// Letters to YVYNYL // 

Haunted Spurs - Manhattan

 / Pop-garage punk artist Justin Daniel Rutz took a moment from his pretty chill job as an art museum security guard to tell me about the fresh music he’s been working on with his dedicated free time between shifts. 

Hey Mark, 

Right now I’m typing this on my phone where I work. It’s not the most ideal but it’s where I have the most time. An art museum is a strange place to inhabit. Especially as a security guard. I’m surrounded by the greatest most celebrated artists that have ever walked the earth and also the everlasting slew of forgotten artists whose names no one will remember. And I’m not talking about the artists on the walls that I don’t particularly care for that day. They already did it, they already won.

I’m talking about the guards that work here. The people that wander the halls. They’re all artists, in their own write. Some may be actors, or musicians or painters, but all of us are the same. Artists are all the same type of people, whether they’re a 26 year old white kid, a refugee from the siege of Sarajevo, or a baby boomer that was a former Black Panther. We’re all exactly the same as the people that hang on the walls that surround us. But there has to be a difference right? Something that stands between those that hang on the walls and the slew that meanders the halls? Is it pure talent? You could hang any of their paintings next to a Picasso and 9/10 people that walk in wouldn’t notice anything different. Pure luck? No, I can’t believe that I have no role in deciding my future. And then something snapped.

I had been in a few “bands” around Portland, playing my own material or buried in the rhythm section of a multi-genre skipping band with more band members than audience members and it just wasn’t working anymore. I couldn’t juggle working 40 hrs with three bands hoping something will strike gold while never feeling like I was in control of where I was headed. So I decided to act like an artist, I threw a fit and crumpled up whatever work was in front of me and started over from scratch with a fevered pitch.

I had been really inspired by the mixtape movement that happened in hip-hop and the idea of the guerrilla musician using any way possible to get ahead.  I can record everything myself now, I have a way to release everything myself now, I have a way to market myself now. That worked for me, I was rich in time not money, so I downloaded free recording software, bought the cheapest interface I could find, opened a bottle of wine and started. I basically just sat in my room every night and just recorded everything I had. It wasn’t that much but I had a group of skeleton songs. I wanted it to be garage rock, it’s near and dear to my heart and it’s the only choice aesthetically that I could really get away with on my budget.

I wrote most of the bass lines or lead guitar parts on the spot, so a lot of the time what your hearing is the first and only time I played it. I whittled away at it though and after about a month I had pretty much everything recorded. Except drums. I had planned on using a drum machine, which sounds crazy now but I wanted it to be all DIY. That didn’t work, like not at all. so I called my friend Donovan Allen that grew up in the same bleak seaside town as me and thankfully he was amazing, the drums and the vocals were the only thing I couldn’t really skimp on.  Luckily at the time where I was living, my landlord had worked at some studios in Portland in the 90’s and made out like a bandit when they all had to close, so he made a studio out of the basement of his house and thankfully that was readily available, outside of the odd metal band that would go in and shake the entire house from time to time. 

Somehow everything ended up coming together better than I could have imagined. I still don’t know what the difference is between the names on the walls and the faceless hordes that occupy the halls. But I’m still working at it. Maybe luck, maybe talent, maybe nurture, maybe nature. I don’t know. Whatever it is though I want to try and find out. I want to be there, whatever muddy bank I have to climb I will, if I have to fight tooth and nail I will, I’ll do whatever it takes to get there, even if it’s just so that someone will mispronounce my name in two hundred years time. It will still be my name.

Thanks,
Justin Rutz

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