the nap where i recalled my entire life
For this week, I'm releasing a live recording of me performing as Ghost Down at Hart Bar on August 17th, 2025. Synths, field recordings, a little stress, a little peace.
You can listen to that here, and read a small blurb about the track here.
Coming Up:
Overheard plays O+ Fest (!!!!) in Kingston, NY on Friday October 10th. Our first time playing in the new Kingston venue Assembly! Get tickets here.
Thank you to everyone who came out for my first gallery inclusion ever! The photos are still up and can be seen at Smush Gallery in Jersey City until the end of October.
A reminder that a month ago I released my debut album as Ghost Down, Mr. Mist. You can stream or buy it here, and read a track-by-track breakdown here.
Misc. Stuff I’m Into:
Movies:
Twinless [2025, dir. James Sweeney]. Easily one of the best of the year. Tragic, affecting, hilarious, uncomfortable, surprisingly sexy. We grieve what was and what could have been, within others and ourselves.
Music:
Happy equinox y’all. Overheard worked together to craft a comprehensive and genre-expansive fall playlist, and you can check that out right here! (Apple Music only, sorry [not really]). Listen in order if you can. We made that for our newsletter that goes out every changing of the season, which you can follow here. (We're working on getting off of the hated substack, but in the meantime!)
Games:
Hollow Knight: Silksong. Someone talk to me about it before I become unreachable upon the official release of Hades II.
yeah.
Some of you may know that I have this seemingly encyclopedic knowledge of the first three seasons of SpongeBob. I tested this out recently: I was eating onigiri with friends and they started quoting or describing scenes from the show and I’d tell them the episode title. 100% accuracy rate. Impressive or sad? Who’s to say.
The thing is, I don’t actually watch SpongeBob all that much. Outside of clips on YouTube, I haven’t watched an episode of the show since 2020, and before that, who knows when. Most, if not all of my memory of moments and quotes from the show comes from the fact that I simply held onto it all from watching as a kid and teen, and the ol’ noggin never seems to let go. I can look at a frame and remember its exact context, and that doesn’t just apply to SpongeBob. If I’m walking past a familiar street corner somewhere in NYC, I’ll be suddenly hit by a distinct memory I had at that spot, flash-banged by a hard conversation or warmed by the thought of little Will sneaking into a playground with their grandpa. Hell, most of my writing is based around specific pieces of art or media that evoke exact moments in my life.
I don’t think I’m some special kid though, because I can’t remember a conversation I had with a coworker that morning, I can’t remember to put a new bag in the garbage every time I take it out unless I say it out loud forty times on the way back to the kitchen, I can’t remember most things without a relevant snippet of context. Friends will remind me that apparently I told them some profound shit or a really good joke once that they’ve been holding onto for years. Not only do I typically not recall saying anything like it, but it also seems like something that could not have come out of me. Brains are funny like that.
To that end, I’ve been asking around lately for what my homies remember of their childhoods, and how much they trust those memories. Some say, not at all. Childhood is one big blur to them, sometimes trauma plays a part, sometimes it’s just how their brain works. Some say, kind of! But only the big things. It’s kind of like the ‘what happens when you try to picture an apple’ question. I say, as some kind of tragic humblebrag, that yeah I can spin a perfectly photorealistic royal blue apple around in my head, and also, one time I couldn’t nap properly so I instead tried to recall as much of my life as I could in sequence from my earliest memory. Word of advice: don’t do this.
It started simple enough, me sitting on the floor when I was three watching my mom dance in the kitchen of our Manhattan apartment. The first crumb of context to lead into the next thing in the sequence. I’m pretending to nap while listening to my preschool teachers talk shit. Suddenly: middle school bullies warning me of the dangers of white people, my grandmother’s wheezing smoker’s cough, both times I almost drowned in a pool, slamming 12 raw oysters in front of a stunned street food salesman when I was nine years old, crushes all across my life from 5 years old to last year, the beginnings and ends of every relationship I’ve ever been in, farts in a car on the drive to Chicago, the first and only time I ever turned on Ocarina of Time, playing Crash Bandicoot: Purple on Game Boy Advance in the closet during a Puerto Rican power outage x severe thunderstorm collab, seeing my grandfather cry for the first time when his sister passed, yellowjackets invading my house, playing Boxes live and making eye contact with Erin while I was mid-panic attack on stage, using couch cushions to try to do the Legolas shield slide from Two Towers with my little brother…
Like ten thousand more things later, the sun had gone down, and I got out of bed and stumbled around my house in a daze, crying a little, laughing a little, barely able to drink water, thinking, ‘should I go to the hospital?’ So, I don’t do that anymore.
Instead I’ll just be content to look at the rocks by the water in Williamsburg and remember that time I crushed some tall boys with Overheard.
- Will
P.S. Did I mention that my beloved partner Em’s birthday is this Friday? Happy birthday Em!
