Goodbye to Analog

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Release Date: October 31, 2013

Treadmill Trackstar Releases 3rd Fan Funded Album

Treadmill Trackstar will release their third fan funded album titled Goodbye to Analog on October 31,  2013,  16 years to the day after their Breaking/Atlantic Records release of Only This in 1997.

Goodbye to Analog is the third conceptual album in the band’s growing catalog.  The premise originated with the thought that maybe Snow White was perfectly happy sleeping and uses this fairy tale as a jumping off point to tell the story of three addicts trying to make their way and uses drugs as a metaphor for everything that constrains us.  The album was written as if it were the first act of a rock musical and comes with a companion “script“.  A second act is likely at some point.

Work started on this record back in March of 2009 with massive research into musical theater, character sketches, story outlines, thematic brainstorming, musical brainstorming, and lots of other work that may or may not have been a complete waste of time.  One old document describes the project as, “Snow White meets My Own Private Idaho meets Hansel and Gretel.  One character was assigned Anarchy/Faith/Palestine.  Another was assigned Peace/Atheist/Israel.  There are lots of notes on parasites, specifically the wasp that can take over the brain of a cockroach.  There was discussion about The Iceman Cometh and Death of a Salesman and Eugene Oneal’s idea that the things that keep us going are really just pipe-dreams.  “There’s a limit to the guilt you can feel and the forgiveness and the pity you can take!” The sign outside of  Goatfeathers was an inspiration, “Goatfeathers are the distractions, sidelines, and deflections that take a man’s attentions from his own business and keep him from getting ahead.” – Ellis Parker Butler 1918.  The constant crutch of tomorrow.  Nihlistic Zen. So drugs were used as a metaphor for everything that constrains us.

Musical ideas were explored, drawing from things like the requiem form, idée fixe, and menheim rocket…  Musical theater was delved into – Porgy and Bess, The Pirates of Penzance, and of course Tommy, Hedwig, and Rent.  There was an eagerness to  land somewhere musically between 70’s crotch rock and The Boards of Canada.

But the biggest challenge was this.  All of the songs had stand on their own as pop songs too.

Once we got that all of this nonsense out of our system, Angelo threw it all away and wrote the record.  After fits and starts, long delays and short bursts of heavy lifting – the songs were pretty much done and demo’d by November 2011.  By Christmas, Angelo had driven Tony to bail from the project – and I quote, “Dude, I can’t work with you anymore.”  No blame there.  But this threw all sorts of wrenches into the machine and caused lots more delays.  Angelo enlisted the help of an incredible drummer he played in a jazz band with in high school named Beaver Bausch as well as scoring a couple of tracks from Stephen Russ from The Fire Tonight.  Then Heidi bailed on cello – which was kind of okay since there had been an incident over learning a cover of Always on My Mind which had already relegated cello to “ten percent” on the new record.  This, combined with Angelo being sick of having to write cello parts just to write them led to Ang only writing cello parts where they would accent – and ex-Treadmill-cellist Katie Hamilton was brought in to record cello for Treadmill for the first time since Only This in 1996.

With  Mr. Mike Mills as the lone survivor on bass, Angelo felt it was okay to bring in some other guest players like John Furr (Buck Stanley, Blightobody, The Tantrums), Jesse James  (The Fire Tonight),  and John Hennessey. And Kenny McWilliam’s added some killer guitar parts as well.

Finally – 3 years after work started- Goodbye to Analog was completed.  Thank freaking God.

And as usual – the next project was started before the last one was completed.  That’s how we do.  There is a new idea tentatively titled Under the Guise in the works which seems to want to feature songs with titles like, My Parents are Robots, Lost Pets, VDM, Top Floor Free Will, and Gun Show.  This will be Treadmill’s 7th release (if you count Angelo’s ’98 EP).  You can see details (and help!) at www.patreon.com/treadmilltrackstar

We can’t do any of this without the friends, family, and fans who take part in our fund raising efforts to get these records out there.  These folks are listed below.  Thank you!