In 2021, record label Spartan Records was set to release a reissue of musician and songwriter Chris Simpson’s defunct solo project Zookeeper on vinyl for the first time. I was brought on to write an essay for the liner notes, which was then turned into the script for this online documentary about the project. Along with the writing, I performed and recorded the narration.

Born With Things To Do

Stories, like songs, often exist larger in memory than they did in reality.

The first time I met Chris Simpson was in the spring of 2004 on my inaugural day as a dishwasher at Starseed’s Cafe. Chris and I worked the Thursday afternoon shift, a largely uneventful gig with lengthy stretches of inactivity between pouring drink refills and bussing tables. I often wonder how different my life would have been if we had met at the weekend brunch shift, or during the graveyard rush with a constant stream of inebriated patrons waiting for pancakes and queso. There probably wouldn’t have been time to talk about our shared love of Daniel Lanois and Radiohead, our similar religious backgrounds, or how he was becoming more and more enthralled by the vast works of Van Morrison, John Cale, Graham Greene, Simon and Garfunkel, Herman Hesse, and Bob Dylan — conversations that led us like a series of winding staircases from the surface of our daily lives into the inner worlds of thought and dream, belief and doubt, fear and love. I feel like I owe a great deal to those slow Starseed’s Thursday afternoons.

With The Gloria Record on indefinite hiatus, Chris had been performing on his own for less than a year at that point. He had played a few solo shows, singing songs from their catalogue, some choice covers, as well as the occasional Mineral tune. Behind the scenes though, he was writing new material with a passion and at a pace that he hadn’t experienced before. Sometimes during smoke breaks at the diner, or after our shift ended, Chris and I would sit in his little blue truck and listen to cassettes of the demos he was making. Those songs had a life to them, a real breath and movement. They were alive with characters and stories, like a play with a series of non-sequential acts, short musical novellas depicting the worlds that existed inside his mind. Gone were the familiar autobiographical confessions. In their place there were families searching for lost children. Forlorn strangers praying to payphone booths. Infants trapped in mangers and escaping from delivery rooms. There were apparitional tax collectors, prognosticative sidewalk drawings, imprisoning mailing lists, hordes of DJs. These new songs told the story of a people made of miracle and possibility, living in a land of compromise and half-measures but yearning to burst out from behind their locked doors and closed blinds.

I was enamored with these songs. I wanted to learn them and sing them to myself at home, with my friends, in my bands, anywhere and everywhere. When Chris brought up the idea of a recording session, I volunteered to type out chord charts for him to use. I am not one hundred percent sure when exactly Zookeeper began, but I think that those chord charts probably got me a seat at the table. The session was booked at Erik Wofford’s Cacophony studio (a large converted barn in far East Austin). Chris invited some of his former TGR bandmates, as well as members of local darlings Zykos and a handful of other Austin music friends. While most of these folks wouldn’t go on to be Zookeeper regulars, that session set the tone for how the new band would operate by exhibiting two of its most key aspects: spontaneity and inclusion. And so when Chris’s dishwasher friend showed up with chord charts, he got introduced to everyone, was handed an acoustic guitar, and played along as the tape started rolling.

Charts aside, my biggest contribution to Zookeeper may have been introducing Chris to Ben Lance and Alex Dupree. Ben and I had lived together in an old converted church near downtown Houston in the early aughts. One day I came home to hear this angelic sonic wash enveloping the whole building, and rounded the corner to find Ben hunched over his amp and an array of pedals. He was considering attending art school in Denton to study painting, and I immediately knew I had to talk him into moving to Austin and starting a band with me instead. We moved in early 2003 and formed Sad Accordions with some friends we had met through a small church we were a part of at the time. That’s also where I met Alex Dupree. Alex was a college student, an incredible songwriter, and an amazing guitarist who could also dance his way around a set of keys without breaking a sweat. He had recently made an album on a four-track cassette recorder with his group the Trapdoor Band. I remember driving to Dallas with Chris for a show and playing him Alex’s record on the way. He was immediately sold. “Who is this kid?” By the time the next Zookeeper recording session came around, both Alex and Ben were a part of the fold.

