“The Big Lie” was written in summer of 2016 and recorded in January 2017. Along with several other tracks (“(Those Who Know So Well) What God Wants,” “Sleep,” and “Affected Disaffection”), this one was recorded while I had pneumonia and was on a three week course of antibiotics. Fortunately, these songs mostly didn’t require tremendous vocal acrobatics. With “The Big Lie,” the goal was to be a menacing chant. The lead vocal is actually about twelve tracks merged into a single

The General Electorate’s SYNTHETIC BONES goes some pretty dark places in its second half. In this song, religion as a governmental force is exposed as what it usually amounts to in such scenarios: a not-so-subtle way for cherry-picking zealots to ignore the larger teachings and focus on dogmatic minutiae that affords them a power consolidation. After all, religion was used to justify slavery, and the KKK regularly reminds us that they’re simply a “Christian” organization (ign

“The Mountebank Parade,” from The General Electorate’s SYNTHETIC BONES, is about the danger of stupid people acting in large numbers. The ignorant and deluded are often easily (indeed, willfully) enchanted by charlatans and demagogues. I wrote this song in March 2016 as I watched a demagogue rise to prominence, propelled into the stratosphere by stupid people whose zealotry and hatred of anything they don’t understand blinded them to the danger of what they were undertaking.

The music has a lighthearted sound to it, but this is the song where The General Electorate’s SYNTHETIC BONES album begins getting darker. Written in March of 2016, the song is a reminder that nationalism, fascism, and jingoism are all phony forms of patriotism embraced by the lowest common denominator (and leveraged by the wicked) to move power away from democratic processes and towards dictatorships and totalitarianism. This was the first track on the album to truly sound l