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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Season Five of Drifter's Sympathy will be dropping on March 8th! - This is a special mini-episode meant to announce the new Season, but it includes a section of last season's special Q&A episode where Patreon listeners were essentially able to guide their own episode. Emil dives back into the 90's and navigates the difficulties artists face from an extremely personal perspective.

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We've reached the Final Hour of this season... for now...

 Emil went out to his mother's farm and recorded the finale of these 6 episodes in the middle of the night while drinking a significant amount of moonshine. He enters a strange and dazed state of mind, temporarily entering a flashback of the 'religious episode' he experienced in 1998. After several years of being held captive inside an extreme and crippling depression, he had a dream where God came to him and said that it was finally time to experience what actual happiness is.

 This cast is about the epic struggle to appreciate life itself, and how, if we are lucky enough to achieve any kind of peak experience of what enlightenment is, we have no idea how long that insight will stay before releasing us back into the world as it is generally seen. The cast ends in 1999 with Emil moving up to Portland where his artistic life began all over again. Because of the eerie quiet and meditative quality of this cast, its best listened to while alone, late at night.

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Emil and Alex recently got off a massive Grails tour that took them to places as disparate as Poland, Turkey, Estonia and Lithuania, ending up in Copenhagen where they recorded this cast at Alex's apartment. It begins with the two reflecting on how traveling as a band can reach heavy emotional impasses that require a kind of comedic release and Grails have established a dense list of guilty pleasures that've eased their morning hangovers after touring Europe for over 15 years. The conversation eventually moves into their love of British and Italian library music and ends with record shopping in Greece underneath the Parthenon. Because this season has been consistently thematically 'heavy', "Rare Soundtracks III" serves as a necessarily lighthearted entry for this run of 6 episodes. The next episode will return to Emil's breakdown, gradual breakthrough and eventual move up to Portland, Oregon to begin the next chapter of his life. 

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This episode dives completely into the field of extreme, paralyzing alienation and the hovering spectre of the failure of your childhood dreams. It also features a tribute to the healing power of the music of Daniel Johnston... a singer that has the power to build a profound bridge out to you when you are in the most debilitating pain. 

 Although this cast unrelentingly focuses on the sensation of floating in the space of a certain kind of loneliness, it posits a central wager that if you follow that Alone-ness ALL the way through to its logical conclusion, being alone can eventually transform into a kind of superpower... and point the way towards a crucial kind of inner redemption and spiritual understanding.

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 This episode brings the Drifter's documentary-style series on the history of Home Recording to a close for now...🍏 The sheer amount of info in this one could've easily gone into a 300 page book, given that the 'lo-fi'-era has barely been acknowledged as existing as a legitimate form of expression at all. As home-recording has historically only been seen as a stepping stone towards more traditional forms of music industry careerism, Emil tries to re-frame the impulse and phenomenon as its own real and beautiful sub-world of vital documentation in itself.

 Whereas the previous episode "The Dawn of Home Recording" examines the impulse of Les Paul's initial invention of the overdub, this cast investigates what happens when you hand that technology over to tomorrow's freaks to make their own private, warped fantasies undeniably real.

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