Junk Ruse - ABOUT

Junk Ruse is a band that doesn't exist in the usual sense, and that is exactly the point.

Conceived by G.B. Meyer, a writer and lyricist just outside Washington D.C., and brought to life with Joe Romero, a vocalist, multi-instrumentalist, and producer in Guadalajara, Mexico, Junk Ruse is an eight-album, 81-song meta-album released across eight years on streaming platforms worldwide. The two have never met. They have never spoken. Everything was made by correspondence, across a border, through trust and taste and sustained creative exchange.

The music draws from the sonic world between Woodstock and Y2K, not as nostalgia but as an emotional frequency. Each song stands alone, releasable as a single from some blurry point in time and geography. Together the eight albums form a complete work, a mosaic mural that only reveals its full shape when you step back far enough to see it whole.

Junk Ruse is a sonic novel. A phantom discography. A cross-border collaboration. A gallery hung on streaming services. And underneath all of it, one idea: the self is the ruse, and we are here to love and be loved on a hard path.

The whole story is below.

THE WHOLE STORY

The voice you hear is Joe Romero of Guadalajara. It’s his distinct “guitar hand” as well. In fact, the performance of all instruments and all male vocals on the Junk Ruse tracks is Joe. It’s important to me to tell you this first. He is the other half of this endeavor, expressing my words and song compositions and direction for this concept into what you are hearing. Let the words I am writing begin with the fact that he is the talented performance meeting your ears as much as these words from me in Junk Ruse, and that in this story you are reading, the language arrives to you from me, just outside DC. We have never met, never spoken on the phone, never held a chat with each other. Our work has been entirely by correspondence, a trade of messages and files, with the exception of seeing each other in video form occasionally on social media, or in my fortunate case, seeing him perform live on TikTok to the requests of his online followers, largely in Mexico. To his credit, his English is superlative, and graciously, he has never looked for more of my extremely humble Spanish than some of the lyrics I have painstakingly penned. Today, I call him a friend, as much as a partner I admire and respect. We began as strangers in my request for a freelancer to help me with a recording of “Hollyberry Red.”

—-//——

When I found Joe on Fiverr, he had less than a year of working exclusively there, betting on himself as a musical freelancer with his own studio for hire. There is more to say about how I came to such an interest in working with somebody younger from Mexico, but that was central to my first search. It is hard to recall exactly the sequence of thoughts and intuitive choices that led me to find him, but it happened quickly. He was the first and final freelancer I reviewed with the idea of making an improved recording of “Hollyberry Red.” His demo reels were enjoyable, and it is difficult to give any reasonable explanation of why I knew with immediate, gut-level certainty that he was the guy. But I can tell you his vocal cover of “Jump” by Van Halen was relaxed and confident, true to the original and uniquely his all at once. Whatever subliminal textures made me think the energy was younger and not native to the U.S. added to the appeal because, although I knew they were genuinely present, they could not be objectively pointed out. This was perfect. I dropped him a line. I shared my guitar and vocal sketch, provided some reference tracks, and included a fair amount of notes about Nick Lowe. What I received was not just a demo. It was a track, fully inhabited, reconceived from everything I had given him, produced in a lean indie mix but in a high-quality style. This was not just a demo. I had just made a track with a new collaborator across the border that exceeded even what I imagined it could be. Where I had hoped there would be a lodestone for how to guide an effort I was calling “Gold Border Music,” as a demo or a proof of the idea, instead, in one track, we had arrived at a sound of our own. It would be hard to explain my surprise. It gave this Gold Border Music idea new life, although I had yet to name this first body of work.

—-//—-

It could be described as lofty and broad in the moment, but the vision was real and very much of its time when it started in 2019. It was time for me to redirect my writing efforts to something new. I am not a solo creator and prefer to work in partnership musically, being very much a writer and not precisely a musician, a self-taught guitar player with no music education. My seven-year collaboration with my friend Christian was in a new gestation, a fallow period, as he was entering the production phase of his first singer-songwriter album. I had notebooks full of lyric ideas that we had not used with his MadFam jam project, and that were not likely candidates for crafting into songs he would use. Many of them were incomplete or peculiar in their narrative or imagery. As it became clear that I wanted to start something else, I began to daydream about creating in some kind of pen-pal style with Mexico.

