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“A rugged vocal performance is accented by cascading backing harmonies and delivers poetry about bottling up pain and grief. A chugging arrangement creates a bed of toe-tapping tempos and sleek guitars for a simplistic yet potent single… shaping up to be a landmark release for the folk-rock band.” – Glide Magazine

“Bacon wrote ‘Alone With Grief’ to be a comfort and a balm to those who have experienced loss, but without sugar-coating or toxic positivity.” – The Bluegrass Situation

“Fleetwood Mac would be fortunate to have such endearing well-written songs as these… Annie is the standard California folk-rock Americana artist who has seasoned her work… no rough edges just bracingly smart music… imaginative lyrics, captivating melodies & a formal breadth with her voice… songs can be ethereal, maybe even approach a little surrealism in structure. But Annie deals with reality quite closely…on her terms.” – Americana Highways

“Finely crafted and full of atmosphere. Bacon’s vocal performance is particularly effective; her weariness and hurt are evident in her voice as she delivers a beautiful melody… Bacon exposes her vulnerabilities, confronting heartbreak, grief, loss and identity as she draws us into intimate reflections on difficult personal experiences. This is mature, sophisticated songwriting, music and feeling to lose yourself in. Be absorbed.” – Americana UK

“When I think of people who exemplify the Bay Area’s creative culture, I think of people like Annie Bacon. Highly original, filled with integrity and continually questing…” – No Depression

“Creates a cinematic experience for listeners with haunting melodies and carefully orchestrated harmonies. Her sound varies as each track pulls from various influences, sometimes folk, sometimes indie-rock, but always fiercely emotional.” – Earmilk

“Bacon at her most vulnerable and forthcoming… encourages us to be present in our emotions, even if those emotions don’t feel good. Emotions can’t be just wished away, and ‘Mist’ acknowledges that it’s better to confront them head-on… conjuring up thoughts of Stevie Nicks or Carly Simon.” – V13

“Annie Bacon’s storytelling is exceptional.” – Folk Radio UK 

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Annie Bacon & Her Oshen – Storm

Folk-rock Americana singer-songwriter Annie Bacon & her Oshen’s fourth LP Storm (out June 14) is a meditation on grief. Bacon lays her soul bare as she confronts broken hearts, death and the loss of her own identity, all while utilizing the strengths of folk music’s sincerity in storytelling and rock n roll’s engagement with our primal emotions. It’s an album that starts with a scream (“Secret Broken Heart”) and ends with a whisper (“Worry”). It’s a journey through the most difficult time in one woman’s life; a mature album of heart-on-your-sleeve intimacy and powerfully vivid honesty.

The album kicks off with the soft-rocker “Secret Broken Heart,” with its big guitars that give way to Bacon’s luscious voice and gorgeous harmonies. Stylistically, it lands somewhere within the “Dreams” of Fleetwood Mac, The Cranberries and Brandi Carlile. She sings about self-sacrifice and hiding your feelings for the sake of others, perhaps to your own detriment. “She’s got a shimmer from a secret broken heart / You can see it if you look at her real hard / She drives around crying in her car / Another earthquake ripping another little scar.” At its core it’s a reminder that we never know what someone is going through, because so many of us hide our grief away.

“Walk A Little Farther” is a dark meditation for a broken heart. It confronts wallowing in darkness while holding back crying out in desperation. Its plucky, syncopated pace urges you to take a step, and then one more, to move just a little bit faster than your pain. Its outro works as a prescribed mantra for those who need to hear it, urging them to “walk a little farther / start again.”

“I would go for long walks,” says Bacon, “I knew that if I stopped, my grief was going to overwhelm me. I musically wanted to capture that feeling. I got into this habit of: walk, home, shower (let it burn), say a prayer, write a song. We shot the video near the Huron River in Ann Arbor, where I’d take my walks. I wanted to get the feel of the dreamscape and sadness I was feeling at the time. Grief doesn’t stop. It happens in the daytime. It happens all the time. My walk felt neverending, like I just had to keep going.”

“Mist” has the emotional depth and mesmerizingly ethereal vocal quality of Stevie Nicks or Carly Simon. Bacon’s shifting inward/outward lyrical perspective urges us to be present in our emotions, even if it feels bad. It’s comforting guitar lick anchors the song before leading into a melodic chorus that simply reels you in, despite lyrically never repeating.

“I was driving when the whole song came to me at once,” says Bacon. “My kid was sleeping in the back seat. I was trying to imagine what I was looking for in the mist. I put myself in that space. I realized that I was looking for me. I was the one who was lost. How do you come back to yourself when you feel lost in the world? The only way back, is to be where you are in the world at that moment. Even if it’s painful.”

“Alone with Grief” was written about her deceased father. It’s a song of solidarity to soothe broken hearts and bring solace when grief is fresh and at its most painful. This song is a healing salve with its relaxing bossa nova percussion and Bacon’s breezy, beautiful vocals. It gives off nice, beachy, “The Girl From Ipanema” vibes, but with lyrics that bare a deep wisdom. “When every death contains a thousand more / And you’re holding onto breath but you don’t know what for / When the minutes feel like years because a second changed your life / Just know you’re not the only one alone with grief tonight,” she sings.

“I wanted this song to bring people comfort,” says Bacon, “in a way that I needed comfort when I was so lost in my grief. I was thinking about the experience of early parenting, when I was nursing my baby in the middle of the night … there’s this alone/together thing. It’s just you and this baby, in the whole fucking world, at three in the morning. You’re exhausted. It’s very lonely. It’s very solitary. And yet, there are people feeding babies at the exact same time, in the middle of the night, all over the world. You’re totally alone, and yet other people are having the exact same experience as you at the same time. I wanted to channel that feeling in this song.”

“Can’t Remember” brings grief’s ability to warp our memory into heartbreaking focus: “If our love was strong / I can’t remember anymore / If you were my one true love / I’ve forgotten that by now.” On “When Will I Learn” the sadness of the pedal steel and warmth of the organ accentuate the song’s theme of accepting people for who they are, not what you want them to be.

