Exposed Erratics (Part 1)
New album! Live show! And assorted trivia!
I woke up this morning with the awareness that 1) at 1:54 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time I’d officially be turning 53 and 2) as of now, I have five collections of music to my name, both on my own Bandcamp page and on all the major streaming services.
Those collections are, in order of release: the I Call Time album (2014); the Germination EP (2016); Teach Me to Burn (recorded 1994-95, released 2022); my George Harrison tribute, The Georgian Style; and the newbie, out today, Exposed Erratics.
It seems to me that such things ought to be celebrated. And I’ll be doing so on Saturday, June 28, at Room 52, 212 E. 52nd St. in Manhattan. The Mac Randall Five—featuring Pete Galub on guitar, Jeff Hudgins on reeds, Michael Gelfand on bass and Peter Catapano on drums—will take a New York City stage for the first time in 10 years to play choice selections from my, ahem, catalog.
To prepare prospective listeners for the new album, I’ve written some notes on the individual tracks. Though reading these notes is by no means necessary for an enjoyment of the music, it’s possible that they may add some insight to the experience. But first, an explanation of the album’s title: Exposed erratics are rock formations that have been transported by glacial activity from their original location and deposited in an area to which they aren’t native. They’re “exposed” because they’re not where they normally are; they’re “erratics” because they don’t fit the prevailing pattern of stratification in the rock. I use this term in one of the album’s songs (“Diagnosis”), and I liked the way it summed up the whole collection. These compositions don’t fit into any established stylistic pattern that I can recognize, and many of them have traveled quite a way from their origins. The title also matches up well with Michael Gelfand’s cover photograph, which zooms in on a rock face in northwestern New Jersey.
And now, without further ado, the songs of Exposed Erratics’ first half. (The second half—side two, if you like—will be covered in a future post.)
My first four-track cassette demo of this song, instrumental only, was recorded on December 30, 1994 in my bedroom studio at 22 Concord Ave., Cambridge, Mass., and titled “Eight Days” for reasons I think I may understand but am no longer 100% clear about. The tempo’s on the slow side, but the possibility of rock is there. I returned to “Eight Days” on May 6, 1995, at a faster tempo with a more fleshed-out arrangement and lyrics. The latter were meant to be pure wordplay, like a late-’80s Wire song, full of internal rhymes and mounting ridiculousness. But it must be conceded that the mood is bleak overall. “Sort out spirals and arrange, caretaker of the sick at heart”—the spirals are internal and downward, and the process of sorting them out and arranging them (as if on a library shelf) is left to a caretaker, someone who can handle the task, someone not me. “Eight Days” was renamed “Twenty to One,” which doesn’t mean 12:40 on your watch. It comes from the line “Deluded by experts, twenty to one”; in other words, it’s experts vs. me and I am greatly outnumbered. You can hear the second demo, still a favorite of mine, as part of my home demo compilation on Soundcloud, Box of Urchins Not Received (which takes its name from another line in this song). “Twenty to One” went no further until I recorded it for this album in 2024.
Initial Pro Tools demo tracking took place on November 3, 2016, five days before the first Trump election. Some words, like those of the chorus, were already there, surrounded by vocal improv. The rest of the lyrics came later, after the disaster at the polls (the Word doc containing the complete lyrics is dated October 7, 2017). The sentiments are clear: The American people are connected—geographically and electronically—but not united, and that state of connected non-union is making some of us meaner, or allowing some of us to be meaner than we would otherwise be. We’re being encouraged to accept this development as normal, part of everyday life, but it’s not. Still up to the minute, I’m sad to say. I believe this was the first demo I ever recorded with a drum machine (built into my Yamaha PSR-E343 keyboard, a birthday present from my wife). And in the end, I liked the sound of it enough to leave it as part of the final recording, along with the E-bow guitar. Vibe: Todd Rundgren joins Field Music, as Prince, Hall & Oates and Tears for Fears cheer the union from the sidelines.
