"WHY OHIO?"

(39 minutes, 2023)




This was my first attempt at a concept album, and I hope it was a successful one. The story is set in the early 1980s, in a small midwestern American town undergoing a violent collective psychosis. Paranoid delusions, family annihilations, Manson-style home invasions, and door-to-door spree killings run rampant, while big hairy monsters haunt the woods outside town.

It's all part of a behavior-modification experiment, with the town as one big laboratory. EM radiation and subliminal messages broadcast over TV and radio waves create an environment of total fear, and people start getting some Very Bad Ideas. A local preacher with a public access cable show has the diabolic revelation that everybody's damned no matter what, so you may as well get on the devil's good side. He establishes himself as a small-town Antichrist, with a flock of eager young volunteers to help him spread the New Word, and a golf cart-mounted guillotine for those who need some extra convincing.

Soon the chaotic violence is completely out of control, but the shadowy figure running the operation has a contingency plan: drop the bomb, exterminate them all. A supposed nuclear power plant disaster can explain the glowing mushroom cloud.

I used a lot of samples from VHS-taped TV news segments and cable programming to help put the lyrics in context. Jack Chick's apocalyptic fever dreams, phrases borrowed from Francis E. Dec pamphlets and the Manson Family killers, and the paranormal journalism of John Keel influenced the themes of the album. For the music, I based most of the songs around cool synth bass lines, and I think there's a good variety of sounds on this one. I hope you like it! And if you don't, please don't tell me.


TRACK LIST


1. "because we can."

2. Tune In to Turn On Your Bloodthirsty Dinosaur Brainstem

3. Sex Watson

4. Let Them Eat Static

5. Slaughter in the Shriner Hall

6. Mothmen at Work

7. BeasTV

8. Golf Cart with Guillotine

9. Civil War Two at Memorial Park

10. The Final Cookout



Read the lyrics here.



back to the Music page

Music Main Page