I wrote something like this about “American music” back when we were putting Sevendys together. Once something’s over and safely in the past, you can start looking at the whole of it, and the context.

Music has meant so many things to me, but its main benefit has been therapeutic. I had a problem, I turned it into a song. Then it was no longer a problem – it was a song.

I had a lot of problems, so I have a lot of songs.

But on a moment-to-moment basis, I no longer have those kinds of problems. I’m generally pretty okay with the way my life is these days. Except when I re-enter the arena where art is publicly made – then I’m like the Millennium Falcon popping out of hyperspace into the sector where Alderaan is supposed to be and finding only debris and a mess in the Force.

Making music is still one of the best things in my life, but sharing it has become a total drag. The Facebook/Twitter/Blogosphere sweepstakes just gives me agita. There’s the stock line about overcoming the “signal-to-noise ratio”, but that’s not really the deal. Nobody’s even trying to find the good stuff because everyone’s hustling his or her own crap. There is no audience. Even the people who don’t produce creative work are ceaselessly broadcasting the minutiae of their lives.

I don’t wanna pretend to like a bunch of half-assed bullshit just so the people who made it will fake excitement when I put something out. I have no idea whether anybody actually enjoys anything!

Then again, if this is the worst problem in my life then things probably aren’t that bad. It really only makes me cranky when I think about it… which I don’t necessarily have to do. Given my process, though, this leaves precious little in the way of song fodder. Surprisingly, I’m pretty okay with that, too.

It’s a lot easier to finish your work when you’re not being handed more work.

I’m sure there are more songs in me, but maybe not too many more. I feel comfortable looking back at the catalog as a whole – every emotion I felt for twenty years, encapsulated in little song pills I can take to relive just about any moment, or share with others in hopes of a genuine empathic connection. That music is me, for better or worse. My drive now is to complete it all to the best of my ability, organize it… and move on.

But how best to do that?

This happened the other day: I was in a public bathroom. I peed. I washed my hands. I walked over to the paper towel dispenser, which already had a sheet hanging from it. I tore off the sheet and began to dry my hands.

The machine dispensed, unbidden, another six-inch serving of paper towel. I am normally a two-towel guy, so, cool – I tossed out the damp first sheet and grabbed this second.

As soon as I took it, the dispenser rolled out another. My hands were pretty well dry now, but instinctively they dropped the second sheet into the garbage and ripped down the third. At which point the machine offered a fourth, and now comfortable and in a groove, I reached for it, and I realized that I could be perfectly happy standing there in the toilet accepting shitty slices of recycled paper from a hole in the wall all day long.

But I had other stuff to do, so I left.

Small Sacrifices Must Be Made! is my new record. You can download it now, or order a physical copy on CD. (Vinyl is coming with the official street date, October 9. I’m making the album available through this site today because it’s my birthday and I’m nice.)

This is the post where I tell you everything about the album I can think of. Lots of words follow!

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I started working on Small Sacrifices when I was 16. That’s when I wrote the oldest song on here: “Babysitter”. I hated little kids then and I hate them even more now!

But the process of realizing the record began in 2008.

At that point, I was waist-deep in another album you haven’t heard yet, Failing Upwards. I had assembled this crazy recording band and everything was done except guitar. Three tracks in, the guitarist went out on tour*. I decided to wait for the dude.

I waited, and waited, and got really bored. I had upgraded my home studio, so I started digitizing and archiving old stuff to pass the time – mainly four-track recordings and synth sequences from the early ’90s. Turned out to be a lot of promising material in there: riffs and patterns, chord progressions, the occasional fully-arranged but forgotten instrumental. And one or two songs that were complete, lyrics and all, but had just slipped through the cracks in the intervening decade-and-a-half.

I was like: huh.

Most of my ’90s solo work was programmed on a Korg workstation keyboard called the O1-W. The O1-W had a sequencer feature which enabled me to do full-band arrangements of up to 16 tracks using instrument samples in the keyboard – drums, piano, organ, bass, strings, and so on. I was only making demos for reference, but then whenever the time came to record the shit for real, I had no band to perform it. So I plugged in the O1-W, crossed my fingers and hoped that a decent engineer could magically make my electronic drums sound like real ones, my canned bass sound like a real bass, and so on. That was impossible, of course – physical laws and such.

So when I hear stuff I did in the ’90s, my first impulse is to wonder what it would sound like if, as originally intended, real human musicians played it.

With that in mind, I gathered seven pieces of archived ephemera, patched any lyrical/musical/conceptual holes, and brought them to Anton Fig for drums. Some of this material was so old that I didn’t yet know how to program drums when I sequenced it – sometimes I’d have a snare, tom and cymbal hit all at once. Again, physical laws. But Anton made sense of the junk and pulled off some awesome, heroic drumming.

As I began to tweak the lyrics, I noticed a prevailing theme: the passage of time. I know, that’s broad. But there were specific concepts being reflected from song to song: the effect of time on perception and understanding; contrast and conflict between people of different ages and generations; the inevitability of change over time and also the patterns that create the illusion of change over time.

