Tyson Motsenbocker

Mexico

Mon, 13 May 2013 19:18:41 -0400

Mexico

Fallen : Video Two from Olivenhain.

Sun, 12 May 2013 18:07:13 -0400

Fallen : Video Two from Olivenhain.

I sincerely apologize for the lack of content. I am writing a...

Mon, 06 May 2013 02:08:14 -0400

I sincerely apologize for the lack of content. I am writing a book. This is the beginning of a story called “June” - it’s a handholder with the song “Can’t Come Home Again”

Starts like this:

“A person in love (either with another person or a place) can not, in fairness wish it to thrive and grow, and then become angry when the growth arrives in an unanticipated direction.”

It was one of the coldest winters I could remember, although each winter somehow seemed colder than the last during those years – like the marrow in my bones was growing a little thinner or settling - settling like a couple of incompatible lovers drifting apart. That was how I felt in the winter. Every morning, up with the light in a house that was just cold enough that I couldn’t complain, but uncomfortable – always uncomfortable. Winter is difficult to appreciate here because it is impossible to acknowledge the wonderful when you are cold. I was always cold in the winter then, and now the deep cold inside me doesn’t thaw until June, and even then some mornings I wake up and my joints are remembering – remembering this winter maybe, as I often do. Joints follow muscle, muscle follows brain, brain follows memory and memory runs in rivers cut by the deepest losses. In this way is where I am the most unified. One body, many parts, as it were – but I was much younger then.

It was a January day; dark in the recess of the lost Christmas glow under the treebeds and in the alleyways the city had gone to sleep again, waiting it out and leaving an emancipated shell in it’s wake. The snow had massed in mounds on the roadside where the mailboxes seemed to rest inside. Smokestacks emitted smoke without fire and the windows were frosted into a state of white glass. I couldn’t tell where the ice ended and the windows began. I have known people who are asleep while they are awake, and they have frozen windows for eyes, but there are moments when the little residents move across the eyes from inside to look out the glass and the lights are on for a moment. That is how I remember it.

Video one from Olivenhain.

Mon, 06 May 2013 01:11:51 -0400

Video one from Olivenhain.

Professing

Thu, 31 Jan 2013 04:59:00 -0500

Last night I had a late drive from the dark depths of San Diego proper to the little town I live in - up in the North county where the highways conglomerate and the people are at rest in the evenings. This is a favorite drive, where I catch up on my library of talk show podcasts like John Roderick talking about Jeffrey Dahmer or the Beatles. Normally by the end of the short, 30 minute trip I’m driving with my knees trying to research the Night of the Long Knives or some other piece of obscure history or culture that I believe I should better recognize in the moment, but last night I was on the phone.

I was a freshman in college when a professor called me into his office. Goes like this:

“So, what’s the plan.” - professor

“Plan is, I’m tired of the hoops, and basically, I’m trying to have fun and the hoops are keeping me from the fun and I’m angsty/nervous.” - very conjugated me, also I remember down-talking fraternaties during this part of my monologue, where he listened, well.

“See, fraternity boys are just like you, coondogging fun and not understanding, being turdwagons, etc…” - Professor didn’t say this, but I’m remembering he said something along these lines, where he compared my inability to see outside the walls of my own skin to the frat-boy party passion that I hated. It could be that his words were calling down the wrong chimney, or maybe the bandanna wrapped around my head was impeding my ability to conjure aligning ideas, but I misunderstood him.

So I retaliate.

“I want to do what I want, being, music.”

Now here is where the conflict began, where my inability to communicate what I actually wanted to say and his wisdom in the arena of videogaming undergrads disconnected; he explains calling, in a different word.

“There’s an eskimo.” - Professor

I’m tracking.

“He accidentally wins a Porche from a cereal box raffle.”

I’m really exploring the liklihood of accomodating mail, arctic cereal, milk storage etc…

“Kellogs uses helicopter, flys Porche to North Pole.”

