Like many people who run their own personal website, I, Big Kitty, forget to update it quite often. This time, I forgot to post my new album,
Riding a Mule Through the Winter Forest, and its first video (of many, I hope), “For your journey.”
This album was recorded at Foggy Farm Studios by Mika Bramardi, in Portet d’Aspet, France. Not far from where I live! Mika is a great musician and part of a great band called the Foggy Tapes.
Actually all but this one song, For your journey, was recorded there. This one I did at my house, outside at night.
I hope you enjoy this album. For now, it’s still only up on the rather new artist-run cooperative, Subvert.fm. I’ll get it on Bandcamp and the streaming services before August, but for now this is the only place to find it! Please check out Subvert and enjoy this record.
This record, let me describe it to you. It’s an acoustic record, it’s full of the humanity that is the antithesis of computerized, auto-tuned perfection. I wrote these songs with gaps in them, that I could improvise. And they are, in certain parts, made up on the spot, improvised. And every time I perform them, I do them differently. So that’s part of the charm here, nothing is perfect, everything is real and human.
The lyrics address a lot of real things happening in the world and my preoccupations. A lot of thinking about death, death is a kind of key to understanding life and appreciating life, knowing that we will die. That’s also a bit of rebellion against the intense fear of death that dominates the financial-tech-imperialist culture that’s in full flower right now.
So this album is about playing and having fun knowing that death is here, it’s the dance of death, a joyful one, and that in itself is a revolutionary act, not in the sense of being original, but in the sense of rebellion against the dominant culture.
So there’s a brief framing of the album for you – it combines songwriting, folk styles, poetry, and psychedelia in tone. “I hope you find something you like about it”
