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Two Dollars And A Casio

by Western Blot

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    Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality downloads of Two Dollars And A Casio, Don't Waste Your Time With Him, Open, Excel, Ivy, Scam Likely, XING PED, Valeria, and 13 more. , and , .

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1.
2.
3.
Proximity 04:43
4.
Ev&&o 02:29
5.
Valeria 05:49
6.
Keep It Down 05:12
7.
8.
Freedom '20 02:57
9.
Little Songs 00:37
10.
11.
12.
Always News 03:43
13.
T-Shirt 05:23
14.
Casi-O 03:03
15.
Sentiment 02:50
16.
17.
We Won 02:28
18.
Too 30 02:39
19.
20.
21.
22.
Signal 04:12

about

1. Don’t Waste Your Time With Him
A-side, originally released 9/22/2023

This compilation is the product of a very prolific period when I was releasing an album every year from and also releasing several non-album tracks each year. And you might think that finishing and releasing a lot of music would clear out your backlog of unfinished drafts, but for me, that is not the case, right now I probably have about a hundred ideas with titles and partial lyrics, and at least a hundred other instrumental demos. So when it came time to put together this compilation and I wanted to release one last single ahead of it, I kind of took my pick of what seemed like the best idea I felt I had ready to go, “Don’t Waste Your Time With Him,” and spent a chunk of my summer focusing on writing this song instead of a bunch of songs at once. Plus I think it’s kind of funny to put the refrain “waste your time with me” at the beginning of a 70+ minute record.

2. Yeah, This One Hurts
From the Excel EP, originally released 4/1/2022

My album Ivy had a song, “A Great Man (Who Isn’t A Good Man),” that sort of mulled over how often men can be productive and noble in their professional lives but destructive and violent in their personal lives. The morning after I put the finishing touches on that song and finalized that album, I woke up to yet another news story of a public figure being accused of rape (I thought about saying “another #MeToo story” but why use euphemisms?). And this particular story really shook me and made me feel angry and betrayed, and I started writing this song that morning. Naming my 4th album Ivy was sort of a joke, a phonetic pronunciation of the Roman numeral IV. My next project, released shortly after I turned 40, was named Excel as the phonetic pronunciation of the Roman numeral XL, to keep that theme going.

3. Proximity
A-side, originally released 12/10/2021

A couple years ago I saw that a label from The Netherlands called Seaside Tapes (now called Seaside Bliss) taking submissions for a singles series on their sublabel Celestial / Crystallize, and thought some of the stuff they were putting out was cool. As I was finishing Ivy, I let them hear several songs and pick out their favorite, and they picked “Proximity,” which otherwise would’ve been on that record. The vocalist on this track, Brooks Long, is a talented R&B singer/songwriter who has a great weekly radio show, 6 Degrees of Soul, on WTMD here in Maryland. The first couple Western Blot songs I asked him to sing were uptempo tracks and I felt like he totally understood my sense of humor and the wordplay those songs and delivered them really well, but he seemed almost intimidated or wary when I asked him to sing an earnest love song like “Proximity.” I have no compunction about letting other people sing my more personal or emotional songs, though, I would do it all the time if I could. Singing my own songs is my last resort.

4. Ev&&o
From the Sorry For Arty Rocking EP, originally released 10/19/2020

One day I had the funny thought that Evan Dando’s name has “and” in it twice if you remove the spaces, and once I figured out the silly way of writing out his name as Ev&&o, I toyed with the idea of releasing an EP of Lemonheads covers under that name. Ultimately, though, I opted for using it as the title of a song that namechecked Dando in the same spirit as “Alex Chilton” by The Replacements.

