BACKGROUND: As much as I didn't want to admit it, in order to book shows or get people to cover Magical, Beautiful, I had to make some promotional material. In true I Hear A New World fashion, it came out nearly incomprehensible - a (poorly) hand-written one-sheet on yellow graph paper filled with misinformation and an out-of-focus photograph. The one saving grace was a little blurb written by my favorite contemporaneous music writer, Larry 'Fuzz-O' Dolman. I didn't think he'd agree to it, and I was very happy when he did, even though his writing looked really awkward when promoters cut-and-pasted the first two sentences into their show listings. (PS: Larry let me insert whichever two artists I wanted into the "mixed up with his..." part, and I could never settle on anything, so I changed it all the time):

Ah, Music in the 21st Century. . .everything has been ridiculed and destroyed by punk/hardcore/noise, so now everything is available at a low, low price. What happens when a piano wiz-kid from Orange County grows up in the midst of this cultural chaos and gets his Minor Threat mixed up with his Neil Young? Well, he might move to Chicago and take up the life of the world-wandering musician with Head of Femur and Casiotone for the Painfully Alone, and when he's not on tour he might only half-jokingly call himself Magical, Beautiful and hide in his basement putting together grandiosely stoned prog/pop compositions with chewing gum and resin. You might even be holding his record in your hands right now. . .see if you can hear a new world, or at least a mixed-up new vision of what's left of the old one. . .

- [Larry "Fuzz-O" Dolman, January 2007]

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