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In 2019, Stephen Steinbrink discovered a short YouTube video of a street magician who approaches a highschooler walking home in Barstow, California. InchHere, let me show you my idea,Inch he says, as he places a quarter on the kid's hand. The magician performs 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 InchCool.InchThe title of Disappearing Coin, the new album from Oakland songwriter Stephen Steinbrink, comes from this short clip. InchWhen I look at it now,Inch he says, InchI 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.InchInchI've watched it probably a hundred times,Inch he says. InchIt cracked me up but also blew my mind open- the feeling 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.InchAfter a decade of incessant recording and touring, Steinbrink's creative world felt strange and alien, and he felt compelled to reorient himself in relationship to songwriting by exploring artistic and spiritual worlds outside of music. Following the 2018 of the acclaimed Utopia Teased, Steinbrink completed an apprenticeship in the nearly-lost art of Stained Glass, becoming a glazier at a studio that over three years, fully restored the enormous 90-year-old windows in San Francisco's Grace Cathedral. He committed to his Buddhist study, beginning lay monastic training before the process was thwarted by the pandemic. He dove deeper into music
