Above is the cover of "Everybody Dance with your Steering Wheel". It's now available for download via http://skeletonstv.bandcamp.com. More on that in a minute...
I'm writing to tell you that the latest musics from the SKELETON$™ universe are, perhaps surprisingly, on the way. I don't quite know when yet, but it's getting close. There was a time when we weren't sure that was gonna happen. We actually started to record more than a year ago - then stopped for a few reasons. To catch you up: Jon, our drumming man, left New York City for cleaner air on the West Side of the United States. Jason (guitar man and go to guy since the earliest days) spent some time on the road with some more famous types, and began honing his solo chops as the "American Academy of Acheivement." I wrote some music for the Brooklyn Philharmonic, followed by some time making a baby, and then in tiny fits of creative energy frustration explosions made a few pop songs under the name "UUMANS". More of those songs will see release pretty soon, and a proper album will compile tracks from the past while.Â
Needless to say, none of these activities led to new SKELETONSâ„¢ music being made. And why make new SKELETONSâ„¢ music? Making music the way I (and we as a band) tend to make music (or want to make music) is EXPENSIVE. It takes WAY TO MUCH TIME. It requires many people and those people need to be interested in it and energized by it. It takes the kind of ambitious creative energy and confidence that is much easier to come by when your young and broke and don't have any other responsibilities other than being creative. All the esoteric things that I love about making music and recordings - the things that can only happen on the first take when the ideas are NEW and EXCITING - the tiny sonic details that only happen once - the PERFECT PART that doesn't sound TOO PERFECT - strange unfolding textural patterns and poly-rhythms - wild stylistic diversions - pristine recording quality in a room that sounds good! These things are not what normal people are necessarily looking for. You can't practice these things or qualify them so easily. They take time. So you spend hours and hours trying to be transcendent, you do your best, you make what you have the resources to make (no record we've been able to make has been up to these standards!), and then "The Internet" takes over and maybe you go on tour and then it's over and you go back to your day job.
I hate to sound defeatist - it's such an unbecoming quality. But somehow it escaped me (and it seems like a billion other people) that I wouldn't have $1 million to make a record every time it was time to make a record. Just for reference - the most we've spent on an album is about $1500. Somehow though we've found our way into studios of some kind, with equipment that's "close enough" - and at least got some things out there. All around us (since about a decade ago) there's people saying "You don't need studios anymore, blah blah blah" and people say "You make money on tour and licensing blah blah blah" without thinking about how that effects the actual music. Does our music sound good in the background for commercials? Who's making money on the DIY tour circuit? I get exhausted thinking about INDUSTRY. Everyone wants to talk about it. Fuck, I do too! I want to be successful! But what about THE MUSIC? It feels parallel to this GOV'T SHUTDOWN business. Parallel to New York City's shift to the billionaires (even David Byrne's talking about it). We've been losing the battle to the almighty $$$, we knew that. But what about THE MUSIC? That's the thing we love. That's the thing we want to do. Is it time to throw away the instruments, skip the band practice, no amps no mics, 40 takes of the vocal track with an SM58 through auto-tune in your bathroom, try to make it loud and catchy and concise enough to compete with MILEY or KANYE (BTW I love Kanye) because SOMEHOW ALL THE SUDDEN WE'RE ALL COMPETING FOR THE SAME SHIT? (also BTW - why and how would we compete with KANYE who has the world's best producers and the world's best studios and gets to spend most of his time being creative?) We've had recording budgets listed in every "record contract" we've signed - but getting that money from the label? It's eluded us somehow every time... Or, here's the answer I hear about making records now: if you work real hard, and practice real hard, and get real good at selling yourself on the internet you could just do a Kickstarter campaign and maybe spend two days in the studio (with Steve Albini)?
Luckily (or unluckily, depending on your view), Jason and I had an opportunity through Roulette to do some recording (we had to do some of it in public.). In a setting fairly close to the right one. With a little money for musicians. And time to do it. So in spite of all these defeatist and exhausted thoughts, we thought we'd make a SKELETONS™ album. We asked Greg Fox (from Zs, Guardian Alien, formerly Liturgy) and Mike Pride (a zillion bands) to play drums, Justin Frye (PC Worship) played bass and helped engineer, Mike Gallope (Janka Nabay, Starring) played piano, Caley Monahan-Ward (Extra Life) played violin and helped engineer, Matt Nelson, Sam Kulik, Nathaniel Morgan and Alex Toth played horns. We brought in a string quartet for good measure, too. At the moment, the songs are all long. They're pretty dynamic. They sound like people playing instruments in a nice room sometimes. Sometimes it sounds crazy and somewhat electronic. If I weren't an engineer myself, and we didn't get this chance - we'd probably be something like $50,000 in the hole. Which is kind of a total joke... There's NO way in the wildest imagination of the wildest imaginer that Skeletons would recoup that amount of money with our current "infrastructure"... on sales, touring, licensing, ANYTHING. My point being, it just wouldn't have happened.
ANYWAY. It will be soon that you will hear some of this music or hear about it's eventual release. For now, I've decided to suck it up and make "Everybody Dance with Your Steering Wheel" available. It's the first "official" release that I made under the SKELETONS™ name. I recorded it when I was 19. I hope that's a good enough explanation of why I wasn't sure if I wanted it to be public for a while. I have fantasies of being like Harry Partch and burning everything I've ever made before I was 30 and starting over. I also have fantasies of Jason and I re-recording all the Skeletons albums and fixing the things that make us feel weird. Problem is, we'd have to do that every couple of years...
I've also made available "I'll do" - which is an EP recorded right before "Git" that never got released for one reason or another. I like that one OK. It's of a moment and reminds me of the first time I came to New York City. There's also "Diety of Hair", an LP of improvisations and performances live on the radio from the "Kings of all Cities" era - and a live performance from the Big Band at Issue Project Room, which features decent versions of two still unreleased songs "Paint Over It" and "Hands", though the recording quality's a little rough...
I wanted to tell you all these things because I hope that you'll consider downloading some music or buying some records or CDs if you've been meaning to. It's with your support that we might be able to bring new music to you sooner, and perhaps more importantly, not be defeated to begin with...
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