Album Notes

How come you've never heard of this record by a band that's sold millions? And why did it only sell 25,000 copies when it came out on dot.com startup Musicblitz.com in 2000? Well, it wasn't because the record isn't great. Freaked Out and Small got rave reviews in CMJ, Alternative Press and the All Music Guide, among others. Presidents guitarist Dave Dederer offers a full explanation: "In 2000, the Presidents didn't even exist. We'd been split up for almost three years. A family friend of mine was doing A&R at this startup, and he offered us some dough up front to go in and cut a record for downloadable-only release. Remember, this is 2000, so anything seemed possible in that regard. We told him we weren't a band, we weren't reuniting, we weren't going to play any shows, we weren't doing any promo and we'd make whatever the hell record we wanted to make. He was fine with that. We even originally planned to release the record under a new name, The Quitters, but it turned out that name was already taken. "By the time we were making the record, Musicblitz realized that the web thing wasn't going to work. They decided overnight to become a brick and mortar record company, something they knew nothing about. And then they went bankrupt just a couple of months after the record came out. Personally, I'm blown away that it sold as many records as it did. And I'm proud of the record - it's probably my favorite thing we've recorded." The Presidents are, of course, reunited. They've been touring the U.S. since early 2003 and released a new album, Love Everybody, in August, 2004. Love Everybody features the radio hit "Some Postman." The release of Freaked Out and Small on Nail/Allegro is concurrent with band's 10th anniversary re-release of their multi-platinum debut. All three of the Presidents Nail/Allegro releases are on the band's own PUSA Inc. label. "We're excited about Nail and about doing this ourselves," says Dederer. "We're making tons of stuff happen on our own in terms of marketing and promotion, and it's satisfying to see that we can often do better at this on our own than we did with Sony. And it's cool that we have three-fifths of our catalog in our ownership and distributed under one roof - I feel a sense of pride and accomplishment that was just never there on a major."