released November 3, 2023

Calvin Grad: writing, vocals, instruments, co-production
Nick Bisceglia: co-production, engineering, mixing, alto saxophone, vocals
Chris Weisman: guitar solo on "What Is Floating", feedback on "The One Who Moves"
Quentin Moore: guitar on "I'll Never Stop Believing In Love"
Caroline Bennett: album art

Your old geometry tutor, a sprightly yogic septuagenarian who lives on the far edge of town, is relocating to Jefferson City, Missouri to be closer to his niece, and he’s offered you sixty dollars to clean out his attic. You oblige: you’ve barely been in touch since you graduated, but you’ve always liked the guy, and you haven’t had much going on recently anyway. You can certainly spare an afternoon. You know he’s a pack-rat, and you bet he’s got some interesting stuff up there.

Most of the accumulation is plain old crap. A scuffed-up Emmett Kelly clown painting, a tunic, a pair of mildewy bowling shoes, some Better Home & Gardens magazines from the 1990s. Ick! You’re cramming this stuff willy-nilly into a 60-gallon, unscented trash bag to take to the Salvation Army donation center later, barely paying heed to what you’re tossing as you hold your nose. You’re sticking an uber-gaudy novelty coffee mug into the sack when you spot a dusty milk crate in the far corner full of what appears to be old records.

You peek. Some of the music you sort of recognize: a terribly beat-up copy of Mose Allison’s Back Country Suite, a couple mangled CDs by Tulsa, Oklahoma’s Dwight Twilley, a cassette by jazz pianist David Frishberg, a ring-worn disc of Rush’s Fly By Night with no sleeve. But there’s one item that piques your curiosity—a pristine reel-to-reel box with the words “Tupping Time Plus” scrawled in orange felt marker. You open the thing and are confronted by a noxious smell, a well-worn tape, and a moth-eaten lyrics sheet credited to a man named Calvin Grad, a suite of five song-poems written in tightly-wound cursive. You pour them over. The handwriting is a bit hard to make out, but what you can read perplexes you. “Martin’s valet,” “Puffin’ away,” “They say nobody after all is not agreed.” What could all this mean?

When you finish up for the day, you show your ex-tutor your find and he just shrugs. A long life means you pick up some mysterious items along the way. He suggests you take it to the A/V lab in the strip mall downtown, and that his buddy Allan would help you take a listen. And so you head over there the next morning, after spending the whole night turning it over.

The reel plays no problem and you’re immediately confronted by a rustling countdown and gentle arpeggiated C sharp. Then a warm voice: When I look the my people in the eye. Just like that, you’re sucked in, and the next eight minutes seem to go by in a flash. Who is this Grad guy? The music, you deduce, was recorded some time between 1975 and 2028 by a young man between the ages of sixteen and forty-four. He is accompanied by zero to eight musicians. These songs are his life’s work, or else he wrote them the previous evening. This music must be either very simple or very difficult to perform.

Written in good old Beatlesian plainsong, this five-point musical cycle is a rock opera in miniature in the mode of “A Quick One, While He's Away,” “Brown Shoes Don’t Make It,” or how things sound when you’re about to fall asleep on a bus ride. The tracks are approached in a range of style and sensibility: bad-time jam, nice-time groove, lovers’ lament, noodling then tightness, a surprise key change, and can’t you hear a bit of Neil Diamond’s “I Am, I Said”? You wonder how Calvin Grad must have felt when he wrote all this, and what kind of person he must have been. Music’s interesting because it's so intimate, but a lot of the time you encounter the best stuff by chance. You’re glad that Mr. Grad will never stop believing in love, because things have been kind of hard recently. You wonder how it ended up in that attic, but you guess that’s just the beauty of these sorts of things.

— Gareth Nuttycombe

Written 8/27-9/4, 2022.
Recorded in Brattleboro 12/3-4, 2022.

Thanks to Nick, Quentin, Chris and Caroline for their invaluable contributions. Thanks to Annie for the album title. Thanks to Kyle for the special material. Thanks to Priya for the support.

And thank you for being interested!