From Grief to Kindness, How Ston The Band’s Loper Chronicles Life’s Complexities
Photo by Alejandra Sol Casas
It's a scorching triple-digit degree Wednesday evening in San Antonio when I join Jonathan Livingston (who you might know as Ston) at a parking lot on the northwest side to talk music. We sit on the asphalt and drink some cans of Arizona tea. Behind us are the faded pink remnants of the former grandeur that was Randy’s Ballroom. It was there that in 1978 the Sex Pistols notoriously played their last riotous show in Texas before breaking up a few days later. Livingston admits he doesn’t know the history of the former honky tonk venue turned bingo hall, but finds the parallels between honky tonk and punk music reflective of his own brand of music, which he jokingly calls “southwest emo” or “post-hardcore with a twang.”
Ston the Band is his current musical endeavor. Their latest album, Loper, dropped earlier this month and observes many of his life’s intricacies, often finding beauty in indignities. He creates conversational music that crescendos his experiences with death, grief, and love and magnifies the often overlooked miniscule miracles of the mundane.
As he sips on his iced tea, he reminisces on previous instances occurring in various parking lots throughout the years. For Livingston, parking lots have always been a popular hangout spot with friends. He also tells me about some of the oddities he observed en route here, including a bar with a pool in it.
“What a magical fucked up world we live in,” he laughs. “I'm a pretty boring person, frankly. I don't do anything. But, that doesn't mean that my life isn't meaningful in the sense that all of our lives are truly and deeply meaningful.”
Photos by Alejandra Sol Casas
Through his casually profound lyrics, gentle demeanor, and endearingly introspective banter, it can be easy to feel like you know the person behind Ston The Band. But the birth of this musical incarnation stems from a tragedy in 2019.
Livingston was residing in Rochester, New York when his friend, who had been battling colon cancer, asked him to return to San Antonio to visit. Upon realizing the gravity of the situation, Livingston booked a flight home. After a series of frustrating delays, including a rerouted flight and an incident where his plane caught fire on the tarmac, the initial four hour trip transformed into an arduous sixteen hour ordeal. Unfortunately, Livingston finally made it to San Antonio a mere 45 minutes after his friend passed away.
Despite no longer having an impetus to return, Livingston decided to move permanently back to San Antonio following his friend’s death. He had no plan, but decided to rent out a room and live with his friends and eventual bandmates, guitarist Zach Salas, who he’s playfully coined a “pop princess genius” and drummer Alejandro Abeledo. Together the trio played and recorded music during the initial COVID-19 lockdown.
Livingston compared that creative experience to his childhood as a homeschool student. “I was just kind of in a room by myself for a lot of my life growing up. You can probably see the parallels between that and the COVID lockdown.” He found it perplexing when others vented their frustrations online. While they grappled with stir-craziness, he found himself in his familiar element, knowing exactly how to cope— though initially he preferred not to, given how much effort he had put in throughout his life trying to escape that isolation.
Having been a part of other musical projects such as local post hardcore group, Wolf Tone, Kirstian Barboza’s math rock endeavor, Short Shorts, Jacob Isaac’s Porridge Fist, and even a brief stint in the death metal scene with Destroy All Traces, Livingston took a more earnest approach when writing songs for Ston The Band. This time he incorporated the instrumentalization from the various rock genres he knew, while layering his familiar homestyle accent on top and experimenting with country-style vocalizations.
He cites iconic country crooners, such as Hank Williams, for their innovative vocal techniques including yodeling. “It's very avant garde like the things that they’re doing with their voice,” Livingston said. “I was like, ‘I want to do an exaggerated version of that because these techniques are strange.’ They’re yodeling just casually like it’s not a big deal.”
His band’s moniker at the time was Loper, named after the ranch owner in the children’s book series Hank The Cowdog. Livingston also related to the name once he found out it was an archaic word that meant “to walk around.”
“You know what? When I'm processing through shit, I walk around a lot.” he said.
Due to some confusion with the name that had his friends mistakenly calling it “Looper”, Livingston changed the name to Ston the Band, but used Loper for the title of the album as a way to honor the beginnings of the project.
After about a year of writing songs, borrowing equipment from friends, trusting the minds of Will Clegg and Brian Holman to master the tracks, and commissioning local artist Francis Baca to design the cover art, Loper was finally released earlier this month.
Photos by Alejandra Sol Casas
“A lot of the album really is about my friend dying or the anticipation of my friend dying.”
Perhaps the most poignant manifestation of his grief can be found on the track Cowboy Killers, which was actually written when he first found out about his friend’s diagnosis.
“And I would say at the end, ‘cancer, cancer, no, you can't take my friend’ and god damn, that has a fucking different meaning to me now. Because it did.”
Homages to some other departed friends are also interspersed throughout the album.
Aunts pays tribute to local rock band Ants, with Livingston echoing the phrase “you died,” derived from the title of the song by Ants. While the original song lamented a band member’s father dying, it resonated with Livingston’s own experience of losing not only his friend due to cancer, but another friend as well. The song opens with the line “smack the pack thirteen times, lucky’s I flip two” which was a ritual he adopted when smoking cigarettes after observing his friend do the same prior to her demise.
“I do a lot of things casually in my life in remembrance of,” he reflects. “Death is an absence, but that absence is also an absolute presence, it’s absolutely real in our lives.”
One of the most light-hearted songs on Loper is the opening track, Armadillo. He claims it’s the closest thing he’s ever written to a love song. Concurring with the present, the song captures the simple splendor of drinking Arizona Tea and hanging out in parking lots with his friends.
“There's situations we experience and they're all really mundane, most of the time, but there's so much beauty in that and I wanted to convey that romantically.” He stops to think. “Like the idea of all this, what we could easily view as just like boring bullshit. They really are the moments that define our lives. And so like, why not romanticize the existence that we're in?”
The sun is going down by now, casting its golden hour glow onto the crackled pink walls of Randy’s Ballroom. Livingston tangents off and begins to tell a story of a time he gave someone a water bottle on a hike and how the man later told him how moved he was by his gesture. He summarizes the story by concluding that the trivialities of his life are like a butterfly effect that leave lasting impressions in his life and those of others. That’s why he finds so much importance in doing his best to be a decent person in a world that often skews callous.
“I think kindness is important… it’s so easy to be casually cruel because we live in a casually cruel world.”
In the fading light, the enduring beauty of Livingston’s message aligns with the sentiments in his music, which reflects the significance he finds in life’s intricate threads.
Loper is currently available to stream on Spotify, Apple Music, and Bandcamp. You can check out some photos from last week’s album release show at The Lonesome Rose below.
Photos by Devin De Leon