Lore

Porch Rock

Anna Lee came up with the name Porch Music after she and James visited a friend who was having a hard time. They played him a bunch of unreleased songs on his porch. They wanted to cheer him up, let him know they loved him, and remind him they were there if he needed them.

The name stuck. Given a genre of their own, they'd call Quantaphoria Porch Rock. Their music is homemade, and it wanders wherever the song takes them. Art rock is the answer when somebody needs a category.

The guitar came first

James was diagnosed with Tourette syndrome at five years old, in 1993. His family was in Northern California then, and he remembers people coming to observe him and interview his mother. At eleven, he picked up a guitar and found the first thing that quieted his tics.

Anxiety had always made them worse. Playing gave him something to focus on, a skill he could work at, and a little silence. At parties and in other social situations, a guitar against his chest became the coziest security blanket he knew. He still doesn't know why doing something in front of people helped him feel less anxious around them. It helped anyway.

Guitar became his first real hyperfixation and special interest. Decades later, he is still at it, with every intention of improving until the day he journeys into the multiverse.

A tattoo, a guitar, and a voice

Anna first came to James's house for a tattoo from his roommate, Ben Jackson. Ben introduced them while James played guitar for her. Ben had been James's best friend since high school, and the two had spent long hours jamming together. His rhythms and improvisational spirit left their mark on James's playing.

James discovered that Anna could harmonize with just about anything he played. They became good friends, and a couple of years later they eloped on St. Patrick's Day, 2018.

Dave Love had met James about a year before James and Anna began dating. He stayed a close friend and fellow musician through the adventures that followed. James also played a benefit for teen suicide awareness. Dave now writes with Quantaphoria, plays bass, and works on their recordings through Glass Elephant Studios.

For James and Anna, writing a song together is still a date. They get to try something, laugh at themselves, change their minds, and hear what the other person does with it. Marriage, kids, jobs and dishes all happen around that ongoing collaboration. They keep making time for something they can get better at together.

A song worth hearing from every angle

A song often starts with James finding a guitar part and singing nonsense over it. Anna hears words and harmony in what he's doing. They pass it back and forth until the parts have changed enough that neither can claim every piece. Both sing lead and play guitar. Anna wrote and plays the dual-toned guitar harmony between the choruses of Fortuna Daydream.

Their process has a lot in common with the surrealist automatism in their artwork. They follow what comes out, record it, and see what begins to take shape. They care much more about catching a musical moment than making it obey a songwriting formula.

Ween is one of their biggest influences, and probably their shared favorite band. Not every song lands for both of them. They love the diversity, the playfulness, and the freedom to take an idea somewhere ridiculous or beautiful just because it feels worth exploring. Quantaphoria has its own way of doing that. A song can move from something close and bare into a much heavier passage, with the blues still somewhere in James's hands.

Growing up, James often got bored listening to the radio while he waited for the part of a song everybody knew. He wanted to make music that didn't leave him waiting. James says people have described his songs as several choruses competing for dominance, and meant it as a compliment. Many Quantaphoria songs have multiple interchangeable choruses.

That is deliberate: every verse, bridge, transition and line should carry as much feeling as the part people are expected to remember. James thinks of a good sculpture, something worth walking around because every angle has something to offer. He wants that from a song, too.

The people who stayed

For more than seven years, James lived with a diagnosis of bipolar I disorder with psychosis, which he now describes as a misdiagnosis. After being diagnosed with celiac disease, he came to believe the untreated illness had driven much of what he had experienced. He describes himself today as healing and living without medication.

The psychosis was prolonged and extreme. Looking back on it can still be embarrassing. Anna and Dave lived through those years alongside him, and James credits their friendship, art and music with helping him survive. James is grateful they are still here together and can now look back and laugh.

They kept writing during those years. Illness was part of their lives, and so were work, children, bills and the everyday business of being a family. That is the life many of their songs came out of. They still make music for themselves, and for people who might need it the way they have needed it.

The faces behind the music

James and Anna love painting their faces and dressing up, sometimes in extra-glamorous ways. James often wears half a smile and half a frown. Even when he is laughing, he can be feeling anxiety, pain and everything else at once. Painting those feelings on his face helps him express something that a smile alone doesn't tell.

He connects that image with a passage in Black Elk Speaks, as conveyed by John G. Neihardt, about laughter and sorrow as two expressions of truth.

His visual art has traveled under the name Jams2blues and been exhibited internationally. He still signs his drawings J2B. When keeping the art business going stopped making financial sense, he closed that chapter and put himself fully into Quantaphoria. The drawing and painting came with him. Anna created the band's original lettering, and her hand-painted work remains part of its visual life.

More than twenty-five hours

On February 20-21, 2024, James played improvised guitar for more than twenty-five hours across three back-to-back livestreams, raising donations for Stepping Stones Safe Haven, a shelter serving women and children experiencing homelessness.

Read the story and watch the full performance:
https://www.quantaphoria.com/post/the-birthday-i-played-for-more-than-25-hours

These days, a song might begin at home and end up with someone James and Anna will never meet. They hope it brings a little of what they wanted to give their friend on his porch: good company, and the feeling that somebody cares.