My albums have thirteen songs on them. This was a coincidence at first -- I didn’t realize that the first couple were sequenced that way until it was pointed out to me -- but it long ago became apparent in other, unrelated ways, that the number thirteen had some mysterious significance in my life. So, when it came time to sequence my third record, I didn’t mess around -- it got thirteen songs, just like its predecessors, and just like every recording I’ve made since. I happen to like continuity and I just might be superstitious.
This current collection only exists because I’ve stuck with the thirteen track formula. If, for example, I record twenty songs for a new album, and maybe fifteen of them warrant release, two of those fifteen end up getting cut, as a matter of course. An unexpected bonus about continuing to put out albums this way is that there are now more than enough of these lonely orphans lying around to make up an album of their very own.
Here are thirteen of them. Annotated session information and liner notes below.
1. Luck (outtake from Look At All This!)
2. Letter One (outtake from Do What I Want)
3. I’ll Fly Away (outtake from Better Get Right)
4. When It Rains (Recorded live in Portland, ME)
5. Soon (outtake from I Like You A Lot)
6. Time Will Destroy (outtake from unreleased album, 2003)
7. The Zoo (outtake from No Further Instructions)
8. Fields of Meat (outtake from Look At All This!)
9. Home (Mountain Road) (outtake from Look At All This!)
10. Baseball (outtake from The World Will Be Different)
11. Soul of A Man (outtake from Better Get Right)
12. The Prisoner’s Song (outtake from Look At All This!)
13. One For The Road (Recorded live in Durham, NC)
An Annotated Guide:
Recording "Look At All This!," Photo by David Sykes
Track One: LUCK
One of several outtakes from the Look At All This! sessions. Whereas my first three albums all featured a band that had already played countless gigs together, the group was assembled for the purposes of making this album was playing together for the first time as the tapes were rolling.
Photo by David Sykes
Mazz Swift and Ian Riggs had both been part of my live band for a year or so, but Jordan (Guy) Perlson and Michael Daves had each just moved to town, and were brand new to the fold. It didn’t take long for the new group to find its groove -- this track is one of the very first things we laid down.
Michael Daves and Jordan Perlson, Photo by David SykesPersonnel:
Michael Daves: Electric Guitar
Howard Fishman: Vocals, Acoustic Guitar
Jordan Perlson: Drums
Ian Riggs: Upright Bass
Mazz Swift: Violin
Recorded at: 23 E.10th Street, NYC, December 2004
Engineer: David Sykes
Track 2. LETTER ONE
Photo by Anders Goldfarb
A song from “we are destroyed,” and a melody that reappears throughout the narrative, each time with a new set of lyrics -- a device that allows the character of Eliza to keep a sort of diary of her emotional state as she travels west with The Donner Party. It’s a conceit; though she’s ostensibly writing letters home to a lover who has spurned her, the audience knows that she’s in uncharted wilderness, and that the letters will never reach their recipient.
CD Release show for DO WHAT I WANT, April 2002
This track is an outtake from Do What I Want, an album we recorded in downtown Manhattan in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, smoke and stench still wafting through the air. We used the same studio we’d recorded I Like You A Lot in the year before, and we were the same band, but whereas that album had been essentially a live-to-tape, all-acoustic affair, we were now exploring a new sonic palette and when it came to choosing songs for the final album sequence, this track felt like it didn’t belong -- it somehow seemed like a leftover from the band’s previous incarnation.
Personnel:
Russell Farhang: Violin
Howard Fishman: Vocals, Acoustic Guitar
Jonathan Flaugher: Upright Bass
Erik Jekabson: Trumpet
Recorded at Sorcerer Sound, NYC, October 2001
Engineer: Tim Conklin
Track Three: I’LL FLY AWAY
(Traditional)
Photo by Kaity Volpe
This was always a strong contender for inclusion on Better Get Right, but at the time it somehow felt redundant at the time to have it appear along with "Down By The Riverside." Don't ask me why.
Essentially a “live” track in the studio, this recording features an exceptionally soulful, greasy solo from Roland “King” Barber during the breakdown section.
Photo by Ed Bobrow
Personnel:
Roland Barber: Second trombone solo, vocals
Etienne Charles: Trumpet, first ensemble solo, vocals
Jose Davila: Sousaphone
Howard Fishman: Vocals, Acoustic Guitar
Andrae Murchison: Trombone, first ensemble solo, vocals
Jordan Perlson: Drums
Engineer: Dana Leong
Recorded at Life After Dark Studios, Harlem, NYC, December 2008
Track Four: WHEN IT RAINS (Live)
Photo by Jason Woodruff
A song that I’ve been performing in concert for some years now,, but one that has somehow never made it onto an album. A couple of different studio outtakes exist from The World Will Be Different sessions, but there was something about the insouciance of this live version from Portland, Maine that trumped them.
