The Best Music My Musical Brothers Have Made

photo by Mike Madison - This is the band Crescent Moon + Big Trouble. L-R Steve McPherson (my actual family brother), Sean McPherson (that’s me), Alexei Casselle (that’s Crescent Moon), Josh Peterson, Peter Leggett

I had a rehearsal today with the group Crescent Moon + Big Trouble. This is a sideproject of a sideproject but it is one of the most amazing musical groups I play in. Big Trouble is a retired instrumental group featuring my brother Steve on guitar and Josh and Peter from Heiruspecs on guitar and drums. We have an interesting take on instrumental music and playing with them has been an incredible gift for the past 15 years. For as long as we’ve been together we’ve also always played with Alexei Casselle aka Crescent Moon. Me and Alexei are the same age, he came up with Oddjobs/CMI same way I was coming up with Heiruspecs. I love Alexei and getting to have a long running project with him is one of the high notes of my musical career. We practiced today because we’ve got a gig coming up opening for Diane. It’s on Saturday January 15 at the Entry, I hope you come. I hope you buy tickets first, here’s that link.

When you are just practicing music you’ve already written the mind can wander in a really beautiful way during a rehearsal. Today as I was looking at these men I’ve known for so long, I was thinking about what my favorite work they’ve done as individuals is. We’ve played great music as a group, but we all have other groups and individual high notes. So, I’d like to tell about the best musical contributions on planet Earth from us five.

The Best Things Crescent Moon + Big Trouble has Made
I love this band. Here’s our best songs. I’ll get into us as individuals next.

Broken Dishes is a song we made at our first rehearsal which was probably in 2006. I wrote the guitar part. Steve, Peter and Josh made it stunningly beautiful. It is this sleepy understated brush work* by Peter that sits ready to pull up to a boil the minute that Alexei brings up his intensity. Steve is floating around with this absolutely tear jerking slide adventure and Josh and me are in the cut with the fundamentals of the composition. But forget about us, the star is Alexei. He teases out the uneasy conversations that move in strange directions when in a new physical location with a family member. The way the environment just changes the tone. It’s raw, it’s ugly and it’s goosebumping. This is one of Alexei’s greatest pieces of writing.

*brushes are fancy weird things that drummers use instead of sticks to make different textures happen. I have no idea how common that knowledge is.

Streetlights is off of our most recent releases and this is one spot where I think this song kept us together as a band when we had the least energy to keep on going. Everybody in the band but Peter has kids. We’ve all got other bands. This band operates at a deficit so we never make any money. For a couple years it seems like all we did was get together twice a year to play this song. The thing was, the song was good enough that that was just fine. My brother wrote the fundamentals on this one and it shows the magic of what my brother does writing wise. Steve writes full, magnificent chordal things and dares the band to find their way into the world of those chords. In this case Josh worked in some beautiful almost country style stylings in the choruses on guitar and he danced around with beautiful joshisms* in the verse.
When we cut this demo I had my doubts about what Alexei would find in it. It moved along in a weird time signature and I believe in the demo it was kind of arbitrary how frequently the riff actually happened. Alexei came back with this defeated & triumphant at-the-same-time lyric that immediately commanded attention. At rehearsal Steve said he has thought about getting it tattooed on his body and now I’m thinking about it too. The band got in there with precision to bend the riff around Alexei’s lyrics. But somehow, we kept the spirit, the energy. And Peter is an absolute vision on the drums. It is so exciting, so up front and so well delivered. I think this is some of our best playing as a collective. That’s why the shit it’s on this list.

*joshisms - Josh has a way of teasing out the beautiful and subtle in anything musical. He will rarely stick his neck and craft the part that demands your attention. And if he does it’s very rare that it will sound like a GUITAR WITH A CAPITAL G. But the man can find the secret beauty in the movement between any three chords, he’ll thread some needle and he’ll give you something that elevates the piece completely. Let’s move on with these players individually.

The Best Things My Brother Steven McPherson has Made
My brother is a hell of a guitar player and writer. Here’s some of his best work.

My brother writes big. He’s not gonna bring a song in that goes from I to IV. There’s gonna be something. He’s into the big shit. And Forecast is the big shit. It’s like if the band Chicago fired their horn section but kept on trying to sound like they had a horn section. This type of writing makes learning Steve’s songs both challenging and rewarding. A lot of great songs aren’t hard to play. This f*cker is hard to play. I’m not on this recording, but I did learn to play this song when I was with Catfish Blue. It’s majestic, it’s ambitious and it’s joyous. Well done Steve.

