Also at Christmastime

Here's the video of the Christmas song I wrote for you many years ago - "It's Christmas, Sweetheart". With love & faith... your Michael 

Flag Day 2024

Little sweetheart, today is a funny little holiday called Flag Day. I always used to see it on the calendar and joke about it but it's kind of neat in its timing - almost the midpoint of the year. I guess the Summer Solstice is more like it but it's halfway through the sixth month. 

Anyway, I wrote a song called "Flag Day", as you'll remember, that year I was out in the Bay Area. You immediately came up with the backing vocals and later that year we recorded it for what was meant to be our first EP but wound up becoming Of Love and Loss. A few years later, re-imagining the songs from that album and including new spoken word narrative and underscoring, we released Sometimes in Dreams. This is that album's version - the Summer Dream version and below is the video for it. 

Thinking of you on this day and everyday. With all my love forever...

Supporting WFMU

Little sweetheart, non-commercial, community and public radio have all been particular advocates of our music over the last decade from London’s Resonance to California’s KFJC to The Netherlands Radio Hoogeveen to France’s CAMP. They’re all quite different stations in their own right but all have in common that they are listener-supported and do not take corporate or even governmental funding. Individual listener contributions, often quite modest ones, are what keep them on the air. 

One of our greatest champions, little sweetheart, has been WFMU, who are currently in the midst of their annual fundraising “Marathon”. Most public radio stations give away prizes or “premiums” as gifts during the fundraising and, fervent listener-supporters ourselves, we’ve been honored this year to be included in all that. 

Two shows on WFMU have made our upcoming 11th album, In The Hours Left Until Dawn, a pledge prize (one of them a Grand Prize) as part of their efforts. It’s honor to help support WFMU and very kind of them, too, in letting more people know about our work - which is of, for and about YOU! 

Listen, little sweetheart, you’re on the radio!!
 

Each Song A Prayer

Sometimes after we finish an album, little sweetheart, I don’t pick up a guitar for weeks but tonight I did. Instead of the very specific concentration on overdubs, which was where I was at - writing, playing and recording guitar and other parts for the new songs - I just powered up and played whatever came to mind, not necessarily any of the songs from the new album. 

I think I’ve said this before, little sweetheart, that playing and singing the songs I write for, especially when I revisit one or two that I haven’t played in a while, is a very intense and emotional experience, very much like prayer. I cried and cried as I played some of them tonight, little sweetheart. And that is as it should be. 

How very much I love and long for you. With all my heart. 

KFJC...

Little sweetheart, when Of Love and Loss first came out, we got a really nice review from Toronto’s Ground Control Magazine. The writer, Daryl Darko Barnett, later interviewed me and I found out he actually lived in NorCal. Over the next few years we got to be friends and he was often telling me about a great college station in Los Altos Hills - KFJC. He really thought they’d like our stuff and it was his - and I’d later discover - lots of NorCal folks favorite station. 

I routinely sent them new releases but never heard anything until one day when Daryl called me. He was driving around and he had the station on but he was in the mountains and it kept coming in and out but he heard them back announce us. He didn’t hear the song but he heard our name, little sweetheart. So, I looked up who was on air just then and it was Carson Street, kind of KFJC’s main deejay. 

I got in touch and he told me the station had loved Til Morning Is Nigh and that it had been in their Heavily Played Albums list. Carson, of course, has gone on to be a great friend and advocate of ours. It was he, little sweetheart, who did the three hour special about us in 2020 just before we released Deux Anges. 

Today, Carson and the station added In The Hours Left Until Dawn to the current library. The album doesn’t come out until April 7 but they have an advance copy and it should be on several shows before the week is even out. 

Listen, little sweetheart - you’re on the radio!  

Kind Words

Little sweetheart, like I was saying, the new album doesn’t release until April 7, but we’ve already gotten some lovely airplay and very kind words from WFMU’s legendary Irene Trudel to KFJC’s great Carson Street, from NSPR’s wonderful ambient music show Tapeta Lucida, to Italy’s White Light/White Heat music zine, who named it to their “Picks of the Week”. We’re very honored and grateful and, little sweetheart, it is, as ever, all for you. With all my love…
 

In The Hours Left Until Dawn

Little sweetheart, our 11th album is complete! I’d been tinkering with the mixes even into January but finally sent them off for mastering and then with the finished artwork to our CD manufacturer. The digital and CD versions will both come out the same day - April 7th (Jesse’s birthday). 

The album is another double-album - 22 tracks over two discs and 2 hours and is called In The Hours Left Until Dawn. 

As ever, it is very much for you and, as always, your soaring vocals weave their way throughout the journey. Advance copies will head to some radio stations and music from here to Europe and beyond. I’ll let you know what we hear. As ever, it’s so very much for you. 

