The Glad Fact, by The Dirty Projectors (CD on Western Vinyl)

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Dave Longstreth tells the story of the Brown Finches: "One Sunday morning in February 2002, I went on a walk through New Haven, CT. I eventually sat down at a picnic table outside McDonalds to eat a Big Mac and some fries. It was very cold, and I was wearing my grandfather's jacket, which is large and brown and puffy with down feathers. I was very irritable. Gradually I became aware of a chorus of twittering finches perched in the shrubs around me. They surrounded me and waited to eat my crumbs. They seemed to be whispering amongst themselves, fidgeting around within the shrubs trying to work out some inscrutable pecking order, each shifting its weight in nervous expectation. I began to throw my cold fries at them to make them leave me alone, but more finches arrived at the sight of the food. The more fries I threw, the more finches arrived. They got a little frenzied and starting pecking at each other's necks. They didn't care that I meant to hurt them -- they were hungry. They seemed to expect my arbitrary malice, along with the terrible weather, the scarcity of food, and the competition between themselves, as part of the natural harshness of things." a The story of the finches, and the day that Dave walked around New Haven, is central to The Glad Fact. It has also been the inspiration of several of his songs since, including ‘Grandfather's Jacket,' from the recent micro-press States' Rights Records release Morning Better Last! (in which Dave explores how he became the finch by wearing the jacket), and 'Finches' Song At Oceanic Parking Lot,' in which a chorus of finches meditate on the difference between a searcher and a colonist, from the forthcoming glitch-opera The Getty Address. What it all means we're not exactly sure. But it is good music, and the kid writes a lot of it. a The Glad Fact is romantic idealism in its disappointed, hibernating plumage. It is burrowing-in, closing-eyes, feathers-ruffled, self-doubting type stuff: nihilism, by turns melancholy and hedonist! The album is a reply, a year and a half later, to The Graceful Fallen Mango, an album Dave made about a breakup with his high school girlfriend. It was a classic breakup album: with that arc of brokenness and then healing. Hope. He made it believing in it. But a year and a half later, the promise of the cyclic nature of the world -- that love will come again! that the sensitive one will be rewarded with secret delights! -- has not been fulfilled. The music that results is at once tender and aggressive. a The album cover is made from the same colors as the cover of The Graceful Fallen Mango, but in their soiled, sallow shades. It is a painting Dave made on a 6x4' piece of corrugated cardboard. It was his emblem for a while; he took it back and forth to shows in Brooklyn from New Haven in the back of his truck, and played with it hung up behind him. The Obese Man embodies a sort of self-aware depravity. "Behold, I am disease!" he seems to say — that is his honesty, his glad fact.

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