It’s been a long strange trip for SL001, the limited-edition reissue of Todd’s With Love…From Me To You LP. The first batch I received from the manufacturing plant had a defect that rendered all but 150 or so copies unplayable. Boy, was that a fun day. Sitting on my bedroom floor opening 400 albums and checking each one individually to see if it was good or bad. Thankfully the company took them back and pressed up a new batch for me. The turnaround was relatively quick, all things considered, and I received my replacement records this morning. I’ve only looked at ten or so (black vinyl) but they all passed my visual test. So it looks like we’re finally gonna get this thing off the ground. I’m 99.9% certain that next Wednesday, September 18th, will be the official on-sale date. I’ll post Tuesday night with all the details, how to order, etc., and then at a random time on Wednesday the Swan Fungus Records page will start taking orders. At that point, if you’ll recall, the first 100 customers will receive clear vinyl. Also — and this is super-exciting — 10 copies at random (could be clear vinyl, could be black vinyl) will include a personalized “Thank You” note from Todd, which will look like this:
Cool, right? I thought so too.
In keeping with my new tradition of sharing info about the original album with each update regarding the reissue, I asked Todd to shed some light on the recording of With Love…From Me To You. Although the details are hazy, Todd had this to say about the experience:
We actually started — the pictures on the back cover were taken where we started the recording — in a church sanctuary that had good acoustics. But we didn’t have the structure. We didn’t have the know-how. Even in 1979 the notion of DIY wasn’t really all it was cracked up to be. We didn’t have somebody else with us who was disciplined and knowledgable enough to do what needed to be done to make a really good recording. I was about twenty-five miles from South Bend, Indiana. Notre Dame country. There was, at that time, a very small recording studio called Audio Services in either South Bend or Mishawaka, so my parents footed the bill and we recorded there. We only made 100 albums. And when you think of only 100 albums going to family and friends, the last thing you’d think of is that somewhere down the road one is going to wind up in Denmark, or Los Angeles. I don’t even think we charged family for copies of the album. We might have charged five dollars. Which is fine, we didn’t do it for the money. When you’re seventeen or eighteen years old all your’e thinking is that you’d better pay your parents back.
Well, we can’t charge just $5 for this reissue — not for the physical product, anyway — but we’re going to keep it as inexpensive as possible. Again, I’m still working out some of the details (like…how to handle International orders when PayPal does not allow the printing of First Class International postage), but I’m a firm believer in the idea that an LP should be priced to sell. There’s nothing worse than having record labels charge $18 for a single LP before shipping is calculated. Isn’t the high MSRP why consumers gave up on CDs? That said, one thing I can guarantee is that if you want to buy a high-quality/lossless digital copy of the album (you know, for those of you who want to support Todd but don’t own a turntable) it will cost $4 through Bandcamp. That’s a buck less than Todd charged back in 1979!
That’s enough for today. Stay tuned. Next Tuesday we’ll debunk the myth of Todd’s prom and reveal all the last minute details before the reissue goes on sale.
Ashra – Deep Distance [MP3]
