Four notes.

Four notes of the new All Them Witches album was all it took to hook me.

Chit chatting with Patrick over the phone, we’re talking about some recent vinyl purchases – him from Time Machine Records in Grants Pass, me from the Vinyl Vault here in Sonora. We both spend way too much on records but after giving up smokes and booze this vice is acceptable.

“And then I picked up this one Hannah recommended – All Them Witches, never heard them but I’m going to give them a listen.” He said.

“Hmm, never heard of them either,” I responded. Any idea what they’re like?

“No – I just don’t want to be that guy,” Patrick says.

“What do you mean?” I inquire, having a sense I already know what he means.

Hannah is significantly younger than the both of us, so she tends to highlight things that might otherwise be off our collective radars. Such an already refined ear is an absolute joy to see in the younger generation.

“That guy who stopped listening to new stuff. I look at my collection and it’s mostly ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s – I don’t want to be that guy,” he says.

“I feel that!” I said.

We disconnect and I slink back into my chair.

I’m not that guy but I don’t want to be that guy either.

I open Apple Music, look up the band – House of Mirrors, just released a week ago. Fuck it, let’s do this.

Four notes and chills run up my spine as the haunting opening riff from “Red Rocking Chair” begins. Charles starts singing and then it hits. Acid Bath, Black Sabbath, Black Angels.

Something primal deep within me stirs and I stand up, launching out of my chair, reach over for the dial and crank it up… oh my… This. Is. Good.

This is what should have been playing when Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda were traipsing through a New Orleans cemetery hopped up on psychedelics – that’s where it takes you. But don’t you fucking dare decide to take a nap, we’re just getting started. This is a party pressed onto vinyl and you will be here till we kick you off the porch.

I pop Pat a text – Dude…this is fucking amazing – the first in a rapid-fire stream of consciousness reactions as the album unfolds.

Track three, “Aethernet,” moves us out of the cemetery and along the riverbanks. Muscle shirts, Daisy Dukes, cowboy boots and BBQ. Humid, languid, nasty in all the right ways as folks strip off their clothes and head down to the river for a dip in the water. There’s an unsettled menace in the air like a low-pressure system moving in, a storm nipping at its heels.

The texts continue in a flurry to Patrick, who finally throws up the white flag and tells me it’s in his rotation for tomorrow.

“Tomorrow?! There is no tomorrow,” I respond, no longer in control of my mind or words as I’m transported to wherever these guys want to take me.

Somewhere between track four and track five I pop over to the band’s website and order the vinyl, rush delivery. The party’s moved to no one’s house and it’s a rager as someone lights a bonfire out back and the whiskey is freely flowing.

Around what I tell myself would be the second side (Track six, “Starting Line”), the record’s arc bends back toward Earth and starts to reenter the atmosphere. That raging party has turned into your four best friends on the porch, slightly drunk but hanging on, the moment’s not done. “Starting Line” locks into a riff that pulses and coils like Lennon’s coda on “She’s So Heavy” — except McLeod lets it finish. No rug pull. Just the groove riding all the way home, and somewhere in there Ben McLeod is smiling, hoping you catch it.

By the time “Angel on the Wayside” comes around (Track 8), the party has dwindled to a select few, but damn are they still at it. Dancing, grinding, not as much enthusiasm as earlier but all good things have to come to a close and one by one folks are stumbling to their cars, calling it a night.

“The Welterweight” gets you home but “Saturn Song” tucks you in, gives you a kiss on the forehead as it pulls the covers up under your chin. It’s been one helluva night but now it’s time to shuffle off to dreamland. Tomorrow’s another day, another band, another party.

The best albums take you for a ride. Sometimes the trajectory is a slow on-ramp, merging as the music accelerates till you’re moving full speed down the road. And then there’s House of Mirrors, which goes from 0-whatthefuck without even checking to see if you buckled your seat belt, tossing cigarettes out the window as it cracks a beer.

Ten minutes and a stream of unhinged texts later, a photo lands in my messages. Patrick, needle down, album spinning.

Some records don’t wait for tomorrow.

