This album is dedicated to my aunt Debbie, who passed away from suicide in 2001.

It’s my first solo album in 7 years. It’s a dense layer cake of depression and hope, political anger and pop culture escape, and life changes both chosen and endured, made immediate by Bird Peterson’s bombastic, maximalist electronic production and elevated by features from some of my favorite rappers. Making it helped me, and I hope listening to it helps someone else.

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Debbie was the epitome of the “cool weird aunt”, the Iowa girl who escaped the Midwest and moved to California. I remember somewhere around 1999 reading her poems I wrote over the phone and talking to her about music and books. But beside a handful of calls and visits, she was the family member that I most pieced together from hearsay: She lived with another woman out there, she “self-medicated” with weed, she struggled with depression, worked a lot of various jobs — but to me, she was the artist, the weirdo, the black sheep who got out.

Later, I left the Midwest too — I moved to Austin in 2008, and I spent 12 years there building a rich and creative life. I released several albums and founded a hip hop event called Austin Mic Exchange, which flourished for 5 years as a weekly open mic. When that event ended in 2017, it created an absence one that deepened by avoidant reclusiveness at not wanting to face a music scene I worried I’d abandoned.

I had to keep making stuff, and I diversified — I started acting, hosting different events, taking comedy classes. But music, I knew, was my lifeblood, and the longer I stayed away, the more I worried I might never get it back again. I had writers’ block for years. I worried I had nothing to say. I felt worthless. I had a great job at a tech company, I was making good money, and I was more depressed than I’d ever been in my life.

When COVID hit, I had no more excuses holding me back, and I made the jump I’d been dreaming about since high school — I moved to Los Angeles. The first thing I learned about my new apartment was that its previous tenant’s name had been Debbie. I felt like I’d inherited a charge to make this artistic, weird, and happy life work, and in that apartment, I recorded this album.

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I first heard the prototypes for beats on this album in 2015 when producer Bird Peterson reached out to my then-rap-trio about doing a record together. They were the most exciting production I’d ever had the chance to write with, and when the group project fell apart, they became the fuel, the reason, for me to come back to music. As such, this album took 7 years to make — 7 years of major life changes, deep depressions, artistic wins, political rage, and a cross-country move.

Through scraps of verses and short bursts of energy, this slowly and accidentally became the most personal piece of art I’ve ever produced — part diary, part soapbox, a rebuke of capital and an embrace of radical empathy, written in dense verse and set to shoulder-grabbing stereo production. Me and Bird’s aesthetic and instincts made for the perfect marriage, and looking back I see the worth in the wait.

I named this record “GONZO RECITES POETRY WHILE DEFUSING A BOMB” for many reasons: Gonzo is that weirdo artist who doesn’t care about anything but creation. Gonzo and I share a desire to merge “low art” and “high art”. In the titular sketch, Gonzo is reading “To a Skylark” by Shelley, a poem about how human sadness will always taint our art, as opposed to the purely joyful sounds of the “Bird”. Shelley’s wife Mary (of Frankenstein fame) was the first to translate the works of Goethe (such as Faust) into English. And Goethe, I have long been told, is my great-great-great-etc. uncle, a family fact from my father that both inspires me and triggers that “failed potential” shame so many former gifted kid millennials feel.

The cover art is a painting of Goethe superimposed with a photo my dear friend Vineet took of me wrestling with a very sweet dog named Lil Butt. It’s low art, it’s high art, it’s me. It’s the veneer of poise and the chaos of a kennel. It is my poetry and my bomb. It is my father and my mother, wrestling inside of me always. It is the result of 7 years of change and uncertainty.

But enough esoteric string connecting. This is also a big, loud, lovingly produced album celebrating being a weirdo in a hard world, and it’s for anyone who worries their best days are behind them. To you, to myself, and for Debbie — they’re not.

- Protextor