Hi guys.
I way overslept this morning and thus exercised the option to work from home, so it’s really quite bold of me to spend any of my remaining workday writing a Substack. So I suppose I’ll keep it short. It’s also raining and thunderstorming here in Evanston; I took Cleo on a walk and we both came back soaked. I took that opportunity to give her a bath, so she’s curled up next to me smelling like lavender. Life remains good.
We made CDs! of Well! It took a long time, and there were so many little steps and problems that required solving. Once we had all the component pieces, we sat down in the studio at Open Studio Project - which is right next to my apartment and also where I worked for about two years - and starting printing, paper-cutting, re-sizing, stapling. Trying to figure out which square needs to go on which side of the booklet, and then which ones need to be upside-down, was incredibly, almost shockingly confusing. But we got there, and we’re happy with them. I think the amount of work it took to make these was a major factor in me sleeping through my alarm this morning. haha.
Anyway, we made 25 original Wells, and then 25 Deluxe Editions that have the “All I Ever Wanted” demo as a bonus track. The contents of the booklet are the same. You can purchase them on our Bandcamp, linked here, and we will ship them out within three days. If you want to buy one and you live in Chicago or we have plans to see you sometime soon, you can just venmo one of us and we’ll give it to you.
If you aren’t sure why should buy a CD when you a) don’t have a CD player, b) have no plans to get a CD player, and/or c) have access to this music for free, consider the points raised by my good and smart friend Timothy1:
Collecting is often compulsive, almost always illogical. And among all collectables, this is especially true of the CD, an object which has the rare privilege of having been rendered obsolete not once, but twice – first as a technology, later as a novelty – so as to be almost impressive in the degree of its uselessness. When the CD was invented, it had three advantages over its competitors. First, it was smaller, and therefore more convenient and portable than vinyl; second, as a digital medium, its quality didn’t degrade over time; and third, its audio quality was far superior than that of the cassette. But when the portable MP3 player, and later music streaming, came to the market, the once unimpeachable case for the CD disintegrated. The portable MP3 outperformed the CD on each of these counts (save audio quality, but to all but the most particular listeners this makes no difference). Without anything unique to show for itself, the CD fell from its position as vinyl’s usurper to its ugly, deadbeat cousin. In short, it became a novelty item. And as a novelty item, the vinyl record beats the CD on every count aside from price point: analogue appeal, size, decorative potential (I once tried to hang up my CD booklets on walls, but the pages fanned out, and instead of a neat grid I ended up with a flappy mess that rustled at the slightest draft), and quality of inserts (compare the skimpiness of a CD booklet to the attention lavished on a vinyl record’s insert). There is no reason to buy a CD in 2022. There was no reason to buy a CD in 2010.
Paradoxically, the CD’s double-obsolescence – the fact of its being bad at everything – is precisely what makes it special. The unique degree of its uselessness makes CD collecting one of the purest examples of what we call ‘materialism.’ When a collector purchases a CD, she purchases nothing that she does not already effectively own, aside from the material heft of the disc. Most collectors already have access to the most valuable component of the CD, the music, through streaming services. What remains is hardly worth ten dollars: artwork on the back and side of the jewel case, a design printed onto the face of the disc, and, if you’re lucky, a short lyric booklet containing some photos. The CD’s value lies in its physicality. It is not any feature of the CD that makes it valuable, attractive even; it is the fact that it is a physical object.
You can’t deny that it is, after all, a physical object.
The other piece, which I would be remiss not to mention, is that we’re currently gathering funds so that we can pay for our album, which we’re recording at the end of May with our dear friend Sam Genualdi and our new friend Jack Henry. So if you are interested in supporting that project and haven’t figured out a way to do that yet, here, at last, is a way.
Other band news: Mak and I got a new guitar, and it’s so sexy.
I know that what we’ve built with Widemouth has come largely from our pretty indie songs and voices and collaboration and acoustic guitars and friendship and all that, but there is, not even that far from the surface, a 13-year-old in me who just wants to be a god of rock and roll. He is very happy about this.
Other than that, we have a few shows this spring on the books that we’re excited about, so look out for announcements. We’re also putting together a mini-tour of a couple midwestern cities for the beginning of summer. You’ll hear more about that on here at some point soon.
And summer is coming. holy shit.
That’s all. Love to everybody
Jamie
This is from his brilliant Substack entry titled “Mandoline,” from a couple years ago. It’s long but entirely worth reading. He currently writes for the culture desk of the Bay Area newspaper SFGATE, and is writing a whole lot of good stuff.