Hello, this is the third i am david brothers newsletter!
I originally intended to make this a biweekly thing, then immediately sent two in a row and wrote a third. I’m trying to measure my pace so I don’t burn my self out and lose sight of what I’m trying to do here, so I made my self take a break. Wait, what am I trying to do here? Listen to this:
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Four things of no particular relation:
–Katsuyori Shibata update: I watched Katsuyori Shibata vs Tomoaki Honma from 7/3/2016, Kizuna Road 2016, for Shibata’s NEVER Openweight championship. It’s a bruiser fest. There’s a good bit where Honma is asking Shibata to hit back, but elbowing him before he can. Shibata eventually answers with a flying guillotine, and Honma answers that with a brainbuster. Beautiful.
–Death Stranding 2: I went to a Death Stranding concert in LA and ended up writing three essays about the game that weekend. I don’t want this newsletter to be only about Death Stranding, and I have friends I don’t want to spoil just yet, so stay tuned while I figure out what to do here. I mean it, for real this time. I really do have three joints in the hopper! There’s a google doc and everything!!
–GES Draw Party: Do you do figure drawing? You should do figure drawing. It’s really pleasant, and sometimes you really nail what you’re going for and have a good day. GES Draw Party is one of my favorite ways to get some practice, especially their super-short bean fests with twenty-second poses.
–Elden Ring: Nightreign: I took a long break from Elden Ring: Nightreign right before Deep of Night came out, the extra-hard mode. I picked it up again with this week’s new DLC and hoo boy is the new Undertaker character a ton of fun. The fun of the game has really come back in a short period of time, though the long runs mean that I can only do a couple in a session. I wrote about Nightreign back in July. Knowing my luck, I’ll end up writing about it again, based on how much I like this DLC.
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Brothers, Bowie, Byrne: Beloved Brotherhood
According to Apple Music, despite my top genre, as usual, being hip-hop, my most-listened artist this year was David Bowie and my second most-listened was David Byrne. Considering I named my first website “4thletter!” and this one “i am david brothers,” I did kinda laugh at the coincidence. The brand is beloved.
Bowie isn’t new to me any more, though I’m still discovering new-to-me songs. I found him in my late 20s or so and really latched on in my 30s. I’m very much a Station to Station, Diamond Dogs, Ziggy Stardust kinda guy, though as I’ve been listening to his work and filling out my knowledge gaps, I’m finding something to enjoy about all of it.
As a human being, as a (learning) musician, as a creative person, I found a lot to admire in Bowie. “I am not David Bowie, but we have the same initials” is a half-joke I say to my self sometimes, based on an old Pulp song. The cleanest way I found to express how I felt about Bowie at the time was that I wanted to feel as free to be David Brothers as David Bowie felt free to be David Bowie. That feeling has evolved over the years from deeply aspirational to a more broad, full-spectrum appreciation. I don’t really need the example nowadays, but I did need the nudge that his presence on Earth provided.
I listen to Bowie on shuffle a lot. I’m generally listening to albums if I’m listening to music, sitting with one artist through a project and then moving on to the next, whether I’m sitting around, on the bus, or working. But I like Bowie’s stuff enough—and have found interesting songs frequently enough from shuffling his work—that it’s almost like a nice grab bag of things I know well and things I’ll one day know well.
I’m not too surprised that Bowie was tops for me. I’ve been making comics with friends (buy Time Waits and/or Good Devils) and I’ve been getting used to the idea of signing comics after a lifetime spent behind the scenes. When I needed a cool signature that wasn’t my actual, real-life cool signature, I scrolled through a Google Image Search of his name until I found something I felt that I could make my own, but also borrowed a bit of his flavor for my self to enjoy on my own.
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Rap music made me love obfuscation:
I’m realizing as I write this that I do this kind of oblique reference all the time. I have two tattoos, one for my hometown and one for Oakland where I live now. The Oakland tattoo is in the same font the Golden State Warriors used when I became a fan of that team. The hometown tattoo is in the same font the Atlanta Hawks used when I watched them as a kid. It’s not a big secret. I don’t mind telling people when they ask about them, but I think I do like having my inside/outside jokes when I can get them.
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Visiting a new church:
David Byrne is more new to me, but it turns out we have the same initials, too.
I know the Talking Heads, in the sense that I have sung along with their songs on video games here and there, but I haven’t dug into them the same way I have Bowie, or Joni Mitchell, or whoever. A friend showed me David Byrne’s film True Stories (1986) last year, and I came away from it really impressed…with John Goodman, who I loved in his role. Don’t get me wrong—I thought Byrne was great and the movie was interesting, and it stuck with me for a while. But whenever I thought about it, I’d think about certain aspects of Goodman’s performance that struck me more than Byrne’s direct contributions.
That doesn’t mean that Byrne was far from my mind, though, and when I saw that he was coming to town to perform a new album, I reached out to the friend who showed me True Stories. I was thrilled to hear that they were going to the show and got a ticket next to them. I basically didn’t go to concerts really at all until 2021, and a big part of the whole experience for me is experiencing the faves of my friends through their eyes. What do they respond to, what trivia do they know, what’s their relationship to this band and their music? Everyone’s a critic, if you live your life the right way.
The show was my motivation to get familiar with Byrne, with a focus on the upcoming album when it dropped. I wouldn’t say I’m an expert, but I spent time listening to the Talking Heads, and was really blown away by the performance of American Utopia (2020) that Spike Lee shot for HBO. I assumed I’d like the music at the show, but I was starting to figure out the finer points of his work that appealed to me. A small list of “Oh I hope he plays this.”
