My Life As A Singing Mermaid

Collection Contents

#		Title	Length
1		The Singing Mermaid	3:44	Play
2		Medicine Man	3:42	Play
3		Third Rail	1:47	Play
4		The Pinhead's Lullabye	3:35	Play
5		Needle in Your Eye	4:16	Play
6		List of Attractions (of Coney Island)	1:22	Play
7		Green Light	5:44	Play
8		Mint Condition	3:42	Play
9		Morir Sonyando	4:14	Play
10		Sister Rosemarie	4:18	Play
11		Super Model	2:56	Play
12		I Wanna Be Sedated	3:13	Play

Items may be purchased individually.

Contributors

Details

Royalties

See the payment distribution when this media is bought.

Description	Amount
Bitmunk Marketplace Service	USD $0.98
CD Baby Artist Royalty	USD $5.97
CD Baby 9% Digital Distribution Cost	USD $0.54
Bitmunk Download Service	USD $0.61
Bitmunk MicroPayment Service	USD $0.01
Total	USD $8.09

Bitmunk uses a micropayment system that is accurate to 7 monetary digits.
Mouse over an individual amount to see its exact value.

Description

Carol Lipnik and Spookarama's classic My Life As A Singing Mermaid produced by Bradford Reed (inventor of the Amazing Pencilina which is prominently featured) is now available here in a beautiful handmade edition.

CAROL LIPNIK chronicles a life spent in the decaying panorama that is/was Coney Island. Anyone who has ever seen the movie Angel Heart on the big screen knows that austere vision of that widescreen shot of Mickey Roarke walking across the beach to see the man from the carny. When the life leaves the circus, when the carnival has become carnivorous and the summer makes way for those gloomy Northeastern winters, it's sad and stark and haunting, like a cute toy left out in the rain. MY LIFE AS A SINGING MERMAID is one of those quintessentially American experiences, like watching Bugs Bunny or an episode of The Twighlight Zone on a Saturday afternoon. Your Dodge Dart won't start, you got laid off from your job (I think they call it downsizing these days), you took some records out of the library to explore some new sounds (The Three Penny Opera, Harry Partch, G. Gershwin) as you've worn the grooves off The Ramones' Leave Home- nothing seems to help shake off the shade. But Carol Lipnik understands. If Laura Nyro or Diamanda Galas grew up in Brooklyn with Syd Barrett and Randy Newman as her godfathers, the result could be The Devine Ms. L.
If DJ Spooky mix-melded Laura Nyro's New York Tendaberry with Tom Waits' Mule Variations it might sound something like MY LIFE AS A SINGING MERMAID.
CL transmogrifies and distills that eerie pre-Prozac ambiance that only comes from being an American-where the clown that comes to your 6th birthday party later turns out to be John Wayne Gacy or Bobcat Golthwait, and nobody in the neighborhood is that surprised when a body is found down by the factory and you're looked upon as a weirdo if you read anything other than the sports page or Seventeen.
Ms. L has a genuinely affecting range, just dramatic enough to make her point. But unlike some theatrical singers, she injects equal parts warmth, wonder, angst, piss and vinegar into her songs, each a gem of construction. (With her you never feel like you're listening to some Broadway wannabe, or some primal-scream therapy dropout, nor a self-consciously avant-gardener.) Most unsettling is CL's cover of the Ramones' I wanna Be Sedated, which is given a deliriously languid reading, as if Lotte Lenya thought it was a variation on Gloomy Sunday. Her band completes Lipnik's fractured sonatas, deriving from the zigzag amalgam(s) of Captain Beefheart, Tom Waits, circus music, pre-1962 cartoon music, Raymond Scott and Charles Ives. Call it Great Suburban Music, Ancient To The Future.
-Mark Keresman