5. Valeria
A-side, originally released 5/4/2021

The third Western Blot album 5/4 was released on May 4th, 2020 with every song written in the 5/4 time signature. And I decided to continue releasing a new song in 5/4 every May 4th after that, along with a DJ set of songs by other artists in 5/4, on my Soundcloud. The first installment of the series in 2021 featured “Valeria” and a mix with songs by typical experimental time signature art rockers like Beyonce, Taylor Swift, and Vanessa Hudgens. If you get a musical idea while laying half-asleep in bed, you’ll probably just roll over and hope you remember it in the morning, but sometimes you get up and try to record it in the middle of the night. I came up with the main “Valeria” riff that way, and recorded it pretty much exactly as you hear it on this track, and was just so in love with that riff that I worked my ass off trying to build a great song around it, and it’s probably my favorite track on this whole collection. By the way, I’ve never released anything on vinyl, but I always sequence my albums as LPs with 2 sides to help organize the record and make it flow, and this is my first ‘double LP’-length project. Side 1 ends here.

6. Keep It Down
“Avoiding Everyone” B-side, originally released 4/2/2021

Side 2 starts here. After writing a bunch of songs in 5/4, the next time signature I wanted to conquer was 9/8. And while a lot of my songs start the usual way with melodies and/or lyrics, it was fun to do things in such a backwards order and still wind up with a song I felt really proud of. I started with the time signature, got a drum pattern going, then found a synth sound I liked, and wrote a riff around the one note that resonated in a cool way. Then I looked at what letters of the alphabet I hadn’t started a Western Blot song title with yet, picked K, and just let the title “Keep It Down” pop into my head and wrote something kind of inspired by every apartment I ever lived in with irritable downstairs neighbors. I’m obsessed with mellotrons, they’re the only expensive piece of gear I genuinely covet, and the second half of “Keep It Down” is me doing my best impression of a mellotron by heavily manipulating a Casio string patch.

7. Limited Edition
From the Too 30 EP, released 1/3/2018
Co-produced by Mat Leffler-Schulman

This is the oldest song on this collection, in multiple ways. That drum pattern is something I’d just really enjoyed playing for many years, and I actually have a recording of it from way back in 2001 when the earliest Western Blot songs were taking shape. So when we were in Mobtown Studios working on Materialistic, I kind of thought, I don’t know when’s the next time I’m going to be in a studio where my drums sound this good, I’m just going to play this beat for a few minutes, and then force myself to finally write a song over it. The song I wrote didn’t quite sound right at the tempo I recorded the drums, so we slowed down the drums a few BPMs before adding everything else. The wonderful and talented Scott Siskind of the band Vinny Vegas sang on the track, and also made the cover art for the EP it appeared on.

8. Freedom ‘20
From the Sorry For Arty Rocking EP, originally released 10/19/2020

I’ve always loved the George Michael song “Freedom! ’90,” and it occurred to me once a long time ago that the next year that would have the same ring to it to do a song with a similar title would be 2020. When 2020 finally rolled around, I felt this pressure to write the song (or wait and try again in 2030) but I wasn’t sure what it would be about or what it would sound like. Then 2020 turned out to be this really bizarre and unique year in pretty much everybody’s lives, and eventually I kind of felt out what the song could be. This was the third piece of music I came up with when brainstorming for “Freedom ’20,” the first two wound up becoming the songs “Quaaltagh” and “Heathen.” I’ve had the same digital 8-track for over 20 years, but I bought a newer one of the same model when the original started glitching a bit in 2020. Some of the glitches became happy accidents in songs, though: the drums cut out on “Freedom ‘20” for a couple seconds in a way that sounds really cool at the beginning of the second chorus, like I couldn’t have planned it better.

9. Little Songs
From the Excel EP, originally released 4/1/2022

The first Western Blot album had some fairly long songs with complex structures and intros and bridges and breakdowns, and then the last one I wrote for the album was just 2 minutes of verse-chorus-verse-chorus, and I really loved it and it kind of freed me up more to make songs as big or as small as I liked. And as I started to enjoy making these shorter simpler songs, a couple lines popped up into my head, and I realized, well, there it is, that’s the whole song.

