This cast ties together the 90's era of our story to the current ERA.💫 (if you want some XTRA background you can re-listen to the episodes 'Moving to LA' & 'Moving to Portland' as those two set this one UP.)

The opening catches listeners up to Portland, Oregon in 1999 and the emotional STATE of things... but this cast could ultimately be called "The beginning of GRAILS".

The bottom line is that one often has to throw everything out the window to open up a new horizon of possibilities. And that horizon, by definition, can often begin with a pathetic and destitute situation by LAW. But from that desert floor,, grow the WEEDS that become the terrain in every hero's journey rite?

 This cast features a couple very special guests... Alex Hall (Grails co-founder, who's living out in Malmo, Sweden) weighs in on the frame by frame situation from his perspective. And then Emil & Alex realize that they didn't so much 'start' Grails but that their mutual friend Brad Adkins (who introduced them) forced them to start the band against their WILL. So not only do you often begin the dream out in the desert with no food or water,, but sometimes there's a GUN to yr back too.🔥🚣‍♂️🔥

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 For the first episode of SEASON SIX, we have the LONGEST Drifter's episode of all time!

...this may have something to do with the fact that Emil gets drunk at the end in a quest to fully articulate his true feelings about one of his favorite underdogs. "Mellow Soldiers" had to be born to explore the dark & often unintentional side of the soft rock we've all grown up with.

...The SOLDIERS at hand for this episode are largely :

*Art Garfunkel - the reigning king of insincerity..

*Rupert Holmes - the nasa scientist that might've guided pop music to entirely new geographies of deeper & subtler content...

*Country - an obscure folk-rock band who's two songwriters came from fascinating chess-piece positions and then suffered two drastically different fates..

*Charles Manson - the reigning king of candlelit, acoustic guitar crooning andddddd murder..

*Christie - the power pop band that nearly united the continents under one banner of sick azzz choruses...

 >> HAPPY NEW YEAR & welcome to SEASON SIX✨🔦✨

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Ever since he heard the Trigger Cut 7" in high school, Emil has been a big fan of Stephen Malkmus' contributions to the American underground. Emil stopped by Stephen's house while visiting Portland a few years ago and had a rare conversation about his younger years and early experiences in Pavement.

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Ron & Emil recently began a ritual of Sunday brunching at the same family restaurant they worked at back in 1992. After a pleasant brunch Ron is granted his customary 'hard cider' and the mics are fired up. Questions were posed by listeners on Patreon and, while Ron is initially shocked that he's gotten fan mail, his storied wisdom comes rolling out just the same. It begins with the unwrapping of some rare 8-track tapes Emil's just added to his collection, which to Ron's astonishment and inevitable arousal, contains the entire Bob Dylan discography. And then when the cider eventually starts hitting, Ron regales the true, unknown story behind his friendship with the, now un-locatable, "Ecstasy Damaged Chef".

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"LONER LEGENDS III" is the final episode of Season Five & features::

*an overview of Eden Ahbez & the writing of Nature Boy*

*a difficult dive into the dastardly world of John Phillips*

*an overview of Alan Hull's work with Lindisfarne and his solo LPs*

*a section on Basil Kirchin and his pioneering of 'ambient music'*

Thanks so much for listening

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Emil has a mid-life crisis... and records it. This episode is a sequel to "The Outsider", the other purely philosophical episode that anchored Drifter's Sympathy into a hardcore existentialist stance. This cast uses the holy trinity of American Country Music, Taoism and the Twilight Zone to illustrate our fruitless attempt to resolve the perpetually unfinished nature of consciousness itself. In the form of a classic Existentialist thesis, 'Four Walls' puts forward that escapism only erodes what integrity and strength we have... and that the only way forward is straight through the murk & confusion directly. At the very least, you'll never hear the song "Hello Walls" the same again... and at the very best, this cast helps demonstrate why Kurtz's last words in 'Heart of Darkness' are "The horror, The horror."

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 The sequel of "THE DAWN OF SELFISH MUSIC" goes a little darker into the consequences of gaining total freedom. On the other side of this new frontier, Dylan finds people breaking into his house to find their leader, Miles Davis tries to shake off imitators chasing his every aesthetic move and a never-ending supply of drugs causes David Crosby's life to fully crash and burn. Gene Clark is the patron saint of this episode, while managing to commit various sins no saint has ever conceived of. If this particular cast ever seems overly negative, its really just an attempt to grapple with the true ugliness that went on behind the making of some of our favorite music. Because treating that music as a product alone doesn't really honor the spiritual confusion that came alongside the "me generation" and selfish music's announcement that anything was now fair game. When does being too selfish cause total destruction...? - All of the characters in this episode flirt with total freedom and some don't make it out.🔥

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Duncan Trussell returns to Drifter's Sympathy for the continuation of "The Lecturer". Emil and Duncan get into the archaeology of their friendship, their early development and how they were molded by completely different forms of trauma to come to a similar internal place. The second half dives into their artistic process and how Taoist methods have helped lead them towards creating their body of work over the years.

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Tracing back to the beginnings of when music on the radio began to slowly fracture and morph in the late 50's, Emil returns to a small fleet of songwriters in the Teen Heartthrob era that began to dream of a coming world of freedom and evolution in the art of songform. Driven by the seizing of a personal power outside of the need to please the crowd, these writers leaked actual emotions into their recordings which set the stage for bands like the Beatles to flex an intellectualism that couldn't have been hypothesized a few years before.

This setting is established by the epic meeting of Bobby Vee and Bob Dylan in a record store in Fargo, North Dakota in 1959. Dylan lasts two weeks in Vee's band after greatly misrepresenting his skill set and then Bobby Vee goes on to become an international superstar without him, showing Dylan that the dream is really possible. Then when Dylan makes his return to the market with a fully developed image, he ends up eviscerating Bobby Vee's entire genre and the world would never be the same. This is part one of "the Dawn of Selfishness".

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 The new season of Drifter's Sympathy picks back up at the end of the last episode.

'I Want to Live a Peaceful Life' was about the sudden malaise that can descend on you at the end of college. Emil moved in with Duncan Trussell in LA and only lasted a summer before he realized that it wasn't the right place to start a music career based on hyper-honesty.

 This episode approaches the emotional field of getting to Portland in 1999 and experiencing cultural confusion after having spent four years recording up in the mountains of North Carolina. The cast wades in what it feels like to be 22 years old... simultaneously out of your depth, while also having something to offer that no one wants any part of. 

 There will be a part two of 'Moving to Portland' next season that gets into the beginnings of starting to play music in front of people, but this episode is centered around the sensation of arriving in a foreign land. Its a meditation on the true deflation one feels when they grasp how ridiculous scaling the vertical wall that trying to make art in public can be... and the harsh reality of trying to achieve what you think your heroes did.

 There are important references in here to the earlier episodes : 'Moving to LA',, 'The Satan Seller' and 'I Want to Live A Peaceful Life'... 

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