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We’ve updated our Terms of Use. You can review the changes here.

most of my heroes are good friends of mine

by Stephen Becker / Abe Hollow / Market

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about

••• ALL MAY 2020 PROCEEDS from this release will be matched by the three artists, and the total donated towards Covid-19 relief at the BKShowsLove Emergency Fund and North Oakland Restorative Justice Council. $10 or more is appreciated :)

www.gofundme.com/f/bkshowslove-emergency-fund-to-Feed-Brooklynites
www.facebook.com/NorthOaklandRestorativeJustice/

••• For the first six weeks of quarantine, Abe Hollow, Stephen Becker, and Market rotated covering each other’s songs, each performing and recording one song per week, at home.

NATE: A) This was so fkin fun. Steve is the best musician i know and Adam the best audio engineer. They both have, on occasion, written my favorite songs. We’ve made a lot of stuff together over the years and we trade scraps and demos all the time. Covering their songs felt like making little love letters to their talents, thank you notes for their collaboration over the years. I never imagined how much those feelings would motivate me to work hard and make good stuff…in fact, this is some of my favorite stuff I’ve made in a while. I just wanted to impress my friends, which I guess is sort of all I ever want to do. B) When we sent these covers to each other each week in quarantine, we would video chat, mute ourselves, and listen together. The crux of the whole project for me was watching my friends’ faces at the moment that they realized which song of theirs I had covered. That was the whole point to me. I’m not sure if this was the most selfish or the most selfless musical project I’ve ever undertaken. It feels like both, which I love. We got a lot of each others' lyrics wrong, but it was worth the surprise each week. C) At it’s best, a new release of music gives me that feeling, even from a stranger. I lay in my bed with my headphones on, grinning, cause I can’t believe this mthrfker covered my secret song, and I can’t believe how much better they made it.

ADAM: I sometimes wonder if the idea that as an artist, you have your own distinct identity—your own unique blueprint for expressing ideas, your very own singularly-shaped impulse to make something,—is a mild form of self-delusion, if not total bullshit. I sometimes wonder if even in those fleeting times when you’re at your best—in what you feel to be your most poignant, original, groundbreaking moments in the midst of your craft, when that floodlight of imagination pours out into the creative void—the brave, solid individual holding that light is not an individual at all, but a cloud. Not a solid self, but a murky constellation of subselves, and subselves within those subselves. A frenzied and mostly incoherent quantum crashing together of particles of experience and memory, foaming into tall dark waves that crash on the brick walls of your physical or technical limitations, seething and reforming and crashing again, over and over, scrambled and boiling and relentless in their pounding on that boundary, again and again until THWACK the wall finally cracks, and the hot bubbling incoherent soup of ideas flows into coherence, becomes attention and union and something ecstatically real. But the specific delusion of this moment is in the feeling that you did this, that you made this, that you are here and that you are alone. You did not do this alone. It was those subtle shifting subselves, the ghosts in the machine that found each other to briefly and collectively smash your inhibitions and dethrone your scrambled mess of incoherence. It was not you, but the multitude within you that knows better, has seen further, has travelled deeper into their own soup-sea of ideas and will know the shape of yours better than most. They are salty, battered sailors for life, and they are true blue. And I start to wonder if these whaling, sailing, sub-subselves, these guiding ghosts that calm the seas and simply disprove the myth of your identity, these heroes of your every day life, are simply what you call your friends, without whom none of this would exist. 

STEPHEN: "Covers? Not really. These are accolades, velveteen statues, certified brain-wreckers all, not some Wonderwall around the campfire. We took a bat to a house that didn’t need fixing and rebuilt the thing. Well, actually not of all them started as homes — some were more like junkyards, or pieces of scrap, dug out from cobwebbed Bandcamp URL’s. Honestly I was just relieved to not have to write anything. Like who better than these two to provide the songs? Adam’s cosmic poetry, Nate’s tearjerker realism. LIGHTS OUT. It’s that first step that drives me a little crazy sometimes, the actual writing. Then I remembered something Jonny Greenwood said about how because sound is just vibrations in the air floating around us, every possible combination of notes and melodies and chord progressions (and words, too) is all already out there, existing in space. And what we do as musicians is pick and choose from the ether. So this fan is gawking at Jonny but Jonny's like, ‘What do you mean? I barely did anything. I’m sitting back and enjoying it just like you are.’ because he’s also just listening to and marveling at this one combination that sure, he threw together, but he might as well have been doing a cover of his best friend’s tune, or covering some trusty eternal Being who already made the perfect song — so Nature? God? Brahma? Hans Moleman? Whoever it is for you. In other words, all we can do are covers."

credits

released May 1, 2020

most of my heroes are good friends of mine
CEE-006

All sounds by Stephen Becker, Abe Hollow, and Market
except Sally Decker added vox on Track 2 and Katie Von Schleicher added vox on Tracks 7 and 18

Tracks 1, 5, 8, 10, 11, 14 written by Adam Hirsch
Tracks 2, 9, 13, 15, 16, 17 written by Nate Mendelsohn
Tracks 3, 4, 6, 7, 12, 18 written by Stephen Becker

Mixed and mastered by the artists

Original versions can be found at the following bandcamps, besides tracks 6, 7, 17 which are unreleased:

abehollow.bandcamp.com
stephenbecker.bandcamp.com
cowsattheedgeoftheearth.bandcamp.com
tuckamore.bandcamp.com

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Cows at the Edge of the Earth New York, New York

"not a label" ?

• a shared bandcamp / secret public web bunker from a bunch of friends who make music, sometimes together

• not a label ? just a bandcamp [and secret public web bunker]

• email nate [cowsattheedgeof
theearth at
gmail.com] with questions suggestions
etc
... more

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