 |
|||||||||
|
|
|||||||||
|
|||||||||
MOVING
MOUNTAINS – featuring the outstanding
fiddle playing of Dennis
Caplinger, a lovely nylon-string guitar solo by Kentucky fingerstylist
Pat Kirtley, me, on my trusty Folkroots mountain dulcimer, and the very
melodic electric bass playing of Doug
Robinson. (Doug co-produced the album, and he also played on and
produced The Andy Robinson Band CD.) "Moving Mountains" is featured in
the soundtrack of Lost Lake, a
quirky
independent film about karma and past lives from
Adams Entertainment. LISTEN
THE
BRIDGES
ARE BURNING
– A spontaneous expression of glee. I
picked
up my dulcimer and this one
just
spilled out of me in the midst of packing
to move back to San Diego, after 24 years of the rock & roll life
in Los
Angeles. LISTEN95 TEARS – I bought
a small ceramic flute while on vacation in the Czech Republic. The
shaky little melody I was able to
coax out of that thing is perfect for this tune. The
crusty-sounding voice in the second section is a Stylophone, a kind of
primitive toy synthesizer, made in the Sixties.
CONVERSATIONS
– Remember the "party" tracks you used to hear in the background of
certain pop and soul records of the sixties? This is my folky
version of that sort of thing. That's my mother-in-law's laughter
you hear as the "lead instrument" at several points in the
song. LISTEN
EXOTIC
AMERICA – The
idea for the title came from a quote attributed to Andy Warhol,
about how Americans are
probably the most exotic people on earth, whether we realize it or
not. LISTEN PENGUIN – I've had this tune in my "back pocket" since the mid-Seventies, when my buddy Richard and I used to take our kalimbas and jam during hikes along the cliffs above Torrey Pines State Beach. Larry Clark used software to “reverse” the sound of my kalimba solo, and then I cut and pasted certain passages of it back into the recording. That's the unique, fluttering sound.
THE DIFFERENT
WORLD SONG
– In the late eighties I did some experimenting with
isolation
tanks. Once, while “floating”, a musical phrase, complete with lyrics,
popped into my head, and I ended up writing a song around it.
Eventually we named
our band after that song. I decided to drop the lyrics here, and use
"The Different World Song" as an excuse to get crazy with my Black
Mountain
electric
dulcimer. LISTEN
AFTER THE
FIRES –
More electric dulcimer, pretty and sort of melancholy…a peace prayer,
really. I named it after
witnessing the eerie calm which followed the devastating Southern
California wildfires of 2003. LISTENCHILDREN'S GAMES – If you strip away all the psychedelic stuff, there's a folky little sing-song tune underneath. Scott Colby’s brilliant slide guitar helped morph this one into something rather gnarly. I played most of the keyboard parts in the breaks on a wheezing plastic chord organ that I bought for ten bucks at a swap meet. NAMELESS PARADE – My original idea for "Nameless" got away from me, almost immediately, and I got lost in a seemingly endless series of revisions: changing the drums and percussion, redoing the bass part, adding the introduction, editing the flute, etc., etc. At one point I thought I was done, but then I got my first Taylor guitar, and decided I just had to add a slide guitar part - it's subtle, but it's in there. I finally brought the song to Doug, and guess what? We redid drum parts, added percussion and edited stuff into the wee hours. Now, when I listen to "Nameless Parade", it’s always sort of a pleasant surprise, almost as if someone else composed and played it, instead of me. LET THERE BE NIGHT – This was improvised in the studio; it’s based on a 8-bar loop of a chord progression I played on electric dulcimer. AVENUE V - In the desert outside of LA, there is a little town called Pearblossom, and out behind Pearblossom, just before the foothills, there is a network of long, hard dirt roads with street signs on them, but no buildings. I used to go hiking out there. There wasn't much out there but Joshua trees and these tremendous radio transmission towers reaching up into the sky. It was a beautiful, eerie, lonely sort of place. The roads were all named for letters of the alphabet, and I spent a good deal of time wandering along "Avenue V". ANDY TALKS ABOUT THE SONGS FROM EXOTIC AMERICA: Moving Mountains, The Bridges Are Burning, 95 Tears, Penguin, The Different World Song, Children's Games, Nameless Parade, Let There Be Night |
|||||||||
|
SOME OF THE VERY TALENTED MUSICIANS WHO PLAYED ON EXOTIC AMERICA: |
|||||||||
website by Dasha © 2004-2006 Brontosaurus Music CD cover art by Atticus Wolrab |