I got pretty into this… I mean, at this point, the project was basically a collaboration through time between two versions of myself: the teenager who started the songs and the thirtysomething who was finishing them.

I pulled four additional unreleased songs of similar theme to fill out the record, and then eventually wrote two more that happened to fit. As Anton finished the drums, I moved them on to Graham Maby for bass and Reeves Gabrels for guitar. The result is something I’ve never had on any of my solo records: a consistent band from start to finish, smoothing out some of the stylistic jerkiness that’s affected my previous full-length efforts. (There is one exception, noted below.)

It’s probably worth mentioning that this entire album was recorded and mixed in people’s homes. I did piano, electric piano and organ tracks in a studio, but that’s only because I don’t own a real piano, electric piano or organ. Anton tracked all the drums at home. I recorded the vocals, synths, and guitars in my apartment. Graham did the bass in a friend’s home studio. Horns, strings, pedal steel… all recorded at home by the players. The album was mixed by Pete deBoer in his home studio. This kept costs way down, and I still got what I think is the best-sounding album I’ve ever made. The moral: great musicians sound great, and a great mixer does great mixes. Pay for talent.

One of the old tracks, a nine-minute mëtal epic called “You, Succubus”, was ultimately cut. The music was all recorded but I couldn’t make the lyric resonate, no matter how much I rewrote the ’93 original. When you collaborate with a much younger version of yourself, you are technically working with somebody who no longer exists. I empathized with much of what teenage JD was trying to say, but not everything… and it’s not like I could just call the dude for clarification. Early ’90s Jed is a very different person from me; on “You, Succubus” we had a disconnect. I’ll keep at it, and maybe the song can end up on some other thing.

Which brings me to the part where I tell you shit about each track individually.

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AGAIN
In 2001, Blondie made a record that would eventually be titled The Curse of Blondie. There was a hangup with the album’s release and it appeared that the band would have to go back to the drawing board and cut all new material. Chris Stein asked Arturo Vega if that kid who was writing the musical would be interested in contributing a few songs for the project. Blondie is one of my favorite bands ever, so of course I said fuck yeah!

I submitted three demos: “Bowery Electric” (which at that point was still just a Collider tune), “Aftermath” (which I had written the previous year) and “Again”. This last song was grown from snippets of melody and lyric I’d been kicking around since 1999; I brought it together and arranged it with Blondie in mind.

I was told that two songs had made the cut (“Bowery Electric” was out because they’d already written a tribute song for Joey Ramone called “Hello Joe”). I got so psyched.

But one of the tracks from The Curse of Blondie snuck out in Europe and became a top-40 hit. Their U.S. label scrambled to capitalize by rushing out the album as it was. That didn’t work out so well, and Blondie didn’t put out another record until last year. By then my two submissions were long forgotten.

I like that if you put Small Sacrifices on repeat, this song signals the album starting over. Again!

BABYSITTER
This is the oldest composition on the record. As I said at the top, I wrote it when I was 16, and it was originally a punk tune so simple I was actually able to play guitar myself on the four-track demo.

I used to make these holiday recordings to give my friends as gifts – each one involved a bunch of cover tunes arranged to sound like some unlikely third party was performing the track. Like a Silver Jews song recorded by Mr. Big, or Fugazi doing an LL Cool J track.

When I approached “Babysitter” for this project, I used that method and tried to imagine the act least likely to record the song. That would be the Jackson 5.

The lead that sounds like an organ in the instrumental break is Reeves playing his guitar through a VG-8 synth. The lead that sounds like a sax at the end of the song is a sax – that’s the amazing Ralph Carney!

EMILIES
I once attended a Gary Panter lecture in which he said: “Artists can’t compete with nature, children, or crazy people.”

As time passes and my work becomes more obscure, I think about the condition of being an “outsider artist”. That is, not really an artist, but a crazy person who makes things that are condescendingly referred to as art by third parties who don’t understand the difference between a crazy person and an artist.

Art is a form of communication. Intent to communicate something, even just a feeling, has to be there – without that, it’s simply craft… or crazy. Perfect example: Emily Dickinson.

Here’s this loony chick who didn’t leave her room for decades. There she wrote a bunch of stuff – technically poetry – meant to be shared with almost no one. She wanted it all burned upon her death; her family didn’t comply. A woman named Mabel Todd stumbled upon Dickinson’s work posthumously, declared it art, edited and published it.

Can we derive enjoyment from the work of Emily Dickinson? Sure, though that was not her intention. This is outsider art, which reaches the world at large by ignorant attrition, framed by people who don’t understand that the context in which a work of art is created is as important as the work itself.

And that’s one of the reasons I cherish my small audience more and more as time goes by. As long as you’re here, someone is picking up what I’m laying down, and I’m not just some nutjob singing to myself!

TWO-THIRDS
My pal Joe Student came to visit Albany in the fall of 1995. He was all bummed out with some midlife crisis bullshit, which I didn’t really understand as I was barely 20. But after hearing Joe’s lament, I felt like there was a song in there so I jotted down some lyrics. The lyrics came with a musical concept, which I sequenced up.

