Production Date: 2006 Produced by: Alex Gibson Executive Producer: Rupert Hine Recorded & Mixed by: Alex Gibson Add. Engineer: Nathan Jenkins, Mark Valentine and Andy McEwen Photography: Sheila Ryan Art Design: Tanja Niggendijker

Only available here, on this site.

Songs

Good Wyrd

AC/DC

April Showers, April Tears (Saul Williams)

Easter

Dirty Purity

Parker Posey

Murder Suicide

Before Beyond

Voodoo Dolls

Rape Game

What

Glass

The wait is over.

Stuart Davis' new studio album ¿What is a landmark work by a pop iconoclast. With the expert aid of producer Alex Gibson, Davis' twelfth full length release is his best yet. The acclaimed songwriter and Zen Buddhist delves ever-challenging topics, from extolling the spiritual virtues of oddity (Good Wyrd), boxing with paradox (AC/DC), to playing the role of a Hollywood director bent on getting an indie Goddess to sell out (Parker Posey). The album moves through every mood and mode of the human condition, from the dumpster (Rape Game) to the transparent release of ineffable freedom (Glass), thirty-five year old Davis demonstrates the depth and versatility that has made him a critic's darling and a cult icon in the U.S. and Europe. And for the first time in fifteen years, he's released an album without putting the lyrics in the CD jacket.

But if listeners do decode some of Davis' gift for electro-locution, they will not be disappointed. Some random samplings from his new batch of songs reveal his kaleidoscopic imagination as alive as ever, as in Good Wyrd, reviewing the family dynamics of shadow,

I damn near died at the moment of conception
My-my-my daddy couldn't keep his erection
but you'd never guess it to see me today
'cuz I stand up straight (like a typical gay)
With a flock of baby birds that are stuck in my mouth
I wanna gag and gag till they come fluttering out
I'm living with lock-jaw and egg-shell cheeks
I keep dreading the day that they discover their beaks

Wyrd
Good Wyrd

In Easter, Davis slams his own escapism masquerading as spirituality, and recognizes the divinity in day to day family life,

Right posture, right poses
too bad what's under the robes is
still cross-eyed, in the witness
and searching for suchness
Back home, God's diamond
puts a diaper on the daughter
of a mystical martyr
who triggered a seizure
making believe that his body's a disease
he's wishing for a World where his vapor could thrive
giving up his life (as if he were alive)
he would have wings
if feather's came from crutches
or that cushion he clutches

But it's the scarcity of words in Glass that move the song like a line drawing, a black and white calligraphy. At eight lines, it's his lightest touch yet.

Falling snow
on the back
of a gliding crow
of a crow

Moonlight breaks
the glass
of a frozen lake
of a lake

Another first, this album features the recent collaboration between Davis and his long time hero, hip-hop visionary Saul Williams. Williams joined Davis in the studio in Boulder Colorado (Davis' home), and in addition to providing the backing vocals on Easter, wrote a poem on the spot, offering it as a companion to the song Easter, one of the albums great highlights. It's one more reason this collection is so satisfying and surprising from beginning to end. Rather than settle into a safe set of formulas, Davis has continued to challenge himself and his audience, pushing into new territories over and over. Never content to remain in the comfort of his previous success, its Stu's relentless drive to find new perspectives, new selves, and new puzzles in the human condition that make him such a perennially rewarding artist.

Davis will be touring through this summer and fall, promoting the release of ¿What.

What is the sound
of one hand slapping
your face
before your parents were born?