Album Notes

Rob Getzschman embodies the Midwest. Born Omaha, raised St. Louis, sipping Mississippi River tap water through the formative years. While starlets and harlots made for LA, he moved east to prove himself with the heralding of the millennium, seeking the corners of America which most resembled the turn of the twentieth century. After publishing his first album, "songs for the anti-de-counterrevolution," he left the blessed heartland for New York City. There he entered the antifolk underground for about ten months, absorbing songwriting and performing in an environment which fêted presence over perfection and improv over particulars. The recordings in his head took time to catch up, however, and this antifolk period produced the decidedly folk "Eleven Coming Back," an homage to Getzschman's most deeply felt influences in Leadbelly, Woody Guthrie, Dave Van Ronk and others.

After failing to plant roots in any of the five boroughs, the next fall found Getzschman vacillating between Boston and Maine, wondering why. He found work doing manual labor and framing art, and in between eking out an existence, captured a set of demos on a Radio Shack tape recorder. These sometimes-desperate songs were of the antifolk variety which he could nary afford to produce in a studio. Instead, he bought a tape deck and spun 100 copies of the "Brooklyn Demos" cassette to distribute to friends and musicians. Working nights in a Boston club taught him the flip side of highly-polished pop rock on a local level. Commuting to record in New York City, Getzschman exorcised a philosophical tome of an album entitled "Heirs of Pretension." With more production and instrumentation than any previous effort, this album promised a refined vision of creation, including material from 1999 through 2002.