Relocation is complete

A lot has happened since the last real blog (and there was a lost blog in the pipeline that just squirted out) so without any ado…

We did shaky but fun shows at Vinyl and at the Star Bar in Atlanta that were both well-received, almost surprisingly so. It was great to stand on stage and throw the same “tantrum” (jumping all over the place, screaming and bleeding on the guitar) that I used to throw as a kid, and to get a pat on the back for doing so. People actually like it when I’m wild here so I’m going to keep on doing it. What’s crazy is that Jennifer and Jim are the two wildest personalities and musicians that I’ve had the thrill to play with, and we bonded so much that we’re calling it a band now. Jennifer and I agreed that we’re going to be Adam & The Pinks (to resurrect an old, hardly-used band name from Nashville circa 2004) but Jim isn’t so sure. If you’d like to offer condolences to Jim or to suggest something a little less feminine (I like the “cute” band name to go with the new heavy sound but Jim wants something with more teeth), please drop us a line. We’re thrilled to have found each other though because it just feels right. Lots of bands work hard to fake the chemistry that we’ve stumbled upon!

A third show that happened recently was the Who tribute at The Earl – Jim and I joined forces with two of the Sweetloves to make a one-off band called (for this gig) “The House That Track Built”. We did “The Real Me”, “A Quick One” and “We’re Not Gonna Take It/See Me, Feel Me/Listening To You”. The show was fun, huge and thank goodness our performance was up to par. Hopefully I’ll get a chance to pull out that white boilersuit again one day, but in lieu of that I’m trying to get a youtube or youtube-ready video of the performance. Basically, everything is going really great in Atlanta. I love it here and I feel really encouraged to do my best. Not someone else’s best, but mine. There’s a difference.

We have a LOT of shows coming up. Between the three of us, we’re a booking MACHINE. However, if you live in a town where we’re not playing yet (ie Chattanooga, Montgomery, Auburn, Tuscaloosa, Birmingham, Black Mountain, London, Tokyo) please feel free to get involved. We want to come see you.

Oh, and in even bigger news than “everything’s going so well and I love my band” and such, you can now hear a little taste of what we’ve been doing in the studio. There’s a new album preview up on myspace. Now that there are leaves on the trees outside, I find myself surprisingly capable of writing lyrics again. It was a hard trek through winter to now but it looks like it’s going to be very easy to finish the record now. Go to our myspace page: http://www.myspace.com/AdamMcIntyre and if “Preview 1″ is still up, give that a listen. It’s a little different from the old stuff and now that we’re going to start doing those new songs at live shows… well, we’re happy. A big burden has been lifted and now there’s only excitement rushing in to take its place.

So in short, new songs, new shows, new band, new town that has welcomed us with open arms. I hope to see you this Summer.

Love to you all,

Adam, Jennifer & Jim

PS – boy and girl “Per Ardua” artwork shirts (courtesy of Ridgely Schantz) at cafepress

 

Ash Wednesday [I should check to make sure that my blogs are going through]

Happy Mardi Gras, people.

I just made a King Cake (no baby, though; Paul is too big now) and threw Mardi Gras beads out the front door in hopes that some barely-legal girls would come take their tops off.

Gentlemen, that has never worked but as with so many things you really have to keep at it to see results. For example, having a drummer. That takes dedication. I’m on my second drummer this week, but do you see me scowling? NO. I am a very upbeat person and besides, Jim came back. Jim? He played on the record a few months ago before he left. But now he’s back. Pretty soon you’ll need notes to keep up with who has been in the band. It will be like the charts for R.Kelly’s videos. Once we start doing shows, I’m sure things will be a lot more steady.

Up next, we have that show on Saturday at Vinyl – $8 for a bunch of music. After that, I have a lot of work to do on the record and a lot of shows to play with the new band. Invite us to do acoustic shows, I dare you.

 

And then the guitar peed on me.

Replacement Guitar

Originally uploaded by adammcintyre.

