Emil Amos' Drifter's Sympathy

Latest Episodes:

HIGHSCHOOL II - THE 2nd WORLD Sep 24, 2026

Show notes

In a throwback to the very first Drifters season's atmosphere, this episode travels back to HIGHSCHOOL to unravel our subcultural origin story and sift through the clues of what made us the way we are. While recently on a sabbatical in Chicago to make the new Holy Sons record, Emil met up with his best friend from 1993, Jacob Ciocci, who's now become a professor of Computer Art and who'd initially drawn all of Emil's first solo show flyers back when they were kids.

Jacob was there in a very formative moment... when the Boston guru first arrived in town and Emil evaporated into a cloud of drugs. So to learn about what lies in our future, the two start by digging into the past.

The philosophical takeaway they eventually arrive at evolves into a concept about how we spend a great deal of our lives in the "2nd WORLD"... an imaginary place you begin to build as a child to escape the various brutalities of your immediate environment.🌷

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LONER LEGENDS V Sep 22, 2026

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This episode of Loner Legends is one of the most important casts in this series because we get to bring a true punk god back from the dead, honor his complexities and raise him up to his rightful place in history. Adrian Borland sat side by side with Robert Smith in the mission to refine and define the landscape of post-punk... but one boy ended up changing the world and the other was locked away in a madhouse.

After creating the first home-recorded punk record in history with The Outsiders, Adrian forged the pioneering band The Sound and then made industrial/experimental history with Second Layer. Hopefully this cast gets more eyes on his singular, fiery spirit and hips people to one of the greatest, lesser-known artists of the 1980's.

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MOVING TO PORTLAND III Aug 24, 2026

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The third installment of the MOVING TO PORTLAND Trilogy bares the accidental creation of the band GRAILS, their first show and first recording... but the task of it brings some seedy characters into the mix. Emil begins recording a record called "I Want to Live a Peaceful Life" with his new friend Pat and things wobble forward into a very emotionally opaque horizon.

This episode is dedicated to Pat who eventually took his own life. We loved him. You can read about how many people were affected by him and how he was a huge part of helping bands out in Portland and Chicago from the nineties onward here :

https://chicagoreader.com/blogs/remembering-soundman-and-musician-patrick-kenneally-who-nurtured-scenes-in-chicago-and-portland/

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LORDS OF SELFISH MUSIC Aug 10, 2026

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Drifter's Sympathy returns with the first episode of SEASON SEVEN called 'Lords of Selfish Music'!

While this episode could've easily been called "Casualties of Selfish Music", it avoids dwelling on their dark endings too much. This is an attempt to dig the classics back up and place them under a new lens of 'existential history' that unearths a more 3-dimensional view of our heroes.

Richard Manuel of The Band, Sandy Denny & Danny Kirwan of Fleetwood Mac are the central characters of this episode, being people who've had quite a bit of ink spilled on them that was often more cut & paste than the true deep dives they deserve. And while they don't appear to be overtly rebellious, each of these characters found themselves trapped between violent contradictions in their private biospheres, creating internal battles that bore some of the most gutting artwork of their time.

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*Q&A and 7th Season Announcement* Jul 13, 2026

Show notes

The SEVENTH SEASON of Drifter's Sympathy is coming on August 10th to all streaming platforms! The season will open with a new series called "LORDS of SELFISH MUSIC," and roll out 6 new episodes over the course of 3 months. Join the Drifter's Sympathy Patreon NOW if you want to get each episode a week earlier, ad free and receive all the new exclusive stuff we've put together. We're shipping out a brand new unreleased Holy Sons LP, a new Drifter's shirt, a couple tapes and MORE. (https://www.patreon.com/drifterssympathy) This bonus episode features an explanation of what's coming up and includes a Q&A session we did on the Patreon 4 years ago. See you on August 10th!

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BONUS EPISODE - 'Sun City Girls, Grails & The Turn Of The Century' Oct 08, 2025

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For a SEASON SIX bonus episode Drifter's Sympathy is highlighting a recent cast Emil did on a new Sun City Girls based podcast ('The Burning Nerve Ending Magic Podcast').

The cast begins around the time Emil moved to Portland and dives into Grails' classic cover of "Space Prophet Dogon" (released in 2003 on "The Burden of Hope"). Then it moves into Emil's time with Jandek as it ran parallel to his meeting Alan Bishop of SCG, and how both of those characters helped change the course of his artistic life.

