so that was not supposed to be the title of the album at all.

like, I thought long and hard about what title to give our first collection of original music...a lot of bands go the self-titled route and that's not a bad option if you like the name of your band as much as I do.

still, the question "what's the name of the album?" persisted in my mind for months after the first handful of songs were all screwed together for the most part...obviously, on some level, I saw an opportunity to further express myself.

...but when ZiZi said she thought the name of the album was "wet paint" was because that's the phrase I used on the poster for the album announcement party a few months back--pardon the mess, we're making something cool here--it kept coming back to me over the next weeks.

in the end, it was as obvious to me as it was to her: what's more symbolic of immediate, visible, tangible change than wet paint? 

the fresh coat on a brand new playground.

luminescent stripes newly painted along a pedestrian pathway for night visibility.

perhaps a bit of impromptu street art.

wet paint, see?

like, you don't paint something you want to look the same when you're done. 

guess if I loved the way we live I probably wouldn't be making music, let some private school nepo baby pen you the next album about how the way our so-called civilization is designed to operate is Good Actually.

the world I was born into, the one I was most extensively trained for, the society of stability and merit on the packaging for The Product, is dead.

maybe it never existed depending on various elements of your appearance and presentation, but it's openly not even a thing now.

the Powers that Be are not even pretending to offer a fairish deal for the mostish people...the veneer of civility that tinted the horrific machine that crushes millions of faceless cousins in its gears.

it is also true that a fresh coat of paint ain't gonna do it at this time...far from being broken, the machine is working exactly as intended, meticulously squeezing our only planet like a fleshy fruit to ensure every single one of its sweetest drops fall in just a few insatiable mouths.

it must be shut down, disassembled entirely--in a rapid and unscheduled fashion if necessary--and its parts repurposed toward more authentic forms of advancement.

only then will a bucket and brush truly and enduringly improve my worldview.

...but until then, you might as well at least keep the supplies around, right? practice your strokes so that you'll nail all the lines when it's time? 

in this way, wet paint symbolizes hope for me.

sure, some of the lyrics might color me as a pessimist but despite enduring about as much of an ass-kicking as an inner child can take over the past half-decade or so, here I stand and remain, ready to seize on the first opportunity to make a good day better and a bad day at least fun to look at.

people have been trying to kill that kid all my adult life.

that all you got sucka?

little fuck is stubborn, just ask my mama.

that's why hope is a central theme of the album. hope and imperfection, a more than fitting power source.

now to decide what order the songs go in...kinda like every week when I do the setlist for our Friday night gig down at Sanctuary, except this one goes on my permanent record.

no pressure.

let's see, "4011" ('cuarenta-once', which translates loosely as "fortyleven" and means 'this cheese looks like a banana to me') definitely goes first...that's an album starter if I ever heard one, upbeat and with all the overall subtlety of a brick to the back of the head.

what has clever satire gotten us in a world where bootlicking fascists criticize Rage Against the Machine for the political content of their music?

what the fuck is the point of nuance if anyone you have to convince is trying their hardest not to acknowledge their understanding of your point?

so yeah, DON'T WANNA THINK ABOUT IT JUST SHUT UP AND DANCE

probably "dámelo" next, we are straight outta Jalisco so it''ll be cool to have our first two track titles be in Spanish .

people really dig that one, love to see heads bopping and shoulders bouncing while I rap about how the class of monsters that claim dominion over our lives belong in concrete cages.

"finale (bye)" is a clear candidate for last track for obvious reasons.

still gotta figure out where the brand-new one (working title: "today") that flowered out of a practice jam this month goes. we'll play that one Tuesday at Mardi Gras and see how it goes over...could see it as high as third!

wait how many songs in an album anyway? 

Bad Religion's "No Control" had 15 and "Get Rich or Die Tryin'" also had about that many, Zi's fav Radiohead album had about 10, and "Stadium Arcadium" had, like, 50 songs and honestly that's way too much even though it's probably my favorite Chili Peppers album so let's put a ceiling on it somewhere.

"Now That's What I Call Music!" was important in my developing teenage life, at least the first couple outside the UK...the anthology hovers around 15 tracks so that seems like a fairly standard unit of measurement I guess.

then again we don't really do "standard" stuff here at the pleasant uprising.

in a way I guess "how many songs in an album" is like "how long is a book" and I've certainly written those before...a book is as long as it takes to illustrate the information and no shorter.

so I plan to paint as complete a picture of the 2020s as I can with this album.

all power to The People.

--Flor!