Heyday

An
American in Asia:

His Quest for Cosmic Truth

(or at least a Decent Espresso)

Monster Island is the project I embarked upon a year before I left Swoon 23. The first album (above) was recorded on my friend Corey's HI-8 studio in his messy messy apartment. I lived there with him for a few months and during that time I wrote and recorded all the tracks for the first album, Heyday. Corey played keyboards on a couple songs and everything else - guitar, bass, drums, harmonica, vocals, flute - was me. I suck at keyboards but I played some of them too.

It was great to be in the position to make all the creative decisions for the project beginning to end. From the start it was for no one but me. My whole goal was to cut an album that I loved to listen to ad infinitum.

I took everything that I admired about the bands in my fair-sized album collection and mashed it together as artfully as I could. A few other people have said nice things about it, though you can't trust anything said to an artist's face. Nobody wants to see an artist cry. Almost as bad as watching a mime do that invisible box thing.

Anyway, I didn't care what anyone else thought because to my ears I exactly achieved my goal. I listened to that thing day in, day out for at least 2 or 3 years, and I still put it on every couple of weeks.

I got the EQ perfect which, to me, means you could play it on a bad car stereo whizzing down the freeway with the windows down and still hear the bass and kick drum. What I wanted was music for driving at silly speeds while maintaining total serenity.

The beat was set to a wandering walk, and if you shook your hips to it, you had to do it wide and slow. The melodies are pure pop, which usually makes me snore. So I buried the pop up to it's neck in fuzz and discord and let the tide come in on it.

The theme of the whole album is of a single, stellar day. The kind of day that is one long beautiful strange note with beats you remember for the rest of your life. Weird shit happens left and right and you're in the center.

The album starts slow and sludgy with Mirror, slams into the fierce driving song Heyday (and I'm still proud of that D-D#-A#-A turnaround), hits mud again, turns on it's back and stares at the sun, rockets into sheer two-chord sugar-pop, suddenly a weepy acoustic tune, gnashing psychedelia and winds out in a Velvet Underground one-chord infinity jam.

I don't think I'm impressing anyone with this album and it was never my intention. However I am proud of it because I succeeded in pleasing myself no end. Here it is. Free download. All copyright ©1998-2007 Jeff Studebaker, of course.

Mirror - a slow heavy love song to set the mood.

Heyday - contains my favourite line, "Are you really small or are you far away?"

Super Reject - sludgy ode to all my favourite waste-cases.

Sungirl - the sun comes up on a death-metal wake.

Maybe I'm Hi - pure pop and hella fun to play.

Airplane - getting weepy over a long-distance relationship.

The Incredible Melting - grinding psychedelia.

Ring Around The Sun - the aforementioned V-U raveup.

Feel free to download, copy, send 'em to your friends. Mention my name if you do. Otherwise they're free.

Jeffrey Studebaker has been (in no particular order) a SE Asian correspondent for a Singaporean travel magazine, a teacher, consultant and translator in Japan, a guitarist with the band, Swoon 23 in every city of the US of A, a coffee roaster in Seattle, a bike messenger in Portland, a marine fire system repairman in Seattle, an osteoporosis clinic researcher in Providence, a mental ward counsellor on the night shift in Portland, a brief success in New York, and he has now returned to the US after nearly a decade in Asia to pursue a publishing career.