Surrealist Cowboy Music

14 MP3 Songs
ROCK: Folk Rock, COUNTRY: Country Rock



Details:
This album contains 14 strange, heartfelt songs performed with bass, drums, guitars and mandolin, and lots of vocal harmonies.

"Mama Nada" was originally a rough acronym for "Matt Morgan Nathanael David." Those were the members of Madrona during the hot New Orleans summer of 2003, sizzling in the middle of cables and microphones as the ADAT rolled and the air conditioning sat silent. At the end of each take there were gasps and people dove over one another to turn the AC back on. At 2:00 every afternoon the sky ripped open and dumped gallons of lukewarm water over the city. It drummed on the air conditioner. You can hear it on some of the tracks. When the rain stopped the moisture turned back into insidious, vining steam and hid out in the necks of the guitars and in drumsticks.

In time, Mama Nada became a character of her own, independent of the names from which she was formed. She became Mother Nothing--some kind of cartoon witch with chilling powers of silent vaporization. She represents the darkness surrounding us, the void that births us and into which we inevitably accidentally stumble, the humid undertow of this sinister and sleezy city. You can see her on the album jacket, liquidating unfortunate bunny rabbits.

Somebody called this album "surreal cowboy music." That seems accurate, and the cowboy is Mama Nada, and she's thinking, as she rides surrealistically, of a road toward New Orleans that induces stroke in anyone who drives it, and once they die they become characters in old black and white movies together with immortal cockroaches and the souls of drunk drivers who have achieved nirvana through head-on collision, in a world where words are on fire and factories have fingers with which to pull new and innocent lust from burning but unconsumed trees and weave it into the regrets of old soldiers, and the protaganist is a strange half-fish half-child who gets his hand cut off but sprouts a new and very wise eye in its place and then takes a walk across an intercontinental bridge of blood, talks for a moment with a spy who is searching for ignorance instead of intelligence, and finally arrives at a starlit bus stop where a prostitute prophet tells him a story about a serial killer who climbs out of old black and white movies when they are played on televisions in the summer, and black dogs that turn into white ones in the course of a day.

You should buy this album because it will make your life better: more surreal, more heartfelt, and generally more cowboy.