MP3 Teejay. - Preliminary Division

Alternative Pop for the Thinking Man.

14 MP3 Songs
ROCK: 80's Rock, ELECTRONIC: Pop Crossover



Details:
Although I've been recording and playing since 1982 as both a solo artist and a member of (one may say too many) bands, I've never had the opportunity to sit down and outline my past. With the release of Preliminary Division, coupled with new vectors in music distribution brought on by the Internet, I guess I have that chance now.

Preliminary Division is a compilation of songs from two previously-released albums ("Theory and Escape" and "After the Crush"). For the most part, the songs were written, played, and produced by myself, recorded in my own studio, over a time span from 1988 to 1998.

The world in the 90's was filled with promise. My studies of Cosmological Physics were forcing me to consider the world in ways I never had before, and working in the band Brompton's Cocktail was providing me an outlet for playing music which made no demands on my own songwriting.

I worked at a nightclub, where nightly exposure to the (as yet) unsullied mantra of hip-hop added new and interesting "flavas" to the possibilities of music. These were the heady days, before the Superconducting Supercollider was cancelled, when I still believed we could return to the moon, and search for God, in my own lifetime. Terrorism was at least a scintillatingly "romantic" notion, not bearing the stigma it does today. Love was a wonderful thing, perhaps topped only by the process of falling into that state - for, does matter not radiate most brightly right before crossing the event horizon into a black hole? Self-help programs abounded, as did the belief that they would actually have any effect on the trainee. The jolly folks at Fermilab, in Batavia, welcomed me among their fold, and there I was in the company of people who actually understood what I was talking about, if only for a while. We had this cat, Ludwig, who daily awaited my crooning as an invitation to dinner... Finally, my "paying gig" was no longer working in a small, stuffy darkroom reeking of C-41 Bleach to the tune of an (honestly) good guy beset by terrific anger management issues, but the rough and tumble insanity of a nightclub, where on any given evening I could be shot for pointing out a discrepancy in the number of "bones" offered as payment by the Gin & Juice swilling patrons.

Is it any wonder that this material came to be, given these circumstances? This was prior to the modern era of "complaint rock", and although I was certainly as angst-ridden as the best of them, I tried to approach matters from a more practical standpoint...

I recall the bulk of this material just falling together - in retrospect, there were no "battles" to get my ideas into the songs. The usual constraints certainly applied, to be sure, but in all, the process was pretty painless. I was aided by some extraordinary musicians:

* Michael "Sedge" Cantore - playing drums on "The Process of Falling" on a hot August night, with his drums crammed into my bedroom at Casa Goofy in Lanham because I didn't have any decent isolation booth. Sedge, wherever you are, I miss you, man.
* Mike Masquith - my lifelong best friend, whose guitar work here is characterized in several songs by our normal working method: "dude, c'mon over and bring your guitar - I need a couple of solos!"
* Tim Wilhelm - whose own brand of blistering guitar solos are featured on "The Halflife of Love" and "This is Where I Work".
* David Williams - Who - alone - heeded my call for backup vocals from the Quigley's roster, and came out to honk and quack with me on "Da BOINK!"

Some history regarding the songs themselves:

"Intellect" - By the late 80's, the "proto-rap" of such classics as Lightnin' Rod and Sugarhill Gang had evolved into more of a swaggering, boastful mode wherein the artist would gloat about how many cars he had, how many houses he had bought for his mother, how tremendously he was hung, etc. Hundreds of hustlas, all struttin' and pontificating about how great they were; it was all very tiresome, especially to a Caucasian such as myself who liked the music, but knew he could never fit in. In riposte, I wrote "Intellect", to highlight at least a few of my own merits.

"Amy, Missing at Fermilab" - I had the good fortune to be at Fermilab when the first Top Quark event was detected, validating the Standard Model of cosmological physics. It remains a high point in my life to have witnessed that event... and I got to thinking about the dedication and enthusiasm of all the folks that made it happen. As usual, I got to doing a little "Gedanken" of my own, which led me to an alternate hypothesis of how they might have found that Top Quark.

"Moon in Aquarius" - Well, 'there was this girl, see'... she an Aquarian, I a Taurus: not the most auspicious of pairings. Still, with the fierce Will of Youth, and my penchant for the Unattainable, I harbored a belief that if the planets were to line up just right... Ah, nuts.

