It Isn't Forever

Several years ago my friend Mindy offered both of us a writing challenge.  The topic was making a mix-tape for a person one doesn’t know.  We both wrote fictional stories around this notion, and even though they were fictional, I believe the seeds of both stories contained nuggets of tragic truth.  I know mine did.  Creating mix tapes, especially during my teens and twenties was a passion for me.  They were important for personal use and for connecting with friends.  Plus, they are legendarily supposed to be some sort of powerful romantic audio love letter that can and will win the heart of a crush.  It makes for a magical idea, but I’m not so sure of its actual effectiveness.  It never stopped me from daydreaming about this possibility. 

Mix tapes (or the modern equivalent – CD, or more likely, streaming playlist) were always important to me.  I have always made them. It has been going on for even longer than I’ve been buying music. They used to come along fast and furious. I could and have cranked them out for myself to listen to in the car, or Walkman or to simply catalogue a moment in time.  In 1986, on a school night, for no apparent reason, I created a tape for my own enjoyment titled October 18, 1986 (the rainy evening it was born), and it included three songs named “Shame.”  This became an annual tradition for a few years – all containing at least one song titled “Shame” (that’s a lot of shame), and then was reborn as a CD series after receiving a kidney transplant on an October 18^th.  Mostly though, these mixes have been made for friends, co-workers, classmates, and relatives. I’m not sure why, other than my near psychotic need to share my love of music. What better way is there than sharing the actual music?  It’s much more effective than my efforts to write about it.  Perhaps all of this has been practice for the dream scenario mentioned above (and sadly rarely ever implemented) – the mix tape for a crush or a girlfriend.

During this Covid-19 pandemic home time, like so many, I’ve been purging junk that is taking up space around my place.  I’ve been browsing through a giant stack of old spiral notebooks, mostly dating back to 1991-93, full of writing - old record reviews, short stories, several drafts of a mission statement of sorts for the fledgling This Wreckage ‘zine, a disturbing number of lists of personal single and album rankings - my own strange version of Billboard countdowns, and a few sketched out song lists for potential mix tapes.  Unfortunately, there is no sign of a playlist for a particular mix tape that I made that has become legendary in my mind.  It’s a mix I made for a girl, where I laid everything bare.  A collection of songs that were able to break my heart and thrill me with shivers.  If only I could hear that collection again.  Sadly, I do not remember what exactly wound up on that Maxell cassette.  I have some ideas and some pretty sures, but with too much alone time on my hands, I have become obsessed with the notion of recreating this long forgotten mix.

Nineteen Ninety One was a really difficult year for me.  I had to drop out of college and move back home to the isolation of the Oregon coast, due to my mom’s serious health issues that would lead her down the road of undergoing long distance kidney dialysis (the closest clinic was at least an hour away from our home) and seriously declining health, leading to her unfortunate passing nine months later.  Plus I had my own related health problems (genetics!) that landed me in the hospital for about a month, due to a botched surgery.  Let’s just say that recovery was slow and painful.  It felt like the table my life resided on had been flipped over suddenly, leaving me blindly searching for some sort of solid ground to stand on.  So, I did what I had mostly done up to that point in life, I shoved all the pain, fear, and uncertainty down into my gut and tried to rebuild some sort of foundation to stand on.

The following year found me back at my High School-era job making pizzas, shuffling through life, creating a handful of Xeroxed ‘zines with Wil and trying to get them some exposure, and then eventually returning to a different school in Seattle that fall for three months.  Why three months?  Well, in December, I found out that I needed another surgery, so at the end of 1992 I packed everything up and moved back home, which honestly didn’t feel like much of a home anymore.

For much of my late teenage years and into my twenties, I battled depression.  I always chalked it up to the tumultuous times that young adults are always told about, you know, never fitting in, not cool enough, no love life, no taste for partying, spending most of my time alone, etc.  No big deal.  Swallow it down.  Rinse and repeat.  Hold onto my nature of being quiet and even keeled.  Yet, this time, after dealing with another major surgery, things were different.  I began to talk more, I began sharing my thoughts, and my insecurities.  I became an open book.  Once I returned to work at the old pizza joint, I remember being a 21-22 year old, working with a lot of 15-16 year olds, and I felt like a complete and utter failure.  Many of my friends were closing in on their college graduations and here I was in the local teenage hangout asking about the town gossip from a boy who was still a year away from shaving once a month.  That kid became a proxy therapist for me as I blabbered on and on about how life sucks and why.  I could no longer hide my depression - my total sense of loss.  Everything bubbled up to the surface. 