—-//—-

I had been a pen pal in my teen years, signed up through an agency in the classifieds of Rolling Stone, and captivated by the idea from Big Blue Marble on Saturday TV in my childhood. Years in a career in IT had taught me how to collaborate on projects across the world, and so much of my collaboration with Christian had been by correspondence, sending lyrics and ideas. In a moment when so much cultural and political divide seemed cartoonishly obsessed with the U.S.-Mexican border, it struck me as something I wanted to counteract in my own way with a country I have always loved: Mexico. Among experiences with people and travel, this has very early origins in my mother telling me about her “family” in Mexico City. When I was very small, she taught me words in Spanish, cooked enchiladas enthusiastically, making Mexico part of our home. She was so young when I was born, so soon after her semester there in an exchange and student teaching program, and her enthusiasm for this adventure lived large as one of her biggest experiences. I was probably in the first grade when I finally understood I was not Mexican or part of a Mexican family in some way. The structure of these things is different in such a little brain, but I know the imprint was significant. And I have never lost that appreciation for Mexico and the incredible people I have met in my life from there, or whose families originate there and preserve that heritage here. It is the gold border of my home country as I see it. No offense to Canada. :)

—-//—-

And so here it began, growing and creating art with a new channel for some of this material in what seemed like a fun new adventure at a minimum. (I was right.) I could preserve a certain voice for collaborating with Christian when he was ready. And I pored through my scribbles and shared notebooks that I had kept in my standing partnership, looking for what I wanted to work with. I began engaging with a guitar in a way I had not for a very long time, so long that it was infuriating how much of a near-beginner I had become. I modeled songs in GarageBand on my iPhone. I found songs I had started and mostly completed with my late friend Rich long ago. And in time I had an idea that I was capturing certain themes of recollection and reunion, and it felt like I was bending time. It did not have an exact statement, but my imagination was holding close the Wim Wenders film Wings of Desire, with angels observing the great play in progress, and Tom Robbins’s book Jitterbug Perfume, and characters following their noses to the persistence of memory in a strange dance with time. Without analyzing this, I accepted that this was the muse.

—-//—-

This started with one track, “Hollyberry Red,” and a new acquaintance with a talented freelancer named Joe. Another song followed, a complete revision of a very developed track in a very different performance and production style. I told Joe how I would like to remake it, and to my astonishment he met the idea well and brought some fresh color and expression at the same time. That was “Of Machines and People.” Another track followed, “Absolutely True,” fully written and sketched but missing the required passion. Again, it was met and matched by what Joe had to offer, in a way that I connected with beyond the simple scope of a project.

At first, as we worked, I imagined that this would be some playlist of singles. Then two things happened. First, I found a song order of ten tracks from our first sixteen or seventeen that made sense as an album, with a distinct A side and B side like independent vinyl from the 70s and 80s. It also extended into an emerging second album of ten, with its own A side and B side, following the first album in a continuity that I could not explain but knew by intuition was an unfolding series and set. Second came the choice to continue creating and arranging these tracks and releasing these albums as we continued to create, a way of displaying in a public gallery what was unfolding.

As we worked through the first four of these, the songs increasingly became new work. By the time we were in Album 4, we began experimenting with process across Albums 3 and 4, where some of the scope I offered Joe included new approaches such as: use this palette of chord progressions and lyrics, or take this sketch and the story behind it and write lyrics in Spanish. We began to dabble in a more collaborative creative process, trying new ways of iterating sound as the songs increasingly became new pieces and not specific reinventions released from the songwriting dungeon.

—-//—-

As this happened, certain things became clear that I thought were idiosyncratic but instead came to be understood as intuitively channeled anchors. What kept asserting itself was less a set of rules than a set of recognitions. I found myself returning to the idea that every song needed to stand alone, releasable as a single from some blurry point in time and geography. A sonic palette began to surface on its own, rooted in the thirty years between 1969 and 1999, following independent vinyl and the broadcast evolution of FM, MTV, and college radio as its emotional register. Structure would be as long or as strange as the song required, with every experiment welcome if the song could hold it. And underneath each song, whether obvious or not, lived a story I understood completely. The stories were their own mythology, autobiographical emotion present as ingredient rather than as confession, and first person used carefully and deliberately as a result. The songs would teach me the rest, if I just trusted that.

