I had to go to a post office today. it smelled. You can smell people. lines are slow. Do not enjoy this aspect of being human. Its just not me. but I make the most of it and talk to everyone in the lines around me because it is such a novelty for me still. So its happening now. just like in the vision I had. the little cat is out of the bag and making its way around the world. People everywhere are listening to the new CD now. Some like it and some don't. makes me cry when they don't like it. Lol. Some local magazine reviewed sleep with you. This guy slammed us again. second time he gave us a bad review. first one I never read but I heard that it was out there. says we ripped off the lyrics to I'm not the only one from nirvana? Can you imagine? Only in fort Lauderdale would someone be so stupid not to know by listening to our music or just by our reputation that I don't even own a nirvana album. no one in the band does. Maybe I WAS the only one in that department, but I just never got into nirvana; at least not yet. Little does he know that I wrote the song in 91—when was nirvana around???? I don't even know. every album he slams us. he writes like he only listened to the first three songs. And blew it off. You can tell he never dove in past song 3. This guy is a real first pager—those cats who only read the first page of every book they own and think they fucking know something. Its one thing if they get it and just don't like it, or even hate it. You can respect that. Its another thing when you can tell that they just don't even get it. That they never bothered to check it out. Man that shit is never easy to swallow. Guys like that, with real limited taste in music, shouldn’t be reviewing music. Anyway, they gave us a huge picture and named the album one of the top ten of the year released by local artists. Go figure. So that's cool. More fans will know the new album is out.

[I can’t sleep. That review has me tossing and turning. Sleep with you was for me an exploration of love and sex and relationships and all that kind of really personal romance stuff that I never explored on earlier albums. I had always focused so much on philosophical and spiritual and socio-political matters, so this was another step, taking a chance lyrically. Some people have made mention of the fact that I am emotionless on the cover of the CD with some generic model naked on the cover. As if I'm not even there. Have no interest in her being there. as if there is something inherently wrong in that. But that was the idea. That is what it feels like when you embrace the rock star lifestyle expressed in the title song. It does feel shallow and removed and disconnected. You quickly lose the fun and the novelty of all that and your heart starts to long for something deeper and more profound. That is why the album progresses the way it does. Its not glamorizing it as much as its exploring all of it, both sides. All of it.

Some interviewer asked me the other day, “is the album about picking up chicks and sleeping with as many of them as you can? Is that how you would sum it up?” and I thought, ‘oh shit, I think we’re in trouble here.’ yeah the first song is about that. but that's why the singer is suicidal on the next song, I'm not the only one, cause that's just not enough for him, and he’s longing to find his partner in superhero girl and he thinks he finds her in veronica or Minnie driver or Shira or Little Tree and all the others he mentions in Girls, but in the end it’s a false alarm, like a lot of relationships are, so he Keeps moving on, and he is sad and frustrated by it, and so yeah he goes in and out of drug abuse, as in the songs vicodin and junkie and he does feel guilty by not being able to control his primitive sexual urges sometimes, and just not being there for his friends and God, hence Guilty, and ending with Little Tree and the idea of love being the most important and profound thing one can go after in this lifetime, and then of course the hidden track Free love goes one step beyond that and accepts the idea that love and sex and romance isn't or at least shouldn’t be exclusive to just the opposite sex. That these ideals transcend all that. and it should just be this wide open exploration of the heart and spirit and body.

It’s a fucking story, a tone poem, an opera if you will, and its not just about those first three songs; a lot of people get that. some don't. but it still sucks to be misunderstood. Especially when you’re really working hard and giving it your all. some times I worry that we took such a risk with sleep with you; that it is too personal and too direct and blunt and too close to home. [Maddie told me today ‘Fishy look you have to understand that for the last two years we have looked up to you with this whole social and political activism and save the world and music from different countries type of vibe and well, how would you feel if U2 came out with their next album singing “all I wanna do is sleep with you...” You'd be a little freaked out too. Its kind of a shock for people. It was for me. But we are trying to get used to the new sound and the new themes because we like you guys.”] I thought I would roll the dice, dive in and make something really personal, like just say fuck it, throw caution to the wind, and make the most personal album I could. We didn't even use a studio for the photo shoots. We used my house, my bedroom. We recorded a lot of songs that were written about real people. The idea was to take it all off and just let go and get real and personal.

Some reviewer said that the CD was made by people with gobs of cash and no tact. Little does he know that we are flat broke. We spent every last dollar we had to make sleep with you as beautiful and moving a work of art as we could for our fans and ourselves. It was meant as a gift. Because so many people complain that few albums these days come with any great artwork. The elaborate artwork of our CD packaging is something we pride ourselves on. We all know perfectly well that its supposed to be really hip and cool to be all indie and lo-fi and have no pix of the band on the cover and to have really low budget artwork and all that, but we’re not falling for it, and neither is G2 our designer, who at this point is like a member of our band, and neither are a lot of other music fans, which we are big time. We want to go back to the old days when albums came with lots of great pictures and lyrics and all that. So yeah we’ll spend money on the CD packaging till we have nothing left to spend and we love that the fans get off on it as much as we do. He also bears witness to how little he knows me or my work by stating something so obvious to anyone who does know me or the band, as if it is his idea---that we have no tact. Tact is not one of my strong points. nor of any real artists. tact had nothing to do with it; it wasn’t about that. it never was and it never can be. it is always going to be about telling it like it is, whether everyone gets it or not. It has to be that way. one album at a time. just a constant process of telling it like it is, or at least like it feels in the moment when you are making it.]  

Gave a ton of phone interviews this week. One with a newspaper from the University of Idaho for a story on Sleep with you. Cool guy. You know, you never know how to gauge these interviews when you get certain questions. He asks me if I ever slept with a man when I was younger like Pete Townsend circa 1973. I tell him that of course I did. yeah who hasn’t? haven't you? and then I'm like well I'm not really sure what Pete did with another guy in 1973 to be honest though. i guess the thing is that you just have to remember that when you're talking to them, they're writing, no matter what, you gotta try to remember that. that cool girl from the Miami herald and the article she wrote, man it was so personal. And me just talking a mile a minute, telling her everything. my hands moving all over the place, not watching myself. Just yapping. not understanding that anything I said would be put in the article. Crazy. I think everyone I'm talking to is my friend, you know. you forget the tape is rolling and that maybe sometimes they’re just pretending, so they can get the story. Sometimes its hard to know what the story they are trying to get is. You think that we’re all just these connected beings, so close and connected and in love with one another. and then I read these reviews that some of these guys write and they are almost vindictive, like they hate you or something, like they really are mad at you, even though you don't know each other, and then you start thinking ‘well maybe we aren't all as close and connected and in love as one would like to believe all the time.’ but hey, at least they’re writing about you.

Current Spin: nelly, nellyville. Man he invented a whole new sound.