It was a drawing in my sketchbook I did several years ago that I always dug. During artist week at the Sou’Wester I recreated it large. The original is 8.5x11, but this one runs 14.5x20.

I did this drawing some years ago at my ADX studio in Portland for my friend Beth Haidle, creative director of the kids’ illustration and comics magazine Illustoria. I occasionally do work for them, and this piece was an illustration for the magazine.

This drawing eventually landed on my book cover, The Tigers They Let Me. It isn’t the final illustration, but one variant I made while working it out. I retraced the image, scanned the line work, colored it, then photocopied and enlarged it onto thin colored paper I’d salvaged from the Portland city dump during a six-month Glean residency. I’d come away with stacks of that paper—stuff I really dig. While preparing pieces for the residency show, I ran this tiger image onto one sheet and typed a poem over it. I’m not sure the poem exists anywhere else. Its lines circle back to the book’s themes—very memory based, very love based.

This is a screen-printed poster for Jenny Don’t & The Spurs 2023 Far East tour—hand-screened by Jenny and me, numbered out of 100, with this copy marked as number three. This tour poster serves as a keepsake of the journey that carried us through Australia, New Zealand, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines. A cool artifact that commemorates that unforgettable tour. This poster was designed by famed graphic artist Scott Sugiuchi, whose work was featured prominently on releases from Washington State's Estrus Records in the nineties and early two thousands.

This is one of my favorite western shirts, self-cut for that rock-and-roll flare. I wore it while drumming with Pierce Arrows and later with Jenny Don’t & The Spurs on our debut self-titled album released in 2014.

This is an 18x24 silkscreen-printed poster from a February 2008 Pierces Arrows concert in Minneapolis. It’s hand-numbered 32/50 and bears the artist’s stamp on the back.

This is my very first chain-stitch embroidered patch. When I was learning to use my machine to make western suits, I needed something to practice, so we got a shark—a great white. I was gonna make a Jaws suit. Maybe someday it'll still happen.

After one of our three-month monster tours, I needed to decompress and stop thinking about music for a minute. I painted this using acrylic and a small piece of wood I found in our driveway—no paintbrush, just that wood. I call it “The Perfect View” because, to me, nothing beats the sight of a blooming cactus; it signals summer is about to start, or has already started.

I made this outfit completely from scratch: went to the fabric store, found the fabric, and constructed every piece myself. I chain-stitched the donkeys and the stars, then hand-rhinestoned the entire thing. I wore it when we first played The Chapel in San Francisco—our debut at that place—and it’s also featured in a duct-tape wedding present Kelly and I received. I'll add the photo. From top to bottom it’s all my handiwork.

Rini: I found this song about a month ago; it sounded familiar, and for days I couldn't get it out of my head. I texted my dad asking if he could learn it on guitar or piano because I loved it and really wanted to sing it. He said yes, and since you were already planning to record something, we came out here today. The song is 'I Knew You Well' by Art Lown

These are the lyrics to a song called “Drone” from our album “Space.” I wrote it in 2013—twelve years ago, three years before the 2016 election. It’s about drones, drone warfare, and how people normalize atrocity. When I played it for my band mates, nobody said anything. We never played it live, and no one’s ever mentioned it. I always thought it was a good song.

This is the original drawing for a show poster, at the High Watermark in Portland, Oregon on October 18, 2014.

This song came from not knowing what to write about, mixed with loneliness and an addiction to scrolling. Peter Nevins was with me at a fire while I was writing it, and he told me to pause before the last 'in the river.' Every time I reach that part, I think of him, though I never pause long enough. The robots know me better than anyone, which makes it hard to put down the phone. This was recorded to cassette by Cory Gray at Scenic Burrows, Vancouver, WA on August 26, 2025.

This guitar, I made on my housemate’s skill saw two summers ago. I cranked out about thirty of them, sold them at the bar, and they’re almost practical. I went to the hardware store for thin wood; the sides are balsa cabinet trim I bent around and hot-glued in place. Little nails and wire for strings and knobs, and I added a strip of leather for a strap. It isn’t patterned after any particular model. I’ve done dark-brown ones, sun-bursty ones, bright yellow ones, even six replicas of Taylor’s Mickey guitar. I hung on to this one because it stood out from the rest.