For as many musicians as were beginning to collect around these songs, there really was no “band” to speak of yet. Two of the earliest outings I can recall were both as an odd three-piece ensemble. We drove out to Los Angeles in the summer of 2005 to open for our friend Jeff Klein. That group consisted of Simpson on guitar and piano, Kyle Hunt (who would go on to play with The Black Angels) on synthesizer, and myself on bass, with a spontaneous last minute addition of Mike Semple from Friends of Dean Martinez—who Kyle knew but none of the rest of us had ever met before—on electric guitar and tape echo (this was classic Chris Simpson – new person? Recommended by a friend? Available tonight? Welcome to the family!). A few months later we drove out to play a couple of shows in New Mexico, again as a three-piece, this time swapping Kyle and his synths for Kullen Fuchs on vibraphone (and probably a horn of some sort). Looking back, it seems strange that we wouldn’t have prioritized finding a drummer. But Zookeeper in those early days was more about Chris discovering and becoming infatuated with individuals (as he had with Alex and Ben) than about assembling a band. He would often show up to work, going on about a phenomenal guitar player he had met, or a horn player he’d seen at some show or another. Eventually that person would be invited to sit in on a recording session, and often as not they would stick around for a few months or years. In that way, it was very much a web of individual atmospheres and personal relationships, rather than the need for specific instruments, that defined the sound of Zookeeper. That was the case with both Kyle and Kullen. And it was very much the case with Cully Symington.

I had been hearing about Cully for months before I ever met him. He was a pretty young fella compared to many of us—just a year or so out of high school—and already had a reputation as a solid and creative drummer. Everybody in Austin wanted him to be in their band, and for good reason. Cully is one of the most overtly musical and lyrical drummers I’ve ever heard play. Speaking as the other half of that rhythm section, playing with Cully can’t help but make you a better bass player. He also has zero ego, which is especially impressive for someone so talented. Chris met Cully at another early Cacophony session after Wofford had recommended him for the gig. It was an instant connection. Outside of the aforementioned chord-charted night, Cully played drums on every Zookeeper session from then on out. And there were many.

While we wound up taking advantage of different studios and other spaces over the years, the vast majority of the sessions took place at The Bubble, an alley garage-turned-two-story recording studio. The musicians would be in a big room upstairs, while engineer Alex Lyon manned the tape machine on the first floor. We would usually book two or three days at a time, with the Zookeeper regulars coming and going as our schedules permitted. Add to that the tendency for friends new and old to drop by and play cello or harmonica for a song or two, or for someone to switch from an autoharp to a drum machine halfway through a take… I can’t imagine the strain we must have put on poor Alex during those sessions. Often Chris would come in with a handful of new tunes that he’d written since the last session, songs that none of us had heard before, and we just had to feel our way through them in the moment. This dynamic lent itself heavily to improvisation, experimentation (photographic evidence exists of Alex Dupree on a “PianoSaurus,” and of our friend John Hoover playing an electric guitar with a tambourine, a plastic cup, and a jaw harp), happy accidents, flat out mistakes, and general chaos (mostly of either the good or neutral variety). Sometimes we would play a song six times in a row. Sometimes it was one-and-done. The prevailing ethos seemed to be: record it now, learn it later. We were never looking for perfection. With Chris as our guide, we were searching for a feeling, for soul.

