Track List:

Side A

1 Doggie Paddlin’ Thru The Cosmic Consciousness

2 Band Time

3 When The Money Comes In

4 Lead Me To Your Lord

5 Hold On (It’s All Rite)

Side B

6 We ain’t Got Nothin’

7 Cool Breeze Blow

8 Father’s Day

9 Fields of Grass / 9 Is The End (It’s Over)

Musicians Featured:

• Tabor Allen - drums & percussion

• Eamon Fogarty - Wurlitzer electric piano, electric bass, nylon string guitar, vocals

• Ben Lumsdaine - drums & percussion, acoustic guitar

• Max Knouse - acoustic, 12-string acoustic and electric guitars

• Chris Forsyth - electric guitar

• Ryan Jewell - drums & percussion

• Doug McCombs - bass

• Josh Ottum - acoustic guitar, bass

• Carey Frank - grand piano, Hammond organ,

• Davin Givhan - electric bass, acoustic guitar

• Michael Krasser - electric guitar

• T. J. Masters - acoustic guitar, nylon string guitar

• Mike Baggetta - electric sitar

• Dave Easley - Weissenborn slide guitar, pedal steel guitar

• Isaiah Morfin - baritone saxophone

• Chris Schlarb - acoustic, nylon string and electric guitars, bass, percussion, Honer Pianet T, glockenspiel, vocals

  Heather Sommerhauser - Prophet 10, grand piano, vocals

• Ann Thaiss - vocals

• Alicia Walter - vocals

• Jeremiah Lloyd Harmon - vocals

• Adriana Schlarb - vocals

Cover Artwork

• Cover Photo by Adriana Schlarb

• Engineering & Session photography by Devin O’Brien

• Layout by David J. Woodruff

Full Liner Notes:

We begin at the end.

“I’m imagining this is, like, the last two minutes of the album.”

Studio chatter litters Doggie Paddlin’ Thru The Cosmic Consciousness, the latest, and perhaps final, outing from Psychic Temple, the ever-morphing, ever-mutating constellation of players constituting Chris Schlarb’s own Planet Long Beach Rock and Roll Orchestra. Schlarb’s Southern California boy cadence carries a swaying rhythm, his speech is punctuated musically. This raw tape—behind the scenes snippets from BIG EGO and The Time Machine, a makeshift studio assembled by Chris and engineer/confidant Devin O'Brien in the Joshua Tree desert—never feels intrusive. The clips beckon and invite you in, a lifted curtain and a peek at the world revealed behind it.

Somewhere along the line, Schlarb got it into his head that perhaps his musical visions will lead him elsewhere from here on out. “9 is the end, it’s over,” Schlarb sings after the ninth song on this, his ninth album under the Psychic Temple banner. He wrote the gnomic, elliptical figure with 7-year old daughter Isabella at the kitchen table. As drummer Tabor Allen and bassist Josh Ottum dig into a swampy, two chord groove, Schlarb is joined by a choir of acoustics (drummer Ben Lumsdaine on 6- and Max Knouse on 12-string), aching pedal steel from Dave Easley, a wiry fence of electric guitars, Hammond organ and a group of sympathetic voices that includes longtime companions, collaborators, and family. If this were the end of Psychic Temple, it wouldn’t be such a bad end after all.

Psychic Temple has been a lot of things: a semi-cult, a recording collective, a rock band that plays like a jazz band or the other way around. Schlarb has also been many things: a truck driver, a video game composer, a private investigator, but he is first and foremost an assembler, someone whose vision and imaginative spirit intuitively understands how disparate artists might fit together, forming cosmic pickup bands that bring his visions to life: free jazz freakouts, fusions of folk, pop, rock and roll. Psychic Temple remains an ever-adaptable organism, mutating as required to fit the moment and Schlarb’s creative inclinations. In 2016, that evolutionary process led to opening a commercial recording studio (BIG EGO) a few years later, a label (BIG EGO Records, natch), which he runs with his wife and creative partner Adriana Schlarb. 

Yet despite this industrious zeal and continual output, there is one thing Psychic Temple is definitively not: a business. “I’m just going to do what I want to do,” Schlarb says. “I’m not trying to sabotage it, but I have to leave open the possibility of complete sabotage if that’s what is required.”

If Schlarb was trying to sabotage himself with Doggie Paddlin’ Thru The Cosmic Consciousness, he missed the mark. It picks up where 2023’s far out A Universe Regards Itself left off. The waves that closed that collaboration with synthesist Lisa Bella Donna are back, washing over the protagonist as he considers mortality and bliss over Mike Baggetta's languid electric sitar on the opening title track: “Just a leaf in the wind/getting blown off again/out of view.” From there, Schlarb and co. settle into his warmest collection of songs yet. Pastoral, spaced out gems, folk ballads, ZZ Top robo-choogle, fuzzed out power pop, E-Street evoking grandeur. Along the way Chris Forsyth's trio with bassist Doug McCombs and drummer Ryan Jewell are fully synthesized into the Psychic Temple for rockers like When The Money Comes In—sprawling lineup aside, Doggie Paddlin’ is a journey that packs double-album ambition into a slim, nine-song package. Thinking of the end, it turns out, loosened the reins. It opened it up.

If it is the end, that’s fine, Schlarb says. He insists he isn’t staging one of those “countdown to the reunion” tour stunts, he’s not trying to make a big deal of it. He’s certainly not suggesting he’s quitting music, riding off into the sunset to get a cushy tech job.  “I’m a lifer, whether I like it or not.” It’s just that when it comes to Psychic Temple, it’s allowed him to make records with his heroes, his friends, his family. It’s more than he ever bargained for.

“I never tried to do it,” Schlarb says, doggie paddling as we converse. “I never was angling for it. I just wanted to do the things that seemed right to me. That sounded right, that felt right. And if it's over, it's over. That's okay.” - Jason Woodbury, Phoenix Arizona