Heading west toward San Francisco, we’d just come down out of the Sierra Nevada foothills as Highway 108 stretched out in front of us. Still about 100 miles from our destination, California’s vast Central Valley sat between us and the Coast Range.

“So you thinking Portugal?” K asked as the monkeys, absorbed in their own storybook worlds, played in the backseat.

“It’s got to be something similar to where we are now,” I said as I quickly glanced over to her, our concerned eyes locking for a second before mine returned to the road.

This had been an ongoing conversation between the two of us the last few years. Nothing felt safe in our native country and more and more the “cruelty being the point” was living up to its ideals.

Leaving. Leaving everything we loved about this nation, packing it all up and just going somewhere, anywhere else. We were married in one of this nation’s National Parks. My twins spend most of their days on one of the nation’s oldest national forests. To give it all up, to start over…

As I pondered all of this, a song came back to me, a song that seems like it’s always there, just at the edge of a waking dream ready to reassert itself when the moment calls. This stretch of open, golden expanse dominated by oaks always reminded me of the drive out to Jamul and I was back in our San Diego home, to a time before the twins were born.

It’d been a long day. Working all morning on the farm then hurrying home to do some work around the house, exhausted, K and I slipped off to our bedroom to veg out for a while before calling it a night. We were knee deep in the modern western series Longmire, having recently returned from a Wyoming trip and feeling a bit of cowboy nostalgia. K’s head resting on my shoulder, laptop nestled on my legs, we kept each other awake through the episode bone-tired though we were. And then I heard the opening lines of a song as the credits rolled and it stopped me cold — the first time a song had done so in many years.

Exhaustion temporarily hijacked, I immediately took to the internet to figure out what that song was, with its dreamlike sequence opening and the comforting repetition of the main guitar line. The soothing voice that carried a song of sadness like a southern gothic magnolia both blooming and wilting before your eyes.

“The Dark.”

The Bones of JR Jones?

Who are these guys and why had I never heard of them?

When I say these guys, what I mean to say is guy — as in singular. There is an interesting phenomenon in music, call it the punk to folk pipeline. Young kids the world over, eager to play in a band, pick up a guitar and suddenly wake up to the Sex Pistols, the Ramones, or Joy Division. Many stay on this well-worn path but for a select few, the journey leads them down roads they didn’t expect. For Jonathan Linaberry, the JR in The Bones of JR Jones, steeped in the punk aesthetic of the early 2000s, the path diverged when his father gave him a collection of music that harkened back to a different era.

“I grew up listening to punk rock. I fell in love with the blues and folk music when I was 18 or 19 years old after my dad gave me a collection of American roots music, and it totally changed the landscape for me,” Linaberry said in a 2016 interview with Mother Church Pew.

One can claim lineage through one of two ways — earned or given. Most of us know the story of the given: the kid who receives their parents’ name and fortune only to squander it away, no understanding of what it took to get there. Then there is the earned, where the roads less travelled are taken, a light shone on those darker passageways. Linaberry, a classically trained pianist who cut his teeth playing punk rock in bands outside of Syracuse, New York, armed with a collection of Americana music, headed off to New York City and the Pratt Institute to study art and design. Here is where the lightning would strike — in the form of a chance listen in a friend’s dorm room.

“I was in a friend’s dorm, and they were playing a guy named Blind Lemon Jefferson, this old Texas bluesman from the late ‘20s,” Linaberry said in an interview with Salt Lake Magazine.

Raw, ugly, emotive — this recording of the legendary bluesman was more authentic, more punk rock than anything Linaberry had ever heard and it struck something inside him, something deep that would lead him on a path to find the field recordings of Alan Lomax.

In 1933, Alan Lomax set out across the American South and Midwest alongside his father John, determined to document and preserve the traditional and folk music of the region before it disappeared entirely. Working with a portable recording machine, Lomax captured anyone willing to sit for him — one Saturday recording Jimmie Rodgers, the following Sunday the Carter Family. The resulting archive, now housed in the Library of Congress, includes some of the earliest recordings of Lead Belly, Muddy Waters and Woody Guthrie. The Lomax recordings are both invaluable and complicated — questions of consent, compensation and a white Northern academic extracting cultural material from poor Black and rural communities without meaningful reciprocity have followed his legacy ever since. But what they preserved changed Linaberry permanently.

