My old homie and former bandmate Ed sent me his newest solo CD and I couldn't have been more pleased. Here was my email to him. "Hot damn!!! Off the charts Ed, the CD is really something else. You know Beck just won a Grammy for this kind of multi instrumental affair (but I listened to Becks album, not so good...Ed Cole on the other hand is out of this world...maybe you should change your name to just, Ed :-) Dude, literally blown away by your song writing (you do know something besides power chords huh?) the album kept me captivated from beginning to end, not a dud on the whole thing. The hit is obviously "This Way" or so you would think seeing as how you did a vid for it, but I'll say it again, hot damn. The opening tune "Dog Died..." is the perfect starter, how can you go wrong with a jews harp, but it doesn't end there. And throughout, I am a big time sucker for the cello, you stick that shit in there and my mind sees colors. I think my fave is Ancient History, the lyrics, the cello, the family chorus....HOT DAMN!!! Have you sent this think out to labels, I know you're not the rockstar type but this record is the kind of thing you could make a living on. You are some kind of acoustic post-punk Woody Guthrie." Something I left out, in my note to him was mentioning the mind altering cover art. Let that be a lesson for you folx out there, if you want to represent your aural art well, wrap it in meaningful visual art. I have listened to this thing like five more times since I wrote that note and I'm still amazed that I actually know someone this talented. On top of being an incredible folk-punk-singer-song-writer-multi-instrumentalist, he is a masterful composer, surrounding himself with wonderful artists who in their own right are amazing, only serving to make this disc shine brighter. I asked my old friend to give his take on the project/album and being the Mustard Relic that he is, he wrote what you might call liner notes, exclusive to the Relics...
"I started working on Interim in 2010. It was really spurred on by the death of a couple different friends in a short time span in fall of 2010. It's always a time for reflection when someone close kicks the bucket, it shocks you back to your senses. Teenage Hero, Stone Cold Morning, Storyline, Night Stuff, Groovy Gloom - all those songs flowed out in late 2010 - early 2011. All the songs were written by the end of 2011. I started bringing in Amy Danziger, a cello player and friend from Eugene, and she really helped add some melodic elements, was very good at working fast with minimal dialogue, she really works well with others. We recorded a bunch of her parts in my garage at the time. After I moved to Portland in 2012 my computer took a crap and didn't work despite getting kicked multiple times. I was despondent, took the whole fucking thing apart, down to the power supply and plugged every piece back together. After doing this 2 or 3 times, suddenly the stupid thing started working again, I started calling up friends left and right to come over and play on the recordings before the machine melted down again. Brian Gardiner I've known for many years, we were neighbors in Eugene in 2000 and I knew him from Pellet Gun and Dan Jones & the Squids. He's the best drummer in Portland right now, just awesome, Keith-Moon -meets - classical - percussion kind of drummer, really kicks the whole project into gear. Hans Eichinger is a good friend, also from Eugene, who plays more in the folk idiom. He plays banjo, guitar, fiddle and other instruments. He's got something real about his playing, very in - the - moment, he really knows music from the bowels through the brain. Many others contribute instruments and vocals. Jason and Pia Robbins, AKA the Comforters, are friends from Eugene who are both awesome musicians. Jason engineered the first the Underlings CD, that's how we met. I love singing with Pia on Teenage Hero, and Jason's slide guitar really elevates Stone Cold Morning. I shouldn't sleight the other players - Eric Jensen drums on one song, totally kills it. Tina Cole, my wife plays flute on Stone Cold Morning and everyone sings on Ancient History. Sean Shanahan should have been on the whole damn thing but he just contributes mandolin to This Way. Brian Donnelly plays harmonica on a song. It was very fun to freak out and schedule everyone to get together to play on it. I would grab my desktop computer, go down to Eugene, set up in Dan Jones' practice shed, have 2 or 3 people come over for tracking and then break down and come back to Portland and resume my work week at the organic vegetable factory. It took over 2 years of this but then suddenly everything was done as of August of 2014. I scheduled some studio time to mix the CD at the infamous Haywire studios in SE Portland. Rob Bartleson works with a lot of people in the area and is a respected pro at his craft. He helped me mix the tracks and mastered the CD as well. That was a medium-long but not at all painful process. After it was ready for duplication, I got Eric Jensen to paint a picture on the cover kind of detailing my waxy mental state and then got it laid out by my graphic guru David Snider. All the same people have been helping me for years, it ended up being a nice-looking package. I get by with a little help from my friends. Now, I'm gonna play some shows and send it out to college stations and I guess some kind of review sights? I have a cool band of dudes backing me right now, I'm calling it Ed Cole and the Chem Trail Riders. Brian Gardiner on drums, Hans Eichinger on fiddle and guitar, Will Rousch on upright bass. We have a CD release gig at Sam Bond's Garage in Eugene on Friday, March 27 and then in Portland we play May 2nd at Kelly's Olympian."
With that being said, here's my favorite tune...
"Ancient History"
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUyjz5xPrVw&w=560&h=315]
Ed's got a webpage at Ed Cole Rock and Roll, a Blogspot, a Twitter at EdtheHead123, and if you dug that tune you can go buy the CD at his Bandcamp. At the very least, give the rest of the tunes a listen below... [bandcamp width=100% height=120 album=872856580 size=large bgcol=ffffff linkcol=0687f5 tracklist=false artwork=small]
Another one of those posts of random shit a virtual hoarder might pick up in his travels across cyberspace, footprints you might say, through an intangible land of very real ideas. This first one is of a deleted scene from season 4 of the Walking Dead that I've been meaning to share for quite some time, now that we are already at the end of season 5. Not sure why they deleted it, some great acting in my amateur opinion, but maybe the world is not ready for a concept like "stumping". I wonder how many good scenes end up on the cutting room floor. Of the 4 characters in the scene, 3 are dead now...
[video width="640" height="360" mp4="http://mustard-relics.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/The-Walking-Dead-Season-4-Deleted-Scene-Ep.-408.mp4"][/video]
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