Now that I had become an open wound, a raw nerve, I began to yearn for my life from two-plus years prior.  I missed the idea of possibility, potential, and hope.  I started to reach out to the few people I knew from school, which included a young woman who, during my dark years away, had become to mean the world to me.  I couldn’t get her out of my mind.  She became some sort of ideal who inspired me to become a better person.  I can see it in those This Wreckage mission statement rough drafts I tossed recently.  There was a desire to broaden my horizons, connect with people, and to offer a place for open expression.  It was about this time the mix-tape plan hatched in my head.  I would mail it to her and it would be a compilation that laid out the story of my scrambled emotions and yearning heart and to let her know how important she is.

 

This is where things get hazy.  I have a feeling that I opened the tape with the solo live rendition of Mark Eitzel’s “Firefly.”  I had been obsessed with that whole album (Songs of Love Live), and that song in particular for a nearly couple of years by that point.  Though, Eitzel’s sad sack “Thanks for coming” that opens the song, or the “I’m always fucking this part up” apology during his guitar bridge, have become repeated jokes over the years within the small circle of my friends.  It’s the warbles and imperfections of his soaring repeated howls over his loss (“Where did you go?”) of a loved one has made people I’ve shared it with laugh, albeit uncomfortably.  It’s a heart wrenching song that never fails to send debilitating shivers down my spine.  That temporary notion of fireflies was strong in those times, and I think I likely bookended things and closed the tape with the Magnetic Fields’ beautiful “100,000 Fireflies.”  Long before Stephin Merritt graced most of his songs with his droll baritone, and every album would be based on some sort of gimmick, his songs were sung by the folk-sounding Susan Anway, whose voice managed to infuse the words with a simple melancholy.  I purchased the 7” single for this song during the height of my love of loud, fast, abrasive music (industrial, hardcore, noise).  However, this quiet, fragile, unique sounding song about the bittersweet nature of love couldn’t have been a more perfect representation of my mindset.

“I went out to the forest and caught
A 100, 000 fireflies
As they ricochet 'round my room
They remind me of your starry eyes
Someone else's might not have made me so sad
But this is the worst night I ever had"

 

Elsewhere, I’d like to imagine that I put on something by the Field Mice whose plaintive uncomplicated songs are the type that no one is supposed to like, because it's too hard to admit their sheer vulnerability have such much emotional power. I’m afraid the spare plea for physical contact of “It Isn’t Forever” was the choice I may have made for this collection.  It’s a song that begs to be heard, while alone, late at night, when the last thing in the world you want is to be alone.  “It Isn’t Forever” alternates quiet verses of longing with loud abrasive instrumental passages that, like the title, display the all too often fleeting nature of intimacy.

 

I must have also put on the majestic and invigorating love song “Sunshine Smile” from Adorable, because it was this girl’s electric eyes that captured my initial attention, dropped my jaw, froze me in place, and placed about 100,000 fireflies ablaze in my stomach.  I cannot hear this song without thinking of her.  Speaking of which, I would’ve been remiss if I hadn’t have placed Ride’s crashing single “Taste” onto this tape.  Again, the chaotic burst of pure energy that drives the song, Laurence Colbert’s unbelievable rollicking attack on the drums, and the ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’ that come in about 30 seconds into the song make for the exact representation of what was going inside my mind and body every time I was anywhere near her presence, and for long after.  It doesn't hurt that "Taste" was released not long after that first time I was awestruck by her.  It became my constant adrenalized soundtrack to guide me through her presence.

 

There’s a chance I may have doubled down on the Mark Eitzel pain, when he moonlighted for a few songs as the vocalist for the creative instrumental band Toiling Midgets.  The turmoil and self-flagellation that he goes through in the searing “Golden Frog” can only end with a repeated conclusion to himself “you were weak.”  A feeling that I often felt of myself then and now.  The anthem of someone who is often too afraid to take chances in order not to disrupt whatever tiny fragments of comfort remain. 

