The Albatross Song Premieres and Now It's Release Eve

The visual restlessly swirls between reality and fantasy, a thorny and psychedelic mind trip that mercilessly swallows the senses.
— Jason Scott, B-sides and Badlands

"The Albatross Song" got is premiere yesterday on a music blog called B-Sides and Badlands that's run by journalist Jason Scott.   It's a wonderful read and I appreciate the extra effort Scott put into the review, doing some research on Noah Stryker's "The Thing With Feathers" that I had mentioned in my own comments and writing some very kind words about the song, its production, and the video.   Please stop by and give it a read.

As is my want, I'll do a more extensive write up on the history of this song — it's origins and how its been performed over the years and realized as a recording.  For now, I'm happy that it got it's moment to shine a bit ahead of the full album release, which is, now mere hours away.

In another (yet to be officially recorded and released) song, that like The Albatross Song, is derived from a book on natural history, this one being about an Octopus as its source material is The Soul of an Octopus by Sy Montgomery, I have a line "this infinite division of our attentions is not something which I'll adjust."   This is me lamenting a bit about how balkanized our attention spans have become in the busy social media era where the true precious and rare commodities are our eyeballs and the chance to be what is immediately in front of them at the current moment.   We're bombarded constantly by new sensory input, and the cynical algorithms of our age exacerbate this phenomenon by commodifying the reaction — hijacking our limbic systems and impulses with hot takes and click bait and whatever it takes to rise just for a second above the noise to be noticed.  They say to live in the moment, but the moment is increasingly minute,  shaved ever more razor thin.

So it feels like a fool's errand to create anything that's meant to have lasting value — that is designed to be repeatedly engaged with and revisited for new meaning and rediscovery.  If it's not new, it's not interesting.  If it's not already popular, it's not worth looking at.   Fifteen minutes ago might as well be yesterday which might as well have been a previous millennium.  And yet, here I am being a fool — the boy who clapped the hardest when Tinker Bell was dying — hoping that if I try, I'll be noticed.

Maybe the only way to win is to not play.  But you're in the game no matter what you do — whether you like it or not.  I can't say I've always put my best foot forward, but I have tried to create something.  And I've hit the streets putting up flyers, chatted up strangers at live music events, and in general put way more effort than it ever feels like it's worth posting stuff on Facebook and the like (not to mention feeding the beast with ad money...ugh).  If you ever want to feel insignificant, don't contemplate the universe, just post something on Twitter when you have less than 200 followers. 

​But I figure it's my one shot with this thing to make a splash and these songs are important to me.

So "At Home At Sea" drops tonight — for some perhaps past your bedtime.  But if you're on the West Coast, it's a mere 9 PM.  Perhaps you'd consider giving it all a listen when the time comes:

Check it out on Spotify or Apple Music or YouTube 

- E.G..