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In this country, no one can be king. But to be kingsize? Why yes, you can.

If all my dreams come true, I’ll play “Kingsize” with a real string orchestra in an empty concert hall someday. Perhaps the coronation of a king. Here’s an anthem, with both the pomp and the circumstance.

On the other side of this EP, “Thirty-Six” is a song by John Porcellino of King-Cat Comics fame and his band Felt Pilotes, from their mid-90s record Wonderful Summer. They were a quartet of suburban Chicago expatriates living cheaply in Denver, playing on small stages in bars on Capitol Hill and the train yard north of downtown before they called it RiNo.

When we met in 1992, Porcellino’s DIY ethos jibed with and inspired me (this wouldn’t exist without him). He made comix and music and hustled his and others’ zines and records (and still does). He was a punk-of-all-trades, cranking out content from an upper floor of the Don Edward with a DAK 2000, a butter-colored Stratocaster and the keenest memory of almost anyone I knew.

It was an era. Looking back, I recognize it as one of those spans in a timeline when previously unimaginable things are possible, in part because you see the window is closing.

Plus, I was a young man falling in love.

We were married by the time Wonderful Summer came out. Soon after, Porcellino got very sick, somebody moved back to Chicago, I think, and you knew there would never* be another Felt Pilotes record.

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Thirty-ish years later, this song is still embedded in my heart, a bullet from a revolution in softness. Its simple lines expressed everything I could say to the person I fell in love with then, and they still do today:

You don't know which way to go
There's just one thing I think you should know

I always want you by my side
I'm never gonna change my mind

Lately I’ve been thinking about the balance of the promises we make versus the ones we keep. Bringing that scale closer to even is a lifetime’s work. I’ll never be king of anything, but here is my proclamation.

Thanks, John. ❤️

_{* Never say never, because they’re back!}

• Listen here

Here is a mixtape of songs made back in Denvertown. Most have been sitting out in the open over on the Cloud of Sound*, but why not collect them into a proper album? Just follow the recipe: sequence tunes, give it a title, add packaging, release!

Notes on these tunes (download here):

1. A slivery, spare tunelet plucked and keyed, and truth is I recorded this as a backing track for something else. But there’s beauty in a simple thing. Like a circle.
2. Strange, but true: I actually do now live on a sort of cul-de-sac, and I am also at this writing a sitting member on the board of the HOA. The rest of this song, however, is (still) fiction.
3. My neighbor in Denver had an old Pontiac Grand Prix SJ parked on the street for years (likely still does). Summer sun baked away its factory sheen, and winter snow made its sharp angles all the stranger. That car and its shifting stillness is at least a little bit behind this arpeggiated experiment for two stringed instruments and an app called Bebot.
4. Always thought I might do more with this one, perhaps add a second voice, make a video, but alas. Fun fact: I recorded the vocals on a commute to work, waiting for the 27 when it still went across Yale Ave. in south Denver. Listen closely, and you’ll hear.
5. Another tune that could be bigger, longer … but better? Maybe not. This one is dedicated Uncle Rick.
6. A song to follow “Baby It’s Cold Outside,” when the man-who-won’t-take-no-for-an-answer finally realizes no is the answer.
7. John Dowland plugs in his hollow body electric guitar in a quiet Quonset hut and plays us this lament.

The world is jam-packed with homemade music, and your freetime is limited. On behalf of Kingsize Beast, thank you for listening. Proceed as if they give a damn.

• Listen

Sometime last spring I took a picture that’s stayed with me all year. I didn’t mean to, but somehow the frame captured the mood of the last light of day without really getting the light itself. There’s a brightness, yes, but it’s tinged with awareness that the light is fading. The golden hour.

With a similar but reversed kind of layered vision, I’m looking back at 2020. An extraordinarily hard year. Deadly for way too many innocent people. But every day was a gift.

Here is a very small token of my gratitude. Please enjoy.

My current read for the NLS is Bruno Latour’s devastingly eye-opening Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime. Even from the first post-acknowledgements page, you get the idea: