Remember that time you considered working with the dead

A plucked, bright instrumental of Ride Forever, momentum made of small bouncing notes.

The synth version that arrived after talking the parody out of it, the ride taken seriously, gliding on pure tone.

Pan sweeps carry the ride from one side to the other, the road itself seeming to lean into the turns.

A playful instrumental detour for Ride Forever, the same horizon seen through a stranger, smaller lens.

Ride Forever dissolved into ambient drift, the open road with the vocals washed out to sky and horizon.

That hurt more than I thought it would

Simpsons did it!

I inherted a banjo, a harmonica, and pan flute

Sung in Swedish, Cia’s native language, a confession that water and clouds look identical when you fly low enough, and that the horizon was never telling the truth.

Sung in Swedish, Cia’s native language, a confession that water and clouds look identical when you fly low enough, and that the horizon was never telling the truth.

A remix of the lie we tell ourselves about the horizon, the sky and the sea blurred into one bright deception.

Interview: Stephan Kuslich & Dev Yarusso on Hey Kid (Breathe Slow)

Interview by Evan Hale

Hale:
This song doesn’t just feel emotional, it feels confrontational. Like it’s asking something of the listener they might not want to answer. Where does that come from?

Kuslich:
Because it is.

Most people are living a life they didn’t consciously choose. They’re just following a script that got handed to them early on, and nobody ever told them they could stop.

You’re taught to be patient.
You’re told to endure.
You’re told boredom is part of being an adult.

I don’t buy that anymore.

Hale:
You don’t think boredom is just part of life?

Kuslich:
No. I think boredom is a signal.

It’s your brain telling you something really important: “This isn’t it.”

It’s the feeling you get when you suddenly realize that life is a limited-time opportunity, and whatever you’re doing right now isn’t meaningful to you. It’s not enriching you. It’s not moving you.

And instead of listening to that signal, most people suppress it. They sit through things they don’t care about, spend time with people they don’t enjoy, consume content that does nothing for them, and call it normal.

That’s the part I reject.

Yarusso:
That idea is all over the song, even when it’s not explicitly said.

The pauses, the pacing, the restraint, it all creates space for that realization to hit. Because it’s not a loud thought. It’s a quiet one.

It’s that moment where you stop and go,
“Why am I doing this?”

Hale:
You’ve taken that philosophy pretty far in your own life.

Kuslich:
Yeah. I don’t sit through things that don’t matter to me anymore.

If I’m 30 minutes into a movie and it hasn’t moved me, I’m out.
If I’m reading a book that doesn’t spark something, I close it.

I don’t have time to waste on things that are wasting my life.

And that sounds harsh to people, but it’s actually the opposite. It’s respect. For my time. For my attention.

Hale:
Most people would say that’s impatience.

Kuslich:
That’s because we’ve been trained to think enduring boredom is a virtue.

When you’re young, people constantly tell you to be patient. To sit still. To tolerate boredom. To wait your turn even when your turn never fully materializes.

And that belief just carries into adulthood without ever being questioned.

But patience for what?

Patience for things that don’t matter to you?
Patience for experiences that don’t enrich your life?

That’s not virtue. That’s inertia.

Hale:
There’s also a pretty stark way you talk about how people spend their time.

Kuslich:
Yeah, and it’s uncomfortable, but it’s real.

The average person spends over a month every year watching reality TV and scrolling apps that are literally engineered just to hold their attention.

Thirty-one days.

Stack that up over a lifetime and… what did you get out of it?

That’s where regret comes from. Not from failure. From time spent on nothing.

Yarusso:
That’s why the song doesn’t rush.

If you rush it, it becomes another thing people passively consume. Another thing in the background.

But if you slow it down enough, it forces you to sit with yourself. And that’s where the discomfort comes in.

Hale:
Let’s go back to the core structure. Who are the two voices in this song?

Kuslich:
It’s me talking to myself.

Voice 1 is who I am now, someone who understands the cost of that mindset.
Voice 2 is who I was, ambitious, driven, chasing everything.

And the younger version isn’t wrong. He’s just missing information.

Hale:
What’s the central idea you’re trying to communicate to that younger version?

Kuslich:
That we were never obligated to live that way.

That’s the whole thing.

Not that success is bad. Not that ambition is wrong.
But that we chose a version of it that cost more than it gave back.

