Happy 15th Birthday, Grand!

*** 10 June 2018 - today is the 15th birthday of my album Grand. and it's not just any birthday, today the rights to the album revert back to me and my label, TVP Records. welcome home, Grand!

if you're not familiar with the record, you can check it out on spotify, iTunes, or bandcamp.

As part of the celebration, i'm re-upping what wrote on Grand's 10th birthday. i think it still applies! ***

Ten years ago this week, my second album Grand was released. I remember at the time being highly disappointed with the June 10 release date, worried that it would consign my record to a mere drip of an entry splash. More than anything, I feared that among the Big Summer Releases by Big Names, Grand would be lost and all that I had put into the record would go to waste.

Grand was an incredibly difficult record to make. My first record Distillation had done better than anyone expected. Now I had to follow up a well-received debut record 21 years in the making with one made merely from the previous 2 years.

the board we made Grand on, with Judy watching over — the board we made *Grand* on, with Judy watching over

Based on the success of Distillation, I had recently signed a three record deal, and I didn't know yet that once you make something successful, the music business would prefer you make the same thing again. An early version of the album was rejected by the label, forcing me to write and record two more songs on short notice. The pressure from the record company broke my close relationship with Grand's producer for five years (we're cool now, thank god). A final cherry on top: when I flew to LA for the album shoot, I landed to find that the stylist had gotten my measurements wrong and had shopped for someone 5' tall but a size 8. Nothing wrong with those proportions, but they just aren't mine.

So when the label proposed June 10, I felt like it was another sign that the record was doomed.

Though it has taken me years to see this, in the end, everything about Grand has turned out just fine. In fact, better than fine. Grand has sold more than any other record I've made and by a long shot. That summer of 2003, I played Glastonbury, Newport, and Bonnaroo. That fall I did late nite TV in Ireland and got to be on Jools Holland with Elbow and a young Amy Winehouse. These turned out to be once in a lifetime experiences, and hindsight has made me incredibly grateful for them. And for lots of folks, Grand is the record of mine they heard first. Maybe there are other things I've done since that they like, but nothing holds a candle to that first sense of discovery.

So I guess the lesson of Grand is that time takes time. And that you can worry and struggle all you want, but it doesn't sink into the DNA of the sound. No one but me and those closest to me at the time knew how hard that record was to make. Ten years later, I get to enjoy it like everyone else.

And it also turns out that June 10 has an even more important connection to Grand then just being its birthday. June 10 is also the birthday of the album's patron saint and thematic guide, the lovely Miss Judy Garland. Believe it or not, I didn't notice this until years later.

In the summer of 2001, I was staying with a friend in West Hollywood. One afternoon on the way back to her house, I passed a bookstore. No place special to be, I wandered in and found myself thumbing through Gerald Clarke's then-new biography of Garland, "Get Happy".

To say that book changed my life would be an understatement. I knew nothing about Garland beyond an ambivalence toward "The Wizard of Oz". But reading that book, I became fascinated with Judy, and thus began a two year obsession that culminated when Grand finally came out, on what would have been Garland's 81st birthday.

In between, I listened to every Garland album I could find. I watched every Garland movie available in the days before Netflix and the iTunes store. A friend even tipped me off to the home recordings Judy made in preparation for a never completed memoir.

Though songs like "Cinematic", "Cosmopolitians", "How To Be A Lady", "James", "Starlit", "Vera", and "Lucky Day" make explicit references to Garland, her spirit hovers over every note of the entire album. "A Better Wife" is about a brilliant artist and friend of mine that died making her transition, way before her time. "The Taste of You" and "An Innocent Fiction", inspired by the Arthur Miller short story "The Performance", owe everything to my understanding of vaudeville as Judy knew it. The most popular songs on the record, "Slung-lo" and "Born to Hum", came from tanglings with my record company. Not that they were evil studio bosses working me to the bone, but I certainly could relate to Garland's frustration within the rigid machinery of MGM in the 30's and 40's.

Somehow, when I realized that Grand and Garland had the same birthday, I exhaled a little. Grand is perfect the way it is and came out at exactly the right time. The struggle to make it seemed less epic; the sense of disappointment I carried around the record dissipated; the thought that somehow I hadn't made enough of a record just left me. Not that I don't worry about other more recent records I have made. Of course I do. But I am glad to know that eventually, given enough time, I can simply love that little record about the lovely Miss Garland. And wish them both a very happy birthday.

I usually disable the comments on my website, but for this post, I'm allowing them. Please share your Grand stories below!!

Thanks to the WayBackMachine, you can also read my original introduction to the record, tracklistings, and watch the website intro from June 10, 2003.

second or third draft of “cosmopolitans”