We were joined this night by the great Allen Lowe on tenor, whose fat, swinging tone perfectly fits the old-fashioned feel of the song.
Songwriters will sometimes say of a tune that it simply wrote itself. This was one of those songs for me.
Personnel:
Howard Fishman: Vocals, Acoustic Guitar
Allen Lowe: Tenor Saxophone
Nathan Peck: Upright Bass
Mazz Swift: Violin
Recorded live in concert at One Longfellow Square, Portland, ME., December 4, 2010
Track Five: SOON
(Ira Gershwin/George Gershwin)
Photo by Pierre Jelenc
The only song recorded for I Like You A Lot that was not included on the album, this was a one-off, recorded very late in the evening -- a song we’d played a few times together in concert, but never with piano, and never with this sort of feel. It had been a while since we'd done it, and I wasn't so sharp on the lyric, singing the beginning of second verse at the top instead of the proper one ("Soon/My dear you'll never be lonely/Soon/ You'll find I live for you only").
Photo by Nicolas Hill
This has always been one of my favorite standards. Once, when I was a teenager, my grandmother Minna Bromberg and I were watching a documentary about the Gershwins, and someone played a rendition of “Soon.” In the second measure of the song, when “blue” notes tug at the melody and harmony (“the lonely nights will be ended”) I remember her saying “that’s a Jewish melody.”
Personnel:
Russell Farhang: Violin
Howard Fishman: Vocals, Piano
Jonathan Flaugher: Upright Bass
Erik Jekabson: Trumpet
Engineer: Tim Conklin
Recorded at Sorcerer Sound, NYC, September 12, 2000
Track Six:TIME WILL DESTROY
In the late summer of 2003, what we were still calling The Howard Fishman Quartet decamped to Telefunken Studios on Talcott Mountain in Connecticut to record what was supposed to be the follow up to Do What I Want. It was a strange and confusing time. Erik had left the group to move to California, and though Russell and Jon were still on hand, within just a few months both of them would be gone as well.
Photo by Anders GoldfarbAfter touring and promoting the previous two records, playing hundreds of shows together up and down the East Coast, we’d hit a bit of burnout. As usual, I brought a batch of new songs to the sessions, but this time something was different. For one thing, the studio set-up proved to be a challenge; for the first time, we were unable to make eye contact with one another while tracking. Worse, the arrangements of the songs, rather than taking shape organically, felt formulaic and flat. There was creative dissension. There were bad vibes. The magic was gone.
Although some nice things from those sessions survive (including a late night set of standards with just Jon and me on upright bass and guitar), the album was shelved and most of the songs were rewritten and re-recorded the following year with an entirely different band for the record that would become Look At All This!
“Time Will Destroy,” a scrap, seems a fitting representation of where the band was at the time.
The silver lining that seemed impossible to imagine back then is that Russell, Jon, Erik and I would reunite years later, and have continued to perform and record together whenever the stars align.
Personnel:
Russell Farhang: Violin
Howard Fishman: Vocals, Acoustic Guitar
Jonathan Flaugher: Upright Bass
Engineer: Chip Karpells
Recorded at Telefunken Studios, Simsbury, CT, August 2003
Track Seven: THE ZOO
Photo by Jim McLaughlin
This recording comes from an all-night session with Jon and Jordan -- a marathon that began in the early evening, concluded after sunrise, and featured numerous takes of something like two dozen different songs (none of which these guys had ever heard before). I think we recorded almost all of the basic tracks for The World Will Be Different that night, several from No Further Instructions, and a handful of oddities that simply didn’t or wouldn’t fit on either of those albums. This is one of those latter, sort of a companion piece to “Garbage” from NFI, before it became apparent that most of the songs on that album seemed to be about Romania.
Personnel:
Jim Campilongo: Lead Electric Guitar
Howard Fishman: Electric Guitar
Jon Flaugher: Electric Bass
Jordan Perlson: Drums
Engineer: Alan Camlet
Recorded at Hoboken Recorders, NJ, 2009
Track Eight: FIELDS OF MEAT
Photo by David SykesThe meat seeds for this song were planted on a long car ride with Ian Riggs, as we made our way from Brooklyn to a tour stop in Camden, Maine. Ian has a keen appreciation for the random and the absurd, one of the reasons we’ve always gotten along so well.
We were talking about the idea of “meat” as something that gets bought and sold -- an abstract word that many people take for granted but is in fact a polite way of describing the flesh of a murdered animal that has been prepared for human consumption. How soon, we wondered, will humanity be giving polite names to every living thing on earth, as it all gets repurposed for our use and disposal?
