Philadelphia brings us up to the present. When we moved here, it was a Hail Mary smack dab in the middle of a pandemic. I’d only been here one time for a couple of hours in the early 2000s. The wife, never. Here, I’m in a rock n roll band. We play old and new original numbers, even a cover or two. Some of the songs are mine, and within that group of songs, some are new, written here.
Others were songs from my work in Barcelona as Goldeggasse. A few are even older, from the 90s in San Francisco—Everything Must Go, with Pete. The reworking of the Barcelona numbers is most exciting because most of those, in their original form, were unlistenable. Well, that’s being a little too harsh and self-aggrandizing. They just weren’t songs that anybody other than the songwriter would ever listen to a second time, or seek to listen to a second time. The band breathes new life into them.
New rhythms, new riffs, new melodies, or, more accurately, melodies where there were none previously— just me, monotonously intoning words that mirrored the repetitive bass line.
Americana Barcelona / 2021
Americana Barcelona is a coffee table book created and published in Philadelphia after our years in Barcelona. Creating and publishing the book was, for me, cathartic, because that was a tough city to leave. We were in Barcelona for 10 years, and that was the longest I’d lived anywhere since my hometown. The thing about Barcelona is that it is the greatest city on Planet Earth to live in. There are definitely better places to visit, but visiting a place is not living in a place. So, again, tough to leave. Then there was the timing of our departure. We left Spain on January 27, 2021, right in the middle of the pandemic. There weren’t a lot of goodbyes to be had.
Tres / 2022
Tres is the third Goldeggasse album. Technically, there were two albums between Goldeggasse’s second album, Normal Data, than this one (The Last Days of Logan Legend and Pandemic Companion), but at six years and 37 minutes across two continents, it still took way too long to finish.
It does represent an evolution for me, personally (as well it should after six years). There are some instrumentals, first off, which I’d not even attempted previously since my music and melodies were, historically, anemic at best. Second, it was an opportunity to pay homage to artists that influenced me over the years. Private Wilson was my stab at a son in the vein of Peter Gabriel’s Genesis. Rooster Homeward was written with a Nick Cave juxtaposition in mind. Tres also contains songs written as tributes to influential artists who passed during those six years: Leonard Cohen and David Bowie.
Old Everything Must Go Videos / 2022
After getting back in touch with my old bandmate from San Francisco, I created a bunch of music videos for several of the songs we recorded together at the time. As always, the music videos are drawn from videos in the public domain, primarily found in the Prelinger Archives.
Paper Knives & Dragonflies / 2022
Paper Knives & Dragonflies is a record album that was written, produced and released by my good friend from Barcelona, Ash Wan. One of the great joys of my last few years in the city was meeting him close to his studio in the Gothic Quarter for drinks. This was almost always as Plaça George Orwell, and it is something I miss terribly. Ash was working on this album prior to my return to the states, and I contributed much of the lyrics to one of the songs on the album: Game of Chance. The song is described as “a beatnik vibe trip hop track, pertaining to a Bonnie and Clyde-esque road trip that ends badly.” You can even hear me and my wife’s voices in the song.
The Alpha Upgrade of HD Heathers / 2023
The Alpha Upgrade of HD Heathers, Book of Glads Volume 1 began as a single novel: Everybody Wants HD Heathers. It has more expansive ambitions now because a couple of sci-fi aficionados/friends who were kind enough to give me notes on early drafts really enjoyed the world I’d created.
The Alpha Upgrade of HD Heathers is Book 1 in the Science Fiction saga The Book of Glads, and is available for purchase at Amazon.com.
Experience a world in which nation states have fallen by the wayside, giving way to The Mega-City System and The Alpha Upgrade Program. While The System acknowledges, and even caters to the shortcomings of all citizens, The Program gives everyone the opportunity to have the strength, dexterity or virility of a superhero, and the fame that comes with it. The one catch is that you must agree to participate in the most popular form of entertainment—Gladiatorial Combat—sometimes to the death.
HD Heathers opted for a strength upgrade fresh out of high school. Now, 15 years later, she’s the hero of millions, having gained wealth, prestige, and stardom.
Follow the #4 Glad in Mega-City Philadelphia as she navigates celebrity, loneliness, and the creeping feeling that the world is not as utopian as she’d been led to believe.
Philadelphia / 2023
Goldeggasse’s 4th album Philadelphia was created entirely in the city of Philadelphia in the time since arriving. It was a prolific period of creativity for me, probably in large part because I’m in a band called The Strain now, which is inspirational and exciting. I would say these songs are better songs, all in all, than those I wrote in the past. It’s definitely a little uneven. Sandwiched between random numbers are three loosely story-driven ‘Gangster Rock’ songs.
There are also three songs dealing directly with death. I turned 50 a couple of years ago, and while I would not describe myself as morose on the subject, it made me think about time, and its scarcity. “This must be the beginning of the long goodbye.” “Money comes and goes. Time just goes.” They were lines that came to mind. The first of them inspired The Long Goodbye.