I’m remembering some people I knew from North Pole Alaska who would not understand a Porche. Also, cost/benefit in promotion not beneficial to cereal company.

“Eskimo doesn’t understand Porche.”

Back on track.

“Thinks: windshield and radio/heater. Porche is designed for weather monitoring.”

Why would an eskimo monitor weather? Is he a scientist?

“Battery dies. Confusion. Eskimo decides Porche can stretch skins of Caribu and Seal over sleek design.”

19 year old self is really exhausting understanding of Inuit culture to understand what is valid/should be looked down upon.

“See, Porche is for driving it fast. Eskimos waste Porche.”

I write a song called The Professor, criticizing his methods. Lyrically:

Professor Burns/Has been teaching me/about the eskimos/with his PhD/But I’m not ready to admit that my dreams are make believe.

We recorded it for the Plane Ticket Home EP but it didn’t make the cut because it sucked.

I remember feeling as though this well meaning and very wise man was criticizing my desire to play music as a profession, when in actuality he was explaining that in order to fit within the umbrella of greater humanity and understanding, you first have to look beyond the perceived rewards and realize that the human being is most enthousiastic when encountering the depth of meaning in the lives of others.

He told me: “When you drive the Porche, it becomes more fun than fun.”

I called that professor last night and told him, I get it. It’s more fun than fun and I understand and I’m sorry and it woke him up from his sleep and he asked me who I was living with now.

It’s in the same vein, you know - how it feels thanking someone and telling them that they were right even when you both doubted it for a while.

Hope to see y’all out this month!

Thu, 29 Nov 2012 21:27:05 -0500

Hope to see y’all out this month!

From Rivers and Roads.

Thu, 29 Nov 2012 21:25:46 -0500

From Rivers and Roads.

How do I download the song that is playing at the top of your blog right now? It is not on your EP and is one of the most beautiful things I have ever heard.

Thu, 29 Nov 2012 21:22:22 -0500

Thanks for asking, Anonymous. That song was done for a project film a few fine folks I know recently made about flyfishing and a North to South roadtrip from Seattle to Los Angeles. It also features another song I wrote called “I Still Have to Go” that I will post here now. I’m going to release these two songs later this month on noisetrade, so stay tuned.

Audio

Wed, 10 Oct 2012 04:18:32 -0400

The Sleeping Boats

Wed, 10 Oct 2012 04:16:47 -0400

I suppose that it is a common knowledge - an axiom of all history’s inhabitants - that there are characters in our midst which are at work in some way, unseen - or, maybe seen in the shadows or breezes that flicker across our path as we are in a place that allows for the recognition. My father once told me that he sees shadows when he prays, that dash around the room, forces he perceived to be polarized to the teams of good or evil that were affected by his unspoken pieces. I don’t know whom they were, except that I believe that they were there, and that they influenced the light, and that my father had no fear of them. It’s a comforting knowledge.

I’ve been in the North County of San Diego for less than two weeks after a long absence. Two months in Arizona followed by one in Michigan - which was a stage for the most theatrical thunder storms I have encountered since I was five years old and the heavens seemed to shatter into pieces while I lived in the Caribbean. I have never seen electricity at wild like I saw in Michigan. There is a peacefulness and a stillness there that doesn’t exist in California, or in the South of California - and I was presented with the perceived cost of the change of our country, in that the silence that was polluted in the places of control in our Nation still exists in the corners of America - and those of us who have forgotten it have also forgotten that it is a thing to be protected. I believe that our political turmoil, and the petty lashings of the right should be attributed to a very profound fear of the looming loss of the silence - which carries with it simplicity, hard work and morality - albeit occasionally fortified and horse-winker’d. The fear of loss is the most powerful human response and to look down a nose upon it is unforgivable ignorance.

