Greetings to all:

It is almost 11 years to the day that I finished recording my first album, Camper Van Beethoven's "Telephone Free Landslide Victory." At the time I had just graduated from college and was working as the manager of a small farm near Santa Cruz, California. No matter how great our pretensions in CVB--we thought we could be a kind of post-punk The Beatles,--I never dreamed that ten years later I would have a gold, much less platinum record. So it is with a certain absurd pride we named the new Cracker record "The Golden Age."

Absurd because both of my bands Cracker and CVB released first albums that were completely out of sync with what our musical peers were doing at the time. CVB, an odd collaboration of former punk rockers and unrepentant hippies, oscillated wildly between the two poles of semi-acoustic folk music and semi-acoustic punk rock--oftentimes within a single song. This was at a time that one was most likely to hear Bauhaus, the Cure or other English purveyors of gloom echoing through the halls of college dormitories. REM was still a cult phenomenon and only skate rats still listened to punk rock.

Cracker's eponymous first LP, released in February 1992, took a kind of roots-rock and twang approach. This was inconveniently just as the original grunge wave was cresting. Although this LP sold more than the previous and best-selling CVB record ("Key Lime Pie"), in a way it was hardly noticed. "Kerosene Hat," released in September 1993, fared a little better. We had three bonafide radio hits on that record, 'Low,' 'Get Off This,' and 'Eurotrash Girl' (although it took almost six months of touring before the first single 'Low' actually began to catch on). Eventually this record went on to sell more than a million copies.

So I feel very lucky indeed to be here today telling you about my ninth album, which of course is Cracker's third.

"The Golden Age" was recorded off and on between March and December of 1995. Tracks were cut at the legendary Ardent studios in Memphis and the not so legendary Woodland in Nashville, but the majority of the recording took place in a very untimely and lazy manner at our studio, The Sound Of Music, in Richmond, Virginia (our first all southern record!). Production was handled by Dennis Herring (Oxford, Mississippi) and myself (for those of you who are keeping score, Dennis Herring also produced CVB's "Key Lime Pie"). The record was mixed by Andy Wallace, who mixed Nirvana's "Nevermind" as well as a kajillion other great records, and is quite a nice guy...for a Yankee. Heh heh. OK, enough of the technical stuff. On to the music.

Without apologies, let me just tell you right off that this is a big-time and expensive record. It is our attempt at a pop rock record a la Roxy Music. There is a 15-piece string section on five of the songs! It is our attempt to explain our weird songwriting approach to the masses. Perhaps an early conversation between Cracker co-founder and lead guitarist John Hickman and I would be enlightening. The gist was since "Kerosene Hat" had gone platinum, the typical route for artists like us--who've been kicking around in the underground and alternative scene for 15 or so years--would be to make our "credibility" record and turn away from the mainstream, make our lo-fi, or punk rock masterpiece, an acoustic record, whatever. But to the two of us it seemed this would be not only lame, but unchallenging, and really quite easy. We were more interested in making something slightly pretentious and big-time. To take our weird songs so far they'd start to sound like pop songs, and to take our pop songs so far they'd start to sound weird. This was our goal and I think we have succeeded. But we are not really the final judges on this matter now are we? We could be totally out to lunch. And I could sound like a total idiot six months from now.

The second thing about this record is: It sounds like John Hickman has lost his mind. Really, he's gone off on some kind of weird lead guitar tangent. I mean I was the chief songwriter in CVB and yet John continually startled me and surprised me with his parts for this record. In my humble opinion he has entered the ranks of the great guitar stylists (no pun intended, even though John's former career was Hair Stylist). This is the main thing that sets this record apart from the previous two Cracker records.

Finally I would like to mention some of the guests who worked on our new record. Most obvious is our friend Joan Osborne and her 2000 Grammy nominations. We share drummer Charlie Quintana with Joan. They were in Richmond doing a show and we fetched her from sound check, had her sing backing vocals on 'Nothing To Believe In,' and then dropped her back off at her gig. The pedal steel on this record is played by ex-Camper Van Beethoven multi-instrumentalist David Immergluck. Charlie Gillingham from the Counting Crows plays all the hammond organ on the record, and an interesting fellow named David Campbell arranged the strings on this record. Much to our surprise it turns out that Mr. Campbell is the father of the artist (currently) known as Beck.

Anyway I hope you enjoy our new record, we certainly enjoyed making it.

Sincerely,

David Lowery

P.S. We began touring for the new record April 4th in Victoria B.C. (this was the first night of our trans-Canadian tour; U.S. dates followed. Joining us for this tour is New York City keyboard player Kenny Margolis (Lucky 7's, Freedy Johnston, Mink Deville). And in true Spinal Tap tradition, drummer Charlie Quintana has been replaced by Johnny Hott of Richmond, VA (House of Freaks, Gutterball, Sparklehorse). No spontaneous combustion or other nastiness involved, Charlie simply opted to continue touring with Joan Osborne (Kenny's comment: "Hey, I only got to be the new guy in the band for a week!"). As usual, Bob Rupe is on bass and John Hickman is on lead guitar.