Bacon brings us peace in the idea that we’re not alone in our pain with songs like “The Island,” where she sings about things you can see but can’t have, like a potential lover or a lost childhood home, and “California Heat” which takes us through the five stages of grief as Bacon walks to her friend’s memorial bench on a hot and dry San Rafael hiking path.

The tender and dark “It Might” breathes. It expands and contracts as it tackles that tricky time of leaving a long-term relationship. It speaks to the experience of meeting the right person at the wrong time, and how insisting on the time we need to heal may mean we miss out on what’s right in front of us. “Dance” continues the idea of letting go, along with the dichotomy of holding on. Where in “California Heat” Bacon sings of her friend “I’m not ready to write a song about you” — now she was ready to embrace her feelings.

“She was a perfect human being,” Bacon says. “She was beautiful, smart, brilliant, kind, playful and fun. She could party with the best of them. She was also a yoga instructor. Now I do yoga every morning to commune with her, to stay close to her. It was absolutely devastating to lose her. One of my tools to get through grief is by continuing to have a relationship with my dead people. This song is a rumination on missing her and who she was. I’m learning from her memory how to stay present, to enjoy and appreciate the things I have in the moment.”

“Dance” also has 172 names whispered into it, names of people from Bacon’s family, community and fans, including that of her father and her friend.

“No Clove Day” (co-written with Alto, MI songwriter Kyle Rasche) is about small moments of self-destruction that remind you that you’re alive, bloody lungs and all. “Love Can Mean” is a reminder to love yourself, and gives you permission to leave a lover if it’s the right thing to do. The forlorn pedal steel emphasizes Bacon’s lyrics that move through your heart like an arrow of truth, even if it’s hard to hear. The gentle honky tonk shuffle of “It’s Okay” is similarly a song that Bacon wrote to remind herself to be kind to herself, and humble in a world that is always going to change.

The album ends with the gentle Lorretta Lynn meets Hurray for the Riff Raff acoustic-folk hush of “Worry,” a soothing balm that closes the record with a message of hope. “Maybe if I worry every angle / I can cut pain off at the pass / Or maybe worry is the trouble / Maybe I should worry a little less,” she sings.

Bacon made this album with Paul Defiglia (Avett Brothers, Langhorn Slim, Erin Rae, Twain) at his Daylight studio in Nashville with engineers Kate Haldrup (Sam Bush, Liz Cooper, Lilly Hiatt, Erin Rae) and Wil Tsyon.

“I knew that I could only work with Paul to make this really tender project,” says Bacon, “even though it was going to mean traveling to Nashville. There’s nowhere else on earth that’s safe enough for me to go where I needed to go on this record, psychically and spiritually.”

On Storm, Bacon provided all the vocals and played her sunburst Les Paul guitar as well as co-producing with Defiglia who contributed bass, keys, synth, organ and drum machine. Defiglia brought in a couple of ringers: Bacon’s college friend Thomas Bryan Eaton (Miss Tess) on guitars, pedal steel & mandolin, and Nashville jazz-drumming phenom Anson Hohne who rounded out the group on percussion. Hohne, as a composer, played with an uncanny sense of sound, space, tone and expression. Bacon came to them with 14 songs and they immediately tapped into something magical. Nearly unrehearsed, they played with a symbiosis, knocking all of the songs out in two days, with a third day for pickups. Mike Clemow and Wade Strange mixed the record at SeeThruSound in New York City, and it was mastered by Piper Payne (Janis Ian, Dolly Parton, LeAnn Rimes) at Neato Mastering in Nashville.

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Bacon grew up in Maine and was ocean obsessed. She played a little music in high school, studied politics in college, and then moved to Oakland where she met a transgender woman and incredible musician named Nicole McRory. McRory became Bacon’s first musical mentor, and Bacon played in her band for five years. Bacon’s single “Nicki’s Song” (2016) is about her. Later, she was encouraged to learn bass and joined the swaggering country-rock revival band Sweet Crude Bill. Just as that project was ending, Bacon got her first laptop with recording capabilities. She began writing her own songs and Annie Bacon & Her Oshen was born.

Her backing band, Oshen, is a rotating cast of players that’s changed as she’s moved from Oakland to San Francisco to Ann Arbor, Michigan. “When I lost my faith,” Bacon says, “the ocean gave it back to me. My 28-year-old self thought it would be fun to spell it phonetically: O-s-h-e-n.”

Her first album Live at the Red Devil Lounge (2011) was recorded live from the soundboard, capturing a very special night two days before Christmas with Savannah Jo Lack (Lord Huron, Alanis Morissette, Rod Stewart) on violin and James Nash (The Waybacks, Elvis Costello, Emmylou Harris, Bela Fleck) on guitar and mandolin.

Bacon found out she was pregnant when she began recording Light to See Dark (2012), and  her son was born a week after the album was mastered. The children of her long-time bandmates Elizabeth Greenblatt and Cristian Hernandez (who also engineered, produced, and mixed the album) would play in Bacon’s home studio in the tower of an old Sears building in San Francisco while they recorded for months. Standout track “A Pounding Corps of Drummers” holds a special place in Bacon’s heart as it was her late father’s favorite of her songs.

Motherhood was a powerful and focusing force for Bacon, and she got serious about her craft in her son’s early years, but it was a time of turbulence and trauma for Bacon leading up to her album Stranded Songs (2013). Her then-partner lost his job, they had to temporarily flee the Bay Area, and her son had a freak series of life-threatening infections.

“It was a record I had to make with my friends [Omar Cuellar, Tal Ariel, Toan Pham and Miles Gordon] to help me heal from what I’d just gone through,” Bacon says. “I had these ukulele songs that I’d bring out at parties, all adorably fun and didn’t fit anywhere in my catalog. It was like a restart as I was stranded in my life and these songs were stranded too. We found home together.”

