Previous solo albums are:

Turn It Down (1991)

Fool Around (1998)

Bender: Songs for the Red States was written and recorded from 2003 to 2006 at my home studio in southern New Hampshire.

I love music. My parents are both musicians and we always had music on in the house. When I was young it was typically classical music in the morning and jazz in the evenings, but as my brothers and I grew older there was steadily more popular music and rock and roll.

In the 70’s my brothers and I would listen to American Top 40. This was back before corporate radio programming and it was possible for almost any song to be a hit without being approved by marketing focus groups. A rock song could be followed by a soul song, followed by folk, country, a song in a foreign language and then an instrumental. This was back when record labels signed bands and gave them time to develop, rather than dumping them if their first album isn’t a smash hit. Bands made music that appealed to them, not music that was designed to sell.

In the 80s I was music director of my college radio station and discovered a whole world of independent music. Great bands that weren’t on major record labels or getting any commercial radio play: X, The Replacements, Lloyd Cole and the Commotions, XTC, They Might Be Giants, The Soft Boys. Then for a fleeting moment in the early 90s it looked like some of these bands were actually breaking into the mainstream: R.E.M., Matthew Sweet, Soul Asylum, Nirvana. But then it fell apart. Instead of learning to develop new talent the major record companies went on a spree and bought out most of the prominent indy labels, promoting a few of the most popular bands for an album or two and dropping the rest. So the whole “minor league” indy label infrastructure collapsed, and then the majors shifted their focus to teeny bopper music.

Early in the 21st century the internet music revolution is changing everything again. The major labels naturally refused to change their business model to adapt to this new technology and instead went to war against it. But meanwhile thousands of musicians and bands discovered a new way to spread their music.