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POPULAR MUSIC VOL. 3: THE JOHNNY AMERICAN CONCEPT ALBUM

by Goodbye The Band

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    The download contains a PDF all of the truly embarassing lyrics from the "intentionally bad song" project used on Popular Music Vol. 3 and 4 and some artwork made for CDRs.
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about

Written to Jim Santo from Demo Universe (RIP) in 2001:

Hey, Jim! It’s Goodbye the Band! It’s been almost a year, so we decided it was time to send you something else.

This CD is entitled, “Popular Music: Vol. 3: The Johnny American Concept Album.” It’s the last installment in the Popular Music trilogy. It’s 18 songs, 38 minutes long. It was recorded last August, and finished nine months ago.

The story of the creation of JACA is an odd one, and despite any bullshitting in the past, what we’re about to tell you is true. We wrote a set of lyrics containing forty-five songs in two days. They were meant to be completely ridiculous. They were not meant to be connected in any way, shape or form. Just odd, off-the-top of our head stuff. We recorded 31 of those songs in a month’s time with Johnny American, and chose our favorite tracks for a final, mastered CD. As it turns out, the 18 tracks that make JACA so very JACA form a concept album of sorts – a story of a beaten, frying-pain wielding, child-corrupting record producer named Brian Eno, his poor wife, and his revenge-seeking children. It is a story of epic, accidental proportions and it really disturbs us that we write about this stuff without even realizing it. As a friend told us, “If I didn’t know this was a joke, I’d be scared of you.” We finished all but one of the remaining songs between the end of November and the beginning of December later last year. The full set of songs is available for the truly adventurous, or stupid.

The songs can also be enjoyed at a less conceptual and pretentious level. The songs were all written in fun, even if they’re really about patricide and such. When we first gave one of our friends a copy of the CD, he incessantly sang “Silkscreen Chicken,” a song about Andy Warhol until we taught him how to play it on the guitar. Unfortunately or not, he’s now dead.

The sonic and lyrical weirdness here is at an all-time high here, but it’s probably our favorite record we’ve made, and certainly the most sonically unified. (That means a lot of the songs sound the same.) You’ll recognize some of the tracks on this CD from a disc we sent you last summer, Summer 2001. They have the same titles as when they were recorded last year, so it shouldn’t confuse you.

Making the record sound the way it does seemed to be the only way to constructively use the intense pleasure – and burden – of discovering two very cool, influential, defunct bands in the same summer. One of the tracks actually features real drums. All of the tracks were originally recorded at levels way over the digital distortion peak, and mastered with a bit of the very high-end (responsible for the piercing digital sound) cut off, and the volume level set slightly below 0 dB (the peak level).

Hope you enjoy. Look forward to another album, Songs Set To Music, in your mailbox later this summer. It features less odd-sounding songs and lyrics that mostly are considerably more normal than these.

Also, some requests: we’d really appreciate it if you only referred to our contact guy as “Johnny American,” in both this review and – if it’s not too much trouble – if you could fix the past reviews’ contact info so it reads “Johnny American” and not “John Acquadro.” Thanks a lot. (Johnny’s a real paranoid.) And soon, we’ll have a new address – in New York City! But more on that some other time. Could you also update our ‘Demo Links’ page link so it goes to the crackerbox.net address on the first page? Thanks a lot.

And, for the record, most of us never heard Captain Beefheart, never listened to Zappa, and nobody in the band had a Ween record until this February. Also, the Pennock Bridge Collective was a one or two time thing as far as I know. Otherwise, there’s not much cross-pollination on Crackerbox.net. (The Spinto Band and their side-projects are usually easily identifiable as, at the very least, second cousins.)

Thanks for your time.

Sincerely,




Johnny American
for GOODBYE THE BAND

– – –

credits

released October 19, 2001

Thanks to Matthew Rowe and Spencer Owen.

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