True Story House exposes the blanking plate for our primeval superpower
Specialized high-desert rock music and its assault on the methodical annihilation of community and The System's savage indifference to humanity.
Heart break, struggle, murder, and the realization that people, fellow human beings, were being slaughtered with ‘merican tax money, no matter how we skew the slant, going into winter of 2023 sucked. For the world.
We had momentum coming out of Covid, those fortunate of us who survived, leveled up, or moved on. Then the crippling ‘merican economic inflation and ensuing senselessness among neighboring humans in Gaza. As if we needed more fan on the flame, we all became acutely aware of the disgusting worthlessness, and the fatal helplessness the Republic (gov) has legislated itself into by its own creation of the ruling corporate: corporations as an entity.
No doom and gloom here. It was all by design. The moment human beings “progressed” from hunter gatherer to civilizations, roughly some 20,000 years ago, and began a very opinionated system of sharing resources, a distinguished demographic of humans had to um, give up their agency, to further the species. Those who refused to give up said agency, were considered outlaws, or heathens (whatever word they used back then) the first of their kind in modern history, and were specifically targeted by the lawmakers and leaders of said societies, in order to “protect the resources.” (Sound familiar?) This was all before rich white supremacy became a thing, but some time after agriculture began domesticating humans globally, coming out of the last ice age.
It took me, listening to True Story House, the songwriting of Johnny Wilson, and researching some powerful signals and symbols in his writing, along with the dedicated production efforts at Empty House Studio, founded and operated by Matthew Tobias, about three months of reading to fully understand how to describe his music. It is very much about the failures of systems. All systems. Along with some embarrassing and humiliating discoveries colonial ‘merica has on its hands. I recognized the agency Johnny conveys in his music, and the astounding effectiveness the band has by driving the point home, but I now have the task of highlighting several examples, a few artistic metaphors, to tie in the healing power of music with the revelations that history is not what they taught us. We are peeling back layer after layer of misinformation and blatant white washing; colonial cover ups and global indigenous slaughter.
It’s so much to research and capture that their music has inspired me to write about it: my view on the world and the loss of community in the western society while living and working in downtown Albuquerque, NM. This essay will consist of multiple parts and will likely serve as my transition into more consistent and informative creative writing, not entirely unlike an old newspaper column.
Follow along with my first writings after hearing True Story House and their evening at Echoes Albuquerque, celebrating both their new album release and some relevant heavy hitters from the last album.
Johnny Wilson’s True Story House is a rock music pilgrimage trenched in an ancient superpower conduit that predates human civilization. Superseded by a psychological septic tank of self-defeating sabotage, with its subterranean dispersal of self-love and acceptance, the global institution of shame tempered our primeval instincts and the subsequent social structures they built diminished the tolerance to mostly nil, in favor of a more civil, sharing-the-resources system to advance the human species. Basically, when we came out of the ice ages and civilizations began popping up in the overcrowded warmer areas, they put a blanking plate over the exposed live circuit, and rendered murder an unjustified and immoral capacity of human capability.
But they didn’t remove the draw.
Justifiable homicide, the precedent molded by rapid development of civilizations, became the luxury dispense of the higher, ruling class; then government as we know it now. The non-conforming individual, those who openly rebelled against whatever system was in place, was left to navigate its own existence through restricting and damaging social hierarchies and engineered beliefs intended to progress society, not the rogue dissenter.
The human spirit.
Agency, the pre-history datalink between the physical body, emotional regulation, and primeval instinct, is what makes us human. The lightning fast ability to rework an internal response to an external threat keeps the bodily weapon in check and allows for a larger margin of correction in situational unknowns. Agency is the scientific link to our survival success and in a properly functioning body, agency is our sole conviction. Sadly, in our western, consumerist society, properly functioning bodies don’t produce revenue at idle. Extraction, the process of shaming a demographic into giving up their agency, occurs through a global network of sensational gaslighting and reliance on domestic trauma and generates billions in profits for the overlords.