At first blush, punk to Americana seems counterintuitive. Blow the dust off and it becomes immediately obvious — the connective tissue is authenticity. The bootleggers running ‘shine through Appalachian hollers and the punk kid playing basement shows are animated by the same spirit — raw, unmediated, outside the sanctioned channels of polite society. It’s both lived experience and aesthetic that shows itself in the lyrics of the music. That thread runs from “Which Side Are You On” echoing from the hills to Dylan’s protest folk and John Prine to the Dead Kennedys’ “Police Truck” without ever losing the plot.

Whether it’s instinct or training doesn’t really matter. Not content to solely abide the folk or punk traditions, Linaberry adds a dash of Faulkner’s Southern Gothic weight both lyrically and musically — the beauty and rot sitting side by side, the past refusing to stay buried. Put all of that into a band and you have the world Jonathan Linaberry is working in.

But it wasn’t right away. The love of American roots music came to him in his late teens and early twenties. Linaberry would need to go on, start building a life — bartending, teaching preschool, playing in an acoustic group called Feverfew. Taking a page from his punk background, absorbing the music fully, coupled with hard-earned experience, before being ready to put his own touch on it. He released his first EP in 2012 with The Wildness, his first full length, Dark Was the Yearling, in 2014. Twelve years of walking the walk before The Bones of JR Jones was fully ready to make its entrance on the world’s stage.

How you hear Linaberry has everything to do with how you’ve experienced him. His live performances and what’s captured on his studio albums are, at times, two completely different animals. Linaberry himself has acknowledged the gap — the atmosphere created in the studio just isn’t there at a solo performance level, which is to be expected. Lower the tone arm on side one of Dark Was the Yearling and “Dreams to Tell” fills the speakers, the staccato of the guitar setting the mood while Linaberry’s voice stands in for a harmonica on the song’s opening wails. Contrast this to his live performance of the same song — just the man on stage with only his banjo, the tempo brought significantly down. What shows up as a Saturday night rocker on the album is turned into a Sunday morning hymnal when performed for an audience.

As the album unfolds across 41 minutes and 12 tracks, all of America’s musical ghosts are on display holding space for their newest acolyte — the chain-gang hum that opens “Ticket Home,” the Doc Watson-like guitar picking on “Hearts Racing,” the echo of every Delta Blues singer long forgotten on “Fury of the Light.” The casual listener will find something deeply comforting and familiar within the album while the more serious listener will find themselves compelled to take a journey — a journey that is the songbook of this nation so many of us call home.

And then there is “The Dark,” the song that forever set me in Linaberry’s orbit like a moon to the Earth. I’ve always preferred my music on vinyl — “The Dark” breathes life into side two of the record. The opening sequence transports you through a haze of humidity and clouds to a land of Linaberry’s making. “All our sweetest sins, carry them to our end.” And you’re there, walking among the dilapidated house watching a family keep its secrets inside like a narrator in a Faulkner novel, taking notes to carry back to the world. The music soothing, the lyrics unsettling, the image painted something all of us carry — lived or inherited.

Somewhere between the Delta and doling out juice boxes, K and I return to the expat conversation.

“Only American hubris would call it expat-ing and not immigrating,” I say, the disgust just on the edge of my words.

K snickers at the observation before responding.

“I don’t know, I don’t want to give up just yet and I also don’t want to wait until it’s too late,” she says, her eyes turned toward the landscape outside the window. “This is one of the most beautiful countries I’ve ever been in and I really don’t want to give up on it.”

“Me either,” I say, realizing my fears are the same as hers — not wanting to leave too late but not yet willing to give up. “I just wish there was some sort of a speck out there right now that felt like hope.”

The speck is already there. It’s been playing on my turntable for years.

Tilting the rearview mirror to better see the monkeys, I stare for just a minute at those two little miracles sitting in the back seat. I bring my gaze back up to the road, K is still looking out the window. I take her hand, bring it to my lips and gently kiss it as I’ve done so many times before.

