From Alamogordo to Tunis: songs about psychos & sociopaths, refugees, tyrants, theocrats, bigots, atheists, lovers, terrorists, nuclear weapons & climate change, a wrestling of ego and id through a single mic from a ragged voice and tortured guitar...

Between the Droughts and the Floods: Track by track

1. Blood in the Wake opens with a bit of interesting electronic tomfoolery to mask a shitty editing decision on my part and thereafter is just me and my acoustic angrily singing about religious profiteers, conscienceless gun vendors, exploitative insurance companies, dishonest investment bankers, reckless drivers, and politicians that cut funding for public health services, while explaining thpsychopaths are born without a conscience but sociopaths simply learn to suppress their natural empathy feelings of empathy for others.

2. Atheists in Mecca is dedicated to all of the countless atheists, agnostics, skeptics, and secular humanists in the so-called Muslim world and in oppressive theocratic Christian, Hindu, Jewish, and other religiously dictatorial communities. It was recorded in a hotel room in Tunis. Despite the harshness of my vocal I felt that this take captured the right mood so I kept it.

3. Between the Droughts and the Floods is about climate change denial and climate change worsened severe weather events. The first verse refers to Hurricane Harvey which caused massive flooding in Houston and other locations in large part due to extraordinarily warm deep sea water temperatures, which my lyrics actually underestimated. The warm water temperatures actually went as deep as 600 feet under the surface of the Gulf waters. I like the way the instrumental parts sound as if I am trying to rip my guitar apart.

4. Leaves of Kosutnjak is about the four years my wife and I spent apart because I could not find a job that paid enough to qualify for a visa to bring her to the USA to marry me. We met on Facebook in 2011, just after the Jasmine Revolution/Arab Spring and the successful ousting of Ben Ali. She liked something I wrote about secularism in the so-called Muslim world and universal human rights. At the time I was attending classes at San Diego Mesa College in International Relations, Middle East History, and American History and she was studying linguistics at Manouba University. To make a long story short, I had to leave San Diego, become an over the road trucker for 6 months, then move to my rural hometown and become a concrete mixer driver in order to make enough money to please USCIS. We had two visits a year apart, in Tunis and one in Belgrade Serbia before we could finally be together. The part about the Mufti is a reference to the fact that we couldn’t get married in Tunisia because my then fiancee was considered a “Muslim” even though she is actually an atheist and was forbidden from marrying a man who was not “Muslim”, although “Muslim” men were free to marry women of any religion. We were married in the USA and a few years later feminists and secularists in the Tunisian parliament passed a new law to allow Tunisian women to marry men of any or no religion freely and recently deceased Tunisian President Essebsi signed it into law. We are now married in both the USA and Tunisia and neither of us had to fake a religious conversion to do it! The sounds in the middle of the song are from a video I made from my first trip to Tunisia in 2012 with the sound of the call to prayer from the mosque nearby filtered through a flock of squawking birds.

5. R2P (Human Refugees) is perhaps even more personal and yet very political. The title refers to the Responsibility to Protect doctrine much debated since the failure of the international community to intervene to stop the genocide in Rwanda. The first verse refers to my abusive conservative Christian upbringing and the lifelong financial, emotional and career setbacks it has led to. The second verse refers to my the horrific car crash that took my wife’s ability to feel or use her body below the waist, nearly killed her sister, and stole my wife’s Green Card and therefore our right to reside in the USA. Finally I tell the story of sitting on my wife’s hospital bed and watching news of another boat of migrants setting sail from the coast of Libya only to tragically sink in the Mediterranean and the Central American migrants fleeing from MS-13 to seek asylum in the USA only to have their children taken away by the goons of the Trump Administration.

6. Blood in the Wake (Reprise) is more about psychopaths and sociopaths, but this time it refers to Putin’s propaganda and disinformation efforts, Trump’s anti-press Twitter rants, the NRA’s enabling of white supremacists and anti-government fanatics to arm themselves, pedophile priests, and Islamic terror groups.

7. Islamists in Bornu begins with a big “Fuck you” aimed at that jihadists terrorizing parts of two of Africa’s most musical countries: Nigeria and Mali. I was simply outraged that jihadists were kidnapping girls in Nigeria and cutting the hands off guitarists in Mali. This is perhaps the most blasphemous and sacrilegious song on the whole album.

8. By The Smartphone Light is a short, darkly comical bit of Trump bashing.

9. And Photograph Stars is about the cynical vapidness of the commercial pop music industry.

10. Magical Markets and Magical Mules was recorded back in 2017 in Alamogordo, New Mexico. The first verse is about the Wall Street douche-bags that caused the 2007 recession. The second verse is about the destructiveness of under-informed conspiracy theories becoming more popular than accurate legitimate journalism. The third verse compares the illogical and immoral philosophies of ISIS and al Qaeda with the Tea Party and the alt-right; the philosophies of Christian Dominionists and prosperity theologists with Ayn Rand worshiping uber-capitalists. In the end I conclude that irrational beliefs from “the magic of the market” to “benevolent dictatorships” to theocratic tyranny are all used to keep people stupid so rulers can exploit them.