A good balancing follow-up to that abasement could’ve been “Awesome Sky” from Boston punk rockers Moving Targets.  I'm about 87% certain that this amazing instrumental was near the end of side A of the mix.  Despite being absent lyrics, this song may have encapsulated my emotions better than all of the other soul-baring lyrical songs included.  Its restless energy, its earnest search for that glimpse of an 'awesome sky' that keeps getting momentarily obscured by something. Once we reach that triumphant sight (what a chorus!) the song reaches incredible heights like a stellar sunset poking out between clouds or over a magnificent horizon.  Yet like the sun disappearing, the song quietly runs out of steam and disappears.  Gone for good.  Leaving us astonished and inspired.

It’s difficult to know how I filled all 90 minutes of this tape.  Could I have gone for it and crammed it entirely with spirit shredding content?  Was I that willing to be exposed?  Perhaps I threw on something such as Concrete Blonde’s delectable wizened cover of Leonard Cohen’s remarkable “Everybody Knows,” to keep the thread alive but not so damn direct, or the surprisingly groovy and tender love song to planet Earth: “Living in the Rose,” from the normally political and intense New Model Army – a song that would’ve been brand new at that time.  I had to have included something from the Sundays too.  They were and are one of my all-time favorites who wrote a ton of the types of songs to fill this brand of mix-tape.  I imagine that I would’ve snuck the stunningly beautiful and brief b-side “Noise,” an ode to silence and solitude on there as a tasty set up for their second album highlight “Goodbye.”  The first single to follow up their flawless debut is indescribably pretty as it builds to a satisfying and dramatic climax, before ending with the inevitable cold send off to her now former lover.  A dose of reality crashes into the dreams of heaven.  That was it.  A goodbye wasn’t needed in this case.  It was over before it had a chance to begin.

 

These songs I’ve mentioned are merely educated guesses as to what made it onto that tape.  I remember dubbing it on a lazy music filled sunny spring afternoon.  I distinctly remember being abuzz from the emotional impact the lovelorn songs had over me after completion.  I remember feeling completely despondent, yet alive with an unidentifiable sense of accomplishment.  This recorded cry for attention was likely a terrible mistake, but I knew I had to do something.  I was bursting with love to give and utterly incapable of believing the notion that I could ever receive that kind of love in return.  I could not and still cannot imagine it, so the whole thing was an exercise in futility. 

 

By the time autumn of that year came around, I had gone back to bottling everything up.  I nearly stopped speaking entirely.  An overwhelming sense of loss and emptiness swallowed me.  A callus formed around me creating a numbness that still encompasses me to this day.  I have been smashing frustrations, disappointments, sadness, and illness into my gut for so long that there is no room for anything else.  The bubbling over anxiousness, excitement, passion, and most important, anticipation that filled that mix tape and the reason behind it stand as a symbol for everything I feel I’m missing.  I think the idea of recreating that grouping of particular songs, despite the sorrow attached to them, is a tiny spark of life buried deep within my clouded mind fighting to get out.

I’m not sure it can.

The Color Blue

Honeyrude

The Color Blue

(Shifting Sounds)

Last December, when I first happened upon the song/video “Roger McClain” by Honeyrude, I had the sudden feeling that I hadn’t felt since the early songs from The Joy Formidable.  The song has an energy, spark, and call to action that transported me to another place, reminding me why I love music so much.  Each song they’ve sneaked out over the past several months has had the same effect on me.  Their music sounds so effortless and perfect, as if the alternately stinging and dreamy guitar-leads (Ian Lund) interlocking with the flawless rhythm section (Billy Kunath – bass, Paul Goetz – drums) have always been out there in the atmosphere awaiting for some brilliant musicians to collect this amazing bounty for our ears to feast.  Then you add Jess Leadbetter’s wonderfully chameleon-like vocals and open-ended, thought provoking lyrics and things just get better!

The last time I wrote about an album on this blog thing dates back to June 5^th last year, when I wrote about Kristin Welchez’s complete discard of the amazing Dum Dum Girls legacy in favor of an embrace of top 40 dance pop with Kristin Kontrol.  I kind of felt like that was the last review I would ever write (here).  Somehow, it pointed out to me how criticism of any art is truly insignificant and a waste of time (though what I have historically done is not criticism as much as recommend), not just because I really have never found an audience, but because all art should be allowed to find its way, and all artists need to be to do what feels true to them.  Yet, here I am again, at the least momentarily, because I cannot hide away my love of this debut album!  I have to shout it from the mountaintops!

