Album Notes

If you could put your finger on the pulse of Houston, you would hear two very different beats. The first would be the thriving rhythm of a city teeming with difference- racial, cultural and individual. It would step jerkingly to the patterns of a thousand drummers playing a hundred kinds of music. The other is the sickly, leaden, inexorable trudge of the black lifeblood of the city. This beat follows a single demonic maestro: money.

As a result, our relationship to the city is profoundly ambivalent. Rent is dirt cheap, and the food is great, but the place seethes with corruption, the traffic and air pollution are among the worst in the country, and the summer heat and suburban sprawl are legendary. To be an artist in such an environment to be on an urban frontier. The possibilities are endless, but the plausiblities seem depressingly limited.

This attitude depends on our awareness that other places might oppress us less, and yet we decline to leave. Beneath dissatisfaction, we believe that, along with all the things we revile, the city is what we want it to be, and that above all, it will let us be what we want, and let our music be what it deserves to be. This is the new sound of Houston: heartfelt, raw, uncompromising, and cosmopolitan.

"The creation of a work of art, like an act of love, is our one small 'yes' at the center of a vast 'no.'"- Gore Vidal