With all my love.

On Christmas...

We've made not one but two Christmas albums over the years, little sweetheart (!) - BPXmas in 2014 and Til Morning Is Nigh in 2018. 

This track, written for you, of course, opens the first of them. 

You are in my heart, my prayers, my every thought. Love you forever. Happy Christmas, little sweetheart! 

 

 

Angel Frequency....

When we were putting together Til Morning, little sweetheart, I very much had something I'd long admired in mind. 

Sometime around 2002 or 2003 I first heard the BBC broadcast of "Nine Lessons and Carols" - an annual Christmas Eve service performed by The Kings College Cambridge Choir. The mixture of spoken word and devotional music - much like Taize and Electric Hymnal - inspired me to want to do something in that vein. 

The spoken word component was helped tremendously by the literal godsend of Sylvia coming into my life, into our life, and as she joined the band with you and I. 

A further thing I admired about 9 Lessons was the tradition of a new work being commissioned each year for inclusion in the service. This often led to a piece being highly modern and I thought we should do something not unlike that. That as we placed older, less well known Christmas songs in new shoegaze-y arrangements, I also compose and record an experimental music piece to be at the album's center. 

And that's what the track "Angel Frequency" is. Below is the video we did for it. 

Happy Christmas, little sweetheart! 

 

 

On Irene's Show

Another of our champions, little sweetheart, the legendary Irene Trudel included a track of ours on her Christmas show on WFMU this week. Another of my favorites from Til Morning, mostly because it features your soaring vocals. It’s "Noel". 

The full show is amazing. It’s up on WFMU’s archive here. And the the track itself on Bandcamp here. 

Happy Christmas, little sweetheart!

The 11th Album

We’re nearing completion of the new album, our 11th (!), little sweetheart. Just about at final mixes. It’s another double album, 22 tracks over two discs and 2 hours, and you, as ever, are at its center. Much more on this in the coming days!
 

On Max's show

We’re always excited, little sweetheart, when the great Max Reinhardt - BBC Radio 3/Soho Radio - plays us on his show... and he has again this week! 

As Christmas nears, he featured one of my favorites from our album Til Morning Is Nigh - "Milles Anges Divins". It’s a French carol that Sylvia suggested for the album. I learned and re-arranged it and wrote out all the French in phonetics so I could sing it properly! Ha! I also play melodica on it! 

This particular episode of Max’s show is not available on the MixCloud archive but here’s a link to the track on Bandcamp and below is the video we did for it. 

Love you forever!

April 25 - pt 1

It’s my birthday, little sweetheart, twinned forever with you for a multitude of reasons but certainly very much so because your memorial was held on the day. 

You and I were meant to be together here in New York working on my play My Before and After, which I’d written so very much with you mind - a big role unimaginable for anyone but yourself. And we had tickets to go see Low in Philadelphia the day itself, on my birthday night. 

Instead, I was speaking at your memorial in San Francisco. 

When we made the Sometimes in Dreams double-album, I revisited, with a couple of edits and additions, what I said that day for you, composed underscoring and putting it together as the centerpiece of that album - The Choral Text Passage. I’m posting a link to it here . 

I’m so grateful for you, my little sweetheart. How I love you! Forever! Forever! 

Easter Sunday

Little sweetheart, today is Easter Sunday.

Sunday service is really nice but honestly, it’s the ones leading up to it that are the most meaningful to me. Maybe because I don’t remember observing any of them as a child - just Easter Sunday itself. And mostly, I think, for the reasons I’ve told you here - how the great gift of your love so changed and saved me.

I do have on our album, our 5th - Electric Hymnal - which I’ve often described as a sonic prayer for you. It was very much inspired by my experiences at West End and I had wanted to write and record something to express that - how it helped my mindfulness and listening for your celestial, guiding presence. It kind of marks, too, the beginnings of our using spoken word in our work. I think it holds up pretty good - it came out in June 2016 - and it takes me to you immediately.

Happy Easter, my little sweetheart!

"Forests" charting!

Little sweetheart, there’s continued to be a groundswell of support for the new album - Forests, Voices, Coastlines, Dreams - as it has made the Heavily Played Albums charts of both WFMU and California’s KFJC, where it has charted just this week at 31. 

Listen, little sweetheart - you’re on the radio!!

 

Summer-FM!

Little sweetheart, we’re almost a year out from the release of Deux Anges but our friends at KFJC, WFMU, London’s Resonance FM, and any number of internet radio stations are still playing tracks from the double album, for which we’re incredibly grateful!

Also, today, Dan - who has a Sunday morning show on the aforementioned KFJC in Nor Cal played a track from Of Love and Loss. “Out”, with your soaring vocals, came in the first hour between a new band that we quite like, Memory Wire, and a longtime favorite of us both, the Cure.

