Album Notes

Nervous and the Kid: A Manic Myth

How does a music group come about? What womb, what kernel, what crime sparked its inception? These days people seem to knock around the planet like billiard balls. It’s hard keep track of a band member for long, let alone a family member or an ex-girlfriend. We all have our own peculiar orbits, I suppose---our own topsy-turvy trajectories. So I guess this is my mixed-up metaphorical way of saying there’s been a revolving cast of characters that have played vital roles in Nervous and the kid. Whether they know it or not, I still consider all who have shared the stage with us (and numbed their throats with beer and singing) as honorary and official lifetime card-carrying members. But being a part of Nervous and the kid is as easy as just saying hello. Hello. We are a welcoming band. Perhaps that is our sub-genre: welcoming.

This particular musical band (as well as a few other more embarrassing ones) has been an ongoing collaboration between my brother, our friends, and myself. How hard is that? We learn by trying--that is, none of us are fluent. We read music with our ears. The experiment is one of merriment--of trying to inspire beautiful things in beautiful people. Of course, there are always the inevitable hurt-feelings, string-breakings and lyric-forgettings. Sometimes musical efforts bound off the foreheads of an audience like so many old tennis shoes. But failure is like a diamond lodged in the back of your throat. It hurts like a bitch, but it’s not without worth. Here is some blank space:



We would like to rearrange the universe a little: cosmic feng-shui. Put that couch over there; drape a tablecloth over the TV; change the color of the sea. Ah, such lofty goals for this little jalopy of a band---I know.

I can’t help but think that a when a music group begins, there are two basic desires: to become something and to share something. The combination and fruition of these two desires, like some alchemical formula, begets the creative act: that evolutionary movement, the raising of invisible structures, that widening of reality, that widdleing and molding of some inconceivable artifact that forms itself in the air about the uncombed heads of aspiring musicians as they drive electricity from their brains into amplifiers.

Let us imagine a band is playing music. Nervous and the kid is playing music. They are strumming and hitting things. Watch. This is our music. Music is a way of sending pleasure from one head to another (even if it is a sad pleasure or an angry pleasure). We are, in a sense, conduits--conductors. We are also cultivators, curators, bike mechanics, waiters, soldiers, and booksellers. Being an artist allows us to be many things as well as nothing at all. The first thing to be, infact, (especially if you’re an artist) is nothing at all. Try that now.
I will do the same.

Tell us how you would like us to proceed. We are successful when we are able to communicate that which is beyond words—that is music. We will never be rich. Gamblers are never rich. But we will make you smile and bob your heads--not like puppets--but like poets sharing in the creative act. A band needs ears to listen and heads to bob. A band needs a hundred gleaming smiles. Are you smiling now? Thank you. Are you smiling now?

Currently, Nervous and the kid is: A-Okay

Chris Bolton (Words, chords and voice)
Andrew Bolton (Chords, traps and vice)
Mike May (Cheese traps and mice)
Alex Mcfarland (Bass, cords or jeans)