This project is a labor of love.

Like probably a lot of people in my generation, I first got into The Shotguns in high school. My brother, home from college for the 2005 Thanksgiving break, handed me a freshly burned CD labeled "Girl w/ a Buzzcut" and then under that, “(actually good I swear).” (At the time, we were both insufferable indie kids who normally wouldn’t touch a rock act mainstream enough to win a Grammy with a ten-foot pole. Like I said: insufferable.)

I’d been vaguely aware of The Shotguns before that, of course — flipped past the music videos on MTV, seen some of the more alternative kids at my school wearing the iconic black T-shirt, heard those couple of lines from the titular “Girl with a Buzzcut” in Weird Al’s 1996 “The Alternative Polka” medley — but had never actually sat down and listened to a full album before.

From the opening of “Trailer Trash,” it absolutely blew me away. Somehow, the arrangements still sounded fresh fifteen years later (and still do, even now). Coupled with Levy’s masterful delivery — goosebumps.

The next day, I begged a ride to Borders and bought every Shotguns album available at the time. I still remember the tattooed checkout clerk reverently handling over my stack of CDs. “This is the good shit,” she said, like it was a secret. But then, the best music often feels that way, like something private between you and the band. I can remember listening to the whole pile of new CDs back to back until the wee hours of the morning, feeling almost angry that something so good existed, because if humanity had the capacity to make songs like this, why did we ever settle for less?

Although the original Girl With A Buzzcut was certainly a success, their later albums have been more critically acclaimed (I mean: Grammy), or more likely to be fan favorites. Listening to Girl With A Buzzcut, I think you only get glimpses of the lyricist who will go on to write “I’d go to Hell for you / just to be in Hell with you” — for every “We’ll Never Have Sex,” with its nonchallantly devastating refrain (“I know better than that”) there’s a line in “The Pines” that feels like it could’ve been slightly tighter. But Buzzcut was my gateway into a new world, and it will always hold a special place in my heart for that. Besides, that bassline in “Going to Pittsburgh” still absolutely shreds.

I’d been playing The Shotguns songs for as long as I’d been struggling to make chords on a borrowed guitar. Recently, through the magic of the internet, I learned that Haushinka was also out there doing their own unplugged covers. From there, this project came together faster than it had any right to.

Tremendous gratitude to The Shotguns’ team, for giving us permission to release this cover album, and for being onboard the second we made it clear that:

1. This was not an ironic thing, like that wave of white guys doing folk covers of rap songs a few years back; we are acoustic, yes, but sincere in our love for this music.

2. Any earnings would be going to a nonprofit aimed at helping LGBTQ+ youth.

And while I’m being grateful, a quick shout-out to Levy himself, for being publicly out at a time when that was a particularly vulnerable thing to be. To bring his partner to the 2003 Grammys, deep in the George W. Bush years — I hope he knows what a beacon of hope that was for so many queer kids growing up frantic for any sense of a possible happy future.

“The good shit” indeed, 2005 Borders cashier. The good shit indeed.

-Jess, Fall 2022



In the wee hours of a Philadelphia March morning, after a fumbling first time with a beautiful girl who cared about me far less than I cared about her, we lay in something that was not quite a post-coital glow. Before nestling into my side, sweaty and content, she popped a CD into her little boombox that doubled as a karaoke machine. It was 2011, so she could have easily played something from her laptop, but she was a little analog.

The mournful beginnings of what I soon knew to be Trailer Trash filtered through the speaker, an otherwise beautiful sound dampened in her cramped bedroom. It was a mournful tune for what I thought had been a happy moment, but she was sort of like that -- finding the melancholy in the joyous. I was immediately arrested by the sincerity in a young man's croon, heightened by the vulnerability of my own nude body beside someone who, while so close, was miles away.

"This isn't the song that reminds me of you," she had said, her eyes on me in the dark. "But it's the album that does."

That relationship fizzled out fairly quickly after, but Ed Levy's distinct timbre and musical deftness stuck with me in a way that no other sound has. I didn't know what she meant by the association she had, but I devoured The Shotguns' discography like a person starved anyway. And through this exploration, I had the unique privilege of simultaneously feeling seen and called out by this person I would never, ever meet. Although Levy has released more seminal work in the years since the debut that took the world by storm, Girl With A Buzzcut sticks with me. I think of that girl who could never, ever love me, happily married to someone else now, and I find myself happy that Levy got his happy ending.

Whether the songs are about his partner of twenty years, we will never know. But what we do have is someone who laid his soul bare, who sang the song of himself and of his love when he wasn't sure who was going to listen. I hope you listen to these covers, arranged and expressed with love by Jess and myself, and you find the solace that I found on a chilly night between winter and spring.

- Haushinka, 2022