Bacon & her Oshen began to generate some buzz in San Francisco, but things were in constant flux. Her community was trying to hold itself together in the wake of a changing scene. Warehouse parties were gone. Rents were getting crazy, and her partner lost his job again.

In the midst of all this, Bacon participated in MacArthur genius grant recipient Taylor Mac’s A 24-Decade History of Popular Music, including their only 24-hour performance in New York City and a four show stint at the Curran Theatre in San Francisco.

“The show is about how communities are built by breaking them down,” says Bacon. “My ego flared during a performance, and I just sat on the stairs crying instead of working the show. Life had just become so hard in San Francisco. Everything was a competition all the time. How do I stay afloat? How do I keep my head above water, musically, creatively, and financially? I invited ego death. I wanted my ego to die. Be careful what you ask for, because I did actually end up getting that.”

It was time to turn the tides.They packed up and left the Bay Area for Ann Arbor, Michigan. Bacon wasted no time and quickly found a place in an incredible folk music scene. “I had to break things down and start all over again. Thankfully, the Michigan community opened its arms to me,” says Bacon.

Nothing Stays the Same (2019) was the first time Bacon worked with Defiglia. She recorded three songs with him in his Nashville backyard studio, and was hooked. She made several more trips to Nashville to record the album, but Bacon wasn’t able to enjoy the fruit of her labors as a series of tragedies fell like dominos just as the album came out.

The album’s title track was written for one of Bacon’s closest friends who almost succumbed to her cancer the week before the album was released. Bacon flew to San Francisco to be with her, and thankfully she temporarily pulled through. A week later, her then-mother-in-law was diagnosed with stage-four pancreatic cancer, and touring the new record was put on hold. She passed away eight weeks after diagnosis. Two weeks after that, her San Francisco friend passed away. Two months later her father unexpectedly died. A week later, her then-partner lost his job for a third time. The COVID pandemic started five weeks after that. Within a few months, her childhood home was sold in a rush, and she had a fall that left her unable to walk for months. By the end of 2022, her long-term relationship had fallen apart as well, and she was unpacking her life in a small apartment along the Huron River.

“It was a shit show,” says Bacon. “I’m not sure I would have made it through if I didn’t have a kid, to be completely honest. My song ‘It’s Okay’ is about those worst days. It’s a bouncy song, but I had to stop over and over while we were recording, because I’d just start sobbing. No one had heard the song before I brought it into the studio. It felt like a very selfish song. It’s the one that’s really for me, but I hope it speaks to others too. It’s there to remind me how important it is to speak kindly to myself when the world inside and out is burning. Because no one else will do that if I don’t.”

But true to the creative spirit, Bacon leans into her broken hearts and forges earnest, imperfect art. She emerges from these years with a forthcoming novel on themes of motherhood, betrayal, war and forgiveness; a feature-length folk-musical (co-created with collaborator Kyle Rasche) called The Keeper that’s a love letter to Michigan; and a mountain of new music, including Storm.

Though it was made in an emotional hurricane, Storm is an album for those who need solace in their grief; for those who need to feel less alone and lost. She lets us know that it’s okay to not be okay while we’re navigating our way through the storm, and that we’ll all make it through hard times with as much presence as we can muster, a little patience, a little fire, and most of all kindness to ourselves and others.

“There were moments in the thick of the grief,” says Bacon, “where even the people who knew me best couldn’t touch me. But I’ve learned, you’re not the only one who’s alone. There’s this strange sort of togetherness in these kinds of experiences. You could be a 15-year-old who suddenly lost a parent, an adult whose husband died, or a 30-year-old getting divorced. It’s about accepting these moments of your life when you’re going through this grief, and recognizing that this is not only who you are. That there’s another world on the other side, and you’re not alone.”

TRACK LIST:
01 – Secret Broken Heart
02 – Mist
03 – Can’t Remember
04 – When Will I Learn
05 – California Heat
06 – Walk A Little Farther
07 – It Might
08 – The Island
09 – Alone With Grief
10 – Dance
11 – No Clove Day
12 – Love Can Mean
13 – It’s Okay
14 – Worry

ALBUM CREDITS
All songs written by Annie Bacon (ASCAP) / OSHEN music
Except “No Clove Day” written by Annie Bacon (ASCAP) and Kyle Rasche (BMI)
Produced by Annie Bacon & Paul Defiglia
Recorded by Paul Defiglia with Kate Haldrup and Wil Tsyon at Daylight, Nashville / TN
Mixed by Mike Clemow and Wade Strange at SeeThruSound / NY
Mastered by Piper Payne at Neato Mastering / CA

Performed by:
Annie Bacon: guitar, vocals
Paul Defiglia: bass, keys, synth, organ, drum machine
Thomas Bryan Eaton: guitars, pedal steel, mandolin
Anson Hohne: drums, percussion

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“With a buzzsaw psychedelic urgency, the Portland, Oregon-based instrumental surf-garage-psych project Trabants never relents into cruise control. With soft passages crashing into abrasively hypnotic squawls, along with guitar pyrotechnics, Trabants recalls the work of Russian Circles, Explosions in the Sky, and Allah-Las’.” – Glide Magazine

“Exquisite and mesmerising… a fuzzy guitar-driven rolling ball of psychedelia… The guitars are hypnotic and intoxicating, weaving and punching, with percussion that drives it along and adds colour… will leave you wanting much much more.” – The AU Review

“Straddles the lines between surf, garage-rock and psychedelia… a frantic urgency, with biting guitar tones playing silk road psych over rumbling bass and drums. Think Dick Dale with a heavy lysergic dose. Drive on boys, this is quite the ride.” – Shindig! Magazine

“Two slabs of surfy psych-rock instrumentals from a group that’s been doing it longer than you’ve been alive, probably.” – Bandcamp

