The World of Today and the World of Tomorrow, by Adam Gnade

The World of Today and the World of Tomorrow

by Adam Gnade

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Note: 10 different tape color variants.

Includes unlimited streaming of The World of Today and the World of Tomorrow via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

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1.	Invocation (featuring Demetrius Francisco Antuña) 02:24	lyrics	buy track
This is my invocation. I’m putting it in words and I’m throwing it to the breeze. I’m making a list here and you are the notary and now it’s official. I wish to live a good life and at the end of my life I wish to go easy, but I want to know I’m going, and I want to be surrounded by the people I love as I go. I wish to go in a rush of wind that rattles the tree branches then falls silent and still as morning. I wish to live a life that’s like the relief when you wake up from a nightmare and know it was all just a dream. I wish to wake up rested and with a calm heart. I wish to never be tired when I shouldn’t be tired. I wish to think clearly and never stumble over a thought as I struggle to explain myself. I wish to be thought of as eloquent. I wish to say lovely things. I want to stand at the fence-line and watch Ward’s cattle in the field moving as slow as ancient time. I want to take it slow. I want to take my time in this fast, fast life. I want to be good, gentle, and true to the people I love, and I want them to think of me as good, gentle, and true. I want the people I love to look at me and think: Don’t go nowhere. I want the sweet ache of our times long past to comfort and not hurt me. I wish to grow old with a straight back and a clear, sharp mind. I wish to grow old with those I love by my side. And when my boots have worn out float me away. Float me away. When my time here is over. Float me away. When my work here is done. Let me go nowhere. Let me go. Float me away.
2.	Interlude 1, Voices of America 00:32		buy track
3.	I Can't Believe the Beauty of Life But I've Spent So Long Hating Mine 01:14		buy track
4.	The World of Today 02:39		buy track
5.	The World of Tomorrow 04:24	lyrics	buy track
These are my unrealistic expectations. I want to be left alone by pain and I want to be given the heat of life. I want the ones I love to be left unscathed. I want a very small group of people that I love to live forever. This is a plea for the world of tomorrow. This is a wish and want, an invocation yet again. Once this is over let us spread ourselves across the country like butter on warm bread as we visit those we love most. Give us North Park, City Heights, and Golden Hill. Give us Lawrence, Kansas, and Kansas City. Give us gray sandy shores in Long Beach where we walk slow at the waterline at dusk and talk of the wreck of these years, of how much we’ve changed and remained the same. Coal-trains, West Virginia with the green crag of woods. Truckstop New Mexico and browsing the snack aisle together, tired from the drive. Wyoming, the piney expanse in the fog. Church-bells in the morning, Sioux City, and you’re hungover and you’ve just cut off all your hair in a park, and your mind is drifting, and it’s alright. The world of tomorrow is a thing to grab hold of. It’s a rising sound. It’s firmer ground on which to stand. The world of tomorrow, I’m waiting for you so don’t let me down. I mean it, we’re counting on you, good friend. I want to be left alone by pain and I want to be given the heat of life, and I will lie in the grass with you in Omaha, and we will watch the clouds move above us like buses and train cars and submarines.
6.	This is My Hope for You in the Shit World 02:22	lyrics	buy track
I want to tell you it’s going to be okay, but that’s a lie. The truth is it’s going to be okay then it’s going to get bad then maybe it’ll be okay again for a while. The only consistency I see is how inconsistent life is. This is the shit world, the world of us all. My hope for you is that you will get it softer than most. I hope you will find friends. I hope you will find love and that the love you find will feel like a castle wall. I hope you will dream easy dreams and in the morning I hope you will sing to yourself as you make breakfast in a sunny kitchen. I hope you will think “This is the life” and mean it. I hope you will look your demons right in the eye and I hope you will say, “No. You can’t have me.” I hope you will never tire of thunderstorms. I hope you will hold onto the dreams you had when you first began to dream. I hope you will feel safe where you are but also as wild as a flooding river and untamed as vining rose and morning glory. This is my hope for you.
7.	Interlude at the Ruby Teeth Homestead 01:15		buy track
8.	The Shitty Mess 02:36		buy track
9.	The Spring Birds 03:29	lyrics	buy track
"Years ago," is what I keep thinking. Years ago back home, and years ago people I knew, and years ago how it was. "How it was," is another one. How it was before the shootings, before the virus, before I left. How it was. Life is quiet now. The rain speckling the window. A view of the farm fields, green through the running glass. The clock ticking in the library. There's a library now. A wall of bookshelves and stacks of books on the floor and my writing table by the window. Years ago I wrote in my bedroom or I wrote on the bus or I wrote sitting on the tarpaper roof of our place on Broadway. Alison and Frankie and I lived there, the apartment in Golden Hill, the place I lived in San Diego before I left. I would write up on the roof or read. Taking a break, I would lie on my back on the hot rooftop and drape my arm across my face and listen to the traffic down on Broadway. The intersection with Humberto's and the laundromat. The 7-Eleven and the Chinese donut place. Was there a Chinese donut place? I'm not sure what's real and what I've made up. But today I can smell the donuts--the sugar and the frying grease. On warm, clear days we would bring up a party of friends and they would drink beer and smoke cigarettes and stare out across the blue skyline. Southern California. Palm trees. The Mexican church. To the west, Downtown, the Gaslamp, and the harbor. Beyond that, the sea. Now Alison and I are on the farm in the middle of the country as the quiet of the virus settles like ash from a fire. Frankie and her boys, Willy and Johnsy, are on a plane headed here--stopping in Colorado first where there was a shooting yesterday at a grocery store. I read the headlines this morning. There's a quote that sticks with me from the New York Times: “We ducked and I just started counting in between shots, and by the fourth shot I told my son, ‘We have to run,’” one customer said. Reading that I thought, what if that was Frankie and the boys? What if it was them counting the shots? Them deciding when to run? Time is passing like white ships sailing in the night. Years ago truly is years ago. How it was truly was; it has passed. The rain has stopped. The spring birds sit healing up from winter on the dark branches. Which drip. And drip.
10.	Interlude at the Gate 00:16		buy track
11.	The Carter Family 04:16	lyrics	buy track
A rainstorm rolls in from the south, the wind blowing the grass in the fields, and the skies darkening over the low hills and woods. We are in the farmhouse—the rooms dark at noon like Victorian parlors. No, not like that. Like something else. This is no time except now, and ours. Don’t romanticize. Love it or not, you must live in the world as it is. At night to fall asleep I tell myself the words “All is in its place.” I breathe in and when I breathe out I think the word “All,” and then with the next breath out “is” and then “in” and “its” and finally “place.” This is how I push away the news that twice-vaccinated people are getting sick, that Giancarlo DiTrapano has died, and that the Earth is choked more and more each day. I used to build a castle in my mind to sleep, but now my castles can be breached. You have to stay flexible, pliant. I’m not the first to say this, but I’m saying it now—a rigid stick will snap in two while a blade of glass will bend low then rise again. With the windows open you can smell the world outside. It’s nothing distinct, but it’s a living smell, the smell of life coming back, struggling back, standing back up. It’s spring and it is as good as a thing can be. (Now we repair damage. Now we drink water. We sleep as late as we can. We walk in the wet fields. We eat big meals. And we do this together. Together is what’s important here. Remember that. Remember how this feels.) Sometimes at night I lie awake and I think of all the time I’ve wasted. The empty lonesome hours, months on the internet, the busy work. How much of our lives have we spilled out like piss onto concrete? To quantify this would be to look into the face of something I’d rather not know. So, you push on. You make lists and you try your best to check them off. You ignore that which has no remedy. The spring birds peck in the grass as seen from the front room windows. The gray skies heavy (“leaden” is a word I’ve always liked). The sound of happy voices and movement in the house. A joke told. A song sang. To live like this always would be to truly live. Our days on this blue Earth are like a song that says, “the storms will hurl the midnight fears/and sweep lost millions to their doom.” They are also a song that says, “I am going where there is no depression.” Sometimes life is a song that says both, and maybe it’s necessary to say both, maybe it’s not possible to say one without the other. Then laughter in the house. The rainclouds gather. The spring birds growing healthy under gray April skies.

