Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast. I have the distinct pleasure of sitting this afternoon with Brad Schistimus, who is the lead singer, the Marimba player, and the harpsichordist for the band five times

August. Actually I don't know that it has any of those things in it. I do know that you

have a wide variety of stuff going on.

Brad, welcome to Darkhorse. Most people are probably not going to have heard

of you unless they are connected into certain dissident circles.

Can you give us a sense of who you are and where you came from?

Yeah, so I started five times August when I was 18, like right after high school.

And, you know, I kind of at that time wanted to be a, you know, just acoustic singer-songwriter kind of guy, John Mayer-ish, Dave Matthews

been kind of up-and-coming songwriter. And down that path, I ended up getting songs to MTV and ended up touring a lot of colleges back then and this was about 2003 or 4.

And that's what I did for about 10 years doing songs, you know pop love songs during the

country had some albums in Walmart and Best Buy stores and I was doing stuff.

I took a break when I became a family man, started up a kids music project called the Juice Box

and that's what I was kind of doing

prior to the COVID world and then it kind of shut me down

musically and then I came back sort of as this kind of protest artist writing about what was happening in the world.

So this is certainly how I became aware of you and I must tell you the first time I heard a song of yours it's almost indescribable

and gave me a kind of hope at a moment that was extremely dark. The COVID dissidents, and I consider you very much a COVID

dissident with a special skill set, but the COVID dissidents faced an

absolutely unholy world where we were being demonized in very close quarters and very personally as if we were somehow morally defective and so selfish that we would not go along with

you know the slightest inconvenience even to save the lives of our family members and you know our countrymen.

That was a very ugly period and to hear somebody rise up musically and challenge that order and do it so eloquently.

The song in question, the one that brought you to my attention, sad little man which is a song about Anthony Fauchy.

...