The Backgound: by Chris Merrill... ... guitar and harmonica, clear, streamlined accompaniments, full of nothing but astonishing and brilliant new songs. I think the music speaks for itself. The recordings sound disarming and misguided, like something out of Abbey Road. The lyrics, arrangements, and musical textures were often reminiscent of those you might have heard on Blonde on Blonde, Revolver. Theres a lot to experience in these songs.... ...the song, Burned Coffee, full of bitterness and caffeine, is an inspired and sly meditation, his own surreal Nighthawk-poets at the diner, set in our plastic-pop-corporate-industry-owned-age. Its a lively, ironic, post-60s, postmodern lament. A rich tone-poem that is at once a funny and disturbing landscape of cut-throat deals, cell phones, short-term profits, animosity for art, and instant gratificationan environment so polluted as to asphyxiate even the most brilliant of artists. People who, in the past, even only a generation ago, would have been our shining lights, our poets and critics, are now a new breed of predictable, even prosaic failures. Poster boys for Prozac, AA, Viagra, minimum-wage Employees of the Month. Its too late is a song almost deceptive in its familiarity, its subject one of the most classic troubadour themes: a tender romance coming to an end. A song lucid enough to break your heart, like a sweet sense-memory of a childhood friend. It is also more complicated than it initially lets on, more attentive in the end to the shades of gray between the darkness of loss and the luminescence of love. Its a song not afraid to linger in the shadows under the stairs, hide its face in its hood, lull you off of your feet. I played cards with the devil is another inspired mix of seemingly incongruous influences, a cross between Charles Johnson, Neil Young, Frederick Nietzsche, and a Tarot deck. Y.H. offers a moody portrait of the fall of naïve and reckless youth, misdirection and self-enslavement, with an implicit reminder (at least for this listener) of Nietsches insight into self-loathing: that whoever has no respect for himself still respects himself as somebody whose opinion matters. The song, Trips, Skips, and Hats, is a literate and vibrant free-for-all, equal parts Bob Dylan, T.S. Eliot, and Jack Kerouac. The song is a puzzle of urban-sprawl-wasteland, with Visions of Johanna-Prufrock, and chemically altered states. Its a song that vibrantly plays with time and language, homonyms and homographs, while whispering, sometimes shouting, of starlit escapades out on the D-train. These songs have already become a part of my life, how I experience the world, their melodies have been memorized with their lyrics. Ive listened to the CD over and over again, enchanted, getting to know the music like you do a good Dylan album, or a late 60s Beatles record, getting wrapped up in the feel and quality of the arrangements, becoming immersed in the sound of each piece, coming to terms with the poetry. Ive spent enough time with the songs that theyve become a part of my life the same way the White Album or Blood on the Tracks is a part of it: I cant imagine living without them playing somewhere in my mind, and I even have a hard time remembering what it was like not knowing them. I just hope that more people will have the same opportunity, and right quick.