shakey graves as long as you love me lyrics

It was simply thrust into the world as a decapod of perplexingly memorable, narrative-wrapped songs with a mysterious cover and no information about the artist… only available on the relatively new platform of Bandcamp. Roll the Bones was released on the first day of 2011 without a lick of promotion advancing it. Of course, that’s far from what actually materialized. He still plays that scenario through his mind like an alternative reality. In the shadows self-doubt that surrounds any artists first record, Rose-Garcia had a fantasy: he releases Roll the Bones, only ten people hear it, it’s rediscovered a decade later by Numero Group, hailed as before-its-time, and finds an audience as a lost treasure. They’d tell me, ‘You’re lucky I like this record because it’s the last one I’ll ever be able to listen to in my car.’” “Sometimes I’d spray paint the CD so they looked good and people would stick them in their car stereo and it would fuse in and never come out. “I liked that if they were opened, you couldn’t close them again,” he smiles. As the album took shape, he began manufacturing one-off editions of the CD, stapled to self-destruct in brown paper, with black and white photographs glued upon them, and an ink pen marking of the artist's enduring logo: a skull struck by an arrow. Thus Roll the Bones was by no means a Big Bang creation story, rather a years long process of metamorphosis where literally hundreds of tracks were winnowed down into ten. Consistency didn’t matter, he asserts, because there was no demand or expectations. For Rose-Garcia, who’s long loved the incongruous art form of sequencing strange mixtapes for friends, his own record was subject to change every time he burned a disc for somebody. There are dozens of burned discs with widely varying track lists, loosely resembling what would become the Austin native’s 2011 breakout debut Roll the Bones.

In this lode of unreleased ephemera, CD-Rs are the most bountiful element. “And, honestly, a lot of trying to keep myself from going crazy.”

“There was a lot of conceptualizing going on - trying to figure out what I wanted stuff to look like, sound like, and be like,” Rose-Garcia recalls, shuffling through the physical files on his second-story deck in South Austin. At the time, he envisioned the photocopied storybook as a potential vessel for releasing his music. The latter, which Graves - aka Alejandro Rose-Garcia - wrote and illustrated, tells the tale of a once-courageous, now retired mouse who must journey to the moon to save his sweetheart. There are stencils, lyrics, drawings, prototypes for concert posters, and even a zine. Inside them, artifacts document an immense era of anonymous DIY creativity, from 2007 through 2010 - the three years before Roll The Bones came out and changed his life. The prehistory of Shakey Graves exists in two overstuffed folders.

Shakey graves as long as you love me lyrics