I spent a few weeks up and down the California coast with some very admirable Southerners, and then again with some surfing musicians who are upon the dawn of their adulthood as husbands, and the talk was similar - dawning between the bachlor’ing that has founded our friendship and the horizon of the men they will become.

In San Diego I sat for a few days, installing shelves with a passion that I believe no man has ever held for the installation of shelves - because when you live between other men’s walls for many months the ability to use a drill to alter a wall is a furious pleasure. I rebuilt the carburetors on the 1971 Honda motorcycle I now own, and rode that motorcycle through the Eucalyptus groves in Rancho Santa Fe, and along the coast in the morning, when the fog is so thick I can’t even bother to check the waves, and maybe I never really wanted to because I spent hundreds of hours in places like Sacramento and Edmonton imagining myself in the October morning driving down the PCH into Cardiff with the wind at my knees and nothing else mattered.

Last night I ran the Jimmy Durante road from my house to the Del Mar rivermouth in the dark and said hello to homeless-Steve who lives by the lagoon, near the city storage and was feeding halibut to his cats and listening to NPR by firelight on an old thrift store radio. When I arrived at the beach the feeling inside of me was a feeling I’d been waiting for a long time - a kind of joy that can only come at night, and is the result of a wide number of uncontrollable factors, one of which was the fishing boats with their lights glimmering on the ocean, and the extreme low tide that reflected the tide wash down the beach for hundreds of normally submerged feet. I walked down to the beach and contemplated my dissatisfaction, as I always do in aligned moments and studied the lights. In the kelp patties at night, during the Yellowtale runs, many of the boats are illuminated with hundreds of halogen light bulbs, but there are others, boats who are waiting their catches, and they are smoking cigarettes on board and watching Friends reruns on 8” monitors while the fish entangle themselves - and these are the sleeping boats - the boats that are in the shadows or breezes that flicker across our path as we are in a place that allows for the recognition, even though the lights aren’t on.

I apologize for the errors. It’s 2am and I’ve been drinking Gin in my underpants.

I’ve noticed that somehow the passing of time in my life is measured by the notation of events on my...

Fri, 10 Aug 2012 01:47:55 -0400

I’ve noticed that somehow the passing of time in my life is measured by the notation of events on my internet page, if, being true: I am still sitting on the beach allowing the sandy breezes of late winter California wash the road weariness out of me on the empty stretches of open water down the stairs at Cherry Hill beach – I went there most days with a book and a towel and a surfboard and waited and waited and usually ended up sleeping until the evening chill was too severe to comfortably ignore any longer – but the truth is that those days are quite long gone, so long that it feels like another life entirely because now I’m not driving home to a house full of old friends and Bo’s cooking in the air and the smoky recesses of our back porch because I’m in another State, and even if I wasn’t it wouldn’t look alike. I’ll allow for the changes, and the changes aren’t all bad, only different.

The late winter was a quieter one than usual, in preparation for an old friend’s wedding – the friend I wrote the song “Memphis” for, which is a prophetic word on what was to happen to him after his wedding, and the wedding was more romantic that I’d imagined, high among the Rocky Mountains in Steamboat Springs, Colorado – a town that I was raised watching Warren Miller narrate, and instead of pioneering there for nipplehigh powder ragings I saw it in the early spring, dripping in the sun aboard the goodbye of an oldest and greatest friend. I’d spent too long watching him go in my own projected renditions – bashing myself mentally to the sullen numbness that appears when waiting for a preconceived painful change. He walked down the isle and back again and I was waiting for the dancing with no nettled grievances and a smile on my face, knowing that the sadness was probably half over, and the consequences merely beginning.

In the Spring we watched the sun come a little stronger – which is the subtlety of season in the place I live, and no less life giving. I went to Mexico a couple of times and surfed my brains out. I spent a week in the Pacific Northwest again, weed-wacked for my mother and visited the beautiful young families of some people I love in Couer D’ Alene, Idaho. In may I packed my car and drove to Flagstaff in Arizona and many things happened there at a place called Lost Canyon which were beautiful and always new and I met some people who are worth knowing and my life is better because they are now in it, or in it more.

