Xuluprophet

06/17/2026

There is always meaning, dialogue, and intention behind a lot of what me and Oisin do that not everybody gets to see from the outside. Sometimes it looks like two dudes just making noise, laughing at each other, arguing over parts, chasing grooves, or pulling songs out of thin air. But underneath that, there is always language. There is always purpose. There is always some little agreement between us that gives the music another layer.
This particular rhythm starts with something I came up with in the spring of 2013. There is a whole other version of it buried somewhere in the Bandcamp files that does not sound like this one at all. This video is from September 2014, early as hell in the story, back when everything is still raw, innocent, broke, hungry, and held together by nothing but nerve, stubbornness, and belief.
What this song eventually becomes is something me and Oisin agree has a private meaning every time we play it. Every time we hit this rhythm, we are sending love and affection to our women. Under all the groove and repetition and all that weird Xuluprophet machinery, there is love in it. Gratitude in it. Appreciation in it. All that mushy s**t that musicians like to pretend we are too cool to admit until the right chord progression snitches on us.
And I’m telling you, this is the early days. My guitar does not want to stay in tune. Oisin is playing something with action high enough to qualify as a piece of gym equipment. Nothing about it is easy. Nothing about it is polished. But we make it work because that is what we do. We take whatever is in our hands, whatever is in the room, whatever is left in the tank, and we pull music out of it anyway....Years later, Oisin reminds me where we started. He tells me I have gotten soft from sleeping indoors. That is the kind of s**t he says because he knows exactly where the story begins. He knows the back porches, the borrowed spaces, the busted gear, the uncertainty, the hunger, and the ridiculous belief that somehow two people with almost nothing could build something that meant something.
I have had these videos hidden for over a decade. Me and him would pull them out sometimes, watch them, laugh, and say, “Yeah, we probably don’t need to put that out. That is not really representative of what we are doing now.” And for a long time, that made sense.
But it feels different now.
Now it feels like this needs to be seen because this moment is pure. This is before too many eyes are on us. Before the machinery around the band gets more complicated. Before people start observing us in ways that make you observe yourself. This is me and Oisin in one of the most honest parts of our story, just letting the music move through us without trying to prove anything to anybody.
Back then, I am raw as f**k. I am still sleeping on back porches, including my homegirl Clara’s, still figuring out how to go from nothing to something, still trying to build a life where music is not just survival, but direction. This is the time period that eventually gives us the title From the Gutter to the Swamp, because that is exactly what it is. That is where we come from. Gutter, swamp, sweat, sound, faith, stubbornness, and whatever strange spirit keeps pushing us forward.
This is one of the most pure windows me and Oisin ever have. Before the audience. Before the expectations. Before the judgment. Before even we fully understand what we are becoming to each other.
Just two friends. Two guitars. One rhythm. A whole lot of love hidden inside the noise.

06/17/2026

A lot of people only ever saw the external dynamic between me and Oisin. They saw me, the loudmouth, the half-feral middle-aged man foaming at the mouth about whatever injustice had crawled across my radar that week. Then they saw Oisin, reserved, dignified, thoughtful, respectable, somehow accomplishing what so many others could not. For reasons I still don't entirely understand, he always seemed able to translate my chaos into something useful.
We used to joke about the Old Man Club. Long before there was a full band, before the stages got bigger and the catalog got deeper, there were just a couple of acoustic guitars, a pile of ideas, and a growing belief that music ought to do more than simply entertain people.
Somewhere along the way, a group of Vietnam veterans became early supporters of what we were doing. They were peace advocates, old warriors who had seen enough suffering to know the difference between patriotism and propaganda. They heard some of our early songs and conversations and got behind us in a way neither of us expected. More than once, they encouraged us to use music as a vehicle for thought, to challenge people, to question things, to shine a light into dark corners.That idea stuck.
If you listen through the catalog, you'll hear it all over the place. A lot of the songs are criticisms of systems that increase suffering instead of reducing it. They're questions disguised as music. They're protests disguised as melodies. They're warnings disguised as stories.
We've taken plenty of heat for that over the years. We've lost fans. We've had people tell us to keep politics out of music, keep religion out of music, keep social issues out of music, keep our mouths shut and just play the songs. But me and my friend always knew that wasn't the honorable route. Neither one of us ever believed the highest purpose of music was simply helping people forget the world for a few hours.
Sure, shaking asses is fine. We have absolutely nothing against shaking asses.But waking people up mattered too.
Getting people to look beyond the endless cycle of distraction, outrage, consumption, celebrity worship, doom scrolling, TikTok hypnosis, and the pursuit of increasingly comfortable cages always mattered to us. Music was supposed to make people feel something, but it was also supposed to make people think.
That's why I'm proud of songs like Land of the Slave and so many of the other strange noise makings we've released over the years. They were never written to follow trends or chase algorithms. They were written because we believed artists have an obligation to stand for something bigger than themselves.
At our best, that's what we tried to do.
Not pledge loyalty to a political party, a church, a flag, or a tribe.
We pledged loyalty to the better parts of humanity and hoped the songs might help somebody remember those parts inside themselves.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgsTVWdDQXQ&list=RDWgsTVWdDQXQ&start_radio=1
This was a label release on Boom One Records
We wrote this at the old house on Huntingdon, and eventually recorded the bass in the closet next to the bathroom. Oisin Daly then got Alfredo Martinez Art to do the cover art.

