O Holy Night

A few Year-end Wrap-up posts, here's the first:

Back on December 1st, Absolutely Kosher premiered its first annual holiday special, in tribute to those holiday tv specials of old, featuring new videos of Christmas songs by most of the current awesome roster - Edinburgh School for the Deaf, New Bad Things, Nonconnah, Okay, Saiko Ryusui (of Brabrabra), and Spaceheads...and me, (car colors).

I covered O Holy Night (as did Okay, wonderfully), a newly mixed version of the song that I'd done a few years ago for Al Crisafulli's then radio show, Signal to Noise, on WFDU. It's the way I used to do it live, connecting to the Outro guitars of one of the songs of this next album, then changing a note (C to C#) to modulate to D, put in a loop, drop down an octave and voila..song's iffy backbone.

The video though is all-new and took me about a week, believe it or not, culling footage from hard drives, figuring out the video editing app (Davinci Resolve), getting an edit together that felt right with the music. It's really a home movie - mostly kids, stuff from my life, the dog appears briefly - but probably the best one I'll ever make and I'm actually disproportionately proud of it (ha).

You can see that here.

And the whole AbKosh holiday special - highly recommended - is here.

One last note, the holiday videos will only be up through December, then carefully wrapped in newspaper & placed lovingly into the same cardboard boxes we've had for years to spend the next eleven months in the attic...

“Old Death” released unto the hideous world

The time I've waited to say this has been...long. And this is the long version of that...

The new single, "Old Death" (b/w "And It's All Guns & Arrows (alt. take)" and "I'll Bear"), my first music in two decades, is live now, released, out today. You can buy or stream it here on Bandcamp. It's also now findable on your favored streaming platform near you.

“Old Death” is, like the rest of the album, sort of a sequel to the meadowlands before it and like that one, is about time, how one chooses to spend it, what those choices cost. That means for me, the song (and album) is also about making the album itself. It's about death, maybe obviously, but it's really about my dumb life. And because so much of that life, over the last decade especially, lined up weirdly well to the Odyssey, it's all sorta hung on Homer's narrative framework (unlike say, “Ulysses”, in my case it’s all very non-fictional/auto-biographical).

However like Ulysses”, every song is written in a stream-of-consciousness mode. Or for me, really more of a stream-of-memories: that time this happened, that other-time-this-reminds-me-of happened etc. Hence, the parenthetical dating throughout the lyrics as those memories pop in&out.

So basically like, unlike, like and then unlike Ulysses” - ha.

"Old Death", serves both as the album-in-miniature - literally, most of its six-or-so non-repeating sections sorta correspond to other songs on the album - and as a pretty good example of how&why the album as a whole was put together over 10 years of solo work. In one sense, that's sorta just practical, work-like, even architectural - rooms are added, hallways extended, windows bricked over, additions torn down, entrances and exits opened, rooms painted, paint scraped away, re-painted…until it feels livable.

But in another, on this album I became sorta hell-bent on using form (& arrangement) to move through individual songs (& the album as a whole), up&down hills, more like how films unfold, as a way of contrasting how time feels like it moves (to me) - sometimes with things changing all at once in songs (school years end, jobs end, relationships start, children arrive) and sometimes slowly evolving one phase into another or simply overlapping, as on the album as a whole (youth folds into middle age, middle age gradually into old, music as a career dissolves into at-home parenting even as the parenting defffffinitely starts all-at-once - ha)

"And It's All Guns & Arrows (alt. take)" is, as the name goes, an alternate take of one of the songs on the album. I only recorded the basics in 2021, finishing it this past summer, and is more how I've done it live/solo - slower & only the first half. "I'll Bear" is a song I demo'd for this last wrens record (in 2010, 2012 or so) but put on the discard pile, resurrecting it last summer when a friend swung by to overdub drums. Which speaking of...

I’m joined here by Jeff Lipstein (original wrens drummer(!), Mercury Rev, Sandy Bell etc.), who played and recorded the drums on “Old Death” - fantastically. And on “I'll Bear” by Bill Swartz (Nectarine, Ultraswiss etc.), drumming ditto-ly fantastically...on drums in our basement on eterna-loan from the exceedingly generous Scott Steinhardt.

