I honestly didn't know if I could make this record. A couple years back I'd hit a creative cul-de-sac and some people I loved died and I sort semi-retired to work on a book and do a some political volunteer work in a new town in a new state overrun by mean-spirited Koch-bankrolled Tea Party zombie hordes. But, if you make songs, it's tough to do all that without some songs and, maybe moreso, some beats insinuating themselves into your brain. Especially after we lost. Especially when everywhere I looked just looked kind of bleak. So about this time last year, I started just putzing around with a new computer and some of the bells and whistles that came with it. Then I added a few more, and some kickass friends helped me shape things into a makeshift studio here in my East Side apartment. I didn't know anything about engineering other than working with some pretty esteemed talents on my first six studio records, but there was a learning curve to it and some of the technology, if you know a few things, lends itself to trial-and-error. I initially experimented with some of my favorite songs because I'd always wanted to try to translate them to my -- whatever you call it -- idiom, then I started making some demos of some new songs. But as I refined the tracks, something started happening: They weren't GREAT, but they were getting . . . not bad-ish? So I consulted my musical friends and kept trial-and-erroring, scrapped guitar takes, tweaked rhythm tracks, borrowed mics, redid vocals, and little bit by little bit, they started sounding better than not bad-ish -- I think, I hope -- and got me mulling putting them all together as an album. It took a year of working on it in my spare hours, doing all the parts except for the lead guitar dubs invaluably contributed by Brandon Parkhurst and Pete Mancini, and mixing and mixing and mixing, and consulting, and mixing again until it became this thing you're looking at. Then a bunch of beautiful people helped me get it processed and printed and mastered via a crowdfunding thing on Indiegogo.com in the spring of 2013, and here we are. I'm basically a lone guy with a guitar these days, so what might be a bit strange is that these are band tracks and continue the sort of big multi-instrument power-pop/roots rock-meets-Phil Spector sound I started working on with my first solo records. That's because that's how I heard these songs as I conceived them, and how I "re-imagined" the covers, and I wanted to be true to that sonic idea, because that kind of thing, I think, makes a better record overall Track A-to-Track Z. What my Indiegogo friends and loved ones also helped me do, however, and what sales of this record will also, is fund the project after this, where I will strip things down and simplify everything in taking a new look at some of the songs I've written over the years, as designated by my patrons. Anyway, for now, I'm sad, and angry, and existential, and horny as hell, and periodically blissful, and I still wish people would think about stuff rationally a little more and be nicer to other people, and I think we all deserve better and owe it to our neighbors to be so. There's no fancy philosophy or theology to that, it's just how we make things suck less. And that, as it's done for twenty years, wound up informing some songs I wove into a rock & roll record. If you decide to buy it, I hope to hell you like it, since that is the point of this sh*t. Thanks for taking a look.