Album Notes

"This could be one of the strangest and most unique reviews I have had to do. Could you imagine making an album influenced by almost everything you have ever heard in your life? That is how I feel when I listen to this CD. Evan Hause is the wizard behind this truly unique smorgasbord of songs. He plays every instrument (there are somewhere in the neighborhood of 40) and sings every note. He is truly a well-rounded and talented musician. There is no simple way to describe how the music sounds. There are so many different themes, styles, and directions it drifts. The lyrics...are laced with creative melodies. He does a wonderful job of harmonizing his vocals on the song 'The Heaven We Knew So Well.'" DEMORAMA

This kaleidoscopic rock CD by 3-time ASCAP Award winning composer Evan Hause was originally released on May 28, 1998. Hause is a North Carolinian currently living in Brooklyn, NY, dubbed by "The New Yorker" magazine "Greenpoint's own….a versatile experimentalist whose interests range across the jazz, pop, and improvisational genres." A composer of several operas and works for symphony orchestra, electronics, jazz groups, choruses, and many other combinations, Hause's first passion is Rock songwriting, and "Adventures of Freddy" is his first major song compilation and document of his multi-instrumental talents.

The songs on "Adventures of Freddy" trip effortlessly from folk to reggae to disco to cowboy swing to metal to pop to prog to hip-hop to country, not as a contrived display of musical "look at me" but under the influence of the lyrics, which are a celebration of the individual within a colorful small-town street scene, making observations about happenings that range from the mundane (haircuts, ringing a cash register) to the extreme (train-hopping horndogs, an obsession gone violent) to the transcendental. One encounters dimestore Messiahs, donut-munching cops on the (dead-)beat, runaways, strippers, and chatty bartenders and the ever-present dream of getting away from it all.

The "orchestrations" tastefully bounce from standard guitar-bass-drums-piano to two fretless basses and vibraphone to a triple guitar Marshall stack lead break, to acoustic folk to a massive pipe organ – a sonic candy store which also calls up such oddities as a bicycle and brake drum.

The complimentary busy cover artwork was commissioned by the brilliant Madison-based pen-and-paper artist Danny Michael Donovan-Wilhelmi and printed on odd-sized softshell cases by Chicago's now-defunct Fireproof Press, who was seminal in the production of so many 90's Chicago indie-rock LPs. The entire package, which includes a Rock lyric trivia puzzle, is tied up lovingly with a hemp twine bow. There are a limited number of these left.