The video, directed & edited by Kyle Garrett (at Seven Summits) and beautifully filmed by cinematographer Aaron Fagerstrom, is  honestly, incredible - Kyle only wrote me a few weeks ago, we hit it off, and between him filming & editing on the West Coast and me filming myself (begrudgingly) here in Brooklyn, he whipped out the whole thing in like a week. It's simply great. I'm very proud of it even as, and maybe because, I had not too much to do with it. Wait, I did the soundtrack for a video...! ha.

And you can bask in the halo of its glory here.

Lastly, a giant single-release-day thank-you to my infinitely patient and cool wife; our three youngsters; Cory for putting this out with me; Matt for making that possible at this nifty level; Jeff & Bill for the drumming (and Scott Steinhardt for the actual drums in our basement that Bill used); Kyle (and Aaron Fagerstrom) for the video; Alan Douches for the mastering; Josh Pfeffer for the art direction; and Amanda Pitts for running the press.

And thank you - truly - for listening.

charles

HappyAnnounceDay!

There have been an awful lot of things that have come in the way of this, over a whole lot of years, and so while I sorta still can't believe it... officially, after 20 short years (and 3 weeks, 6 days, and some hours), welcome to AnnounceDay, Raggedy Man!

the basics:

So let me get right to the good parts, then we can wade into the iffier waters of the backstory...

I've renamed the new project Car Colors.

The first single, Old Death, will be out Nov. 17th but is available for pre-order on 12" vinyl (w/ two b-sides) as of this very morning(!) and you can do that HERE!

The new album is out early 2024 (more on that as we get closer).

And all of that is via the legendary...Absolutely Kosher Records (!), (yes, as in they-who-released-the last-album,-the-Meadowlands (see Backstory below)) now newly revived & relaunched after a 12-year hiatus and just in time for both their 25th label anniversary and our first Bandcamp Friday together.

the fancies:

We've also got a bunch of related nifty things up sleeves:

• album will begin to rollout after the holidays/new year with a couple of singles-to-come, a video or two, the usual..

• There will be number of limited-edition versions of the vinyl album with hand-silkscreened covers by me, which will be available in a couple places (mostly a couple friends' stores)

• an Atmos v. of the album (after regular record release), and if it pulls off, an accompanying 'live' Atmos listening party at a theatre near you (ok, actually just near me).

• There will be NFT's of a select number of alternate versions of songs (I know they have fallen - or plummeted, really - out of fashion in the last year or two but I'm still really excited by them, by some cool under-utilized opportunities they present.

• the art project of 'orig' v. of album (yes, I'll be trying to show, and theoretically sell, the 'album' as an art piece - see my whole years-long 'Originals vs Copies' thing) & I'll be doing that with the esteemed (and ok, just plain cool) artist, Beth Campbell

• And a few other things that are still in the hashing-out

• More on all that after the single, after the new year..

about the Old Death single...

I'll go into more about Old Death, this single - as a song, about the lyrics, about how it's an invocation and a stand-in for the album in miniature etc. - before the Nov. 17th release date. Ditto the two b-sides, And It's All Guns & Arrows (alt. take), which will be on the album (along with the original v. of that song), and I'll Bear, which is single-only.

But in the meantime, just a quick hat tip to the drummers, Jeff Lipstein on Old Death (he recorded his drums too) and Bill Swartz on I'll Bear (we recorded him in our basement with two mics and Bill's iPhone, so technically, Bill ALSO recorded his drums - ha). Both are old friends, both drum takes are amazing, and more on both later as well..

Why putting it out now..chiefly, once we'd started working on this all last winter (more on that immediately below), part of the plan became to relaunch Absolutely Kosher with this as the first release. And part of that plan was so that Cory could take some advantage of the remaining months of this, Absolutely Kosher's Silver 25th anniversary as a label. He's got a lot of wonderful releases & re-releases lined up: the awesome Sybris, releasing their first new single, Dead on 10/20, albums by Edinburgh School for the Deaf and Brabrabra later in Oct., a label podcast, a holiday TV special, a series of box sets..it's happening.

Then the Car Colors album in early '24 (more details to follow).

the backstory...

