an excerpt of "Summer Heatwave Brings Sape to Apple Valley," Mojave Almanac

Goody’s Family Restaurant isn’t usually this loud on a Tuesday afternoon, but when Starsapien is in town, patrons shouldn’t forget to bring earplugs to breakfast. 

Victorville’s beloved neighborhood diner is the penultimate stop for the Los Angeles-based songwriter Jay Siebold and his schlepsome band. They’ve spent the summer dotting the plush-boothed coffee houses of San Bernardino County, playing to afternoon audiences of “white-haired club sandwich ladies,” as Siebold describes.

“These are the people I think about when I make music. The ideal candidate for a Starsapien fan is… the fifty-five-and-up crowd, divorced and dating again for the first time in a while… matriarchal women with moxie but they still keep a weekly lunch with the gals.”

The look in Siebold’s eye makes you wonder if you can believe anything he’s saying. It’s only when he’s performing a song like “The South” from his 2021 release, Streams of Conscience, that one feels he may be capable of expressing true, if morbid, sentiment.

“I might move back to the South if I die,” Siebold sings. “Lots of room to spread out and become the ground again."

The American South--North Carolina in particular--holds significance to Siebold beyond a song lyric. He lived and worked in the Raleigh-Durham area prior to heading west five years ago, and he says he returned to the state last winter to record a new album.

“This Starsapien thing is West Coast songs performed by an East Coast band. So we set up shop in the woods last year and put down a handful of songs… hopefully [they have] some LA edge with a Carolina breeze, you know?”