Album Notes

“Sleeping With Nunchucks” finds Quinn W. Shagbark departing from the studio excess of 2005’s “I’ll Shoot You Ace I Swear To God” and returning to the lo-fi, mostly acoustic, quick-fast-in-a-hurry aesthetic that characterized his earliest studio apartment albums. Having nearly retired from music altogether, Shagbark made a surprise appearance in Seattle late in 2006, typically manic and frothing at the mouth with stories of cowboy samurais, and hastily recorded thirteen tracks before once again disappearing. The result is by turns soothing and disturbing, conventional and strange, but always quintessential Shagbark.

Songs like “Where Do We Go From Here?” harken back to a time before moogerfoogers and synthesizers, when Shagbark’s oblique lyrics were rarely dressed in anything but three-chord folk songs, while “Living on The Edge This Ain’t” more or less reeks of moogerfoogers and synthesizers.

Rarely has Shagbark sounded more at peace than on “Smoke The Rest Tomorrow,” but the weaponized affection of “(I’m going to hurt myself) Really Bad On Purpose (because I know it’s going to hurt you worse)” may qualify as the most cruelly bizarre of Quinn’s myriad songs involving a body getting buried out back by the sycamore.

Rumored to have been inspired by a martial arts display at a Pacific Northwest rodeo, “Sleeping With Nunchucks” is a portrait of Quinn W. Shagbark once again doing what he does best: Writing and recording medium-length songs that, for better or worse, couldn’t possibly have come from anywhere else.