“It’s not time yet, my love,” I say to her. “And what we’re building will give us some leeway should it come to that. All of this, everything before us, it’s worth fighting for — and you and me and those two munchkins in the back, we’re fighters.”

“I know,” she whispers as she squeezes my hand, gently releasing pressure but not my hand.

Do you know what chill hours are? They’re the amount of time a fruit tree needs to stay in a state of dormancy, somewhere between 32 and 45 degrees Fahrenheit to produce fruit. Honeycrisp apples need about 1200 or so, Bing cherries want in the neighborhood of 800 and the delicate Blenheim apricot gets by with about 400. The tree of rock and roll apparently needed 20 years but it’s finally starting to wake up.

Maybe we needed 2016 and a real-life monster manifesting in the form of a reality television star turned president with an administration whose corruption made Nixon’s look like saints. Maybe we needed the ennui and passivity of a Biden administration and their lackadaisical, milquetoast passivity that did nothing to ensure protections into the future enabling the orange monster to come screaming back in 2024. Paw-paw shuffling toward the Oval Office when he should have been shuffling toward the porch and his rocking chair. Maybe that mix of servility and malice was exactly the fertilizer the tree of rock needed to start rooting again.

I’d like to introduce you to Dexter and the Moonrocks. While some acts were busy manufacturing their moment — fake accounts, algorithmic manipulation, thousands of phantom fans conjured from a marketing firm’s server farm — four guys from Throckmorton, Texas were playing to a bartender who asked them to keep it down.

They coined the term western space grunge– while their music is serious, irreverence is a streak that runs a mile wide down these boys’ back. Sad cowboy music is another way they’ve described what they make but they’ve been quick to ensure all of us understand what they mean. On the band’s official TikTok, drummer, Ryan Fox explained:

“We don’t mean six-hundred-dollar pairs of boots and songs about tractors and patriotism. We mean ‘The government does not care about me. I am an abused member of the workforce, and my body is broken even though I’m twenty-three.’ Please stop confusing the two.”

If you’d never heard of Throckmorton, Texas don’t worry no one in the blessed world minus the 730 souls who call it home have. For the four guys making up this nonsensical sounding band – we’ll get back to that – their closest paying gig was 71 miles to the north in Abilene which unless you’re from Texas you’ve probably never heard of either!

“There’s one traffic light in town, and it’s just a blinking red light,” Tuffs said of his hometown of about 730 residents in an interview with Texas Monthly. “There’s no grocery store. You have to drive thirty miles to go grocery shopping... Your neighbors probably have pigs. It sounds like I’m talking bad about it, but somehow, I like it.”

Before there was a band there were four young men doing what young men in small town Texas do — making a living with their hands and their backs. James Tuffs was a fry cook. Ryan Anderson was working oil fields. Ty Anderson was decorating concrete surfaces. Ryan Fox was coaching kids baseball. Between the four of them they covered most of the ways a man can wear himself out in rural west Texas before thirty. These are not men who grew up being told they were special. They grew up being told to show up and do the work.

Which, as it turns out, is exactly what they did.

The more you peel back the layers of this band the stranger, or depending on your view, glorious it gets. These young men were just busy scratching out a life in a small Texas town whose biggest claim to fame was being one of many waypoints on the Great Western Trail cattle drives.

Following high school, Tuffs entered Cisco College seeking a degree in kinesiology – the study of human movement – all while working in a restaurant kitchen. Music was Tuffs’ thing – he begged his buddy Ryan Anderson, a childhood friend, to teach him guitar which he eventually did. Tuffs was penning lyrics on the regular and found himself one evening sharing a few originals with his parents. Duly impressed, Tuffs parents entered their son into a songwriting contest (without his knowledge) and while he didn’t win, he came damn close, making it to the finals.

“After I made the finals,” Tuffs said, “this dude walked up to me, and he was like, ‘Yo, man, I’m trying to start a record label. I really think that one day you could work in music.’ And I was super stoked. I think I was nineteen at the time, and I just called Ryan, and I was like, ‘Yo, dude, drop out of college. We’re starting a band.’ And he literally dropped out of college. We literally started a band.”

So now a fry cook, an oil field operator, a concrete surface decorator and a kid’s baseball coach were in a band. They just needed a name.

Tuffs has mentioned hearing Death Cab for Cutie on his parents stereo while growing up and here’s one of those cosmic jokes come to life. When Death Cab for Cutie lead singer, Ben Gibbard was asked by Time Out Chicago how they came up with the name, he responded

“The name was never supposed to be something that someone was going to reference 15 years on. So yeah, I would absolutely go back and give it a more obvious name.”

Cut to Tuffs being asked a similar question – their name came about simply because James Tuffs thought Dexter and the Moonrocks sounded cooler than James and the Moonrocks. There wasn’t much thought put in. It was about that quick. They’ve joked that Dexter is someone they kidnapped years ago and keep in the basement stealing his musical superpowers, surviving on a diet of cat treats and yogurt.

Whether Tuffs knew that story about Death Cab and their name or was just walking down a well-trodden path, we may never know. History rhymes, history repeats and the universe gleefully laughs.

And now these kids are selling out shows in Los Angeles. But they did it the old-fashioned way, they earned it touring across the country, building a fan base who adores them.

Three shows in 2021, 18 shows in 2022, 53 shows in 2023. 62 shows in 2024. 50 shows in 2025 and still going.

They toured with Mitchell Ferguson, Red Leather, Cigarettes at Sunset and kept building their network, kept grinding, kept honing their craft ‘till 2025 when they played the Vans Warped Tour in Long Beach.

Night after night they just put their head down and played – any market, any town regardless of cantankerous bartenders or being in someone’s basement. That’s not a band gaming an algorithm, that’s a band logging miles - 73,381 to be exact. More than 70,000 miles of blood, sweat and tears – I can only hope with each mile another entry is made in the bands songbook, oh the stories it will tell.

As Ty Anderson, the rig worker, has said - beats the hell outta a pulling unit.

In Dexter and the Moonrocks you can hear the influences of the past. You hear arrangements a ’la the Kings of Leon, of the trademark storytelling musings of the Turnpike Troubadours, the infusion of grunge and indie courtesy of Nirvana and Death Cab for Cutie. The cynic might choose to see derivative, the romantic optimist, of which I count myself instead sees DNA. The thoughtful sees it for what it is – another scion harvested from the tree of Rock and Roll and grafted on to the current era.

“We realized that oil workers like to listen to Alice in Chains, and the goth kids like Tyler Childers so why couldn’t we do both? And so we did, and it worked so well,” Tuffs has said.

Take the song “Ritalin”: “I’m not myself without my medicine/I took some Ritalin, wasn’t a little bit.”

Of course a kid from nowhere Texas in 2026 would write an ode to one of this generation’s most over prescribed pills. James Tuffs - 26, Ryan Anderson - 26, Ryan Fox - 24 — solidly Gen Z, grew up as the most medicated cohort in history — many of them were put on stimulants as kids, some diagnosed, some not. It’s normalized in a way that would have been unthinkable in the 80s when “Ritalin” was considered controversial and slightly sinister. Ritalin is to today’s younger generation with its nod to losing oneself via ADHD medication what Nirvana’s “Dumb”, with its talk of opiate-induced haze, physical sluggishness and detached euphoria as wink and a nod to heroin was to the kids of the 90s. Young adults have long channeled their generational trauma through guitars, Dexter is just writing the current soundtrack.

And here’s the rub – they don’t even have a full-length album out yet, nor are there any stated plans. The best fans of the band are going to get is the occasional single drop – “12 Steps” is slated for May 27 -- and the continued string of EPs – clearly these boys are not following a playbook. Or maybe they are, a playbook written on a dusty cattle trail by a 23-year-old whose body is already broken from a life baked in the west Texas sun and the type of labor that puts calluses on your hands, labor that leaves marks that doesn’t wash off.

In horticulture there’s a lot of truths, rules that will burn you if you try to break them one such truth, a truth these four men from Throckmorton, Texas have woven into the fabric of their being - you can’t fake the cold, you can’t fake the hard times. The tree either goes through winter or it doesn’t bear fruit.

Dexter and the Moonrocks’ 2025 Tour Set List on Apple Music