about

Tapes are sold out.

Note: there are 10 different color variants of this album.

ABOUT I spent the spring of 2021 writing about how life was, how the rainstorms came every few days, about the spring birds, about the fields and the skies, and about the people living here at the farm and the world outside our boundaries—the mass shootings, our political division, and the uncertainty a lot of us felt (and still feel) about our future.

Those short pieces became The World of Today and the World of Tomorrow. I recorded the writing and the accompanying music in one of the upstairs rooms of the Ruby Teeth Homestead farmhouse while life went on in the next room and downstairs and outside. In these recordings, you will hear the voices of the five people who lived here this spring. You will hear the storms outside—thunder, rain speckling the window glass, the heaviness of spring weather as winter fades to memory. You’ll also hear the sounds of the house settling, doors creaking open and pressing shut, laughter, footsteps, songs sung overheard, conversations, dogs barking and roosters crowing, and wind whistling around the walls. This is very much a documentation of a place and a time.

Using a Tascam Pocket Studio, I recorded my speaking voice reading aloud along with synth, mountain dulcimer, acoustic and electric guitar, piano, organ, chime box, Judy Harp, and four-string guitar, then added to that a series of multi-tracked noise experiments that serve to capture the feeling of being in an old farmhouse on the prairie in spring with five people during a time when there was both peace (here) and chaos (also here, and everywhere else).

The music was inspired by John Fahey, the Album Leaf’s first improvisational recordings, Bright Eyes’ Letting Go of the Happiness record, David Berman’s Silver Jews, my great-grandmother’s old country mixtapes, Castanets’ City of Refuge and Cathedral, Aldous Harding, Jackie O’Motherfucker, Jonquil’s Sunny Casinos, and Inca Ore (as well as the many [and mostly forgotten] Portland noise and drone artists I would watch at the Tube when I lived in Oregon).
It’s a very personal thing, this one. It’s also warm, noisy, cluttered, happy, loving, shambled, drowsy, and often very dark. Listen to it on headphones, and do so alone or you’ll miss a lot. With all its layers of noise, this will sound like garbage when heard in a crowded room or outside or over the speakers of a car stereo. The World of Today and the World of Tomorrow is for you alone (or you and someone you can trust to keep quiet for a half hour). Those are your only instructions. Beyond them, this is out of my hands, and like that, I send it into the world with hope for its fortune.
-Adam Gnade

credits

released December 3, 2021

Vocals, acoustic guitar, electric guitar, four-string guitar, mountain dulcimer, piano, organ, synth, judy harp, chime box, noise, samples, field recordings by Adam Gnade.

Slide guitar, noise by Demetrius Francisco Antuña.

Additional vocals from Elizabeth Thompson, Jessie Duke, Liam Christian, Jack Christian as well as found cassettes (track #1) and field recordings from TV news, CMT, and the Grand Ole Opry.

license

about

Hello America Stereo Cassette

A new record label releasing audio recordings of writers' work. Poems backed by noise. Novels as audio books. Stories on cassettes. Curated by Adam Gnade. Currently accepting submissions.