• Image of ELEPHANT MICAH ~ PLAYS THE SONGS OF BIBLE BIRDS ~ lp (TIME-LAG 047)
  • Image of ELEPHANT MICAH ~ PLAYS THE SONGS OF BIBLE BIRDS ~ lp (TIME-LAG 047)
  • Image of ELEPHANT MICAH ~ PLAYS THE SONGS OF BIBLE BIRDS ~ lp (TIME-LAG 047)
  • Image of ELEPHANT MICAH ~ PLAYS THE SONGS OF BIBLE BIRDS ~ lp (TIME-LAG 047)

we’ll let joe himself shed a little light here : touring the east coast in 2003, someone asked, “you’re from indiana – have you ever heard of the bible bird man?” i hadn’t, so i did some research. his video had already been stolen from the library at earlham college, but i stole it back and returned it. i began to imagine what the musical equivalent of his evangelical bird act might sound like. i wrote a song about the bird man, thinking of releasing it as a “re-issue” of a central indiana country-gospel group that had never existed – the bible birds. then i thought maybe i would do an elephant micah album of covers originally written by this (non-existent) bible birds band. in the end of course the concept kind of dissipated and it just became an elephant micah album. i recruited beth remis from static films (and more recently pillars and tongues) to help arrange/sing harmonies for the songs, and generally bring them up to pseudo-gospel snuff. we played the songs around the upper midwest once with ben racher on a portable pump organ and jason henn on upright bass. all of us got together in indianapolis in 2006 and recorded this. i drove everyone crazy with my insistence on weird recording methods. i think i was kind of trying to approximate the timbres of the hymn sing broadcast on salem, indiana’s WSLM. who knows? i was critical of the results and didn’t finalize them for several years. here it is finally, a kind of “prequel” companion to the ‘hindu windmills’ (TIME-LAG 035) album. - joe o’connell 2010… so there you have it. an overlooked chapter from this wonderful artist finally seeing the light of day, and a perfect companion piece to the highly praised ‘hindu windmills’ album. both albums are clearly united by their warm, lo-fi intimacy, sparse production, and stunning song-craft. strikingly simple & beautiful stuff…

lp version : packaged in a lovely three color screen printed heavy stock tri-fold art paper cover, with heavy stock offset printed lyric insert. limited edition of 500 copies.

released december 2010.