“Penna’s expressive, commanding playing sometimes evokes Peter Green, while his acoustic 12-string is reminiscent of Hendrix’ rare forays on the instrument.” – Vintage Guitar

“A captivating blend of Eastern-influenced psychedelic music and classic surf.” – Last Day Deaf

“Trabants cull a mood from something like a spaghetti western or a Frankie-and-Annette flick, establish a riff to serve as its appropriate avatar, and blow it up with solo freakouts and slow-burning crescendos.” – The Boston Phoenix

“Chill on the beach in the sun and listen to the crashing waves, gaze upon the beautifully barren landscape of Sergio Leone’s brutal westerns, dance all night to the fuzzed out guitars of the 1960’s sunset strip, dine with class on the coast of capri… Trabants will take you there.” – Grateful Web

” ‘Mantra’ channels the raw energy of the ’60s with intense fuzz effects, setting the tone for a vivid auditory experience that invites listeners to embark on their own psychedelic journey.” – Psychedelic Underground Generation

“The guitar’s primordial fuzz harmonizes with glockenspiels and bells, hypnotically guiding you through your inner mind like a repeated mantra… will remind you of La Luz, Dick Dale, Tame Impala, Ty Segall, The Doors… Trabants continues to captivate with its retro-modern sound and unique visual experiences.” – lacaverna.net

“The time has come to travel to other dimensions aboard the music of Trabants and its psychedelic song ‘Mantra’ … elements of surf, garage and psychedelia, distinguished by its meditative vibes, a reverse guitar and a catchy chorus… generates a hypnotic environment… paints a mental landscapes of beautiful and flourishing nature… transforming our way of seeing reality… This gem is perfect for listening alone if you want to find meaning in your existence.” – End Sessions

“Penna’s guitar shines throughout. His background in film and TV music comes to the fore… Hot stuff.” – Vintage Rock Magazine

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Trabants – 7-inch vinyl “Mantra” b/w “Surfers On Acid”

Portland, Oregon-based instrumental surf-garage-psych project Trabants is orchestrated by musical auteur Eric Penna and a rotating cast of ‘60s-psych-loving ringers that he assembles like the ensemble cast of a Sergio Leone film. Trabants’ latest fuzzed-out, visceral, psychedelic surf experience is a two-track, 7-inch, 45-rpm vinyl containing the songs “Mantra” b/w “Surfers On Acid” (out via Hypnotic Bridge Records).

Trabants (pronounced Truh-bonts) have shared bills with Dick Dale, Charlie Megira, Mark Sultan of The King Khan & BBQ Show, Yonatan Gat of Monotonix, Tav Falco’s Panther Burns, La Luz, Messer Chups, The Sloths and more. They’ve played festivals across the world including the Surfer Joe Festival (Italy), Tiki Kon (Portland, Ore.) and Surf Guitar 101 Festival (Los Angeles). The roster of Trabants contributors include Pete Curry (Los Straitjackets / Nick Lowe), Samira Winter (Winter), Bryan Murphy (Man Man), Glenn Brigman (Triptides) and members/sidemen of bands as diverse as The Pharcyde, The Monkees, World/Inferno Friendship Society and many more.

Penna’s songs can be heard in Netflix’s Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, Hulu’s Shut Eye, CBS’ Undercover Boss, Gordon Ramsay’s 24 Hours to Hell and Back, films like Surf Noir and T-Rex, and ad campaigns for Mountain Dew, Yeti and others. He was nominated for an Independent Music Award for best instrumental album alongside a placement on the show Becoming featuring Johnny Knoxville.

“These two songs are more deliberate than anything else we’ve done before,” says Penna. “Being an instrumental band, we create a mood. Often times it evokes a place, from Maui to Madrid, from Paris to Tangiers, or from the 1960s’ Sunset Strip to the spaghetti Western landscapes of the Almerían desert. However, these songs serve more as a voyage inside the listener themselves. It’s a record in two parts, side-A and side-B, mind and body represented by each.”

This 7-inch is a mind and body sonic trip to other worlds, where fuzz is the primary alchemical ingredient for life. “Mantra” takes on the aspect of mind as the ultimate psych-rock instrumental. It fuses the best elements of Eastern-influenced psychedelic music and classic surf with its meditative drones, trippy backwards guitar and big expansive chorus. The primal fuzz of the guitar harmonizes with glockenspiels and chimes as its hypnotic core guides you through your inner mind like a repeating mantra. It’s a personal journey inward to the root of existence.

“There’s a heartbeat to the whole thing,” says Penna. “It’s malleable to be whatever you need it to be. To find whatever that source of energy is within yourself. I love exploring music in this way when I’m recording with others. With these particular people. In this particular room. At this particular time. Making this song. Exploring music like that helps me find my mantra, but it’s also a way for you to find your own mantra too.”

The video for “Mantra” was shot over a hot weekend in Palm Springs. The video mirrors an hallucinogenic trip where the protagonist goes on a spiritual desert journey in her mind, and returns in a different form. It blends psychedelic imagery of nature, art and mysticism as she travels through a mid-century modern chic motel and stunning mountain vistas, all through a retro-cool lens.

“I’m Brazilian and loved that Palm Springs heat; I thrive creatively in it.” says Penna, “‘Mantra’ existed in my mind before it was recorded so I shot the whole video to the song in my head. I knew the pace I wanted, and that it should be a journey that could happen in any order. A journey with no start or end. That’s actually my wife in the video. We just loaded up a bag of ‘60s dresses we picked up in weird vintage L.A. shops over the years, with the intention that she’d go film this psychedelic journey with me.”

“Surfers on Acid” takes on the aspect of the body. There’s a sense of urgency in this instrumental surf song’s push and pull. Notes will hesitate, precariously holding on, riding this psychedelic wave of color to its improvised backwards guitar ending. It was recorded to tape, embracing the bleed, not doing punch-ins, and riding full takes to their completion. Penna’s expert guitar mastery is on full display as we’re hit with his groovy labyrinthine melodies and solos.

