I really miss getting together with a few friends in a practice space or a club or a studio and making a lot of noise. So I made a Soundcloud mixtape compiling a bunch of different tracks I've played drums on over the past two decades, and it's out today, dedicated to my mom, Cynthia Heikel, who helped me buy my first drum set when I was 13 and let me loudly practice in her house. 

Broken Sticks: Al Shipley on drums 2000-2020

All tracks are noted by their original year of release (previously unreleased tracks are noted by the year of recording, and a lot of this stuff has really never been heard before). The oldest song is over 20 years old, and I finished recording the newest song, "Cell Flow Thing," yesterday afternoon. Here's a quick guide to the bands I've played in and musicians I've collaborated with that appear here:

Snoozer is a name that Susie Ghahremani wrote and recorded songs under, later recording as Boy Girl Party. In 1999, Susie and I mailed tapes to each other to collaborate on music when I lived in Delaware and she lived in Rhode Island. She picked a couple minutes of my drumming out of a tape I recorded in my house and wrote a wonderful song, "Me More," over it. In 2001, she included the song on Snoozer's self-titled album, and when she toured that year I finally got to meet Susie and hear her perform "Me More" in Baltimore, at the old Ottobar on Davis Street. "Me More" appeared on the 2005 compilation Homemade Hits, Vol. 1 alongside lo-fi luminaries like Ariel Pink and Katie The Pest, and and it has 4 thousand plays on Spotify alone, making it probably the most popular song here. Susie is also a prolific visual artist and I've read some of the children's books she's illustrated to my kids. 

The True Human Motive was a Sussex County, Delaware-based emo band I played drums for in 1999 and 2000, really my first band that wrote songs and played shows (I started a couple bands with my brother Zac previous to that, but those bands mainly jammed in our house, learned some covers, and played Mario Kart when we got bored). Singer/guitarist Benn Roe, bassist Chris Howell, guitarist Andy Paller and I were all students at Cape Henlopen High School in Lewes, Delaware, and during my senior year we practiced wrote constantly and went upstate to record an album at Clay Creek Studios in Newark with Nick Rotundo (who passed away in 2017, RIP). We finished the album Hope but it wasn't really ever released, although it apparently circulated in the screamo underground enough that I used to see people list us among bands they liked on their MySpace pages. The album featured a few tracks with improvised music and spoken word vocals, and "Stiff Legs" featured some of the first music I composed on keyboard, although I didn't come up with any words to record to the music for the True Human Motive track -- a decade later I reworked it as the Western Blot song "Sore Winners." The band broke up when I moved to Maryland for college, but Benn and Chris continued working together in A Petal Fallen. 

Tuner was a York, Pennsylvania-based band led by singer/guitarist Chris Monahan that I played drums for in 2002-2003 (no relation to the other TUNER featuring King Crimson's Pat Mastelotto that started releasing albums a few years later). Chris went to school at York College, just a quick drive over the border from where I was attending Towson University in Maryland, so I'd go up on weekends to practice and occasionally play shows with Tuner. I have probably an hour of demos I recorded of Chris's songs, beautiful weird haunting folky/shoegaze/soft-loud stuff. But I didn't keep in touch after I got tired of making the journey up to York and gradually left the band, and I haven't been able to find any of those folks on Facebook on anything. So if Chris or Patrice or anyone else who played in Tuner sees this, drop me a line, I'd love to hear from you and send you all those recordings. 

Zuul was a Baltimore-based band started by guitarist Sean Krus, singer Nick Chester, and bassist Michael Bartolomeo that I joined after their first drummer left. We played together from 2003 to 2005, gigging around Baltimore, mostly at the Sidebar, and performed on the air on Third Rail Radio on WMUC once (no relation to another Zuul that played around Baltimore in the 2010s). It was a really fun, funny band, and we had a really bizarre repertoire of covers (Christina Aguilera, Billy Idol, Enrique Iglesias). Nick Chester is well known in the video game industry and works for Epic Games, Sean Krus went on to play in Balti Mare, and Mike Bartolomeo is a TV editor who directs short films (including one student film I starred in and a Western Blot music video). 

Western Blot is the name I started releasing music under in 2012, although I had been writing and recording demos for those songs for over a decade, playing drums and keyboards and singing or writing lyrics for other vocalists. There's kind of a hole in this mixtape with no music from 2005 to 2011, because after Zuul broke up I just decided I wouldn't perform or release music again until I got my solo project off the ground, and that took a while as I became a father and focused on my writing career. Ishai Barnoy and John German play with me in the live band version of Western Blot and appear on some of the studio tracks. Over three albums and three EPs, I have collaborated with a wide variety of vocalists in the Baltimore scene: Koye Berry, Lizzy Greif (20ooo), Brooks Long (Brooks Long & The Mad Dog No Good), Shawna Potter (War On Women), Andy Shankman (Jumpcuts), Scott Siskind (Vinny Vegas), and Kathleen Wilson (Thee Lexington Arrows). I self-produced some Western Blot tracks and co-produced most of them with Mat Leffler-Schulman or Doug Bartholomew.

Golden Beat was a Baltimore-based band that formed in early 2015 and broke up in late 2016 with singer/guitarist Dan Doggett (Monument), guitarist Chris Merriam (Private Eleanor), and bassist K.B. Blankson (They Move On Threads), and myself. We recorded a total of 5 songs (3 in a studio session with Tim St. Clair of Soft Peaks and others in a demo in our practice space), but had more good ones that we performed live or practiced that never got recorded. 

Woodfir is a Baltimore-based band I formed in 2016 with singer/guitarist Reda Lee and Tim King, both formerly of Blood Horses. Western Blot was on the bill for one of the last Blood Horses shows, and after they broke up Tim and I formed a band, the short-lived Maris Vera with April from Mental School (which wrote a few songs, played one show, and never made any recordings). Woodfir has released two EPs and over the past 4 years I've played more shows with them than probably any other band I've been in. Tim and Reda and I have continued sending each other tracks and working on new songs since we've been unable to practice during the COVID-19 lockdown. I also included two kind of rare songs on the mixtape that we used to play live a lot: "Western Song," which was briefly released in 2018, and a demo of "Salvia," a song we've yet to record in the studio that has gone through a few different iterations and different tempos. The cover of this mixtape is a picture of all the broken drumsticks I had on the floor when I moved out of the space where Woodfir, Golden Beat and Western Blot practiced from 2014 to 2017. The Woodfir tracks were produced by Mat Leffler-Schulman, Doug Bartholomew, and Steve Johnson. 

Doc Heller is one of the aliases of Pennsylvania-based rapper/producer Darko The Super. When I was tracking the Western Blot album 5/4 with Doug Bartholomew, I recorded some drums that I sent to him, which he cut up and looped for two tracks on the 2018 album What Up Duderino?!! I really enjoy this mode of long distance collaboration that I started all those years ago with Snoozer, and I recently sent off 27 drum improvisations to 27 different people, so I may have enough tracks to do another Broken Sticks compilation at some point. 

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