After the break-up of the band in 2021, I spent that summer & fall scrambling to figure out what I was going to do for this record both label-wise (staying on Sub Pop, vs another label vs self-release), lining up things like a publicist (esp. if I was gonna put it out myself) etc.. That winter (so that's winter 2021-2022), I arranged with various friends to re-do the drums on my songs since they were the only things I hadn't played. And while those drum recordings came out wonderfully (more on those heroes later), I had been already pretty exhausted & unhealthy long before the album even finished in 2019, before the protracted band break-up over the next couple of years (for a good idea on how bad it had all been, see yesterday's post on mental health). And so by that spring (2022), I sorta just lost any final momentum and gave up.

Yeah, I half-heartedly mixed a couple songs, I wrote/recorded a couple more to extend the original eight songs into a full album...but I had stopped (and was actually happier in the non-music stuff than I'd been in years). During that time, I also sort of punted any decision with Sub Pop - to be clear, putting a record out with a label of their size, stature, resources & history was literally what I had worked decades toward and the idea of walking away from that was incredibly hard for me. But I also think I knew that with how everything had played out, that I would have to leave.

Things continued apace into the fall - so that's last fall, a year ago, 2022 - when discussions began between the other former-wrens & myself, Cory (he of Absolutely Kosher), along with our former management, trying to hash out a plan to re-release the meadowlands for its 20th anniversary (which just passed a few weeks ago).

As those talks broke down, it was clear we would not be re-pressing/re-releasing the album but there was good that came out of it - among other things, I was reminded what a good, and crucially, honest person Cory was. I was also reminded that we were able to work together well & get things done not because we agreed on everything, but because we could disagree without rancor, and figure whatever out. So I asked him if he'd be interested in reviving Absolutely Kosher, which he'd had on hiatus since 2011, to help me put this record out. I figured we'd do it on Bandcamp, maybe press some cassettes or piano rolls, and we could both go out on a high note, as it should've been all along, together. That was my pitch anyway (ha). Sweetly, he was very moved and agreed, so I wriggled out of my SubPop contract right before the holidays that December. But cooler, once he hit the ground running after the new year, people seemed to come out of the woodwork to offer him (and by extension, me) advice on the changing label-scape, distribution, investment etc. It all just seemed to back up my hunch that this was the right thing all along (following hunches being sort of a late-blooming thing I'm putting stock in). And his momentum carried me along with it. I went from having thrown in whatever towel one throws twenty years after a game ends at the end of last year, to here, as we close out the last few months of this year, more optimistic and excited about music, about putting out this music, than I have been in a loooong time.

And I wouldn't be doing it if he hadn't said yes.

the MH Post

I've thought about this, about posting this, thousands of times. Probably quite literally - once or twice a day, even now, and so over the last say, 5 years esp., = roughly 3,000x (forewarned: it's also almost that many words - ha). And every single time I have thought about it, I've also wondered if I would have the whateverwithal to do it, but as I type this, I think I'm finally there...

So the "MH" in the title of this post is Mental Health, and it's telling because that's even how I labeled the doc on my computer, MH Post, almost like it was code not only for things I don't wanna talk about, but for things I don't even wanna see in myself. Which I guess, brings me to why I am talking about it & about my own experience with it over the last decade esp...

why doing:

First, it's not about me per se, and I'm actually not putting it out there for the hug-mojis (truly appreciated as those are). I'm actually doing really fine now these last few years, for a lot of reasons. Truly.

But I know that there are a lot of people out there who are struggling, who continue to, struggles similar to these, to mine. I can see it (or think that I can) in some of the people I meet or already know, in family or in friends, in other people in music etc.. But I also know that I miss the signs too, or miss spotting the extent of it all, as w/ one of my brothers who we lost during the pandemic due in part to exactly these same sort of struggles. At the same time, and I can't tell for sure, I have a feeling that maybe people that meet or know me have no idea what's going behind the visor, that I've had similar problems (I really, if I'm honest, have no idea at all how I come across - it could be that my deals are completely self-evident - maybe none of us do..?).

So if my sharing some of this can help anyone at all, and possibly go in some small measure towards removing even just a little/more of the stigma around all this, then this feels like my one chance and avenue to put some good, something positive, out there in the world.

