The Dork E.P.: Track List! Art! My Inner Madness!

Tomorrow I'll be posting, here and anywhere else I can think of, an E.P. of new spoken-word poems. I wrote them in a flurry last month, when I realized I hadn't written any poems lately; and I recorded them all at once, more or less, on a Saturday night when Shabbos ended early and I put my kids to bed and said goodbye to Itta when she was off doing a social thing and then realized that my house was particularly quiet -- too quiet, you'd think -- and I needed an excuse to start talking to myself.

This is the prototype art for the cover, which is by Katie Skau:

It's called (unless one of us comes up with something I like more before midday tomorrow) the Dork E.P. There's one track called "Dork 2.0," and I could call it that, except that it feels like a bit too much for a tiny little album that's less than 10 minutes long. I'm actually sort of proud of having it so short. When I was in high school, and did the recording trick of recording one track on my tape player, then playing it back close to the tape player while I recorded another track, the goal was to make songs as long as possible -- my favorite R.E.M. songs were four minutes long! some were almost five! they was practically symphonies! -- but for Dork, brevity seemed to be the thing.

Here's the track list:

1. Get Back Here New York City, I'm Not Finished with You Yet
2. Dork 2.0
3. Shit Girls Don't Say
4. Love in the Time of Attachment Parenting
5. Born to Run
6. Shit Girls Don't Say (other people version)

Originally I'd asked people to film themselves reciting the poem "Shit Girls Don't Say" for a music video (well, a non-music music video). Due to my computer being about 27 years old and not being able to crunch the recordings on iMovie, I had to mix it as an audio track better. And I kind of like it that way, in the end: The more-or-less proper closing track is "Love in the Time of Attachment Parenting," which is sort of my cover version of this great book you should read, and then my actual cover version of "Born to Run" (which I am praying doesn't sound bad), and then other people doing a cover of my thing.

Yes, I realize this is an immense amount of thought to put into a 9-minute recording -- let alone, one I'm giving away for free, and with no clear (to me) motive (I mean, I'm not really thinking that Sony will buy the rights, or that Kanye will hear this and ask me to record a song with him) -- but it feels right. And I really hope you come back tomorrow and download it.