10. Podcast Killed The Radio Star
“Scam Likely” B-side, originally released 10/12/2021

I try not to be a massive snob about podcasts – I know there are some great ones, I’ve had fun guesting on podcasts that friends and other people have invited me onto. In fact, the first time any Western Blot music was shared with the public in any fashion was when an instrumental rough mix of “Button Masher” was used as the theme music for my brother Zac’s old podcast No Topic Required. That being said, I’m a music guy and I simply can never bring myself to spend much time listening to podcasts when I could be listening to music instead, which is sort of the point of this song. At one point I taped a pilot episode of a podcast as the host/moderator of a show a friend was trying to sell. It didn’t get picked up, but I thought it would be funny to release this song while I was hosting a podcast. The songs on this collection are all over the place in terms of fidelity or whether they could've been proper album tracks, but this track is an example of me truly not giving a crap how a song sounds, like there's a vocal punch-in that sounds abruptly different from the rest of the song, it was recorded deliberately as a B-side when I was about to release a single.

11. The Latest Last Straw
From the Sorry For Arty Rocking EP, originally released 10/19/2020
Co-produced by Doug Bartholomew

In 2018, I recorded the 5/4 album in Pasadena, Maryland with Doug Bartholomew, who had a cool little studio in the shed behind his house where my band Woodfir recorded its first EP. Doug and I worked pretty quickly on the album, partly because he was about to sell his house and move to North Carolina, partly because I just tend to work quickly. I think I recorded drums for 16 songs in 2 days – 8 for tracks that I finished with Doug for the album, and then others that I’ve since finished on my own, including “The Latest Last Straw,” and some others I haven’t finished yet. I’ve done a lot of video work in addition to recording a lot of music, so I’ve been in many situations where a producer or director is telling a performer “one more take” over and over, because you never know how many more takes you’re going to need and you just keep asking for one until you get it. So that I inspired the outro of this song, where I tried to repeat that mantra refrain as many times as possible, after speeding through two verses and two choruses as quickly as possible. Side 2 ends here.

12. Always News
A-side, released 5/4/2023

Side 3 starts here. Another song from the May 4th series. I’ve had drum machines and drum loops on a lot of Western Blot songs, but only a couple songs with no live drums whatsoever, this one and “Casi-O.” This was a real experiment in trying to create a track with a different method and different vibe than I usually do, and I really enjoyed how it came out. I had no idea what the lyrics were going to be, and then I found a half-finished set of lyrics I’d done a few months earlier, made it fit without much trouble (which is kind of rare with the 5/4 time signature), and wrote the other half of the lyrics pretty quickly. At 2:04 you can hear my cat Lucy walk on the keyboard in the middle of me recording a part of the song. My first instinct was to delete it, but then I took a second, listened, and realized it kind of sounded right and left it in. Lucy is the only other person who played an instrument on this record.

13. T-Shirt
“Don’t Waste Your Time With Him” B-side, released 9/22/2023
Written by Tim Foljahn

I’ve done occasional covers with other bands I played drums in, but I’m usually the person who’s voting against doing any covers and had never done any Western Blot covers (one exception – we played a bit of The Ronettes’ “Be My Baby” at a show a couple weeks after drummer Hal Blaine died). But I decided that the first cover recorded by Western Blot should be of the first band I ever interviewed, Two Dollar Guitar. I remember going to see them open for Mike Watt in my little hometown in Delaware when I was 17, my brother and I interviewed Tim Foljahn, Steve Shelley, and Janet Wygal before the show, and that night was the first time I heard “T-Shirt,” one of their best songs, a few months before they released it. I have some ideas for other songs I’d like to cover someday, but it was so difficult to get to a point where I felt like I did this song any justice at all, to me it's a lot more daunting to cover someone else’s song and not ruin it, instead of simply making the best and only version of my own songs.

