Leaving San Diego

“I love San Diego and miss it,” says Japanese Sunday mastermind Eric Kusanagi, who lived in Golden Hill and worked downtown at Sushi Deli. “It’s where I was reborn.” The core member of dreamy shoegaze JS relocated to Philadelphia in 2007 after his wife gave birth to a son with a rare birth defect that “left my wife and I so broke I might as well be selling Chiclets on a Tijuana bridge.”

JS started as a bedroom project. While Kusanagi recovered from a botched knee surgery, a friend gave him a guitar. He quickly outgrew his acoustic guitar and formed a rotating cast of musicians to actualize his layered compositions. Debut Taps, Taps, Lights Out was released in April of ’06 and was a welcome addition to San Diego’s post-rock sound forged by locals Tristeza and the Album Leaf. The band toured Japan in March of ’09, during which time Kusanagi had a falling-out with drummer Justin Jay (Boyscout). “To this day, I don’t think he even knows what the songs are about or what the record is about,” Kusanagi says.

Kusanagi is now shopping around labels to press his new album, Fair Winds and Following Seas. “It’s kind of like a mariner’s goodbye — fitting, I think, because I was in the Navy for four years. It’s kind of a goodbye record to San Diego and all the friends and nice people I’ve met through the years [there].”

The new album contains tracks recorded in San Diego’s Black Box Recording Studios with Mario Quintero.

“To me, this record is about my family and the struggles and sacrifices we made to give my son a better life, leaving everyone I had known and loved...leaving San Diego — a place that had been my home for the past ten years.”