—-//—-

While continuing in this way, a new mystery arrived. Album 5 was intentionally more collaborative in process and with a vision for the sound that had a fresh energy. Most of these tracks were not fully sketched but handed off to Joe with what I called proto-sketches, sound ideas for the song, along with lyrics and reference songs and so on. It was fun, mostly because of how well this partnership was expanding and how, as we tried new approaches, we got something new and interesting. And after several years of working together, even though entirely by correspondence and occasionally watching him live on TikTok, we had become friends, as much as pen pals creating songs probably could.

So as we had started this fifth set, my thought had been that this would bring us to 50 songs and a nice round number as a body of work. And as we finished, I was challenged to keep to that. While this album felt right following the four before it, it also clearly felt more like a reinvigorated opening of sorts, as if the sound were being given a fresh spin of the wheel and new momentum, and the arc of greater storytelling was far from resolving. Further, and not unrelated, I knew what I wanted to do for Album 6, which was ambitious in how we would approach it but felt like the right next step, the correct evolution of sound, and an exciting evolution in the next unfolding of story, a fresh avenue for this friendship and collaboration to explore what it could be.

—-//—-

The wandering intuition of this intentional architecture inside a pen-pal correspondence over the border continued. All the understanding of the albums as ordered and structured pieces was clear, and so was the discipline of listenable songs that portrayed stories in various transparencies and played with reference influences to express them emotionally. Joe and I had more fun as we went, with Albums 6 and 7 tapping into a shared enjoyment of our creative process. It was an enjoyment without exception, but for my part there was a little tension as a writer finding my way in the dark, confident I would find the cathedral of this cave in time, with the odd certainty growing in me that there was a resolution to understanding this whole thing in a very specific way that would deliver me to this grand chamber and fully illuminate it.

As it turns out, that moment showed up in a single evening in February 2025. We had just released Album 6, had started coordinating the recording of Album 7, and I was about two songs into the working title of Album 8. It might have taken a week of thinking about it to take full stock of it and integrate it carefully, exploring it for gaps or quiet holes in the truth of it, balancing it against how it felt as I gave it time and consideration. Yes, it arrived fully formed and true, and has remained unchanged.

—-//—-

The concepts I had held did not necessarily become untrue or irrelevant. Yes, this was still a widely ranged anthology of sounds and conveyed emotion in a sonic novel. Certainly, this was still an avatar of a band with the artifact aura of vintage LPs. And of course, quite uniquely, this was a cross-border and even cross-generational collaboration, presented in the public gallery of streaming music services. These are facets of a much bigger gem, which is that this is a mosaic mural in sonic form, with the distinct architectural frame of being a meta-album. The first four albums act as the Side A, and the next four serve as the Side B. This frequency of words and vibrations could be enjoyed start to finish, or for the pleasure of one small part of it, much like a standard LP, across eight albums, eighty-one songs, eight years, by the band Junk Ruse. It is a mosaic, fragments of sound and language drawn from rock and roll’s deepest traditions, assembled panel by panel into something that only reveals its full shape when you step back far enough to see it whole. The ruse is the method. The mosaic is what it made. It moves through reunion and loss, through truth and its cost, through the accumulated weight of time. Eighty-one songs, 9 x 9, the completion of a journey, in one meta-album, with each track containing an LP experience. And it ends with the bees in the bramble going about their business, unaware and unconcerned for any greater cosmic drama.

—-//—-

Joe and I talk about a lot of things, but not that much about the direction and vision of Junk Ruse as a work. For sure, we talk a lot about the song we are working on, about the album itself, particularly when we move into final production and mixing, and the other fun stuff of pen-pal coworking creatives: music we are enjoying, movies we checked out, concerts we just saw, stories of spending time with the lady of the house, details of any fun travels, you get the picture. But any examination of Junk Ruse through a bigger lens focuses on the sound of what we are creating, the collected audible textures of a project. He had already noticed that the albums seem to flow and connect to each other, possibly as an outcome of helping me structure the track order and Side A/Side B structure of Album 4, though I do not recall exactly. But I was excited to tell him that I knew we were creating this muraled mosaic of a meta-album because it was going to help deliver Albums 7 and 8, with this vision having so much time and music between us to contextualize it. It was perhaps a little less exhilarating to announce the endpoint. The enjoyment of the project as an ongoing flow state had never been shadowed by talk of an end. We were having fun. But I was able to share all this with him in a short summary of what I wanted to do next. Gold Border Music had two distinct new one-album stories with working titles that I shared as well. As it turns out, Joe was excited and receptive to all of this, more than I imagined. But he did indicate it was a little bittersweet to think of the Junk Ruse collaboration coming to an end, which, while expected, surprised me by how much I appreciated him saying so, since I felt the same way. And it was an honor that he would say so.

