Not long after we wrapped production on the upcoming France de Griessen album, spring had come to an end, and I was on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean for the first time in over a year – I went to Oaxaca, Mexico, to visit my parents and some friends who live there, including Negrita Yani, who plays accordion on my two most recent albums and is an incredible songwriter and performer in her own right – she invited me to perform at her Summer Solstice event in Oaxaca, where I met the poet Zandy Nova, who invited me to play guitar during some of her performance that same night.

Apparently, around the same time as that performance, I also wrote this mysterious statement about the current fascination with early 2000s music and aesthetics – I think in response to hearing so many “songs from my youth” in cafes around Mexico, the UK, and mainland Europe in recent years, and noticing those aesthetics are “making a comeback” in other ways.

And, looking back on it now, this really was a summer full of revisiting (and being revisited by) “songs from my youth”.

I spent most of the summer in Oaxaca, digging through the archives of decades of my work that my parents have been generously storing in their home – which meant that in addition to whatever early 2000s chart-toppers they were playing on the radio in seemingly every coffee shop in Mexico, I was also hearing hundreds of songs I wrote and recorded myself in my childhood and teenage years, and combing through videos from early gigs and filmmaking projects.

This project also led me to spend some time a bit further North, in Puebla, where I brought some of the VHS tapes of early gigs and projects of mine to be digitized for this project, as I couldn’t find a place to digitize the tapes in Oaxaca – some of these were copies of limited edition Cannonball Statman VHS releases from the early 2010s that had never been digitized, others were raw footage from a VHS camera, and some were VHS releases that had also been released digitally.

The previously analog-only releases that are now digitized included these videos of me playing “The Morgue” in my room in 2012, and me playing “How Have You Been?” at Goodbye Blue Monday in 2013 with Ria Boss on vocals and Jon Edelstein on drums – and the ones that were already released online include the infamous “Old VHS Tapes” series, which we’ve added a “New Digital Video of Bobby” to that resurfaced on one of the DVDs in the archives.

The work in both the physical archives and the digital archives took up a lot of my time (and Kléo’s) over the past several months, with me spending more than 8 hours a day on it in many cases – it left me without much time to do anything else, aside from a handful of local gigs and preparations for the release of my new album.

One of those local gigs was the release party for the song “Theme from Cannonball Statman” in August at Centro Cultural Liliana Loth, which we now have some photos and videos from on the site. That party featured performances by Negrita Yani, Araceli Mancilla, Mark Statman, Zach Hunter, Efraín Velasco Sosa, Enna Osorio, and myself, and a showing of some brand new paintings by my mom, the New York painter and memoirist Katherine Koch – it was a lot of fun!

So many thank yous to everyone who performed at, participated in, and attended that party, and the release party for the album itself that we just had, and all the other events this year – and to everyone else who helped make them possible – and, to the people at TRANSFERS in Puebla for digitizing my tapes, and my parents for storing and taking care of my archives!

Next → Page 7: Autumn reflections on the NYC underground scene and the power of music

or jump to:

Page 1: Dancing dogs and insects in the days before the party, visual art and guests start to arrive

Page 2: Poetry and Music at the party

Page 3: Cannonball Statman at the party

Page 4: Winter in Wales, recording the new album in Somerset

Page 5: Spring Romantic Punk touring season in Europe and the UK

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Page 8: What am I doing in 2025?

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