Williams, Arizona is a desert town but not in the traditional sense. I think when I saw Williams for the first time I remembered that there was a time, not so long ago when Americans believed that the best days we still yet to come: those days were before us and the future was bright and the worries were soon to be over, if not mostly conquered by understanding and brawn and down home cooking… until the secret day, recently, when it was over, the best had seemingly snuck past when no one was watching and the neon started buzzing a little louder and the windows were cracked and nobody wanted to dance in the road anymore, but Williams remembers. I firmly believe that if I asked a stranger in Williams to dance in the road with me, I would have a higher chance of them agreeing, than in say, Detroit, but not better than in Disneyland.

Williams is a route 66 town looking down over America in the Arizona high desert. It’s the kind of place you can find a velvet elvis or a prewar transistor radio at a fair price. It’s practically overflowing with nic-nacs and memorabilia to the gold era, as defined by rounder cars and deeper music with record-crackle. I spent many afternoons in a diner called the “Route 66 Diner” and I sat at the James Dean booth and smiled about the warm sunshine of the past, which casts no shadows – and I don’t want any shadows on my nostalgia dammit, because I never saw the fifties, and what I’ve seen ain’t worth shadowing.

In July I spent a week with Kokua in Northern California. It was a fair week and I played paintball in a tailored suit.

In July I climbed a mountain near Mt. Whitney which was nearly as high. It involved ropes and rock climbing in places that were 5,000 feet exposed to the valley down below and the altitude hurt my brain but the views and the height were breathtaking. I finished that climb and my whole body ached for many days.

In August I traveled to Northern Michigan. A place called Lake City, and more specifically a place called Timberwolf Lake. I play my guitar here and read books and swim in the lake in the middle of the night sometimes which is a good way to remember that you are a human being and that swimming in the middle of the night is one of life’s great privileges. It is a simple existence which I have grown to appreciate, but being gone from home for nearly 11 weeks, my imagination has recreated my Ocean-side homelife into a Norman Rockwell existence where Cap’n Keno’s would win awards for architecture and atmosphere and everyone is holding hands.

This post is dedicated to Gerrit Davis, who is abroad and remembers me to write.

Photo

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 11:41:25 -0400

This is one of the tunes - still unmastered, from the new...

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 17:06:38 -0500

This is one of the tunes - still unmastered, from the new Seafarers EP.

I was at one of your shows once and you played a song that had "Please don't cry it's alright, you're always gonna be my darlin" in the chorus. What's the name of the song and how do I get my hands on it?

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 16:27:40 -0500

That song is called Footfalls, and it will surely be on the next record, but the only way to hear it before then is to come see us play it live.

A lot of your songs are stories. How much are the fact or fiction and do you set out to write short stories and then just figure out how to put music to them?

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 16:26:52 -0500

I’ve always felt that I’m I mediocre musician and an acceptable writer - or storyteller, when it comes out clear. I’d say that, unfortunately maybe - almost all of the stories in my songs are true - excluding one or two which are projections of reality maybe, but these ones are often the most real in my mind - the characters are real people, the places are real places and the events are usually the tangible affects of longer and less plotted events. Like the song called Can’t Come Home Again. That’s a song about realizing that the town I grew up in doesn’t exist any longer, and that the people there have moved on. In the song the couple look over the town that, presumably, held the stage for an early romance, but the set is different and the memories are sort of like ghosts wandering in and out of places that didn’t exist, or no longer do. It’s a moment of clarity. That moment for me took much longer and didn’t happen in the place I grew up in, but it’s like I wish it did. It’s cleaner that way, with more closure.

