A Bandcamp Day Sale & a lot about Sunny Day Real Estate

Everyone’s a Winner, Bargains Galore!

Here’s a weird thing: “Step Right Up” off of Tom Waits’s excellent 1976 album Small Change is the only song on that album that I can’t put over an Instagram post, and it’s the only one that I ever want playing when I’ve got some sort of sale to talk about. The other ten (sad) songs are up for grabs, but I was gonna try to be funny, because I always have such a weird relationship to having to sometimes be a strange carnival-barker version of myself as part of my job. And honestly, some fragment of that song is usually on my mind whenever I’m trying to figure out how to be a little less awkward when ushering people (gently) toward either of our stores…it’s kinda perfect. And man, that one line always stops me in my tracks: “You got it buddy…the large print giveth, and the small print taketh away…”

Anyway, all of that is to say, they just made another Bandcamp Day for us. I don’t think I’ve brought these up in here yet, so bear with me: On the first Friday of (almost) every month, Bandcamp passes up their usual fees & commissions on record sales…it was a nice thing they started doing during the pandemic to help out bands and small independent labels (like mine), and some months it’s been a giant help.

This month, we’re passing that savings on to you—as they say in, I dunno, mattress warehouse commericals—I’ve made a discount code that covers the cut that they’re *not* taking, plus a little more just for fun!

The code word GOODFOOT gets you 20% OFF of anything in the Landland Bandcamp thing.

And just for (more) fun, that code also works in our Landland General Store (the BigCartel one), so if you’ve been eyeballing any of the posters or shirts or whatever else over there, the decision just got 1/5th easier.

So, ALL of our stuff in either store is 20% OFF, but just for today—Friday, May the 3rd—from now until midnight (or technically, 11:59pm).

GOODFOOT

Say it to the internet stores.

Oh…ONE IMPORTANT NOTE! Our BigCartel store now lets you use ApplePay to check out FAST—that’ll actually speed right past the code part, so to get the discount, it looks like you HAVE to check out the slow way. Sorta annoying, but on that note, we can’t adjust orders if the code isn’t entered, so please make sure it’s in there. Pay less for the stuff! Get these records (that I love) outta my house! Same with the posters…we’d love to ship them right to you! Step right up!

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Novum Vetus

On a COMPLETELY different note, the “new” Sunny Day Real Estate album just went up on streaming, and that’s in quotes because it’s a full re-recording of their debut album, Diary from 1994…this one’s Diary at London Bridge Studio, having been recorded at the same studio near Seattle where Pearl Jam recorded Ten, and I think it’ll be interesting seeing people reconcile the fact that these guys took an album that was so important when it came out that it effectively helped define a genre of music, and then 30 years later...they somehow made it better.

I’ve gone on and on all over the place about how important this band has been to me, so I’m going to try to keep this relatively succinct¹; the original Diary is one of a handful of albums where I can vividly remember everything about the first time I ever heard it: My older cousin Josh had always been my gateway to finding out about music—I’ve got more to say about him in a future substack, but most of what I got into as a kid came from digging through the pile of CDs he’d have spilling out of his paint-splattered backpack and studying the liner notes & thanks lists in between taking turns at playing Sega Genesis games; just picking up whatever was around and being like, "What's a Dinosaur Jr?" or "Is Arcwelder the name of the band or the album?" I think Sunny Day Real Estate's Diary was the first or second time I ever got a sense that he might've been keeping track of his role in shaping my formative years; he'd just seen them play up in Minneapolis and bought a cd at the show, and I don't remember exactly why it came up, but at some point he ended up kinda thrusting it at me to borrow for the weekend.

I clearly remember sitting in a friend’s carpeted basement, three of us buddies huddled around a boombox, just listening to this thing straight through—not just having it going in the background while doing homework or playing video games, but just avidly and directly listening to a thing that sounded like nothing I'd ever heard before. I don't know if it was an over-saturation of hyper-didactic punk music leading up to this (which I do still love), or just perfect timing with puberty and the weird rush of emotions that comes with all of that, but from the very start, the comparatively-abstract sincerity in the lyrics and all of the tender quiet-to-loud dynamics really hit me and my friends hard and I don't think there's any way to overstate how obsessed we became with this album.

Anyway, fast forward to now, and the reason I’m mentioning this at all: I made a music video. It’s months later and it’s still one of the weirdest things to wrap my head around.

I’ve ended up in a really lucky and cool spot where I get to work on posters & art things for Sunny Day Real Estate sometimes. It means more to me than a lot of the work I get to do—it just does—almost to the point where I put so much pressure on myself to do a good job that it almost ends up not happening…every single time. I have the hardest time working on things for bands I LOVE…if you look closely you can see it; our poster for Cap’n Jazz was a thing that had been a DREAM to me forever—I never even expected them to play shows again—and when it came down to it, Jes swooped in at the 11th hour and saved me from weird work paralysis, letting me sorta take a more backseat “art director” role on a poster I never would’ve let myself make. I don’t know what it is…there’s other examples, but I’ll spare myself for now, haha.