This is Corky Gibbs. There was a guy in my grandparents’ church called Corky Gibbs, and I just love that name. This doll was originally a marionette, but his strings broke, so he broke free. Wendy at the Thirst gave me oven-bake clay—Sculpey—and I used it for his hat, hands, and shoes. His body is fabric I cut and hot-glued together. I built him just for fun; he’s not in any stop-motion, he simply exists as a friend. He used to dance on his strings, and I hoped to get him to play music, but marionettes are harder than I expected. I really like him. Thank you.

This is the spray-paint and stencil version of “The Face” I drew everywhere. This piece is more complex than the lithograph. I used multiple stencils and, by barely pressing the nozzle, stumbled onto a speckled spit that gave great texture—maybe a glitchy can, holding the nozzle part way down. I leaned into it, layering colors and watching them react wet-on-wet. Different papers let the paint sit on the surface so parts looked enameled, almost like cloisonné. Hours went into fine-tuning pressure and distance, turning the studio into a test lab. It was a cool, fun way to work. Around ’91–’92 I’d just switched from oils to spray paint and stencils, even working with huge canvases that took over the whole studio and had to have another person around to help position the stencils.

Back in the late eighties, early nineties, Absolut Vodka was running an ad campaign with cool artists—Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, maybe Basquiat. All my favorite artists had done an Absolut ad, so I wanted one too. I went ahead and made mine just for fun using spray paint and stencils on paper.

This is a face I used to doodle everywhere when I was supposed to be taking notes in anthropology class or whatever requirements I didn’t do very well in. I used to do paintings of this; I’ve kinda obsessed on this sort of thing. It started in college: I was in art school. I started with oil paints, then did spray paint and stencils and some very big, like eight-foot square paintings of the same thing. This is a lithograph. I painted onto a polished piece of stone with something oil-based, which etched the stone, and then you print off that. With oil paints I would spend way too much time trying to make things perfect, so I kept trying to find ways of making things more spontaneous, so I couldn’t dwell on it and fuck it up. This was one of the ways; the spray-paint stencil was another. The paper’s just thick ripped paper. It was probably on a big roll or came as big sheets, and we cut it down by just putting a straight edge on it and ripping it. The face itself doesn’t mean anything specific to me. Maybe it’s some idealized kind of beauty—the cheekbones and the pointy-ish nose. I don’t know. It’s just something I keep coming back to.

I’ve always thought this was one of my better songs. It was tracked for a full-band record that was supposed to come out in 2007 —but it never saw daylight because the band broke up before finishing the album. That session is still the only time the song’s been recorded. I wrote it on piano, but here is an acoustic guitar version. One take, no fuss. The really crazy thing is the vocal mic here is the same as the 2007 full band version. The old Type Foundry gold Lawson. (This recording was made by Cory Gray at Scenic Burrows in Vancouver, WA, Aug11, 2025)

I started playing at The Landmark Saloon shortly after they opened in 2010. Around 2012 I took the first Mondays slot; it was a strictly country bar, and I was hesitant because I didn’t want to mess up their country-only vibe. They liked me, so I asked for their worst night—first Mondays—and settled in. After a decent run I moved to third Thursdays. Emma Allen created this artwork for that series—she’s a talented artist, singer, and songwriter. I kept third Thursdays until music ceased during pandemic. Since they started having music again I now play first and third Saturdays. In the artwork, Horsey—the little plastic horse I used to photograph—appears in the shot. Portland loves its old horse hoops and chained plastic horses; this image also depicts the condos rising around our little Landmark Saloon.

This poster is from my years with M.Ward. I toured with the band 2006-2018, and was the primary engineer for the records 2002-2018 . This poster is from one of our shows at the Sasquatch Music Festival, probably the second or third— I think we ended up playing there three times. This one is from May 27, 2012. We were supposed n some big stages back then, and this was certainly one of them. It was always beautiful: the sun sinking behind the stage, over the gorge spread out below. Those festivals are the only times I’ve ever been up there. I’m not much of a festival-goer, but the catering tent was always a highlight.