“On my album Freakout,” says Penna, “we had ‘Mecca,’ which I recorded with an electric sitar/guitar hybrid. This song is a sequel to that. I wanted to flip surf concepts on its head by utilizing my original Tychobrahe Octavia fuzz pedal rather than a clean, reverb surf sound. There’s something primal about that original pedal. The modern version ‘fixes’ the little things I love about the pedal. It’s finicky, but I like that. That pedal really sang with its super dense fuzz, especially through the classic Fender Showman amp that I borrowed from legendary Portland instrumentalists Satan’s Pilgrims.”

Penna grew up in the not-very-rockin’, Edgar Allan Poe creepy meets John Waters weird, city of Baltimore. He started playing music as a teenager, and early on met Andy Bopp of the Interscope Records’ power pop band Love Nut. Bopp took him under his wing to teach him songwriting and recording. He brought Penna on tour to give him an education on the road.

“Andy would take me to record stores while we were on tour,” says Penna. “He’d go through the dollar record bin with me. He liked ‘60s stuff. He’d break down how the modern music that I liked used techniques from the ‘60s and ‘70s. I learned to write songs with these records by methodically studying the forgotten songwriting conventions of past masters of their craft.”

Penna recorded his first album with Bopp producing, a power pop project called Dyslexic Crush. The night they finished, Penna and a bandmate drove overnight to Plymouth, Massachusetts to play it for prospective manager John Lay. They listened to it all day, and he pushed for it to be included in the horror-comedy spoof film Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th. This was the first of a lifetime of Penna’s music being used in film, TV and ads.

Penna moved to Boston when he was 18, just as Baltimore began to swell with a cool indie scene with bands like Beach House, Dan Deacon and Future Islands. He was in talks with Big Deal Records to put out the album, but they folded. But, not before they helped include Dyslexic Crush on a Rhino Records ‘90s teen bands compilation. Penna kept up Dyslexic Crush as he attended Boston University. After an internship at Capital Records in Los Angeles, Penna returned to Boston and opened his first recording studio where he honed his chops recording twelve hours a day.

During this time he helped form the indie/punk band Ketman, who became popular in Boston’s rock scene. They toured Brazil and the U.S.A. They played shows with legends like Mike Watt and Silver Jews. The Boston Phoenix chose them as the best band in Massachusetts in their “50 states 50 bands” article. Their first full-length record El Topo did really well, and their next record Ketman A Go Go did just as well, but didn’t raise them to the next level.

“We were practicing everyday,” says Penna. “The stagnation of that second record was like the kiss of death. I was very much like a workhorse. That music required a lot of agility. I kept in-practice, seven days a week, for a long time. The strict regiment led me crave laid back and mysterious surf instrumentals so I started another band to take gigs Ketman wasn’t right for. I booked the first show with no band or songs and had to build it right away.”

Trabants, named after an Eastern European car made of compressed cotton, was born with Penna at the helm and a rotating cast of musicians, a different Boston supergroup at each show. They played a mixed repertoire of obscure movie soundtrack songs and original surf instrumentals.

“The name Trabants was as random as the concept,” says Penna. “It’s the car everyone was getting around in when I visited Eastern Europe. They’re from another universe. It felt apt. We were this ragtag group of musicians trying to make a living playing music, doing it in an inhospitable environment. Later I found out it means a naturally occurring satellite in German. I always thought there’s something beautiful and lonely about that metaphor. How we, as musicians, were orbiting this strange, undulating group of songs that we picked from all these different places.”

Penna was enamored with the book Recording the Beatles: The Studio Equipment and Techniques Used to Create Their Classic Albums by Kevin Ryan & Brian Kehew, when he recorded the first Trabants album Highwire Surfing (2011). He recorded in mono, using all vintage gear and techniques at his studio in Boston. Penna wanted to push into the world of music for movies/TV, so he packed up and moved to Los Angeles before releasing Highwire Surfing into the world.

After a couple hard-fought L.A. years of going out every night to make friends and connections, Penna became a go-to soundtrack person for getting vintage sounds. He wrote and recorded everyday, building a catalog of music that can be heard in shows like MTV’s Catfish, Shark Week and multiple Vice documentaries. He scored the film Surf Noir, featuring a version of the classic track “Sea of Love” with vocals from actress Troian Bellasario (of Pretty Little Liars).

He went back to Boston for a summer to record Cinematic (2013), a spaghetti Western-surf album with horns, where every song could be its own movie. Standout track “Dead Men Tell No Lies” would feel right at home in a Quentin Tarantino / Robert Rodriguez collaboration and landed placements in both NFL defensive end Simeon Rice’s directorial debut Unsullied and the romantic comedy In Stereo, both in 2015.

“Trabants encompasses the vintage aspect of my music. Eric Penna could do anything: produce a modern album, write modern pop music, engineer, compose for TV and film, play guitar in someone else’s band, etc… but Trabants is the temple where I hone my ability to capture sounds from the ’50s and ’60s,” Penna says.

Los Angeles saw a surge of retro-psychedelic rock projects in the mid-2010’s, and Penna recorded many of them, including Winter, Basement Babies, So Many Wizards, and the first two Easy Love albums (which includes one of the sisters of Summer Twins). Penna recorded the Trabants album Freakout (2015) during the 50th anniversary of 1965’s psychedelic boom.

“Psych bands were getting big,” says Penna. “Tame Impala went from being a super-weird unknown band to gaining mainstream popularity. Freakout felt like the world was catching up with how cool the ‘60s were.”

Penna recorded Nel Cuore Di Una Terra Selvaggia (2018) over three and a half years, a David Lynchian spaghetti Western album with a heavy reliance on harpsichord, horns and orchestral arrangements. Penna teamed up with singer Prom Queen for “Daddy’s Got a Big Gun,” a slinky, Nancy Sinatra meets James Bond track that breaks up all the bolero gunfight action of this album.

