I am extremely proud to announce that Salon de la Guerre’s 33rd album, Even Toy Dogs Get the Blues, has been released today. It can now be found on all the major digital music platforms for streaming or download, including iTunes, Spotify, Pandora, YouTube, Amazon and Bandcamp. (You can also make TikTok videos with Salon de la Guerre music, if you’re so inclined.)
As longtime readers know, Salon de la Guerre is my nom de rock, and I’m responsible for all the writing and playing (though I thank Apple for the useful sample here and there). Most of this album was made on my iPhone and home computer, save for one track with a guitar flip-out.
The album includes a lot of sketches of compulsive characters—spies, smugglers, strip club patrons, scam artists, obsessive dog lovers and Buddhists.
I recorded the album at my home in New York from May to July.
Salon de la Guerre fans take heart. After taking a year off from music, I’ll be returning to the streaming services in a couple of weeks with a new album called Even Toy Dogs Get the Blues.
I largely stopped writing music in 2022 because I’d been neglecting my fiction; also, I suffered musical equipment failure and, most important, nobody is knocking down my door for new material. But after completing the first draft of a new novel around March (a sequel to my book Zip Monkey) I opened up my iPhone’s GarageBand app to make sure the virtual piano keyboard was working properly (after I dropped the phone). Pretty soon, I was accidentally writing new music. Yes, it’s that simple.
I’m tempted to use horrific cliches like “back to basics” with this album. Since upgrading my technology two years ago, I hadn’t made a rock album on GarageBand for a long while. In 2021, I fell in love with my new Logic Pro software and started writing songs in musical notation for the first time. I got five new albums out of that program and then belatedly discovered that it also did wonders in brightening my guitar sound.
And yet …
It’s just too damn fun to sit around the house with my phone making up melodies on cool prefab instruments. I can do it at the gym too. Or on a train. Or in a boat with a goat. And there are advantages to going the lo-fi route: I keep the songs from getting too filigreed and overproduced and strangling the life out of them. If there’s a guiding philosophy behind Salon de la Guerre, it’s that music can come from anywhere. Sometimes I like playing it on a guitar, and sometimes I just like tapping it out video-game style on my app.
I did throw in a new wrinkle, by using jazzier piano chords this time around to go with the loud guitars. It was not my plan, but I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that the music came out kind of Steely Dan-ish in places. (Steely Danish?)
I’ll also humble brag a bit that this album probably demonstrates my strongest singing ever. I’m a writer by trade, not a vocalist, but I’ve had to learn to interpret my own material because I don’t have the time or money to start a band and hire singers. Over the years, I’ve become less self-conscious about my singing voice. It has a quality and I feel better about it every time I ship out new work.
The new album is a mix of the fun, sad, weird, ominous, propulsive, perverse and literate. In other words, quintessential Salon de la Guerre.
I’ll be releasing it in the next week or so, but until then, here’s a teaser–a jokey take on pickup lines:
Sights of minnow, despair Fish dream to nonaction The rudderless course of a ship Its hull beating against a manless dock
Upended cups on bollards Cranky pier beams And glinty eyed gulls Are harbinger of somebody’s breakfast
Mere muff grazers Spill onto the dock Warning of a fatuous Sunday Afternoon When the boat will be full But not full of anybody Willing to say what needs to be said
One thought is embarrassed to death In a throat Because the men want what they want And you will have what you have
Late in the day Jackson lost on the beam One thought parts Into milk and cream
Your eyes too full of pain and fear You couldn’t tell me the truth right then Not about anything Not right here
Curses spilled from her mouth And milk leaked into the shirt The baby biting hard at new blood And macrophages Baby still colostrum-laughing Licking poems off her pages
A poem of milk Is to be consumed by whomever needs it And blood is fed Brain, stomach and heart The whole water bed
And even light can cut And conjugate Talk soft to The Earth that was its mate
And even life on Mars In tiny yurts and huts Can’t lose the link to Earth Still stirring in our guts
They shared erotic pictures of themselves on an Indonesian chat site. The court’s verdict: sexy!