Like I said, my brother writes big. Because hip-hop has never been dead center in Steve’s musical universe I feel he has a unique gift to just be working in his rock and roll centric world and then every once in awhile discover something that would lock up perfectly with what we were all doing in Heiruspecs. In this case it is again this full beautiful, unruly 6 measure long pattern that sounds amazing. The best hip-hop music comes from things that first weren’t designed to be part of a hip-hop song. In this case, this guitar part just explodes with energy and Felix responded with a hilarious song about the downsides of being a superhero. God damn this song is so fun.

The Best Things Josh Peterson has Made
Josh has been a great guitar player for years. On the low he’s also the sound of the second half of Heiruspecs’ career. Here’s some of his best work.

I knew Josh forever as a guitar player. We’ve been playing together since we were both in high school. I took up way too much oxygen in early Heiruspecs to really let any other music writers shine. I thought the writing work was mine and everyone else would just respond and play. By the time Josh got back in the band we had become much more democratic. But there was a real hierarchy. I had the easiest time getting musical ideas across. I had history on my side plus I write good jams. DeVon had written some of our best tunes and we were just starting to get Peter in the mix as a writer. It is a complete tribute to Josh that as the door opened to contribute more Josh seemed to bring in these gems that the band immediately latched on to. Josh’s batting average of having his demos turn into songs is easily the highest in the group. This was the tune that made me realize that Josh was no joke with the pen. The chords move so strangely to me during the verse. The verse seems to break a lot of rules about what is supposed to work as far as chord movement, but when you hear it is as smooth as butter. Also, for Josh to write these comparatively mellow beats that still command the attention and passion of our emcees, it’s a tribute to how awesome the writing is.

Had to go with the video link on this one because the video is just us recording this song. What the hell Josh? How do you write stuff like this? This song is basically impossible for us to play live, but it packs such a punch without ever swinging a punch in the studio form. And the new record from Heiruspecs that’s coming out next year? It’s got so much Josh writing all over it. Josh can deliver great solos, Josh can do a lot of great guitar player stuff, but I think ultimately it’s what he does as a writer whether he’s on your song or his own. That’s where he shines. And boy does this shine.

The Best Things Alexei (Crescent Moon) has Made
Alexei is one of the best emcees I’ve ever had the honor of working with. Here’s some of his best stuff.

The center of Crescent Moon’s musical output is his collaboration with Steve Lewis, Kill The Vultures. They came out of the ashes of Oddjobs, a group that was doing relatively centrist hip-hop: punchlines, throw your hands up, prominent scratches. The work of Kill The Vultures was this move to provide something a lot more singular. Challenging, angular, strange percussion, challenging subject matter. Steve Lewis is one of the most relentlessly creative producers I’ve ever been around. He seeks to challenge himself, he seeks to challenge his collaborators. I enjoy everything about their catalog. But the first time I heard this song I felt it brought something out into the universe didn’t exist. It was epic, without ever screaming out “this one is epic!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”. And when Channy comes in towards the end of the song with her vocals, it’s game over. It’s just the right amount of everything. God damn. I haven’t made music this courageous, this unapologetically singular.

The song’s good. Alexei’s verse is great (he’s second at about 2:45). Oddjobs certainly had some of the ambition of Kill The Vultures buried within their production even while using a more traditional canvas. The drums on this song are provided by Tim Glenn, who at the time was a member of Heiruspecs. Okay, Alexei is now rightfully celebrated as a great songwriter. That’s great! Good shit. Sometimes I feel like when we celebrate a rapper for being a great songwriter it is code for them not being great at both the technical side of rapping. I also fear that it’s code for them not having skills at the shit talk element of rap. This verse just throws highlighter on the fact that when talking shit and having skills was at the center of the culture, Alexei was right there. He’s out of control on this verse. And the production answers.

The Best Things Peter Leggett has Made
Peter Leggett is a world-class drummer and his creativity is off the charts.

