Congratulations to me! The 47th album by my musical act Salon de la Guerre has just hit the streaming services, and unlike the somber piano album I unleashed just a week ago, this new one is a bit more upbeat and radio friendly (dare I dream that anybody will play this on a radio).
The latest album is called Carnival and it’s now available for digital download on all the major streaming platforms, including Amazon, Apple Music, Pandora, Bandcamp, YouTube and Spotify.
As I said in a recent blog post, this latest album of upbeat rock and alternative songs is where you get to hear me learn how to play the drums in real time, kind of the way you heard me learn to play piano in previous outings. So you can take that as a nervy statement of purpose or an apology.
See, I never had a real drum set on previous Salon de la Guerre records; instead I’ve turned to drum loops and beats I programmed myself on Logic Pro X, GarageBand or Cubase. Lately, however, I wanted to expand the dimensions of my sound a bit, make the songs sound less mechanical and the production of the songs a bit more “roomy.” And as I said earlier this month, I thought some people out there might reject my music simply because it had no real drums.
What’s my personal experience with drumming? Precious little except by osmosis: I was in marching band in high school and while I didn’t play the drums, my sister did, and I was for a long time on a quest to figure out how the magic of drumrolls went down. I bought a pair of my own drumsticks almost 30 years ago, but I’ve never had anything to beat with them except a few cardboard boxes (I hear the Byrds did that in the beginning). Given the quality of the drum loops on modern software—as well as the fact I don’t have a band or a soundproof room in my apartment, and furthermore that I don’t keep time very well—I largely gave up on the idea of real drums until this last autumn, when a kid told me at a high school open house that there were drum rooms in New York City. I realized I could simply take my laptop and a microphone to one of them and experiment.
I’m happy with the results and think I’ve made a fun work that doesn’t sound like anything I’ve done before. The Stonesy flush of “Drink Mee” (the album’s first “single,” as it were) finds me working even without the help of a metronome, and after hearing what I did on the rhythm track here, I decided to go big with a falsetto vocal. I hope you like that instinct, and if not, I apologize in advance.
The idea again: If I’m keeping it fresh for myself, my gamble is that I’m making it fresh for listeners. You can be the judge.
Lyrically, Carnival is a bit of a party album, but since it’s me and I always try to bring a novelist’s sense of irony and wrongness, there’s always going to be a bit of sour with the sweet. As I say on Bandcamp, “The songs look into feelings of anticipation for festive and better times but also know something about the hangovers that come after the fun.”
Meanwhile, I’ll have to humble-brag a bit: With the release of Carnival, I now have almost 600 songs in circulation online. Yes, you can actually go count them (if you’re doing your due diligence).
The entire album Carnival, like its predecessors, was composed, performed and produced by yours truly at my home studio, except, in this case, for the drum tracks, which were recorded at the Rivington Music Rehearsal Studios in lower Manhattan. All the work was done over the autumn of 2025.
The cover photo is by Susan Daniels.
I hope you enjoy it. Here’s a taste from YouTube:
Beauty is Imperfection 