Almost 2 years to the day since I released Truths and Lies and Make-Believe, here comes my second musical collection, Distorted Vision.
(Album cover photography and design by Christopher Rinehart. Click to go to the Bandcamp page, to listen to or purchase the album.)
Like its predecessor, Distorted Vision is another collection of songs mostly inspired by or referencing science fiction and fantasy, as well as songs about the marvels and misfortunes of life itself. I consider it to be a second helping of “truths and lies and make-believe.”
Where T&L&MB had ten all-original tunes, this new album has eleven songs, including two which use existing tunes. I intend to write a series of posts examining each song on its own, but here’s the running order with a few basic notes:
- “Ten Thousand Years Ago” — a (hopefully) funny song including references to Highlander, Doctor Who, vampire stories, and the first Harry Potter book
- “My Distorted Vision” — some of us see things differently than others, and sometimes we see things differently than we used to
- “Winter Simplifies the World” — one of two songs I wrote for a winter-themed event a couple of years ago
- “We Want the Easy Road” — a look at some of the things Christ said that are hard to understand, and hard to follow
- “The Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries” — including several of the Maxims coined by Howard Tayler for his webcomic, Schlock Mercenary
- “The Anti-Candidate Song” — some political insight, or something
- “The Enemy’s Gate is Down” — inspired by Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card
- “The Faded Coat of Brown” — a Civil War tune adapted to the Firefly universe
- “A Great Lake of Beer (for the King of Kings)” — based on a prayer of St. Brigid of Ireland
- “The Books We Call Baen” — a tribute to the authors and founder of Baen Books (full disclosure: I am a Contributing Editor for Baen) sung to the tune of “The Hero of Canton” from Firefly
- “Dead Dog Party” — after the SF&F convention is over, it’s sometimes hard to go back to the real world
All the above links go to Bandcamp, which is the only place the album is available at this time. At Bandcamp you can listen to the songs, purchase a download of individual songs or the whole album, and order a physical CD for me to send to you (and, yes, I ship them myself).* I will make the album available on CD Baby soon, and from there it will be available on Amazon and other outlets — and the songs themselves will be available for streaming.
If you never listened to Truths and Lies and Make-Believe,** but you’ve heard me play guitar and are a little leery of how these songs might sound, let me assure you that just like the first album I did not actually play any of the instruments on this one. My friend Mark Minervino was once again the studio musician par excellence, and also engineered and mixed the songs, and my friend Brian Ceccarelli of Talus Music mastered the CD so the sound quality would be uniform. I couldn’t have done this album, or the last one, without them!
So if this sort of thing interests you, or if you’re just curious, or even if you just want to humor me, I hope you’ll give it a listen — and that maybe you’ll find something you like enough to buy! And if you know someone else who might appreciate it, by all means send them a link to the album or to this blog post.
Thanks, I hope you like what you hear, and let me know what you think!
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*Note that physical CDs won’t ship until close to the end of the month. Sorry!
**Really? It’s been out for 2 years, and you haven’t listened to it yet?
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