This is the printable cover for Whatcom Home.
Since I use it to make labels, it's tailored to my printer and browser (IE7) settings. It might not look or print as nicely on your PC.
I suggest you try a print preview and/or low-ink draft print before trying to print actual labels.
Make sure you configure your browser to print backgrounds, or the images won't print.
Set your left/right printer margins to 0.75 and your top/bottom margins to 0.50.
We all go a little crazy sometimes. However, some of us don't recover. At least, that's what other people tell us. If we hear and believe them enough times, we might start telling ourselves that too.
Are any of us perfectly sane? At least, compared to when we were younger? Do our brains rot as we get older? Is there an inevitable decline in mental clarity, starting at a certain age? Perhaps starting when we were born?
Do I care? Not really. It's just a concept album.
Originally, Whatcom Home was supposed to be about a band jamming in a mental home or a musical tour of Whatcom County, but that never happened. I got distracted by software upgrades, technical difficulties, travel, and the Trex project.
Tripecac was relegated to the back-burner. It wasn't happy there. You can probably sense this when you hear the bored same-ness on much of the CD, especially the first half. Many songs suffer from a lack of ambition or feeling. Kinda like a depressed mental patient.
So that became the theme: a sad, confused guy being admitted to a mental hospital. There's no outsider viewpoint of a jamming band, no dark humor. Musically, it's a half-bored, half-confused mess, although my song notes try to connect the music to the "story".
Finally, in October I started giving Tripecac some TLC. I got back into recording vocals and guitar, and the process became fun again! The technical frustrations were still there, but I often caught myself bobbing my head to my racket, and that's what matters to me.
The album closes with "Ha Ha I'm Coping", which is a very loose cover of a Teardrop Explodes song.