The oldest song here. First four-track cassette demo recorded November 10, 1990 at the Tallman Warehouse, 13 Centre St., New Bedford, Mass. Jonno Deily and I rehearsed “Diagnosis” a bit in 1994 before going into the studio to record what became Teach Me to Burn, but we ended up putting it to the side. I dusted it off for a few solo acoustic gigs in 2005, after revising the lyrics. In March 2024 I revised the lyrics again and recorded a new demo, which was further revised in September 2024, and the lyrics were altered a little more for the final studio version. Clearly, words have been an issue; the original ones sounded good but were, in my opinion, close to meaningless (you can hear them on Box of Urchins Not Received and decide for yourself). They still don’t mean that much, but at least I’m content with them now. Beneath all the punning and medico-scientific terminology, I think the diagnosis is that this is a bad relationship, no matter whether the other person in it is a lover, friend or oneself, of which I remain unsure. But the real point of the song is its rhythmic mayhem.
Possibly my all-time favorite song (of mine). Demo number one was recorded on four-track cassette September 20, 1994, the product of me tuning my Sigma acoustic guitar the way my pal Tim Mungenast tuned his electric on his wonderful song “Lithium Statement”: E-B-D-E-B-F# low to high. An astoundingly rich and inspiring tuning that also spurred the writing of “On the Line,” which I demoed four days before “Armored Ignition” and revisited for Germination. The lyrics are in a sort of triple code, but to me it all makes perfect sense. I think I saw the words “armored ignition” either on or in a rental car, and the image it evoked in me had little to do (at least directly) with combustion engines: There’s a fire burning, the archetypal flame of love, but it’s being heavily protected so it can’t burn freely. “Armored Ignition” is an apotheosis of cleverness; I managed to stuff the words “rhetoric,” “tractate,” “chrysolite” and “octopi” into it! And its mood is so complex, both exuberant and melancholy. When I rediscovered it in 2021, I realized that it was still a personal fave. I revised it a bit and recorded a new, less discursive solo demo on my phone. Then in February 2024, I filled out the arrangement for a third demo, which became the blueprint for the studio version. I am absolutely elated that this song has found new life 30 years on. It’s one of the best things I’ve done.
I came up with “The Differential” late one night in 2013 and recorded a quick demo in Audacity (I think). Considered recording it for I Call Time and Germination but ended up shelving it. Partly because it was yet another downer of a Mac song, partly because I wasn’t convinced it was done, partly because I felt it reflected badly on me. I was in a morbid and self-pitying frame of mind that night, focused on the gulf that then seemed to exist between the way my wife and I were with each other and the way I thought I wanted us to be. In short: I was looking for more romance in our life together. I was also willfully avoiding the fact that we had a six-year-old to raise and, of necessity, it just wasn’t going to be the sexiest time in our lives. Ten years later, at a differently fraught moment, I went back to the song, found it still resonant and began to think that it might resonate with others too; the feelings it expresses, I’ve discovered, are feelings that lots of people have about their partners and themselves, at least from time to time. I added nothing to it, changed one word (from “racy” to “risqué”) and recorded a new demo in February and March 2024, gradually creating a kind of sound tapestry for the second half, of which I’m very proud. That second home demo, with a little pro-studio cleanup, is the final recording.
As opposed to “nocturne,” get it? So witty! The first demo of this instrumental piece was recorded in GarageBand sometime in 2018. I promptly forgot about it for five years. In 2023 I rediscovered it and tried rehearsing it with Michael Gelfand and Peter Catapano. Recorded a new demo—two acoustic guitars, two electric guitars and bass—on February 27, 2024, and decided after much inner back and forth that this demo should be the basis for the studio version. At first I liked the idea of recording it as a live trio with Michael and Peter because it sounded like a tune we might have played in our old band Fuller, and I figured we could do it in our sleep. But the experience of playing it with them that way in rehearsal wasn’t as exciting as I’d hoped. I preferred the atmosphere of my demo, so that’s what you hear, with Peter’s drums, my fretless acoustic bass guitar (a loaner from Michael) and Jeff Hudgins’ clarinets and baritone sax overdubbed later. The mood of “Dayturne” comes from the many emotions that emerged in me after my mother-in-law’s death in December 2017. Reflective, with a lot of empty space.
Stay tuned for the other half of my album notes.