14. Casi-O
A-side, originally released 9/15/2020

When I was in high school and had been playing drums for a few years and started to get the itch to have a melodic instrument I could write songs with, I asked for a synthesizer for Christmas, and my mom got me the Casio CTK-533 that I have written and recorded the overwhelming majority of Western Blot songs on (thanks, Mom!). A few years back, I had a bunch of A/V and music equipment stolen from my car, and miraculously the thief was arrested about 24 hours later and I promptly got all my stuff back. My Casio was probably the least expensive item taken in the theft, but it was the one that had the most sentimental value for me, so I wrote a song about the ordeal, and for the first time I did the entire song (besides vocals) on the keyboard, including the drums. And I made the music a bit of an homage to The Cars, with a nod to their album Candy-O in the title and cover art, and released it on the first anniversary of Ric Ocasek’s death. Shout out to John Candy and John Hughes for the title of the album.

15. Sentiment
From the Excel EP, originally released 4/1/2022

I had a vague idea for this song kicking around for years, and then one week when I was listening to a ton of Todd Rundgren, I kind of keyed in to how to make it in the style of a sentimental ‘70s ballad, and really enjoyed doing the synth strings and the dramatic key change. One day I drove into a parking garage in Washington, D.C. for work, and there was a beat up old upright piano just sitting by the stairwell in the garage. I played a little of “Sentiment” on the piano and recorded it on my phone, and made that the intro of the song.

16. Cell Flow Thing
From Broken Sticks: Al Shipley On Drums 2000-2020, originally released 11/12/2020
Co-produced by Dave Bartholomew

Another song where I recorded drums during the 5/4 sessions and then worked on the rest a couple years later, layering clean drums over distorted drums and mixing them together in fun ways. I just had this idea for a kind of tortured musical pun, “Cell Flow Thing” is a homonym of “self loathing” and the drum pattern is based on the vocal cadence from the Goodie Mob song “Cell Therapy.” I guess it works as kind of a raga, but I wish I had written actual verses instead of just coming up with two refrains and alternating them. I put together a Soundcloud compilation of different things I’d played drums on from various projects over the span of 20 years, including a number of things that had never been properly released, but “Cell Flow Thing” was the one completely new track I put together for the compilation. Side 3 ends here.

17. We Won
“Casi-O” B-side, originally released 9/15/2020

Side 4 starts here. I’ve had a digital 8-track for 20 years, but for many years I only used it for demos and made the first three Western Blot albums in studios with producers. Mostly I was just daunted by trying to record live drums, it’s very hard to make those sound good, that’s still the main reason a lot of people go into studios. But when Covid hit, I decided to finally bear down and figure out how to record drums to my satisfaction, and did extensive testing and comparing of different effects, mic positions, until I figured out the basic formula responsible for most of the drums on this collection. I’m pretty proud of it, I kind of consider it “my” drum sound now, and I do it all with one microphone. Anyway, this was the first song I recorded after figuring out that drum sound, and though songh had kind of gone through different iterations in my head before that, including originally being much slower, recording “We Won” was such a breeze. I feel like almost everything on the track was the first or second take, just boom boom boom, fell right together and sounded right.

18. Too 30
From the Too 30 EP, released 1/3/2018
Co-produced by Mat Leffler-Schulman

The first Western Blot album had no outtakes or b-sides, those 9 songs were pretty much the first 9 songs I’d ever written complete music and lyrics for. And then the next two albums were concept albums where I only included songs that fit the theme of the record. “Too 30” was one song I had written that didn’t fit either album, and I didn’t want to wait until three albums down the line to release it, so it became kind of the first thing that I knew would be a non-album track for an EP, which really opened the floodgates for me to do all these other EPs and singles and eventually a whole B-sides compilation. Just as we slowed down the “Limited Edition” drums to fit the song, after “Too 30” was finished I decided to speed up the entire track a little bit (I later did the same thing with “Hurt When It Hits” on the Open album). As a drummer, I know that it's hugely important to set things at the right tempo that works for every element in the song, and I think I have a great intuition for what the right tempo is. But man, if you get it a tiny bit wrong when you’re laying down the rhythm track, you can make the whole song sound too sluggish or too rushed.

