Album Notes

The Slow Poisoner (alias Andrew Goldfarb) is a one-man-surrealistic-rock-and-roll-band from San Francisco. He strums a guitar shaped like a dying swan and sings about swamp women, weeping willows, furtive rituals, cosmic paranoia, creeping fungi, forgotten diseases and witches in the woods. He keeps time by thumping on a kick drum rigged with sleigh bells, and while performing displays elaborately painted signs that bear the title of each song being sung.

Originally he was the leader of a five piece band, but over time the group slowly became thinner and thinner as the other members drifted off into mystery. Eventually an apparition of an eight- fisted cephalopod (the Rocktopus) instructed Andrew to go it alone, and since 2005 that is what he has done, touring the country repeatedly and playing venues that range from libraries to science fiction conventions, beauty parlors and laundromats.

In keeping with the tradition of the one-man-band as snake oil salesman, he sells his own patent medicine. Bottles of The Slow Poisoner's Miracle Tonic are brewed with pure egyptian oil and have proven effective in the treatment of Consumption, Women's Troubles, Gout, Neuralgia, Wandering Limbs, Stoutness, Onanism, Disinterested Bladder, Elephantiasis, Cholera, Barnacles and Boils, The Fits, Excessive Abscesses, Necrosis, Lavender Fever and General Wasting.

The new CD is called “Lost Hills” and it’s a roots-rock-opera about ghosts and liquor. It tells a true story from Andrew's days as a traveling salesman, about the time he became embroiled in a love triangle with a phantom hitch-hiker and a sinister minister. The record is narrated with spoken word vignettes that painstakingly explain the events as they unfold, making for the least confusing concept album ever recorded. The songs span a wide range of musical styles in service of the story, from folk blues to fuzzy psychedelia.

Andrew is also the author and illustrator of the long-running underground comic strip "Ogner Stump's One Thousand Sorrows" and the novels "Ballad of a Slow Poisoner" and "Slub Glub in the Weird World of the Weeping Willows."