“I couldn’t find a harpsichord that would stay in tune,” says Penna. “I eventually found this guy in Skid Row who had a warehouse of harpsichords. He tuned harpsichords by ear. He let me set up and I recorded for ten hours in that warehouse.”

An avid record collector, Penna produced and compiled a CD for London-based reissue label Ace Records called CYCLONE! -GALLIC GUITARS A GO GO of never before reissued European ‘60s garage music first heard as part of Mukta Mohan’s morning radio show and the Molotov Cocktail Hour, both on L.A.’s KXLU. Also, The Mary Pickford Foundation enlisted Penna’s help in creating modern soundtracks to silent films being restored in their massive archive for rerelease.

Penna was looking to expand when COVID hit. He moved to Portland, Oregon and set up a larger, more comprehensive studio. He immediately started building his stable of players in Portland including Dave Berkham (bass), and his pal Anthony Brisson (drums). There he recorded Lockdown (2020) & Lockdown (part II) (2023), a collection of fuzzy, blues songs that he’d been working on for nearly a decade, that he now had the time to complete. He recorded Lockdown with a previous lineup that included Pete Curry (Los Straitjackets / Nick Lowe), and Lockdown (part II) with Berkham and Brisson—which was their proving grounds for this new 7-inch.

“I’m getting better at my instrument everyday,” says Penna. “It used to be hard to write a song when I was younger. Now it’s akin to snatching ideas out of the air, like fish out of water. Different songs are passing by me all the time. I write a song almost every day and add them to sync libraries. The diligence of writing a lot does pay off eventually. I write a lot of songs for these records, initially, and I hold onto the ideas that stick around for a while. Eventually, I’ve only held onto the best stuff.”

Penna is currently working on the soundtrack for the documentary Blackangelcity which focuses on the Leimert Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, and celebrates the life of jazz singer Barbara Morrison. Penna also tours as the guitarist with “Planet Earth’s Longest-Running Modern Surf Band,” The Insect Surfers.

The two songs of this 7-inch are harbingers for Trabants next full length LP—recorded with the same lineup, and at the same time as “Mantra” and “Surfers On Acid,” two songs that are built to twist your mind and mutate your body’s third eye open. So, we have more exotica-tinged, fuzzed-out, psychedelic surf guitar instrumentals to look forward to from Penna and his mind-expanding band of psych-rock misfits.

ALBUM CREDITS:
Written, recorded and mixed by Eric Penna at Hemstreet Sound in Portland, OR
Mastered by Nick Zampiello at New Alliance East

Eric Penna – Guitars, percussion
Dave Berkham – bass
Anthony Brisson (coordination) – drums

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“One of the telltale signs of an elite songwriter is sincerity, a quality John Calvin inherently exudes. His lyrics are poetic in nature, while the music is entrenched within the rich traditions of American folk music.” – V13

“Wrapped In folk mystique & intrigue… blends jazzy drums with folk storytelling… a whirlwind of a listen. The unpredictable crashing of the drums slides into droning keys with a twangy twist, creating a collage-style arrangement and a beautiful canvas for Calvin’s introspective songwriting. On a bed of relaxed melodies, the singer/songwriter digs into a vulnerable place and emerges with a palpable longing… a pure country ballad that challenges the genre’s tropes to land on a colorful middle ground between blues, jazz, and indie rock.” – Glide Magazine

“His Tom Petty and Wilco sincerity emphasizes being the best father possible, while also trying to minimize inherited trauma… this song naked of empathy… beautiful melancholic Chick Corea style vibe that swells with cinematic strings.” – Soulwavez

“A totally sincere and melancholic song… a calm that embraces our soul… a violin enters to wrap our hearts in a very good aura… There’s no doubt about the excellent talent of John Calvin, as he has the ability to transmit powerful emotions and messages in every second of [‘I Can Make Your Heart Mine’].” – Zona Emergente

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John Calvin – Greener Fields & Fairer Seas LP (out Jan. 24, 2025)

Americana heartland-rocker John Calvin’s new LP Greener Fields & Fairer Seas (out Jan. 24) is an antidote to the world’s ills. It’s a bold statement that no matter how bad things get, a silver lining always follows. Poetic lyrics weave through a rich tapestry of folk (and occasionally overdriven) guitars, organs, orchestral strings and gospel backing vocals, reminding us to pay attention to the world around us and to choose kindness in our daily lives. It’s an album that delves into the horrors of the pandemic years, while projecting hope through building a family, fatherhood and Texas. This is an album about growing up.

The tongue-in-cheek irony of the title Greener Fields & Fairer Seas isn’t lost on Calvin. “I have a wonderful life, wife and kids,” says Calvin. “I have a lot to be thankful for, but there’s always something more to strive for. Stumbling from bar to bar in my past life was fun, but having people in my life who believe in me inspires me to be a better person.”

Written while Calvin was in the throes of COVID in the early days of the 2020 pandemic, the album kicks off with the uplifting “Rest of My Roads.” Piano and organ peek out before building into its cacophonous orchestral chorus. Eric DeFade’s wailing saxophone solo cuts through the maelstrom in this song about coming to terms with one’s mortality. It has the musical complexity and emotional resonance of The Band while utilizing the loud-quite-loud ebb and flow of the Pixies. The uncertainty of the time is lyrically emphasized in the well-worn metaphor of, “We’re sowing those seeds / Just to watch ‘em grow.”

“I was shivering and sweating,” says Calvin. “I was looking out the window at the leaves and the shadows they were casting. It was a strange, Pink Floyd, psychedelic experience. The grocery stores were out of food and paper. I was eating the same Campbell’s soup every night, until I just stopped eating. People were dying and we didn’t know what was going to happen. It was scary knowing that my kids were relying on me for their safety. I made a promise to myself and my family to not take things for granted.”

