It all started when…
As a child my favorite toys were called Dino Riders. Since the toys (and the TV show that was designed to sell them) only existed from 1988-1990, one has to be of a certain age for these toys to ring a bell. I happen to be of that age.
The premise of Dino Riders was ridiculous: a time-travel accident sends a spaceship full of humans to the time of dinosaurs. Their enemies, captained by a cruel frog-human tyrant, follow them through time, and so the warring parties end up riding armored dinosaurs into battle, shooting lasers at each other while the bad guys try to steal the good guys’ McGuffin. As I said, ridiculous… but, on the other hand, no more ridiculous than its far more popular contemporary, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
One of the Dino Rider toys was an Edmontonia, a dinosaur I had to that point never heard of. It’s basically a Cretaceous-era Ankylosaurus, but with shoulder spikes and without the tail club. A monstrous, carapaced brute. Later when I first visited the American Museum of Natural History in New York I saw the fossil of a real one for the first time. It is imposing.
Years later after I was a bit older I began to observe many of the ways people can be damaged by life and how they build defenses both emotional and physical against the things they fear. I found that many people build defenses to stop other people from hurting them, whereas I tend to point my defenses inward at myself due to my various regrets I have accrued in my life. These misaligned defenses increasingly made certain conversations with my friends difficult, as they fear different things than I do. And as the world seems to get more fearful and dangerous, ever more defenses are constructed.
Eventually I went back to the American Museum of Natural History to see the Edmontonia. This is an animal whose armor is decidedly pointed outward.
So I wrote this album about armored dinosaurs, armored people, extinction, regret, and the sense that the world is evolving too fast for the people who live in it to keep up.
The slogan of the Dino Riders was “harness the power of dinosaurs.” I’ve tried my best.
In the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic I was locked indoors with nothing to do. So I really dedicated myself to improving my chops on the bass guitar. Only problem: my only fretted bass was a Warwick $$ Corvette and I decided this was no longer the tone for me, and what I really wanted was a vintage P bass. What followed was an epic saga of buying, playing, returning, and reselling basses that took nearly a year and a half, all during a pandemic when I had to practically wear hazmat gear to so much as walk into a Guitar Center. In the end, I did find my P bass, but during these adventures I also stumbled upon a Fender fretless jazz bass. The fretless J is famously associated with Jaco Pastorius, who literally invented it by ripping the frets out of his J-bass before a gig. I am no Jaco but I fell in love with the tone and versatility of this instrument. This fretless J undergirds more than half of the songs on this album. You’ll know it when you hear it.