Emil Amos' Drifter's Sympathy
Emil Amos charts the birth and development of the classic archetype 'The Outsider', telling disturbing and often humiliating stories about growing up in a small town in the 90’s. Every other episode digs into the archaeology of lesser-known music to illuminate the same themes from a more objective, historical perspective.
Episodes
March 12, 2025 • 66 mins
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' i...
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February 27, 2025 • 69 mins
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 ti...
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February 12, 2025 • 63 mins
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...
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January 29, 2025 • 60 mins
"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 p...
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January 15, 2025 • 60 mins
This cast ties together the 90's era of our story to the current ERA.💫 (if you want some XTRA background you can re-listen to the episodes 'Moving to LA' & 'Moving to Portland' as those two set this one UP.)
The opening catches listeners up to Portland, Oregon in 1999 and the emotional STATE of things... but this cast could ultimately be called "The beginning of GRAILS".
The bottom line is that one often has to throw everything ou...
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January 1, 2025 • 80 mins
For the first episode of SEASON SIX, we have the LONGEST Drifter's episode of all time!
...this may have something to do with the fact that Emil gets drunk at the end in a quest to fully articulate his true feelings about one of his favorite underdogs. "Mellow Soldiers" had to be born to explore the dark & often unintentional side of the soft rock we've all grown up with.
...The SOLDIERS at hand for this episode are largely :
*Ar...
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July 6, 2022 • 69 mins
Ever since he heard the Trigger Cut 7" in high school, Emil has been a big fan of Stephen Malkmus' contributions to the American underground. Emil stopped by Stephen's house while visiting Portland a few years ago and had a rare conversation about his younger years and early experiences in Pavement.
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June 14, 2022 • 52 mins
Ron & Emil recently began a ritual of Sunday brunching at the same family restaurant they worked at back in 1992. After a pleasant brunch Ron is granted his customary 'hard cider' and the mics are fired up. Questions were posed by listeners on Patreon and, while Ron is initially shocked that he's gotten fan mail, his storied wisdom comes rolling out just the same. It begins with the unwrapping of some rare 8-track tapes Emil's just...
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May 17, 2022 • 74 mins
"LONER LEGENDS III" is the final episode of Season Five & features::
*an overview of Eden Ahbez & the writing of Nature Boy*
*a difficult dive into the dastardly world of John Phillips*
*an overview of Alan Hull's work with Lindisfarne and his solo LPs*
*a section on Basil Kirchin and his pioneering of 'ambient music'*
Thanks so much for listening
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May 3, 2022 • 55 mins
Emil has a mid-life crisis... and records it. This episode is a sequel to "The Outsider", the other purely philosophical episode that anchored Drifter's Sympathy into a hardcore existentialist stance. This cast uses the holy trinity of American Country Music, Taoism and the Twilight Zone to illustrate our fruitless attempt to resolve the perpetually unfinished nature of consciousness itself. In the form of a classic Existentialist ...
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April 19, 2022 • 74 mins
The sequel of "THE DAWN OF SELFISH MUSIC" goes a little darker into the consequences of gaining total freedom. On the other side of this new frontier, Dylan finds people breaking into his house to find their leader, Miles Davis tries to shake off imitators chasing his every aesthetic move and a never-ending supply of drugs causes David Crosby's life to fully crash and burn. Gene Clark is the patron saint of this episode, while man...
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April 5, 2022 • 67 mins
Duncan Trussell returns to Drifter's Sympathy for the continuation of "The Lecturer". Emil and Duncan get into the archaeology of their friendship, their early development and how they were molded by completely different forms of trauma to come to a similar internal place. The second half dives into their artistic process and how Taoist methods have helped lead them towards creating their body of work over the years.
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March 22, 2022 • 72 mins
Tracing back to the beginnings of when music on the radio began to slowly fracture and morph in the late 50's, Emil returns to a small fleet of songwriters in the Teen Heartthrob era that began to dream of a coming world of freedom and evolution in the art of songform. Driven by the seizing of a personal power outside of the need to please the crowd, these writers leaked actual emotions into their recordings which set the stage for...
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March 8, 2022 • 61 mins
The new season of Drifter's Sympathy picks back up at the end of the last episode.
'I Want to Live a Peaceful Life' was about the sudden malaise that can descend on you at the end of college. Emil moved in with Duncan Trussell in LA and only lasted a summer before he realized that it wasn't the right place to start a music career based on hyper-honesty.
This episode approaches the emotional field of getting to Portland in 1999 an...
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February 15, 2022 • 26 mins
Season Five of Drifter's Sympathy will be dropping on March 8th! - This is a special mini-episode meant to announce the new Season, but it includes a section of last season's special Q&A episode where Patreon listeners were essentially able to guide their own episode. Emil dives back into the 90's and navigates the difficulties artists face from an extremely personal perspective.
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May 21, 2019 • 56 mins
We've reached the Final Hour of this season... for now...
Emil went out to his mother's farm and recorded the finale of these 6 episodes in the middle of the night while drinking a significant amount of moonshine. He enters a strange and dazed state of mind, temporarily entering a flashback of the 'religious episode' he experienced in 1998. After several years of being held captive inside an extreme and crippling depression, he ha...
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May 5, 2019 • 66 mins
Emil and Alex recently got off a massive Grails tour that took them to places as disparate as Poland, Turkey, Estonia and Lithuania, ending up in Copenhagen where they recorded this cast at Alex's apartment. It begins with the two reflecting on how traveling as a band can reach heavy emotional impasses that require a kind of comedic release and Grails have established a dense list of guilty pleasures that've eased their morning han...
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April 22, 2019 • 62 mins
This episode dives completely into the field of extreme, paralyzing alienation and the hovering spectre of the failure of your childhood dreams. It also features a tribute to the healing power of the music of Daniel Johnston... a singer that has the power to build a profound bridge out to you when you are in the most debilitating pain.
Although this cast unrelentingly focuses on the sensation of floating in the space of a certain...
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April 1, 2019 • 71 mins
This episode brings the Drifter's documentary-style series on the history of Home Recording to a close for now...🍏 The sheer amount of info in this one could've easily gone into a 300 page book, given that the 'lo-fi'-era has barely been acknowledged as existing as a legitimate form of expression at all. As home-recording has historically only been seen as a stepping stone towards more traditional forms of music industry careeris...
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March 18, 2019 • 59 mins
Emil has a nervous breakdown in New York, packs everything into his car and starts driving south. He takes a sabbatical in his childhood home in North Carolina thinking it will offer some perspective, but it only brings on a full mid-life crisis which he realizes he's been needing and fully embraces. While cleaning his mom's old house and looking at baby pictures, he has a revelation about what truly carves a person into their eve...
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