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about this album
I parked at the end of the lane, next to the barn that is conjoined to the former chicken coop that is now Farmer Joe’s Hen Haus studio. Joe was already there, stuffing some weeds he’d pulled from between the ivy atop his root cellar into a bin and talking with his children about the big, fat spiders he saw when he had opened the cellar doors. After hellos all round, Joe sent the kids off and invited me into the studio. The Hen Haus is not a large building, but neither is it small. Inside it is but one room, cozy and rustic, but large enough for your normal five-piece band to record in. Joe offered me some coffee and we sat at his workbench (after service as a chicken coop, the small barn was converted into a wood working shop by the previous owner; Joe has set his recording equipment and speakers up on the workbench left behind). I had come because he called; Farmer Joe had something to give me for Cyclops Eye Music, but he wanted to say a few things about it first. He told me of a younger Farmer Joe than the one I was listening to, while sipping coffee in the Hen Haus. It was in 1991, fresh from his tractor and fields, that Farmer Joe the younger hid himself in a back room behind the kitchen with an eight track recorder, headphones, a microphone and several instruments, and wrote some songs to his new sweetheart (and some about other things too). The result was his first solo album, ‘Bodo Otto’, named after a revolutionary war era physician whose tall tombstone Joe