The Angels Of Light - Everything is Good Here/Please Come Home

I once had a band called Swans, based here in NYC. It lasted 15 years. We released a ridiculous amount of albums along the way, and they seem to have had an influence and/or effect (bad and good!) on a fair number of people. In 1999 I started my new band, The Angels of Light, at which point (I hope), I left my past behind. This is the 3rd Angels album. It started, innocently enough, with the intent of being a simple collection of well-written songs performed by the musicians who played them live for the last few years, with the addition of a few acoustic songs, lightly colored. Instead, as things often seem to go around here, I ended up saturating every available molecule of the recording tape with sound, then hacked, cut, poured sonic fertilizer/salt on the resultant wounds, and it finally metastasized into this raging/weeping BEAST, which in the end succeeded in slowly biting off my head, leaving this album behind as evidence. Some songs might be construed as sad or poignant, and others "rock" in a weird, skewed way, I suppose. The way I work as a producer is first to follow the visual picture I had of the song's final outcome when I wrote it - then eventually throw out all my high fallutin' ideas/dreams, remaining open to chance, "mistakes" (especially), random juxtapositions, blind alleys, and most importantly, the input of others. The results here are sometimes subtle, sometimes excessive, but I think I've managed to sort through the chaos, letting the songs discover themselves. So, it's densely orchestrated in some places, sparse in others. It is much, much different than the first two angels albums. A few friends say it's a "breakthrough" or some such thing, but believe me, the thing controlled me, I did not control it. Maybe that's why, after about 20 years of making records, I think it's one of the best things I've done. In retrospect, it seems the subject matter of the songs is my response to disasters/cataclysms ­ personal/historical/political - with a few exceptions, 2 of which are my versions of fairy tales, and the other a simple love song. The instrumentation is all over the place, initially built up from my acoustic guitar and voice, then incorporating everything from electronic noise, to banjo and mandolin, to bass-drums-electric guitar, to (open-tuned) lap steel guitar, to vibraphones and marimbas, to accordion, fiddles, and flutes (yes, flutes), to the dreaded children's choir, to layered vocal harmonies, to drones acquired from various organic sources, to piano and fender Rhodes, to trumpet and trombone. Where does it fit in the current musical environment? Nowhere, I'm sure. It's a gift for the befuddled, the rancorous, the deluded, the chosen, the failed and the insane, the crazed and misguided, the spiritual seekers, the hungry, the numb, the inveterately passive, the secretly angry over-achievers, the blandly normal, the well-primed consumers, and the mildly, distracted curious - Oh, and You, of course. I hope you'll listen. It was made with LOVE, believe it or not, and it's as close as I can come to a purity of intent. These are my songs, but the musicians/friends that contributed to these recordings are stellar, in my opinion, and in all cases their performances forced me to view the final arrangements in a new, unfamiliar ­ and often uncomfortable, light ­ the best place to be. I can't think of anything that would be less fulfilling than ending up with something that sounded exactly as I'd planned it from beginning to end.

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