The new Byrne album Who Is The Sky? came out in September and fell on me like a ton of bricks. I went into it cold, not reading any interviews or doing anything but listening to the exuberant lead single “Everybody Laughs.” I found the album very agreeable, in the sense of “You know what? This guy sounds like he was very recently depressed and is working through it.” Which is projection, and I knew it was projection, until I got to “My Apartment is My Friend,” which is the most I used to be depressed song I’ve ever heard in my life, a phrase I mean in the most admiringly complimentary, real-recognize-real way that I can muster.
“My Apartment Is My Friend” hit me in a metaphorical big flashing red boss weak point button that I didn’t even know I had. I live a couple thousand miles from family, and while I have great friends here in the Bay and elsewhere, it’s still sometimes quite lonely, even after all this time. It’s one of those unsolvable problems—life is what it is, and you gotta keep on living it. You do what you can.
One thing I’ve done is really try to make my apartment into my friend. It’s been a pretty grim year for mental health, but I know if I push, there’s someting in here that’ll get me back on my fight. I need to draw, write, read, fight, or play my way out of my funk, treading water long enough for my brain to start acting right again. Part of that means making things convenient, like finding a rice cooker that works for one, instead of a family. A bigger part of that is making things feel good, like owning a purple couch.
(Years later, I spilled paint on that coach and had to replace the cover. And then I did it again. It’s green now, 12 years and two covers after I got it.)
The thing about “My Apartment Is My Friend” is that I never really thought of my own situation that way, but after I heard it, it’s absolutely true and applies to me. It’s a light animism, an endearing anthropomorphism, and I really appreciate how Byrne apologizes for being sad, but still proud that his apartment is his friend.
Explaining this, it sounds like the saddest thing ever, but it really isn’t. It’s a way of coping, of wrenching my life onto a track I enjoy more than the one my brain sometimes leads me down. I listened to this song and I felt happy that Byrne found his way to cope too.
I was impressed with the concert this past November, from the dancing to the design. I was thrilled that he performed not just “My Apartment Is My Friend” (fan video) but also “Everybody’s Coming to My House,” my favorite tune off American Utopia. In that film, he explained that he originally wrote the song from a place of anxiety:
About a year ago, I invited a high school choir in Detroit, Michigan, to do an interpretation of this next song. The song’s called “Everybody’s Coming to My House.” (audience cheering) Thank you. And in my version, and that’s the version you’re gonna hear… (scattered laughter) It…it kinda sounds like the singer is not sure how he feels about everybody coming over to his house. And you can sense, although he never says it in the song, you can sense that he’s thinking, “When are they gonna leave?” (audience laughing) In contrast, their version… And this was kind of a profound thing for me. They didn’t change a single lyric. They didn’t change the melody, and yet their version has a completely different meaning. Their version seems to be about welcome, inviting everyone over, inclusion. I kinda liked their version better, and I didn’t know how they did it. Unfortunately, I am what I am. (audience laughing, cheering, applauding) Not sure how to take that applause.
I found this really endearing. It was easy to see my self in it. Someone at work once called me the most anti-social social butterfly she knows, and I totally got what she meant as soon as she said it. I can turn it on until I can’t, so I totally grasp how “Everybody’s Coming to My House” is sometimes “Everybody’s Coming to My House! D:”, even if you’d rather it be “Everybody’s Coming to My House! :D” every single time. I am what I am.
With that said, he did follow “Everybody’s Coming to My House” and close the show with “Burning Down the House,” so…I feel like he’s trying to tell us something about overstaying our welcome.
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I accidentally organized my life so that everything is reps:
Similar to David Bowie, David Byrne is another guy that’s remarkably comfortable in his skin to me, with a clear idea of what he wants from art and an open mind when it comes to the alchemy that happens between music and performer. Getting to know his work to the extent that I have this year has been a real pleasure, whether I’m recognizing a kindred spirit or puzzling out my reaction to unfamiliar tunes. “Who Is The Sky?” is definitely my fave amongst his catalog so far, but I have a lot of learning to do.
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I don’t really have a better place for these semi-relevant digressions:
-Speaking of concerts, the Gorillaz are touring next year, including two days in LA. They’re one of my favorite bands and I’ve never seen them live other than on a livestream, so let me know if you see any good banks to rob. The new album is about coming to terms with death and dying, and features appearances from their deceased friends. I’m usually vehemently anti post-humous stuff but this one feels respectful in a way that (for instance) that one robot in Aliens: Romulus (2023) didn’t.
-Seeing music through the eyes of my friends—did you ever go to another church when you were a kid? It’s the best analogy I have for the experience, visiting a place where the rules for everything are different and you don’t know the history. I hesitate to use the word intimate for this kind of sharing, but it does feel deeper than just hanging out to me. I’m always grateful when people meet me on this level.
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Other things I’ve written over the past while:
-I double-featured Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling (1986) and Jay Kelly (2025) and wrote about both of ’em. They’re very different movies but it was a fun compare/contrast.
-Scattered thoughts on One Battle After Another (2025), including a detail about black hair that touched me and is probably also a bit of projection. I dunno. It’s been a long month.
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It’s good to help if you can:
I don’t have any friends on Kickstarter at the moment, at least that I can recall. If you’re in the giving mood, let me suggest the Alameda County Community Food Bank here in the Bay or the West Valley Food Pantry down in Southern California. Better yet, you probably have a local food bank or similar outfit near you. Someone over there is helping people. If you can’t help out directly, try to donate money or attention and spread the word. Every little bit helps.
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That’s it.