Flea of the Year (EP)

Jim Robertson

Num	Title	Length
1.	Dirty Boots	5:12
2.	Song of the Milky Way	5:20
3.	Bottom of My Glass	4:57
4.	Dirty Little Secret	2:28
5.	Six of One	4:07
6.	I'll Wait	3:14
7.	House of the Rising Sun	3:19
8.	Lateside	2:40
9.	Rioja	2:43
10.	BONUS: Dirty Boots (demo)	3:01
11.	BONUS: Song of the Milky Way (demo)	2:27
12.	BONUS: Bottom of My Glass (demo)	4:13
13.	BONUS: Six of One (demo)	6:15

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Every MP3 file includes artist, title, album, and date info as well as album cover art.

Album notes

So, this is an "EP" release. Why that?

Well, my 3 previous "official" Jim albums contained 11, 16, and 14 songs each. So, this one -- with 9 songs (forget the Bonus Tracks) -- felt a bit less "full." At one point in 2011, I was about to release just a four-song EP of Six of One, I'll Wait, Bottom of My Glass, and Dirty Boots, but I didn't pull the trigger and kept accumulating more songs. Finally, in Jan 2020, I reviewed what I had in the can, and I decided to just pull the rip cord on these songs.

Each of these songs could use some tweaks or even extensive surgury, but I really couldn't image spending any more time on any of these songs in the next ten years or so -- given work/life balance, the fact that some of these songs are already 9-12 years old, and the fact that I have another dozen or so half-baked other songs in the pipeline that need work.

These songs and recordings are not meant to be perfect -- but rather demos, sketches, and diary entries. And, some statement to the world that "this is who I am."

Dirty Boots: The darkest song I could write. 3 AM lust over a minor key pseudo blues riff. A dirty, nasty, sick dark song from the depths of my self-hatred. Just use your imagination, folks. It's pretty much straight up.

Bottom of My Glass: I was trying to write a country song along the lines of "Take Your Tongue Out of My Mouth, I'm Kissing You Goodbye." Of course, it cane out sounding more like Billy Joel. More self-loathing.

Song of the Milky Way: Bowie and Glen Campbell sharing a six-pack in a Cadillac between Bismark and Billings while listening to The Replacements as 98.3 fades out. A lot of silence in that car. Actually, I was trying to channel Witcha Lineman , So. Central Rain, and Left of the Dial. Along with Hunky Dory-era Bowie. Seriously.

Dirty Little Secret: Hmmm. We all have secrets; a few of those secrets are clean, but most of them are dirty. I came home one night around 1 AM in 2007 (?), sat down with a guitar, and wrote this song in more-or-less one take. It might be "okay," but it is certainly urgent and honest.

Six of One: Half dozen. Doubles. Triples. Roll the dice. Written about 2006-2007. Yeah ... lots to unpack in this song. At the time, I thought I was on top of the world. Little did I know.

I'll Wait: A piano song whole-formed in my head walking up from the train station after work circa 2004. Is there something in this song that is evocative of Bruce in his River phase? Probably only in my mind. Of course, the song nods its head to The Replacements at the end.

House of the Rising Sun: Now we are into the experimental part of the album. Crazy experiment glommed onto a kick-ass vocal of a waitress hosted in my house at 1 AM who claimed she could sing. Yes: she COULD sing. I recorded her acappella vocals and then layered the music (all keyboards) underneath it -- going for a dark Radiohead-like feel.

Lateside: Completely digital. Sort of experimental. Written and recorded pretty quickly. A "different" side of Jim's stuff. Again, I think I came home one night around 1 AM in 2007 (?), sat down in front of the compuer/keyboard, and wrote this song pretty quickly. I think my notebook said "Mid-Century Modern" as some instruction. I was probably reading about Jasper Johns, Merce Cunningham, and Ray Eames at the time.

Rioja: Another sort of experiment. Sort of birthed "in the studio" -- like I did with FELT's Tricky Mouse. Just found a piano riff, then a drum sample, and then grooved a bass underneath. I found a copyright-free vocal sample that seemed to work over it all. Then, I got Tarquin to guest on various vocal improvisations, and it really helped "open up" (aka improve) the song from something more mundane.

BONUS: Dirty Boots: The original music track I recorded on my ProTools setup and then took on a road trip (a conference to Philadelphia in 2009) during which I wrote the lyrics -- typical Jim move -- long distance travel + headphones + scratch pad = completed song.

BONUS: Song of the Milky Way: Me at the piano, just trying to capture a newly-written song. Obviously raw. You can hear me vamping on the piano in between verses towards the end of the recording, because the song wasn't really fully composed yet.

BONUS: Bottom of My Glass: I haven't really done this before -- releasing early comps or demos or sketches of finished songs. But, I wanted to this time to capture the moment in time in which I "birthed" this song. Me at the piano. This was during a phase from 2003-2011 during which I wrote most of my songs on the piano, rather than (previously) on the guitar.

BONUS: Six of One: An early version of this song, recorded to a stolen drum sample from The Gilfted Children -- like, my favorite band ever. While I loved the feel of the drum sample, I didn't really capture the drum sample in a way that was going to work for my song, so I had to start from scratch to get the "official version" that is song # 5 on this album.

Discussion

Wow. So, this release of recorded music from Jim has been a long time coming. Literally, 25 years or so.

Jim's previous "official" release of demo songs was his PULASKi SKYLiNES "album" of 1996. It keystoned a prolific period between Jim's 1990-1995 4-track demo period -- some in "grad school exile" in Tallahasse, some Hoboken-based with The Fords and alt.sex.dentist.

Yet, Jim kept writing and recording. Three significants factors:

His first daugher Astrid was born in 1998 and his parents drove up an upright piano from their recently-closed Georgia restaurant to Jim in New Jersey in 1999 or 2000. It was so much easier to bounce a toddler on a knee and play piano with one hand than to whip out a guitar (which needs two hands), so Jim pivoted to piano as his primary means to write and capture songs.
Jim met a few other fathers in South Orange, who were musicians -- Tarquin, Mark, Chuck -- many, many others. So, a lot of Jim's musicial attention was poured into the bands of 3rd Gear and FELT.
And, Jim's divorce and nomadic existence for a few years between 2011 and 2014 didn't exactly lend itself to a stable recording environment.

I debated with myself if I needed to polish these songs more and if I was prepared to release them to the world. At some point, I concluded that I could:

polish them up for another 20 years; or
just release them and move along -- new songs are always gestating

So -- good, bad, or ugly -- here it is: Flea of the Year (EP).

I also debated with myself whether to call this an "EP" or not. My three previous releases -- Sundays, Holidays, and Other Days (1991), Songs and Shovels (1993), and PULASKi SKYLiNES (1996) were pretty "robust" releases of 11, 16, and 14 songs each. Flea of the Year only has 9 songs (not counting the bonus stuff). But, I decided that releasing a collection of songs that was fewer in number, less slaved over, but perhaps still resonant would be better than spending another 12 years on them. So, thus, the "EP" label.

Jim Robertson

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Flea of the Year (EP)

Jim Robertson

Album notes

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