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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
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
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
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. 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. LISTEN
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". LISTENTHE 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. 95 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. 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.
CHILDREN'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. LISTEN 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. 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 |
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SOME OF THE VERY TALENTED MUSICIANS WHO PLAYED ON EXOTIC AMERICA: |
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website by Dasha © 2004-2009 Brontosaurus Music CD cover art by Atticus Wolrab |
