Setting Sail

Readers, hey.

Lemme introduce me but let’s also acknowledge us.

Introductions can be awkward, I know, I’ll start. I’m Roddy. I’ve made a life for myself making music. With Faith No More and then Imperial Teen. I live in NYC and I work with my boyfriend in a band called MAN ON MAN and two awesome friends in a band called CRICKETS and also sometimes the horror art project gnarl core Nastie Band. FNM is kind of on semi permanent hiatus and Imperial Teen is making a record slowly but definitely. I wrote an opera about Sasquatch a couple years ago but I can talk about all those projects later. I’m here in anticipation of a book I’ve written, it’s a memoir called The Royal We. It’s my first foray into writing and it’s exciting and scary and a whole new world for me..

My initial purge and process was to lay out my life in story form from beginning to end. I did it every morning first thing for like over a year until I was happy with it. When I shared it with an agent he told me that ‘cradle to grave’ pieces don’t really sell that well. Say that phrase out loud. Cradle to grave. Can you even? I don’t care so much about the selling part, but the phrase scared the fuck out of me. For starters, i hate biopics. The predictability and the formula and honestly the straight line of a story, there just aren’t enough surprises, know what I mean? I find myself checking my watch, just waiting for the protagonist to die. Creating something formulaic and routine like that freaked me out so I went to Paris and reworked everything I’d done. I know. Paris. It’s ok to roll your eyes. I needed to change up everything so I could change up everything so I went there and sat in an old library for a month and wrote.

Now as it sits, my book is more of an ode to San Francisco, bicycle messengering, sex work, heroin, dreadlocks, the birth of politics in punk rock, wheatgrass, witches, crystal meth, coming out, self love and the burning down and obliteration of a great American city. It’s not a tell all but it tells a lot. I’m leaning into the poetic and the literary. There are people you know in it, overdoses, tragedies and victories and failures. I’ll share excerpts of it here as we go forward but for now that’s me.

So you. First we can assume you read. And for that I love you, the furtherment of posterity loves you, the flailing industry of the printed page loves you, wordsmiths of the world love you and the rest of them? They look up to you.

Let’s start with just the three things in our lives in this specific moment.

1. Anohni

2. The Burmese Harp

3. PAT at Union Pool

Just that. That’s what I woke up with this morning. Tell me where you’re at, Readers. What did you wake up with?

What’s the three things that moved it forward for you?

This space is me sharing and listening. Two things I do best so let’s engage.

Love you all,

RB