Monday, March 23, 2026

Noah Shepherd: Just for a Night

Happy Fried Egg, as we say in my world. It’s Fried Egg the 20th! What’s cookin’? Sweet jams. Are you tired of me yet?

Y’all, I am stoked. I’m chuffed. I’ve been sitting on this for way too long, mostly because I didn’t know where to begin.

I found this artist on Instagram. There’s a video of a guy with a mustache riding his bike down a road, over shirt flailing, wearing the kind of expression that says he's got a sneaky secret. The caption reads: “My music’s so underground, even you haven’t heard of it.”

Here's the reel: REEL REEL !!

Bro knows his audience. And we are all very happy to be seen.

Typically, my articles have a flow: excitement, discovery backstory, artist history, and then we really get into the music. I like that. It works.

But today? There’s almost nothing out there on this guy. No interviews, no deep dives, no semi-neatly packaged narrative. So instead, we’re just going to sit in it. Speculate a little. Chat about some jams.

I’ll give you a few recommendations, even though NoahFreakingShepherd has very quickly become a no-skips artist for me. I’ve got a soft spot for 2020s bedroom folk, but I’ll say this as earnestly as I can: this man has stolen my musical heart. Lyrically, melodically, chord-ally… it just hits in an equally simple and profound way.

Honestly, just get in the car, put his music on, and you'll get it. If you don't, I can't help you.

NOAHFREAKINGSHEPHERD

When you look at Noah's socials, you can gather quite a bit quickly. He's got a couple videos that went viral just for hot takes like Willie Nelsons arm hair, blazers on Christmas, and "Thing's That'll Make a Grown Man Cry". Spoiler alert, it's a a tear in a man's favorite sentimental jacket.

He's a seemingly charming and funny guy who's been posting reels and tiktoks since at least 2023, as far as I could scroll. Here's some other things I've gathered with my brain, eyes and ears (Noah, if you see this, feel free to fact check me).

— Noah is a multi-instrumentalist and lyricist

— Noah makes his own music

— Noah is a producer

— Noah's studio is in his bedroom (or some room) in his humble abode (maybe)

— Noah is from Oceanside, San Diego which apparently you can't call DAYGO though I personally enjoy that silliness. (Being from a beach town as well, we always call Redondo, DONDO. We like it.)

— Noah has a mustache and a blinding watch tan

—Noah is making bangers about love, living, and and the endless human pursuit of happiness

Feast your eyes on the beauty of my hard earned research! One day, they'll publish this article in a music history textbook as a profound turning point in music discovery. "What a proFOUND proFIND," they'd say.

Just fire me. Oh wait, I'll just fire myself.

Noah's Freaking Audio

There are a few major points I want to bring into this conversation: timbre, lyrics, and something else I haven't figured out yet 'cause I'm still writing. 3 is the magic number. There's something else I wanna say. I'm not there yet. Let me think...

SHEP's catalog is like if music was a shoulder-sat sidekick that gives your ears a warm hug. A drive by the ocean. It has that certain quality that bossa nova has; just relaxed enough to chill, just upbeat enough to shimmy. I dig it, like a shovel baby.

The instruments and the audio are turned back in a way that lets the treble (high end) brush the ears lightly. For example, in one of my absolute favorites, No Where's Home, there's some lead guitar parts that don't necessarily fill the speakers, even though it's the lead. It's the kind of lead guitar/melodic hook that just feels good to listen to because it breathes the way a singer sings. There's no overplaying happening in SHEP's music. Just enough. Goldilocks and the Fweakin Shep.

And honestly, it goes beyond that. He has multiple instrumental tracks as well that are unique in their own right.

I'm not sure how I feel about comparing artists as a way to describe someone's music. SHEP's music is certainly his own; however, he does remind me of all the best parts of a few artists I love, and I'm sure you do as well: Jack Johnson (lyrically/melodic delivery), Mac DeMarco (guitar tone), Her's (song structure), and in the best way possible, certain songs of his remind me of video games, particularly Animal Crossing. Let's come back to that.

So we've got potential influence, timbre (Tam-BUR)... Oh. I guess I accidentally remembered what I wanted to write about by just writing about it. Cheers, brain.

LYRICS and other things I want to say

Mr. SHEP is sentimental, existential, romantical (I told you 3's the magic number). His music has this sort of new-love innocence that's priceless. It's honest, it's straightforward, it's uncomplicated.

