So, this week, my powerpop/jangle-garage band, Safe Houses, dropped our first release since before the pandemic. It’s a digital double-A-side single — “Someday Is Starting Now (Julia)”/”I Don’t Feel Like Dancing,” two songs that we’ve been playing for as long as most of our fans and friends have known who we are. It’s accompanied by a music video for “Someday Is Starting Now,” and of course the audio and video are both embedded in this post after the jump.

This release has been an extremely long time coming. It was actually supposed to come out a full year ago. Back in the early spring of 2022, we were chatting with labels and strategizing a late-spring release. Then we were hit with a cease and desist from lawyers representing a person who holds a registered trademark on our name at the time (Shelter Dogs), and we had to hold off on putting any new product into the marketplace (I hate that phrasing too, but that’s how the intellectual property specialists would frame it). Then, when they refused to budge on permitting us to continue using that name, we had to change our band name to Safe Houses and rebrand all of our digital channels (including how we appeared on your Spotifys and Apple Musics and all) and previous releases. This is a process that took, and I’m not exaggerating, nine months, end to end.

So in the meantime, we (wrote a pile of new songs and) shot a music video! The project came out of a conversation my friend Jamie Frey and I had in the backyard of the Old Stanley’s bar in Bushwick. The concept: You have two romantic leads; let’s call them “Brian” and “Julia.” They’re supposed to meet at a party, but “situations” keep arising between the two of them, preventing both of them from spotting each other at the same time. Jamie brought in his cinematographer and video editor friend Tasha Lutek, who advised us on which scenes would work from a technical angle and which wouldn’t. Then we put out a call to our friends to take part in the shoot, and simulated a party at the Pet Rescue space (the DIY spot I used to manage), shortly before it closed last summer.

Fwiw I don’t play “Brian.” I play the anonymous guitarist and bartender. Brian is portrayed by Billy Pedlow, who was cast because he looked kinda like me, but younger. Kathryn Shearing plays Julia. Also fwiw the video tells a different story than the song itself. In the song, the narrator is trying to convince Julia to move to New York City for a more exciting and materially rewarding life, even though he’s underemployed and feeling essentially unseen. To my mind, the narrator and Julia are friends — but I wanted the lyrics to be a bit ambiguous, to suggest their relationship was a romantic one, because I thought that would make for a more interesting story. And we really leaned into portraying the leads as a semi-star-crossed couple, because that raises the emotional stakes of the video. Also, there’s not much room for ambiguity when both the song and the video are bombastic, hypercolor, breakneck, and blown-out.

The audio itself features the 2018-21 lineup of Safe Houses — myself (guitar, vocals), Madi Cox (keyboards, vocals), Alex Heigl (bass), and Dan Miura (drums). “Someday Is Starting Now” was recorded way back during the sessions for our 2019 EP, Crashing a Party with Safe Houses, and “I Don’t Feel Like Dancing” was recorded during the 2021 sessions for the still-upcoming EP Love in the Time of Chloroform (release TBD). Both songs were always intended to be stand-alone singles, rather than EP tracks, so considering the crazy delay we had in releasing anything, it seemed like a good idea to just make it a double-A-side. I know a double-A-side is technically impossible in digital, because there’s nothing to flip over, but I don’t care. A single is supposed to have two songs anyway.

To release and promote this single, I officially launched a record label, University of Space Recording Co., which has been a pipe dream of mine for a few years. The University of Space is intended to ultimately become an interdisciplinary creative lab and organization for the proliferation of new art, following in the “multimedia punk utopian” ideals of Pet Rescue. Right now, USpace is primarily a digital-only label with a string of upcoming releases from my own projects in the queue. That’s just to start. Eventually we’ll bring more recording artists on board, we’ll be releasing tapes, we’ll build out the promotional infrastructure, we’ll expand beyond music, and ideally we’ll have a physical space to enable the creation of new works.

The music video had its exclusive premiere on the Full Time Aesthetic blog (recommended — FTA is one of the more substantial and professional music blogs I’ve seen emerge in a while), and it’s appeared on a “Songs Not to Be Missed” roundup on Tinnitist. I’ve recently been interviewed about past, present, and future Safe Houses matters by Musicshelf with Mustard and arts_x_artists, and there are some more Safe Houses features that’ll be appearing via other media sources in the coming weeks.

Check out Safe Houses on Bandcamp ($2 download for the two-song single), SoundCloud, YouTube, Spotify, or any other major audio streaming channel.