And sure, I’ve done benefit shows etc. for various causes, which is doing good in the world. And I know one could say that even just making & releasing music is doing good - and I agree in general on the vital value of art. But I also know that there's some vestigial part of me, sad as it sounds, that still likes when people say&write nice things about the music or clap at shows - baby happy! And I want to be able to do something good that doesn't involve, in short, charles-applause as payment.

why now:

And so only doing it now, not really as part of an album rollout, but partly because due to that album rollout, this is the probably-brief period in which I might have the most eyes on it, where it might do that most good (and partly because I'm only now working up the courage to do so). So using the opportunity with whatever attention is shone this way in the brief period of prep for the album release, to be able to say, 'this has happened to me too. You're not the only one, even as I know it can feel like that'.

so in my case...

root causes:

In my case, the stresses that led here were compound, a combination of poor choices playing out (both in career-life in general (music, music-as-career, band stuff) and this album-recording specifically), in combination w/ personality, personal history, my own over-packed set of internal Tourister baggage etc..

I know the myeloma drugs, esp. the steroids I was on for the first year or two of treatment, def. did not help (in hindsight, I also think I may have been more freaked, denially so, about that whole thing, in a way that I didn't actually feel day-to-day at the time. I was pretty upbeat about it all then - and now - it just didn't really affect me. In fact it made me almost happy to go into treatment every Friday because it meant I had an out on having to work on the record&music! You know your career/life choices are not going well, or that you've fallen into doing it all wrong, when the day spent doing cancer stuff is the one you look fwd to each week - ha.

After years of the stress of the album-making going badly, and working that around the at-home parenting (i.e. working too late into the night), things reached something of a give-point. It's oddly hard for me to remember exactly when, I think because all of this progresses so incrementally or at least did in my case. But I know the 2017-2018 school year was key - that's the year our youngest-of-three started pre-k, which meant that for the first time since 2008, I had the house to myself and a fairly consistent & solid 5-hour day, 5 days a week to work (just a quick aside about the album (so about me), the bulk of the final music you'll hear on it is from school years, fall 2017 to spring 2019). But what I hadn't counted on in having the house to myself, was a profound depression rolling in like a clumsy scene change in a school play. Or maybe it was having home to myself, and knowing the babies were quickly becoming not-babies and were already gone into the schooling-industrial complex, to never fully come back, that allowed a pot that had been simmering to boil over.

So to the point above, in my case, for years, how I spent my allotted time & efforts was in making music, one ridiculous record actually, and that served both as an escape from, and a cause of, a veritable tasting menu of mental/emotional health issues (depression, self-loathing, self-harm, ending-it-ideation, etc.).

the particulars:

It started fairly small and harder for me to spot at the time. For a couple years, I went nowhere that wasn't the four-block loop running from our house to our children's grade school and back again..pretty literally, 360-some days/year.

Later it became returning home to hours on the couch after the school drop-offs, often crying out the morning. Tellingly, I fell into the habit of 'rewarding' myself with one episode of the Twilight Zone (orig. series, I'm not an animal) before setting up mic's to record or whatever. I'd google "Twilight Zone Episodes" to check the original air-date of each and find one that corresponded with that day's date (there were five TZ seasons, so there's usually one that lines up, or close enough, esp. during the school-year since tv shows generally didn't air in the summers back then). And I'd reflect on all the say, October 4ths that had happened since, most of which I was alive for, what I'd done with them etc. (Oct. 4th, 1963 being the classic "Steel" episode, by-the-by).

After watching, I also took to reading up on that day's episode (Wikipedia or IMDB) and to find that almost all of the actors, many of whom for which that ep. of Twilight Zone was career apogee, were dead was of course not surprising. But somehow learning that many/most of them died decades after that zenith, many/most right near Hollywood, only made things worse as I pictured them waiting by the phone for another 40 years, for the call from their agent that another/better offer had come in. Keeping at it, like a Bissell on a wrens record - ha. I'm sure it wasn't like that, that they each had full rich lives (god, I hope) but that's how it played to me due to - and that sad routine as well as anything shows - where my thinking was at then.

At the worst of it, I was engaging in what I guess I can only bring myself to half-name as 'ending-it ideation’, and I enjoyed the sweets of self-harm (when life comes to shove I’m apparently given to self-punching, like the office scene from Fight Club except I don’t leave with a full severance package and a computer).

the whole thing in one bonkers paragraph:

At some point, sort of at the tail-end of the worst of it (so maybe around 2019 when work on the album was finally finishing..?), someone asked what the album was about. I just came across my answer the other day, looking for something else, and it encapsulates my complete panicked mania at the time, why it was all so hard and took so long, and the toll it took mental health-wise, financially etc.:

It's also not a bad new band-bio...

