The Burning Stars are Jesse Day and Matt Jarrell, two old friends who've been playing music together and apart for the last two decades. Their first EP is a southern gothic exploration of love, loss, and the agonizing joy of raising a family in the 2020s.

The general ethos of the band is to give each song nothing more or less than it needs. The result is sometimes a rollicking stomper like “The Gambler,” which explores the outer limits of what two people can do at once with acoustic and electric guitars, vocal harmonies, suitcase drums and foot tambourines—at one point Matt attempted to affix an egg shaker to his strumming hand with an elaborate system of duct tape and a Michael Jackson glove—and sometimes a quietly strummed acoustic guitar and plaintive vocal melody like the closer “Star Child”, an ode to Jesse’s first born, adapted from a poem written by a Seattle street poet.

The album was recorded in Matt’s home studio (read garage) using Pro Tools, with a collection of mics including a Stam SA-87 (Neumann U87 clone), an AKG 214, an SM7 B (so they could sing like Bob Jovi), and an assortment of ribbon mics. Having mixed to the best of their abilities, the band brought their humble wav files to Jim Briggs III, the Emmy Award winning sound designer best known for his work at The Center For Investigative Reporting, and spent a glorious afternoon mastering in his Emeryville studio.

Jesse and Matt have been playing music together in one form or another ever since they met in the warehouse scene—a community of pre-MySpace proto-DIY musicians and artists who staged shows and events in the industrial park of a backwater, 90s stoner town called Benicia, CA. In the college years they played house parties and clubs in Santa Cruz in the band Tom’s Farmacy, which specialized in overly complicated punk songs and practiced in a storage unit behind Ferrel’s Donuts. The two parted ways in the late 2000s to chase their dreams in the big city, Matt in the San Francisco prog rock band Two Headed Spy, and Jesse in a series of bands in Brooklyn, New York, notably the post-punk noise makers Hunt Club. But their spiritual and musical bond was never diminished, as they maintained an epistolary relationship of emailed demos and songs—even a few that were for and about each other—and never stopped talking about when they’d get the band back together. Eventually, after rocking every shithole in the American north east and southern states, Jesse moved back to California to start a family and get a real job, and hang out with Matt more. The Burning Stars is a testament to the power of friendship, family, and the great spirit that moves us ever closer to where we belong.