On 6/25/2009 I made a “non canonical” cover that was so cool-looking to me that it basically justified the existence of a non canonical album.

In case you don’t know about the Citizen Nowhere project, it is going to end up being 8 albums. It started in 2003 and you can get six of the albums by CLICKING OVER TO THIS POST and the seventh at THIS POST.

That means there is one more to go and the post directly below this one (at least if you are reading this on the Listen Or Don’t section of my blog), you can hear “Loose Lips,” which will be on Citizen Nowhere 8.

But “Loose Lips” got me thinking about how I wanted 8 to sound, and I realized that the nearly-complete album I thought was #8 really wasn’t. It was a bunch of tracks that didn’t fit. Most of them were about the Recession, some were left over from previous albums, but it wasn’t fitting together and it wasn’t providing a listening experience.

So: there will be two additional “albums” of material before I close out Citizen Nowhere with the 8th album. This track, “Escape Sometime” will be on the disc called: non canonical, b-sides. There will also be a non canonical, instrumentals that will have - you guessed it - instrumentals only.

Despite the preview/”leak” track here, the B-Sides album will probably come out second.

non canonical, instrumentals will be the first release, and you will get that within the next two weeks. It’s really neat. I almost thought about making a cover that looked like it was an original motion picture soundtrack to a movie I’ll never make…

Hmmmm.

Maybe I’ll still do that.

If I find a way to escape sometime…

dontdownloadme “Escape Sometime” by Citizen Nowhere off Citizen Nowhere, non canonical, b-sides

Ok, so this one kind of sprung up on me.
If you noticed my small Facebook status update, you’ll know that work on the final Citizen Nowhere album has begun. And up until I finished the rough version of Loose Lips, there was a chance I could have dropped CN VIII on you guys right after the new year (about a year off from The Solitary Vice actually). But then I finished this track…

…and I’m starting to think the whole album should sound like this.

That decision has two ramifications:

1) All the tracks I consider part of CN VIII right now (I’m calling it something pretentious that is laughable, so let’s just use the Roman Numerals until later) aren’t any longer. They will need new vocals and arrangements or will get shunned off to the secret CN wrap-up project.

2) CN VIII is now more distant. Spring, maybe? Summer, hopefully? Fall, for sure?

Anyway. Enjoy this one and know that it will appear on the LAST Citizen Nowhere album and might be slightly more pleasantly mixed than it is now.

dontdownloadme “Loose Lips” by Citizen Nowhere off Citizen Nowhere VIII

It’s happened, I’ve finished The Solitary Vice. Well, in the sense that I was told I would be out of a job come this Friday and I figured I should be working on getting a new job and keeping my apartment rather than polishing the seventh Citizen Nowhere album.

You can access the download site HERE though BEWARE! There is music that plays automatically, so I’d MUTE your computer, look at it WHEN AT HOME or put on HEADPHONES.

Or, you can bypass all that and download the ZIP file by clicking HERE.

Ok, I’m in Colorado now, and I didn’t have enough room in my luggage to bring my MIDI controller. At first this pissed me off, because my constant obsession that is referenced in the tagline of this blog. I just really need to be making an album so I have something to do that isn’t celebrity pictures or movie rumors. Otherwise I’d go crazy.

On the other hand, sometimes I take time to do music that could be better spent of celebrity pictures and movie rumors, so it’s sort of like an addiction in the sense that wanting to make music suggests I make bad decisions about my personal scheduling.

Like right now. I’m supposed to be looking up pictures of celebrities. I have another window open that has several tabs of leaked Carmen Electra Playboy photos.

Anyway, I’ve used this time without a MIDI controller to listen to tracks off of (what I was calling) zeroone on multiple devices. This album is going to clock in somewhere between 40 and 50 minutes and is getting really close to release. As both Valhalla and Out Of Insight Out Of Mind proved, none of you are that interested in high-quality AIFF files, so that saves me a lot of rendering time.

THE TITLE HAS BEEN CHANGED. I was reading about old myths of masturbation and realized that they would socially refer to choking your chicken as “the solitary vice.” Of course, I had to snatch that up for my own use. Not only is it a colloquial phrase from the past that refers to masturbation, but my inability to not work on Citizen Nowhere in 2008 was certainly a vice and one I did alone.

zeroone was called such because it was supposed to be an album of instrumentals that only had binary names. The two tracks I’ve posted from it fit this formula (0101 and 010101) and I had seven of them lined up - the seventh being 01010101010101. I was going to do this so no one read into any of the tracks, they were just music, they didn’t “document” anything sonically.

Then, one of the songs got lyrics. And I added a cover song. Things snowballed and zeroone is off. I’ll probably get around to it sometime (I’ve been listening to a bunch of film soundtracks), and I’d really like to do zeroone in the future. I like the idea of 40 minutes of insturmental tracks to plug into my iPod so I can walk aroun the city without silencing my thoughts.

Thus, CN7 is now The Solitary Vice.

IT WILL BE RELEASED TWICE. I know this sounds counter-intuitive, but I will be releasing The Solitary Vice in 2 different ways. The first way will be VERY early in 2009. Possibly even on New Year’s Day if I wake up from the hangover.

Sometime in early 2009, there will be a ZIP file of The Complete Citizen Nowhere Collection, “celebrating” five years of Personal Diary Music. That’s 8 albums, 7 of original material and 1 compilation of my favorites from the first four:

Alone In Americaland, Pretentious, III: Sin Seer, IV, Mirrors & Masks, Valhalla, Out Of Insight Out Of Mind, The Solitary Vice

It will be a honkingly huge file, but it represents five years worth of work from 2003-2008.

In the spirit of excess graphic design, the version of The Solitary Vice that appears in the massive collection will have an alt cover that looks like this:

The Solitary Vice: Complete Collection Alt Cover

After that sits in the digestive system of the brave and the few, I’ll have a few days/weeks to contemplate adding tracks to The Solitary Vice, just in case. Sometime in the first quarter of 2009, The Solitary Vice will be released with its real cover:

Citizen Nowhere VII: The Solitary Vice

Got it? Got it?

So, in anticipation of The Solitary Vice, and in the new tradition of Citizen Nowhere, I’m giving you the “promo” single with the official release announcement (that’s this post).

download link “Hey You” by Citizen Nowhere off The Solitary Vice

I’m designing the cover for zeroone, the seventh (sigh) Citizen Nowhere Album.

I’m going to plunk some designs down here just so I can stop thinking about them.

zeroone cover one: book cover wrap

zeroone cover two: sewn version