Here are some of my favorites:

Wait — this one, keyboard tone and melody in particular, sounds like it's right out of Animal Crossing
Just For a Night — you're gonna love that transition between feels. It picks up tempo at the perfect spot. All of a sudden, you went from loving the road and coasting, to doing 90 in a 65.
You're the One — please let me play this bass line. It's so fun and scratches my brain in the perfect way. In that kind of "never get tired of it" way, like Mike Dirnt's bass line in Longview (Green Day)
No Where's Home — this song is perfect. BUT, the best part is the lyrics.

I can tell by the way that you tie your shoes and the way that you wear your clothes

You've been through it before

No where's home

The way that you talk the way that you walk

The smiles you give to the people that stalk on their free time

No where's home

Chorus (this is the best part)

But you'll keep on movin' anyway, looking for something worth it to make you stay

You'll keep on searchin' for your zone

You're better off when you realize that nowhere's home

And so on... The imagery in the next part is so beautiful it's hard not to just write out all the words here.

Oh wait, I can do that. Please be gentle, there are no lyrics to be found on YouTube Music (I don't use Spotify).

Your cigarette burns in your soft red lips

The people around you try to tell you how it fits

But you don't care

No where's home

Travelin' round like a beat-up jug, man

Tryna make a living to purchase a house for your old man

No where's home

But you'll keep on movin' anyway, looking for something worth it to make you stay

You'll keep on searchin' for your zone

You're better off when you realize that nowhere's home

I'm gonna come back to this blog and be sad that I didn't talk about more of his tunes. It's true. I do love every one. If you gave him a listen, let me know what you think in the comments. Maybe you think his music sucks. I wanna know why you're wrong.

Love you. Stay tuned

SUBSCRIBE ON SUBSTACK TO HAVE THESE EMAILED TO YOU: https://substack.com/@berlyd

-BD

Listen to Just For a Night: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5sLkt0CD1k

Listen to No Where's Home: https://youtu.be/2qoGQlTCRFw?si=e0ZyoNRqtu1kOsGf

Wednesday, March 11, 2026

Webinar™: 公衆 Pool

I N T R O . C O M

Time to dial up and log in, folks. Hellokimi93 signing into AIM for a quick chat about this week's music discovery. Hellokimi93 was actually my first email. My AIM was idancedance123. So, hmu.

I actually found this artist in 2025, but I am unfortunately blessed with too many great discoveries to write about. So today we are going back in time, which is fitting, considering the music itself feels like stepping into a digital time capsule. Let me ask you this: how niche is too niche? In the last 25 years, the word niche has deepened like the ocean itself. With the introduction of the internet, there are now more corners of the musical world than ever before. And by corners, I mean sub-genres within sub-genres.

Discoveries like this are exactly why I write everything down. One day I hope to be documenting music history for genres so niche, so buried in the digital strata, that only an internet deep diver such as myself could be trusted to chronicle them.

You might have to wait a while for that though; I'm currently on hold...

Reflections

You may or may not remember that last year I wrote a super blog about a compilation album called Buddha Bar. I have basically sworn off super blogs since then, mostly because I know how much work that was. Don't get me wrong, it was equally full of joy, excitement, and intrigue. While it is my second most successful piece of writing to date (golf clap), that particular article covered fourteen different artists and was even labeled "too long" for a Substack email. Alas, I love the research, the mystery solving, and the internet hunt.

This will not be a super blog because we are only focusing on one artist. However, for the first time here, I would like to discuss multiple songs from a single album. Hooray for milestones...which is funny, considering this album sounds like you're trapped inside Windows 95.

w w w . d e e p d i v e . c o m

(2021, album cover pictured above)

What do we know about Webinar™? The album I want to focus on today is w w w . d e e p d i v e . c o m, released in 2021. The title alone feels like a hyperlink pulled straight from the early internet.

Here's the Bandcamp site:
https://fullmetalrecords.bandcamp.com/album/w-w-w-d-e-e-p-d-i-v-e-c-o-m

As a musician, history buff, and a sucker for atmosphere, I am giddy like a piglet in the mud.

Webinar™ appears to be a producer who primarily creates instrumental beats, but the music is quietly intertwined with an experience. I'm usually resistant to the word "nostalgic." Nothing bothers me more than when words turn into trends. The minute a word becomes fashionable, companies start slapping it onto anything they can sell, pretending they're helping us reconnect with the past.

