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Buy it exclusively through our web-store.
Take a stand against mediocrity in the music
industry today! Read more about the making of
the controversial CD below ...
about the fact that they didn’t really notice Shawn Mafia existed in the first place. The music industry is over-
saturated with artists and ready to burst out all over the place. Not like giving birth but more like someone taking
a very sharp kitchen knife to it’s bowels and stabbing uneven and cutting crooked … a stinky, foul shit shower of
songwriters raining down on everyone.
At least that’s how I see it.
What you will find here is no big-budget recording studios, no slick producers spinning straw into gold, and no high-
falutin’ record label willing to pick up the tab. This album was born in the dark belly of a black widow infested
garage converted into a dingy recording studio with big aspirations! Down Wind Studios is positioned, as the crow
flies, on the wrong side of the tracks in Desert Hot Springs, CA. Each song came out screaming in the 120 degree
heat blowing from the box fans on to the reel-to-reel recording tape. Much time was spent laying down the tracks.
My backing band, The Ten Cent Thrills, who I have been working with for the past few years arrived bruised but
unbroken for each session and played their asses off for no financial compensation. They were the much needed
blood transfusion that kept the heart of this thing pumping. Still more countless hours were sacrificed to me
attempting to mix all the madness captured on tape. The recording engineer and proprietor, Tom Hagerty, would
lean back in his chair, smoke a massive spliff, and chuckle to himself as I manned the mixing board like some
bogus surgeon attempting to perform a back-alley abortion. And that’s exactly how these songs came out.
All of this was paid for by the tragedy of others. The money that went into this project swims in bad blood. I have
worked at a Funeral Home for the last three years to supplement the limited funds that come in from my fabulous
and exciting career in the Music Biz. Each paycheck I received from transporting a murder victim to the County
Coroner’s Morgue, embalming a 10 year boy killed playing in the street, or making funeral arrangements for the
bereaved got me one step closer to the compact disc you may be holding in your hands right now.
New Moon Records, a daring and innovative small label out of Joshua Tree, CA boldly agreed to release Death
In ‘D’ Major in joint conjunction with me. Owner and recording artist, Steve Lester, managed to pull a Houdini
with the mixes of the songs I gave him. He mastered, organized, sequenced and often times wrestled this musical
beast into a cohesive collection. I am proud to be associated with this label. I don’t know if they can say the same
about me.
To me, Death in ‘D’ Major signifies a successful exercise in failure. A collection of songs doomed to depravity.
All those tales of three time losers, at the bottom rung of life, out there feverishly wandering the desperate
boulevards of this existence unaware that they never really had a chance to begin with. In this collection of
musical oddities you will find a pop/rock song about prostitution and suicide, a death dirge, a folk ballad about a
Hell’s Angel confessing all in a run down church pew, a tune that dreams of reuniting with one’s high school
sweetheart but is too drunk to remember her name, a real to life account of a woman murdered in a dumpster out
back of the Humane Society Bingo Hall, a spoken word soliloquy about driving dead bodies around Palms
Springs, CA recorded ad-lib into a hand held tape recorder as it happened, a huckster snake oil pitch with all the
infomercial majesty of the Prophet Peter Popoff, an off-tempo rockabilly/punk barn blazer about Mojave desert
dope fiends, and a sizzling swing number drunk to the tits with Cheap Women and Cheaper Wine.
This album represents my blood, bone, and 100 proof sweat. It tells stories about my own life and other
individuals that I have encountered along the way. It was a three year labor of love that eventually turned to
passionate hate. In the words of Herman Hesse these songs are “not for everyone!” To the few wayward souls
that may get their hands on this recording I implore you to please hide it away from the world … it’s too tragic,
too sensitive for the light of day.
Shawn Mafia
June 2007