Atlanta’s music scene is very different from Nashville’s in every imaginable way except that carbon-based life forms make noises that they call “music” in both towns. In Nashville I was never held up by lack of the right musicians to play with. In Atlanta… well, let’s just say that it’s a good thing I play a few instruments and like recording.

I’m very busy with that, as always. I ran out of lyrics at the end of 2006 (after recording three other CDs), which has tripped up progress on the second EP but never fear; the muse has returned after a lot of anxiety and depression was (partially) diagnosed as side-effects of Atrial Fibrillation. My heart problems have only gotten worse over the last ten years but if I stay away from caffeine and chocolate I should live a long and happy life. So I need to work on that will ASAP.

Oh, dark humor!

The lyrics are about halfway finished, and then I’ll start putting vocals down. I’m particularly encouraged by the ease of recording vocals recently (the typical pitch problems have dwindled considerably), for example “Don’t Ruin It For Me” (on myspace) was written and recorded in an afternoon – the vocal is two takes put together. Normally it’s a lot more than two takes. I won’t say how much more. I recorded “Strangers” for a Dave Davies tribute CD about a week ago and the vocal for that was even easier… it might even be one continuous take. Thank goodness for that tonsillectomy – my voice has healed and stabilized and I can move on with my life.

I have a lot of surprises for 2007. I’m going to be very busy – busier still if I can find some people to play shows.

 

EP 2 progress:

marriedtothesea.com

 

Part 2: Booking shows!

I’m just popping in with some helpful information now that the balls are rolling in Atlanta and I can stop holding my breath. First, I’ve discovered that you meet musicians here by meeting musicians. I know it seems obvious, but it took me about five months. Now that you know what a genius I am, I’ll move along to more TIPS FOR MAKIN IT BIG IN NASHVEGAS.

Tip 1: To book a show, act like a psycho stalker. Remember that time when you were trying to get a date with that one girl who was out of your league and you gave her a mix tape, called her and left messages, sent a tape of 40 songs you’d written about her along with a nice letter about how you can’t live without her, talked to her friends and asked them to put in a good word, sent a safety copy of the mix tape just in case the first one didn’t make it somehow, photoshopped photos of her to include you, secretly killed her dog and made a big show of giving her a new puppy, told her current boyfriend how much she likes anal hard and often, and finally, gave her a mix tape? I mean the one where you included a bunch of songs from “Pet Sounds” because that’s the only way she’d ever really “get” you. You basically need to apply those skills to book a show in Nashville. Get used to the idea of sending multiple packages because the first one will get “lost” (thrown away immediately), calling three times a week (or twice, once you figure out the booking person’s “call hours”) with different character voices from “different people in the organization”, sending emails (not that they check their in-box ever) and also accept that you’re tailing different people. The booking person at The Boro changed four times in five months once, which almost caused me to seriously doubt my sanity. I’d like to think that the frequent booking changes at The Boro had nothing to do with me, but I’ll never know. Finally, don’t be afraid of totally freaking them out by stopping by the venue twice a week around 2pm. Your presence goes a long way toward inspiring what you ultimately need to book your show; fear.

Tip 2: Give yourself 6 months of lead time. The clubs don’t book 6 months in advance; it will take that long to warm them up. Consider it foreplay. If you have an album release show to book, start telling the club you need to book while you are still recording the album. The booking people hate you. It isn’t personal; they hate everybody that isn’t really their friend at this point. They’re tired of the overly-aggressive musicians coming around where they work all the time, and they basically book those people to get them to please stop stalking them. However, they simply ignore the people who don’t do that. I just realized that you could actually pretend to be their friend. That’s another route, but it involves a lot of bribes. Do you have time for that? Probably not. In any case, if you aren’t actually their friend, please remember that you’re dealing with people who hate their job and therefore are gigantic slackers. I guarantee that in their “office” (a closet in the club, or perhaps their bedroom; often they’re the same place) you’ll find an ever-growing pile of CD-sized bubble mailers filled with CDs, glitter and confetti, some of which date back to three Summers ago when they started booking. Keep this in mind while you’re working on staying on the legal side of stalking these people; they hate their jobs, they hate you, they just want you out of their hair. The squeaky wheel gets oiled first. It may take up to six months to get oiled though. Be prepared to re-book your gig several times, and also to have your show moved to a Monday afternoon before the club regularly opens.

