The punishing cultural and meteorological landscape of North Dallas in the 1980s was our forge. It was the cauldron of our over-air-conditioned suburban youth. A high school filmmaking club brought together creative minds and served as the catalyst for friendships that would last decades, not to mention momentum towards film industry careers. Mostly bored out of our skulls, we hung out--like, a lot--and eventually formed a band of musical misfits too un-skilled to muster FM rock radio covers. We wrote our own songs out of sheer incompetence, but we did respect our elders. Our father was album rock; our mother was the Beatles; our second cousin once removed was soul; our best friend’s big sister was disco, our surly uncle was punk, and our eye-opening college girlfriend was The Residents. We wrote our songs and played ‘em in sweaty suburban rumpus rooms to friends and fellow travelers. Soon though, we were flung far and wide, landing on our noses skidding to a stop in distant zip codes. Time passed. But, miracles do happen and sometimes lightning strikes in different places twice. We all picked ourselves up, dusted off our various axes, and tried to remember what to play, with a few decades more moss on our backs. The moss helped, somehow, and we sounded better together than before, despite the distances that separated us.

We have been accused of swearing off and throwing out our virtual stomp boxes and counterfeit echoplexes (ahem, maaaybe we have). For certain, the sturm and groove of our sound is real, if the magic threads and sweet sugar filtered through engineers and producers is via tape loops, overdubs and ProTools--we’re not Luddites, for Eno’s sake!

Our first album, "Sloppy Firsts," was an attempt to capture for posterity the songs mostly written so many years before. It also served as an opportunity to discover the grind and magic that is studio production. With our latest release, "Infamous Hearts Picture Show," we hope to rekindle the joy of throwing a new vinyl purchase on the turntable, flopping into a beanbag chair with engaging cover art in hand, and settling in for an hour of rocking out to new sounds--analog, not streamed.

Still, we don’t know how (or maybe opt not) to play the simplest covers. It’s a curse and blessing we’ll probably take to our musical graves. As an epitaph on our eventual tombstone, it’s probably one Macho Haiku can live with.

-MACHO HAIKU, 2025 (with acknowledgement to ever-listenin’, hard-thinkin’ Professor Sconce for borrowing heavily from his liner notes)