this zip contains
• the eight delicate titular olives (the songs)
• eight pieces of art (one cover + one for each song) by painter Ty Williams
• a sweet photo of me yawning

A note on this digital EP:

Eight Delicate Olives Slowly Chewed at Midnight is a collection of home recordings that would in olden days have languished in the vaults. It’s composed of intimately recorded (read: demoed) instrumental one-offs and songs that I wrote and recorded in Copenhagen last fall that don’t quite fit in with the songs selected to go on my forthcoming full-length, God Bless the Hunger, and/or that I have forgotten how to play (numbers 1, 3, 6, 8, and the bridge to number 7, if you’re curious). Instead of leaving them to die with my hard drive, I’ve decided to pass them along to you.

Autumn Joy is mostly about nostalgic memories of touring (only someone who hadn’t been on tour for at least half a year could write this song). Breathe Slow I hated when I wrote it, but now I like it quite a bit. American Guilt makes the strange and probably inappropriate connection between the extermination of Native Americans and then end of a relationship. R. Frank & Son was written about the photographer Robert Frank, cobbled weirdly together out of actual quotes from him, pieces of a great Vanity Fair article on him by Charlie LeDuff, and my own extrapolations. Robert Frank is a brilliant photographer, by the way. If you do not know him you should immediately go look at The Americans, one of the most moving collections of art I have ever seen anywhere ever. It’s at the Met in NYC right now and if you are a New Yorker you owe it to yourself to stop by.

The zip file comes with eight, count em eight, lovely original artworks by Ty Williams (www.typaints.com). Print them out, put them on your walls, curl them under your pillow at night for good dreams, give them to your loved ones, write To Do lists on them, practice kissing on them when no one is looking. You know, all the stuff you usually do with good art.

love,
Gabriel