Ironically, the lyric that would give the album Look At All This! its name comes from a song that doesn’t even formally appear on the album. “Fields of Meat” wound up being a hidden track, neither sequenced nor credited, and appearing after a few minutes of silence following the end of the album’s final song, “Pictures.”
I fought for this track to be on the album proper, but this was the first time I’d used an outside producer for one of my records, and I lost the fight.
I always thought that this song deserved to have a track of its own, not least because without a credit in the hidden track, some listeners over the years have told me that they hear me saying "Fields of Me" ("Mountains of me, etc.) -- interesting, but incorrect.
Personnel:
Michael Daves: Electric Guitar
Howard Fishman: Vocals, Piano
Jordan Perlson: Drums
Ian Riggs: Upright Bass
Recorded at: 23 E.10th Street, NYC, December 2004
Engineer: David Sykes
Track Nine: HOME (MOUNTAIN ROAD)
"Night Hills," oil on canvas, HF 2008While composing songs for the ill-fated travelers in “we are destroyed,” I imagined instances in which they must have keenly felt the effects of their self-imposed geographical dislocation, and felt a yearning for the familiarity of home (and all the feelings that can be conjured by that word).
Although this song’s lyrics would later be rewritten and retitled as “Where Do We Go From Here?,” the version here has the original words, inspired by memories of being in my childhood home on a cool summer evening -- an electric fan in the window, crickets chirping outside, the occasional soft whoosh of a vehicle passing by, but otherwise all darkness and safety, the excitement and promise of tomorrow just on the other side of cozy, restful sleep.
Personnel:
Michael Daves: Lap Steel Guitar
Howard Fishman: Vocals, Acoustic Guitar
Ian Riggs: Upright Bass
Recorded at: 23 E.10th Street, NYC, December 2004
Engineer: David Sykes
Track Ten: BASEBALL
"Resonate," by Sean Patrick Gallagher
A song that is sometimes much longer in performance. A number of lyrics were expurgated for this recording (including some thoughts about Andy Petitte and Alex Rodriguez).
People that don’t know me well often tell me that I’m quiet, and sometimes ask what I’m thinking about. This is what I’m thinking about.
Personnel:
Howard Fishman: Acoustic Guitar, Vocals, Fender Rhodes
Bill Malchow: Accordion
Jordan Perlson: Drums
Engineer: Alan Camlet
Recorded at Hoboken Recorders, NJ, 2009
Track Eleven: SOUL OF A MAN
(Traditional)
The Biting Fish live at Dizzy's, Jazz@Lincoln Center, 2008, photo by Kathleen Scully
A song originally recorded in 1930 by the great Blind Willie Johnson, this is another essentially live track -- another one-off, from the end of the very first day of tracking for what would become the album Better Get Right. The band had never heard the song before the tape was rolling, but that didn’t matter. I just asked them to listen, and to play what they felt. This is what happened.
Personnel:
Roland Barber: Second trombone solo
Etienne Charles: Trumpet
Jose Davila: Sousaphone
Howard Fishman: Vocals, Acoustic Guitar
Andrae Murchison: . Trombone, first trombone solo
Jordan Perlson: Drums
Engineer: Dana Leong
Recorded at Life After Dark Studios, Harlem, NYC, December 2008
Track Twelve: PRISONER'S SONG
(Traditional)
Another “palate cleanser,” recorded between takes of other things we were working on for the Look at All This! album. I’ve always loved Vernon Dalhart’s 1924 recording of this song, which I first heard in New Orleans, at Butch Trivette’s house, when I lived there in the early 90’s. Michael Daves was noodling around on a banjo, and used it for this one and only take -- according to him, his first recording ever on the instrument.
Personnel:
Michael Daves: Banjo
Howard Fishman: Vocals, Acoustic Guitar
Ian Riggs: Upright Bass
Recorded at: 23 E.10th Street, NYC, December 2004
Engineer: David Sykes
Track Thirteen: ONE FOR THE ROAD (ONE FOR MY BABY)
(B. Dylan)
Photo by Anders Goldfarb
Choosing just thirteen songs for my live “Basement Tapes” album, culled from our three-night stand at Joe’s Pub in New York City wasn’t easy, given the dozens and dozens of songs we tackled of the complete, peculiar, underground (and now, finally available) recordings made by Bob Dylan and The Band in 1967. This rendition of “One For The Road” actually comes from a different three-night stand of this music, at Duke Performances in North Carolina.
Spontaneity, surprise and irreverence are such a part of this music for me -- I like to think this performance captures a little of all of those things.
Personnel:
Howard Fishman: Vocals, Acoustic Guitar
Jordan Perlson: Drums
Ian Riggs: Electric Bass, vocals
S. Stephen Stevenson: Trumpet, vocals
Roland Satterwhite: Violin, vocals
Recorded live at Duke University, Durham, NC, 2008