Woody Guthrie Songs To Grow On For Mother & Child CD

Either you shut down emotionally to weather the shitstorms or you erupt like Vesuvius because someone has relegated you to secondary status, behind the drug of choice.

An addict only has to keep falling and the world sympathizes with his co-dependency. But how about no dependency? How about being saddled with someone who always disappoints, never comes through for you, and blames you for all his/her own inadequacies? Not so much sympathy there. So you second-guess yourself, you lash out at ghosts, but mostly you seethe, knowing that while your little thrillseeker always has the welcoming arms of a fix to run to, you ultimately have to work out all their shitty deeds alone.

It's that sober-bordering-on-insane outlook that informs every note of Art for Starters' ambitious debut, a double CD titled Drugs Made My Favorite Bands, Drugs Ruined My Favorite People. It's a record that its author, David Jensen (late of Before Braille, a beloved Arizona band that imploded in 2005), needed to make for his own survival but not one that he was ever 100 percent sure he would share with the public. After mixing the album in a marathon 28-hour session, Jensen moved his possessions into storage, and he and his wife pulled up stakes and spent six months teaching English in Korea.

A chance catch of a particularly incandescent set in Scottsdale suggested that maybe there already was an Art for Starters CD out there in the universe. And Jensen's car trunk had bundles of 'em shrinkwrapped and ready to go. Not ready to release its record just yet, the band instead sold bundles of CDs from the members' various previous groups, rubberbanded together, at the Art for Starters merch booth.