New Record Out Halloween
A Revenge Fantasy!
Hey Faux Friends,
I am excited to share that this Sunday, October 31, will see the release of the second Faux Jean record of 2021. The album is called “A Revenge Fantasy,” and you can listen to three songs for free right now by clicking on the above link. It will be available exclusively on Bandcamp and it looks like this:
I chose to call this record “A Revenge Fantasy” because those words appear in a lyric from one of the songs on the record, and it seems appropriately provocative for a Faux Jean album title. I could just as easily have called it “The Squirrel Fight Demos,” but I went for the punchier title. I can’t help myself. (I noticed my kids seem to like the word “revenge” and “avenge,” so that played into it a little too, I reckon.)
The album was recorded in a single sitting on February 20, 2015. At that time, I was living in the grad student housing in Madison, Wisconsin with my wife and kids. I was going to Madtown Tech then, while my wife was getting her PhD in Education at UW-Madison. I’d brought home this digital recording device with built-in microphones that I’d checked out of the Media Lab at the Tech school. There was a pretty massive blizzard going on outside as I recorded, and some squirrels were engaged in an epic battle in the fresh snow; I also had a bit of a cold on this day. I felt pretty crappy, but I wanted to get some song ideas recorded while I had that device at home and no one else was there—the thought being that maybe I could improvise some arrangements on songs that had stumped me in coming to fruition through the path of least resistance. Although, really, improv is a version of the path of least resistance.
For instance, the song “Thrift (old housewives demo)” has been clanging around my brain rather loudly since 1996 or seven, and on this day, I was going to try to squeeze out a workable arrangement. Of course, here it is six years from that day and I do not have a finalized arrangement—but I do like this version as a signpost to a future version, and I hope you like it too.
So yeah, the whole record is me “banging out some acoustic numbers” as a sort of progress report to myself as a songwriter. Complete with patter. It is a record of this one afternoon on this one day in this one apartment where a person sang into a digital void, after school and before work, hoping to learn something.
I remain your humble servant &c,
Faux Jean
P.S. I have opted to only release this record on Bandcamp for now and not give any money to Facebook in the promotional efforts, so I would be grateful if you could share this with anyone who might dig. 🙏🏻