Albert Mark

Albert and I played and wrote songs together in a Eureka, CA rock band called The Science during the late 1970s and early 1980s. We kept in touch over the years and in the early 2000s started talking about doing some more writing and recording. However, since I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area and Albert lived in Eureka, we had to set up one of those long distance relationships. 

We started the project in December 2007 when Albert came to stay with me for 5 days. We wrote and recorded “While We Have Time” just to see if we could still work together. I was a little worried because sometimes when you try to rekindle old relationships, people have gone in different directions and it just doesn’t work. But it turned out Albert and I had evolved in ways that actually strengthened our songwriting partnership. “While We Have Time” was easy and fun to write. We found out that we “clicked” even better musically and still really enjoyed working together. 

Albert bought a music computer system and we began traveling back and forth between Eureka and the Bay Area to write and record. Recording with Albert Clark is just about the most fun a guy like me can have in life. Sometimes he has a complete song ready to go and only needs help on lyrics and melody. Sometimes he just has a great lick that needs development into a complete song. Sometimes he will take my ideas and give them a fantastic musical twist or figure out how to turn them into a song. Sitting around and thinking up lyrics with Albert can be rolling-on-the-floor funny, like when he sang me the first line of “East LA” - “Well my brain ain’t workin’ too good today.” Or the punch line of “Walkin’ Your Man” - “And a dog’s gotta do what a dog’s gotta do.” 

Working together stimulated us to get into lyrics and musical ideas that mean something to us. This album says what we want to say at this stage of life. Since Albert is a much better musician, I really had to push myself to keep up, which I’m grateful for. I learned a hell of a lot from him as we made this record. The album took a long time because of the long distance aspect and life intervening, as it has a tendency to do. But that turned out to be a good thing in some ways. Some of the songs like “Hegemony” and “Minority” benefited from radical rearrangement over the years. And Albert came up with the idea of my friend Dave Barrows playing sax on "Anna Nova." 

Also, starting around the year 2015, virtual instruments like pianos, drums, guitars and basses made a giant leap in sound quality and playability. We already had good performance data and songs, but now we were able to get the sounds we were looking for. One example is the piano sound on “While We Have Time,” which is a sampled version of the actual piano Freddie Mercury used on all the Queen albums. Another is the virtual banjo on “Minority” with its authentic picking patterns. In that case there is also a Eureka connection, because RealiBanjo was created by Mike Greene, another Eureka native who runs Realitone instruments.  

So here is our Adolescent Dementia. We hope you enjoy listening to it as much as we enjoyed making it.