Wayward friends John Taj Neville and Michael Barrett (Secret Message Machine, Blank Blank) reunited in 2023 when they discovered that, after more than a decade of lost contact, they lived in the same wooded neighborhood outside of Chapel Hill, NC. 

They slowly worked on a batch of songs over the next year, showcasing Neville’s songwriting with Barrett engineering, producing and playing drums and auxiliary instruments. The resulting album is a deep dive into Neville’s contemplations on life-as-we-know-it. Barrett holds down the rhythms, adding supportive flare on the bass and bouncy drumming under Neville’s baritone vocals. Loss, spirituality, human bonds to each other and to nature come into focus, surrounded by strum-strummy guitars, adventuresome finger-picking and rapt melodic leads. Bright With a Strange Window tells the story of Neville approaching middle-age, and coming to view reality hopefully more as it is, rather than how he would like it to be.

SPICE HAWK! EP (2020)

In the early quarantine days of the Covid-19 pandemic, my old friend and musical collaborator Joe Norkus was playing around with an old drum machine and said, “you should record some songs, I’ll make you beats.” So that’s what we did. Joe made beats and I played guitar and sang. He filled out the songs with bass and organ. This is the result.

These tunes are really simple but were really fun to make and gave me something to obsess over in the early days of the pandemic in 2020. I’ve wanted to release them for a while but was afraid they weren’t “done” enough. Turns out they are, for better or worse. Hope you enjoy.

Credited on:

Embarrassing Fruits:

Frontier Justice (2010)

Community / Exploitation (2009)

The First Time EP (2008)