Emil Amos' Drifter's Sympathy

...One of the most important chapters of our tale!📕 The towering myth of Ron's benevolence is put into perspective as his trust with Emil becomes fractured. Emil begins to see Ron as fallible and human just like the rest of us while his second guru begins to grow darker and darker. A new theory is posited... that the pull of the guru is fueled by a tension that comes from risk. And that putting o...

Emil heads back down to the initial crossroads where we naively wander across the dividing lines of various sub-cultures and get sucked under their psychological tide. He sees a somewhat unfortunate Grateful Dead show with Ron at around age 15 which bores and frightens him in turn... and that experience begins a strange fascination with the dark side of the hippie movement. 'Plastic Flower People'...

In 1998 Duncan Trussell (comedian), David MacLean (writer) and Emil (musician) went to India and Sri Lanka together for 3 months. They lived in Dharamshala for a month with Tibetan Refugees and Buddhist monks and then traveled to Agra, New Delhi and Varanasi together. In Varanasi they took a semi-disastrous trip down the Ganges where Emil ingested too many religious drugs and his body evaporated a...

 EPISODE 30 ✨🔦✨ In this episode Emil travels back down to Chapel Hill to try and re-assess the landscape that gave birth to his musical outlook in the early nineties. He uses the flashpoint of Chapel Hill's underground music explosion to argue that its the people living in a town that truly define the psychological geography of a place before they disappear and that place's identity transforms....

On March 5th the next episodes of Drifter's Sympathy will start rolling out!💥 We've set up a Patreon for people to support the podcast so it can run ad free for the rest of the season. The 3rd Season has 6 more episodes to go, but if you want to support the show and join the Patreon you get all the episodes a week early and two of the Lost Episodes too. There's also a new Drifter's Sympathy shirt...

Episode 29 tells the genesis tale behind the song 'Saccharine Trust' that was named after the classic SST band of the '80s. The first half of the cast meditates on the unstable period of life the song is about and then segues into a lesson on meeting your heroes when Emil ends up face to face with his early underground idol, J Mascis from Dinosaur Jr. The second half of the cast drifts into the mi...

'The Terrorists' digs down into the music that shapes our minds when we first become indoctrinated in the language of the punk spirit. Another version of the loner/outsider, The TERRORIST anticipates their marginalization and amps up the aggression for a preemptive attack. Twisting the knife back into the gatekeepers and mutating the artistic frontier before others can theorize on what's coming ne...

This is the story of how the first song on the first Holy Sons record was channeled during a precarious bender and super-faded viewing of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom in 1997. This bender eventually leads to a semi-disastrous conclusion at a party that Emil has some trouble owning up to. The second half of the cast gets into the initial elation we feel when canonizing our early heroes... a...

Loner Legends returns for a second round to help define the impetus behind Drifter's Sympathy. The 'loser' is an archetype that still needs a good bit of ironing out... and for this episode we're presented with classically wayward examples like Arch Hall Jr., Gary Stewart, Bobb Trimble and Jimmy Campbell. Underdogs who crashed up against their time with a particular fearlessness and were then trap...

'Dawn of Individuation' launches Season 3 of Drifter's Sympathy by grappling with the etymology of nostalgia as an 'acute form of homesickness'. Its a mellow opening that digs into the initial chance you get to invent yourself at age 13, the mating rituals of junior high school and the vanity that drives one to flip a penny into a water fountain and pray to god earnestly for popularity and affirma...

LONER LEGENDS brings the second season of Drifter's Sympathy to a close with special spotlights on Pete Hamm, Roger Rodier, Moondog and the great Skip Spence, who might've unknowingly kicked off this entire genre. Spence's story is used as a jumping off point as he embodied the classic tragedy of someone who was impossibly talented, taken off the path towards happiness by schizophrenia and addicti...

To bring Season 2 to its thematic close, Duncan guest-hosts with Emil and they try to sum up their thoughts on the light and dark sides of the nature of the Guru. The episode is named after a Universal voice that Duncan dubbed 'The Lecturer'... an entity that might visit you when you've ingested too much and the rudder of your mind leaves you floating directionless. In that moment of vulnerability...