I don’t remember whether Joe just happened to have a synthesizer with him, or if he came back with one later, but he played me this really cool pattern that made for the perfect intro and coda to the intense middle section I’d written. We recorded the tune in the WCDB production studio, which had a four-track reel-to-reel tape recorder at the time. The Small Sacrifices version of “Two-Thirds” is built right on top of that recording – Joe’s synth is the original take he tracked back in ’95.

I’m now just about the age Joe was when we wrote that song.

RIDE THE PARTY BUS
This is the most recently written track on the album. It’s also the only one that doesn’t have Reeves or Graham on it – it was a last-second addition to replace the aborted “You, Succubus”, and by the time I decided to include it Reeves had joined The Cure and left the country.

I ended up keeping the guitars from my demo, which were played by John Delehanty. I think John’s guitars are absolutely perfect, and to be candid, if Reeves had played on this one I probably would have just begged him to do something similar.

And here’s to Bryan Thomas: eternal props for his just-under-the-wire superhero bass assist! Graham wasn’t available for this one, and neither was my original choice of backup, the great Rudy Sarzo. I was in danger of having to leave “Party Bus” off the album, but Bryan (whose first ever rock concert was an Ozzy show that featured Rudy on bass) stepped in and threw down!

QUESTION
This song is for my pal Rosie. We went on a date on my birthday in 2010, and I had no idea that’s what it was supposed to be; it never occurred to me that Rosie could have any romantic interest in me.

Actually, that’s not true. I had just enough suspicion that it might be a date that I was a nervous wreck. Because Rosie is awesome. I don’t think I uttered a single coherent sentence all night, I had so much agita.

I had already moved upstate by then, and was staying at the Hotel Chelsea. In my room at 2am I had plenty of time and silence to ponder whether we’d just gone on a date, and how badly I might’ve choked if it had in fact been one.

I started writing Rosie a Facebook message (“Question” was the subject line – FB still used those back then), but then it occurred to me that the message had a certain cadence which might lend itself to a melody, and next thing I knew I was in the bathroom (better acoustics, plus all the interesting Chelsea Hotel shit happens in the bathroom) singing it into my iPhone. I had a four-track app so I recorded the message in four-part harmony.

I sent Rosie an MP3 the next morning; she enjoyed the song (enough to give me permission to include it here), and let me know that she had considered it to be a date! However, I was also informed that for any dates she may go on in the future, my services would not be required.

AFTERMATH
You may be aware that I’ve been working on a musical theater piece since 2000 – Rise And Shine. But even if Rise And Shine someday makes it to a stage, it won’t be the first time something I wrote was performed on Broadway.

“Aftermath” is about a girl named Lauren who I used to pass in the hall at high school every day… after math. I wrote the song in 1999 or 2000 and it’s remained virtually unchanged from my very first arrangement. Collider recorded the song twice. We cut it at Scarlet East in Albany with Chris deRosa and Tom Kaz in 2001; that version was mixed by Tommy Ramone and included on a Collider demo CD (I also gave it to Blondie that year). We revisited “Aftermath” with Tommy as producer in 2002 for our WCYF EP.

About two years later, chunks of “Aftermath” showed up on Green Day’s American Idiot in the form of a song called “Whatsername”.

I know, the claim is baseless. Except it’s not; I lived in the Ramones Loft back then. Billie Joe Armstrong has been in my apartment.

I’m not gonna accuse the dude of willfully lifting parts of “Aftermath”. It could have been a subconscious thing.

Then again, this is the music business.

Anyway, there are two reasons why “Aftermath” is on this record, and neither is a knock on the excellent WCYF version, which featured great playing by Mike Keaney and Joe Abba (in fact, I used Joe’s shaker and finger cymbals from that recording). First, it fit the theme of passing time… and second, Anton requested we record it after doing the song live. When Anton Fig asks you to let him play drums on something, you put that shit on your album!

SYMBIOSIS
I wrote this song in early 1994. Skyscape was still active back then, but in flux – Dom left the band, then Steve Theater, then we spent a year figuring out our direction. By the time Skyscape was ready to play “Symbiosis”, The Hanslick Rebellion had claimed the song and was doing it live. But I felt guilty and pulled it back for Skyscape, which promptly broke up. And “Symbiosis” sat around for almost two decades, existing only in demo form.

I think it’s one of the best songs I have, and it makes me so happy to finally hear “Symbiosis” brought to life. Rebecca Coleman, formerly of Avi Buffalo and now of Pageants, sings the shimmery backing vocal. Sometimes I feel like Rebecca might be Earth’s most talented human.

THE KNOWING ONES
There’s no record of my family history pre-Holocaust; when I was growing up, we had only stories from a generation that, frankly, couldn’t remember a heck of a lot. For example, according to my paternal grandmother, we either had family in England, or someone in my family had once taken a trip to England. Not particularly helpful.

