Once upon a time, deep in the woods of northern California, there lived a singer/songwriter named Christopher Prim, who liked to write and play music, and occasionally went to the trouble of recording it. One year he bought a multitrack recorder, and painstakingly learned to use it. Sitting by his woodstove, he hammered out take after take, and edited the be-jesus out of some of his favorite heartfelt and rascally tunes.
Christopher wasn’t one of those people who needed to proudly tell you his recordings were done all in one take. His perfectionism didn’t run that way. In fact, you may hear a few pops and pings from the woodstove in a couple of places. But some people like that, as opposed to the sterile silence of most studio recordings.
Anyway, after much time and effort, Christopher achieved his goal of “good performances of good songs, decently recorded”, and released his collection of tunes, under the title “Clean House”, which was sort of literal, but was a metaphor, too. Christopher, a lifelong bachelor, lived in a rental with a very old carpet, and didn’t always realize his own ‘clean house’ ambitions, so when it came time to design the album cover, he put a picture of a forest on it, to expand the concept beyond the obvious human references to square rooms, ammonia, windows and vacuum cleaners.
A forest seemed like a good image, because there was growth and death and irregular beauty and seasons, and it was both dirty and clean, all at once. A very alive house, the kind people would want to live in, if they really thought about it—a place where sufficient order balanced out the creative chaos. It was a metaphor that could apply it to the U.S. as a nation, the leaves that were getting turned over recently, or at least raked around a lot—and even the planet itself—an ecosystem full of interdependent systems.
Mostly he thought people would like the song, and would like to sing it, because they wanted to live in a clean house, too. It was a catchy, simple song—as opposed to some of the paragraphs Christopher wrote for the album description—and if he could get people to listen to it, he thought, maybe they’d be inspired toward cleaning their own houses, maybe even work toward all of us having one big clean house.
No hand drums, like Christopher's first album 'Number One', but more harmony vocals, and tasty bass and electric guitar parts, too.
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