Notes

Recorded in 2008 by Brian at the Aqueerium in DC. Anti-copyright. Riot Folk Collective.

THE GOOD TIMES AND THE BAD

And my friends are scattering again like dandelions blowing in the wind. Yep, it's true. We are growing up every day and things change quick. Mark and I released a split two years ago when we were living together in Berkeley. Now we're living 3,000 miles apart and doing different things. But we still wanted to do another CD, especially if you heard the quality of the last one. . . we thought it sounded good at the time. . . So here it is, a year or so in the making and a lot of ideas at work.

I know how I feel lots of times (although I am learning lately to not let it get the best of me): But it seems that I have hoped as many hopes and dreamed so many dreams, seen them swept aside by weather, and blown away by men, washed away in my own mistakes, that - - I use to wonder if it wouldn't be better just to haul off and quit hoping. Just protect my own inner brain, my own mind and heart, by drawing it up into a hard knot, and not having any more hopes or dreams at all. Pull in my feelings, and call back all of my sentiments - and not let any earthly event move me in either direction, either cause me to hate, to fear, to love, to care, to take sides, to argue the matter at all ---; and, yet, like this song says, there are certain good times, and pleasures that I never can forget, no matter how much I want to, because the pleasures, and the displeasures, the good times and the bad, are really all there is to me. And these pleasures that you cannot ever forget are the yeast that always starts working in your mind again, and it gets in your thoughts again, and in your eyes again, and then, all at once, no matter what has happened to you, you are building a brand new world again, based and built on the mistakes, the wreck, the hard luck and trouble of the old one.
-Woody Guthrie

I thought this paragraph, which Woody wrote about a love song he dug, was a good song. I wondered why he didn't make one. So I figured since he didn't, I would (and could), so I did. We decided to name the album after the name, which we think generally describes the album's content. We write a lot about the bad times, the chaos-economy, the war(s), prisons, Palestine, etc. But we also threw some good times songs on this album, the springtime, living somewhere new, growing up, learning to deal with the bad times and reflecting on good memories. The mixture provides a more balanced album then we normally might do. Because the pleasures, and the displeasures, the good times and the bad, are really all there is to me.

As tends to be the case when Mark and I make music or perform together, there's a lot of laughter and such caught on the tape and we aren't perfectionists. Or maybe we are imperfect perfectionists. We like to make an album that sounds how we like it, but we aren't too concerned about meeting any standards. We hope you feel the same, or can grow to appreciate the simplicity of our fairly raw recordings.

Brian (who has recorded several of my CDs as well as helped plenty of local radical artists get albums out, thanks Brian!) recorded most of the album at the Aqueerium in DC. Mark mixed it and we added stuff in person and from afar to complete all the noises. The songs were written over a long period of time, but mostly in 2007-2008. Some back as far as 2005 (I think). We wrote a few together and wrote a few while we were living together.

--Ryan

I think these songs show the bittersweet burden of empathy and real love, of loneliness, of rootlessness, of connectedness to cities, bioregions, and people, of relationships that set out in uncharted territories. I can sympathize with Woody Guthrie's sentiment in "The Good Times And The Bad". So often I've wished I didn't care so much, that I wasn't so effected by the world around me. Other people seem so content. But it's the only way I know how to be, wading through the extremes of passionate joy and love and all-encompassing rage and sadness. What else matters? The world's a mess--the world's fucking beautiful. People are terrible to each other--people's capacity to feel and express themselves never stops amazing me. That's where this album comes from, those extremes.

Thanks to Brian for recording us. Big love to people in Bellingham, Tacoma, Seattle, Olympia, Vancouver, and Portland. I miss ya'll in Berkeley, Oakland, and San Francisco. Ahava maod to friends and family in Baltimore, New England, New York, and Toronto. Thanks to all my musical collaborators, past and present, especially Mahra and the Riot Folks. Thanks to everyone who gifted and lent me instruments and equipment that I used on this album. So much love and gratitude to Rio for everything, for an epic list of gifts, concrete, abstract and woo-woo, too long to go into here, so I'll just leave it at thanks for the love, radness, courage and magic baking. Thanks to Cascadia, for being a lush, green, wet home, and especially to the artists, performers and musicians who make the work that nourishes me and the activists and radicals who inspire me. Keep on keeping it real.

--Mark