in advance, so they reached out to local bands to fill out the e...

November Newsletter: Gratitude

I have a recurring nightmare of clams. I’m on the beach, walking into the ocean, when suddenly I find my feet pinched by thousands of hard, painful objects - a seabed full of shelled mollusks, sinking their hinged jaws into my flesh. These creatures have always revolted me, those unmistakable signs of life from what seems more like an object than a creature awakening a primal dread within me. Their existence seems to imply the existence of life without beauty, without gentleness, without th...

Archive Stream

Stream it!

HOW TO LEAVE TOWN JAM STREAM

Now this is a story all about how....

Archive Sunday #72

Starting back in early September, we met back up with Death Cab for Cutie to play some local Pacific Northwest amphitheaters. Our first show was down in Portland at the Oregon Zoo for the tail end of their Zoo Nights series. I remember we all discussed the ethics of zoos on the drive down and while Andrew was firmly against the idea, most of us thought that as long as the zoos focused on education and rehabilitation they could be beneficial overall. We had a few minutes after loading-in to wa...

Archive Sunday #71

The next day after the Hollywood Bowl show with Death Cab, we caught a flight to Porto with a couple hour layover in Paris. The Paris airport is beautiful, but kinda uncomfortable when you have to spend an extended amount of time there. I remember we couldn't find a spot to sit anywhere in our connection terminal, so we eventually gave up and settled on the floor. The terminal had this impressive glass ceiling, but in the summer heat it kinda turned the place into a greenhouse. Needless to sa...

October Streams

Howdy, here's this month's streaming schedule.

October 20th, noon PST - band's delight stream with Will, content TBD.

October 28th, 4 PST - band performance stream. In celebration of its tenth anniversary, we will be playing all or most of How To Leave Town!

October 30th, 4 PST - Archive Sunday Stream

Archive Sunday #70

  Picking back up in Indianapolis, we set our sights on finishing off the later part of the tour. So we drove south through Kentucky towards Nashville the next day. We must have listened to some podcast or something about the Kentucky blue people, because I remember discussing our chances of encountering any on our long drive through the state. In the end we mostly saw just endless corn fields with the occasional gas station and fast food joint.

About five hours or so later, w...

Archive Sunday #69

    Later in March we received a last minute offer to play SXSW again to help fill out an artist showcase at Stubb's. We were pleasantly surprised to learn it actually paid something rather than just exposure, so the four of us jumped at the opportunity to return. We arrived the day before and checked out the Fender tent to kill some time. I remember grabbing a bunch of guitar cables they had laying around as freebies, and the other guys laughed for me filling my pockets w...