The official release date for my new album, DEN OF MANIACS, has been confirmed as March 23, 2010. In the meanwhile, here are two free mp3s and the album cover (left-click to listen, right-click to save):

Look at Me (link no longer available)
(in which I improvise a lot of electric guitar solos as a means of coping with
increasingly colorful existential quandaries)

Go Away (link no longer available)
(a 6/8 response to a famous song by Jacques Brel)

Download DEN OF MANIACS at iTunes.

The cover art, featuring me and Jonathan Arron Taylor, was done by Vesna Jovanovic with the assistance of Pawel Mlynarczyk. The drums on the above tracks were performed by George Lawler.

Anywayz, two songs were mixed in the first week, and now I’m working on a song that’ll take a week or two to put together. I’m looking to release before summer. Here are the songs to be included (not in this order):

1. Look at Me
2. Fever (title will probably change because I see there’s a song called this on Neko Case’s new album)
3. Fell (folky electronica shredder remix)
4. Vante Left Them Human (featuring violin)
5. I Want to Be (new parenthetical identifier to come)
6. Spiders in Heaven
7. Snack Time
8. Go Away
9. The Gift
10. Untitled (the lyrics aren’t done yet)

Three of these appeared on previous releases: “Fell” is the live version I do in my solo set plus some violin parts; “Vante Left Them Human” is basically a studio version of the arrangement I did in the live video with Emanuel Ban on violin; “I Want to Be” is a very different, cool arrangement of that song.

Also, “The Gift” once appeared on a Christmas charity compilation. This is a new version. I’ve always wanted to get this song to a wider audience.

After this album, I’m planning to release another one in Jan or Feb 2010. That one will feature songs I wrote back when I was heavily influenced by Brazilian music (especially Caetano Veloso, Jorge Ben and Paulinho da Viola, all kinds of Samba forms et al… ); I was also really into Mexican folk, and on the brink of an obsession with Jacques Brel that lasted about a year and half. I might seek to enlist Heitor Garcia to play some percussion on it, if there’s time. Also, I haven’t mentioned that to him yet either, so we’ll see. He was playing drums with me back when I conceived some of these tunes, so it’d be a nice completion to the circle. The poppier stuff (like “Between the Lines”), I hope to get George Lawler on board for again.

After that, I’ll be ready to do something totally new. I have ideas, such as for a musical/opera thingy (that neither of those terms adequately describe), and I have a couple of album concepts. I also have some ideas for live shows, if I can ever get the funding to pull them off.