Rhinoceros Crossing


I think this one has the best recordings of “Snow Globe”, “Skyscraper”, “Hoyt-Schermerhorn”, and “Rabbit”, though everyone’s entitled to their own opinion.

This is also the album with “No Spine” and “Saturn Youth”. Recorded right around the same time as New Uranians and Miracle on Neon Clown Avenue.

See also: A Band with 3 Hands

From the original release on BandCamp:

(Some of youse have been telling me I’m not a real Musician™, because I don’t talk about myself often enough on the Internet; so I’m going to tell a few stories here about the songs on this album, and then I’m going to go livestream myself petting my dog or something.)

The man with one hand in the song “Hoyt-Schermerhorn (and a Man with One Hand)” exists in real life, but when we met while waiting for the G train at Hoyt-Schermerhorn, he was wearing a Venetian mask, not a Venusian mask. It was still pretty cool. He’s also a really good rapper; we were in a band together for about half an hour.

Recently, I was on a bus somewhere wearing a shirt with a picture of the planet Saturn on it, and someone approached me and asked if I was “the guy from the band Saturn Youth”; I looked it up, and no such band exists, so I made it the title of the second song on this album. And no, I didn’t feed LSD to my dog, but it’s not outside the realm of possibility that my dog fed LSD to me.

I wrote “Snow Globe” when I was 16 as a response to people insisting I write more “happy” songs, and I was so happy with how it came out that I started playing it at my shows, and eventually recorded it. Whether or not it is, in fact, a “happy” song remains a topic of heated debate, mostly between me and my dog.

In addition to endlessly inquiring about the meanings of my songs and demanding I livestream myself petting him far more often than is humanly possible, my dog is working on a several hours-long noise piece that consists entirely of the sounds of him picking up his metal food bowl in his mouth and loudly dropping it on a variety of surfaces. It’s far superior to anything I’ve ever done, and it will be released to his neighbors in several live installments throughout the coming decade. 

released September 14, 2019

All music and lyrics written, composed, arranged, performed, recorded, mixed, and mastered by Jesse, who also designed and took the photo on the album cover, which was almost destroyed, but was miraculously rescued by Katherine Koch.

early draft of the lyrics for “No Spine”