Claire Higgins’ Wet Stickers
Dustin’ off the studio journal for this one. A few months ago when the weather got really cold in Brooklyn my neighbor's pipes exploded and dumped a foot of water into my basement. This is the same basement where we wrote Evermotion and did some work on the still-unmixed-still-unnamed new album. Here’s a video of my suffering. That’s me suffering in blue pants.
And yes, those are my drums soaking in ice water, but don’t worry — drums are waterproof and material things are for suckers. I spent all night pumping the basement dry and flew to Montreal to record the next morning. I am a problem solver.
Except that even after the insurance check cleared and the dehumidifer did its dehumidifying, there was a lingering mildew smell. After a while I figured out it was the IKEA record shelf -- it had absorbed the water into its depraved corkboard soul like a sponge and never let go. So that got sent to the curb… and yet the musty smell persisted.
But yesterday I think I found it. It was a shoebox full of old Gus / Guster fan mail from the 90’s, when people would write actual physical letters to our band, and we would (sometimes) send them actual physical letters back. These fossils had been sent to me from the Guster office years ago because I fancy myself an archivist-if-I-do-say-so-myself. I opened the box to find that these precious notes from people-who-really-dug-our-new-album-Goldfly were still wet and moldy.
And as I went through the process of peeling the letters apart from one another and trying to air them out, I was joined by my ten year old daughter who was home from school with a stomach virus.
JOLENE: Whatcha doin’ daddy?
THUNDERDAD: I’m airing out these wet papers that got soaked when the basement flooded.
JOLENE: Can I help?
And because nothing helps a stomach virus like a face full of black mold, I said she could. At which point I remembered she could read, and….
JOLENE: Wait. Dad. These people actually took the time to write letters to your band? Why?
THUNDERDAD: Well, that’s how we communicated with our fans, before email and Instagram and stuff...
JOLENE: Oh my god, this is so cute, this person said her whole high school liked you because she played your music in the cafeteria one day. DID YOU WRITE HER BACK? TELL ME YOU WROTE HER BACK!?
THUNDERDAD: Umm, sometimes we wrote back. I think.
JOLENE: WHAT!?
THUNDERDAD: In general we are pretty good to our fans —
JOLENE: YOU DON’T REMEMBER!? OKAY, I’M GOING TO WRITE HER BACK IF YOU WON'T.
THUNDERDAD: I doubt she still lives at that address, it was twenty-two years ago.
And then Jolene spotted something peculiar. A sealed envelope with a stamp on it, addressed to Claire Higgins in Hinsdale, Illinois.
It was one of those SASE deals, and Jolene was in detective-mode so we dug around until we found the accompanying letter Claire had written us:
THUNDERDAD: If you do write back to Claire, can you ask her why she put “celebrity” in quotation marks?
When we opened it up, there were a few stickers inside and some of those awesome gretus-heart temporary tattoo things. We should totally make those again!
Anyway, Claire Higgins, I don’t know when you wrote that letter, but stamps cost 33 cents back then so we could probably do some googling and at least find the general range when you might have written it BUT, we’re sorry we never sent you anything back. Clearly, someone in our office came really close to sending you some stickers and stuff, but couldn’t close the deal.
Where can we find you? I want to add 16 cents postage to this mold-ridden envelope and mail this off as if being a couple decades late is no big deal. Also, my daughter will kill me if I don’t.
Brian
p.s. I guess now that we’re done recording our album I should put up a more proper studio journal?











