released December 3, 2021

These songs were written over three distinct periods from 2009 to 2011: the first in Bamberg, Germany; the second in Athens, Georgia; and the third in New York City. I moved to Bamberg in fall 2009 to study for two semesters. On arriving I bought the cheapest nylon-string guitar I could find; I played it alone in my room; I went on moody walks; I contemplated old things. When I got back to Athens in fall 2010 I took the songs I’d written, plus a few new ones, plus a few very straight Leonard Cohen covers, and played a couple of solo shows under the name Skoene Oke—a too-clever reference to the E.T.A. Hoffmann story “Der Sandmann,” where the uncanny Coppola hawks his eyeglasses as “sköne Oke,” Italian-inflected pidgin German which, literally translated, means “pretty eyes,” not incidentally the title of one of my favorite songs by Silver Jews; I spelled it out “Skoene” instead of “Sköne” because the latter seemed a bit too Mötley Crüe. I left for New York in January 2011, after just a few months in Athens—I still sometimes wonder why I ever left—and there I played exactly one solo show, at a bar in Red Hook, opening for my cousin Ray Brown. After the show I got in an argument with a guy at the bar about the Egyptian Revolution—a topic about which I knew and know very little—and that was the end of Skoene Oke’s solo career. I stopped playing music for years after that.

Late last December, just before New Year’s, both our upstairs and downstairs neighbors went out of town for a few days. I figured I’d make use of the opportunity. I’d bought some recording equipment in order to make the first Shelto Marx album, so it was easy enough to set up two microphones and press play. I recorded the guitar and vocals simultaneously over those few days in late December 2020; I’d do a few takes of each song and pick the best take. Over the next couple weeks I added a bit of piano and bass. It was all recorded and mixed on “the little 8-track that could,” my Tascam DP-008EX. Warts and all. If you listen closely, you can hear the street sweeper going by.

“Songs build little rooms in time,” David Berman sang not long before he died. I’m hoping these songs can be such rooms. I don’t think anyone should shed a tear for all the songs that don’t get recorded, especially not nowadays when we’re all just a few megabytes away from posterity. Still, I’m glad to have gotten these down at last, and I hope they prove worthy of preserving.

Thanks to Dan for the guitar, to Ben L. for again letting me borrow the bass, and to Sal for tolerating four days of early morning recording. Two of the Athens songs—“A Little Bit of Noise Won’t Make Your Roommate Up” and “On the Fence”—were originally Stegosaurus songs that I reworked later; Dan Gold and Jeff Gess deserve equal credit.

-Shelto Marx, December 2021, NYC

Luftmensch Records, LUFT 006