—-//—-

It was clear as we moved forward that reaching the edge of the cathedral in the cave was just in time. In a way that is hard to explain, it added an important aspect to what was next, particularly as we began recording Album 7 in April 2025. Further, it was essential for my writing of Album 8 past the third track to understand not only how the album resolved but also how it traveled to an exact closure following the penultimate landing. Or to speak plainly, I could not stick the landing if I could not see the target. And even then, sticking the landing, and even laying out the intentional progress toward it, was challenging. When I arrived there, finishing my sketches and notes and collected references and all lyrical edits in October 2025, it was deeply satisfying and just as bittersweet as Joe had found in a moment of us discussing this.

As I write this in April 2026, I anticipate I will live in a state of excitement and tiny grief as this slowly resolving passage unfolds. We will release Album 7 soon and start recording Album 8. I have an entire year to reflect on it. But then again, the work goes on and I have to find time to start writing what is next, working title “Tattlebag,” and get ready to shift gears with Joe when we get there, at least with the hope that life does not make other plans. So here I will begin to wrap up this story to you, my listener. Will you spend time with this and become closer to it? I imagine all of you as acquaintances and friends in the real-life space of walking this planet. Some will forget the name in short order after our brief acquaintance, and others will come to know and love the psyche of it to its edges and corners. Of the former there will be many, and of the latter I would be honored by a handful. I am so pleased you have spent time with this novel of Junk Ruse, and with the delight of being inside the tale of sound and fury and not minding it at all. If the tale is told by the idiot, let us ponder that the fool is wise, or at least that it is the fool who sees clearly because he is not invested in the illusion. The idiot and the sage are the same figure approached from different directions. And the bees go on about their business.

—-//—-

If you would humor me, I will share a final thought on what Junk Ruse actually is, and offer you a diverse list of Eight Things about Eight Albums and one last story (81 songs). The architecture and scope of this seem to favor sharing a structured party favor to take away with you.

Here it is:

The sounds are an emotional tuning fork, not a nostalgia trip. The 1969–1999 sonic palette exists to create a feeling that floats outside of calendar time, so that every song lives in a blurry somewhere, unanchored to any particular moment or place. The music does not belong to a decade. It belongs to the emotions it carries.
Everything flows from a writer’s character I inhabit. He is the angel from Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire, who observes the great human drama but cannot touch the ground. He carries a copy of Jitterbug Perfume in his pocket, which keeps him from taking himself too seriously. He travels as far as he must to experience every emotion without being destroyed by any of them.
Spanish in these songs is not decoration or texture. It carries what English cannot hold. When a lyric moves into Spanish, it has reached the threshold of the unsayable, where grief, longing, or love is too charged for the cooler language to contain without losing something essential.
This is not a collection of songs about different people. It tracks archetypes, recurring forces in the human story, cycling through time and incarnation. The codependent lovers appear in multiple albums not as the same two people, but as the same eternal pattern wearing different faces. The project is closer to mythology than memoir.
Underneath the aesthetic conceit of phantom records and a fictional band, there is a single core idea. The self, the constructed, narrating, identity-maintaining self, is the ruse. The junk we accumulate around the soul to make it feel like a somebody. The project named itself correctly before I fully understood why.
The collaboration with Joe Romero of Guadalajara is itself part of the meaning. We have never met in person, never spoken online or on the phone. We have worked entirely by correspondence across a border our culture made into a wall, and produced something neither of us could make alone. The process demonstrates the thesis. Genuine connection crosses every distance the constructed self uses to stay separate.
The structure completed itself: 81 songs, eight albums, Side A and Side B. None of this was planned from the beginning. It arrived whole in a single evening in February 2025 and has remained unchanged. The work knew its own shape before I did. I just had to be willing to recognize it when it showed up.
The angel is not untouched. Loss and grief move through this entire project, in many songs and many forms, and the witness who observes the human drama from a careful distance discovers repeatedly that he was never truly outside it. The posture of the observer does not protect against the hard path. That vulnerability is what keeps the whole project human.

And underneath all of it:

We are here to love and be loved, and in that incarnation, to have the experience of it being a hard path.

Epilogue (a reflection)

I believe I have made a relational art piece.

