Partially Naked Self-Examination Music Blog, Week 22

To apologize for many weeks now of old (i.e. poorly recorded) and (in the case of the "classical pieces") near unlistenable material, I've now newly encoded and posted the entirety of my "Mark Lint and the Fake Johnson Trio" album: http://marklint.com/FJTalbum.html.

This is probably my single strongest collection of tunes. The recording quality is decent (i.e. digital 8-track, not 4-track cassette like the MayTricks stuff), and we put A LOT of time into the arrangements and mixing, though I of course didn't have my current computer magic whereby I can fix things out of tune and/or time, so it's hardly a professional masterpiece. It was also a transitional time for my voice between its nasally, unsupported origins and its current state of relative strength, meaning that people have criticized my singing on this. Still, it's a dream compared to the older stuff, and the songs are, again, a bit stronger on the whole than what I've produced more recently, I think.

"The Fake Johnson Trio" was a band name I came up with because I wanted it to sound like a jazz or folk thing but with an obviously fake name, and actually using the name "Fake" was the most absurd way of doing that. This was my attempt, unlike the MayTricks, to do marketable "alternative" rock, conceived in 1994 or so when grunge was still alive and well. I would deny or at least subvert my sensitive side to put on a manly, jaded air and use big drums and distorted guitar and all that obvious, cliche stuff. This would undoubtedly make me the big bucks.

Well, it still turned out to be a weird niche band, but I like it, and it's the culmination of the my first three or four years in Austin building up a tight ensemble, though the recording itself was not completed until said band had safely broken up, meaning that I ended up playing the majority of bass parts myself even though that was not my role in this band and we used a few different drummers, only a couple of which I'd played these songs live with, and I dragged in a fleet of singers to do various backing parts so it wouldn't just be me singing against myself.

Note: Among the many session musicians on this is one Hal Thorsrud, who now teaches ancient philosophy at Agnes Scott college in Georgia.