Thirty

1)  Abstract Girl (Smith/Redding) 3:39
2)  Queen Of Anamosa (Smith) 4:00
3)  One More Time (Smith/Orbit) 5:00
4)  Cannery Row (Smith/Redding) 3:30
5)  Keep On Walking (dedicated to Samantha Fish) (Smith) 3:25
6)  Into The Now (Smith/Redding) 4:19

7)  All Along The Watchtower (Dylan) 3:48
8)  You Know I Not Good For You (Smith/Miller) 3:10
9)  A Passage To Yesterday (Smith/Redding) 2:47
10) Law Of The Land (Smith/Orbit) 3:29
11) Curio (Smith) 2:47
12) Goodbye Doesn't Mean Forever (Smith/Passmore) 5:05

More than five years after Pawnshops For Olivia, I finally issued 30, a simple title of the fact that I have been doing this for three decades, not bad for somebody nobody knows about.  Except a select few.  Yeah it's garage rock and it may have been the long awaited followup to Town's Edge Rock, that came out late June of 1983.  Unlike the mostly acoustic Pawnshops, 30, I just cranked the amps up and hope that the voice could hold over the noise.

For this album, I started out with a blank sheet of paper and guitar and let the ideas flow.  Geoff Redding plays a vital role in this, he was left out of the the last album and everytime I got the acoustic out, he was left out in the recordings but this time out, he participated in all of the recordings.  Originally known as No Exit, I actually released that album and Diggy Kat was kind enough to play all of the songs off that album but I wasn't happy with the end results and in September revisited and left off three songs in favor of  All Along The Watchtower, a very ragged run through.  Richard Dennanbaugh recorded the one take, to which I didn't play drums for a few months and then added the drums once the guitars were laid down.  One More Time, the lyrics were written in 1992 and fitted upon a shoegazer melody that I think came from The Charlatans UK.  Law Of The Land was co credited to Jack Orbit even though he didn't have much to do with the album and Ken Miller helped out with You Know I'm Not Good For You, which may have been a play on words from the Amy Winehouse song.

Keep On Walking was my account of going to Davenport on a chilly night in Davenport and got to see the up and coming Samantha Fish and damn she tore up the place, and even got off into the dance floor, wailing on the guitar and coming up face to face with me. A fun night, till going home the radiator plug fell out and I had to spend a sleepless night at  a hotel in Eldridge after coming to conclude I couldn't make the hour and 20 minute trip back home with it spewing anti freeze over the Casey's store parking lot. 

Goodbye Doesn't Mean Forever was co written with Nicole Passmore around the time we got together in 2009 and I came across some words that she jotted down in a letter sent to me and I discovered it upon a pile of lyrics.  The chorus she had a hand in helping out. Amazingly that song was the only acoustic number on that album.

Curio was thought up after a bargain hunting trip to the Springville junk shop and seeing all this hoarder house stuff all around the place, it inspired me to write a song about relics of yesterday and about getting rid of things in life you really don't need.  I don't consider it to be a love song or breakup song, but rather a observation of we accumulate so much shit in our life, no wonder we can't find room to breathe, sounds like our recording studio and place of residence, called the Hoarder House.  Perhaps the most telling of song is Passage To Yesterday, which explains my love of records and perhaps lack of being a person to settle down with.  One of the oddball waltz time songs I ever did, it's basically me playing snare using the infamous hot rods, which is a step up from brushes but the forced hi hat playing sounds like I am using the bass drum to keep the beat, I'm really not. It just sounds that way.

Martin Daniels helped out on the sequencing of the songs. On No Exit, the album ran over 55 minutes and included a cover of The End by the Doors, originally done in 1976 and not in a good way on the forgettable but given an A for effort on the 1976 effort  Beautiful Renditions.  It's really a great song if you take out the bizarre interludes and sections that Jim Morrison gave it's epic 11 minute saga, but ours was 9 and half minutes, and I can listen to it without problems.  We may take another stab at a shorter version and leave out the Killer Woke Before Dawn part.



No Exit was met with discouraging reviews,  the cover art was quite controversial, which showed a painting of a nude woman and I thought it would fit the music quite well. Alas, the faint of heart complained about the double entree which wasn't the case but later on we pulled the cover in favor of the one that you see in front of you.  With 12 songs at hand and a shorter time program, the end result results in a better flow of songs going into one another.  With 30 reviews were much better.

And I can live with the end result.