The Tom Petty meets Wilco sincerity of “I Can Make Your Heart Mine” emphasizes being the best parent you can possibly be, while attempting to minimize inherited trauma. “What I can’t leave behind / I’ll have to carry on / But I can make your heart mine / I can hold you close and let you go,” Calvin sings as his honest vocals trade off with bass, drums and Rhodes organ in this stripped-bare song of empathy. A phantom guitar is implied through its beautiful, Chick Corea-eque melancholic vibe that crescendos with cinematic strings.

“It’s important to see things from a child’s perspective,” says Calvin. “I use empathy to help my children grow. Your wins will be my wins. Your losses are my losses. You’re worthy of that. We make mistakes and that’s okay. Be accepting of what you can’t control. Listening to the case they’re making will get you 90% there. If you did your job right, your kid will be able to walk away as a mostly unscathed adult.”

The acoustic “Hazel or Blue” is an ode to Calvin’s late grandmother and the family mythology that she passed along. Calvin’s finger-picked guitar dances with the pedal steel as DeFade’s ethereal flute flitters and fades in and out of existence. “The kids in our family either had hazel or blue eyes,” says Calvin, “and the story went you had to worry about the kids with blue eyes.” It’s a song about not making the same mistakes as your parents, or passing them on to your own children.

The pedal steel-centric and geologic “Austin Chalk” ruminates on our oldest human mythology, the flood, while feeling just as timeless. The Austin Chalk is a massive and ancient outcropping of limestone that travels, like Calvin’s troubadourian guitar strums, from Dallas, to Austin, to San Antonio. The bed of underground rock would cause flooding from the Trinity River in certain areas of South Dallas, which have always been separated by racial and economic lines. Lush green spaces intermingled with poverty. The song lives in a mellow Khruangbin-esque drizzle before exploding like a thunderclap on the chorus, all while evoking wet ground previously tread in Stevie Ray Vaughan’s “Texas Flood.”

“I was sitting on my patio playing that rolling intro on my J-50 when it started to rain,” says Calvin. “I’d play louder to keep up with the noise of the storm, then quiet down when there was a lull. Then out of nowhere, someone yelled, ‘Hey, we got a flood on our hands!’ I started thinking about the 4.5 billion year-old Earth versus the 200,000 years us humans have had. Our short time on this planet was a big orienting principle. We’re only here for the blink of an eye.”

Similarly, the wondrous post-grunge song “Gravity” takes on the weight of the world and the crushing inescapability of time. “All the heroes are ground to dust / Just to pave the street / As we waltz along endlessly / To a tune we call time,” he sings.

The plaintive “Saint Innocent” is about coping with the loss of his wife’s best friend. The title is taken from a pinot noir they’d all drink together, while winking at its religious implications. It ruminates on dealing with loss in unhealthy ways. Calvin’s grief can be felt through his primal vocals and impassioned guitar work. Pete Freeman’s furious pedal steel wails and Kelsey Jumper’s sorrowful backing vocals carry the emotional resonance of Joe Cocker’s “With A Little Help From My Friends.”

“Ellen and my wife were peas in a pod,” says Calvin. “We thought we’d spend our lives with her. She’d do firework shows professionally around Michigan. She loved it. She’d have a beer and just watch the fireworks. She was one of those people who just wanted to bring you something lovely and unexpected. Her love and dedication to fireworks was great. I sing, ‘paint those starry skies for me,’ and every time I see fireworks I still think about her.”

The gentle and touching “She Might Be a Song” is also about Ellen, and her succumbing to cancer. Calvin’s lyrical imagery and metaphors of cells dividing, ultraviolet light and “a summer dress of lead” is heartbreaking. Its threadbare intimacy is an alchemical portal into Calvin’s soul, like he’s whispering psychedelic secret truths to each of us listeners individually. It’s incredibly personal yet we all have to deal with the universality of death. It’s tragic and touching, all while feeling like we’re absorbing ancient wisdom in his anguish.

The washed out and trippy “High is My Favorite Height” comes from an off-handed quip from Calvin’s son when he was five years old and staring out of a car window at Texas overpasses shooting into the sky. It’s about seeing things from unique perspectives and opening your mind to the world around you. It calls to the listener to embrace childlike innocence and wonder through its mind-bending space echo. “It took the purple one to rein me in / And the green to settle down again,” Calvin sings, reminiscent of the Hunter S. Thompson Fear and Loathing quote “[we had] a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, laughers, screamers…”

Calvin attended the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, and his song “Our Souls Have Broken Chains” is about Heather Heyer who was fatally injured during the white supremist Unite the Right rally there. It’s a song of frustration at injustice that rolls in like a thunderstorm. The musical tension echoes the fear we all feel from the people who deem us different from them, enemies — people who might kill us because of that feeling. The pandemic years brought these feelings to the forefront through unnecessary violent deaths. George Floyd. Trayvon Martin. Freddie Gray. The song explodes in swirling strings and a near-screaming outro. Calvin’s demand for respect and kindness is like screaming into the void — into a wind that refuses to carry his words to those who need to hear them most.

“I thought that we could come together as a country and hold people accountable,” says Calvin, “that we could change the system. A woman doing the right thing. She’s just protesting. We all should have a right to protest, and she gets run down by an idiot in a Charger. It just broke my heart. We need to stop that primal instinct to think of another person as ‘other,’ to the point that you’d kill them. As a people, we need to find ways to defuse that powder keg.”

“Ode to Denis Johnson” is a love letter to the author, perhaps most known for the short story collection Jesus’ Son. Like the author, this song is fun and harrowing, particularly with it’s opening line of “Kill yourself / In the company of strangers.” It’s California gothic meets Velvet Underground New York skeeze.