Tip 3: Do their job for them. The last thing they want to do is their job, and if you come to them with a package deal (yourself and 1-3 other bands that will offer little variety but hopefully a decent number of warm bodies to buy alcohol), you’ll often get what you want. Since you have this package deal going with yourself and some other bands, why not make it into an event? And while it’s an event, why don’t you promote it as such? The more initiative you show, the more they like you. While you’re at it, offer to help the booking people out by clearing out their pile of unwanted CDs from naive bands who have less initiative than you; open all of the packages and give the CDs to your appreciative and drunk audience members. Does it suck? Who cares! Free CD! Aww, thanks.

Tip 4: Be flexible. These people have important schedules that you have to work around. It’s just how life goes. The more cooperative you are, the more likely it is that you’ll get the gig you want.

Tip 5: Disregard Tip 4; it’s total BS. F*ck these slackers. You’ll get the gig you want, WHEN you want; BE FIRM! Talk to them like you would a child. They need direction and motivation and they clearly weren’t born with either. If they had been, they’d own a club themselves, or better yet, they’d be the manager at a fast-food restaurant. You won’t find the real go-getters booking no-name acts like yourselves into their little crappy clubs, will you? So, again, be firm.

Tip 6: Apologize for your previous behavior often. Tips 1-5 don’t work all that well, to be perfectly honest. Booking a show in Nashville requires as much VooDoo as it does experience. If they don’t respond to your apology in a way that makes you feel any better, kick them really hard in the shin and run away quickly. This will earn their respect and you’ll gain a reputation for being “enigmatic” or perhaps “difficult”. Nothing says “talent” and “big draw” like being a tempermental brat. It works for tons of acts. See your entire record collection for proof.

Tip 7: I don’t know, man. Just call them and leave incoherent, tearful messages and tell them you don’t know what you’re going to do. If this doesn’t work, move to Atlanta.

Special extra tip: If they call you for a gig, it’s probably just a dive bar over by Centennial Park. This is a trap. Hang up immediately.

I hope that this has been as helpful and informative for you as it has been for me! Take care of yourselves and remember; you can’t have too much Cilantro in your Saag Paneer, but you can have too much sag in your in-ear monitors.

This is continued from Part One of the “Nashville” series. Click here to go straight to that nonsense.

Adam McIntyre defected from Nashville in May of 2006 after a ten-year stay. He currently cowers in his studio, recording music that people generally don’t want to listen to.

 

EXPERIMENTING!

First, let me say this: Per Ardua is my best work. Not just my favorite because it’s the newest, but all bullshit aside, it’s what’s for dinner. It’s a personal best; it’s the debut of my newly-improved singing voice; it’s heavier and more focused than anything I’ve ever done. I have a very hard time plugging my own music (I’ll shout about my friends’ music all day) so just in case you were wondering, I am goddamned proud of Per Ardua.

I think that being from southern Alabama stunted my musical growth somewhat. There, I said it. Montgomery isn’t a big entertainment town (there are a lot of high school kids and people over 45, but seemingly nothing in between); people stay at home and watch TV. It’s hard to find other musicians – much less challenging ones – to play with. I found a good group of guys to be in my band and we had a great time playing blues covers and doing Zeppeliny type stuff. And I don’t mean the challenging material; I’m talking about the first record, which was very easy to figure out if you can play blues. I was never asked to nor encouraged to venture beyond that. The people at our shows figured that Cloverdale Blues-Rock was as good as it got, and most of the other bands either played the exact stuff that we played or meandering jam band stuff. I mean, thank god I have roots but it would be years before I realized that there was a world beyond funky blues-rock.

