Digital edit of this print.

The first time I really listened to Creedence Clearwater Revival wasn’t until I was 16. My best friend and I were sitting on his parent’s lounge room floor, flipping through his dad’s record collection, drinking beer, burning incense and probably fretting about what the hell we were going to do with our lives. Later on, he gave me a CD to burn and that started a (kind of, sometimes it’s still embarrassing) shameless love of southern rock. It’s worth noting that this was the same friend who sat me down on the edge of a garden bed outside the school sports stadium and made me listen to Tool, and then Alice in Chains, in quick succession. We both had one earphone each, conjoined twins via a discman, squinting at the blinding white concrete and trying not to move in case the other’s earphone fell out.

With music, I think the thing that is almost as special as the sound itself is the person who gave you the gift of knowing about that sound. I remember “getting” Pink Floyd – in a dark room at 3am, no less – loving Guns n Roses, unearthing Rodriguez, falling for Bowie, picking up the Shins, understanding Biggie, and inheriting the Doors. All the people who gave me those sounds were and are such crucial people at pivotal times in my life that it makes me smile just thinking about it.

Those mixtapes and CDs with the hand-drawn labels and tracklists were just the best.

Insight into a wild mind with Ted Nugent stuck on repeat. 

Now it's time to wash the screen print ink off my hands and kick back, zone out, and have a cider with my lover and the Weenie Mutt (Humble).
I hope the weekend is treating everyone sweetly.

Little sketchbook page // thought crash

... a stone, a leaf, an unfound door; of a stone, a leaf, a door.

And of all the forgotten faces.


...

Remembering speechlessly we seek




the great forgotten language, the lost lane-end into heaven, a



stone, a leaf, an unfound door.  Where?  When?


O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.




- Thomas Wolfe
Did anyone else use to be borderline obsessive about Bad Religion? They were my 
favourite band when I was about 16, and it's weird reading Look Homeward Angel, 
by Thomas Wolfe, and noticing where an 80s/90s thesaurus punk band got some of its lyrics from. 

I love things that connect to other things.

Pony Gold Creedence shirt; Spell and the Gypsy Collective necklace; The Wild Unknown tarot.

This is about lying under a clear sky at night and talking about the endless unknowable truths; about a shared bottle of whiskey moving hand-to-hand; about bare feet on the dash of a speeding car; about sun on naked legs -- running through a summer field, chasing dogs and horses and guitar riffs and ideas and notions.
It's about a beat-up copy of East of Eden and a scratched vinyl record collection that you inherited from your dad... at the same time that you inherited the truth about good music. 
It's about cracked leather, engine grease, wildflowers in a brown beer bottle.
It's about everything rough and messy and wild and beautiful.

☪

So this is something I've been meaning to do for ages, but the logistics were just way too intimidating. It was hard to get things working exactly the way I wanted, which probably has more to do with my control/perfectionism tendencies than anything else. In the end it was just time to bite the bullet and do it myself... So I'm sending out into the world a limited-run of hand screened shirts (Creedence is the first style, one more to come). They're available for pre-order here, and I'll be shipping out the first lot on September 2. After that, I'm not sure how long I'll keep the screens for... just until a better idea comes along, I guess!