New jangle pop from the Pacific Northwest. Garden Flowers is the latest project from Portland, Oregon’s Carrie and Joel Roth. You might recognize Joel from his other band Daystar who we’ve featured a lot. Along with Carrie and Joel, Garden Flowers also features Daystar bassist Kelly Simmons and Brian Kramer on drums.
“Ghost of the Forest” is two and a half minutes of catchy hooks and the video is silly and fun. Watch in amazement as Cass Wild frolics in the woods and rides her flying motorcycle over the mountains and through the seasons of rural Oregon.
Take flight!
Disclosure: GLONO co-founder Derek Phillips is in Daystar and contributed acoustic guitar to “Someday” on Garden Flowers Vol. II.
Earlier this summer Daystar shared a video for the demo version of a song from 2019’s The Complete Recordings, but now they’ve released a brand new song, the first preview of an upcoming EP, irreverently titled The Early Years. “Epithet” is their first new song since 2022’a “Get Your Gun?” b/w “?Saints & Sinners” single and it’s got all the hooks and harmonies you’ve come to expect from these guys.
Could they pass this off as a long-lost Badfinger outtake? Possibly. Something found on a dusty old reel in the Ardent Studios basement? Why not! But don’t call it a throwback. This is the now sound from way back. It’s the in sound from way out! Are you sure that you’re up for it?
Disclosure: GLONO co-founder Derek Phillips is Daystar’s songwriter and front man. But if his stuff wasn’t good, we’d mock him mercilessly…or ignore it. Thankfully, Daystar is good.
The original acoustic demo of a highlight of 2019’s The Complete Recordings. This version contains an extra verse that didn’t make the album version:
Sarah, don’t you look so sad
You had it all, but it’s all gone bad
So you cry, and you cry, and you cry
While the world that you had’s going by.
I love stuff like this. Big fan of acoustic demos in general. But it’s also fun to see how the songwriting process evolves in the studio. Editing ideas down to what is essential. Does the song need that third verse? No? Chop it out! And if you feel bad about killing a perfectly nice little verse that never did any harm to anybody, go ahead and release your original demo a few years later and resurrect it. Everybody wins!
Disclosure: GLONO co-founder Derek Phillips is Daystar’s songwriter and front man. But if his stuff wasn’t good, we’d mock him mercilessly…or ignore it. Thankfully, Daystar is good.
Check it out. A new double-A-side seven-inch from GLONO co-founder Derek Phillips’ band Daystar. “Saints & Sinners” is a brooding psychedelic burner while its flipside “Get Your Gun” is more of a riff-driven choogler.
The lyric video for “Saints & Sinners” is an appropriately creepy mashup of footage featuring Jim Jones and Elvis Presley, two fellows with big personalities and killer sunglasses. If one is supposed to represent a saint and the other a sinner, it’s anybody’s guess which is which!
Check out the latest video from GLONO co-founder Derek Phillips’ band Daystar! This time around he and his Portland bandmates reveal what they’ve been up to for the last six months.
Spoiler alert: Not much!
“People Get Lonely” is a power pop highlight of The Complete Recordings, looking back on the ideals we had when we were young.
We laughed and swore to fight, and never said goodnight
But you know… People get lonely
Does the rhythm guitar remind you of the Velvet Underground? Or is it more of an Apple Rooftop concert vibe? Either way, it’s a trip, it’s got a funky beat, and you can bug out to it.
Hey hey it’s another video from GLONO co-founder Derek Phillips’ band Daystar! I’d recognize that handwriting anywhere. I’ve got pages of it in yearbooks and letters and stories in the archives.
When I was a teenager I was convinced that my group of friends was destined to be important and famous like the Beats or the Algonquin Round Table, which — combined with my hoarder genetics — required me to save everything anybody produced. So I have every letter, postcard, photo, flyer, cassette, 7-inch, poetry collection, etc., that any of my posse was involved in.
And while the teenage sense of self-importance is undeniably over-inflated, I am still consistently impressed by the creative work of my pals. Adulthood, as it tends to do, quashed the dreams of fortune and celebrity, and now we all have standard day jobs that pay the bills, but most of these folks still do cool stuff on the side.
“Fade Away, Love” is a pretty acoustic ballad played on Phillips’ 1966 Epiphone Texan. If the tone reminds you of the Beatles, that’s not a coincidence. “It’s the same make and model McCartney used on ‘Yesterday’ and ‘Blackbird’ and still records with today,” he recently told Rock & Roll Globe. “His is a ’64.”
DP and Daystar lead guitarist Joel Roth talk a lot about gear and influences in that interview so check it out. They totally nerd out.
Full disclosure: Daystar’s Derek Phillips is a co-founder of Glorious Noise, and he was the best man in my wedding, as I was in his. We’ve been pals since we were 15 year old dorks who bonded in art class over our budding obsession with the Beatles. I listened to Abbey Road for the first time at his house. It was an exciting time, discovering new stuff as quickly as we could, which was tricky in the pre-internet age (pre-CD even!), especially when you’re too young to drive yourself to the record store and too broke to afford much even when you got there. It was work being a fan.
