Album Notes

San Francisco folk/pop songwriter IRA MARLOWE has strolled with his guitar between the tables of a HOWARD JOHNSON'S.

He's performed at a CIRCUMCISION.

He's been courted by a BIG-TIME LOS ANGELES MANAGER who operated from the back of a wholesale bedding outlet.

In between occasional tastes of GLORY--performances at the FILLMORE, SLIM'S, GREAT AMERICAN MUSIC HALL, numerous songwriting awards--Marlowe has endured all that a life on the fringes of the music business can offer. After fifteen years, five smarmy managers and three failed record deals, you'd think he'd have the good sense to quit.

Finally things are looking up! He just won the "Songs Inspired By Literature" Contest (www.siblproject.org) and will be featured on a benefit CD alongside Tom Waits, David Bowie, Roseanne Cash, Steve Earle and other people more famous than him. CD slated for March 2003 release.

And now he's just released his best work ever. "SAVE THE DAY" is about fear, but also about faith. It's a colorful parade of ghosts, gurus, posers, vampires, neurotics, robots, saviors and drunks. Most of all it's a CD about the struggle to find humor and balance in an increasingly maddening and out-of-balance world. The CD has gotten rave reviews from such diverse music sites as CDBaby, www.starpolish.com, and www.babysue.com.

Shuttled from town to town while growing up with his anthropologist parents, Marlowe listened to everything from Gershwin to Bowie to Western Swing to West Side Story. At age 13 he sold enough greeting cards, door-to-door, to earn himself a "Folktune Wood Guitar", and at 19 he began to write songs. In the years since, he's developed a literate, narrative style often described as "cinematic"-drawing comparisons to Elvis Costello, Warren Zevon, Robyn Hitchcock, and Leonard Cohen.

Marlowe is currently developing a comic one-man-show, "How to Write a Song". The show, set to open in April 2003, employs monologues and interactive video to tell the comic/poignant story of his misadventures in pusuit of fame and (more significantly) approval. It features nine songs, dating from the Eighties to the present, including the drunken ballad "Ship In A Bottle", which appears on SAVE THE DAY.