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Scene from an Art Heist

by Nick Stevens a.k.a. The Eighty Six Seas

Nick Stevens a.k.a. The Eighty Six Seas


The most vivid artwork I’ve ever seen was a series of blank frames.

The first time I walked into the Dutch Room at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, I was gobsmacked. This room was the site of the most notorious art heist in history, where thirty-three years ago, two thieves disguised as police officers broke into the museum and stole half a billion dollars worth of masterpieces by Rembrandt, Vermeer, and Degas. I’ve never witnessed such a visceral display of the absence of art.

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Getting Back My Wings

by Jessica DeSimone of Warren Teagarden and the Good Grief

Warren Teagarden and the Good Grief
Photo by Mr. Dodgy

Since I can remember, I’ve been performing. My earliest memories are dancing around my childhood home, singing along to my mom’s records, or doing what I can only describe as a cobra pose inside the giant planter boxes at our local shopping mall, pretending I was Ariel from The Little Mermaid. I used to feel like I could fly when I sang, like I had tiny wings sprouting from my back.

As I got older, my grandma taught me how to play piano, back when my hands were so tiny I couldn’t hit an octave. In school, I added choir, theater, and dance team to my repertoire, and I was sure I would be a big theater star one day. But of course, pragmatism won, and I went to college for something far less fun and ended up in a career even less fun, leaving a part of myself behind.

For years, my creative self was suffocated. I was dying to tap back into the freedom that came with being on stage, that rare out-of-body experience when you get to leave yourself behind and become something else entirely.

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A New Normal

by John Zonn

A New Normal by John Zonn


As Ralph Waldo Emerson – the great American Individualist and Transcendentalist – once said: “All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better”. And so, the new Zonn mini-album “Songs Of Truth And Freedom” started off, as many experiments do, with the inventor watching the world around and perceiving that something needed to be done. This approach, coupled with my fondness for re-writing old tunes, led to the interpretation of a 1980s new-socialist stalwart into a novel anthem for the 2020s.

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A Magical Musical Journey of Folk and Immortality!

by Mark McCafferty

A Magical Musical Journey of Folk and Immortality! by Mark McCafferty
Middle age –
Some buy a motorbike or go skydiving, some swim with sharks or hunt for ancient treasures…. me I started to record all the songs I’d scribbled on little bits of paper over many years! As the technology made it infinitely easier to set up a studio at home… that’s what I did, and here am 😉 7 albums, two e.p.’s and a couple of compilation albums in 4 years, and many more still to come!!

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Ill Spector: Millennial The Eagles???

by Max Colbert

Ill Spector: Millennial The Eagles??? by Max Colbert

“The moon looked pale and wan, as if it shouldn’t be up on a night like this. It rose unwillingly and hung like an ill specter.”

This is a quote from early in the third chapter of a book called Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams. This is a book that I don’t like very much but loved in 8th grade. Before I was in a band, before I played an instrument, before I even listened to music, I loved the stories of Dirk Gently. So, when my friends and I started a band in middle school, I suggested this line as a name, and, being in middle school, misspelled specter as “spector”. This was, more or less, how the band started; as middle schoolers who couldn’t play our instruments, misspelling words, and deciding we liked it better that way. And this is, more or less, how the band has stayed since then.

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