HOWEVER, when I hear music like this, something strange happens. It sounds familiar. It feels familiar. Comforting.

Those are normal reactions when we hear music we like, but the way this album is assembled allows you to almost disappear into it. Float, even.

I'm going to break this down here for you in a few categories:

Concept/Vision — What kind of picture is the producer trying to paint?
Sampling — What am I hearing that's familiar?
Mixing — How am I receiving what I'm hearing?

I want to look at a few different songs from the album to help me help you understand what's happening here. Listen, at the end of the day, this is the kind of "thing" you either get or you don't. For those that don't, I want to try to help you understand. For those that do, I want to know if you're seeing, feeling, and hearing what I am.

Get ready. We're surfing into cyberspace now...

1) C O N C E P T . S Y S

(Concept/Vision)

w w w . d e e p d i v e . c o m is an album full of what we like to call Chill Vibes. From the album cover through the music and the website itself, it's a digital passport.

What we have here, to get as detailed as we can, is a compilation of instrumental tracks that paint a picture. That picture, I believe, is a combination of 90's and 2000's office or home office nostalgia. Windows, to be exact. A time when your PC speakers always sounded a bit muffled, even if you didn't know it at the time.

Without getting into mixing yet, the timbre of the tracks is a huge part of what is supporting this vision. Imagine you're on hold, and you're hearing the most banger hold music ever. It doesn't happen too often, but when it does, you're left hoping that maybe you'll get put on hold again.

It's a distinct experience. Not entirely unique, but instantly recognizable.

The concept, I feel, is a combination of hold music, smooth jazz, and hip hop, melded together with a proper mix that sounds like listening through a Bluetooth headset from 2001. The project sits somewhere in the vaporwave universe, a genre known for sampling smooth jazz, corporate lounge music, and early digital aesthetics.

The album cover is most certainly a major part of the experience of this record. If you were a kid that had access to a public pool, a friend's pool, a vacation or summer house, whatever, the internet has made it very clear that no person has ever had "a single original experience." People on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok would also say something like, "So, we all just had the same childhood?"

This album is an example of that particular piece of summer childhood experience. The feeling of staring into the sun-lit, electric baby-blue pool, the tip of your fingers breaching the surface, adults playing relaxing music in the background, maybe you're waiting for your mom to use the bathroom in the hotel lobby, or you can hear your dad waiting to talk to someone on the phone.

It's no one particular experience, but a multitude that supports this album's vision.

Upon further surfing, I found a statement on a site called:
https://www.utopiadistrict.com/tag/webinartm/

I don't know who it was written by, as the X username link says the account doesn't exist.

Here's what it says:

"w w w . d e e p d i v e . c o m is an album able to deftly navigate the nuances of many subgenres of the vaporwave scene. While on the surface, it might appear to be a traditional lo-fi album. As the album progresses, you find tracks able to successfully navigate out of the box it had seemingly placed itself in. You wind up with some unexpected influences flooding the album while never losing the lo-fi vibes it establishes out of the gate... But the biggest triumph of the album is arguably its selection of samples and loops, as the album stays engaging from beginning to end, avoiding the lulls you'll often encounter in longer albums."

Hopefully between my statement and theirs, you get the idea of what's being done here.

What you need to know is this: vaporwave is a genre built to mirror moods.

Their statement mentioned samples and loops, and that's next on our list.

Surf on.

2) S A M P L I N G . W A V

It's not clear if Webinar uses samples by chopping things they've heard or if they play the samples on instruments themselves, but either way, it's done so well.

Some of the samples I heard right away. Others took me a moment, and some I don't recognize at all.

Here are the ones where I'm 99% sure I know what I'm hearing:

1) Euphoria

This track starts with a smooth jazz sax teasing the beat. There are twinkling beeps that sound somewhere between dialing a phone and a yummy 80's electric piano sound.

Just before the kick drum starts, the sax begins a more structured melody. That melody is most definitely "Take 5" by Dave Brubeck, but in 4/4 time, not 5/4.

If that just looks like fractions, that's fine. Music came before theory did.

It just means that instead of counting in a rhythm of 1-2-3-4, you add an extra beat and count to five. They did not do that here. They changed the melody to fit the 4/4 vaporwave beat, and it's hip as hell.

If you didn't know, "Take 5" is one of the most famous jazz standards in the animal kingdom, known for its distinct 5/4 time signature.