Like fellow Austin, Texas band, Magnet School (whose Brandon Tucker had a hand in mixing this), Honeyrude take the more aggressive approach of the so-called “shoegaze” music from the early 90s, so much so, that I hesitate to mention the dreaded shoegaze term (twice now, dammit!).  Songs like the closing “Falling Backwards” and pounding “Sorry I’m Late” don’t evoke that era at all.  While the aforementioned “Roger McClain” is a straight forward pop song (whose message all of us trapped in some sort of purgatory of our own making need to listen to and act upon) with Johnny Marr-ish light to the touch guitar layers that get gradually more loud and intense as the song progresses before breaking out into a brief, blistering solo.  Meanwhile, the opening “Something About Milwaukee” evokes the chiming majesty of early Adorable crossed with last two album Pale Saints, as does the spectacular and yearning “Flowers,” as Leadbetter sings of a perfect love with the tinged realization that it’s not possible.  The opening explosions of “Ring Ring Ring” melt into sparse, reflective verses, calling to mind some of the bands of the mid-80s L.A. neo-psychedelic scene, before closing with an exciting instrumental flourish.  Speaking of which, the title track contains a wonderful dreamscape, much like a Slowdive epic, but once the drums go double time, the song contains a jam session that feels like it should go on forever and never be quite loud enough.  To me “Lover in Denial” calls to mind Chrome-era Catherine Wheel and first album Concrete Blonde (“Dance Along the Edge”).

I use a lot of these comparisons freely, but in fact, these are simply touchstones.  Honeyrude, sound wholly themselves.  This debut is simply excellent.  They sound like seasoned veterans at the height of their creative powers and cannot recommend this record enough.  They have lifted my spirits and helped provide me with a dose of fire that came along at a much needed time.  What more can one ask for?

(https://shiftingsounds.bandcamp.com/album/the-color-blue)

Honeyrude "Roger McClain"

Broken Heart Surgery

Pete Fij / Terry Bickers

Broken Heart Surgery

(Broadcast)

I’ve been sitting in front of my laptop for what seems like forever, trying to come up with something clever to say about Broken Heart Surgery - this collaboration between Pete Fijalkowski (formerly of Adorable and Polak) and Terry Bickers (of the House of Love and formerly of Levitation), which has been on repeat the entire time.  Luckily, it finally just dawned on me that I am incapable of cleverness, so I should just get on with it.

These two guys are behind some of the most exciting, influential and amazing music I have ever encountered.  I get misty eyed when I think of the first time I heard the House of Love’s stunning “Christine,” or the thrilling drive of Adorable’s “Sunshine Smile,” but those songs were a long time ago and I hate to say it, but sometimes “super groups” or collaborations between musical heroes are often lackluster or disappointing.  Wisely, Fij and Bickers have slowly and quietly unveiled their shared musical vision.  It now seems like ages ago that the embittered ballad “I Don’t Give a Shit about You” reared its sardonic head teasing us with its tasteful simplicity.  And it’s this simplicity that makes this album so damn perfect.  Instead of each of them trying to somehow recapture their youthful exuberant work and potentially creating a mess, they instead have created a singularly focused album, where every damn song is about breaking up and dealing with the notion that if you’ve just broken up with someone, then that means that up to that point, well, you’ve failed in that department every step of the way for a lifetime.  In other words, the entire collection deals with that fine line of self doubt, disgust, anger, sadness and hurt of a freshly collapsed love affair all wrapped within a wry sense of humor.

The opening “Out of Time” sets the mood for the entire album.  A softly strummed acoustic guitar guides the way as Pete Fij states reasons why this latest relationship has failed entirely in terms of technology vs. romanticism, while Bickers’ stellar guitar melody elevates the song to a higher level.  Similarly, “Downsizing” places this failed relationship into business terms, which then sends our broken hearted narrator into seeking love rehab at “Betty Ford.”  Elsewhere, in “Breaking Up” he laments how she gets all the good stuff from their split (“she got the car keys & I got run over”), while “Loved & Lost” is two minutes of quiet clichés (“It’s better to have loved and lost…”) that abruptly ends with a threat to those who perpetrated such notions.  It’s this sense combination of humor and sadness that keeps this album from falling into a complete abyss, as well as the restrained, but subtlety fleshed out melodies of each song.

