drumkit - gerald dowd
bass guitar - john abbey
electric guitar - grant tye
acoustic guitar, vocal, backing vocals - robbie fulks
B3 organ - chris neville
bodhran - jackie moran

The only person I can think of who overlaps the magisteria of astronomy, ambition, rape, and the Manhattan conservative intelligentsia is Arthur Koestler. I tried out a technique in a few of these 50 songs that I don't think I've tried before, manumitting my lyrics ever so slightly from the bondage of logical structure and sequence, permitting them to flit impressionistically hither and yon (even while trying to maintain some clear sense of forward development in the song overall). I can't say exactly what drew me to that method, or whether it was fruitful in the final outcome, but it added a new aspect of enjoyment to the writing -- wondering along with the listener what might happen next.

drumkit - gerald dowd
bass guitar - john abbey
electric guitar and keyboards - scott ligon
vocal and electric guitar - robbie fulks
strings - jubal fulks
accordion - john williams
backing vocals - k.c. mcdonough and ingrid graudins

Shortly after Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni died (6-30-07), I was reading a book called Encountering Directors. The writer, Charles Thomas Samuels, had drummed up some grant money and gone around the world to meet one by one with a sizable cohort of the best living film directors: Hitchcock, Lean, Visconti, Fellini, Clair, Olmi, Bresson, and many others, including the big two aforementioned. Samuels had a style that comes off on paper as probing, cerebral, sometimes presumptuous, and not infrequently hairsplitting, going beyond challenging questions into pointed arguments over "implausible" bits of dialogue and sound effects and the worth of this or that film. In person his style seems to come off worse yet, and while many of his subjects project politeness and good humor, some give back, and Fellini in particular explodes into amazing invective, in a drama that drags on for twenty-some tense pages. That Mr. Samuels -- who killed himself not long after -- was very bright and exceptionally committed to his craft seems to have hindered his capacity for animal enjoyment, and to have led him into a cul-de-sac of carping one-upsmanship. Or am I over-analyzing? There is no basis for most of the biographical and character details in this song, but as it says, they virtually had to be invented: as far as the Internet knows, this once-promising young writer never lived!

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.

bass fiddle - john abbey
vocal and guitar - robbie fulks
vocal - kelly hogan
mandolin and fiddle - don stiernberg

Whatever conviction I have given this comes from my love for Dudley Connell's singing and for the state of Virginia, particularly the part of the Blue Ridge Mountains around Waynesboro and Charlottesville where I used to live as a boy (but those Technicolor hues continue up all the way to Washington and southwest toward Johnson City).

acoustic guitar and vocal - robbie gjersoe
acoustic guitar and vocal - robbie fulks

One of the best of the fifty, in my opinion, in terms of overall effect of the recorded performance. I frequently seem to find myself headed to the airport in Houston or Dallas at 6PM Sunday morning, bleary and a little melancholy, and I guess that's why I put this sad fellow in that place.

drumkit - gerald dowd
bass guitar - john abbey
organ - scott ligon
acoustic guitar and vocal - robbie fulks
banjo - danny barnes
backing vocals - steve dawson and ingrid graudins

The Tim McGraw-Nelly duet was a model for something that, if only on grounds of musical curiosity, should be happening more -- a dedicated tilling of the common land shared by the blackest of the black music and the whitest of the white. The plot might've been wider in the Ray Charles days, back when the integration thing was in. Keith Gattis's use of the banjo in a world-weary soft-rock groove made me think of using it here. The backing by Steve Dawson and Ingrid Graudins is very good, and in some ways the karaoke version that engineer O'Rourke made me, erasing me and lifting them, is the better one.

drumkit - gerald dowd
bass fiddle - john abbey
electric guitar - grant tye
vocal and electric guitar - robbie fulks
organ - scott ligon
backing vocals - gerald mcclendon, scott ligon, gerald dowd, grant tye

Here is one of those songs that, as my wife said, doesn't end at where it seems to be headed. Some film that Penelope Spheeris shot of Ry Cooder singing with Cliff Givens and some others was the inspiration.

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.

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 - gerald dowd
bass guitar - john abbey
mellotron - chris neville
piano - k.c. mcdonough
fiddle - anne harris
vocal - robbie fulks

This is a shameless appropriation of characters, emotions, and scenic detail from Flannery O'Connor's The Violent Bear It Away. Elsewhere I've mentioned things going wrong in tracking songs, but here things went unaccountably right, in that a song that was slowly assembled improvisationally and piece by piece sounds, to my ears, like a natural and thought-out group performance.

drumkit - gerald dowd
bass guitar - john abbey
slide guitar - robbie gjersoe
acoustic guitar and vocal - robbie fulks
organ - scott ligon

I wrote this right after Jerry Reed died -- it's one of those where the music and feel were mainly the motivaters, and the words were put down quick and dirty. Going back and forth with Gjersoe was a blast. The scratch vocal, squawked over a 58 from the control room to help the rhythm guys keep their places, sounded good so we stuck with it (I know everyone says that, but there you have it).

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

A ramble through old times, a little autobiographical only in that it mentions Wake County and a brother; but I think and hope that this sums up a mood that's widespread among the ex-young. Musically it echoes some favorites: Joe South, Jim Ford, Al Anderson.