Between 2004 and 2008, we recorded multiple versions of over 50 songs, on at least 18 reels of tape, at three studios and two houses. Out of all those songs, only 15 were ever released: first on the Belle City Pop EP then on the full length Becoming All Things, both put out by Brian Malone of The Gloria Record on his Belle City Pop label.  Where these songs truly lived though was on stage. Zookeeper the band began to solidify as more shows were played and more tours were booked. Ben, Alex, Simpson, and I formed the main road crew, along with the gentle and lovable Kevin Bybee on drums. We were frequently graced with The Gloria Record’s Benjamin Houtman on keys. Sometimes Brian Malone or Mineral bass player Jeremy Gomez would fill in for Bybee (yes, Jeremy is also a fantastic drummer, as you can hear for yourselves on Delivery Room, the last track on this record). Friends continued to come and go, on this instrument or that. Amps were loaded into vans, hauled through snowy parking lots, plugged into crowded basements and dark bars. Tires were changed, floors were slept on, nights were driven through, rain was danced in—all in the name of these songs. What started as a stage name for Chris’s solo material had grown into an actual band. Even more than that, Zookeeper had become a family—not a nuclear all-American unit, but a sprawling, extended web of step-siblings and nephews and cousins once removed. Chris Simpson inspires this kind of love and loyalty, just as his songs inspired that level of devotion in us.

One of the most rewarding and complicated aspects of being a part of a family—or a community, or a band—is that people change, and their changing changes you. Alex, Kevin, Houtman, and I eventually all wound up in different parts of the country. Cully was scooped up by everyone from Will Sheff to Tim Kasher to Greg Dulli (though he would still make room for recording sessions with Simpson whenever he had down time from the road). Chris and his wife Monika started a family of their own—a whole new kind of zookeeping. He was still writing songs, still working on recording, but at a much different pace. He finished one more Zookeeper album, 2014’s Pink Chalk, a sparse, beautiful collection of mostly newer, post-band songs. Some of the old crew appeared on a few tracks, but these were very different recordings. Gone was the room full of noise makers, banging it out on the fly and hanging on by the seat of their pants. These were intimate recordings, the closest thing to a solo album that Chris had ever done. What was beginning to become clear was that he had entered a new chapter of his artistic life, and that the riotous kinetic energy that was Zookeeper was over. And so, Mountain Time was born.

2020’s Music For Looking Animals was a turning point for Chris, and it was a balm for me. Not only was Simpson’s music getting the attention I’d always believed that it deserved, but many of those old, unused Zookeeper songs were finally released into the world. Every track on that album except for one is a song I had played and listened to and sung out loud too many times to count. They were songs that I had heard fifteen years before in a little blue truck parked outside of Starseed’s, songs that were vital to who I was as a musician and a writer and a man. It was never clear to me why the Zookeeper years seemed so lost on the world at large, even on die-hard Mineral and The Gloria Record fans. But whatever the reason, the songs I’d come to love so much were now getting their due. Mountain Time had taken what Zookeeper helped birth and nurture, and turned it into a creature that had legs in the world. And the world was better for it.

Which brings us to Saint Francis, Zookeeper. Chris Simpson’s lost years. The culmination of countless days and nights of recording. The gathering of friends (and friends of friends) in one big room, all reaching for banjos and organs and sleigh bells and trumpets, crowding around microphones or sitting on the floor and clapping their hands. It’s a pair of headphones taped around your head. It’s pianos played so loud you can hear them in the drum mics. It’s the sound of a band in a bubble (their minds are in trouble but their hearts they are clear). Saint Francis, Zookeeper is the story as it stands thus far: the first two Zookeeper records, remastered for vinyl, plus three never before heard songs. And it’s just the tip of the iceberg. There are still volumes of unheard recordings—multiple takes, alternate versions, unreleased songs, whole finished albums that have never seen the light of day.

Yet.

Songs, like stories, exist larger in memory than they do in “reality.” They often become both more epic and more intimate than any one recording or performance can suggest. These songs were born with things to do. They came from Chris, they lived with us for a while, but they belong to everyone—to anyone who wants them, to anyone who needs them, to anyone for whom these songs have become a part of their story (or have let their own story become a part of these songs).

Zookeeper was a street choir in a strange parade. Saint Francis, Zookeeper is an invitation to that parade. Pick up a guitar or a tambourine. Put on your walking shoes and your favorite hat. Sing it on out with us. Welcome to the family.