When I hit the age of 20, I decided to take some drastic steps; I was sick to death of 12-bar chord progressions. I started playing chord progressions and riffs that sounded edgy, out-there. Mature. New. “Wow, that sounds Beatlesy.” “It does? Kick ass!” It turned out that my idea of futuristic was actually outdated by about 30 years. I always acknowledged that I had a long way to go before my sound wouldn’t be called retro. Each CD I’ve recorded has leapt ahead by increments of 5 years or more – “Drivin’ South” (a cassette tape released in 1996) was 1966, all the way – Yardbirds playing blues. Hell, Bluesbreakers. Superhype’s 1998 EP (which I thought was very new and on-the-edge at the time) was pretty clearly 1968-style Led Zeppelin and Byrds-influenced. My solo debut “Rockstars & Superheroes” in 2003 (recorded mostly in 2001) followed my alt-country phase and was a comically-intended homage to the glam-rock days of 1972. Then there was “Nothing Means Anything” in 2005 which was a conscious effort to leave powerpop behind, and sort of accidentally embraced it. That record is my White Album. It has a little of everything and was the moment I realized that I needed to really try harder to find myself. I was trying too hard to fit in and not trying hard enough to push myself… or something. I still don’t know. I felt at the time like it was a huge step forward, and really it was, for me. It had what every other CD I’d released was lacking, in many ways.

Then the shit really hit the fan and I decided to make an EP instead of a huge album – “Per Ardua”. I focused all of my energy into five songs rather than seventeen. Compared to “Drivin’ South” with a gulf of only ten years, it was a personal triumph. It doesn’t sound like the same guy and probably isn’t. I challenged myself at every turn to improve not only on what I thought were weaknesses but on every bit of feedback from reviewers. Yes! I read reviews, even the bad ones. Eventually. Some of the bad ones are really funny, but I’ve found that most reviewers are trying to be helpful. I have to be true to myself, but I do, I really do have a long way to go. I don’t bend to the will of anyone else – I don’t have to. But I do enjoy this game of expressing myself and knowing that with every CD I release, I grow. Everybody helps me to do that.

Which brings me to my main point: I have been dancing and clapping. The new EP is about halfway finished and for the first time ever, when I listen to the playback, I have to jump up and down, clap my hands and yell “f__ yeah! F___ YEAH!” at the end of each song. You can bang your head to it, you can dance to it, and best of all… you can do the nasty to it. Seriously. So far all of the songs are entirely distorted bass, drums and percussion. No electric guitars (so far) and (so far) it rocks way, way, way harder than anything I’ve done before. For the first time ever, I feel the excitement of having NO IDEA what I’m doing! I don’t know what I’m going to record until it happens, and as a result the song arrangements are pretty hilarious. I don’t know what the songs are going to be about, and I highly doubt that there’s going to be a concept to this CD (for the first time since Superhype) aside from “mostly bass and drums”. I guess my only goal is to not let preconceptions hold me back from doing anything and everything I want to do. Even if I fail miserably, I’ll take a huge step forward.

And I just saw the artwork for the CD cover. Kat Lamp did an amazing job – it can’t be described except with four words: hamster, space battle, owl. It will all make sense later.

I’m sorry if this got seriously long-winded but I felt like I had to say something; I never “studied” the Beatles, I never wanted to be powerpop; it’s only in retrospect that I discover that I’ve been doing something overtly retro. Given my beginnings, I have to constantly reinvent myself in order to move forward; this means that I have definite phases. This requires you to listen with fresh ears – I’ll be happy if you understand where I’ve come from but I’ll be thrilled if you don’t think of me the same way you did five years ago. Perhaps I’ve finally spoken up about this because if you’re looking for sunny pop, this next EP will not have it. It’s rock, plain and simple. I’m trying to have as much fun as possible challenging myself as a musician, and having as much fun as possible rocking way harder than you’ve heard me rock (unless you’ve heard me play with other people, or been to a live show when we were feeling particularly randy).