Xuluprophet - Land of the Slave (Original Mix) - Boom One RecordsB...

06/17/2026

We have all these little inside jokes, routines, and pieces of stage language that probably look ridiculous from the outside, but between me and Oisin, they always carry a deeper meaning. One of them happens right before the first song, when I look across the stage and ask him, “Are you drunk?” and his answer is always, “Not drunk enough.” Then he looks back at me and asks, “Are you high?” and my answer is always, “Not high enough.”
On the surface, that sounds like goofy band banter. Just two musicians talking s**t before the first song. But the real question underneath “Are you drunk?” is, “Are you too drunk to play well?” And the real answer underneath “Not drunk enough” is, “I’m not drunk enough to put up with you.” Then when he asks me, “Are you high?” the real question is, “Are you too high to remember the f**king songs?” And my real answer is, “I’m not high enough to tolerate you.”
That joke does not come out of nowhere. It comes out of real arguments, missed notes, wrong cues, sloppy moments, and the kind of honest musical accountability that only happens when two people are close enough to p**s each other off and still keep building something together. Over time, both of us learn where the line is. We learn the limit. We learn what we can carry onto the stage and what we have no business dragging into the music.
That routine is funny, but it is also a warning system. It is a reminder that both of us have our own demons and devils to manage before the first note ever hits the room. That brings me to another phrase people have heard between us: beating the demons.
For us, beating the demons means pulling all that dark static out of the basement of the mind before it starts rattling the cages too loud. Everybody has something locked down there. Pain, grief, rage, fear, addiction, regret, obsession, old wounds, old cravings, old ghosts. Whatever name you want to put on it, that s**t lives in the nervous system and waits for a weak door. If it gets ignored too long, it starts making noise, and that noise distracts the conscious mind.
When we play music and slip into that altered state that only music can create, we are not just performing. We are dragging those demons out into the light and beating them back into submission with rhythm, volume, sweat, and nerve. We are letting the songs carry the weight for a little while. We are taking the emotional garbage that has been clawing at the inside of the skull and throwing it into the machinery of the band.
That is part of what stage time is for me. It is not just entertainment. It is not just a show. It is not just people clapping and dancing and having a good time, though I love that part too. It is therapy with amplifiers. It is confession without kneeling. It is survival dressed up as noise.
So when people see me and Oisin joking before a song, they are not always seeing the whole thing. They are seeing the visible part of a much deeper language. They are seeing two friends checking each other, challenging each other, laughing at each other, and reminding each other not to let the demons drive the damn bus.
There are a thousand little things like that between us. Little phrases, looks, jokes, rituals, and pieces of code built from years of music, arguments, work, friendship, and survival. As I remember them, I’m going to keep telling them. Because those little things are not little to me. They are part of the whole beautiful, ridiculous, painful, sacred machine.

06/17/2026

This is how we started back in 2013, two acoustic guitars and not really knowing what we were doing but determined to play and make $ at it. We used to busk down on River Street and from there have been advanturing ever since.
Here's a link to help Vanessa http://spot.fund/q78cvgjsc she is the reason that Xulu and Oisin ever met.
This is at Savannah Bazzar an artist market happened at that started at Southern Pine Company of Georgia and spawned many other such collectives.