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.

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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.

I had to turn off the FREE on Shoot The Piano Player this morning, and I am having guilt over it. So here’s what I’m gonna do: Every day until August 7 (when my next new single comes out), I will set one random Song Foundry track to free download. You’ll have to hunt them all down, but once you find ‘em they’re yours forever. All I ask is that you tweet or post the song link on your FB wall after you download (and say something nice about it, would ya?).

There are 22 albums in the music section of this site (and some, like my In The Presence Of Presents and Single of the Month comps, are already set to free download). Finding the free tune each day will be a bit of a scavenger hunt. Here’s a tip, though: it’ll be marked in the track listing as “(free)”.

I hope this introduces you to stuff you’ll like. And who knows – perhaps as you search some of the song titles will pique your interest or spark a memory. There are worse things than finding new music to enjoy!

One track is already set up for ya. Why are you still on this page when you could be downloading that shit?

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 seem to be at a point in life where all of my public school classmates are getting divorced. There are so many custody battles being documented in real time on my Facebook wall right now… sorry to be a cavalier douche about this, but it’s actually pretty good reading. Definitely more interesting than what was for lunch, or how much Monday sucks.

If Facebook had existed when we were 27, our walls would have been splattered with breakup drama, followed by lots of engagement announcements six months later. It was shit-or-get-off-the-pot time… anyone whose relationship wasn’t the relationship ended it and married the next person he or she saw.

These are the people they’re divorcing now. Here’s a song for both sides.

Wait, what’s a Song Foundry Single Of The Month?

It’s how we’re gonna do things around here for a while. On the 7th of every month, you’re gonna get something new. It might be a Skyscape track, or Hanslick Rebellion, or a JD jam from the vaults that you’ve never heard before. Or, like this month, a brand-new solo studio track (finished yesterday!) with special guests Tony Levin, Anton Fig, Earl Slick, Maryann Fennimore, Mike Keaney and Ralph Carney. Listen, download, and please pass it on – if you like what you hear, share it on Facebook or elsewhere. That’s all I ask.

(Sevendys isn’t part of this. Sevendys is extra; Sevendys cannot be contained!)

It’s the Sevendys model that inspired this change: record, mix, release. Seems simple but it’s not. You have to actually record, mix, and then release. When you’re making full albums, it’s really hard to get to step three because first you have to record everything and then you have to mix everything. Waiting to track one last instrument on one last song? If that takes a year, then your whole album, all that work, sits in limbo for at least a year. Not a particularly efficient way to do things.

I like to work on six or seven albums at a time, slowly bringing them to completion over what could be years. When I feel a song approaching doneness, I focus on that one and knock it out. But then the track just kinda sits there until the rest of the album is done.

With Sevendys, we go into the studio, cut four complete tracks, and simply release them as they’re mixed. For example, “Enjoy It” was mixed the day before it was mastered, and released ten minutes after the master was approved. That’s exhilarating. I’ve got Eric Jarvis, who only started mixing my stuff last year, telling me how great it is to work with somebody who just gets stuff online and out so fast, and I’m cracking up because I really move glacially slowly. But Sevendys has managed to put out something in every month of 2011 so far, and I see no reason why that will stop.

Lots of italics in this post! I am emphasizing all kinds of shit, WHOOOOOOOO!

I’ve decided not to wait around for albums to happen anymore. There are mechanisms for collecting singles into albums and pressing albums into cool physical products, and I’ll still do that stuff, because I love to do it… but I see no reason to hoard tracks for moments so far in the future, they may as well never come. Let’s enjoy “She Loves You (NO NO NO)” today!

Performing “A Place Where No One Goes” live at The Institute in Cornwall, UK, 5-30-08.

That 2008 UK tour with Mike Bassett was so much fun, and we played in such odd places. Like the hidden room in an old Bristol tavern… a 700-year-old pub… a couple of art galleries… and here, an old clock tower by the sea (you can even hear the gulls in this video). Audiences were wonderful, too. I’d love to go back and do that again sometime.

By the way, a Steve Albini-engineered studio version of this song will be coming in the fall on my next full-length release, Shoot The Piano Player. Solo piano, tracked live to tape.

Sevendys LA session video | photos

Slowly decompressing from the LA trip. Jet lag wasn’t really an issue – I never caught up with the time difference because I didn’t really sleep while I was there (then again, I don’t really sleep anywhere). But my visit was packed with all-hours activity and I was pretty weary by the time I got back to NY. I still haven’t actually been home… I’ve spent the entire week in Brooklyn, recuperating at Crazee Joe’s. Looking forward to my Albany return tomorrow.

We got four really excellent-sounding tracks done, all live to tape in the studio. The band was set up Wrecking Crew-style in a rabbit warren of isolation panels; once we got a feel for the space, it became pretty easy to communicate during takes. The room (EastWest’s Studio Three) was small but full of character, and I think it definitely colored the music… everything has this syrupy smoothness to it, including the vocals.