The message of “The Knowing Ones”: if nobody’s around to tell you who your ancestors were, there’s also no one around to tell you who they weren’t. Dream, baby, dream!

SECRET PRESTRICTIONS FROM THE PAST
I love the Dead Milkmen song “Stuart”… the way the spoken-word vocal fits so perfectly over the music as it builds and releases. I wanted to give that kind of thing a try.

The story is something my friend Sputnik told me freshman year of college. I tried to recount his tale word for word, in as close as I could get to his voice, complete with all the “dude”s. Sputnik used to begin and end every sentence with “dude”.

“Dude” was not as played out back then as it is today, but I felt like I should stay true to the spirit of the original telling.

The piece of music was salvaged from a stream-of-consciousnessy 1993 sequence and performed by the band almost note-for-note. Graham in particular did an amazing job with the ’90s slap bassline. It’s really awesome playing by the whole group – Anton had to do a million little things to make the drums work, and Reeves is pure Reeves on this track. And let’s not forget Sheridan Riley’s conga playing to tie it all together. Very tricky piece of music, deftly handled.

I HEAR AN ECHO
I once had this boss named Bob. Our gig was magazine production, where the deadlines can be long and killer. I was 22 at the time, with no attachments that weren’t music related (something that hasn’t much changed, come to think of it), but Bob was in his late 30s and married. He and his wife had moved from Chicago to New York City so he could take a promotion.

During my year working for Bob, I watched the dude’s marriage and life implode. It was a horrible thing to see, and I vowed never to let a day job interfere with… well, anything I give a fuck about.

I lost touch with Bob when I left that company; I can only hope he’s doing okay these days. Bob, this one’s for you.

LOSE ME FOREVER
This was a very early Collider song from 1997. It’s a bummer. I wrote it after getting dumped by Elena in the first dumping of what would become an ongoing series.

Collider played “Lose Me Forever” at one or two early shows and even included it on our first demo tape, but it didn’t fit with what was becoming the Collider thing – loud, fast, electronic and snotty. So we put the song aside and I forgot all about it until I came across it on a Zip cartridge formatted for the Roland VS-880 recorder. Remember those? Either of those?

I know this is a depressing way to go out; my advice would be to keep the record on repeat so “Again” comes back on!

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The album’s title (and cover imagery) comes from the story of Otto Lilienthal, the 19th Century “Glider King”. Lilienthal was an inventor who built some of the earliest gliding apparatus, which he tested himself. On a flight in August of 1896, his glider stalled and he fell more than 50 feet, breaking his back. Lilienthal died the next day; his final words were small sacrifices must be made!

Otto Lilienthal’s work directly inspired the next generation of aviation inventors, particularly the Wright brothers.

Just like the work of teenage Jed, and all the shit that poor motherfucker had to go through to create it, has inspired and benefited the version of me that carries on for him today.

The folks at Germany’s Otto Lilienthal Museum were very cool about providing me with hi-res imagery for the album packaging; I am so grateful!

Okay, that’s a long post. I hope you’re still going to listen to the record after all this.

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*The guitarist is still on tour five years later. I’ve moved on and unless something crazy happens, you’ll get that other album exactly one year from today!

I got the finished master of my new record two days ago. I drove around listening to it for a few hours, then listened a few more at home. I uploaded it to my music site for you to hear on July 7, and then did a bunch of prep stuff for its retail release on October 9.

Then I emailed Anton about getting started on the next album. Not next YEAR’S album – we’re already just about finished with that – but one for 2014, ’cause ya know, it takes a while to wrap these things. The record we’re about to start is called Schoolbus Coming At Me, and it’s a collection of all the songs I’ve written with Chris Hug. There are lots!

I almost suggested we begin recording the album I’ve written over the past year and a half, but it’s all about family and family-type relationships ending and I’m just not ready to live with the material as intensely as one needs to when making an album of it. I’d like to try being happy for a while before I revisit that shit.

——-

In honor of one project coming to fruition, I present a list of all the stuff I’m working on that hasn’t, in the order in which I expect to finish it (though I’m not gonna estimate completion dates – I learned that lesson a long time ago). This may be the last time you hear about some of this stuff for a while, especially since this space is about to be taken over by my July 7/October 9 release, Small Sacrifices Must Be Made! But I promise if you stick around, you will eventually get it all:

- A new Hanslick Rebellion single, “Dear Friends And Gentle Hearts”. This is recorded and only needs to be mixed. It’s part of a whole new Rebellion EP of six songs that’s about two-thirds of the way there.

- The 20th anniversary reimagining of Skyscape‘s Band Of The Week, containing the entire album remixed (with new bass from Mike Keaney and additional guitars and drums from Alex Dubovoy and Sheridan Riley) plus signature tracks which for one reason or another did not end up on the original (“It’s Always Christmas In Siberia”; “Mukhopadhyay”; “Hey Jude”).

- A whole new Skyscape album, Dr. Des Moines, which is already completely demoed and partially recorded and features a Skyscape lineup of Dom, Mike, Alex, Sheridan and yours truly, with special guests Reeves Gabrels and Jerry Marotta.

