An album that’s been listed on the “Upcoming Projects” page of this website for almost a decade is now finished and ready for mastering. At the suggestion of friends who have heard it, I have started a Substack where I will be writing about the historical material addressed in the songs on on the record. The first lengthy article I posted there yesterday is about the title of the record and why I chose it.

The track titles all begin with dates that run from 1804 to 2026. The first half is about the colonization of the western part of Turtle Island, and the second half deals with latter day repercussions of that process. I’m interested in how the psychology of conquest turns up in relationships that have to do with class, race, gender, and what is called foreign policy or perhaps neocolonialism. There are 8 songs and the running time is about 77 minutes. Sometimes I call it Research Rock. Yesterday I started calling it Expressway to Yr Skull meets Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

I worked on it intermittently from 2016 to 2026 while living and teaching in Durham NC. (I’ve since moved to Brooklyn.) A lot of different people played on it and I’ll be writing about their contributions in posts to come. It took a long time because I was was primarily focused on my day job as a teacher and related union organizing during those years. Some years, the organizing was so stressful that I hardly recorded much at all. But all those experiences eventually made the record whatever it is. The tracks became one way of processing a lot of the social conflicts I saw coming up in my classrooms – the relationships, the politics, the curriculum I was asked to teach, and the modifications that my colleagues and I made to it.

Release details will be shared here when I figure them out.