Download "(The Shame About) Manboobs" -- free mp3
Our new album, Fustercluck!!! is still in its middle-to-last stages of recording, and will hopefully be ready for a fall 2009 release, so I decided to create a 6-song sampler called Manboobs as a free giveaway in the meanwhile. It includes collaborations with some good friends: Toby Goodshank, Dave End, Nan Turner, Debe Dalton, and Brook Pridemore. You can only get the giveaway at our shows, but you can download the title track from the link above.
I'm still not quite sure how this blog will work, since Fustercluck!!! will contain 30+ more songs than My 3 Addictions did, so I can't go into the kind of insane detail about each track that I did last time and not finally just lose it. So I think this blog will be more blog-like than before and feature notes from the trenches as we finish the 2 (or more) year process that will end in Fustercluck!!!.
So first and foremost: Manboobs.
Ever since I first played "(The Shame About) Manboobs" at the late great Antihoot at the Sidewalk, I knew it was a hit. It connected with a lot of people and made them laugh and allowed them to relate (there's a lot of overweight dudes in this country, let me tell ya).
When I wrote and first played the song, ENB was finishing up work on My 3 Addictions, which had taken a little over 2 years to realize, from the conception and writing to the final recording and release. When the album came out, I was totally over those songs and wanted to play mostly new stuff like "Manboobs." People would like it and ask for a recording, but there was none. I hoped there would not be another 2-year gap before there a recording was ready (well, I guess my hopes were dashed on that one), because the song felt more alive and better to me than those oldies from 2005.
But the process of recording this album has been so scattershot that it has basically taken months to get the song how it is. Sometimes there are songs that are so good, yet turn out elusive to get perfect as a recording that you end up redoing it over and over. I did this with the vocals on "A Modest Proposal (For Laura Cantrell)", and we wound up re-recording almost all of the parts for "Manboobs" just to try tomake sure we communicated the magic we knew the song had in it. I hope we did. (Also, we wanted to create the illusion that we are faintly capable musicians who can play a 4-minute song all the way through without screwing up all the time.)
Now, even after the song's 2nd birthday, "Manboobs" still feels to me like such an anthem that if people end up popping in Fustercluck!!! and never get to the other 45 songs on the album because they like that first one so much (actually, it'll be the second one; the Elastic No-No Band theme song will be track 1) then I think it will still be worth it.
Of course, the other 45 songs will be good too. When my mind is a little less discombobulated, I'll talk about some of them.