- Four more Sevendys singles, already recorded and just waiting to be mixed. Chuck expects to be back in playing shape later this summer (!) which means we’ll be doing more recordings thereafter.

- My solo album for 2013, Failing Upwards, which I’ve been working on since 2007 with Anton Fig, Reeves Gabrels, Tony Levin, Ralph Carney, Dweezil Zappa, Earl Slick and Avi Buffalo. It’s 95% recorded and in the process of being mixed by Tchad Blake. This album will also feature Tchad’s amazing mix of “The Bowery Electric” (the Ramones version), marking the first time that song has been formally released in the US.

- The Rebellion’s recording of the 40-song musical Rise And Shine. I recently cleared this with Arturo and we’re going full-steam ahead. Joe just tracked drums on a bunch of tunes a couple of weeks ago, and I’m working to reassemble the voice cast. It’s gonna take a while but it’s happening!

- My solo album for 2014, the aforementioned Schoolbus Coming At Me, collecting the dozen or so compositions I’ve written to Chris Hug’s wonderful lyrics over the years, plus a couple of instrumental pieces I wrote for Chris’s short films. I hope to continue with the same basic band from Small Sacrifices and Failing Upwards – we’ve done some pretty nice work so far. I know Anton is in for drums.

- Those 11 songs the Rebellion cut with Reeves under the band name Jeebus. It’s mostly done but when and how to put the thing out?!

This list doesn’t include stuff I’m producing for other folks.

“WORK IS GOOD” – Arturo Vega

Many of my Facebook friends are semipro singer-songwriters. We tend to attract each other. As such, I see lots of bitter status updates about the Internet’s “devaluing” of music. I never comment; I don’t want to be a dick in somebody else’s space. Lucky for me, I have my own space and can be a dick here all day long!

The Internet hasn’t devalued anything. It’s revealed the true value of many things.

I say this after watching the two worlds in which I spend most of my productive time – music and print publishing – collapse over the past dozen years. I was cranky for a while. I got over it. I say bring it the rest of the way down.

Has the Internet destroyed our economy? Yes, absolutely; it destroyed the economy such as it had been built. So many of the things people used to blow money on have been exposed as having no monetary value. Gatekeepers and middlemen were once able to monopolize the distribution of information and assign it an arbitrary price. They can’t do that anymore.

Journalism as we’ve known it is worthless. I’m sorry. When I want to find out about news that is breaking right now, I use Twitter. I learn about things as they happen from the people who are standing right in front of them. Blogs, maintained by passionate enthusiasts, organize and refine that information at little or no cost to the user.

Most mass-market entertainment is also worthless. Something made for free and posted on YouTube or Soundcloud by a random dude in my neighborhood can be just as funny, just as resonant, just as entertaining as a big-budget blockbuster film or album. It’s not about piracy; it’s about quantity of entertainment. Free stuff entertains me as much as expensive stuff does, and it’s free.

If I go to a restaurant and there’s a wait, I usually move on. All the sit-down places are packed for breakfast or dinner rush? I can go to McDonald’s and have something that tastes good and will leave me full, and I won’t have to wait for it. No, it’s not going to be a gourmet fuckin experience, but it will fulfill my base meal requirements and probably even make me happy. In this way, all restaurants are essentially always competing with McDonald’s for my patronage. They’re also competing with my kitchen at home.

Art is assigned value by middlemen. Its intrinsic value is zero. You can hear music right now for free: hum to yourself. Whistle. You can make something right now that entertains you or speaks for you. You don’t need me to do it; you don’t need painters, or sculptors, or filmmakers, or novelists, or songwriters. Little kids know this… they can entertain themselves all day using nothing but their imaginations and whatever’s around.

Nobody asked me to write or record music. I felt a need to do it, so I did it. That wasn’t for the world at large; it was for me. My benefit has already been derived. If I needed to make money from it too, that would be a sad commentary on how much my music actually means to me.

Here are some things that have value the Internet cannot “take away”:

Expertise. Craftsmanship. Nostalgia. Arousal. Empathy. Quality. Novelty. Scarcity. Collectability.

You can aspire to some of these; others are not up to you. You can practice and learn until you are an expert or a craftsperson. What someone is nostalgic for, aroused by, or can empathize with is subjective. Some people think “quality” is something you know when you see it; I’m not so sure that isn’t subjective too. And it can be argued that scarcity and collectability only add value when combined with one of the other things on that list.

Expertise and craftsmanship are why I’m happy to scrape together the money for a mix by Tchad Blake or Pete deBoer, or session work from Anton Fig or Jerry Marotta or Tony Levin or Graham Maby or Reeves Gabrels or Ralph Carney… these guys do things nobody else can. You can’t fake them in Pro Tools or Garageband. Do they make my recordings more “sellable”? I’m not sure, but in my opinion (which is the only one that counts ’cause it’s my music), they make them better. And I want my recordings to be the best they can be, even if I’m the only one who will ever give a shit.

