Ever since our days together in Bop and the Zeroes Bop and I have written songs. From our first, Let's Twist, and others made famous by Bop and the Zeroes to real art songs such as The Riddle Dance, we always found it easy to collaborate. Bop wrote the lyrics and I wrote the music, but there was always lots of back and forth. It was easy for us, and fun. However, as we got older, moved away and started families the songwriting came to a stop. Our collaboration focused instead on stream-of-consciousness group emails that were often very funny, and sometimes even profound.

Then, out of nowhere in late 1997 I received an email from Bop that contained this:

( The M. T. Clump version )
The river winced at the rainbows wall
And the ocean did nothing at all.
Tomorrow comes from todays dreams
Are nothing but screens in front of its doors and unfinished floors.

( The Yes version )
Spaciousness streams into a wall
Stop! There! Look! Listen!
Consciousness seems to be a thick fall.
Drop! Stare... at nothing! Glisten!
You might shine when all glistening's gone.
You might glisten when shining's forlorn.

...and then went on with the almost complete lyric to what became our first new song in many years, which we called Longrows. With its dead-on Pink Floyd style and rich Bovinian imagery it seemed like something I wanted to set to music. Originally I thought I was writing a song that the Floyd Boys would learn and play, so I tailored it to the groups strengths: our two Pink Floyd songs were Time and Comfortably Numb, so Longrows was written as a parody of Time that morphed into a Comfortably Numb styled guitar solo. I knew the easiest way to teach it to the band was to make a demo, so I spent several weeks working on one. My studio was still pretty new, so I took this opportunity to give it a real workout. I had a lot of fun, and was very pleased with the result, which I finished in March of 1998. Alas, the Floyd Boys never learned the song.

But a year later, Bop started sending me drafts of ideas for a new song about the Bovinian New Year. Apparently that year (1999), the main source of firewood was coming from what was left of the Lilly Jones house, and Bop's new lyric was called Burnin Lilly Jones. This one emerged more slowly, and I had more input into the songs shape and content. I really pushed my studio to the limit, and was really happy with the new song when it was finished in June of 1999. I was so pleased I put it out as a single.

In July of 1999 I received a very excited email from Bop which contained the following lyric:

this little piggie's market
is this little piggie's home
and this little piggie's roastbeef
is this little piggie's none...
and this little piggy cries...

...and went on with the rest of what would become the lyrics to The Leaf of Eve. I wrote the music very quickly for this, and made several demos of various versions. We were really excited now, and on something of a roll, and I soon had another lyric to work on called Kill Dog Pass.

It was obvious we had tapped a motherlode of ideas for songs, all with the related Bovinia theme. We began talking about making an "album," a song cycle in two parts. "Side one" would be about the animals in Bovinia, and "side two" would be about the people. Over the next few months we wrote a few more, with me cranking out the demos as best I could. However, almost as quickly as the process had started it began to slow down. Bop stopped sending me lyrics. I got very busy with my "serious" music, which took up most of my time in the studio. I wrote a couple of songs with very little input from Bop (but with his words! See the Notes page for details). Towards the end we were struggling to write a kind of finale. Bop sent me one last massive, shapeless email of lyric ideas, but by 2003 we had stopped writing altogether.

And there the project sat until summer of 2009. By then I had been out of touch with Bop for a few years, and was despairing that the project would never be finished. The technology had changed in my studio so that I no longer even had access to the original multi-track recordings. I was thinking, this is my Smile, the great unfinished, unreleased masterpiece. But then I thought wait a minute, I made a finished Smile out of Beach Boys fragments. Why not go back and see if Thinking Man's Pig (Bop's title) could be "finished" the same way? Perhaps there were enough pieces that I could edit what I had into some kind of state that would at least give listeners an idea of what we were doing.

I made myself some ground rules: Nothing new was going to be recorded, and everything I used had to have been heard at some point by Bop. As much as possible I would use the mixes I had intact, but would try to edit the unused bits into the missing songs. The CD you now have is the result. You can be the judge of how well I succeeded.

A few caveats: only Longrows and Burnin' Lilly Jones were really finished in the studio. The rest of the songs are still in a demo stage, although some are clearly farther along than others. I am especially not happy with some of the vocals. Kill Dog Pass turned out to be a song I couldn't really sing, for example, and on Whip that Mule I recorded the lead vocals for the first two verses in one take.

However, it feels great to have it out for all to hear. I hope you enjoy it.