Johnny Wilson writes songs, for this project, as if he were an amused boy who had learned his first non-truth, yet numbed the relentless misery with chiseled scars of human cruelty and social failures forged well into manhood; the empty spaces within a man’s heart where hope and acceptance once kept him curious, they now transmit a hollowed reverb of conviction and reckoning. The human art of truth has always been the only adaptation of life capable of furthering the species while keeping the broadcast signal live, plugged directly into source: the amused and curious boy before the administer of cruelty murdered his authority.
Johnny’s alkaline brilliance lies in the grit of unspeakable authenticity; his stories are cynical and cutting from a surviving statistic’s perspective; a case study in a flawed system that spawned both the musical author and his prison tattoo of injustice, now fighting the system with angst/alt americana rock music for those unable to do so with their own disemboweled dignity.
True Story House is every cosmic thing that surfaces to mind when allowing curiosity to wonder with the music project’s name: it is a metaphor, a conduit, a garden, a well-spring, a safe place, anti-system, a vector of creative influence, a cosmic structure, and even a galactic antenna of love and acceptance in the realm of surviving orphaned voyagers. Perhaps most importantly, the music project is a community structure for the chosen; the last dilapidated house on the dead end street of hope; only the abandoned and destitute will discard its repulsive appearance and recognize its integrity, and its purpose for existing.
The veiled structure of music conduits the integrity of human truth.
How do we know it’s not bullshit? The true story? How do we know the house is solid and the structure will survive an April wind storm on a First Friday Art Walk? How do we know it’s real? How does our brain invigorate relevancy and discernment; how do we connect with studio albums that loiter truth in the city of the abandoned, like discarded scratch offs on the oil-stained concrete next to pump four?
We know the primeval structure is solid because we are living through a validation of mass individual actualization with no community to nurture its growth. The veiled structure of music conduits the integrity of human truth. Community, and any symbology of it, is being globally annihilated by the system (TikTok ban during genocide). The story of injustice survives in spirit through human art and must be told, can only be told, in an application of authentic existence. One can only tell the story if they first emerged from the resistance.
One’s own conviction generates the message that emerges from their soul. Music is the structure of truth with others who bring their own conviction to the vessel. Under the rules of community, truth is existence; it’s a stand alone conviction. It requires no hierarchy to authenticate it.
Music is agency at work through conviction. Matters of the heart converted to mechanical energy.
Johnny Wilson writes music about the hypocritical and destructive nature of humans clumped together in a box, governed and manipulated by a hierarchy of shame and fear; the dubious promises of equality, material excess, and coveted thoughts of eternal riches; disappointed and murderously fed up by continuous streaming of human injustice and stupefying contradictions in a rigged system.
True Story House is a musical project with a flawless foundation of reinforced injustice and rebar of human actualization; structurally sound with a hardware scrap bin of plumbings, wirings, and fixtures; some indestructible reclaimed old-growth flooring scored from a high-country barn tear-down up near Pecos. Nothing wrong with uniformity deviations on a self-made home, but it requires a peculiar eye for unconventional craftsmanship to pass inspection, mandated by the system.
Music is relevant and truthful. True Story House, through a kind and selfless troubadour’s struggles, narrates the demise of the human spirit through systemic human indifference, which is senseless cruelty masquerading as society. Through gratitude and collaboration with music specialists and shadow workers, Scenes That’ll Never Happen continues the self-actualization of a wounded, yet contemporary man in a modern failed system; an individual nonetheless, who finds himself keenly aware it’s all a massive scam in an oppressive system.
Ancient agency encompassed the ability to take another human’s life without trial by society; divine agency exudes the same physical strength to do so, yet searches for external agency in a large, advanced society. The individual is programmed, very early, to behave this way, thus, dispensing droplets of agency over time until the vessel has been fully depleted.
True Story House is a musical illumination of lost human agency.
Stringer.
Stay tuned for Part II of this essay where we dive further into the band members, the crew at Empty House Studio, and the modern-day discovery that Maslow’s bastardized Hierarchy of Needs intentionally removed the very thing True Story House writes about, and indigenous populations figured out thousands of years ago. Quite enlightening, yet sickening.