Sampling it was an amazing move for nostalgia and for newbies discovering jazz through vaporwave alike.

2) ThirdEye.wave

This was an immediate hear for me. I automatically caught this one because she's one of those artists I've listened to countless times, and it's unmistakable for Sade fans.

This is undoubtedly the bass line from Sade's "No Ordinary Love."

This is like one of those "slowed and reverb" covers you might find on YouTube. If you've never heard of that, there's a section of YouTube where folks take a song, slow it down, pitch it lower, and add reverb, creating a nostalgic, almost dream-like version of the song.

pushes up glasses Actually, this is not a new practice. Musicians and producers have been speeding up or slowing down tracks for decades.

Nerd has spoken.

Anyways, enough about that. This track is great at keeping a groove. We're not going much of anywhere here, and we don't need to. Just that juicy, snappy snare drum with a blanket over it, smacking the Internet's ass.

(We're almost to mixing.)

3) サイバ

Sorry bro, you're not getting Sade past me. We got another one.

Paul Denman, Sade's bass player, is one of the most underrated and phenomenal bass players around. He just lays it down, and he sticks with it, and it's beautiful.

There's no question why Webinar would sample not only one, but two Sade songs.

And again with that beautiful snare.

Also, no, I don't speak Japanese, but I know how to use a translator. From that I got "Wise." Can someone tell me if that's right?

3) M I X I N G . E X E

Okay, I was good and I waited, right? I mean, I talked about the mix a lot already...

Yeah right.

Oh my goodness, the essence of this beautiful project. We're finally here.

You may be asking yourself, "What is mixing?"

For those who don't know: you know how in a house with dimming lights you can walk over to the wall and make the light by the window nice and bright, but then you want the light over the couch to be real dim, and the one next to your bed you've got an app to make it red or any other color?

That's kind of like what mixing is, but instead of your living room ambience, it controls the ambience of the track with sound, not lights.

On a single track you have sounds that sit in treble, mid, and bass ranges, bass being the lower end and treble being higher. But it's not just about low and high. It's about how those tones hit, or kiss, your ear depending on how you want them to arrive.

This, my friends, is a master class in mixing.

Have you ever listened to music with a pair of headphones from an airplane that you bought from a flight attendant? It doesn't sound good.

This sounds like that, but instead it sounds good.

Does that make sense?

It's completely intentional.

When you think about hold music, it never sounds that clear, but you kind of wish it did, especially when it's good. This is just clear enough.

I think what Webinar has done here is turn the treble way, way back so even the higher notes don't hit as high in the ear. They touch more than they hit.

There's a grain, an almost vinyl or tape-like quality to the sound, like listening to an old record.

I'm convinced you could put this album out with some regular old mixing and it would not feel or sound the same.

That's how deeply integral this is to the project.

So congratulations, Webinar. Your sub-genre's sub-genre is a goldmine.

And I'm obsessed.

公衆 Pool (Track 4)

The title of this blog and my favorite song on the album.

No special samples.

Hey, did you not realize this is the only blog I haven't started with a discovery story? That's because it's not really a story this time.

It was simply recommended to me by the YouTube Music algorithm. Not the album, just this track specifically.

My favorite number is 3. This track is 3:33.

We were going to hit it off from the get-go.

No delay, no build-up. Just groove right away.

And it is SUCH a great groove.

There's one thing happening in the tune but I have no idea what it is, and I have an attachment to it.

It sounds like this:

dung-ga-dong-ga-dung-geh-dah.

It happens on about the third beat every few measures.

It's some kind of percussion instrument? A keyboard? I have no idea, but it rips, and I love it, and it's stuck in my head constantly.

I walk around my office going:

dung-ga-dong-ga-dung-geh-dah
dung-ga-dong-ga-dung-geh-dah
dung-ga-dong-ga-dung-geh-dah

This groove hooked me from the first play.

I hope you can find something to enjoy from this wonderfully weird corner of the internet.

You guys have heard enough of my unorganized ranting for one day.

I hope you're jamming out wherever you are, and from all of me here at Stay Tuned, stay tuned, crate diggers. Love ya’ll to pieces from Substack to Blogger. Hey do me a favor and send this to someone you think is cool. Reading this will make them cooler. ILY

Share your recent discoveries with me in the comments. I might just feature it.

— BD

Listen to w w w . d e e p d i v e . c o m here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyaG-ZNYqJM