Side A

1.  Summer in Athens (mp3)
2.  Not Falling For You
3.  Whitney
4.  Lonesome Road
5.  Startin' Fires

Side B

6.  Joe's House
7.  Santiago (mp3)
8.  (Mystery Track) †
9.  Crush Song
10.  Bicycle

Notes

The music collected on Orange Blossom Spaceship was recorded by me over a period of roughly four years (measured from the beginnings of "Crush Song" in October 2001 to the final dash of recording in September 2005).  The songwriting and recording processes were by no means systematic and focused: unfinished songs were left on the backburner for months and in some cases years before being re-tackled, sometimes in completely different forms.  In certain cases, songs I thought I was completely and totally done with got picked back up again and reworked/partially re-recorded later.  To give one example, the vocals for "Not Falling For You," thought finished in the middle of 2003, were re-recorded the day I began burning the first batch of the CDs, because I realized that some incompetent EQ I'd done on the old vocals two years earlier produced horrific distortion and noise on CD players.

All the songs are by me (unless you get one of the limited editions with a cover tune for track eight), and pretty much every sound on the record was produced by me or commanded by me through a keyboard, a computer drum machine, or a WAV file from a webpage of free WAV files (for example, the gongs on "Joe's House").  The only exceptions are the sample from Total Recall featured in "Captain D's" and "You thought there was going to be a huge explosion, didn't you?" on "Startin' Fires," which is from the Disneyland record Thrilling, Chilling Sounds of the Haunted House.  "Whatcha Gonna Do," featured only on very rare versions of the album, includes some sampled and messed-with guitar originally played by Travis Hallenbeck, when he was in the short-lived but excellent Doctor Casino band, as well as a clip from "Tom's Diner" by Suzanne Vega.

Technical Stuff

Basically all of the "instrument-sounding" keyboard parts were played on the Yamaha DJX, an underrated workhorse with a surprisingly good General MIDI set and a ton of good drums.  I got this keyboard years ago as a Christmas gift from my father; in early 2005 my father bestowed on me another amazing keyboard gift - a Korg DW-8000, which he found at a yard sale complete with manual and accessories.  I can't state enough how much I appreciate both his sharpness in recognizing these as worthwhile keyboards, and his kindness in equipping me with them.  The DW-8000 is an analog/digital hybrid with astonishing levels of customizability (at least to a Yamahaphile like myself) and proved integral to several of the later songs.  An example would be the spacey, Legend of Zelda-esque tones and drones on "Lonesome Road," a song whose chorus is in fact a tribute to my father's tendency to sing isolated bars of unrecognizable Folkways recordings around the family dinner table and then express disappointment that none of us could recognize these "great ones" about lonesome roads, smoked chicken, and someone known only as "Sylvia's mother."  Anyway, back to keyboards: that covers our main machines, although I also used a Yamaha SHS-10 "keytar" (in addition to helping out in live performances) for the gentle faux-clarinet solo in "Crush Song."

Most of the drums ended up being from the DJX, although these were often supplemented - in particular, I kept needing bigger cymbal crash sounds, so many of the songs ("Whitney" is probably the best example) supplement me playing drums on the DJX with downloaded drum WAVs.  Several of the earlier songs - "Crush Song," "Startin' Fires," and "Not Falling For You" - are drummed primarily using the free software drum machine Hammerhead (or its descendent Tuareg2).  Hammerhead is very easy to use but it is hard to really "jam" with this approach and it can make everything sound a little rigid and lockstep, so gradually I moved towards the keyboard drums.  Only "Bicycle"'s drum tracks are actually played "live" on the keyboard drums straight through the song.  A Casio VL-Tone provides the first, super-chintzy drum loops heard in "Startin' Fires."

Everything was recorded into my computer using the crippled free version of CoolEdit '96, a dated but still unsurpassed WAV editing program that combines an instinctive interface with a great variety of effects and options.  The crippling is unfortunate; you can only use two features at any given time, and "save file" counts as a feature, so doing multiple effects can be very tedious.  However, CoolEdit got bought out and is now published as Adobe Audition for a whopping $300.  I would gladly pay the $50 that CoolEdit cost, but $300 for effectively the same product is just absurd.  Score another victory for the invisible hand of the market!

A program that (at current writing) is still worth its purchase price is ACID Music Studio, whose various ancestor programs I having been using for all tracking and mixing since around 1999 or 2000.  So basically this is what I used to assemble the songs out of the various WAVs.  Other than that I used ACID for volume tweaking, but I basically ignored its effects options since I felt so much more comfortable with CoolEdit.

Acknowledgements

While I am proud of Orange Blossom Spaceship as a personal, all-by-myself accomplishment, no creative work can truly be completed all-by-oneself.  This album would never have been possible without the input, support, inspiration, and criticism of many friends and fans.  I'm sure I'll end up forgetting someone, but I've got to try and cite anyway.  My father's keyboard contributions were cited above, but both he and my mother deserve tremendous credit for being among my most supportive and long-time fans.  All my coworkers at both Copy Services and the Ginkgo Tree restaurant put up with me singing, loudly, on the job, which is where I do a lot of my work coming up with songs and experimenting with vocal technique.  Props as well to DJ Do It and his Indie Rock Karaoke, a delightful format for doing a whole lot of singing in public - again, ideal for experimenting with vocal technique.

Many musicians inspired me in the simple but crucial way of suggesting through their work that music was available to anyone, that it was something I could do too.  Even though my work doesn't sound like theirs I owe them tremendous debts of creative energy and openness; they include Kathleen Hanna, the Microphones, Green Bean Go (and all associated bands), Madeline Adams, and others I am probably forgetting.

The following people were partners in brainstorming at various times and perhaps were most crucial to the album getting made and sounding the way it does: Matt Voss (former partner in The Sorry Sods' songwriting, performing, and recording endeavors), Travis Hallenbeck (keyboard enthusiast, onetime backup guitarist), Mark Herbkersman (former partner in Digital FC, continued shop-talker), Dave Deyette (Double Dinosaur, shockingly huge fan), Matt Grove (onetime backup drummer), and Pat "PJ" Burns (New Logic Theory mastermind, cheerleader to all my most exciting new directions).  Julie Hathaway came up with the "So you wanna be startin' fires?" joke at a party in the summer of 2003; Tony and Kimberly Paglia were warm, supportive fans who helped me get my first gig at a "real" venue.  Many different people inspired lyrics by their own radiance, evil, or eccentricity, but their identities will have to be trickled out in interviews over the coming decades.  Finally, in general I want to thank each and every person who has offered me friendship and love over the past few years - directly or indirectly you have made possible all my creative endeavors including my music.  This album is dedicated to you.

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