British Masters returns for a second volume to mine early Bowie obscurities, classically-influenced prog-folk, private press demos of failed songwriting teams and a short spotlight on Andrew Loog Oldham (producer of the Stones, Del Shannon and Billy Nicholls). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This cast is about the slow attempt we make to repair ourselves while staring into the heart of absurdity. Its about the family of people who've inadvertently helped each other through death and re-birth... the writers, thinkers and artists who have recorded their attempt to appreciate life throughout history. Taking its name from Colin Wilson's book 'The Outsider', the cast eventually devolves in...

Emil's bandmate Alex Hall from Grails and Lilacs & Champagne is in town from Berlin and they deliver an introduction to "Library Music"... The term goes back as far as the twenties when stock music began to be composed to accompany the first films that included sound. Television companies were able to avoid copyright issues by sourcing music from 'music libraries' and the anonymous players who pro...

Duncan Trussell & Emil Amos have been sitting on an archive of prank calls they did in college & talking about releasing them for 2 DECADES now. Some of Emil's favorites have been cleaned up for this exclusive episode of Drifter's Sympathy.✨🌺✨ It serves as a frozen photograph of a strange moment up in the mountains of North Carolina in the 90's, the bizarre personalities of that region and Dunc...

Drifting deep into our UK roots on many drinks, Emil dedicates an entire episode to two unheralded pioneers that got lost in the initial flurry of British invasion-isms. Caravan hid behind the shadow of Pink Floyd without ever truly stepping out into the larger public's mind. Kaleidoscope also burst off that initial spark of Syd's imagination into their own obtuse world and then faded away into ob...

This episode details the story behind the song "Reckless Liberation" from the Holy Sons' record 'Survivalist Tales'. Emil enters college and immediately descends into an inner-storm of disassociation and profound confusion; ...existing up in trees, on rooftops or gazing down upon normal human life from the rafters of the church. Until he eventually sees a girl from across campus that he decides ha...

Re-visiting the entry point at which we all encounter the idea of sex and the mystique/power it holds at a distance, we dive into some of the geniuses behind the music that soundtracked the classic softcore porn films. The centerpiece is on the Emmanuelle films and the three composers that brought to life the darkness and tension those films asked for. But a few moments of dirty disco are hauled o...

This cast is about the absolute peak of recklessness... when you spin the wheel just to see where everything lands. It picks up the thread left off in "Center of the Cyclone", the darkest chapter of Drifter's Sympathy, where Emil had a classical guitar broken over his head and 17 staples put in to rectify the situation. In this episode he accidentally gets into college and then travels up to Bosto...

American Trailblazers returns and seeps into all new cracks of our abandoned history. In a half-drunken fit of mispronunciation, Emil calls up producer John Agnello to set the record straight on the various producers of the Eagles, uncovers various home tapes by forgotten garage bands and rolls out a few unparalleled epics by would've-been-giants from the genesis of the folk-rock boiling pot. List...

Episode 13 kicks off the second season of Drifter's Sympathy.💐 Like an archaeologist going over the same prehistoric site twice, we go back to High School in an attempt to return to more optimistic times. That strategy backfires completely as we dive fully into the experience of finding a dead body, the extremely faint footprint we leave on earth and the confusion of watching a peer get destroyed...

In the late 60's new advances in recording technology collided up against the rise of the flower children and a new genre of insincere bohemian music was pushed into the wake of a new youth market. Some of it was QUITE GOOD as a few very genuine artists got mixed up into this relatively hollow campaign that tried its best to commodify dissent. These songs can be judged as peripheral artifacts or b...

This is the 'season finale' of the first 6 month run of Drifter's Sympathy. We've already covered that there's inevitably a moment in the 'hero's journey' where one doesn't know what they're doing anymore and has lost all sense of safety and direction. This cast is about the stage beyond that where the joke goes too far and one isn't taking death or life seriously. Its a void that a lot of people...

Rare Soundtracks is back. ⚡ This episode digs back into the folds of Grails' influences by focusing on the great 'British Crime' film composer Roy Budd, pointing out the cancerous effect of Tubular Bells on modern horror films and including a small section on MF Doom sampling the composer of Hair. ...Emil's instrumental band Grails has just announced their first record in 6 years. It's called "Ch...