In short, the usual – another phase has ended, a new one has begun, I’m really excited about what I’m recording and I’m still really happy about the last CD… which is still new.

Sorry, just had to get that out there.

 

It’s Hot And You’re Gonna Need A Pool

This month I visited the Salvador Dali Museum, spent about ten days at the beach, got sunburned (against my better judgment), went to the Aquarium here in Atlanta, forced my son to turn two (against my better judgment) and lit a fire under the musical happenings in my life. Oh really? You want proof? Exhibit A: I’m going to be on television here in Atlanta. There’s a very nice music video show on cable access here (not the kind like we had in Nashville where only five people were watching, either) and they’ll be running our homemade video for “America” from the new EP next weekend. You are required by all that is holy to check this out:

“Channel Zero”
Comcast channel 24 July 15th at 10:00 PM
It’s also syndicated in Murfreesboro, TN – people in Nashville always told me that I was more of a Murfreesboro act anyway! So Atlanta and Murfreesboro residents, stay tuned for that.

Exhibit B: my third release of the year should be out in just a few weeks; Les Honky More Tonkies’ new EP “Immoral Imperative” has my lead guitar and bass work all over it. It’s not your typical southern rock; you’ll find Brian Wilson harmonies and pop hooks throughout the dirty rock band’s new release – and I think that it’s harder-rocking than even their last CD was. While I was laying down guitar and bass parts for the CD, the rest of the band were on the road – after doing a particularly Justin Hawkins-ish harmonized guitar solo I called them to play it for them and discovered that they were actually lost in Washington DC and in the parking lot at the Pentagon. I’m sure that a big green van pulling into the Pentagon parking lot at 3am looked at least a little bit suspicious.

That’s all the update you get for now. Part two of “tell us how you really feel” is right around the corner!

Adam

 

Moving, just keep moving…

Here I am in Atlanta. For two days we had no running water, for two weeks we had no internet and we still have no furniture downstairs (we do have beds) and won’t for another few weeks… but so far the setting beats the sub-suburbs of Nashville by a lot. I’m two streets over from Smith’s Old Bar, four minutes from 10 High and about six minutes from Little Five Points where I ran into Jellyfish’s bass player Tim Smith the other day (I was there for the World Party show, which was really quite good – met Karl Wallinger as well). I also found an Indian restaurant this evening that made my eyes water – not because it was hot but because it was just about the best thing I’ve ever tasted.

I have a lot of work to do to the basement to get it ready for recording but it will be a fun process. I have a few ideas for recording but ya know, I did just put out two CDs in two months. Oh? Did I forget to mention that the new fishremover CD is out? There’s a fishremover myspace page if you want to go check it out. I don’t remember the address off the top of my head, but I’m sure that it’s myspace.com/fishremover or something very much like that. I still play many if not most of the instruments in Fishremover, but you’ll see a VERY different side of me than you usually see, partially because I am not the main songwriter. So in light of all the CD releases, it’s finally time to focus more on playing gigs than recording. I’ll take my time with the studio.

I’m enjoying taking my time since I moved, since the pace all around me has sped up. I take the kid to the park every day (where children and moms regularly ask if I’m a rock star), drink thick beer on the back porch every night, read good books and become more efficient at flooding the engine of my scooter (hint, leave the choke on for a full minute after cranking it).

So if anyone would like to get me off my ass by booking some shows for me and finding new bandmates, that’d be great. Otherwise this southern humidity might ensure that I never get anything done ever again.

 

Tell us how you really feel.

Now that I’m leaving Nashville, I think it’s time that I told you what it’s like to be a musician here – fo’ reals. There are a few things that I will not miss – mostly because I’m tired of them but also partially because uh… no I’m just plain tired of them. Strap yourselves in and put yourselves in the shoes of the Nashville musicians who do well for themselves everywhere except their hometown.