One of the great joys of my life is making music with Peter Leggett. At one point we were wildly close as people. Played in 2-3 bands together, were roommates on tour and managed the day to day affairs for Heiruspecs. We’ve grown up, grown apart in expected ways, but there is this shared language of spending a couple years basically smothering each other. We were able to take a lot of the magic language we developed with Heiruspecs of arranging, of different feels of different tricks and smash it over our friend Bill Caperton’s songs. He was the songwriter in Ela and he won the god damn lottery with us taking his already magical songs and putting all of these hip-hop/reggae tricks across the tracks. Peter refuses to do normal shit. He will not phone anything in ever in his life. But for this genre, this Jade Tree indie rock, Peter was born to bring his magic to this sound. Peter knew what would work in this environment. He was student of the rock bands we were emulating. He was also just massively over qualified for adding power to rock tracks. He had heart, groove and a massive technical facility to deliver it. In the build up in this song you can hear Peter artfully just expand the universe, the hi-hat keeps on opening up the fills build a bit and Bill screams over it. I am so lucky to have witnessed this song’s birth and played a part in making it work. But man, this track is all about Peter's arranging and playing and Bill’s writing and singing.

I didn’t think I was going to include this tune. Peter wrote all the music for this amazing song from Heiruspecs called “skyisfalling”. It’s an incredible piece of work and it’s one of our most popular songs. But I forgot about Peter’s work all over this tune Broken Record with I Self Devine making a cameo. It’s how the two drum parts work, how they bounce and answer the lyrics (and the conversation goes in both directions). And it’s classic Peter because the conversation that exists between the two drum parts bounce across the two distinct harmonic parts as well. So you get to hear drum part A against harmonic parts A + B and you get to hear drum part B against harmonic parts A + B as well. Right at this moment I’m writing well into the night just smiling thinking about all the great moments I’ve gotten to make with Peter. This is one of the high points. I love this music. DeVon Gray, our magical keyboard player wrote this song, it has a ton of joshisms (see above!!) but the funky beauty of DeVon’s writing sets the groundwork for the magic that comes out of Peter.

The Best Things Sean McPherson (that’s me) has Made
People who think I have a high opinion of myself will continue to feel that way after reading this.

I’m a songwriter trapped in a bass player’s skill set. And starting around my thirtieth birthday I decided to try to push out the music I wanted to make as a writer. The first big result of that is my work with the Twinkie Jiggles Broken Orchestra. We had one particularly magical day of tracking that involved Graham O’Brien on drums, me on bass, DeVon Gray on keyboards and Chastity Brown on vocals. You are likely familiar with Chastity Brown as she is quite a big name. I am so lucky that she agreed to sing these songs. This song is not popular, people don’t listen to it. But for me, writing a good angry song is one of the hardest things to pull off in the music world. We’ve got a lot of love songs, we’ve got a fair amount of fun songs on planet earth. We have few songs that capture that anger. This one captures the anger, the love, the bitter end of relationship. It landed where I wanted to land lyrically and I am still very proud of the tune. Scott Agster wrote the horn chart and it’s beautiful.

This is the song that I thought was going to catapult Heiruspecs to that next big level. I’m very proud of the groundwork I laid for this song, but I have nothing to do with the three best things about this song:

Felix’s Lyrics - This a great slice of life yet larger than life narrative that Felix is so good at crafting. It’s a day in the life and it also shows how that day is emblematic of a whole universe.
Actually Good Vocal Scratching - The grand majority of vocal scratching is garbage, hot shit. Muad’dib puts something on this song that improves it, intensifies it. It gives something to the tune.
Tasha’s Keyboard Part - Tasha Baron, an earlier keyboard player, brought in that beautiful, soulful keyboard part that plays so well against the rest of it.

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But coming in fourth in the “cool thing about 5ves Olympics” is that bassline. You haven’t heard a bassline quite like it before. You’ll remember it. And I had the good sense to write a drum part against it that was also original but obvious. There should be a hundred songs like 5ves, there aren’t. I don’t really hear songs like 5ves ever. I’m so proud of the tune. If you ask Spotify, Heartsprings is by far our biggest and most successful tune. If you ask Heiruspecs and the audiences at our shows, it’s this tune. It’s 5ves all day.

Thanks for reading this long. I can only assume if you’ve read this long you are either Josh, Peter, Steve or Alexei. You guys are great. I’m lucky to play music with you. Thank you for being amazing.