MP3 Shawn Mafia & The Ten Cent Thrills - Death In ´D´ Major

Shockingly soused tales of defiled redemption based on actual fabricated events. Gritty film noir rock at its finest.

14 MP3 Songs
ROCK: Roots Rock, SPOKEN WORD: With Music



Details:
Perhaps too much time has passed between the first release and the second. Enough time for the world to forget about the fact that they didnât really notice Shawn Mafia existed in the first place. The music industry is over-saturated with artists and ready to burst out all over the place. Not like giving birth but more like someone taking a very sharp kitchen knife to itâs bowels and stabbing uneven and cutting crooked ⦠a stinky, foul shit shower of songwriters raining down on everyone.

At least thatâs how I see it.

What you will find here is no big-budget recording studios, no slick producers spinning straw into gold, and no high-falutinâ record label willing to pick up the tab. This album was born in the dark belly of a black widow infested garage converted into a dingy recording studio with big aspirations! Down Wind Studios is positioned, as the crow flies, on the wrong side of the tracks in Desert Hot Springs, CA. Each song came out screaming in the 120 degree heat blowing from the box fans on to the reel-to-reel recording tape. Much time was spent laying down the tracks. My backing band, The Ten Cent Thrills, who I have been working with for the past few years arrived bruised but unbroken for each session and played their asses off for no financial compensation. They were the much needed blood transfusion that kept the heart of this thing pumping. Still more countless hours were sacrificed to me attempting to mix all the madness captured on tape. The recording engineer and proprietor, Tom Hagerty, would lean back in his chair, smoke a massive spliff, and chuckle to himself as I manned the mixing board like some bogus surgeon attempting to perform a back-alley abortion. And thatâs exactly how these songs came out.

All of this was paid for by the tragedy of others. The money that went into this project swims in bad blood. I have worked at a Funeral Home for the last three years to supplement the limited funds that come in from my fabulous and exciting career in the Music Biz. Each paycheck I received from transporting a murder victim to the County Coronerâs Morgue, embalming a 10 year boy killed playing in the street, or making funeral arrangements for the bereaved got me one step closer to the compact disc you may be holding in your hands right now.

New Moon Records, a daring and innovative small label out of Joshua Tree, CA boldly agreed to release Death In âDâ Major in joint conjunction with me. Owner and recording artist, Steve Lester, managed to pull a Houdini with the mixes of the songs I gave him. He mastered, organized, sequenced and often times wrestled this musical beast into a cohesive collection. I am proud to be associated with this label. I donât know if they can say the same about me.

To me, Death in âDâ Major signifies a successful exercise in failure. A collection of songs doomed to depravity. All those tales of three time losers, at the bottom rung of life, out there feverishly wandering the desperate boulevards of this existence unaware that they never really had a chance to begin with. In this collection of musical oddities you will find a pop/rock song about prostitution and suicide, a death dirge, a folk ballad about a Hellâs Angel confessing all in a run down church pew, a tune that dreams of reuniting with oneâs high school sweetheart but is too drunk to remember her name, a real to life account of a woman murdered in a dumpster out back of the Humane Society Bingo Hall, a spoken word soliloquy about driving dead bodies around Palms Springs, CA recorded ad-lib into a hand held tape recorder as it happened, a huckster snake oil pitch with all the infomercial majesty of the Prophet Peter Popoff, an off-tempo rockabilly/punk barn blazer about Mojave desert dope fiends, and a sizzling swing number drunk to the tits with Cheap Women and Cheaper Wine.

This album represents my blood, bone, and 100 proof sweat. It tells stories about my own life and other individuals that I have encountered along the way. It was a three year labor of love that eventually turned to passionate hate. In the words of Herman Hesse these songs are ânot for everyone!â To the few wayward souls that may get their hands on this recording I implore you to please hide it away from the world ⦠itâs too tragic, too sensitive for the light of day.

Shawn Mafia
June 2007