This picture somehow says it- the guy is sitting at the end of the pier calling out across the ocean, into space, for his love to come come his way. And then there's this wave that's coming too- it's gonna be a lot, you know, when it comes, but he still wants it. And so that's how the illustration came about. The tune is the cry of the wolf into the the void, really. It can also be, like, you're waiting for your lover to come back and you're at the bar, and they said they're just going away for a minute. But come along, you know, make it soon before I'm gone. I mean, not that you'd leave your love, but it also has it has a lot of life and death. Like a big call for big romance. It was recorded at Cory's studio up in up in Vancouver, and it was a really unexpected recording date. The idea for it happened a couple nights before, I gotta say, to be honest, a super stony night and and on a next level. And so it seemed like a cosmically good idea somehow to say yes, when very high, at like one in the morning, he said there was a cancellation the day after tomorrow. And we may not be, like, in shape or anything, but just do you wanna come in and record a song? And so Taylor and I have a few tunes worked up and because we've just played the other night. So this is an honest snapshot of the beginning of a kind of a duet. And the way these tunes were recorded were as if some bar bar owner might understand in some little town down in the wild woods of California or something. It's so good to see what we're trying to say.

This is based on a song called Tam Lin, a very old song that a lot of the greats have done, and this was released in support of when Anais Mitchell and Jefferson Hamer collaborated on a record, and it won the BBC folk award, folk record of the year. And it is it tells how a woman's lover gets kidnapped by the fairies, and they turn him into all kinds of terrifying things. And she has to keep holding on to him through all these transformations. It's pretty good metaphor for romance, I gotta admit. I tried to make it perfect but there’s something about the way it’s uniquely off register that makes the eye dance. It’s on an oddly heavy, extra toothy paper.

This was the first thing Gillian asked me to do, and it was based on that song, “Dear Someone”. I had the vision for it while listening to her play the song at the Fillmore in San Francisco, and then she came off stage, and she walked right up to me and said, “Pete, I wanna ask you to do some artwork” And I said, great, I have the idea already. I was moving to New York the next month, and my first thing I did in New York was go find the coolest silk screen printer in Brooklyn to crank it out. And it became a hot merch item for them on on tour. This is in 2006. I had to re redo it later using the concepts, but this is the very original from which many things have come. And it's signed in pencil. And it is it's signed Signed by the artist. It is one of the only things I'm still proud of from back then.

As a cyclist, I have a million things to plug in that all need charging. That was definitely the reason I wanted to make one of these, because I wanted one central location where everything was right in the mix and bright green so you couldn’t lose any of it. It’s a plywood base with a bunch of USB charger things fixed to the top and a tremendous amount of Great Stuff and airbrush paint decorating.

When I make something, I kinda fall in love with it—that’s a problem I have. I make things thinking I’m gonna sell them, then just wanna keep them. I made these during the pandemic; they’re scenes from working from home. This one’s very real estate: lots of money, Perrier, a comfy chair, making deals, booking appointments, some coffee. I have no association with the sofa fabric; I actually like that it’s nondescript, feels like a hotel lobby where I’m waiting for everybody to come downstairs.

This is a hand-carved leather merchandise sign. I try to make one for every tour; I haven’t managed every time, but I’m always happy when I do. This one was pretty limited. I had three things to sell: whoopee-cushions, songbooks and vinyl- but I snuck in some real estate by adding a magnifying glass zooming in on the Sydney Opera House lawn with a “sold” sign. People wanted to buy it at every Australian show, but I couldn’t let it go. I love these signs and have a few; they look great collected, yet I’m not going to sell just these items again, so someone else could have this, I guess.

This is a representational piece, like my landscape work, but more about a representation of an exploration of something—I'm not even sure what. I didn’t know what to do with it until my friend Michael Nau asked if I had art he could use for his new record. An idea came up to combine elements of this piece and parts of another painting. My wife, Melissa Castellano, art-directed it all from there and laid it out beautifully for Mike's new full-length album “Accompany”.

I've done a few art jobs for Mike over the years, making posters when we go on tour, shirt designs and also album art. This painting was used to create the cover art for his newest full-length, “Accompany” which came out about two years ago. He asked if I had anything that might work, so I showed him this piece, and my wife and I combined parts of it with another painting to design all the artwork for the album. The piece uses gouache, a bit of acrylic, and paper on wood. There are some surfers catching a party wave, the recurring double-eyed dog, and people kneepaddling through the cloudy section.

