Hello reader,
Welcome to the weekend! Ready to get your eyes and ears on another terrific session performance?
Today, Water Tower Sessions makes its 2026 debut with a special Saturday edition, featuring singer-songwriter Seamus Kreitzer of self-described Chicago-based “twangy, nostalgia rock” band Disaster Kid.
The session coincides with the one-year anniversary of the release of Disaster Kid’s EP Rare Bird. With the help of producer and engineer Andrew Tereick (Ratboys, Sam Evian, Hala), the EP was recorded in a cabin owned by a mutual friend’s family in northern Wisconsin. They recorded the EP in five days in the cabin in their secluded and makeshift studio.
The city of Chicago also had a significant impact on Kreitzer’s songwriting. The Chicago music institution Old Town School of Folk Music, where he also works as their Concert Production Coordinator, hosted many of his writing and practice sessions.
You can stream the EP below:
Kreitzer first formed the project over six years ago after emailing Slaughter Beach, Dog’s Jake Ewald, who encouraged Seamus to continue writing songs. According to a press release, the EP “mixes in the sounds and songwriting of Americana and twang as well as Chicago’s more recent indie-rock sounds in the younger Chicago music scene — like their friends The Trenchies and Truth or Consequences New Mexico — to give his diary-like musings crunch and texture.”
The lyrics for the songs on the EP were pieced together from writings and journal entries between 2020 and 2025. On the EP, Kreitzer said via press release he sought to “digest the present moment in an attention-demanding world and pinpoint the small details that sometimes strike us in large ways.”
For his session entry, Kreitzer decided to perform an acoustic performance of the band’s great track “Temples”. Kreitzer, who wrote and arranged the lyrics and music for the song, sought out Tereick to film the performance in the back room of an apartment in Chicago, IL.
“‘Temples’, along with the rest of our EP Rare Bird, was mostly written with pieces of prose and worldly observations I had collected in my journal over a year or so,” Kreitzer tells SWT. “I wanted to write ‘Temples’ specifically as a song decorated, lyric by lyric, with curious scenes and ideas. I felt like the song should represent how I feel about life sometimes. Life can be slippery and random, but it can also be simple and exact.”
Kreitzer says the song’s emotional pull made it a prime choice for an acoustic performance.
“Whether I’m playing the song alone or with the rest of the band, every performance has generated a feeling of catharsis,” he says. “For this video, we found it fitting to show off its quieter edge in a curious location, adorned with objects that also felt both randomized and exact.”
You can watch the session and more on SWT’s YouTube page.
You can follow and listen to Disaster Kid at the following links:
Instagram: Instagram.com/disasterkidband
Facebook: Facebook.com/DisasterKid/
Substack: Disasterkid.substack.com/
Bandcamp: Disaster-kid.bandcamp.com/
YouTube: Youtube.com/@disasterkidband
Apple Music: Disaster Kid on Apple Music
Spotify: Disaster Kid on Spotify
Joshua is co-founder of Scummy Water Tower. He’s freelanced for a variety of newspapers, magazines, and websites, including: Rolling Stone, The Boston Globe, Chicago Sun-Times, Guitar World, MTV News, Grammy.com, Chicago Magazine, Milwaukee Magazine, MKE Lifestyle, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, A.V. Club, SPIN, Alternative Press, Under the Radar, Paste, PopMatters, American Songwriter, and Relix. You can email him at josh@scummywatertower.com.
