Airplane Mode is the new full-length album by me, Alec Spiegelman.
Since yesterday, Oct 23, it has been available on all of the usual digital platforms.
Things got slightly confusing over at Spotify, inside which a second and distinct Alec Spiegelman was created, for this new album and for some guest appearances. Here’s the new me. I’m told that this will only last for a little while, that the new me and the old me are the same, and that they are in the process of being consolidated.
I wrote the songs for this album pretty quickly in the late summer and into the fall of 2018. “Hurt A Little” and “One Decision” were written with Ana Egge.
Ana is my songwriting hero. I got to spend a bunch of time with her on the road, and through the making of two very good albums. Besides just being the most incredible hang, all that time working with Ana was also a graduate education, my theses: the songs we wrote together. Ana happens to sing my favorite version of “Hurt A Little” on her album, “Is It the Kiss”. I sing an entirely different version with my band, Cuddle Magic, on our album “Bath”. And I think that other people should (and will likely) sing it on other albums, and also at home just for themselves. My sense that anybody should, and could, sing that song, is something of which I’m incredibly proud, and which I do not think I could have done without Ana.
Andrew Dimola & Robin MacMillan play the bass & drums, respectively. And Robin engineered the two day-long sessions (Jan 27, 2019 and Aug 10, 2019), with the three of us tracking together at Robin’s amazing old Williamsburg loft studio.
Robin MacMillan is an incredibly talented musician and producer. He is a masterful engineer of his notoriously difficult-to-mic primary instrument: the drum set. He imagines all kinds of driving parts and pockets. He understands some very subtle connections between musical rhythms and dance, and he’s a fine & un-self-conscious dancer. He makes all sorts of beautiful music in collaboration with all of my favorite musicians in town.
I’ve been playing music with Andrew Dimola pretty steadily since we met around 2003 in Cambridge, MA. At this point, I think we have a remarkable amount of shared and specific musical vocabulary. Thankfully, Andrew still breaks rules I would never break, in pursuit of symmetries I would never have seen. Critically, in the context of this album, he can rock un-ironically and aggressively, as this music demands.
Jacob Blumberg made four music videos for four of the shorter songs on the album. Those are all available to watch on my instagram account.
And also, here: