What a Fool Believes

That’s an open-ended record, so I’ll provide a recent fragment:

I got a copy of Stone Arabia by Dana Spiotta for Christmas. I’d been wanting to read it since I heard that part of it was about a guy who makes his own music and keeps it private but to his family, building this whole world around it—from the album art to the reviews. When I was maybe 13 or 14 I did a similar thing. A cousin of mine had this fake band name “Swiss Jaguar” and I decided to create a biography and discography for them. I drew the album covers, came up with song titles—basically everything but the actual music (I had no instruments at the time). I liked Stone Arabia a lot, but found myself wishing afterwards that there had been more about Nik (the musician character) and his “Chronicles”. Since there isn’t more, it’s had me thinking about reviving Swiss Jaguar—not necessarily in the same form—because I really, really like the ideas and questions it poses.