"The Process of Falling" - We can probably all agree that love sucks. However, the real fun in love is that period of discovery, when everything is new, the concept is fresh, and the object of your affections presents a vast field of the unknown, awaiting exploration - and the very fact that you're falling in love adds a wonderful dimension to everything that has gone before in your life. Not the sappy, "love is forever" smarm that we all know is a crock, but rather the widening of the eyes, the expansion of the horizon, the realization that - at least for awhile - you're pretty much invincible because you've fallen in love. It's kind of like cocaine - the first time you get high on it you are Master of the world, never realizing it will gradually take control over your life. For that first high, it's almost worth everything that will follow. That's what I had in mind when I wrote this.

"The Half-life of Love" - Along the same line of reasoning, love can last as long as it really needs to last. Maybe we can extend the corollary to include the rationale that the more fissionable the relationship, the faster it will decay. Or, maybe not - but I got to thinking about relationships that go bust, one person still yearning after the other long after any practical yield is possible.

"On Mechanization" - This song was written waaay back in 1981, during a period when I was cut off from my friends by geography and transportation issues - which led to a rather introspective analysis of how reliant on technology I had become ("it's worse now, yess, nasty hobbitses!").

"That Other Place" - escapism, pure and simple.

"Maria Teresa" - I mentioned the nightclub where I worked; this song is a direct result of those experiences, especially the reference to "separating the 'have' and the 'have-nots' ".At the close of each working night, at about 3AM, the street outside would be filled with about a thousand kids (having been herded out by the staff: "if you aren't sleeping with one of us, you've got to go!"), all of whom were vying for that last phone number, that last shy glance, that last indefinable... something, that would prove their evening, money, and sobriety had not been squandered in vain. In the midst of this was a young lady, serene and beautiful, ho was never swayed by the turmoil around her, and she proved the catalyst for this tune.

"The Witch's Name" - I can't recall whether a dream I had - recounted in this song - predates my completing Umberto Ecco's novel "The Name of the Rose", but both the dream and Ecco's novel inspired me to write this. Rather primitive in its execution, I recorded this while staying at mr Dad's apartment. At the time, I didn't have any sophisticated reverb equipment, so I relied on the old "tried and true" method of tracking vocals in the bathroom, with the mic cable slung over the shower curtain rod. You can imagine my father's consternation on discovering me doing this at 3AM, after the traffic noise had died down.

"After the Crush" - In the midst of a particularly trying relationship, I found myself in a pretty depressed and regressive state; upon which I began writing the songs for my album of the same name. This song was the opening track of the album, setting the stage for what was to follow. Angsty, I know, and with a liberal seasoning of early 'The The' in terms of song construction, dynamics, and self-loathing. 'The The's' Soul Mining album had been a big influence on me, and had a commensurate effect on my own songwriting engrams. I make no apologies for this.

"Looking for Fred" - I acknowledge that the world prior to September 11 2001 was a different place than the world we live in now, and I have no wish to offend or trivialize the agonies we suffered on that day. This song, written in 1992, was a by-product of a time when the term Terrorism did not have the scope of meaning accorded to it in the post-9/11 era. In honesty, the seed for this song stemmed from a skit that shock-jock The Greaseman used to do, viz "Carlos the International Terrorist". I had written the music for the song in retaliation to a comment from my brother that my music "didn't have enough chords", and the resultant shifting of signatures and modes provided a perfect foil against which to craft the lyrics. The lyrics were written in fun, befitting a more innocent time.

"Allison's Eyes" - In a fit of pique, I tried to write a pop song "according to the rules", hooking in just about every hackneyed cliché I could from the books I had just read telling me how to craft a top-40 song that would make me rich and famous. So much for the books, eh? By today's standards, if I had written about petty revenge, "popping a cap in somebody", or how rotten the world is (e.g. "everything is wonderful now"), I might actually have become a celebrity. Still, I liked the result enough to keep it. By the way, there was no "Allison". I needed a name with alliteration and three syllables.

"Drowning Your Sorrows" - Again with the 'The The' influences... and coincidentally a song about petty revenge! This song was near the end of the "After the Crush" album, wherein I shed the oppressive weight of a Love Gone Wrong by taking my erstwhile babe to the beach, and holding her under the water until Dead. It's metaphorical, of course, and I deny all charges.

"Da BOINK!" - We'll exit the compilation on a happy note - specifically, in an attempt to see how many double entendres one can actually shoehorn into a hip-hop tune. I had about twelve verses for this thing; the demo version ran in excess of 15 minues!

So, why the title "Preliminary Division"? It's a reference to the fact that, in the continuum of my life, I'm about half-out of ideas. I have many duties yet to attend to.

Enjoy.