This is a hand-drawn cover for my solo album Under the Ghost, recorded in a trailer up on the Central Coast in 2009. We ran power across a stream through some trees, and the whole thing was a two-week process. A bunch of Central Coast friends are on the record. I’ve done different drawings like this for almost every vinyl copy of the album, so each one is unique and one-of-a-kind. I just buy old records, find empty sleeves, recycle them, turn them inside out, and draw on them to make my album art; this one used to be Jim Nabors’ Kiss Me Goodbye.

This is a tape cassette recording of my cover of “O My Stars” by Michael Hurley. I learned the song for a Michael Hurley tribute show which I did a few weeks back at this great venue in LA called Scribble. And yeah, I absolutely love this jam.

This is the mix reel from the 2017 session that I did with Steve Albini at Electrical Audio in Chicago. It was a little bit of a trade from doing his charity called Letters to Santa that does a twenty four hour show every year. And I did the show and he offered some studio time as a little reward. And I happily accepted. He put contact mics on my guitar. We recorded four songs: 1. So Sea Came to Shore 2. Shuffling Stoned 3. August. 4. Little Lost, which is an Arthur Russell cover. All of the the top three came out, but Little Lost I haven't released. These were alternate versions, but the songs came out on my record “August”.

This is a set list from my first time playing in Ireland on 04/26/2023, and I played at the Cobblestone in Dublin. And it was a significant show for me. I'm incredibly Irish and just to play there felt so correct. And I had done an Anne Briggs cover with my friend Devra Hoff, and I got to sing it there. It was just the best. That's a lot of songs, Europe likes you to play. I think that was probably that was maybe like an hour, hour and hour and ten. I think the longest set I ever did in Europe was 30 songs in a church in France. They're so patient there.

This is my very first UK work permit for the first DJ gig I ever did in London. It was for Warp Records Nesh rave parties. I didn’t know it until Soundcheck, but I was sharing the stage with Aphex Twin. He came to Soundcheck and asked me how to plug in his laptop into my mixer, so I helped him do that Later that night I danced next to Björk on the side of the stage watching Aphex play through my scratch mixer 

This is the first volume in a three part series. Vol. 1 was my first attempt at making a "scratch record" back in the day. I had a modest sampler, an Akai S2000, but a huge record collection. It was challenging to choose the right records to sample for this. I took into consideration the myriad of breaks that were sampled over and over. I wanted this record to be different from the other scratch records out there so I dug deep and intentionally used less obvious samples. I was also playing a lot of instruments around this time so some of them are my own sounds. I had a few big djs back in the day get a hold of these and compliment the choice. I remember one of them saying "it's listenable as a stand alone record" because most of the break and scratch records were not in that time. I recorded it in my apartment in Cincinnati, Ohio deep into my record collecting days. Cincinnati is a Mecca for jazz and funk records due to it being a hot sport back in the 70s for recording funk and jazz. The average collection to a Cincinnati resident in the 70s was what the most insane collectors would die over today. I don't think I ever spent over $10 on a record around that time but so many of those today would be worth hundreds. "Doo-doo" was used as a compliment around that time for some odd reason. "Yo, that beat is doo doo" simultaneously meant good and bad. It was all how it was delivered. The album art is by the graffiti artist, Devious aka Chris Gliebe.

This is a promotional 45 of my track Dos and Don’ts from the album Blue Eyed in the Red Room. I received a box of these from the label when the album came out. This song was a favorite among buyers and so the rest sold while I toured across Europe. I happen to come across my personal copy of it and noticed I had one extra. So this is the extra and I’m reluctantly letting it go. I’ve numbered and signed it for extra authenticity. Gruff and I made this song when I first moved to Los Angeles in 2002. I moved into an apartment off of Melrose Avenue in West Hollywood. I didn’t know Los Angeles at all and realized I had moved in the center of an area where almost everyone around me were aspiring actors, models or very young. Gruff arrived and slept on my sofa for three days while recording this song in a small bedroom inside my apartment. When we finished, we celebrated at a Thai restaurant who had a staff of transgender servers who were so fun and got us wasted. The next day Gruff went off and back on tour.

I just made the tape with Cory - plus some improv piano in the background by Nathan Moore, Sport Fishing USA, Dean the dog. Don’t miss it, don’t sleep on it. This is the only version of this you can hear. It’s unreleased and officially unnamed. You can also get the lyrics on Ghostnote with some doodles.

