was at home, in my little music-room (calling it a ‘studio’ sounds pretentious. I made ‘The Tinkerer’ and ‘LOWER’ on the laptop on which I am typing this and there ain’t no ‘drum room’ in my house), figuring out how to use all this stuff that had been sitting here at my disposal for YEARS. ’The Tinkerer’ was about creating a whole new thing from bits and pieces of what was already there, just like Dr. Frankenstein zapping life into dead body parts… …or Afrika Bambaataa playing ‘breaks’ in the park… …or Jimi Hendrix utilizing the ‘mistake’ of feedback to make a guitar sound like a dolphin. …or Andy Warhol realizing that those soup cans might look cool presented differently. You get the idea by now…I think I’m Nikolai Tesla, yo. Art is science, science is art. I didn’t realize I was starting ‘LOWER’ when I started it. That’s kinda how it works, I write a few tunes…and a few weeks later, I’m looking at a batch of songs for a project. The project then begins to define itself as I follow where the spirit takes me to make the music. The whole time I was crafting what would become ‘LOWER’, I was listening to (and studying) David Bowie. I’d bang out the rare new release here-and-there, but would always go back to the Bowie. I bought pretty much all his studio albums and absorbed them, totally enjoying the process of discovering this ‘new’ classic artist. It was ‘new’ to me; obviously, I was familiar with his work and had a singles collection, but this was my first time delving into the albums and the characters and mythology he created. It was pretty awesome, yo, pretty damn awesome. Maybe I can be that for someone else; I sure enough have the discography…and I’m still adding on and growing. I found the focus of my album at some point during that year. I had recorded about 10 songs at that point. Once I knew what I wanted to do, I kept writing, remixing, producing, adding on…I ended up with about 35 songs to pick from for ‘LOWER’. I had the album down to 19 tracks up until about a week ago, when the process of resequencing required me to actually cut some tracks. Sometimes, you hafta cut things away to get to what you’re really trying to do. Now, I’m there, man. I took the bandages off and realized I was ‘The Thin Beige Duke’. All the Bowie, the science-fiction, ‘space’, the sounds, the soul, the synths, the FONK…it’s there. ‘The Tinkerer’ was The ‘Kid ‘making a man’. ‘LOWER’ is the soundtrack to a movie about that very man building a spaceship in his back yard. (I don’t wanna give it away, but the spaceship actually ends up working…) I guess the next move is to get the finished product to you, huh? Word…I can’t wait and we’re tryna make that happen asaptually…