I started listening to Why? after reading Nate’s last post, and Mr. Terepka has discovered one more musical place where our tastes overlap completely. Considering how much time he and I spend making music together, you’d expect there to be more such places, but, well, there aren’t. That’s part of what gives our music such color.
Anyway, I’m delighted to find another. Why? are fantastic. Although I must say that Why? may be an even worse band name than IY, and I give it a skeptical stare every time I write it down.
Why?’s Alopecia has just eclipsed Mason Jennings’ Blood of Man as my most-played record this week. That will probably change when Mason plays New York next month, because every time I see him I listen to his records, his exclusively, for up to a week after the show.
Mason plays electric guitar on most of Blood of Man, which is a new trick for him, and one I relate to. I didn’t even bring my acoustic guitar to New York this fall. I’m loving the grit and responsiveness of my Les Paul through this new four-watt Vox amp. (Said Vox amp is on almost every track we recorded this summer.)
Hey, what happened to those tracks we recorded this summer, anyway? Well. There are sixteen. They don’t all belong on the same record. We’re trying, for the first time in nearly ten years of playing, to put together a collection of songs that says something as a whole. There’s a better way of saying this: we’re trying to make an album.
Many people say the album is dying, or that it’s already dead. Commercially that may well be true, but artistically it isn’t. Bands don’t speak in sentences. They don’t even in songs. Bands speak in albums. We’ve nearly figured out what it is we’re trying to say.
And hey, don’t panic. Anything we cut from the record we’ll post as a free download right here on the site. So really you should hope that we cut the whole record from the record, but we’re probably not going to do that.
PS - note for Nate: Pick up Herman Dune’s Next Year in Zion. I love it, and I bet $10 you will too.