And we didn’t have to.

Hale:
Everyone has an in-law that annoys them but, “You don’t owe time to in-laws you can’t stand,” I’ve got a feeling this one goes deep for you.

Kuslich:
Yeah. That was the day that really woke me up. It was Thanksgiving.

I was sitting there surrounded by people obsessing over Black Friday deals in the newspaper. It was a cacophony of consumerism plotting and planning to compete with other human beings for stuff they didn’t need at slightly lower prices than a normal day.

And I just… checked out.

I found a quiet corner and started reading my iPad. Just trying to exist somewhere else mentally. And my brother-in-law comes over and tells me to put it away. Tells me to engage. To participate in this whole thing.

And something clicked.

I didn’t argue. I didn’t get defensive. I just sent him an Apple Pay request for $450.

Hale:
Seriously?

Kuslich:
Yeah. He asked what it was for. I told him, “That’s my hourly rate. The only people allowed to tell me to do something I don’t want to do, pay me to do it.”

He told me to fuck off and said he wasn’t paying me anything.

And I just said, “Fine by me,” and went back to reading.

That was the moment.

Hale:
And that changed things?

Kuslich:
Completely. All bullies are cowards and when I told him, he can’t tell me what to do, he lost his shit.

The next Thanksgiving, he tried to start a fistfight with me. And honestly, that was the best gift he could have given me.

Because now I have an irrefutable reason to skip in-law shit that used to steal my whole day.   AND, it is a reason one that no one can argue with. I mean, they’ll try, but it is abusive to force someone to spend time with people who threaten them with violence, so, yeah, the argument runs out of air pretty quickly.

The firewall is impenetrable now.

Hale:
“You don’t owe patience to poison?”

Kuslich:
Yeah, that’s the fuck’n line.

People think being a good person means tolerating things that hurt them.

Why?

You don’t owe your time to people you don’t like.
You don’t owe your attention to things that don’t matter to you.
You don’t owe patience to something that’s actively making your life worse.

Hale:
The beginning of the song carries a lot of sadness. There’s a heaviness, almost a sense of hopelessness in the younger voice. How intentional was that?

Yarusso:
Very intentional.

That voice had to feel trapped. Like he’s doing everything right, everything he’s been told to do, and still feeling like it’s not enough.

It’s exhaustion. It’s that feeling of, “I’m doing everything I’m supposed to do, so why doesn’t it feel right?”

Hale:
And by the end, it flips. There’s this sense of freedom, even joy, in needing nothing. That line, “no one can leave you without leaving you be,” how do you land something that big so simply?

Yarusso:
That’s where Stephan and I really connect.

He’ll give me something like, “The fear of loss dissolves when you realize that your fear of someone leaving you always comes with them giving you freedom when they leave.”

That’s the idea.

My job is to turn that into something you can feel in one line.

So it becomes:
“without leaving you be.”

Same meaning. Just cleaner. It lets the listener feel it instead of think through it.

Hale:
So what do you hope people take away from this?

Kuslich:
I hope it makes them uncomfortable enough to ask one question:

“Why am I doing this?”

And if they’re honest with the answer… everything changes.

Yarusso:
And maybe, for the first time in a long time…

they actually stop…

…and breathe.

“It’s not about success. It’s about realizing you were never obligated to live that way.”

All systems nominal

A song about the moment the dream becomes more honest than the waking life, and the quiet fear of opening your eyes.

Suck it Bitch

By 2006, the song had traveled so far from that first private morning that it hardly seemed possible it had once belonged to two people in a room, and then Approach Vector Icarus got hold of it and stripped away almost everything that made “Welcome to Amsterdam” recognizable as a tourist anthem. The vocals disappeared. The bright campaign polish was dissolved into pulse, echo, and repetition. What remained was the ghost of Sanne’s melody stretched across a hypnotic instrumental track that felt less like arriving in Amsterdam than remembering it through water, headlights, rain, and sleep deprivation. The remix turned the song into motion: a low electronic current under glassy synths, a rhythm that never quite hurried but never stopped, the original hook returning like a canal reflection disturbed by passing boats. It was no longer a welcome sign. It was the city after midnight, looping endlessly in the mind of someone who had once been young there and could still feel the place calling from behind the years.

