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This is our first "Digital 45". We hope to have these pressed on actual 45's at some point. We have finished material sitting around, and rather than hold it for months on end, we decided to show you even more of what we're up to. And we wanted to show you the variability in the project. Some oddities. We hope you enjoy them, and download them.

Here's some track descriptions for you. - Mikey

COLD BLOODED MOON

"I wrote this song back in December of '19, one morning, in the kitchen, guitar strapped on, coffee on the counter-buzz, and happened in a flash of 15 minutes, lyrics and all (with the exception of a few lines, but let us imagine it was "a moment"). I even kept the exact arrangement for the song, from the voice memo, that I made that morning. I imagined Orbison's Black & White concert film in my head as I sang the send off the first time.

When we started tracking it, I knew I wanted it to sound like "Raising Sand", and while it's obvious I could never reach such sonic richness, I took Tony Visconti's advice to me many years ago (about chasing legendary sounds) to "do what YOU think we did to get those tones" sort of approach. So we “tried”. Steve Schiltz from Longwave let me borrow his six string banjo and it worked great to further the vibe. Some think it has a Leonard Cohen vibe, and again that is a thing I will never claim to. Steve even gave me the idea for the backing ghost vocal our friend Rhea Murray did (ala "Who By Fire”). But to me it just added to the "Raising Sand”.

It was originally titled, "I Am the Moon", but I discovered The White Buffalo's song of the same name, and it was such a beauty that I thought that idea had already been recorded very well, and searched for another title. While researching moon transits, I discovered I had written it while the Wolf Moon was waxing. But Anthony and I thought that was too severe for the song (and the wrong season). "The Old Moon" was another name for the Wolf Moon, and while researching the use of that title, a lyric match popped up on one of the streaming services for Dylan's "Changing of the Guard”. First line of his third verse he says, “The cold blooded moon". I thought it was the perfect title, because the Moon character in this song is a bit cold blooded, and because the next full moon is a Blood Moon. A nice little synchronicity."

LITTLE QUARTERS

"Little Quarters happened at the piano. And I tried to tune the thing myself during Lockdown but broke a string. I figured it was as good a time as any to imagine what a Tom Waits might do with that infirmity, and that is what the opening riff is, the three jacked up strings I tried to tune, that led me to the little ditty that follows. Callan from The Demos has been co-writing lyrics with me and he helped out with expounding upon the escapist’s utopian theme. We paired it with Cold Blooded Moon, because of the line, “we’re planting with the moon”, which was just coincidence. But since it is the flower moon coming up and plenty of planting is going on, we thought it was a good time to release it. Alan Murphy added the clarinets and trumpet, and it really gave this a playful vibe. A close friend said that this was White Album-pop, very kind (Anthony’s guitars feed that thought as well). But I credit all the studying of old Broadsides. Our PR says, it’s Vaudeville-like. And a big thank you to Tim Mroz, the double bassist, with giving the groove some essence it needed badly. This was the first mix we completed with Stephen Roessner, and Anthony and I were real excited hearing the music play back from the speakers the way we were imagining."