11. Mutually Assured Destruction is a spoken word piece in which I attempted to tell the whole story of nuclear weapons from the Manhattan Project to the Iran nuclear deal.

The story of my new album: Between the Droughts and the Floods.

After many years of struggle to survive the recession and making huge personal sacrifices to please the US immigration system in order to be with the woman I love, I have finally been able to make the time to make new music.

In 2017 I began writing new songs and instrumentals and recorded and released a single called Magical Markets and Magical Mules. My wife, who is Tunisian, went home for a family visit and I was meant to complete a new album in her absence, between my long and unpredictable shifts as a concrete mixer driver in the mountains and deserts, military bases and construction sites of Otero and Lincoln Counties in Southern New Mexico.

When she returned, we were supposed to begin planning our move to the East Coast in order to make regular trips to Tunisia more affordable, but a cruel tragedy brutally changed everything.

In February 2018, on the night after my wife’s birthday, she and her sister were nearly killed in a severe auto collision in the Tunis suburb of Gammarth. They were both passengers in a friend’s car who had stopped at a red-light. The car they were in was struck from behind by a speeding vehicle. My wife Nesrine suffered a spinal injury which made her paraplegic and several broken ribs which caused her heart to stop at one point, narrowly escaping death. Her sister Jasmine was immediately thrown into a coma due to a head injury, a coma which would last for two months and so many parts of her femur, pelvis and hips were so badly shattered that as I write this, more than a year and a half later, she is still bedridden, even after multiple surgeries which included removing an infected part of her femur and a subsequent bone graft.

This is why my album wound up being (mostly) recorded in a bedroom in Tunis.

Needless to say, I had to quit my job, give up my car and bank account, give away most of my belongings, take my most precious things like family photos, personal documents, CD collection, books, guitars and grandfather’s art to my mother’s house for safe storage and get on the plane to Tunis to be by my wife’s side.

Among the items I packed were the four years of love letters Nes and I sent each other when immigration laws and economic problems kept us apart, the TASCAM digital 8 track I planned on making my new album with, and a copy of my favorite book Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches by Marvin Harris. Unfortunately, Turkish Airlines lost my suitcase and after 6 months of their games I finally gave up on the compensation that they obviously never intended to give me.

All of this made me even more determined to NOT give up on my musical project. The more obstacles you throw in my way, the more angry, stubborn and defiant I become and the more determined I am to accomplish my goals or destroy everything in my path trying to.

I cashed out my large amount of accumulated unused vacation pay so I had a little money besides the funds raised for the girls’ emergency healthcare needs on Go Fund Me, which allowed me to buy a very inexpensive acoustic guitar from a shop in Tunis, Tanglewood from the UK.

The months that followed were exhausting, enraging, sad, confusing, frustrating, but above all full of pain and uncertainty for what the future would bring. I kept writing and composing on that little acoustic guitar and recorded a solo guitar improvisation on my cellphone under an orange tree in the yard of my wife’s grandmother.

Finally after more than year of street noise, screams of pain, lack of privacy and lack of a decent microphone ha made recording an album impossible, I sought out a used USB connected microphone that would allow me to make the only kind of album possible under such circumstances, simple, no overdubs, live in the room, primitive, recorded in little one and two hour breaks that would happen with weeks or even months between.

In the end this tortuously drawn out and unpredictable process gave me more time to fine tune my compositions and my lyrics, but also meant that the recordings came out much rougher and in places harsher on the ears than I had intended. The vocals in Atheists in Mecca and the percussive low register instrumental sections of the title song are good examples of this harshness. But maybe if it can be said that I can be more aggressive with a solo acoustic guitar than most metal, punk, or noise bands achieve with all those effects boxes and amplifiers, that perhaps I’m on to something…or off my rocker.

These sessions involved me waiting nervously for short (and rare) periods of time in which to work alone in a quiet house, recording both guitar and voice through one microphone. Everything was recorded in our bedroom in my wife’s parents’ apartment in Tunis, except for one song which was recorded on the TASCAM in our apartment in Alamogordo, New Mexico and one which was recorded in a hotel room in Tunis.

In the end I wound up with about 28 tunes and decided that they would make two better separate focused albums than one long scattered brained sonic spasm. So they were divided into an album of political songs: Between the Droughts and the Floods and an album of instrumentals: The Future’s as Bright as a Dying Star…which will be released soon but is available to pre-stream in rough mix form on my Bandcamp page.

On the instrumental album everything is also live, essentially dual mono, except for the opening and closing pieces which are multi-track and stereo and everything was recorded in our bedroom in Tunis, except for the piece recorded on my cellphone in the yard of my wife’s grandmother and another piece recorded at the hotel in Tunis.

All of these songs were recorded in my bedroom in Tunis, Tunisia in 2019, except "Atheists in Mecca" which was recorded in a hotel room in Tunis in 2019 and "Magical Markets and Magical Mules" which was recorded in my living room in Alamogordo, New Mexico, USA in 2017.

All of these songs were recorded live with one microphone,
All of these songs are based on true stories.