Naturally, I gravitate to the real heartbreaking moments of fragility of the collection.  “Parallel Girl” evokes heaviness with a tasty John Barry guitar line and a descending atmosphere, while Fij sings of the one that got away and imagining a parallel world where things actually turn out right.  Meanwhile, “Sound of Love” begins with a sense of hope (“the licking of her lips / just before the kiss”); before we soon learn that the sound of love is really the lingering memories of the good moments and the sounds of his former partner leaving.  Then there’s the painful realization in “Gravity” that we rarely can have what we most want. 

Broken Heart Surgery is, simply put, pretty damn perfect.  I recommend you find out for yourself.

(petefijterrbickers.blogspot.com)

Pete Fij / Terry Bickers "Betty Ford"

 

Is It Safe?

I’m coming up on the 8th anniversary of my kidney transplant. If you know me, or have taken the time to peruse the nonsense I’ve been posting on here for the last few years, you’ll know how monumental that event was for me. However, I am not heading in to this year’s celebration feeling too hot. It all reminds me of the second and third years after the transplant. Once the huge high of receiving the new kidney and lease on life started to wear off, once the build up of a few years worth of terrible side effects from massive doses of steroids began to exact their toll, and once reality started to set in, I had a minor crash. When I first received the new kidney, they had me so hopped up on steroids (including rabbit adrenaline!) that just a few days after the surgery I was literally riding my IV pole throughout the hospital hallways like a skateboard with my hospital gown blowing free and loose in the breeze. The excitement of getting a second chance mixed with the brew of hyperactivity inducing drugs had me talking a mile a minute and nearly foaming at the mouth with excitement. I vowed during that frantic time that I would never waste my time again. Of course, within a few months I was back to my old work grind, living essentially as I had before, and instead of being pumped with energy, I was in constant physical pain from something called “avascular necrosis” (which roughly translates as ‘dead or dying bones’ - caused by the same drugs that were helping my body accept my new kidney), and exhausted all of the time. It was then that I truly realized that my big plans and ideas were not realistic. Life is a series of mundane activities broken up by occasional moments of excitement both good and bad, and in my case, after all the 27 (gulp!) surgeries and horrific medications that helped keep me going at all costs along with my increasing age, I was no longer physically capable of doing what I used to or longed to do. It was during that time around 2006 and 2007 that I was working to earn a living for survival, but had zero energy left over to do anything in life that I enjoyed. My life had become mostly a cycle of getting out of bed, going to work, and coming home to watch TV until I fell asleep - only to start over the next day. Does this pattern sound familiar? I think a lot of us have a similar discouraging pattern, but because of my vow and because of that second chance, it felt so acutely painful to realize that I was too exhausted and limited physically to feel like I could escape. It took me a long time, but I was able to slowly work my way to better health again and to finding more frequent moments of recreation – so much so, that this year, I made another unrealistic vow to try and do as much as I could to get out of my home and my shell and do. I can proudly say that I have! This year has been stuffed with adventures, road trips, a ton of live music, my insane LPGA marathon, and more, but I have once again found myself exhausted and frustrated by my total lack of energy and wondering if I will be able to climb back out of the hole again. What I find most depressing about all of this is the daily grind – the ease of falling so easily into the spin cycle of working every day and watching time fly by helplessly.


It’s no wonder then that the second album from L.A. based artist Dina D’Alessandro (Is It Safe?) has found its way back into my car’s CD player all summer long. I was first introduced to her music via Myspace, of all places, around the time that I was struggling with the dark spiral of the endless work grind of 2006. Back in the mid-00’s I would get 10 to 20 friend requests a week from different musical acts on Myspace (along with the multitude of “prostitute” requests from stock photo blondes claiming on my profile page things like “UR HOTT!!” despite the only picture available on my page being one of the mythic Bigfoot strolling across a clearing) and only sometimes did I actually bother to listen to the music from these artists. Thankfully, when I received this friend request, I was in one of those searching for new music mindsets and took a listen to the handful of songs featured on her profile. I believe it was then that I immediately clicked the link to CD Baby and ordered her two albums. I absolutely love them both, but it was her second offering that especially clicked with me.

