Airplane Mode is a full-length album of songs by me, Alec Spiegelman, that has been available on at all the usual digital platforms since Oct 22, 2020
(spotify tidal bandcamp youtube and so on …)
I wrote the songs for this album pretty quickly in the late summer and into the fall of 2018. “Hurt A Little” and “One Decision” were written in collaboration with Ana Egge.
Ana is my songwriting hero, and an incredible hang, and I got to spend a bunch of time with her on the road, and through the making of two very good albums. Ana sings my favorite version of “Hurt A Little” on her album, “Is It the Kiss”. I sing an entirely different version with my band, Cuddle Magic, on our album “Bath”. And I would love if other people would sing it on other albums, and also at home, just for themselves and their friends.
Andrew Dimola & Robin MacMillan play the bass & drums. Robin engineered the two day-long sessions (Jan 27, 2019 and Aug 10, 2019), with the three of us tracking together at Robin’s amazing old Williamsburg loft studio.
Robin MacMillan is an incredibly talented musician and producer. He is a masterful engineer of his notoriously difficult-to-mic primary instrument: the drum set. He imagines all kinds of driving parts and pockets. He understands some very subtle connections between musical rhythms and dance, and he’s a fine & un-self-conscious dancer. He makes all sorts of beautiful music in collaboration with all of my favorite musicians.
I’ve been playing music with Andrew Dimola pretty steadily since we met around 2003 in Cambridge, MA. At this point, I think we have a remarkable amount of shared and specific musical vocabulary. Thankfully, Andrew still breaks rules I would never break, in pursuit of symmetries I would never have seen. Critically, in the context of this album, he can rock un-ironically and aggressively, as the music demands.
Jacob Blumberg made four music videos for four of the shorter songs on the album. Those are all available to watch on my Instagram (from Meta) account, but also, right here: