Recorded over a three day weekend in July of 2019, “Arches & Pathways” finds The Folk Implosion’s John Davis and Refrigerator’s Dennis Callaci reuniting following their “Room For Space” LP from twenty five years back. That first record was improvised and recorded in one afternoon live to a one track. The new record has the luxury of being recorded over three days by engineer Steve Folta in the Callaci living room. The improvised collection features brand new songs written and recorded over those three days by the two of them building upon a live take of piano and drums, or dueling guitars and layering the new baby with overdubs immediately afterward to capture all that was in the room at the time. Expertly mixed by Scott Solter, it is a modern day minimal psych score whose guts are pushed into the skin of songs. Songs of minimal expanse, and you can quote us on that I tell the under assistant west coast promotion man.

The record is available as a 160 gram standard black vinyl edition w/ a download card & lyric sheet or download via Revolver and at your finer independent record stores on November 20th. A strictly limited edition of 100 on swirled orange vinyl includes all of the above as well as a unique signed and numbered poem by John Davis as well as one by Dennis Callaci, and a download card for the 200 poems that Davis and Callaci wrote that are married to this project (a hundred apiece by each of them). Preorder it at Grapefruit https://grapefruitrecordclub.com/products/archespathways. Check out the first track they recorded that Friday and the first song on side 1 “An Alley Opened It’s Mouth and Roared”.

Picture of colored vinyl, poems and cover art of Arches & Pathways
Limited edition of 100 copies available only via The Grapefruit website
John Davis & Dennis Callaci “An Alley Opened It’s Mouth and Roared”

…and here are two of the two hundred poems:

Splattered (J.Davis)

The Home Shopping Network

Caught me again

I, like a thief, bright red handed

Wanting to want

Like a stimulus check

That never arrives,

Except as a promise

You told me in a taxicab – 

But I only heard the bolts

Of the bridge that the axles were rattling

I saw the sun, right through the windows,

But only a dozen of the things 

That it moistened, like a wave,

One that crawls across a beach,

Slowly dying

You told me you saw five of your words

Crawl right out of my left ear

After you blew them in

To my right one

There they are, on the window,

Splattered

Madison Square Garden Bowl Lounge (D. Callaci)

I know all of the places you been to before

I been there myself

Their shitty sound guy with the bowler hat on

And the rayon vest

It didn’t work

It wasn’t sci-fi

It was no-fi

I couldn’t get in

In past the $15 bouncer

And the two-toned hair polizi

And the dog haired collars

James Brolin vacuous Merv Griffinned couch yawn

It all seemed OK until the dawn

Until I awoke

Cum in my coke

Blood on my pillow

And I awoke

And there were all these lesions on me

Begging to be released from my malnourished body

Can we please?

Can we leave?

Can we please?

Can we leave?

Them velvet ropes spun with human hair

That soy sauce made of blood

The dude in the cowboy hat that stands behind you with arms folded as you play

What did he say?

What did he say after the show?

That he couldn’t understand a word

That he couldn’t make out a thing

Madison Square Garden Bowl Lounge

I never found a place to hide in you

You were too skinny

Too thin

There was no fat for me to tuck myself into

So instead we did drugs all night

Mama drugs that we were told not to do

We tried to fuck, but only soft on soft blues 

Emanating from our room

Over the PA

To the crowd assembled to hiss and boo

Fuck, and I tried to love you

Fuck, after I had tried so hard to love you

yeah, but you did it all wrong

at the wrong time

in the wrong venues

yeah but

you got it all wrong

every time

everywhere you went to

Don Everly opines in some op ed

I’ll never attempt to love anyone again


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