Eli | Mike | Mary - click for individual bio

December 7, 2003

Hi everybody.

I am extremely happy and smug to report that we are about to release our first new recordings in something like a year! It's not our album--that's coming soon. We did finish recording it, but now it needs to be mixed. No, instead we Monolators offer you, for this holiday season, a fabulous Christmas-themed CD single featuring our explosive new Xmas carol: "Santa Claus Versus Dave Matthews." I think you will be able to download this song off of our site pretty soon for free--and I encourage you all to do so--but if you spring for the actual CD you get TWO EXTRA TRACKS of Monolators action that I very much doubt will appear anywhere else. So, here's the rundown:

1. Santa Claus Versus Dave Matthews. I fantasize about playing this song one day at the Kennedy Center with the Vienna Boys Choir. Harmony vocals on this rendition courtesy of Arlene from Smells Like Flan! And Mary really rips it up this time--on the drums, I mean. She wasn't flatulent during the recording session. Not much, anyway.

2. The Monolators Holiday Greeting. A truly wonderful and inspiring message delivered to you by the talented Mr. Hugo Armstrong. It represents all of our hopes and dreams for the season; all of our hopes and dreams, that is, as expressed by a tall hairy man pretending to be a robot.

3. Tiny Bicycles (demo version). Not exactly a Christmas song, per se, but I wanted to put this on somewhere. This one has background vocals by Ron Wingate, who lead the band I played in prior to the Monolators, the great C Scale Kitchen Band. I have a vague idea to someday record an EP's worth of C-Scale songs with Ron; I suppose I should let him know about this at some point before I get started. Back then I played the banjo and called myself Ali Akbar Eli. Ron wore an afro wig and a measuring cup around his neck. He called himself Free. I'll have to write more about the C-Scale episode in a future journal entry, it was quite interesting...

Anyway, the bulk of this version of Tiny Bicycles, the bloop-bleep synthesizer part, actually predates the Monolators; I think it was intended as part of some electronic music performance Mary and I planned for a Halloween party. We were going to do three songs, and this was to be the third, but we got cut off after just doing two ("Garbageman," and a cover of Black Tea's "No Flow For The Ho's"). So Ron happened to drop by our house on Friday night and I decided to finish it up. Oh, please don't leave me now...

Anyway, that's it. Like I said, the title track of this little collection will most likely be available for free download; but we'll also be giving out free copies of the entire CD on Monday night at our show at the Silverlake Lounge, so I hope to see you all there.

Eli