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”.
…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