Angelfish &
Stuck/Shards of Love:
Fan Mail

This page is designed to get you all excited about these CDs, so that you will buy them. The original cassette albums were never officially distributed or hyped in any way, so I get great satisfaction that they were nonetheless discovered and recopied by bunches of people I never met....like notes in bottles washed up on the shores of strangers. I have no idea of how many people made copies, but I started hearing stories of barely-decipherable cassettes making the rounds of random high schools a half-decade later (the tail end of the cassette era).

My friend Dwight Peterson and I were trying to create a alternate pop music reality, to meet hungers of ours that we felt the mass-marketed pop and folk music of the time weren't always addressing too well. The same vulnerability that led to some of the quirky music on these albums was consistent with our fear of engaging with that media machine further down the line. (This is the sort of paradox that helps explain why mass-marketed music often sounds the way it does.) I think we needed our social near-vacuum to do what we were doing. This may still hold true for me. I think it holds true for a lot of people I know.

It's nice to intermittently re-discover that our works took on lives of their own beyond our efforts. To use Meme language, they appear to have "self-replicated" in spite of a total lack of promotion or media influence. I am happy that they affected people positively and inspired some passion and creativity.

The letter that follows is similar to letters I have received every few months since I started my website. It happens to be an especially nice one, so here goes:.

Feb 20, 2009

Hi Steve,

I had the Angelfish album (I didn't know it was called that) on a copy of a copy of a Memorex cassette waaaay back in 1989. I found it on a payphone at the Bergen Mall in Paramus, NJ. I loved that tape, and I played the Hell out of it for years until it finally gave out.

After searching for several years (via the different search engines), I have found not only the album, but the artist (that being you), and several other works. How can I go about purchasing this album...and others? Any info would be so appreciated, I could not put it into words.

I cannot tell you how important this album was to me as a teenager. I remember copying Lovesick Puppy Dog* and giving it to a girlfriend I had because she loved it so much...that was waaaaay back in 1991....we were actually talking about that very song on Facebook just the other day. The only thing I have left of that album is what's left of my addled memory, trying to remember the songs lyrics while in the car, or in the shower, etc... it would mean the world to me if I could somehow get a new copy.

I have not heard this album in over a decade, but still, every song stayed with me somehow..

Without sounding too crazy, I wish I could put into words how some of the songs impacted me; some were brilliantly funny to me, like - You Are A Slime, Love Wahoo Wahoo (Didn't Take Much Time To Fall) and Don't Sneeze At Love*... but interestingly enough, there were some that helped me during times of depression or even adolescent heart ache - Sing To Me, She'll Never Know, and even a song that I don't recognize by title here, but I am certain must be. There was a beautiful instrumental on it, and I actually had made a copy of a tape with it on it playing over and over again. I know, I sound foolish, but your music was as much a part of my life as any other that I might have heard on the radio or purchased in Record Town.

Thanks....for being so original, inspiring, and funny all at the same time.

Sincerely,

Vince L. Falcone

* Lovesick Puppydog and Don't Sneeze at Love are now found on the Stuck/Shards of Love CD. They were appended to the end of his tape but weren't "officially" part of the Angelfish cassette.