You don’t decorate your home strictly for guests. Maybe you do, I dunno. But I would figure you’d fill your place with stuff you wanted to see every day… and then if guests happen to show up, they can appreciate the decor, or not.

The most “successful” project I’ve done in the past five years, in terms of monetary ROI, is “Yuppie Exodus From Dumbo”. The song itself is fine; a fun listen and very well performed, but as happy as I am with the finished piece I can’t say it’s the best thing I’ve ever written. And yet I’ve sold almost 50 copies of the track on cylinder, a virtually unplayable format, at a whopping $35 a pop. In this case, people are shelling out for novelty and scarcity – it’s a cylinder record, and there are only 50 signed and numbered copies. Some people collect cylinder records and feel a need to buy any new ones that are made. And there is a chance people are also paying to speculate, since Michael Doret is a name in the art world and it’s his autograph on the thing.

Almost no one is buying the product for the song itself.

And then there’s this:

The Bowery Electric Crew – Joey Ramone Dedication

Somebody forwarded me that link after it had been up for a year, collecting comments. I’ve never seen a dime from “The Bowery Electric” (unlike Jesse Malin, I suppose) – and I’m not credited or even mentioned anywhere on the page – but I couldn’t possibly feel more rewarded for my work than I did when I saw this YouTube video and the testimonials beneath it.

When I put forth a vinyl record or a CD or a digital file – just like everybody else does, and just like anybody else can – I have no expectations of return on investment, and I feel entitled to no reaction. I wanted something to exist; it exists. I wanted the catharsis of creation and I got it. I wanted it recorded; I wanted it packaged. I got what I wanted. Nobody asked me to do any of this.

If I create something that has value to a stranger, they will let me know.

I’ll be returning to the WCDB airwaves on the morning of Sunday, May 20. My new timeslot: 10am-noon Sundays! I hope you’ll join me… I love sharing music, even when I didn’t write it.

Still no word on whether the radio station will be open for overnight broadcasting. This is such a cowardly move by the UAlbany administration, and its timing is so suspect… handing down this “punishment” right before summer break is the equivalent of announcing bad news on a Friday. If these “Student Success” clowns think people are just going to forget and get over it, they’re as stupid as they are out of touch.

To their credit, the station staff has kept up the pressure and a ruling is supposedly forthcoming. Let’s watch closely.

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I want to thank the folks who bought Sevendys merch this past week to help with Chuck Rainey’s medical bills – very cool and generous of you guys. I’ve forwarded the proceeds right on to Chuck with my match, and I’ll keep the program going until further notice.

Again, if you would like to donate to Chuck directly, you can do so here.

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My next album is on track for a July release; I hope to make it available on CD and vinyl at that time. It’s twelve songs and seven are mixed. All but one are with the mix engineer, Pete deBoer, and he’s wrapping them up very efficiently.

It’s a weird record. The upbeat songs are very upbeat and the sad songs are very sad. I previewed the rough album for a friend and she cried at the end. Like real tears and everything. I thought it was maybe because she couldn’t stand to listen anymore – which was okay at that point because the record was over – but she said it was because the last two songs were that upsetting.

So I apologize in advance for whatever this album does to you.

Eschatone‘s distributor requires a few months to properly set up an album, so while I’ll make it available here in all formats July, I would assume it won’t be in stores (if there still are actual record stores) until the fall. Not that this matters to you since you’ll be getting it the day I put it up on my site, right?

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I got Eschatone Records a PO box in Albany today. We’ll be closing down the New York City address and preparing our next round of releases as a bonafide 518 operation. I’m excited to be back with the company; I withdrew from the partnership in 2009 and returned late last year.

We have a plan and some really crazy stuff lined up to release this fall and winter. We’ll be experimenting with formats. We’ll be working with artists whose music will shock you. And we’ll be working with artists whose names will shock you, because you’ll be like How the fuck did they get that guy?

One genre into which I am excited to expand Eschatone is noise. I’ve been dabbling with Avi in our Space Toilets project… it’s fun and visceral, and the recordings, as abstract as they are, really do manage to say something. I think noise can be the ultimate musical metaphor – all feeling, no context, a direct emotional transmission. We’ll be putting out some stuff from Maryland’s Pregnant Spore; I am always surprised at how listenable his work is, and how much it communicates.

Thus even as Eschatone brings you new folk from Brian Dewan, it shall also put out staticky scrapey instrumental noise.

Come to think of it… there is an artist – a guitarist – whose work has long bridged the gap between the two; we’ve got him also. To be announced.

One of my great musical joys is playing with Sevendys. It’s a dream lineup – Jerry Marotta, Chuck Rainey, Avi Buffalo, and Sheridan Riley – on a crazy musical adventure.

But Sevendys has been out of commission since last November, when Chuck suffered a major stroke. He’s recovering – slowly – but six months later, Chuck remains unable to work. We’ve got to help Chuck Rainey out!

Chuck has made your life immeasurably better and you probably don’t even know it. In his 71 years, the dude has played bass on so many classic songs (with everybody from Aretha Franklin to Steely Dan) that every single time we’ve picked him up at an airport, something he recorded came on the PA.
NO SHIT.