This $2 bill was sitting at the bottom of his sock drawer like a $3 diamond.
We’ll never know what the dinosaurs thought of fast food.
This blogger said that his child’s painting should be worth $2 million at least. Just look at those colors!
Watch this adorable lion cub tussle and tumble with his brothers and try to understand that they are learning to murder.
This car wash hack was completely useless to this pedestrian.
This Amazon Go store never opened but you can still imagine it in the empty space Amazon left for you to stare at.
Kick your online privacy up a notch by faking your own death.
This dogsledder did himself no favors when he told the world he was actually a cat person.
It’s now more important than ever to have a poker face at the company Christmas party.
This couple is sad and disgusted by their totally avoidable 30-year age difference.
This urban designer is already thinking a million years ahead to when we’re all being engulfed by karst sinkholes.
This newborn doesn’t forgive lightly for you pushing them out of your womb.
These old videos surfaced of people sexualizing Seth Rogen in 2022, and needless to say … it was awkward!
Bra. Lamp. Fire. It’s all rogue!
This Black columnist is the only one who can beat up on a Black entertainer. Everyone else doing it is racist.
Not Pretty: These strippers are getting pretty lewd when talking about their healthcare plan deductibles.
This plumber shrugged and said, “You should have used copper.”
This gun killed everybody but the intruder because physics.
This Rasmussen Reports (no relation) innocently asked if it was OK to be white then snuck out the door after starting millions of unnecessary arguments which Rasmussen Reports had no way of knowing would happen because it insists it was just asking a normal, scientific question that many white supremacists would ask.
She opened the present and it was Anna, not Elsa. What happened next surprised no one.
You won’t be surprised at what this guy who bought pizza with crypto eight years ago more recently did with his firearm.
We celebrated the one year anniversary of Will Smith finding a novel solution to the problem of being universally liked.
Breaking news, Anne Sexton died almost 50 years ago Jar lids were pulled off With rubber grips in Mourning The wings beat at the dozens per second And the peroxide told its secrets to hair
Dogs have powerful bone jaws And scrape metaphors off ribs And they eat us out from the inside With ravenous disloyalty On Moloch lakes Where former angels watched Their wings become ash and turds
Another day a mind contends with Living in flesh Flued and sooted But loses And forgets itself Dissolves Into heroic glands
Talk to them Not to me
I’ll be new tomorrow We all are Until ossified And broken as news
Watered with limitless Liquor Amber ton’c Profane as a red sky Tonight you laughed so hard You made a faint vasovagal syncope on the Seraglio toilet The head Selim Ghazals rushing from bibulous skull When a sultan thirsts Apollyon cracks Visions of Greeks escaping Wooden smack Skin flayed Eyes on Famagusta Eyes on the Pale Spaniards And Venetian’s Every lipstick, a traitor Every betrayal, a bath A mouth minty With curses. A seaman by nature Is impulsive; In dream canals, He smashed his navies. Under arched eyebrows, A grand vizier birthed Serb Bosnian Who laddered the bones of The fratricides Mapped around the lake, “Sappers sell to Volga and Don Janissaries mail for the water Communication,” said A shaved beard grows faster Than a severed arm. Lent his lettered brain for a Sot writing about orgies during his orgies While their Mustafa Was lent Cyprus ears and noses To harvest rape grape And vintage vine And the sot Wrote poems of heedless love As hateful history somehow left the bastard happy innocent Dying in her behind.
Eric R. Rasmussen is a novelist, composer, journalist and filmmaker. He is the author of ten novels, including the three-volume work The Ghost and the Hemispheres. He is the sole force behind the musical act Salon De La Guerre. And he is the writer/director of the online Web comedy series “The Retributioners” starring Stephanie Faith Scott.