The next Approach Vector Icarus remix, “Bass Driver,” took the dream-state of the first instrumental and pushed it out of the canal mist and onto wet pavement at 2:17 a.m., turning “Welcome to Amsterdam” into something heavier, faster, and more physical. Where the earlier remix floated, this one moved with intent: a deep, rubbery bassline under the melody, not just supporting it but steering it, like a black car threading through narrow streets with the windows down and the city lights breaking across the windshield. Sanne’s original refrain was still buried in there, but now it arrived in fragments, chopped into breath, shimmer, and memory, half-recognizable before the bass swallowed it again. It was less romantic than the first remix, more dangerous, more alive, the sound of Amsterdam not as a postcard or a memory, but as a machine under your feet, humming through bridges, clubs, train tunnels, and sleepless bodies until the whole city felt like it had become the instrument.

The “Chime Synth” remix took the engine of “Bass Driver” and lifted it into the air, replacing weight with shimmer, impact with suspension, and street-level momentum with something closer to bells ringing across water at sunrise. Approach Vector Icarus kept the pulse, but softened its edges, threading Sanne’s old melody through bright chiming synths that sounded like glass catching morning light over the canals. The track felt cleaner, more spacious, almost innocent compared to the darker drive of the previous mix, as if the city had exhaled after the long night and revealed its softer architecture: tram bells, bicycle chains, café cups, church towers, and the first gold wash of daylight on brick. It was still electronic, still hypnotic, but now the repetition felt less like obsession and more like memory polishing itself smooth, each chime returning to the central refrain as if Amsterdam itself were trying to remember the song before the tourists arrived.

The next Approach Vector Icarus remix became the first version that felt haunted in a literal way, because after a deeper analysis of the damaged source tape, they were finally able to rescue a few usable fragments of Sanne’s voice and pull them directly into the remaster. It was not enough to restore the song as she had sung it. It was not even enough to form a full lyric. But it was enough to change everything. Against the four-note sine wave motif and the steady kick drum, her voice appeared only as small, fragile artifacts, half-breath, half-memory, like someone speaking from the other side of magnetic decay. The low percussive hits and sub-bass gave the track a slow physical gravity, while the filtered pads swelled around those recovered vocal traces as if the entire mix had been built to protect them. By Section B, the white-noise sweeps and widening delays made the song feel less like a remix and more like an excavation, each echo searching the tape for one more surviving piece of her. Then the beat fell away, the percussion faded, and the sine wave motif disappeared into silence, leaving only the sudden cello strike at the end, a single dark note that made the listener feel exactly how little had been saved, and how much that little still mattered.

Arrival in a city that feels like a held breath. Glass chimes and a slow pulse welcome you into a place that is half memory already.

How I Met Sanne and Became Her Hofnar-Jongen

I first saw Sanne through my hotel window. I had just spent two weeks touring Europe with Smith & Nephew, co-authoring a paper on the sources of pain in tissue injuries. As a twenty-year-old undergrad with nothing better to do in the summer of 1994, I had jumped at the chance to present at major medical centers across Europe. Our final stop was Amsterdam, and I was granted one full day of freedom before my flight home the following night.

With actual time to myself for the first time in weeks, my perspective shifted. Perhaps it was the relief, or perhaps Amsterdam truly was the most beautiful place I had ever been. Either way, when I looked outside, I saw her: the most beautiful woman I had ever seen, sitting at a cafe in the small, lush park right outside my hotel.

I initially intended to change out of my suit into something more comfortable for wandering, but I caught my reflection in the mirror. I decided the suit made me look professional, older, even. She seemed a bit older than me, and I figured any help I could get in that department would be a bonus.

I wandered down and approached her table. Out of nowhere, I decided to be incredibly forward and asked if I could join her. I spoke English. She responded in Dutch. I tried French. She shook her head. Then I tried Spanish.

That made her smile.

She said in her beautiful accent, “Why did you go to all the trouble to learn multiple languages, but not the one for the place where you travel?”

I explained that in the past two weeks, I had been through ten countries and all my French and Spanish had been of no use, especially in France.

She laughed and said, “De Fransen zijn pretentieuze klootzakken.” -The French are pretentious bastards.

I laughed and agreed.

She arched an eyebrow. “Ah, so you do understand some Dutch, then?”

“I think I understood that purely from the context,” I admitted.

