We're putting out a FREE DOWNLOAD collection called "Almanac Extras". It consists of eleven tunes we couldn't get onto the Almanac reissue proper (That release will be not free but reasonable. See previous posts for more on it and our 7/23-24 reunion gigs).
Use the player above to sample these "extra" songs. To download everything, click the following link, then click on more, then click on "download". https://app.box.com/shared/hdzuph2fab
Song notes from Chris King below.
It's a poor dog (who can't wag his own tail) (Little Richard)
This song we learned from a Little Richard tape, the kind the drugstores sell, is a marvelous testament to the value of putting No. 1 first.
Edwin Bricker
Written from press accounts about a whistleblower at a defense plant in the Pacific Northwest. I corresponded with the tight-lipped lawyer Thomas Carpenter in this story. My first taste of a good lawyer's chronic wariness of publicity.
Goodbye is good by me
One of those simple plays on words the mind is always looking to make. The story is all made up.
Manny, don't sing
I am really proud of this lyric, though the band never quite got the performance right and I lose fights to make more of this song than we do. The subject is the U.S. invasion of Panama and the secret service's callous betrayal of their client, Manuel Noriega. Since writing this I have read much more about this sort of international espionage thing, and in this song written as a clueless kid I really think I got it right ... everything but the "Federal Bureau of Intelligence".
When you were mine (Prince)
One of Prince's finest. Always a fan favorite for us at live shows. Dear Prince, please ask us to take this down if you see it and don't like it. No need to go legal, friend.
Lab rat
A howler of a Richard Skubish confession song. He actually did allow scientists to extract a small muscle from his leg in a research setting in exchange for cold cash!
Cello
Wow, this is misogynistic. I thought it was funny at the time.
They're moving father's grave
Got this from the folklore stacks in the Wash. U. music library. Totally love the acerbic Brit working man humor.
Sorrows of young Pippin
There was a young man named Pippin on campus, and after failing to get over his name and really boring people at parties with my bad improv routines about it, I got it out of my system by writing this song, which I never needed to hear again.
Gospel ship (Carter Family)
Carter Family! "No Depression," indeed! Matt Fuller brought this to this band. I would later write 100 songs with Matt where he was using sly little picking patterns like what he copped from the Carters.
I'll sleep when I'm dead (Warren Zevon)
Not one of Warren Zevons better songs, and a horrid performance of it, and a little sad now that Warren is, in fact, dead. God bless the dead and their music.--Chris King
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