Stephen Steinbrink Disappearing Coin

In 2019, Stephen Steinbrink discovered a short YouTube video of a street magician who approaches a highschooler walking home in Barstow, California. "Here, let me show you my idea," he says, as he places a quarter on the kid's hand. The magicianperforms some relaxed flourishes, and the coin vanishes. In silence, the kid stares at his hand at the nothing where there once, indisputably, was something, until his wonder finds a single word: "Cool." The title of Disappearing Coin, the new album from Oakland songwriter Stephen Steinbrink, comes from this short clip. "When I look at it now," he says, "I relate to the kid, who's obviously uneasy in his body, and going through the experience of being a teenager in the early 2000s growing up in a bleak desert town like I did. I also relate to the coin, an inanimate disc of possibility. And I relate to the magician, an absurd facilitator of sending what is tactile and concrete into the wispy conceptual realm." "I've watched it probably a hundred times," he says. "It cracked me up but also blew my mind open_ thefeeling of wonder I experienced watching this video became a guide as I navigated new ways of staying in the realm of what's both real and magical."Following the 2018 release of Utopia Teased, Steinbrink completed an apprenticeship in the nearly-lost art of Stained Glass, becoming a glazier at a studio thatover three years, fully restored the enormous 90-year-old windows in San Francisco's Grace Cathedral. He committed to his Buddhist study, beginning lay monastictraining before the process was thwarted by the pandemic. He dove deeper into music production for other artists, engineering two albums by Boy Scouts releasedon Anti- Records in 2018 and 2021. Steinbrink delighted in the way these pursuits pulled at the thread of ego's tapestry and decentralized him from his craft, allowing him to embody a new role as a creative caretaker engaging in practices thatfelt communal and restorative."As I slowly began writing for myself again, I tried to imbue m...