After we exhausted the complete Beatles discography we moved on to their solo years, side projects, and bands they produced or influenced. In the early days of usenet newsgroups and tape trading I remember inquiring if anybody had a recording of Paul’s demo of “Day After Day,” the Badfinger song. “Unlikely,” came the reply, “since it was written by Pete Ham.”
Well, it’s thirty years later, and my homie has a band that has recorded an album’s worth of material that’s the direct result of all those years of obsessing over classic sounds. And now they’ve released their second video. DP told Indie Band Guru, that “Warped Reality” is “about those screw-ups in all of our lives who we just can’t give up.” (I hope he’s not talking about me!)
And have you ever noticed
You are always all alone
Holding on but hopeless
Homeward-bound but never home
Their album release show is on Saturday, October 19 at Bunk Bar in Portland with the Resolectrics and Messimer. I’ve already got my copy and it’s a thing a beauty. Dig it.
He was a spaz. So bad that he once slapped a teacher right across the face. We couldn’t believe it. The whole class froze for a moment. And then sped up very fast like an old film projector breaking loose from a jam. There was David, running around the room while we lost our minds, screaming like chimps until Mrs. Oatman caught him and threw him in the bathroom where he tore it up until he went quiet. Nervously, she opened the door to check on him and he was out like a shot and running down the street; running home again.
David was a year older than us but in the same grade. He had a frenetic energy that fueled kids and exhausted adults. He came by it naturally. His dad, Dave Sr., would scream from the sidelines of our baseball games. “Run, you pollack! Run!” We couldn’t believe he called him that, his own son. But the more we laughed, the more the veins in his neck bulged. “Run you pollack! Run!”
While Sr was screaming, Jr was whispering. It was a creepy habit he’d picked up that summer. He’d heard it on the radio and thought it was hilarious to come up behind you, quiet as a black cat, and whisper in your ear: “Be quiet, big boys don’t cry. Big boys don’t cry.” We were in 4th grade and despite our recently acquired trucker mouths, we were not big boys. The act of one of our classmates whispering that in our ears was unnerving and he knew it. That’s why he did it. He was a year older, after all.
It was also the summer of the Atlanta child murders and even though we were 1200 miles away, we were enthralled with horrified fascination. They were our age, some of them. And they kept disappearing. One after another. Sometimes found, sometimes not.
“He’s gonna get us,” Dave would cackle as we raced back to our houses when the street lights came on. “He’s gonna get us!”
It didn’t matter how many times we explained that Georgia was a 12 hour drive away and that he seemed to target black kids, Dave would talk about how he was going to get us. There were countless ways he was going to get us too. In our beds, in our garages, reaching up to pull us down just before we reached the top stair. He was there and he was going to get us. Dave talked about this non-stop. HE was in every conversation, every drawing, everywhere. Dave talked and talked and talked about him.
Until one day Dave disappeared, and we never saw him again.
My fellow GLONO founder Derek Phillips and I have been pals for over thirty years. Throughout these decades he’s always been in bands. Almost too many to count. But because I am a collector and an amateur archivist (a/k/a hoarder), I can count them: thirteen. Wednesday’s Children, the Holy Moly Revival, Siamese Beetle, the Silence, Leslie, Silver, the Vantrells, the Overtones, Moline Dorr, the Blue Ribbon Brothers, Riviera, the Dirty Lawfords, and now Daystar.
I’ve followed each of these bands over the years, and I’m excited about Daystar. They’re a real rock and roll band!
Daystar was formed in Portland with Joel Roth, Nick Foltz, and Kelly Simmons, and their debut album, The Complete Recordings, is coming this summer. They shared its first single, “Right at Home,” based on the occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, back in October.
“Buttons and Brass” is based on more innocent shenanigans: teenagers with nothing to do except goof on each other.
Hanging out, ’cause nothing’s doing
It’s all about somebody else
Push away and Dewey’s stewing
Crying out about broken belts
There were lots of high school weekends when parents were out of town, sitting around somebody’s kitchen table, playing Quarters with Milwaukee’s Best and Doritos. Sink three in a row and you get to make up a rule. Top 3 Quarters rules, in order: 1. Can’t say “drink/drank/drunk,” 2. Gotta call everybody Dave, and 3. Before you consume, you have to stand up, grab your junk and say, “I have a very tiny penis.” Good clean fun.
That level of social awkwardness is carried into the video, shot at Fluff & Gravy Records in Portland and directed by Matt Schulte, wherein our hero repeatedly tries and fails to make the scene. That’s alright, homie, there’s always Quarters.
The air is thick and the static’s crackling. Coded messages and tapped lines, there is danger in the jungle. The choir voice of The Peoples weaves in between the trees, through the hanging vines and into the radio waves. They like baseball and they have lots of friends, but they wish you could be there. You’ll be thankful you weren’t.
How do you save your Soul Stripper?
There was a positive message, so how has it gone all so wrong? Are they sleeping? No. They won’t wake up. Unfolding enveloping missiles of soul recall senses sadly. Sound the alarms but it’s too late. They won’t wake up.
Episode 4 of The Midnight Caller has come through. Turn the knobs just right and you can get the whole broadcast.
