Peter Oren - The Greener Pasture (Color Vinyl) - VINYL LP

The album art, made by my close friend Quintin Caldwell, is a farm scene made in the isometric style of a silicon valley tech company's marketing content. The cattle's enclosures are smart-phone shaped. John WayneInch is a comment on American individualism and the characters that symbolize it. John Wayne's many, yet consistent characters and the consistent but multi-actored Bruce Wayne (Batman) serve as model citizens and vigilantes. They justify violence in fighting crime, or disrespect, while doing little to address underlying causes of injustice. I see in myself similar tendencies of false self-reliance despite knowing that collective effort will be critical to successful change. My previous album, Anthropocene, asks in the title track, Inchwhere will I go/ if I don't want to be/ with idle hands awaiting catastrophe/ here in the Anthropocene.Inch The Greener Pasture offers a somewhat defeated answer to that question in it's own title track InchThe greener pasture is also fenced in/ the wider trough has an asterisk/ rotate the herd every few days/ or is it every few years/ we got their tags on our ears/ standing in S**t crying bovine tears.Inch As cattle's comfort is often forgone, I've been uncomfortably seeking my role in a market economy that might allow me to contribute to necessary change in the system. Even those reluctant to acquiesce to the demands of the labor market such as myself are these days made valuable through their data and attention. Just as screens have reached beyond squared corners, up and around user-facing lenses, screens have spread beyond times square to capture the core of our culture and economy at a rapid pace. In the process of vying for a chance to call music my profession, I've writhed in the pain of isolation it's brought and sunk deeper into hermetic habits, buttressed by social media platforms that my more successful peers have so