So, when Jeremy Enigk called about the 30th anniversary of Diary, and told me that they’d already re-recorded it and were setting up a summer of shows, he sent me an advance copy of it—eeek!—and then IMMEDIATELY threw me a major curve ball asking if I’d, uh, make a music video for the one unheard song on this new Diary album; their first unreleased material in a decade.

I thought of the heavily-worn, pre-internet VHS tape those same friends & I had made of Sunny Day playing on 120 Minutes, and the official videos for “Seven” & “In Circles.” It’s hard to articulate this kind of mystique now that everything’s online forever, but what we’d copied onto that tape was the ONLY video document of these guys that existed back then, and we studied it RELIGIOUSLY. The idea of ever having anything to add to that canon would’ve melted my young mind back then, and it does now.

All of that is saying nothing of the elephant in the room: I didn’t actually know how to make a music video.

The closest I’d ever come was back before the beginning of this most recent Sunny Day Real Estate reunion, they’d asked me to make some sort of poster or graphic representation of an anagram that Dan Hoerner had constructed out of all of their upcoming tour dates…nobody knew they were about to announce a tour, and above all things, this was meant to be very cryptic. The idea was that it’d possibly be a poster, maybe for sale; that part wasn’t as crucial as just making sure we teased that something was coming. Safe to say, nobody (as far as I know) got this one figured out ahead of time.

I wasn’t sure exactly how well a poster would’ve worked for this—in my mind, it might’ve looked like, I dunno, poetry wall art, which for better or worse is REALLY not my forté—so I proposed doing something more along the lines of all the time-lapse process videos I’d made for Instagram (which I’d love to find time to upload to the Landland YouTube…someday). One of them had been of an old tugboat I’d made for one of Jeremy’s tour posters, and those videos are very pleasant to watch, because they kinda gradually build a drawing over time that someone gets to see happen as the result of countless technical decisions and personal markmaking “vocabulary,” and over time (granted, it’s very much sped-up…hours get condensed into something like 30 seconds) the drawing reveals itself.

I quickly threw this one up here just to show y’all what I’m talking about…it’s got a glitchy edit in there, but I’m determined to post this thing you’re (hopefully) reading sometime before the sun rises², so bear with me:

It seemed very much to me like this long string of abstract poetic text that Dan had built would probably benefit more from that kind of presentation. The band was into it. I think I actually showed them a couple other ones that I’d made for “flyers” for a couple Slow Mass shows we’d had at our studio. They’re buried somewhere deep in my Instagram, but they were essentially the next progression in this idea: A drawing (or information) that rolls out over time and delivers a message “in real time,” by just drawing continuously over the top of itself.

Clayboard—the surface I use to draw on—is excellent for this, because it allows you to carve white space and lines back out of an area you’ve inked over. So I’d draw text in black ink all over a clayboard, fill it with more black to cancel all of that text out and give myself a new “blank” slate. At that point, I’d carve out the reverse: white text on top of the new solid black surface. Then, once the camera had a moment with that white-on-black text—long enough that someone could read it—that area would get entirely carved back to white (or as close as necessary), and I’d just move back and forth like that until all the text had been drawn.

With that being the plan for this tour “pre-announcement,” I sat down and “filmed” this whole thing in one go, using my iPhone and a tripod rigged out of a couple lamps and office supplies (I’ve since gotten a set-up that I don’t have to entirely build from scratch and old rulers, thankfully). I think this was a couple hours of drawing, maybe three…I was moving fast because I didn’t totally expect it to work, but after some minor editing to smoothly ease in and out of the time-lapse, and once we synced it up with their song “Grendel,” it all clicked into place:

So that was the groundwork for what we planned to do with the music video that I was definitely going to make for the new Sunny Day Real Estate song. No pressure. Also, the song is seven-and-a-half minutes long. Alright then. In reality, I told Jeremy I’d give it a try, as long as we all knew the whole thing could end up an unusable failure. I needed permission to fail in order to take it on at all.

One thing that had always bothered me about the time-lapses I’d done previously, is that I’m constantly needing to rotate the clayboard to approach the linework at specific angles, and the thing is flipping around like crazy the whole time. I kinda made use of that in the anagram video above, but it wouldn’t have worked at all for this.

I ended up taking a small drafting board that belonged to my Grandpa—which he’d used to draw up houses and construction projects—and mounted that onto a lazy susan to give me the full ability to rotate the entire surface however I needed to. From there, I mounted my cutting mat that I draw on so that I could tape down “registration markers”; little bits of clayboard fixed to the table that I could use to align the drawing, allowing me to move it to do high res scans periodically without messing up the positioning for the tripod and the camera, which I also mounted to the drafting board so that it would also always stay stationary relative to the drawing as I rotated the board beneath it. In the final video, you can see the shadows jumping around when the board rotates, because the lighting I was using was off to the side and not mounted to the board.