"..if your goal (dear listener) was to ridiculously try to make the absolute best thing you could do, in your whole life, a recording in this case, and better than everyone else making them (that you've been positioned to unwittingly compete with for attention/money/etc.), and you didn’t start until your late-40s and it took into your mid-50s to finish…like a novel…and pursued against most current stylistic standards…and did it at-home, on pro-sumer gear, completely by yourself but simulating the interaction of a whole band that wasn't there, playing a song that never happened, in a magical room that doesn't exist, (except in the speakers), piece by dumb piece...and having to undo most of every single week's progress because it wasn’t actually working musically...filling hundreds-to-thousands of gigabytes of hard-drive space with failed versions en route, because you knew going in (and confirm over & over along the way) that you’re not talented - not really - and instead rely on plain dumb mule work...and that that comic amount of labor is making you miss your children growing up right in front of you, even as you're the at-home parent, but an exhausted & therefore lousy one much of the time due all of this, because you’re busy trying to make crappy rhymes in your head or re-do the chord progression to the songs ABOUT missing those children growing up, while they’re actually climbing the playground right in front of you as two-years-olds (now ten-) or whatever...the all-or-nothing just as you’ve always done…and taking the ext. hard drive & headphones on every single family vacation for 10 years to “get precious work done”...all while making no money on any of this, year in&out, and while still incurring pretty real med-expenses as your spouse foots the bill for your hobby-goal (and everything else)...but with that classic music industry carrot of an eventual payday that always comes "right after THIS round of work…no, really"…while packing on a good 25-30 lbs. due all that sitting at the recording desk...all of which leads you down a mental health decline that humiliatingly culminates in the last couple years w/ self-harm, and for the first time, actual ending-it ideation on the couch...

…would you do it? Would you keep at it to the end?

Well...would ya, punk?

haa…that’s what the record’s about."

(that's supposed to be a Dirty Harry quote/joke at the end).

but i'm fine now..

I should restate that I'm doing fine now, great even, increasingly over the last four years or so.

Part of that is due to work stuff (i.e. the record done and that no longer governing my life in the same way) and part is getting out of what might be somewhat unkindly but not inaccurately called a bad relationship. And part is no doubt the lack of steroids. Seriously, young people...the drugs.

But part is that much of the way back for me coincided with the start of lockdown in the beginning of the pandemic. So even as so many people had the hardest time of their lives, between isolation and losing loved ones, while we had both of those too, my world during those first three months was completely reset into a recurring Groundhog's Day of routine and repetition, very quickly an increasingly happy one, of getting the children on&off Zoom classrooms etc., all going to bed at the same time (i.e. me not staying up late for precious 'work'), that completely recalibrated everything for me, or at least started that process.

outro:

So there it is. Now you know. When we meet, you'll know, and it may be in the back of your mind. If so I hope it's because life is, or can be, exceedingly difficult and you've felt that too (just hopefully in not-too-terrible ways) and you recognize in me, another just like you and that we're all in this together.

I think I'll hand off the closing words to John Richards, the KEXP person who many of you prob. know, and his ever-message which I think about often, 'you are not alone'.

And you aren't.

the "Week I've Waited For For About 20 Years" post

Hey, welcome to the "Week I've Waited For For About 20 Years" post -  ha. Nothing major here quite yet, in this post/tweet per se, but here's what's coming up this week:

This Friday, I'll  be announcing the new 'band'/project (and so new social  media(s)/website), new label, new record and 1st single, along with a  bunch of nifty related goods&projects etc. all of which I'm sorta  bamboozled are actually happening, but of which I'm very - and  increasingly - psyched.

And the vinyl of that first single (b/w two b-sides no less) will be available to pre-order Friday as well. Bonkers, I know. This also happens to be the next official Bandcamp Friday, and after all these  years of watching from sidelines, I've gotta admit that I'm more than a  little happy to be participating.

In the meantime, I'll be posting a few related things Tues-Thurs. this week  (mental health stuff, finally addressing the band break-up a cool two years later (albeit fairly briefly), a couple other things), not so much as part of any album rollout but more while I briefly have folks' attention.

Assuming that's of limited interest (which it prob. should be..ha), see you Friday...

And thanks as always,

charles