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LONER LEGENDS IV Mar 12, 2025

Show notes

LONER LEGENDS IV brings us to the end of SEASON SIX with a new installment of the central music pillar of the cast.⛲️

I'd been saving covering one of the greatest songwriters of all time for a few years now so its a relief to finally get to tell the story of the great RAMASES... check out his record 'Space Hymns' immediately!. The second genius on the list for today is Gary Davenport... check out his record 'Scattered Thoughts' immediately! And then for a special feature I flew out to Portland and interviewed the great Jed Bindeman who runs a killer record store called 'Little Axe' and two different labels called "Freedom to Spend" and "Concentric Circles". Jed is one of the deepest cassette diggers in the world and has uncovered vast amounts of private tapes, found the artists and issued these records for the first time on LP. He's put in a very special kind of work, a labor of love similar to this podcast, that will help people slowly realize there's a massive universe of art thriving fully outside of the central capitalist stream.

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NICK DRAKE II Feb 27, 2025

Show notes

This will probably be the only sequel episode Drifter's will ever do on one artist... solely because Nick Drake has such a dense story that had never fully been told until this new book arrived ("Nick Drake: The Life by Richard Morton Jack"). Pat Sansone (Wilco, Autumn Defense) joins Emil again to hash out the more difficult, back half of Nick's story and provide some light on just how quickly Nick had become mentally ill by the time he recorded Pink Moon. Joe Boyd fittingly gets the last word on Drake's legacy and helps us understand how his disappearance inadvertently set up the autonomy of the space we meet these timeless records in.

Important footnote!:: the super legend that Pat refers to in his intense story at the end of this cast is Ahmet Ertegun :: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmet_Ertegun

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NICK DRAKE Feb 12, 2025

Show notes

If something has changed you irrevocably in the past, its a kind of betrayal of yourself to not re-visit it and try to understand why. For this one I wanted to pull in one of the most sensitive and present people I know to help me out (Pat Sansone of Wilco & Autumn Defense) and he really rose to the test. I think we were able to bring Nick Drake's day to day world into focus with the excitement we felt over this new, unprecedented book in hand called 'Nick Drake : The Life' by Richard Morton Jack. This episode could function as a new kind of category I could roll out every once and awhile that's basically a full-on 'Existential History' deep-dive into someone who's true nature has been hiding in plain sight while they've been somewhat misunderstood. I feel strongly that musicians themselves should be the ones exploring the emotional terrain of the great fallen musicians because we're part of a kind of family who's given everything to be sacrificed on this altar... a beautiful but heavy gamble for sure. Maybe its a bit of the overall mission statement of this podcast to try and re-define how we see the actual humanity that lies behind art instead of just kicking back and being entertained by it. And this kind of study can also function as an expose of what it is to be a human in general. Hustling, sweating, dreaming, failing miserably and worrying endlessly... We can see ourselves in Nick Drake in many ways.. for better or worse.

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THE TERRORISTS II Jan 29, 2025

Show notes

"The Terrorists II" arrives to balance out the Mellow Soldiers of Season Six with a bit of history on resistance music and the avant-garde.

It appears to be a natural part of evolution that there are dead spots and valleys in growth, where we just have to WAIT for better ideas while people take urine baths and try out experimental blood-letting procedures. So it's an important task to sweep through culture every now and again to point out that there's some massive amounts of bullshit in our bloodstream that seem to be there voluntarily.

The central concept of this cast needed a name & that term ended up being "NECRO-NESIA"... an idea that means when a culture starts hitting an evolutionary dead end, it tends to turn back & consume "classic" moments of itself... forgetting to move forward at all, while having too much fun enjoying the fruits of its most obvious arrival points. So its a kind of opium addiction to GREAT MOMENTS of capitalism... and the cyclical bastardizing of art into entertainment.

Does Sabrina Carpenter bring anything that wasn't already a basic tenet of the Britney Spears product 25 years ago?... 'The Terrorists II' proposes that we are living in an era where we've become unaware that all culture is becoming THROWBACK culture with no conscience of it's self-consumption.

It follows that the 'Ranger' of culture becomes extremely bored of being surrounded by a lackluster celebration of things that have already happened before... and must take to the farther edges of the earth to seek out new & less stale information. This cast is in GREAT appreciation of those types... while trying to point out that just because the rides at the carnival are FUN, it doesn't mean there isn't a world of depth out there that still needs our attention to keep paving an evolutionary path.

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