THE CINNAMON PHASE! The complete object, straight from the source -- the CD includes a 16-page booklet with lyrics, illustrations, photos, and notes on the creative process. Shipped direct from Black Bear in a handsome padded envelope with a signed letter! This is the only place you can get it these days, so if you want it, don't dink around looking for it elsewhere -- especially not just the MP3's... Have something you can hold in your hands...

As touted, my debut album, "The Cinnamon Phase" was released last week on Baskerville Hill Records. I am thoroughly pleased with how it came out, and thank you to all the people who have been snatching up copies at a promising rate.

The record is available online at the
Baskerville Hill website, for a very modest $12.

Lately I've been buying lots of albums myself in an effort to boost my sales karma, so hopefully it works. This is the way I think of buying records that you know you want; You could easily spend $12-16 on dinner and a drink, or two or three drinks, without thinking twice and never looking back... for the same amount of money you could buy an album that may very well stick with you for years, or even change your outlook on life in some small but important way. We all need food to survive, it's true, but we need inspiration too. MP3's are great, iPods are amazing, but it all stems back to the actual records, the objects that the artists put out and to have that object heightens all the more your relationship with the music and the artist.

"The Cinnamon Phase" is a highly personal and intimate record, and the booklet that comes with it, 16-pages of lyrics and photos and notes about the songs, is an integral part of the experience. Even the mailer that Baskerville Hill sends it in, is a joyful little package of hand-touched goodness in a world growing increasingly devoid of exciting, physical, mail.

Alright, I've said my piece!

Your turn.. GO!

Thank you for reading,

Sam BB

I am phenomenally pleased to officially announce the release date of my debut album, "The Cinnamon Phase," and even more excited by the close proximity of this date to today's date....

JUNE 20th!

It has been quite some time coming and now it is happening, so hopefully you will all be swept up in the warm momentum of summer and feel strongly about being the first citizen in your neighborhood to be spinning Black Bear this summer. If you like what you've heard, either live, or on Myspace, I assure you the opposite of disappointment upon purchasing this album.

I've put my all into every aspect, down to each hand-drawn detail of the cover art, and only the finishing touches remain between today and June 20th. Ryland Bouchard of The Robot Ate Me fame will be mastering the final cut at Folie Mastering in Portland, I will bring the master to Dungeon Replication, also in Portland, and out the other end will come the final object, in all its glory.

The Cinnamon Phase is 12 songs, one for each month of a year, and it goes like this:

1. January - "Black Bear"
2. February - "Your Princess is Priceless"
3. March - "Australia, Olympia, Poughkeepsie"
4. April - "I Want A Flying Dolorean"
5. May - "Whistler's Mother's Day"
6. June - "In the Arboretum"
7. July - "I Believe in Immediacy"
8. August - "I Knew What I Was"
9. September - "Those Rusty Drums"
10. October - "Eve of the Fall"
11. November - "Flicker Wings"
12. December - "Like Venice"

For those people who really believe in immediacy as I do, who want to be sure they get their copy the SOONEST possible day they can so as to not watch another day of their life slip away without having known the songs of this album, it will be available for pre-order a week before the release, starting June 13th, at the illustrious:

www.baskervillehill.com

Thank you all for listening and reading. If there are five albums you buy this summer instead of ripping or downloading them, let this be one of them. I need your support more than Radiohead does.

Yours,

SAM BB

This excerpted from an email I got today from one, Wire R. Appleseed, regarding an online pharmacy that among many other drugs distributes Viagra, Cialis, and Ambien:

felt so chill. outside of a spaceport, watching the Cliaand ships WHERE ARE YOU GOING, Slippery Jim? Angelina people and I dont want you telling them Im entrance, turned it on and saw the bare end of colonel. I was becoming less and less intrigued all the would not have this same burning interest in are very unattractive. bunkroom door and plenty of soldiers were milling Where? I must look into this! and fast behind a radar screen, zing down into the anything except stare while he held the ax high desk. There was no blood.


And the image attached in the email, which linked to the website, was labeled, "chitlins.gif."

It is moments like these, when I become acutely aware of what a small part I play in this world. I have zero explanations with which to address this email. Hallelujah.