2005’s Is It Safe? is absolutely a soundtrack for those of us who are not satisfied with the work a day world. D’Alessandro’s ability to capture the feelings of self disgust and frustration toward living the unfulfilling first world problem of the un-self-actualized life of a worker ant (the name of her music publisher, by the way) is profound. The opening song “Masquerade” was an instant favorite. Not only does it open with a quivering guitar line atop a bed of electric noise that rivals the best moments of A Flock of Seagulls (who she so expertly covered on her 2009 Beautiful Things album with an inspiring and energetic “Space Age Love Song” – my 2010 #16 pick – see review here), but it blossoms into a story of sitting at the office and pretending that all is well and good, while burning up inside with pain and turmoil (“I go to work and start my day / I make believe its all okay / but it’s not okay”). That’s not the only aspect that struck me immediately with this song, because the second verse brings in the element of serious health issues that I identify with, obviously, on a deep emotional level, as our character struggles with not only the dilemma of balancing work and life, but trying not to let physical limitations get in the way (“Disease is such an ugly word / A word I think they’d find absurd / but it’s not absurd / A word I’d rather not discuss / because I don’t like to make a fuss / deny it all the way”). The clincher for why this song speaks so heavily to me arrives in the third verse as Dina brings the story full circle, because part of the need to go to work every day is to get health care coverage and to make enough money to pay for mounting medical expenses, despite the potentially declining ability to work that extra amount needed to do so (“I can’t take it anymore / the desolation I ignore / I’ve got all these bills to pay / I’ll deal with it another day”). It is absolutely heartbreaking.

This album does not focus solely on this dark topic, but touches on it enough throughout to keep the emotional thread alive. The second track, “Dream the Day Away,” which is an amazingly catchy pop rock song with a fantastically catchy chorus atop layers of buzzing guitars, still finds us dwelling on a serious need for escape from “misery.” “Down Again” opens with a guitar riff that reminds me of the stratospheric edgy guitar majesty of the much missed early 90s UK band Adorable as it builds to another driving sing-a-long that finds Dina in a fighting mood and refusing to “go down again.” Before I lose control with my over analysis of the lyrics within, due to my extreme personal identification with these stories as I have interpreted them, I must point out that, aside from the minute long instrumental “Interlude” stuck fittingly in the middle, that this album is an upbeat thrilling listen. I don’t say this enough about the music I recommend, but this is fun to listen to! The performances are spot on, as Dina is backed by a tight rhythm section, giving her space to layer her stellar guitar work and the huge hooks that she writes out in front. Over all of these years and all of the listens (especially the last few months), I still find myself not only singing along while I drive down the road, but throwing in air drum fills, and wringing out feedback on my air guitar as I bounce around behind the wheel. There is not a dud in the bunch. If you take away some of the emotional impact of the lyrics, this album reminds me musically of the chiming beauty of an album that fellow Californians Julie Plug (In Every Corner) released back in 1998, one that is so endlessly likable and (sorry) adorable that it begs for repeated listens, or the non-Madchester inflected Darling Buds from the early 90s (i.e.: their amazing Erotica from 1992). However, D’Alessandro brings an added depth that makes this album an emotional rollercoaster, along with the amazing ear candy, giving her music a timeless feel. In other words, take my medical trauma colored lens interpretations of almost every song herein (aside from “Interlude” and “Everybody Loves You” – an ode to disingenuous trickster) with a grain of salt and give the album a chance to sink in and affect you in its own way. Having said this, I cannot finish this piece without mentioning the closing song “Silly Girl,” and its powerful return to the tragedy of the opener “Masquerade.” The song opens with the lines: “Hope I never see this place again / Hope I never need this place again / The world goes round me every day / As I sit here and waste away” and it is exactly the sentiment I have echoed time and again after leaving a hospital stay (or even the office at my job). Luckily, the opening guitar turns electric, a shuffle beat comes in and the lyrics offer a message of hope and support from an outside voice. It is the perfect closing song to a powerful album (these two song bookends also provided me with inspiration for an early blog post where I quote “Silly Girl” and steal the “Masquerade” title – which can be read here) that I highly recommend. Please go to CD Baby as I once did and at least give her a chance.

Unfortunately, I could not find a song from Is It Safe? on Youtube to post (oddly though this song has the cover art representing it), however, "Disappear" is a great song from Dina D'Alessandro's 2003 debut album Sweetness and Decency and is representative of her great music!