Here’s what we’re gonna do:
There are eight Sevendys songs available for download here. All of them are name-your-price downloads; whatever price you name, we will send that amount to Chuck after Bandcamp and PayPal take their cuts.

There is a Sevendys t-shirt available for purchase here for ten bucks. Buy one and we will pass all the money we get from it (again, post Bandcamp and PayPal) right on to Chuck, plus I will personally match that amount.

There is a Sevendys 7″ vinyl single here, which the entire band – including Chuck himself – autographed in a limited edition of 100 when it came out last summer. It also costs $10, and again, if you buy one we will send the proceeds to Chuck, and I’ll personally match them.

You can also donate to Chuck directly here. I mean, I will be doing so, whether you buy Sevendys shit or not (but then again, I already have the entire Sevendys collection).

To all of us in Sevendys, Chuck is a mentor, friend and inspiration. Chuck, you are in our thoughts every day!

To whom it may concern:
I’m a UAlbany alum and local resident with strong ties to WCDB Albany. I was a station member as a student in the 1990s, and I have served as a community member DJ since mid-2010.

I also worked for UAlbany’s University Auxiliary Services in 2010, as assistant director of communications; during my stint, I helped to implement a number of well-received campuswide student involvement campaigns. Quite a bit of that UAS programming – and this remains the case, I’m told – relied on the WCDB staff for technical a/v assistance, equipment, promotion and manpower.

I’ve heard that a DJ recently broke station policy and let seven non-station-staff UAlbany students into the WCDB offices, where they were caught smoking marijuana. This is unfortunate; I can say from experience that student DJs take their responsibilities very seriously, and this sort of thing is not and has never been part of the WCDB culture. It’s music that intoxicates us… we’ve always left the drinking and drugging to fraternities, sororities, kegs-and-eggers, the SA board, and the UAlbany students who inevitably imbibe at every Dippikill retreat, Fountain Day, Fallfest and Parkfest. Anyway, I’m glad this one student has been permanently removed from the radio station roster, and that he and his friends are now in the process of being duly punished by the proper authorities.

However, I’ve also heard that something called an office of “Student Success” (did this even exist in the ’90s?) has begun investigating WCDB’s FCC license terms and organizational status. This is troubling. An awful lot of people are being penalized – the current station staff, which includes about 100 students (well, about 99 students now); WCDB’s base of local listeners; and the sizable contingent of UAlbany alumni (34 years’ worth) who maintain a keen interest in the station’s well-being – for the actions of one UAlbany student who happened to be a DJ, and seven others who were not.

In the past year, I’ve proudly watched the current WCDB staff grow to include enough students to broadcast around the clock, as we did in the 1990s, and as generations of DJs did for almost two decades before us. A radio station is to an extent a public trust, and this year’s administration has been an exceptional group of custodians. But now I’m hearing that WCDB DJs will not be allowed into the Campus Center to broadcast overnight (2:00am-7:30am Monday through Saturday and 10pm-7:30am Sunday) for perhaps the first time in the station’s history. That seems more than a bit draconian.

Is this really to be the case? And on what basis?

I hope someone from the university administration will respond here, allay my worries and tell me this is just procedural, due diligence to cover UAlbany as the University answers questions about the criminal behavior of eight of its students (who, I’m sure, could just as easily have been caught smoking weed in the dorms, or frankly just about anyplace on campus day or night), and everything will be back to normal soon.

Or is this development something that should concern the community and our alumni?

Luv,
JD

The Hanslick Rebellion played a gig on March 2 – our first in four years. It was awesome (for us, anyway). We agreed to keep things going in spite of the band members’ various familial commitments and the physical distance between us. Playing shows together is difficult, but recording is always possible, and since the Rebellion always goes big we decided to tackle the most daunting monster project in my catalog: the unfinishable Rise And Shine.

We’re talking 40 songs in almost as many genres. 15 singers. Two-and-a-half hours of music. My last attempt to record this thing put me off music for over a year.

Rise And Shine is a musical stage play I’ve been working on since 2000, when Arturo Vega informed me that he’d strung together 20 or so of my already-released tracks to tell a story and had already begun writing the script. We brainstormed a complete three-act arc and I began writing new songs to fill in the gaps – 20 additional pieces of music in all. By 2005 I was well into a fully-cast demo of the thing with an incredible and diverse group of singers that included Dicky Barrett, Brian Dewan, Jessy Moss, Matthew Bair, CJ Ramone, Maryann Fennimore, Bryan Thomas and Kitty Kowalski. But we couldn’t stop tweaking, and what was, in retrospect, the perfect version of the play got mauled to death by revision after revision. I gave up on the demo in 2006 because I just couldn’t keep up with all the changes. By the time we took our last meeting, in 2010, we couldn’t even explain to an interested investor what Rise And Shine was supposed to be about. That’s when I packed it in.

