Darwin Deez

darwin deez's first crash of US tour in boston

Tour leaps into your life and swallows it in an instant. Over the last two months, I had become so cozy and familiar with my Brooklyn life. Last night, I swiped my Metrocard, followed the orange F train to the gray L back home. I stacked my junkmail in a pile to recycle in the morning. When morning came, I propped my stairwell’s door open with that scrap of black tile as I brought my suitcase and bass amp to the van. Paid my January, February, and March rent. And suddenly, the door of Darwin’s van slides shut with its hidden finality, and CLICK, that life is cut off. The familiar streetways of my neighborhood transition into bridges and a view of the distant skyscrapers of Manhattan. Then it’s green highway signs, and the two month adventure has begun. We’ll have to make it through the desert windmill farms outside of Los Angeles before I make it back to my bedroom with the wooden floor. We’ll have to scarf down doner sandwiches in Hamburg before I make it back to my bedroom with the solar system hanging from the ceiling.

Darwin played us the final cut of his new mixtape, Wonky Beats, on the ride up. I was so stoked to hear Koolaid D open up the album. I have been listening to hella Das Racist as a consequence of being in this band. My favorite Wonky Beats cut is this fast one towards the end that Darwin explained as “this album’s ‘Nutmeg’, the flex track.” One of the lines is something like “Drank the house wine at a house party at Amy Winehouse’s house.” I think Deez fans will dig.

Cole lived in Seattle over the break, and his flight was canceled due to the blizzard that happened two nights ago. So we are going into this tour unpracticed. Cole’s paying somebody 100 bucks to pick him up at the airport, right this instant, and drive him up to Boston to unite with us at Great Scott. So we went by Cole’s mom’s house in Connecticut and scooped up his amp and some thrift store treasures that Cole had scavenged for me, personal stylist style. We rolled our way along the east coast talking about that book ‘The Tipping Point’, of mavens and connectors and salespeople. How the crime rate falls drastically in a neighborhood when all the windows are fixed and the graffiti is removed, and how violent crime on a subway falls when they arrest turnstile hoppers. The undismissable influence of context.