I've never released a single before now, and have always preferred the atavistic, stubborn practice of crafting and releasing whole albums, complete with themes, attention to track order and storytelling that all go beyond the experience of listening to just any old individual tracks taken as stand-alone entities (knowing damned well that 99% of people who come across this stuff will not be encountering whole albums, or play them in order, at all). But this was different, and the time felt right, and kind of urgent.
All Out of Bubble Gum is one that didn't come out of me in time to make the Empire album, to which it is thematically related, and I was a little disappointed at the time because I'd just sent Empire out, and then this song got made. I wondered when (or if) it would fit into a different album, because I'd already started writing and decided on the theme to be treated in Let There Be Light and figured it probably wouldn't fit there. This happens a lot, so I just put it in my "unreleased" folder for the time being. Then 2020 happened, George Floyd happened, and some friends I'd sent it to in talking about how I feel about Black Lives Matter, police brutality and the racism in the US (I grew up there and have watched things get better and then far, far, far worse in my own lifetime) and they all urged me to release this as a single.
I always like to point out that the samples in this track are 52 YEARS OLD because the stuff that's transpiring now is bigger and older and a more profoundly fundamental struggle than some folks might allow themselves to comprehend, and that was always the point of making the song, right from the start (a year and a half ago). I think it's a really solid track with important stuff to consider, so please do listen to it.
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