I met Sherman when he wasn’t much more than a charming, but intimidating borderline music bully that rode my bus in high school and taunted me for wearing a Muddy Waters t-shirt that first and fateful week of 9th grade (that would be Muddy Waters the musician, not the bar). Sherman respected the blues-man just fine, however, he was also quick to point out that there was a world of music I had perhaps been underexposed to beyond Classic Rock and The Blues.

The teen displayed an extraordinarily preternatural gift for both musical ability and musical knowledge, seemingly possessing an encyclopedic breadth of internalized information that wasn’t always the business of your average suburban troublemaker in 1994. In short, Sherman introduced me to everything from Free Jazz to Texas Psychedelia to Power Electronics to Outsider Songwriters to Modern Composers to Hardcore Rap to Early Electronic pioneers and beyond. He also taught me how to play the drums, guitar, and bass and we performed together for over ten years. His openness to so many styles and the quick humor with which he dismissed the contrived and the insincere is something that has always stuck with me. I wouldn’t be writing this if not for Sherman.

Over the past fifteen years, he has created clunky Garage Pop, One-Chord Noise Punk, complex and alternately-tuned folk compositions, and, finally, the classically conventional Pop record it seems he has waited his entire life to record.