Stranger Still by Donny Knottsville

As a fan of music growing up, I discovered that some of my favorite artists’ best stuff could be found on b-sides, compilations, soundtracks and outtakes. It’s like the throwaway nature of these kind of “extra” tracks frees the artist up to get looser, weirder or more adventurous and some really great stuff can come out of that sometimes. Occasionally a group would compile that material onto an album or collect it in a box set or whatever and I just always thought that was really neat.

Part of the promotional build up for the My Strangest Adventure album was putting out a series of singles leading to the full release. I took that opportunity to include a couple of “b-side” tracks of my own with each of the 3 singles. These were mostly tracks recorded around the same time as that album, but that either didn’t quite fit in or were finished a little later from that material. After My Strangest Adventure was out, I thought it would be fun to collect the b-sides along with several remixes as a companion piece.

Continuing the theme of working with my significant past collaborators as well as folks I admired but had not done a track with before, Stranger Still includes another wide range of guests. One of the standouts for me was getting together with the legendary eclectic rhyme innovator Kool Keith on the track “Cremation Amadeus”.

As intended, it turned out to be a pretty odd compilation of stuff that you can dig thru and maybe find a few gems in. I enjoyed getting to pull together all the far out material for this one and I hope it works on it’s own as well as a bonus supplement to My Strangest Adventure.

Southern abstract absurdist lyrical cave paintings and assorted curiosities