When I draw on clayboard, there’s a bit of a drop-off on the edge (it’s approx. 1/8” thick), so to not have to deal with that edge all the time, I’ll usually take another smaller piece of clayboard and butt that up against the drawing, so that my right hand can have an even, continuous surface to rest on. Usually that’s just some scrap piece of whatever, but for this, it felt right to use that same original drawing I’d used for the Grendel tour anagram video, which is why it’s in all these photos.

The clayboard from the Sunny Day Seattle poster is propped up back there so that I could remember what the little people looked like (or how I’d drawn them), though these ones ended up so much smaller.

This is a jump ahead in the process, but you can see everything mounted to the board, and the registration markers (w/ blue tape) keeping the drawing aligned. Tools scattered everywhere.

We made a plan to give it a nautical theme; the song is in a 3/4 time signature, which is reminiscent of sea shanties (it was half-written for 1998’s How it Feels to Be Something On, which also has a few songs that feel the same way). At some point, I realized it’d make the most sense—because this wasn’t traditional animation—to have one central figure (the ship) that we just continuously did stuff to. The plan was to keep it in the same place and not have to draw it over and over again, but to put it through hell…we brainstormed a list of challenges for the little fisher-price people on board to endure, and I ran it through the logistics of how I could possibly pull it off, again, knowing that this couldn’t happen like traditional animation.

The way this worked—because I was constantly attacking and repairing the ship and the conditions of the drawing were changing in an irreversible & totally linear fashion—was that once I sat down and started filming, I had to keep moving. I was literally destroying the drawing as I took things away and added new bits, and NONE of it could be recreated without a serious jump in continuity. I had to know where the drawing was going to go for the next two or three hours or so, which things from the list were going to happen to it, and how it would recover (or not). I was drawing in a frenzy (I’m relatively slow at it in general), and it was easy to forget my next moves if it wasn’t written out. I also had to confidently draw over the top of the drawing and carve it back without sketching anything out or practicing on some sketch on the side.

Every time I sat down at the desk over the course of nine days and nights, I’d start by just staring at it for however long it took, planning out what would happen and sometimes sorta miming the actions with my hand. I’d make these sub-lists based on the master list, which I’d tape to the lamp in right front of my face, so that I could just glance up quickly at the notes to see what my next move was…and eventually I ended up just writing the notes on the cutting mat itself. Any port in a storm.

Some of this didn't end up fitting in, and I guess some of it is notes about records that aren't out yet.

I did eventually end up pulling in some “stop-motion” elements, which were basically just tiny bits of drawings that I could pull around with my scraping tool at the same time I was drawing. That was the closest I got to “animating” anything, and it was strange and kinda difficult to coordinate, mostly on the fly. I also figured out some other “practical effects,” like using a desk lamp at my otherwise dimly-lit drawing station to create the flashes of lightning & cannon blasts.

At this point, the little crumbles from scratching away the clayboard were EVERYWHERE.

Pretty much every night when I’d get done filming, I’d take the day’s clips and add them to the main video file, which I was syncing to the song and editing piece-by-piece as I added them, doing tiny surgical edits to the pacing to get certain lightning flashes to line up perfectly with William’s kick drum, or getting certain stages in the drawing’s progression to line up with the rise and fall of the song.

That part was wildly fun for me, and so much of it had to do with spotting moments of near-serendipity and massaging them into a perfect fit. It was always a super relaxing way to end the day, and then I’d send it to Jeremy, and we’d usually end up on the phone talking through what could happen next. Every conversation included me making sure he knew that yeah, it’s working now, but if I ruin it, I can’t go back, and the whole thing will end up ruined…and we just gotta be okay with that. Permission to fail in order to keep moving forward, until eventually, it was just a matter of how to wrap it up.

Jeremy wanted the rebirth of the ship and the dawn of a new day to be the only moment in the video where we saw color. I wanted to fully obliterate the drawing and for that to hurt a little bit after investing so much time and energy and worry and focus into it. By the end, I’d drawn into and carved back into the clayboard so many times, that new ink was settling into the deeply rutted grooves in the board. The fine-tipped pens I use for line work were instantly shredded within a few minutes from being dragged fast over all that texture, and the brush pens I use for the broad strokes were falling apart too, which I didn’t know was possible from my typical use.

Anyway, I don’t know exactly what else to say about this. It’s been really cool seeing people react to it—so much of it has been so positive!—and I’ve gotten really nice messages and texts about it. I still sorta can’t believe I got to do this, and that I mostly pulled it off. I wouldn’t be against doing another thing like this at some point, but I can’t imagine another band that could’ve gotten me to jump in the lake the way I did with this one.

I know it’s kind of a thing now to drench every project in weird gratitude hyperbole, but I really am so grateful to Jeremy and Dan and William from Sunny Day Real Estate for being the best, and for pushing me to do something so ridiculously far from my comfort zone. I guess I should probably try to cram a link to the actual video in here somewhere…I’ve somehow found the limit on Substack too, so I’ll wrap it up here. Thanks for reading this long thing, and thanks for watching this video, if you do, or if you already have. Thanks.

1. i had the best intentions, seriously

2. didn’t happen…not even close.