Spaer’s newest offering Lessons & Nonsense sweats the small stuff, with a penchant for metaphor through animism and building boundless worlds in tiny physical spaces. It feels like a friend encouraging you to look - no, really look - at the intricate, meandering channels of a cool leaf he found. If you give yourself fully to the moment, you realize you hold an entire world in your hand. The EP’s opener, “The Salamander and the Snail”, was inspired by a snail he once (actually) saw riding on the back of a salamander, who was itself riding a flip-flop like a life raft. Spears felt moved watching the two tumble in circles around a waterfall at the mouth of a cave and was inspired to write this touching reflection on friendship, futility, and relational cycles. In the EP’s penultimate song, “The Woodstove,” Spears croons from the perspective of a protective and ultimately concerningly possessive woodstove. And in the EP’s closer, “These Bugs,” he lovingly pokes fun at his vegan girlfriend, forced to kill ants following a hostile takeover of their kitchen.

Across the project, Spears is able to hold all at once beauty and brutality, hope and cynicism, humor and a genuine love of life. Fans of psych rock, trip-hop, folk, indie, and even pop, will all find resonance in the expanse of sounds by Spears. And if you don’t care about genre at all, all the better.