Hey, so maybe you like some of the songs that come at the end of the podcasts to soothe or energize you after a long slog through torturous text? Studies show that off-kilter pop songs are intended to not just be listened to once, but to spin repeatedly, so they can sink into your subconscious, so the infectious melodies can, well, infect you, so all the imperfections start to sound natural.
Now a whopping 17 of the best songs created specifically for the podcast (2011–2015) have been mastered (meaning money was thrown at them and suddenly they sound better) and can now be listened to as a steady stream of a theatrical performance or mixed in with your preferred smartphone playlist. How can you be a philosophy fan and not yet own a philosophy novelty album? Don't you want to be able to explain to your friends what Karl Popper most certainly did not mean by falsifiability using acoustic R&B? Don't you want to relive, very literally, the sexual undertones made more explicit, Sartre's No Exit or join the chorus mourning for Antigone?
But let's be serious here: This is no Weird Al project. We've got a meditation on mortality and love with "Things We Should Do" with the great Lucy Lawless (OK, that one used to be a novelty song until I fixed it). We've got some honest-to-goodness sweet bombastic pop-rock with "I Insist" and something actually disturbing in "The Past Is Not Real." And a crapload more! (Well, eleven more craploads, delivered with great care, though with enough out-of-tune notes left in to make 'em feel homey.)
We've made the mp3s here cost a mere $5 in our store, which amounts to throwing a little something in the music tip jar for a good 6+ years of attempting to entertain you. Or better yet, order a CD, perhaps as a gift for a philosophy lover or just someone who likes to discover cool, underground stuff. Note that all proceeds from sales on our site go right in the slush pile of shared PEL funds to give you more philosophy goodness, and are not siphoned off to feed my distasteful habits. So yes, this is the PEL year-end fundraiser part one, with part two being our 2016 calendar, which we'll start selling very, very soon.
You can hear all the tracks on my CDBaby page. The thing is also of course available via iTunes and Amazon
If you're a PEL Citizen, you've already paid your pittance and can just go download the album, or if you're astute enough to have configured the Citizen feed, you'll find that the entire thing is already now waiting to stream from your mobile device as one big, hour-long car ride feast for you.
Thanks as always for listening and for your support. I know with the songs in particular, there's a fine line between my sharing something (i.e., providing a service) and simply intruding my effusions into your innocent discussions of Twin Earth or whatnot, so as always I appreciate your indulgence.
I'm very pleased to have been able to use this podcast to connect musically with so many people, including the PEL listeners who remotely played on tracks for this album like Ben Kelly, Eric Schumann, Monica Serra, Daniel Gustafsson, John Jughead Pierson, Shawn Saul, Brett Segal, and Maxx Bartko, not to mention all my old and/or local musician friends that came out of the woodwork to play on a track or two.
And thanks for Seth, Wes, and Dylan for allowing the use of PEL funds to enable this mastering effort. This all slakes my thirst for getting more of my catalog out in the world via those nice, convenient electronic media outlets (and not just my designed-in-1997 website). So either we turn a profit on this experiment and the guys continue to tolerate me, or I'll have to whip out a Kickstarter to incessantly tell you about.
-Mark Linsenmayer
The trippy album cover is by Diana Szabo. You don't even WANT to see what's going on in the exposed, blowing brainpan there!
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