Trans is an album that to me, stands apart from all my other albums. When I made it, at first it was all computer age songs….sung through a vocoder to make the characters’ voices and played using technological instruments for accompaniment - synth drums..a synclavier. … ‘Transformer Man,’ ‘Computer Age’ and ‘Mr Soul’ were all like that.

There were also trans-songs with Crazy Horse playing on the tracks that used the vocoders as well, painting a picture of the times. ‘Computer Cowboy,’ ‘Sample and Hold,’ ‘We r in Control.’ This was a story. Computer Age.

I had a long form video planned, ready to go with the album simultaneously, telling the story of all the characters, many of whom sang with sub-titles to make their digital voices more recognizable. They were communicators! Telling the story.

The storyline lived where the digital people with synthetic voices dwelled - many of whom were working in the hospital trying to teach a non-speaking baby-child how to talk and communicate. He was my son. Three hospital nurses, Sylvia and the Synthetics, surrounded the child while another robotic being was always nearby - Tabulon, a robotic computer man, with a deep voice emanating from a grate in his chest reported the story. Tabulon’s face was a keypad. He was constantly pressing his face-keys with a flurry, keeping track of the story and reporting a point of view while singing and talking through his deep sounding chest grate.

Geffen Records declined to let me make the video.

Left with all that music, in the end, I decided to go to the Islands and record there. New songs. ‘Island in the Sun, ‘A little thing called love,’ ‘Hold on to your love’ and ‘Like and Inca’ were all recorded right there and then. We took a whole new track….and combined the two records to make Trans -Trans, an album that told the tale of going from one life to another, as my own life had changed in many ways with the birth of my wonderful second son, quadriplegic, non-speaking, the subject of the film-story and one of my great teachers.

Now the story has ultimately been told as it was meant to be. Animated by my friend Micah, the great Micah Nelson, our story of Trans is finally living!

In the meantime, Trans - the record, has been restored. All the original mixes are there. Just the way the album was first made. The record is in the filing cabinet available now. A missing song ‘If you got love,’ is still missing but now will be found in the archives Volume Three, along with the animated musical film - Trans.

ny be well