I was 15 and I took the bus home like I always do and I had always wanted to record an album. I grabbed my younger brothers ¾ scale guitar and I started playing, using it more as a percussive instrument than strictly strings. I wrote a mess of songs and called it People Have Babies All the Time under the moniker Brown Sugar Megalomania. The title comes from A Farewell to Arms by Hemingway. When I was 16 I wanted to repeat the thrill of spending an afternoon sitting at my kitchen table in my mom’s house and writing a whole album. Bug Martin produced the first one, as well as the second Brown Sugar Megalomania album, Pistol Packin. The title comes from On the Road by Kerouac.

End of summer 2010 and released in February 2011 when I was 20 was Be Tru 2 Yr Crew. I can’t remember where the title came from. I wrote most of the songs living in Finland by myself, studying Finnish as a way to spend a summer. I auditioned for Sibelius Academy (time ½) and didn’t get in and then found myself with a guitar nicer than that ¾ hohner. I had broken up with a partner to travel and found nothing when I got there. There are stories. I saw The Specials and Slash at the same concert, Ozzy as well. I went to the skinhead capital of Finland and made friends with a man who very menacingly watched me piss in a common urinal. I went to camp in Savonlinna and instead stumbled upon some drunk Finns who tossed a stereo in the lake because Finnish rap sucks and then they gave me a place to stay. I threw up that morning after eating some baked good with ketchup and a few days later I showed this dude my hardcore band Whiskers and he told me he has no religion and has opted out of the church. Good for him. I made friends in Helsinki with all sorts of foreigners, no Americans, but surely French Canadian, Japanese, Hispanic and Finns. I went home from college on a winter break and got this album recorded with Bug Martin yet again.

August 2011 I was head over heels for Man Is the Bastard, Amps for Christ and a person I had gotten in a relationship with at college in Wisconsin. I wrote the songs summer of 2010 to the spring of 2011 and honed my love and polished it, thought I had something special, worth spitting on in admiration. I called the album Every Man Needs a Mexican Mistress which comes from the film Into the Wild (I never read the book). It seemed apt. Bug Martin engineered this work as well. I remember playing at the campus bar and singing Bata Motel by Crass and a man in a suit being horrified. I was playing guitar in a punk band called Mutt at this point, at least briefly
I won’t go into personal details but two pieces that still make my heart throb. Sibelius’s second symphony and the second movement of Ralph Vaughn Williams Tuba Concerto. It’s like one of the most important things I learned at conservatory was what Schopenhauer was talking about. All art represents life except music which is the will, too pure for representation.

Somewhere in all this MEAT recorded and shit was raw as hell.
I graduated college in June 2013 but before that, I went home for a last hurrah, back to New Jersey where I went to high school and grew up and still feel comfortable hanging around at. Mike Haller was living with some roommates in the house on park in Flemington and he lived in the attic. I asked him to help me record this album and we started with guitar and then moved onto vocals, then bass and percussion, all in his attic. People began showing up, Liz, Jeff, Adam, Billy, maybe Kyle whoever was to be hanging out might as well record a little. I think Oonaugh showed up but didn’t record anything. The album sounded better than anything I recorded before and I hadn’t even gotten started. I called it The Room of My Life after the Anne Sexton poem, as in,
Here,/in the room of my life/the objects keep changing./Ashtrays to cry into,/the suffering brother of the wood walls,/the forty-eight keys of the typewriter/each an eyeball that is never shut,/the books, each a contestant in a beauty contest,/the black chair, a dog coffin made of Naugahyde,/the sockets on the wall/waiting like a cave of bees,/the gold rug/a conversation of heels and toes,/the fireplace /a knife waiting for someone to pick it up,/the sofa, exhausted with the exertion of a whore,/the phone/two flowers taking root in its crotch,/the doors/opening and closing like sea clams,/the lights /poking at me,/lighting up both the soil and the laugh./The windows, /the starving windows/that drive the trees like nails into my heart./Each day I feed the world out there/although birds explode/right and left./I feed the world in here too, /offering the desk puppy biscuits./However, nothing is just what it seems to be./My objects dream and wear new costumes,/compelled to, it seems, by all the words in my hands/and the sea that bangs in my throat.