Listen, little sweetheart - you’re on the radio!

UK Radio Interview

A got a chance to talk about you for some time tonight, little sweetheart, during a radio interview in the UK. 

A station there, Radio SLE, has several programs that have featured us over the last couple of years. The first of them was in collaboration a while back with the Canadian podcast, Limbocast, that did interviews with me after Deux Anges was released, broadcast the double-album in its entirety and then had us back to talk about Til Morning again last December. 

A couple other shows have picked us up, little sweetheart, and a special one, "Music in Mind", that talks with musicians and composers about their work and issues of health and well-being, asked me a couple weeks ago if they could schedule an hour long interview with me for broadcast today. SLE doesn't archive their broadcasts, so I don't have a link to a recording but I had a very wide ranging and thoughtful chat with their host Frankie Rose. 

We spoke a lot about you, of course - the soul and conscience of Bipolar Explorer, the very reason for its existence and continuation - and she opened and closed the show with songs from Sometimes in Dreams: "You Are Loved (Summer's Theme)" at the top of the hour and "Our Oneness Can Never Be Erased" at its end. 

As ever, it's all for you. Listen, little sweetheart - you're on the radio! 

With all my love forever.   

San Simeon (You Said)

Little sweetheart, our earliest champion, the great Irene Trudel, played a track off of our double-album, Deux Anges, today on her legendary show. It's always an enormous honor and all of the songs are truly prayers to you but I'm so glad she played this one - "San Simeon (You Said)" - the 3rd track on Disc Two. 

The beginnings of this record found their origin on the road trip that Sylvia and I made down Highway One in California - a trip I always wanted to make with you (even though I know you hate being in the car!). We'd flown out to see your folks and were with them before and after. Your dad let us borrow the Enclave (it's the spare car they have hanging around - what replaced the beloved Rendezvous) and we headed down the coast for a five day trip down to my birthplace in Santa Barbara and back on the coastal route, stopping at a few of the Missions along the way. I wrote about it (and Sylvia posted it) on the special mini site about Deux Anges. 

All along the way on the overnights, I played my Westerberg electric (the one I kept at your apartment in the Inner Sunset) through a cheap echo pedal and a 9V mini Marshall amp. I'd record via voice memo and the first three of the 30 songs on Deux Anges were birthed that way. 

All them them - Santa Barbara, Mission Street (Carmel) and San Simeon - retained their titles for their geographical origin. All began as instrumentals and "Santa Barbara" remained one. "San Simeon" was the last to have a vocal. Indeed, I put the vocal on and later had to learn how to play and sing it simultaneously(!). It's incredibly prayerful when I do, now. 

The lyrics are very minimal but perfect somehow in evoking we three - you, Sylvia and I. I know how you are with me. You were that night when I played the lick in our hotel room. You were when these words found me. You are even now. 

With all my love forever.

Songs Are Like Prayers

It’s funny, little sweetheart, how when working on an album for months and months, after its completion and release, that I might not pick up my guitar for weeks or even a month. Finally, I return and I need to remind myself how all of the songs actually go! Ya know?

I made a list of about 40 of ours songs I wanted to review and have been playing again regularly each day. Just me with my pedals, going through the Vox AC-30 using the big halfback Mesa cabinet (what a huge sound!) and the PA powered up for vocals.

When I return to these songs and play them, little sweetheart, it is physically and emotionally healing and I wrote down a phrase after as I sat waiting for the tubes to cool down before I shut everything off for the night. “The songs are like prayers”, I wrote.

And they are. I need to play and sing them and when I do, it brings me closer to you.

It’s the most important work of my life, little sweetheart, to honor and conjure you. How I love you! Forever!

More From The Forest

Little sweetheart, we found out today that there's going to be another iteration of that super cool UK experimental radio broadcast event The Dark Outside. This one will be in September in Galloway Forest. 

It was for years an annual event, little sweetheart. The curator assembles recordings from artists all over the world and broadcasts them in a 24-hour event from this remote location. All of the recordings must be previously unreleased, never before heard, streamed or broadcast. They are premieres, usually composed specifically for the event. 

Further, it had been tradition that you could only hear the broadcast if you were in range of the transmitter itself, always outside, usually in Galloway or Epping Forest. During the pandemic, because it couldn't been done in-person, they broadcast the event online, but without archive or back announcements. You just had to tune in and hear whatever you might hear. 

Our first piece for The Dark Outside was in 2019, pre-pandemic and we've composed, recorded and participated in several more subsequently. Two of them - The Dark Outside, The Light Within and eleven:eleven we released on our Bandcamp page after. I think later this year we will release an album of them all. 

You, little sweetheart, as ever, figure prominently! 

More on all this in the days ahead. With all my love forever.