Folks, sometimes you gotta stand up and raise your hand high to claim the blame you know is yours. Learned that off my daddy Aurelias who they called Skip and now it's my time to take it on the chin like the man he reared me to be---Ed Hazelton, stand-up guy.

You see, this record oughten've been out somewhere back there during The Plague. Yessiree, this one's an artifact. A labor of love and frustration I orchestrated when these boys were just hatchlings in my nursery. How fast they grow up, am I right?

Back then I told the gaggle they needed something to get their fans *hooked* and I'll be doggone if they didn't take that about as far it could go. A bit like the subject matter, you might say. So much so, in fact, I came to reckon it was all more personal for these fellas than I'd wagered at first.

So after the natural period of pruning and alignments, the technical facets rose up and friends, that's where my mistake lay like a snake in so much grass. I'll spare the grisly details, but suffice to say it was a fraught epoch none involved will ever broach revisiting.

The process nearly broke the band and there were certainly broke spirits. A few broke out the spirits. Debating vistas of forests and trees seemed a circular ritual, as sure as the sunrise and dog hair and mugs of joe. Surely we all lost something back there. And damn if we didn't hear the songs about a thousand times each along the way.

Finding a silver lining in a man-made disaster like that is a helluva thing but we managed to pin a few.

The main one being that there's ain't no ceiling for this unkindness of rappers--criminy listen to these words fly--and another being there's no harm in showing people the basement solely on account of you missed about half the cobwebs for all your scrubbing and sweeping. Fact is, the rest of the crib looks that much better when you give 'em the grand tour behind it, so come on in---just breathe through your nose mostly or you might get a spider in your mouth.

- Ed Hazelton, stand-up guy