Writers’ nights in Nashville are particularly terrible. They’re supposed to be the gateway to something bigger – publishing contracts, stardom – I thought of them as auditions to get into the clubs on regular nights. I’ve played and attended dozens of writers’ nights here in Nashvegas and I’m here to tell you how things usually pan out. It’s pretty great, honestly – that is, if you consider yourself a people-watcher.
You’ve been told to show up at the club promptly at 8pm to sign up to play (if you haven’t already made arrangements with the host). If you actually show up “on time” you get the feeling like you’ve shown up on the first day of school a full hour early – your reward is getting to sit in a desk at the front of the class – er, club, waiting for the host (headmaster) to show up. I’m a little tired of this metaphor, so if you’ll excuse me…
Invariably after you show up first, the host comes walking into the club 45 minutes later with a buddy songwriter. They get on the list first. You get on the list after an awkward introduction and a bit of convincing (yes I have a CD out, yes I’m invited, no I’m not just some guy who showed up) and now… the real fun begins!
Several interesting characters have now shown up. These characters are called “song-wri-ters”. Being one of these songwriters myself, I have even taken a couple classes on the matter. On the first day, my instructor said “make no mistake – the thing that all songwriters have in common is some sort of dysfunction. If we weren’t dysfunctional in some way, we wouldn’t feel the need to write songs about it; we’d express ourselves in some less-dramatic way.” A writer’s night is a beautiful illustration of this fact. Artists are supposed to have the flair for dramatics, but any songwriter is a dizzying combination of ego and theatrics. We think that the fact that we create “art” makes us special, and we demand to be treated as such. I’m no exception, but I love laughing at myself – and others – for this very thing. Usually the first writer to go on is the biggest dead weight (or biggest chance) of the evening. They do songs about their grampa, they play their songwriting exercises (“here’s a descriptive one where I never say what it’s about – guess!”), some of them even do cover songs. The other songwriters slam their beers down in an uncomfortable combination of disgust and empathy – how did such a no-talent ass-clown get on stage, and oh every songwriter needs encouragement; he may write the next big hit song and I can say that I was there when…
But the torture ends all too soon. A guy has to get up and do three songs that total 20 minutes. As he’s playing, the host tells you that you’ll be up after another writer or two. Two more writers get up to strut their stuff – some of it is genuinely brilliant but most of it is laughable. At this point you’re told again that you’ll be up after another writer or two – the host has to sneak another buddy up on stage because they have a big show to promote.

This goes on for hours, as the songwriters play and leave one by one.

Finally at 12:45 am, you play three of your songs for the inebriated host and possibly the club owner. As a songwriter, it’s kind of hard to get it up at this point. The flush of anticipation has come and gone and you have blue balls for the applause of an audience of your peers.

You might think that this would get old after the first time, but I swear that it doesn’t. You go back. Lather, rinse, repeat. Over and over you cleanse yourself of the layers of ego that surround your ability. What’s left is something harder and much more sensible – realistic expectations. You learn the trick of being proud of your songs without thinking that they make you – instead, you make them.
Or, if you like, it’s like getting used to being urinated on during job interviews. “Yes, er, I think I am more than qualified for this job position and… what are you doing?” “You’ll get used to it.”

The press here (a necessity if you’d like to let people know you exist) is a bit irritating. Most of the mags that once glorified the music scene around here have either been bought or simply went under. With them died about half of the enthusiasm for the “music scene” around here. Things are now harder for the artists on a local level. You slave away making a record, then you release it and you have to set about promoting it. You invite record reviews, write-ups of live shows, teasers for the public of what you might sound like. The papers and mags around here are more concerned with putting their staff members on the cover, honestly. Some of the hippest acts around will get press, sure. Some of the less-hip acts will get negative press. The definitively unhip acts (like me) get nothing, even if national and oversea mags have taken notice and given positive reviews. It’s a pretty exlusive little club they’ve got going on here. Tim Carroll once said of Nashville that “it’s a five year town” – you’ve got to pay your dues here for a good five years before anyone accepts you – it weeds out a lot of the riffraff, sort of like how a lot of colleges don’t allow freshmen to park on campus since a lot of those freshmen will probably drop out next year anyway. Unfortunately, that isn’t true. You either nail it here the minute you walk in the door or you probably never will. Which brings me back to the press – if us uncool cats can get it, it always carries grossly inaccurate or outdated information and a backhanded compliment.