A good bit of Until it Lands are stories about my mother, all being true. Empty 25 is about a friends spring wedding which was invaded by a winter storm. I have a song none of you have heard called The Fatal Shooting of Antonio Catalano - which is about the early morning robbery of my favorite taco shop and the bloody police shootout at a famous nearby hotel that ended in the discovery of the taco shop owner’s stolen gun, which was a family heirloom.

I write music first.

Will we be able to purchase your Seafarer's project soon?

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 16:14:41 -0500

Yep! As soon as my friend Blake masters it up and makes it sound nice. Send him encouraging messages, he’s busy and loves getting prodded to finish things.

When do you have a new album coming out?!

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 16:12:27 -0500

I am currently putting the finishing touches on a little side project called Seafarers - it should be done any day, and will be for sale by donation on Bandcamp.com. It’s an instrumentally focused record, I play all the instruments save for a few small sections, and my friend Sarah sings some duets with me on it.

As for a “real” record, so to speak - I have been patiently working and waiting on. It will begin preproduction this coming fall, after I finish a pretty substantial fundraising campaign, the latter being the more worrisome for me. I’m going to need all the help I can get on this one.

Tyson, Joseph and I must've listened to your Seafarer stuff 5 or 6 times through this weekend. I'm lovin' it man. It's seriously so good. Keep it up. Maybe next time I'm in Cali Joseph and I will make it down to SD for a bit. - Elias Carlson

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 22:31:16 -0500

Thanks man! I’d love to see you.

Photo

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 18:15:37 -0500

It’s been months since I really wrote anything here. My friend...

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 20:29:27 -0500

It’s been months since I really wrote anything here. My friend Jake tells me that it’s important to write, because writing is the only real indicator of time passed. He says that writing is the witness you give your future self in order to remember the details – I suppose the defense, or the opposition, is that maybe the details – when they fade into obscurity, the fog around them adds the magic that makes all the best memories worth remembering. I heard someone say that people will only remember the way you made them feel. I think that some memories are best left without details, then your feelings and the nostalgia are left to captain that memory into all the places that make good memories better – usually with a good helping of exaggeration and imagination. I think all good writers exaggerate, the best must be liars – the ones who are always writing have to enlarge the details before they’ve even gone through the graces of forgetting them.

Here is the feeling of the past months. I finished tour – sat on the beach for a month and wrote songs and rode my bicycle and tried to figure out home-life and home-work and I tried my hardest not to spoil the romance of the place I’d created while on the road.

When the fog came I was in Utah with Randy and Bobo and a good crew of Young Life people and there was no snow there to speak of but it was good and cold and sunny like an 80’s film about the mountains. I spent three days alone in the Salt Lake City Red Lion Hotel and walked all over that city, speaking with nobody. I found a book under the table in a McDonalds downtown, considered it providence and read the whole thing. It was a good story and I still don’t completely understand what happened in that story.

I spent a week at home for Christmas and it was everything a week home for Christmas should be.

I came back to San Diego and the sun welcomed me in. The waves were good for a long, long time. I surfed with Dave and by myself and got the barrel of my life at Blacks and seawater ran out of my nose every time I bent over for many, many days from the much more common barrels that detonated on my head and spun me across the ocean floor where air, sand and water are all churning together in a big noisy blended roar. Another couple good friends visited, we sat in a circle on the hardwood in our living room and we talked and sang old songs loud and said goodbye to people who weren’t leaving yet and then we all cried and hugged one another and forgot it in the morning. I drank coffee in a strictly regulated group of locations.

I played the Casbah with a band called NO that I like and then I played the Copper Door with a guy named Ethan who I like better. I built a space with lots of musical instruments and plastic boxes with recording equipment screwed into them and I made a new band called Seafarers where all the members are me and none of us sing.

www.soundcloud.com/seafarers

The picture from the top is called “The Chancellor Sorely Tried” and it’s what comes up when you search the internet for Seafarers. It’s sort of like “inspiration.”

I’ve made very little money since tour, and I made no money on tour.