The album’s here! An honest-to-goodness professionally-replicated CD. They look amazing!
If you’ve been following the site for awhile you’ve probably seen the different songs here grow and take shape. Well, they’re done now, and I want you to have it. As always, you can download everything I do for free from this site. You can download the completed album right now, in fact: Free Download of “Mostly About Ferns.”
But if you want to get your hands on a real CD (packaged in fold-out digipaks of recycled paperboard with a recycled plastic tray) you can support my work and buy a copy. It’s easy. I go through PayPal on the pay-what-you-will model, with some low-key incentives of course. Here’s the deal: these CDs come shrinkwrapped, but if you pay/donate $20 or more for a CD, I will open the shrinkwrapping for you. Then I will autograph the CD for you, or for whomever you wish.
This is the latest fractal from my brother and the Fractal Foundation. It premieres tonight, at the Fractal Foundation’s one gazillionth sold-out show at the planetarium in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I had an awful lot of fun doing this music, so much so that I think I’ll dedicate a Song Evolution post to the topic next week.
This is an old song, written for her when she was just a little thing. Now she’s two. She said “Happy Burday You!” and blew out her own candles. It goes quick, I tell you.
The first time I heard Iron & Wine, I was riding at night in someone’s rented white van, heading to the Nevada desert. Since then the music of Sam Beam has had a tendency to work best with me in the dark, and it’s our music of choice if we’re traveling by night.
This is the only Iron & Wine song I know how to play. I heard it for the first time last weekend, fell in love, and learned it over the course of the week. The image of a house burning down before your eyes really resonates with me right now. Our house isn’t burning in the literal sense, but we are packing up and moving for the first time in seven years. Boxes, chaos, memories. Excitement and worry. That strange otherness, the feeling of being outside your routine, of being in fact outside yourself, as though watching your body from the side, as in a dream. That’s what I tried to weave into my interpretation of Sam Beam’s breathy, amazing song.
I have one more song to record for the Fractal Foundation and then I’m taking apart my studio. It feels like the end of something wonderful. Download Free
This was a song that never went anywhere, written for a video game that doesn’t exist. I guess you could consider it practicing. In writing the song I tried to convey the sense of an exotic adventure just opening up before you. I was thinking of travel to foreign lands under a faked passport, masked betrayal, no one to trust, and just barely making it by your wits alone. Also, leaping from rooftop to rooftop. Can’t do without the rooftop leaping.
The song is designed to loop and was intended as the opening song.