Speaking of which, be prepared for a variety of BS with booking shows in this town – as with any other town, really. At first it seems hard, then it gets easy. Then it gets hard again. But we’ll go into all of that next time.

 

The New EP is here!

Mmmm… the sweet taste of non-defeat! I had a ridiculously busy day and came home to find a package from Headphone Treats – several handfuls of these little babies for my CD release show (April 7th at Windows on the Cumberland). The order page should be up on the site by the time most people read this and hey – if you’re looking for some background info on the disc, here ’tis.

I performed the EP entirely by myself except for two guest drummers, who added their talents to 3 of the 5 songs – Eric Stroud (of Superhype) on “Liquid Girlfriend” and “Proscription Day”, Dave Ray (The Coal Men, The Pinks) on “Together and Alone”, though he played drums on a couple songs for the EP that didn’t make the cut.

It was recorded in my home studio last summer and mixed/mastered by Jimmy Ether last fall.

The first track “Together and Alone” is probably a clear departure from anything on the first two albums, hopefully preparing the listener for a totally different experience. My Dad died, and while I wrote a lot of songs about the subject I kept all of them to myself except this one. I don’t think the world needed to hear a record’s worth of songs about my Dad dying of cancer. Maybe just one song will do.
“America” is a little romp about a near-disastrous trip to England and how we weren’t sure if we’d ever be able to get back home… trying all the while to enjoy our brief stay without the benefit of cash. Luckily our buddy Russ took care of us and we didn’t have to starve to death
It was too much excitement for our little minds to process, so this is a little song about “that whole thing”. Good luck deciphering the lyrics (bonus points for being able to tell me what A=443 means).
“Girl U Want” is one of the first songs I remember hearing as a child. Those guys were way ahead of their time (their work from 1974-1982 is my favorite). I had big plans for reworking this Devo classic but I realized at the last minute that Mark Mothersbaugh, Jerry and the boys were already master arrangers so what would be the point? Whenever Devo did a cover song, it was often unrecognizeable but instantly fun (“Satisfaction”, “Are You Experienced?”) and clearly remade in their own idiom. It would only be fitting to redo the song as I’d see fit… but no, they already did all the work for me. I chickened out. My version is basically as faithful as it gets. I read somewhere that the song was an unsuccessful single because of the deceptive placement of the beat at the beginning. People would start dancing to it and then get confused when the drums started.
“Liquid Girlfriend” is the first song that I’ve done without rhythm guitars. I’m tired of guitars always getting in the way, saturating my ears with their endless buzzsaw sounds! Thus I whipped out a family heirloom – my 1969 Baldwin Fun Machine. Yes – Fun Machine. I set the keyboards to varying stages of “cheese” and used everything improperly. It’s about a dream I had wherein people were using this new device to correct their sloppy singing without using a computer program that made everything sound artificial – the device was called the “Liquid Girlfriend”. I woke up from my dream, wrote the song, spent far too long working out the harmonies on the guitar solo and voila – a song was born.
“Proscription Day” – what if we still had public beheadings? Would it be part of the reality TV craze? Would we be “text messaging our votes”? In any case, the public are waiting to see if the condemned man is going to crack… will he? A garage door slamming at the end is a comically poor substitute for a guillotine, but you have to give the people what they want, eh?

Anywho, enjoy the new disc. Or don’t. It’s entirely up to you.
Sincerely,
Jeepers Creepers