The storyline, as plotted in 2000 and held consistent until 2005, is fairly simple – two college friends reunite at a New York City nightclub five years after graduation. One night, a girl from their past appears at the club and fucks all their shit up. That’s basically it. You’ve got a cast of colorful supporting characters representing various denizens of early-aughts New York nightlife, each with a mini-drama woven around the main thread, but it really is straightforward, linear and fun.

Hanslick Rebellion is the no-brainer choice for a Rise And Shine recording. A number of the songs Arturo wrote his script around, including “We Wait And We Wait”, “Leave Your Boyfriend”, “Starlet” and “Grub”, are Rebellion tunes. Better yet, because the Rebellion only recorded live, there were never studio versions of these, so it’s not like we’re being redundant. Plus Mike and I sang the two male leads on the original Rise And Shine demo, with some surprising lead vocal reversals that add a twist for longtime Rebellion fans (for example, Mike sings “Grub” in the play). It’s just right.

My first move in reopening the Rise And Shine case was to sift through the aborted demo recordings and see what might be salvageable. Sadly, not much. For all the vocal talent we had lined up, most of the tracks are unusable. We had such limited time with many of the singers that in some cases we were racing through 20-30 songs in a day. You obviously can’t get good takes that way. Then there’s the file management and handling of those vocal tracks – many were hastily and poorly auto-tuned by the engineer and then the original tracks were discarded! Unbelievable now, but at the time there were no best practices for Pro Tools workflow. The only singers whose work I can confidently keep are Maryann Fennimore, Brian Dewan and Jessy Moss, and those only because their vocals were cut so late in the process that the project stalled before the engineer could mutilate them. Everybody else has to be rerecorded (which is impossible in several cases) or replaced.

On the other hand, all 40 songs are written and arranged right down to the vocal harmonies. It’s all laid out… everything just needs to be properly performed. The undertaking is massive – recording it is only the beginning. Mixing and mastering 40 songs will cost a fortune. I get queasy just thinking about it. Unfortunately, the folks who were willing to invest in Rise And Shine the stage play are probably out on Rise And Shine the album. I understand; there’s a lot more potential ROI in the former.

In order to make this happen as quickly as possible (ha ha) I’m throttling back on my other projects for a while. That means April’s Single of the Month will be the last. My next solo album is just about done, so I do plan on putting it out later this year. But other than that I’ll be in Rise And Shine land for the forseeable future.

As we power through this thing, we’ll do our best to document the process with a series of video clips. Here’s the first one. This is actually an excerpt from a short film made by Emily Sheskin and Serena Kuo in 2004? 2005? I forget exactly. But it features Arturo and me talking about the musical and how we came to be writing partners:

They say that you can’t learn from anyone’s mistakes but your own. I disagree.

I’ve been present for the end of a lot of things. I don’t look like much, so nobody seems to care that I’m in the room when they’re talking about important shit. I was around at the end of the Ramones; the end of CBGB; the end of the music business; the ends of a dozen magazines and print media in general. I’ve watched people make mistakes that impacted countless lives in fundamental ways, including mine, while there was nothing I could do. It’s hard not to learn something from that.

An obvious lesson to take is that everything ends. I once did a design-related interview with a magazine called FPO. At the close of our conversation, the reporter asked me for a quick rundown of publications I’d worked for, so I rattled off a list. More than half of the titles were defunct. Some had gone down in spectacular, even legendary ways, and the reporter said: “That’s like a who’s who of magazine disasters over the past 15 years! I can’t believe one person worked at all of those!”

Well… it’s not like there was anything particularly mystical happening here. If any one of those publications had not failed, I’d still have been working there and would never have moved on to the others. But that’s not how it goes. Everything ends.

One thing I’ve never had much of is ambition. That may not ring true to those of you who’ve been with me since the ’90s, but think about some of the folks I ran with, and my relationship to them, and try to appreciate how I may have reflected certain things about them – like the moon reflecting sunlight. All I’ve ever wanted to do was make my stuff. I don’t really care about anything else. Having a goal, or a passion, is not the same as having ambition.

Goal: I want to make a good record. Ambition: I want to make a million-selling record.

I think a goal is something you can realistically accomplish with your own resources and work, while ambition makes success contingent upon the action of others… the need for them to buy something, or love something, or give us something. We have very little control over that. So little that it isn’t really worth a bother. I can make what I consider a good album by writing songs that have meaning to me, taking the time to craft them into something I’d want to hear, and working for the resources to realize them in the form of a recorded object. What happens with that record once it’s available to other people is, for better or worse, out of my hands.

The lesson I’ve learned working with ambitious people is: don’t get too involved with ambitious people. Just do your thing. The wages of ambition are disappointment and agita for all involved.

I’ve liked the expression “failing upwards” since I first heard it back in 2000, when it was used to describe a shitty coworker who had inexplicably gotten bumped up to middle management. But there’s more to it than the negative. After all these years of watching great endeavors end and fade away, it’s hard not to think of success and failure as arbitrary. We fail upwards, we succeed downwards. The work continues. My wish for all of us in 2012: let’s do our best work.