These are lyrics to a song I wrote in a bunker in the Alvord Desert, I didn't have a tuner, so I just had tuned the guitar by ear, and I didn't know the tuning until the next day. But I don't know. It has a bunch of doodles. I kinda like to doodle on the on the lyric stuff after it's over or while I'm working on it you know, changing it up. “Anyways”, I think is what it's called.

My friend Charles, a tattoo artist and good homie, made this poster for a show we did with our New Orleans friend Thomas Dollbaum. He blew up a photo of me riding a horse during a music video and actually burned the edges. I love it. It’s for the Lollipop Shop show last summer, May 31, 2024. The horse is named Catch—and in the back that’s J.D. on Chicken. That’s about it.

This is #5 of 6 in an alternate artwork mini-series of silkscreened black LP jackets for the test-pressings of my last Carcrashlander record “A Plan to Tell the Future” The official release was white silk-screen on white jacket; and we did this small run silk-screened on black for fun and you can actually see the design better. The other version also had a photo on the front—on this one it’s tucked inside. Rob Jones silk-screened it at the Jealous Butcher Records headquarters, we used images from Book of Symbols and Paul Laffoley art as inspiration. The record features some of my favorite players from that era: Brian Wright, Adam Selzer, Cliff Hayes, Sabrina Velasquez, Ryan Stively, Matt Berger, Sarah Johane, Jacy McIntosh, Kelsey Crawford, Todd Corbett, and Damien Cohn. Though it didn’t come out until 2014, we recorded it around 2011-2012 at the old Scenic Burrows in Goose Hollow, Portland, while I was living in an old dentist office above the studio where I worked.

This is a hand painted and silkscreened show poster by artist Sam Farrell onto which I penciled notation for a few of the melodies on the record.

This is a sound/sculpture collaboration I did with ceramicist Nicky Kriara from our installation “Sandness: Between Land and Sea”. It was a week long artist residency at the Sou’Wester Lodge in Seaview, WA where I composed pieces that lived inside each ceramic piece, as well as a soundscape that played during the installation. The exhibit was based on inspiration from looking at grains of sand through a microscope. Included is a mini media player loaded with the compositions. (Headphones not included.)

Our 2015 demo had too many songs for one record, so we made two—10 copies each, high-quality black vinyl, hand-doodled, numbered, labeled by Kristian.

Our 2015 demos. We had too many songs for one record, so we split then into two. Only ten of each exist worldwide—high-quality black vinyl. Hand numbered, doodled, and labeled by Kristian.

Our 2015 demos. We had so many songs we split them into two hand-numbered, Kristian-doodled records, 10 each, on high-quality black vinyl.

This is an annotated set list from my February 21st 2025 Tractor Tavern performance in Ballard, Seattle. I shared some background from that night—what went down and how I felt about the show. The band that night was Sera Cahoone on drums, Rebecca Young on bass, Charles Wicklander on keys, Jeremy Ferrara on guitar, and Forrest VanTuyl on guitar.

So here we have a cassette recording of me singing and playing the song Bottom of the World written by Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan. I just love a husband wife songwriting duo. It's really a wonderful way to attribute work correctly. Just out in the open, addressing all the contributions upfront. I love to see that. I think Tom Waits always makes me think of coffee. And usually at night, like, in a late night diner. And so I drew a coffee mug and a waning moon on there. And this was recorded here in Vancouver, Washington at Scenic Burrows by Cory. It's on a beautiful clear Maxell cassette. I used to listen to cassettes in the van with my mom. She played Art Garfunkel. Not Paul Simon, just Garfunkel.

Here I am at Scenic Burrows. Cory Gray is my engineer du jour, as is John Askew, both du jour. I'm in this photo with my 1966 Epiphone Cortez, the US-made model before production moved overseas. I got the guitar in June during my last tour, when we were playing Bottom Of The Hill in San Francisco—yes, in San Francisco. I'm wearing my white poplin summer dress, compliments of Revivall in Bozeman, Montana.

This was one of the first collages I ever made. I bought a giant stack of Life magazines from a thrift store in Portland and spent the winter of 2024 cutting them up and being sad and listening to Miles Davis records, mostly Bitches Brew and Miles in the Sky. This room might be in Office Building 9 on Planet Sneth.

