drumkit - gerald dowd
bass guitar - mike fredrickson
electric guitar - scott ligon
acoustic guitar and vocal - robbie fulks
backing vocals - k.c. mcdonough and robbie fulks

O'Rourke remarked during mix, "He needs to do an NRBQ tribute record where he plays every instrument." Scott Ligon plays only the guitar on this one, sounding more like Big Al than Rich Little sounds like Nixon. My favorite part of his soloing is the time-busting one-note stutter toward the end. I won't bore the public anymore with boasts of my illimitable fealty to the 'Q.

bass guitar - john abbey
vocal and guitar - robbie fulks
ukulele - robbie gjersoe
accordion - john williams

When I write barroom songs I'm usually picturing a place like Lee's Liquor Lounge or Marie's Riptide: an old man's bar. In fact I think there are two kinds of bars -- old man bars, and old man bars thinly disguised as something more upbeat. Though country rounder songs are full of drunks swimming in harsh self-examination, I find that in life they are a little like office-workers or political radicals, smothering doubt and downheartedness with compulsory team spirit.

drumkit - gerald dowd
bass guitar - mike fredrickson
electric guitar - grant tye
acoustic guitar and vocal - robbie fulks
keyboard - chris neville
backing vocals - amy warren, k.c. mcdonough,
mike fredrickson, ingrid graudins

A high school friend died suddenly in 2007 and I started this song in her memory. Then "Joan," her name, turned to "Jane," and gradually things got farther away from the spark. As it stands, it's about the fallout from a hookup, and has some whimsical word-association lyrics; but to the subtler extent that it's still about the hole chopped in your landscape by human disappearance, it still concerns Joan, and I think of her when I'm singing it.

drumkit - dan massey
bass guitar - mike fredrickson
organ - pat brennan
wurlitzer - k.c. mcdonough
electric guitar and vocal - robbie fulks
vocal - nora o'connor

Here's one that struck us all pretty positively on first playback, but simply got worse and worse the more it was worked on (which was plenty). I would definitely not buy this a la carte -- it's the true golden turkey of the fifty-song Doberman.

drumkit - gerald dowd
bass guitar - mike fredrickson
electric guitar and vocal - robbie fulks
trumpet - b.j. cord
trombone - raphael crawford
sax - nate lepine
organ and piano - chris neville

This is written from the point of view of someone like my oldest son, someone ready to leave the land of carnal adventure and enter the hallowed kingdom of the contractually monogamous. Time to trade in the Biblical knowing of every woman for the actual knowing of one.

drumkit - gerald dowd
bass guitar - k.c. mcdonough
electric guitar and piano - scott ligon
baritone guitar and vocal - robbie fulks

My son and father-in-law were teamed for the twelfth season of the CBS series "The Amazing Race," in which contestants dash around the planet finding clues and taking on challenges until the last one left standing is awarded a million bucks. This Carl Perkins-y thing refers breezily to their teammates and experiences as if everyone in the world knows what the hell I'm discussing...just smile and play along.

drumkit - gerald dowd
bass guitar - mike fredrickson
electric guitar - grant tye
vocal, electric guitar, keyboard - robbie fulks
backing vocals - k.c. mcdonough, ingrid graudins

We in the arts run now and then into people who can't seem to deal normally with us, once they discover our profession. It's hard to tell where admiration shades into contempt. If I am noticing this, down at my level, it must be like immersion in an acid bath for the truly star-spangled. I adopt in this song the voice of the aggrieved non-arts worker and TV watcher (left behind to nurse his wounds in South Bend) not to understand him better, but to kick him.

drumkit - gerald dowd
electric guitar, bass, keyboards - scott ligon
electric guitar solo - grant tye
vocal, acoustic guitar, Casio samples - robbie fulks
backing vocals - k.c. mcdonough

A lot of pretty obvious reference points here, but see if you can spot the Paul Young semi-quote. This was nothing but fun from first draft to last mix, and who knew it would turn out this well.

guitar and vocal - robbie fulks

Robbie Gjersoe (who was going to play on this until we failed to locate a second part or instrument that really worked) said "Dave Van Ronk" right away on hearing this song, and I think that nails it. Robbie and I both listened a lot to "Sunday Street" when it came out on Philo Records. The versions of "Jesus Met The Woman At The Well" and "Would You Like To Swing On A Star," among others, were daringly simple, and not in the way of a genius prodigy forcing himself into a limited vocabulary, but in the way of a player who was honestly content to let a quality of simple relaxation serve as his total bag of effects. A friend of mine, a longtime new Yorker, took some lessons with Dave, and during one lesson got to see him casually naked, just out of the shower; that certainly feels at one with his music. I had brief encounters with Dave at the Speakeasy and Folk City of the early 1980s, and he was nice enough to encourage my playing and performing. Anyway, this song is a composite, in that its female character goes back and forth between a couple of different actual women. And the Somalian is a kind of racial composite: in the summer of 1981 I worked in a kitchen with two non-talkers, one African-American and one Vietnamese.

guitars - robbie fulks and robbie gjersoe

The title is a tip of the hat to Chris Miller, whose 1971 National Lampoon story was about masturbation, whereas bluegrass flatpicking is about, um, art. If Robbie Gjersoe had heard the song in advance and got to spend some time with it, surely he'd have worked out a hotter and more "put-together" solo than this...yet I do love hearing him flail a bit as well!

drumkit - gerald dowd
bass guitar - john abbey
keyboard - chris neville
electric guitar and vocal - robbie fulks
electric guitar - grant tye
backing vocals - k.c. mcdonough, anna fermin, mike fredrickson
trumpet - b.j. cord
trombone - raphael crawford
sax - nate lepine

Chris Miller's memoir, in which he goes away to Dartmouth and leaves his brother Wilson in the care of madmen a/k/a "the family," inspired this little story. There are a couple embedded references to the world of Miller, like Roslyn, and the dumb "hand" pun. The middle section is a fantasy guitar-hero section; I tried to put wild applause in it as well, but it didn't read right over the noise of the guitar and other instruments. That would have made it funnier, yes? Of course this song is sad as well.

drumkit and percussion - gerald dowd
bass guitar - john abbey
piano, organ and electric guitar - scott ligon
acoustic guitar, electric guitar and vocal - robbie fulks
backing vocals - robbie fulks and k.c. mcdonough
strings- jubal fulks
trumpet - b.j. cord

It's lucky John Abbey knew something about salsa bass playing, or the last section might've really stunk. Lucky that B.J. Cord promptly swings into action when asked to "solo for four minutes over an A chord." And how very nice that Gerald, John, and Scott would spend three-and-a-half hours of a wintry Tuesday afternoon gamely sprinting through one section after another (5:00PM: "Okay, now this is the George Harrison bit...") without so much as a snide remark or an official AFM filing. "Blaze of Ugly" is a sort of point-of-view tune from the Goths on "Amazing Race." (Recycle, reuse....)

suitcase - gerald dowd
archtop guitar and vocal - robbie fulks
organ - scott ligon

High-fidelity note: To listen to this properly, put your hands side by side on alternating sides of your head and flutter spasmodically.