19. That Baby Walk
“Casi-O” B-Side, originally released 9/15/2020

This was released at the same time as “We Won” but I’d started recording it two years earlier. Basically, I had an idea for this song where I’d sing the vocal through the baby monitor we used when my kids were younger, and I also thought the drums should have a junky lo-fi sound. So I was comfortable self-producing this song even though I hadn’t figured out my drum sound yet, and I figured it’d be embarrassing to rig up a baby monitor vocal effect in a studio and convince a producer to record it, and I should just experiment with that in the privacy of my own home. I recorded the vocal right before picking up my kids from school the last day before schools shut down for Covid. I figured, correctly, that it would be the last time I’d be alone in the house for a while. But then I wound up recording vocals for many other songs that year while my kids were in the house, holing up in the upstairs bathroom and hoping they couldn’t hear me sing through the walls. This is a very odd little song that doesn’t take itself seriously, but I think it’s also one of my more profoundly autobiographical songs.

20. Maybe Party Rocking Will Help
From the Sorry For Arty Rocking EP, originally released 10/19/2020

After years of really laboring over songs and taking them very seriously before I’d bring them into a studio, becoming comfortable with self-producing songs and being able to make as much music as I wanted really opened things up for some sillier ideas. I guess I’m saying that’s how I ended up recording an EP with an LMFAO reference in the title, which featured a song which put a Minutemen reference into the mix along with the LMFAO reference. I kind of wish this wasn’t such a deliberately stupid song, because I think it has some of my best drumming on it.

21. Golden West Bleat
“XING PED” B-side, originally released on 7/6/2021
Co-produced by Doug Bartholomew
Co-written by K.B. Blankson, Dan Doggett and Chris Merriam

In 2015 and 2016, I played drums in a band called Golden Beat with former members of Monument, They Move On Threads, and Private Eleanor. We only played a couple of shows, but those two years of weekly practices were an experience I remember very fondly, hanging with those guys and playing those songs, I thought we sounded great. We had a 7-song set, and 5 of them were recorded and collected on an EP, The Complete Works of Golden Beat. After the band broke up, I recorded drums for the other 2 songs and attempted to get other members of the band to finish recording them, but there was no interest, so I wrote new songs with new lyrics (the music isn’t all the same but fairly similar), and released them as a single. The title “Golden West Bleat” is both a combination of the names of Golden Beat and Western Blot, and a reference to the Golden West Café, a Baltimore establishment where Western Blot once played a show.

22. Signal
A-side, originally released on 5/4/2022

The entire 5/4 album was about my father, who died on May 4th, 2017. The first couple of songs in the subsequent series of tracks released on May 4th were about other subjects, but on the 5th anniversary of his passing, it felt right to write something else about him, and “Signal” came out kind of organically, just putting some sounds together and finding a feeling in the music.

credits

released October 13, 2023

all songs written, performed, produced, and mixed by Al Shipley except where otherwise indicated

all songs mastered by Mat-Leffler Schulman at Mobtown Studios except where otherwise indicated

track 13 written by Tim Foljahn

track 21 co-written by K.B. Blankson, Dan Doggett, and Chris Merriam

vocals on track 3 by Brooks Long

vocals on track 7 by Scott Siskind

tracks 11, 16 and 21 co-produced by Doug Bartholomew

tracks 7 and 18 mixed and co-produced by Mat Leffler-Schulman and engineered by Rob Liberati at Mobtown Studios

tracks 7 and 18 mastered by Dan Coutant at Sun Room Audio

cover collage by Al Shipley, comprising art from previous releases by DeadmanJay, Donald Edwards, Jennifer German, Ivo, Al Shipley, and Scott Siskind

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Western Blot Baltimore, Maryland

Songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Al Shipley began releasing music as Western Blot in 2012, and the band's current lineup includes guitarists John German and Ishai Barnoy with a rotating lineup of vocalists.

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