This is a collage that I made out of old sixties Life magazines and eighties National Geographics.

This is the painting I used for the cover of my solo record “Eeli” It is a trippy watercolor of an eel in squares. Eeli was my nickname until I moved to Portland and shed that title, which now I'm admitting existed, which is probably a bad idea. “You’re screwed now” said Cory.

This is an original pencil drawing of the sweet old souls that we used as the artwork for our album, and it was made by a really dear friend, Emma Allen. This drawing that was from a photograph that was taken of me and James when we were playing one of our early gigs as the sweet old souls.

This is a wood-fired sake or whiskey cup—large sake, small whiskey. It has cool patterns from wood ash and stamping. James and I, sweet old souls, love antique things and collect old beach glass on our trips, so this piece is stamped with those antique shards we’ve gathered from shops and the shore.

We just stopped by the studio to get some sandwiches and hang out with our buddy Cory. We had all our instruments because we were on our way home from a gig on the coast. We got offered to make a tape, so we decided to play one of our favorite songs, “The Waltz of the Wind,” which is really special to us. It’s a Hank Williams song—a really special old song that was recommended to us by Michael Hurley’s first wife, Pasta, whom we just met at his memorial a couple weeks ago—very special connection, special song, special opportunity. The B-side is called “I’m Growing Fonder,” and it’s Fats Waller, who we consider one of our patron saints. We love Fats Waller so much. I like to bring those old songs that are completely buried, like the B-sides no one’s heard before that are so special. We like to bring those back and bring them into the modern times.

I think it's important to do a self-portrait every so often. This is my original idea for an album cover, even more original than the coyote, but I don't know why it didn't work for the cover. Works pretty good for a painting. Mostly acrylic and gouache with some watercolor pencil. 12x12.

This was one of the first the ideas for my album cover. There are a lot of Coyote sounds on the record. And I grew up losing cats to coyotes and hearing them around our little one room shack something something. I think it's acrylic and gouache. 12x12

This is an homage to my great aunt Jean’s quilted afghan. She had an old chair with dark wood at her house on the coast in Cloverdale. I don’t think I matched every color exactly, but I remember the black, the quilted squares, and the neon green and orange—really bright, secondary colors. My great aunt had all kinds of quirky things because she lived at the beach. The bathroom was full of shells, and her dad built the house himself after checking out books from the library, so everything was a little off—low ceilings, strange wiring, and tricky stairs. There were lots of old books, blankets, tchotchkes, and an old piano. Out of everything, the afghan was the most vivid and stood out the most.

Corey invited me over—said you were doing a little thing this weekend and might record. The cassette-tape doodle: That’s my best drawing of a cup of coffee. We recorded a song I wrote this past week, still kinda working on it. It’s called “Night Café,” just acoustic guitar and singing. I’ve been playing a fair amount: solo shows around town and some busking. I started busking about a year ago. Seemed like a good way to get a different type of practice in—really get comfortable, learn to hold down a longer set, and maybe make some pocket change. I just treat it like practice. Since I started busking I’m writing a song or two a week. A lot end up in the trash, but the keepers pile up. Might be interesting to throw them all on a cassette—one-on-one takes—and just put them out. I’ve been thinking about how I want to do that; we’ll see.

This is a map my friend Yoichi drew for me on the first day of our tour in Japan. We had separated and were supposed to meet back up to take the train into the city for the show. I was carrying a lot of stuff, including a guitar case crammed full of T-shirts and records. It was very heavy. I followed the map, or at least I thought I did, until I found myself walking out of town. I had missed the spot where I was supposed to turn off. It was crazy hot that day and I walked for maybe an hour and then had to turn around and walk back. When I finally got to the meeting place, Yoichi looked at me very seriously and said “Didn’t you follow the map?”

This sign hung above the door at the Ranch, a punk house in Portland from around 2000 to 2018. Many bands practiced there, and I lived there at one point. My band members also lived there. After the sign had been up for a while, someone added 'chicken fingers' to it. Bands like Divers, Drunken Boat, Coldbringer, Talk is Poison, and Creeping Meatball played there. The Ranch was in Northeast Portland, near Alberta.