This is the original 14 track rock opera + Looking Through the Eyes of Love. And now with this edition you get 20 more tracks of Little Levity – about an hour and a half – of early writing sketches, demos, practice sessions.
Here’s the story of one (Glass Man):
I was working in a gallery late one night in about 2006 where among my artworks (F. Scott Gallery in Sudbury, Mass was showing my works at that time) I’d got this idea for a golem-based rock opera (see the previous post). I then had the idea of basing the opera on the story of a glass repairer because he could be a glass man and the monster he builds could also be considered a glass man.
And because the glass man-monster was going to be a heroic figure, it may have been Tim who thought the words “glass man” should be sung like Tax Man by the Beatles which was sung like Batman by Neal Hefti – I didn’t need to look that up (Ok, I did to verify), because my elementary school music teacher told us she was friends with Neal Hefti. And, hey, if George Harrison can steal the idea from a song from someone (Something in the way she moves doo lang doo lang doo lang) else, why not us? But whoever was responsible for this one-note twice-sung borrowing, Tim built a song around it and left me room to develop the story.
It eventually came out quite different, but in the Bootleg version you get both of ’em!