Sorry, no single this month. How about a whole album instead?

Shoot The Piano Player was recorded a couple summers ago in Chicago. LB, Lucy, Joe Abba and I spent a weekend at Electrical Audio with Steve Albini, fluffy coffee and Pip the cat. With Joe on drums, I tracked 13 songs live to tape, vocals and all. There are maybe three overdubs on the whole album – an organ part and a couple of backing vocals. Lucy and LB hung out in the control room, where they got to watch Albini work. That is a true privilege.

For me, making a record with Steve Albini is up there with working with the Ramones. I love that dude as a concept and admire him as a human being. Albini is, in my opinion, the incorruptible avatar of Generation X’s finest values. Most of my contemporaries have sold out but Albini marches on. He’s tireless behind the board and radiates competence in a way that is somehow simultaneously intense and reassuring. At the end of the session, he congratulated me on coming prepared and getting my work done. That’s like Wade Boggs telling you, “nice at-bat.” One of the best moments of my entire life!

The songs on STPP were written over a 15-year period, and they are generally pretty songwritery. Lots of roleplaying here. A few of the narrators are unsavory characters (“You Make Me Feel So Young” in particular… that song is just fuckin gross but I had to record it. I lost multiple girlfriends to nasty old dudes when I was in my early 20s and the lyric was born of my outrage). “I’m On Your Side” was originally part of Rise And Shine – it’s sung from the perspective of a bigoted asshole cop, and my job is to make you like him if not inadvertently agree with him.

I do a bit of side-switching in these songs, too: “Piece Of Crap” (the oldest composition on the record; it’s from 1994) comes alternately from the point-of-view of the cynical, sneering wannabe pop star and the spoiled teens who worship him; “For A Girl In Promotions” starts out like a snipe at the title character but the narrator is revealed to truly care about her and appreciate what she does. I dunno, this is starting to sound a little navel-gazey… so how bout: I’m proud of this record and happy that I can share it with you!

In addition to the digital release (it’s for sale at iTunes, Amazon and all the rest today as well, but why would you buy it out there when you can get it right here?), Shoot The Piano Player is also available on 8-track tape. The 8-track run is limited to an edition of 20 copies, manufactured by a really cool company called The Dead Media out of Ft. Worth, Texas. Interesting fact about 8-track tapes: they play back twice as fast as cassettes and use thicker, higher-quality tape. It can be argued that a well-built 8-track cartridge sounds better, and preserves more of the analog experience, than vinyl. I most likely will release a vinyl pressing of Shoot The Piano Player at some point, but it could be argued that this 8-track tape may provide the ultimate STPP listening experience if you’ve got the means to play it. My 8-track deck broke recently, so I picked up an old 2-XL robot on eBay. His eyes light up in time with the music. It’s awesome.

Here are some photos from the Shoot The Piano Player recording session:

I needed a long weekend, and here one is!

Working on another Amy Willey mix with Eric Jarvis; hopefully I’ll be able to share that with you in a couple of days. The song is called “Not This Way” and it’s one of my favorites from the Structure days, though the arrangement here is very different. Brian Dewan shines on this version, with layers of electric zither, accordion, and theremin.

We did a lot of the overdubs during a similarly long weekend at a studio in Catskill called Old Soul – a beautiful place with every keyboard instrument you could want to play. I was able to add some real clavinet and mellotron to “Not This Way”, though the mellotron was typically out of tune. Brian worked the pitch wheel while I played.

Wait, I have pictures! These were taken on April 12-13, 2008.

My things have been in Albany since last weekend; I even managed to unpack a bit, and set up most of my studio gear (which is good, ’cause Reeves is coming to town tomorrow night for some Jeebus trackin). But I spent the week downstate – I had to run right back for a couple days of work in NYC. Then there was a wedding in New Jersey which lasted all weekend, as LB was a bridesmaid… so I haven’t spent but a night or two in my new place since moving in.

The wedding ended at five and we booked up here. There was still a bit of daylight yet, and it was springy and clear. We decided to take a nice long walk.

There’s nothing like a good walk. It’s the only exercise I’m interested in. Fuck treadmills and ellipticals at the gym… if I’m going to put one foot in front of the other, I had better be getting somewhere. When LB and I lived on the Lower East Side, we would step out and walk for hours – over the Williamsburg and Manhattan Bridges, or across town and up the West Side Promenade. You might have to deal with the occasional crowd of smokers in front of a restaurant or club, but they weren’t that big a deal. It was the move to Dumbo that kinda killed walking for us. The combination of obnoxious tourists and even more obnoxious locals, all taking shitty pictures of the same stupid crap while their whiny kids shrieked and rolled around on the dirty cobblestones – that got old fast. We eventually stopped going outside.

Tonight we decided to chance it in our new home. We spent a couple of hours exploring parts of downtown Albany I wasn’t familiar with, particularly the area east of the Empire State Plaza. This city just goes on and on! We came across all this stuff I never knew was here: wonderful buildings of all eras, dating back as far as the 1730s; a waterfront; a main drag similar to Saratoga’s Broadway; and Brooklynesque industrial areas, but with a backdrop of rolling hills. It was incredible, and there was nobody on the streets… we had all this to ourselves.

I took three photos around the Plaza, which is right across the street from our new place. I took them for this blog post, to illustrate the dearth of humanity in this gorgeous setting on a warm and bright spring evening. Just the way I like it: the only douchebag with a camera was me.

Then we stopped into Justin’s for meatloaf and mac n’ cheese. And their peppery, velvety coffee, which was just as good as I remember from ten years ago. May I recommend moving to Albany?