Unlike the first Sevendys session, for which Sheridan and I’d had a week of rehearsal, this time the band came in completely cold. As a result, the live feel coalesced around the most prepared player – Chuck. He created this black hole of groove, just pulling everybody in. It was awesome! Sheridan went all Bernard Purdie on the shit, and Avi’s guitaring got super funky while retaining the jangly sweetness that is so characteristic of his rock playing. Definitely some alchemy going on. Here’s a sample, a video snippet from one take of “Congratulations”:

This batch of tunes was full of starts, stops, dropouts and tempo changes; Jerry played us through those on everything from Taos congas to an entire bag of egg shakers. He also served as a sort of field general, sensing weak points in the performance and pointing them out so we could shore things up. Meanwhile, engineer Ben and assistant Stuart kept things moving in the control room under the watchful eye of The Jarv, who was in turn working under the long-distance Yoda-like guidance of Dave McNair. The Celik brothers took over the control room (the whole facility, really – ask the Red Hot Chili Peppers, who were recording in Studio Two) and sent good vibes through the glass, and David Dillon brought the sax for a song that was called “No, REALLY Listening” when we tracked it but will henceforth be known as “Please Don’t Eat Me, I Love You”. All these cool characters… I’m still trying to figure out what the point was of having me at this session!

On Wednesday night we did a Sevendys gig at local Long Beach haunt DiPiazza’s. Chuck had already flown back, but The Jarv sat in on bass (and even played the same bass Chuck used for the session). I was a nervous wreck – five months of playing on the UAlbany campus will do that to you – but Avi, Sheridan and The Jarv were so good, and the crowd so warm, I ended up with a nice live buzz. We closed with the Celik brothers on stage for this steamrolling cover of George Harrison’s “Wah Wah”:

When we weren’t making music, we Disneyed it up with my gracious hosts, Michael Doret and Laura Smith, and Jerry’s awesome son Diego. Late nights were reserved for burgers and donuts with Jax. Just an incredible trip!

While I get the LA tracks in shape for mixing, I’ve started making plans for the next Sevendys session. That will happen this spring at Dreamland in Woodstock, if Avi and Sheridan’s schedules allow. Chuck and Jerry have become part of the fabric of the band, and I hope they’ll both continue with us – I am hearing insane trap kit/Taos drum Sheridan/Jerry interplay on the next batch of tunes. Maybe the full-on five-piece Sevendys could do a few gigs, too.

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Once I’m back in Albany, at my Pro Tools rig, I’ll prep another batch of Green Plaid Recordings to share. These are just too much fun. I’ll also get back to work with Dom on the new Skyscape record; Jerry has already begun adding drums, and hopefully I can get this stuff done by the end of the year. 2011 is Skyscape’s 20th anniversary, after all.

This Green Plaid shit is awesome fun. I’ve found more than an album’s worth of very decent Skyscape material I didn’t even know existed; a 4-track demo of Physics in its entirety; two Pavlov’s Dogs songs; several live performances multitracked on the Portastudio; all the raw components of Jed Has Too Much Free Time. A lot of it is so poorly performed and recorded as to be unusable, but the ideas are there. Combined with takes from other recorded versions of the songs, original MIDI sequences and brand-new elements, these tracks could be the foundation of something really special.

I’ll be working with Jerry Marotta on adding drums to a few of these songs next week. The basic idea: bring the 4-track Portastudio to a real studio and record the kit to cassette through three good microphones and proper outboard gear. We’ll probably Pro-Tools it simultaneously, but I think the low-tech versions will sound fantastic and more in the spirit.

Songs I’m considering for next week’s session, some by request:
- Skyscape’s “My Family”
- “Deep Deep Down”
- “The Yellow Wallpaper”
- “The Boy Who Tripped On His Mother’s Head”
- Skyscape’s cover of “I’m Too Sexy”
- “Smoke More Crack”
- “Autopsy”

If you were around in my early-90s demo days (or if you were a deep-cut user of the Collider Jukebox) and there’s something from that era you’d like me to revisit, just let me know. You can comment here or reply to the Green Plaid post on the wall of my Facebook music page.

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My friend Joe Aversano e-mailed me this excellent question: How do you know when a mix is done?

First of all, if I’m the one mixing, it’s never done. I’m not a mix engineer. A proper mix involves mathematics I don’t understand, gear I’m not qualified to use, and better hearing than I possess. Proper EQ of each element, balance, and application of effects are the baselines for which I trust an engineer. That said, a lot of it is subjective, and as the project’s, uh, “creative director”, I’m supposed to know what sort of thing I want to end up with.

Part of my job is prepping the track for what I consider to be a proper mix. Eliminating stray noises, making sure all the edits are clean – or at least intentional, maybe indicating where I’d like things panned (though that sort of thing should be flexible). Marking sections if necessary. Making notes. I also include only elements I want in the mix… and I should be confident in making those calls. The arrangement I give to the engineer – what sort of instrumentation and how it’s recorded – will go a long way towards dictating the timbre of the finished track.

Then, when I listen back to a mix in progress, I try to go in with more of an ear for what’s missing than what’s right, and I compile a list of things I still want to hear. Could be anything from “more bass” to “less of the vocal double” to “that one snare hit should have a delay, with an automated EQ sweep on it, that moves from center to right as it decays”. Once everything on my list is checked off, the mix is finished as far as I’m concerned.

At this point, I feel like I should give some well-deserved props to Eric Jarvis, who mixed the Sevendys material. He’s been getting the most out of my tracks for a while now, and when you add the mastering might of Dave McNair (under whom The Jarv once apprenticed), the result is some unstoppable shit!

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With all this Mets-Madoff crap going on, I have a thought I’d like to share regarding New York City sports teams. I don’t expect they should win it all every season, but New York franchises ought to be built and run well enough that year in and year out, the New York team is the team everybody else has to get past if they want to be the champ.

There was a period of time when every sports movie climaxed with the protagonists taking on the Yankees. To get where they wanted to be, they’d have to beat the scary New York team. With the resources available in NYC, I think that’s about right, and anything less should not be acceptable.

Of course, I feel the same way about New York City architecture and infrastructure, but the city is a reactionary disgrace on both counts…