I fuck and fight WITH nyc. -my new album, the people involved, NYC and love.

"new york is impossibly handsome
impossibly bright
but his hands are too busy
his shirts are too shiny and tight
on fridays he dances to metronomes
so he can keep counting
all night all night all night" -Dayna Kurtz

My album is almost done. After 2.5 years, 15 thousand dollars (seriously, I know!), one important relationship, recording certain compositions then rejecting them and then recording them again, working with Joe Bass on exactly HOW to capture the sounds over a 3 year period, I am of course now exhausted yet energized, broke and in debt, heart broken but elated, but.....

Jeff Lipton of Peerless Mastering is mastering "Sonic New York". He's the guy who mastered 69 Love Songs for Magnetic Fields and has worked with them allot. He is seriously brilliant. I thought the mastering was done but there is a touch to much high end in the sound for my taste so he is going to have another go at it at the end of next week. This process is slow and painful but good. Mastering is still a bit of mystic art to me but I am being obsessive that this whole thing be a masterpiece. Seriously. You will hear this album and you will think-this is one of the most intense and beautiful things I have ever heard.

Evan Rosen, who is a really really talented young designer, and I are going back and forth on the cover art and the design. His work for the cover is really spot on and absolutely captures the feeling of seeing the mythic city from Brooklyn. Everyone I've been showing it to loves it. He went ahead and made another deeper concept version which I didn't like for this project as much but had great ideas in it. I am finding that allot of peoples initial instincts are right. The way the engineers first hear the mix before they overly tweak is right.

This of course being said by a guy is tweaking allot himself but...I have been right so far. I kow what makes my work read, even if I am discovering some of that as I go.

The design is a work of art, it featuring Evan's work and photos by my father. You will see. I am even considering NOT putting a bar code on it because really, what is the point these days? When will I be selling this retail? If it gets picked up by a label after the first 1000 copies then they can deal with it. I am requesting they not shrink wrap it, I will sign every copy.

I don't want this to be a throw away object. I want the document that is this work to seem like a small piece of wonder in your hands and incredible to your ears.

This album was created because sound engineer Joe Bass Dejarnette and I lived in a house together for 3 years and he was the first person to figure out how to capture my sound by putting a dry stereo pair of mice acoustically near my mouth while recording and putting maybe 5 percent into the recorded sound against the mics. He got this trick from something they used to do with Jimmy Hendrix's guitar.

Brilliant, it somehow made all my crazy sounds present and real. We had to learn to record human beat box (Adam Matta!) and work with tuba (Oren Marshall and Don Godwin), we worked with my two favorite singers in the U.S. Aimee Curl and Rhiannon Giddens from the Carolina Chocolate Drops. I also worked with Don Godwin on some of the recording and on mixing. On "Dreamland" (which will be my bonified summertime regional NYC hit) Sammy Rubin from Project Jenny Project Jan did the production, he was VERY VERY generous with his time and gave me the gift of his amazing artistic sense of arrangement.

Sarah Alden and Kerthy Fix were the albums constant critics and could hear the mixes with fresh ears. Meeta Gawande invested the initial amount that got the project started, Larisa Fuchs lent me money when I had to get my teeth fixed and all my money was going into the record, my Kickstarter friends and fans were very very important, and Jim and Sandy Shirey pitched in when I absolutely needed it and of course my composition gigs and touring gigs paid for it. My former partner for much of the creation of this album Lizzie Wort was a constant inspiration and encouraging force. She is in the music.

The album will be done just in time for tour with Amanda Palmer and Jason Webley (Jason told me "YOU HAVE TO HAVE THIS DONE BY TOUR!" and offered to put up the money and put it on his label to get it printed. He really supports me in a lovely way) and Amanda of course is the only artist at her level of success to go. "I know what to do with this guy! I'll put him onstage to rock the shit out of the audience." I am very thankful for Amanda. I am also thankful for programmer Bill Bragen, party maven Larisa Fuchs and listings czar Jeff Stark who have supported me during my time here in NYC. Shit I gotta stop thanking people or I'll never get to the end of this note.


This album will have cost 15K to 16K to make after the first printing and with the website, maybe more. Fucking what the fuck. How did that happen? Well I flew in a tuba player from London and then the airline charged him $700 to get his tuba back to the UK for starters, I'm not kidding. This is ALLOT of money for a fairly unknown artist who chose the lucrative profession of avant-garde circus composer.

...What have I made? Well in the end you have to please yourself. I have made an album that if I discovered, not being me, that would make me fall in love, fall in love with the music and with the city the album is about and the people performing on it. I have made an album that would make me jealous of it's raw innovation. SONIC NEW YORK is surprising and beautiful and very very dirty and real.

So there you go. I am at a new point of life and this album, this work, this group of 17 compositions about and inspired by New Rock City is the baby I'm birthing at the end of it.
In the end, this whole thing, living in New York City, struggling to make a living doing something that has a limited commercial appeal. Kissing a lover on tope of a building, eating at Punjabi's amid turbaned Taxi cab drivers while listening to Banghra for first time, having long conversations with incredibly vibrant complex friends, walking into the sea with The Hungry March Band at the end of the Mermaid Parade. eating in the covered mall on Arthur Avenue, the honor of knowing so many honest and ferociously talented people...this whole New York thing has been about love. It's a fucking act of love.

I don't "fuck and fight in New York City" I fuck and fight WITH New York City!

I know am lucky in this life. I know that. I know I am a bit of an uncompromising crazy fucker about what I chose to do in life and how I chose to do it. I think it has made my life harder in some ways and easier in others. I don't give a shit about certain things that if I gave a shit about would help my career (seriously to a fault). I just do what I want and by some fucking miracle keep landing on my feet.

So, right now at 5.55 in the morning on an insomniatic Sunday morning I love you all. I really do, I mean everybody. I love this city, as much as I hate the bitch, and as likely as I am likely to leave it soon-I love New York.

Cheers,
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