Musicians Featured:

• Tabor Allen - drums

• Ana Barreiro - drums

• Steuart Liebig - electric bass

• T.J. Masters - acoustic & electric guitars

• Tony Rinaldi - acoustic & electric pianos, Hammond organ

• Doug Fischer - backing vocals (2,4,8), shaker (3)

• Evan Garfield - Conga, bell (3)

• Danny T. Levin - trumpet

• Sebastián López - conga (3), backing vocals (2,4,8)

• David Moyer - tenor & baritone Saxophone

• Natalia Pérez - vocals (2,4,5,8)

• Alex Sadnik - alto saxophone, horn arrangements

Cover Artwork:

• Back Cover photography by Devin O’Brien.

• Layout by David J. Woodruff.

Liner Notes by Meg Duffy:

“I want to watch you eat lemons in the belly of spring” reads to me like a Robert Frost character waxing to their unknown lover—cool, fresh, and newly budded. This was the first lyric that really gutted me on Guma. In “Final Form,” T.J. Masters sings about citrus-eating and about thinking of others thinking about him as his guitars cruise over Tabor Allen (Cherry Glazerr) and Ana Barreiro’s soft-yet-certain drum team. Anna Butterss (an LA favorite of mine) agrees on upright bass between melodic phrases that seem like just the right amount of conversation. Like when you’re excited about what someone is saying and you’re letting them speak and you’re listening, but ideas—responses—are forming in your head. You’re still listening intently, observing all the potential replies without feeling so inclined to grab one, and it’s okay to let them pass through you. “Let the temperature bring what the temperature brings,” Masters says, a blasé but somehow hopeful way of giving power over to something or someone else. Which is much like the way the demo versions of these songs, originally recorded in Masters’ bedroom, were crafted anew by a band of musicians hand-picked by Chris Schlarb (Psychic Temple, BIG EGO Studios). Total blind trust is always something I’m after.
The instrumentation on Guma feels indulgent to my personal desires: heavy shaker presence on the whole record, slick, clean and dry guitar, hard-panned snare hits, harmonies as an arrangement technique, and a blanket of trumpet and saxophones. Nothing too flashy; “pure and undivided.” There’s a coy connectivity to each song in spite of the band’s apparent effortlessness. I’m a sucker for a single snare hit as a fill--nothing more, nothing less. The horn arrangements by Alex Sadnik are wide and not overly showy, adding cool and concise stabs and swift, quick, teetering melodic lines to the already witty chordal makeup without hamming up the jazz tropes too much. On the out section of “Top Floor,” members trade fours over chromatic changes that descend, unexpectedly, while T.J. lets us know, “I give you the best days of my life.” (Perhaps a nod to those b-roll classic rock hits; I’m thinking of Kevin Johnson here.)
I asked T.J. a few questions to get to know him a bit more personally outside of the record. We had met once very briefly in NY at a mutual friend’s studio, but I don’t remember talking with him about much. Since then, he told me, he had moved to Austin, rebuilt a 50-year-old motorcycle by himself, and made this record. He mentioned being attached to the idea of his own demise, but to me these songs belie a musical hopefulness. I love the tongue-in-cheek plays on spirituality: in-jokes about death cruise over delicately silly percussion, Steuart Liebig's fretless bass, and almost ragtime piano on “Palm Bone.” Social media is something we all think about now (isn’t it?) and T.J. reassures the lot of us that we’ll never get it right. But I think he got it right with this record. It’s not demanding, and after about four listens I found myself humming melodies from the harmonized guitar lines in “Elephant Plant,” which reads lyrically as a horticultural threat to a house plant.
I wonder who “Spirit Glide” is about. I never asked T.J. because to me, it’s about The Truman Show. I think of those interviews where Jim Carrey tells us that he’s just a normal guy. Masters sings, “It doesn’t matter if you get me wrong/I still think of you as pure and undivided.” Perspective—it actually can be shifted if you try. Did Truman ever come to live as a “normal” human in society after he discovered he was being watched and duped his whole life? We don’t know! But holding something that’s been tainted in one’s mind as both pure and undivided: that is a soft approach to willpower.