The songs matter, the concepts matter, and the finished catalog matters, and so on, but the collaboration itself belongs inside the meaning of the work. This came into being by correspondence, across a border, through trust, taste, patience, and sustained exchange. I do not see that as incidental. I see it as one of the deepest truths in the piece. Junk Ruse carries something about human connection crossing the distances modern life so often preserves, and the way Joe and I worked became a living expression of that truth.

I also believe I found a form that suits streaming while refusing to be ruled by it. I took the older logic of LPs, sides, sequencing, and the aura of found records, and let that logic live inside a digital gallery. The songs can be encountered one by one, which gives them accessibility, but the larger design only comes into view when someone stands back and sees the whole mural. That strikes me as a genuinely contemporary solution, though I hope it never feels cheap, fashionable, or captive to the habits of the moment.

I believe I turned clippings of autobiography into something closer to myth. My own life is in the work, certainly, but I did not want the songs reduced to diary entries or case notes. I wanted lived experience to pass through image, pattern, symbol, memory, and recurrence until it became shareable at a deeper level. That is why the Jungian dimension matters so much to me. So these songs are less interested in documenting incidents than in tracing forces, thresholds, returns, longings, wounds, and recognitions. I thought of offering an excavation of every track once upon a time, but then concluded explanation would diminish that. It would press the entire work back down into anecdote, when the whole point was to let it breathe as something larger.

I believe the project has also been about incarnation. Again and again, the work seems to move toward embodiment. The witness becomes a participant, and the observer pays a cost. Eventually, the self loses the luxury of remaining abstract. Love, grief, desire, memory, time, and faith all insist on becoming real, on incarnation into flesh. That current runs quietly through the whole mural, and I suspect it may be one of the most important things in it. I am still thinking about it.

As a writer and a human, I believe I have made a proof of life in a mature season of living, and in the most interesting of times, the 2020s. This work came out of an adult life already fully stocked with other labors, family life, experiences of loss and devotion, daily responsibility, and endurance. There is, I think, something quietly defiant in that fact. Junk Ruse stands against the stale idea that serious art belongs chiefly to the young, the visible, the fashionable, or the well-resourced. Humbly I will assert that I did not argue that point in theory and instead made the work.

I believe the work also taught me what it was. That may be the part that moves me most, or it is a finalist at minimum. I began with the Estonian proverb in mind, “The work will teach you how it is done.” I could not embark simply to express something already understood. The project revealed itself back to me over time. Many people make things. My love goes out to them all. Fewer, I believe, are enlarged in understanding by the thing they have made. To my deep gratitude, I think that happened to me here.

My sincere hope is that what I have made is larger than an album project, yet still intimate enough to be lived with. Yes, it certainly has scale, but not to where it sprawls into abstraction. Yes, it has structure, but hopefully stays open enough to still invite some affection. Ultimately, the measure is whether it gives a listener, as it has this writer, a place to dwell.

Credits:

Junk Ruse comprises two distinct songwriters:

G.B. Meyer, serving as the story originator and primary lyricist, directs the sound's trajectory, sketches songs, and assumes the role of creative producer. Explore more about G.B. Meyer
Joe Romero, the musical innovator, performs as a vocalist and multi-instrumentalist, and frequent composer. Additionally, he takes charge as the technical producer and sound engineer. Discover more about Joe Romero

Special thanks:
Harbin Harrison is exclusively our visual designer. From the earliest days of Junk Ruse, his work gave the phantom records a face, creating the visual world the music lives inside: the logotype, the sparrows in flight, and the aura of found artifacts from a band outside of time. The right visual language helped the whole thing become legible, to its makers as much as to its audience. We are deeply grateful.

Den Castelleno brings her distinctive voice as guest vocalist on Zumba de Verdad from Por Gracia del Axioma and two songs from the Espiral de Ciclo release. A prominent presence in the Guadalajara music scene and a veteran of La Voz México, her contribution brought an irreplaceable warmth and authority to those tracks.

Alexa Castillo provides background vocal performance and mixing on several songs on three releases.

Junk Ruse Catalog

SIDE A

2020 - Fuera de Plazo
2021 - Callejero
2022 - Por Gracia del Axioma
2023 - Espiral de Ciclo

SIDE B

5. 2024 - Mientras el Fuego se Encienda

6. 2025 - Todos à la Vez

7. 2026 - Verdades Beat

8. 2027 - El Peso De Polvo