“He’s this Raymond Carver type character,” says Calvin. “I was raised Catholic, and his views on Catholicism resonated. The church is for people who’ve made mistakes and are trying to deal with them. People who aren’t visible to the rest of society. Whose trials and tribulations are close to the ideals of Catholicism. The meek inheriting the earth. The Beatitudes, Sermon on the Mount is much more in line with the type of people that Jesus hung out with. It’s about being kind and understanding to the people among us who are struggling most. Denis Johnson got that and turned it into awesome books. There’s also an undercurrent of self sacrifice in Dennis Johnson that’s less healthy. There’s a religious theory that says Jesus was God so he could’ve saved himself. It’s a perspective that can’t be gained by living a simple life.”

The fingerstyle guitar, bossa nova percussion, and loungy organ of “Sturgeon Moon” brings a carefree spirit to this song that embraces the freedom of New York City living. His poetic lyrics take nothing for granted while embracing a beautiful day, moving through trains, or sitting at a cafe sipping on coffee and wine. The ‘60s chunky-pop, Phil Spector wall of sound “Garden State Variety” swirls and swoons as a poignant and soulful love-at-first-sight song.

Album closer “Shenandoah” is a traditional folk song that Calvin performs with sludgy, overdriven guitars and a four-on-the-floor dirge of percussion. Imagine Springsteen, Pete Seegar and Pearl Jam on a camping trip, singing this around a fire with amps up to eleven. This is an album that’s captured a specific time and place in America, and “Shenandoah” is the perfect sendoff in the vein of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land.”

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Calvin’s story begins two generations ago with his finger-picking grandfather’s Gibson J-50 named Jumbo. He passed away when Calvin was eight years old and it sat unplayed in an attic. Years later, his step-grandmother found out he was playing guitar and bequeathed Jumbo to him. Jumbo and Calvin forged a relationship that has culminated in this new album.

“Jumbo isn’t set up right,” says Calvin, “but I love its sound. I always kept this guitar near me, and it always got played. It has this Neil Young mid-range, and I learned as many of his songs as I could. I was writing songs on this guitar my whole life, but it wasn’t until I got laid off in 2008 that I got serious about it.”

Calvin grew up a military brat, and continues a nomadic lifestyle where the only constant of home is his heirloom guitar Jumbo. Born at Fort Benning, Georgia, Calvin moved nearly every two years of his childhood: up and down the East Coast, to South Korea, to Germany, to living near the Pentagon for high school. He attended UVA in Charlottesville. From there he spent four Burning-Man-attending years in San Francisco and Oakland before settling down in New York City where he met his wife and started his family. Work moved him and his family to Dallas where he put out his debut album Masquerade Monday (2018), and wrote the lion’s share of Greener Fields & Fairer Seas. Now Calvin’s started a new South Florida life with his family in Boca Raton.

Very much a New York City album, the songs that made up Masquerade Monday dealt with frustration and loss — the emotional transition of losing his job and the stability that provided, and the loss of a long-term relationship before he met his wife. This primal scream of an album is epitomized in the vivid imagery of songs like “Beautiful & Wasted,” about cautiously watching the cocaine decline of a friend during his more wild NYC days, and the dark, Nick Cave-esque, finger-picked “Run,” which feels like a nightmare where you’re being chased by a faceless entity — where you know that there’s respite ahead, as long as you don’t stop moving.

“I felt like everything was falling apart at that time in my life,” says Calvin. “I was walking with a limp. It had taken a physical toll. I had a friend in Pittsburgh who offered to record the album for me, and that was the first time I worked with Nate Campisi. He heard things in my songs and brought in additional musicians to build this really full sound. It was that experience that inspired me to musically keep going.”

Working with Campisi inspired new songs in Calvin. He loved the recording process and wanted to work with the same people for the next album. Where Masquerade Monday had a loose, hangout feel with yawning tempos, Calvin wanted to do it again with more precision. For years, he’d grab his J-50 and fly from Miami to Pittsburgh every couple of months.

“To carry-on my guitar,” says Calvin, “I had to practically become a paralegal to wrestle with the gate agent every time. I’d stay walking distance to the studio. We did two weeks with drummer Pat Coyle to lock in the base elements. Every subsequent trip was to refine and record the other musicians. I did that for three years. I believe in allowing a song to be organic. To breathe. To allow the song to be human. Embracing flaws as features.”

The time spent to craft this record was well worth it. This is an audiophile’s album. Calvin and Campisi emphasize instruments in specific moments, building complexity and depth in its production and arrangements. It’s an engaging listening experience reminiscent of Tom Waits’ Mule Variations or Leonard Cohen’s early work. Where Masquerade Monday was about loss, Greener Fields & Fairer Seas is about better times now and in the future.

TRACK LIST:
01 – Rest of My Roads
02 – I Can Make Your Heart Mine
03 – Austin Chalk
04 – Gravity
05 – Saint Innocent
06 – She Might Be a Song
07 – Sturgeon Moon
08 – Garden State Variety
09 – High is My Favorite Height
10 – Hazel or Blue
11- Our Souls Have Broken Chains
12- Ode to Denis Johnson
13 – Shenandoah

ALBUM CREDITS:
All songs written by John Calvin except “Shenandoah”
Produced by Nate Campisi

 John Calvin: acoustic guitar, vocals
Greg DeCarolis: guitar, bass, piano, Hammond organ, Rhodes, glockenspiel
Pat Coyle: drums, percussion, backing vocals
Kelsey Jumper: backing vocals
Eric DeFade: sax, flute, brass arrangements
Robert Matchett: trombone
Joe Herndon: trumpet
James Hart: pedal steel
Pete Freeman: pedal steel
David Bernabo: brass and string arrangements, Rhodes
Nadine Sherman: cello
Sandro Leal-Santiesteban: violin
Ashley Freeburn: violin
Jason Hohn: viola
Ricardo Cortés: art & art direction

John Fusco: photography

Recorded and mixed by Nate Campisi at Mr Smalls Recording Studio, Pittsburgh, PA
Mastered by Reuben Cohen at Lurssen Mastering, Burbank, CA