After graduation I moved to Minneapolis and fell into a lonesome pit for awhile. I washed dishes and wanted to escape the winter. I did put things back together long enough to go back to New Jersey in December 2013 and record Southside of the Cloud Kingdom because I lived on the southside of Minneapolis in Powderhorn at Chicago and Lake and I loved that house and that city and soon the attic was insulated and so sound proof that I called it the cloud kingdom. I lived in a room that wasn’t supposed to be mine and hence painted a color I never liked and I lived outside all supervision and was mostly miserable but can look back now and think about how wonderful it was to have sisters and to be somewhere new, even if everyone ignored me here. I made my own money, played in Sister Species, Cosmic Relief, The Southside Community Band, The May Day Band and the Bavarian Musikmeisters. Of the first and last I am very proud of my accomplishments. May Day was almost too perfect and month beyond the release of this album, which I spent countless time making fine cassettes and a nice package and then performing some of the works at a release party/pizza party at my house, where I was living with my brother, my sister, my smee, my jd, Glenda and a revolving cast of downstairs companions. I met Rickie and Aimee at that release show and they loved what I was doing and they were dressed exactly the same and I fell in love with them and they told me in an email that following summer that if I wanted to come down to Memphis there was always a spot for me.

Being tired of America and wanting to use my degree in Russian and Music, I found a program studying Tuvan Khoomei or “throat singing” in the capital of the Republic of Tuva, Kyzyl, in the Russian Federation. I was to be studying with a master and after a drunk time in Moscow, I sat on a train for 4 days and then on a bus for too many hours and ended up the in morning in the geographic center of Asia, where I met Sailyk who showed me where to sleep. I woke up sweating for the wool fest and it was only the start of navigating the bus to ped college, walking through the grocery store and market place and being stared at and being cold, too cold for snow. I moved to Wisconsin and then Minnesota and then Siberia. Most importantly I worked with Choduraa Tumat, my Tuvan mother and inspiration. There was always a tinge of sadness in her station but her voice rang out beautiful and through hard work, she taught me everything I knew. She took me to competitions where I was the first American many had seen and taught me how to carry a drum with a partner and not fall into a frozen pit toilet. She bought me dinner on my 24th birthday. I was mostly alone but I wrote a lot of songs and practiced singing khoomei and understanding my body and taking stock of my situation and life through meditation. It was all upset by unplanned consequences and I went back to New Jersey six months later. I always wonder how it’d be if things were different and I was there longer.

There was a one-off punk record before I left, released under the name Jon E. Erkkila, which is my birth name which I had been going as after the Brown Sugar business went bust and this album was with my “band” “John Wayne’s Teeth” whose name comes from the Sherman Alexie movie, Smoke Signals. Mike engineered this work and Kyle and Jeff played and it was just good fun that I was excited to bring home and show my mother. The album was entitled Gastronomic Pleasures which comes from Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol.

At some point Of the Realm put out their debut. If you can find it, good on you. (wow I’m so excited for the box set of flemington’s dumbest to come out one day.)

After Tuva, I realized most music is about fast horses and beautiful women, hence I named my album Fast Horses and Beautiful Women and I started working at a pizza place with Mike and went on tour with Casual that summer, while booking my own tour for the fall. It was liberating again, to have my own money and to be out on my own with my own merch and no one else, with my own itinerary and my own set list every night and my own plans. My heart pounded on the way to the first show in Richmond and I questioned whether I could do it and almost started crying on 202 as I was headed towards the turnpike headed south. Needless to say I made it and it changed my life and I saw cities I had never seen and talked to people nicer than I could’ve imagined and fell into fun and hardship just as well every step of the way. I promoted my album, I sang khoomei to anyone who would listen, including a wrecker man in Dallas (who was very impressed) and I made some intimate connections, some more deep and hurting more in the end than I could’ve imagined. I went to Baltimore twice on the trip and moved there that November. But so many places really opened up for me, including Florida, Texas, Oklahoma, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina and all sorts of other shit I had to drive to. I had my birthday while on the road and I was at Beloit College in Beloit, Wisconsin and a security guard jostled me awake violently that day and demanded to see my papers. I drove to Appleton and played for Dean Pertl and then drove to Minneapolis, my lake home.