“So,” she asked, “did you choose to join me because you needed my help ordering a coffee?”

I gestured toward the empty chair at her table. She nodded.

I told her, “I wanted to join you because I saw you through that window,” I pointed up toward the hotel, “and I thought you were the most beautiful person in the most beautiful park in the most beautiful city on a beautiful day. I wanted to meet you because I think I’d like to know you.”

When you have only one day for an adventure, there is little reason to be reserved, especially when you’re simply telling the truth.

She replied with a lengthy statement in Dutch that I didn’t catch at all. She paused, then asked in English, “Espresso?”

“Americano,” I said.

She smiled. “Of course.”

She said a few words in Dutch and she walked toward the counter to order. She seemed to move in slow motion. The light danced through the large trees shading the park, and little tufts of cottonwood fell slowly around her as she moved.

I caught the eye of an older couple at the next table who had been watching the whole exchange with amusement.

“Do you know what she said before she left?” I asked them.

The woman said, “She thinks you are also attractive and admires your confidence. But if she said yes to every American tourist who hit on her…”

She smiled and shrugged.

The man winked at me. “You have her interest, but she wants a man with specific talents. She wants you to impress her.”

I noticed a crate on their table overflowing with some type of fruit.

“Are those apples?”

The woman explained they were perzikrassen, peaches they had picked that morning.

Before she could elaborate, I asked, “Could I borrow three of those?”

The woman smiled and motioned for me to take my pick. I found three equally sized peaches and began to juggle them.

The man laughed, and the woman began to clap her hands with excitement.

The noise made Sanne turn around. When she saw me, her smile was beaming. She picked up the coffee and headed back, and I kept the fruit rotating in the air as she approached.

She set the cup down in front of my chair and faced me.

“Dus dat is je zet? Wil je mijn hofnarretje zijn? Mijn hofnarjongen?”

The couple kindly translated: “Do you want to be her jester?”

I nodded my thanks to them and turned to her, not missing a beat.

“Yes! I’d like to be your hofnar-jongen.”  – Jester-boy.

She laughed, likely because I slaughtered the pronunciation.

“Okay, mijn hof-nar-jon-gen,” she said, carefully pronouncing it for my benefit. “Come drink your coffee and tell me about yourself and what you are doing in Amsterdam.”

I caught the fruit, handed them back to the couple, and said, “Bedankt.”

The older woman, giddy from the spectacle, waved her hand as if to say the fruit was for us. I offered one to Sanne, thanked the couple again, and sat down to a modest round of applause from the surrounding tables, including a few quiet claps from the woman who had drawn me to the park in the first place.

“So,” she asked, “do you always try to pick up women with your juggling skills?”

“Oh god, no,” I laughed. “It’s hard to think of a worse way to impress a woman than admitting you’ve spent way too much time mastering a completely worthless skill. But when life hands you perzikrassen… you make do with what you’ve got.”

She liked that and said, “Well played, mijn hofnarjongen.”

She told me her name was Sanne.

We spent hours talking in that cafe. She asked if I wanted Riesling, which I didn’t understand at first, and then explained it was “summer wine, sweet wine.”

I said I’d love some, and she waved down the waiter for a bottle. I wasn’t sure what the drinking age was, but I wasn’t about to volunteer any information that might make our age difference a deal-breaker.

We finished the bottle, and I asked if she’d like to get dinner.

She pointed to my hotel window. “That is your room?”

I nodded.

“We should go there first,” she said. “It is much better to make love with someone for the first time before the sun sets and before dinner. Shall we?”

“I would like that very much,” I replied.

“I think I will, too,” she said with a sweet smile.

The COVID YEARS

I like this version more than mine

Every 5 years I give these oldies another go

Breath and cellos draw the haters down to a low, mournful hum, more pity than anger in the end.

Crunchy guitars turn the haters into something you can skate over at speed, distortion as the last word.

Strings and bows take the lead, cutting cleanly through the chatter. The most elegant way to dismiss a critic.

The argument rendered in pan flutes, every counterpoint answered with breath instead of spite.

A full symphonic charge against the noise of criticism, swinging the orchestra like a weapon and a shield at once.

Detractors scored like an approaching empire, all pomp and menace, until you realize the march is faintly ridiculous.

The haters reimagined as a woodwind assault, critics turned into a chorus of reeds you can almost dance past.