The Album

I don't want to forget completely about the CD, it's very important to me and I wouldn't want people to think otherwise. I started working on it this past summer. I had five or six songs that were so good they constituted momentum. Just a few more and I'd have a whole album. This won't take long at all.

The idea of an album has become confused lately. So much is strewn about the Web in the atomized form of individual songs, if even an entire song, that I wonder if it matters to have an album at all. I referred to these songs as one-sided singles to my friend Alan and he lit right up. I don't want to spiral into nostalgia on this, like I've aged well and I have a special understanding of the value of an attention span. You know the rap. - You kids! When I was your age our records had two sides for a reason! People had principles and gave a sweet damn if your songs made sense one after the other! Today you groogle it on your internets or some damn thing and get just exactly what you want to hear without having to work for it! Where's the integrity in that? Now what the hell did I do with my glasses...? -

No, I don't want to be like that.

Sure, it's just atavistic sexual imprinting, but I won't abandon an art form that gathers songs into a physical object. I naturally think of songs being together in a collection. An album, named during the era when a bunch of 78rpm records were collected in a heavy, fragile book that looked like a photo album or an industrial era scrapbook. At the close of the reign of that demented troglodyte Reagan, when the object seemed to have settled for all eternity into a thirty-three and one third "long playing" vinyl record, it became suddenly obsolete. Our album collections devolved into long, sad rows of unplayed dust-catchers waiting to be escorted to the thrift store or the curb a few at a time to free up shelf space or to avoid having to lug them up the steps for the next move. The CD's that replaced them were small, precise, less able to contain the emotions that the music inside shook loose. I love the online world with the instant availability of anything, or at least anything that will fit into a computer, but I do still love holding an album cover on my lap with both hands while hearing fifteen or twenty undisturbed minutes of music spool off of the turntable.

I won't even discuss the sound of vinyl here because I don't want to start a fight.

So, though it will be digital, it shall be an album. It will be fine. I don't have a functioning band at the moment, so it will be me and just the stuff I really need. A uke, some percussion maybe. I can't do without a guitar now and then. Must have bass. But that's it. Let's not overproduce it. Not even one trumpet. Solo album, intimate. Maybe too intimate. Gonna be an album, obsolete before it's even finished. Behind the curve and out of the running. But deep from the heart.