Viking Moses in Loose Lips...

No one in the places I’ve lived growing up played anything more than the radio,” he begins, later, manning a merch table heaving with hand-decorated CDRs and seven inches. “But my Mom was always singing, at home, in the car, out on errands, everywhere, always. I was given little toy pianos when I was a little guy, but everyone encouraged me to play them in my room quietly with the door closed. It wasn’t until I heard ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ for the first time and started getting way into Nirvana, finding bootleg recordings of live shows and demos, that it occurred to me that anyone could make honest music, no matter what it sounded like, and express and expose themselves, no matter what anyone else thought. What’s more inspirational than that?”

Brendon’s recorded twelve full-length ‘stories’ so far, though only three have been publicly released to date. 2004’s Crosses (on Oregon-based indie label Marriage Records) is the only album to bear the name Viking Moses, a song cycle chronicling Massei’s three month love affair with a girl named Emma. Lyrical, touching in its cherishing of the details, it opens with two old church songs, ‘I Love The Fishes’ and ‘Michael Rowed The Boat Ashore’, which Brendon and Emma taught each other, rewriting the lyrics as they saw fit. “We’d borrow our friend Ryan’s toy guitar,” he reminisces for the album’s press material, “and duck into congregations every now and again and sing these together. We painted our names on his guitar.” The rest of the album was written while they travelled together, and after they parted, as he moved to Germany, then back with his family in Las Vegas, and on to Chicago, where Brendon worked as a barback at a joint called The Hideout. Brendon and his friends recorded Crosses there. They even used that same toy guitar, with Brendon and Emma’s names painted on the back. So Crosses is a love story, a memoriam to a finite period of time, an affectionate and bittersweet remembrance of something that meant so much but still seeped away anyway. You’ll find yourself returning to it like memories of a love that ended without going too sour, its warm feelings still intact, and unpoisoned by misplaced regret or rancour, nostalgic with a generous, forgiving, grateful tone. Brendon has been touring his stories seemingly non-stop for almost a decade now, sharing stages and bus-seats and floorspace with the likes of Devendra Banhart, Cat Power, Ted Leo, Calvin Johnson and Will Oldham. His late-2005 tour of the UK was unplanned - “I just headed to England to hang out with some friends” - but he soon found himself playing alongside Akron/Family and Banhart, where some say he stole the show (but he seems too polite to do such a thing; perhaps he just walked away with the show tucked unwittingly in his pocket?).

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