For awhile now, at least since then and for the foreseeable future, Baltimore is my home but I am a nomad and things are always changing. But at least it is warm here. In the year and change I’ve been here, I’ve taught music lessons, put lights on Christmas trees, watered and learned a lot about tropical plants, seen a lot of studs, was in a tumultuous relationship, went through like 5 therapists, stayed for a bit in the hospital around my mom’s birthday, spent that birthday at a pony farm (don’t know what to expect for the next one) and I only hit the road once it felt like and I didn’t leave this tiny city much which is okay and the days dragged on. I drove to Florida to play a earthskills convention and then in North Carolina on the way back, which is always a ton of fun. I recorded Slow Groan and began calling myself SLOW GROAN because erkkila is difficult to spell. I had promoted that album on that “tour” and played a few shows around the city.

I learned how to hate myself and love myself and not trust myself and realize I got no friends to realizing I got plenty of friends and there are some kind people in this world who want you to be yourself, even if it means being by yourself and there are some mean nasty people in this world who hate someone else’s existence and people who are going to prey on you and you’ll lose money and it’ll come back. I worked at a bookstore which promoted me and asked me to be a face of their company at a conference they had all attended in the past and then they fired me when they decided I wasn’t the face they wanted to present to the world of Colorado. So fuck them. I never feel good enough in someone else’s eye, never feel well enough to just be comfortable in my skin, despite how much I start loving myself, what tears at my heart and what I want. I hate waking up in the morning, I hate having things undone, I hate giving away my time. But hell that’s all money, it’s a balance. Yadda yadda I’m restless a musician a nomad smoker joker poet whatever, but I’m a schemer. And I am tired of being told what to do. I want to live at the beach one day, maybe in Florida or Tel Aviv and I don’t want to be a man anymore.

I’ve never included a bio or about me or anything in a recording or release until now because it was just assumed if you listened to my music you probably knew me or saw me, so this is just to say I love the last name Erkkila and will hold onto that but call me Yasha Nadezhdovna, daughter of hope and call me those her/she. Yaidl, Yash is fine as well. I’m only vocal in promoting myself and I will not be disrespected. There is a lot more to the story but I don’t need to explain myself completely in text. There’s plenty in my life better not to bring up and stuff I would rather you not hear about and stuff one should know but maybe not everyone. There’s untime I don’t recall and I’ve blacked out a few times in there and I forgot a lot of things and some of the best moments I would never think to include but undoubtless I think about these things all the time. For example, one of my favorite things in the world is staying up all night and seeing the daybreak, especially in Russia in St Petersburg during the summer when daybreak is like 5 am and Finland at like 4 and the dark nights and the sunrise on the beach and then I love to sleep when the sun is up. But if you have questions, please ask. The worst I’ll say is no. I have many people to thank and if you would think I would thank you I would probably be thanking you or you would’ve known I’ve thanked you before, but either way, thanks to everyone who treats other human beings like equals.

This album was written over my time living here in Baltimore and a few songs from Tuva, so basically 2015-2017. The songs are about the way I feel, the situations I’ve been in and people I know, pretty much all I ever write about. But mostly importantly, after all these dramatic changes in my life I just needed to get these songs out before they’re too old so I had recorded all these tracks in the winter 2016 and didn’t release them and needed to do something quick and different because I was not the same person as I was when I came out People Have Babies All Time. I don’t listen to the same music or sound the same or go by the same name. But I have the same want to create as that dummy riding the bus home wanting to just make some music. And there are more sounds coming from what I had written before I can even keep on with the new material so it’s all uphills both ways from here, baby! At one point, briefly, I went to graduate school and a teacher said the title of this album. So without further ado…