My record collection
[231] Tom Rapp - A Journal of the Plague Year (CD)

A Journal of the Plague Year was Tom Rapp’s first new album in over a quarter of a century and most of it was produced and engineered by Damon and both he and Naomi played on various bits of the album.

Tom Rapp - A Journal of the Plague Year

Around the time of the first Terrastock, and Tom’s reappearance Bob sent me two cassettes of Tom/Pearls Before Swine which was my introduction to him and the start of long love. I do still have the cassettes but bought CDs and the LP rarities comps that EARTH put out a couple of years ago. Such a body of work from someone completely unknown to me before Terrastock I.

This album was released in 1999 a couple of years after that first Terrastock, after Bob had sent me the tapes, and around the time of the Constructive Melancholy compilation all of which had contributed to my love of Tom. It is an exceptional album, Tom still had that gentle voice, his sharp tongue, and his tidy wit, and it felt like he hadn’t been away.

Most of the album was recorded at Damon & Naomi’s Kali Studios which I guess is what we can be seen in the Playback Singers CD booklet, with their cat relaxing in it:

Kali studios†

Damon recently, behind his Substack paywall, reprinted an interview that he and Masaki Batoh (of Ghost) conducted with Tom in 1998, it had quite a long and lovely preamble and is the sort of thing that subscribing to the Dada Drummer Almanack worthwhile:

[A]ll of Tom’s songs are touched by a special note of tragedy, something that rarely finds its way into popular music.

Tom Rapp himself is not a tragic figure, however. He is in fact extremely funny. In conversation, the wit that he uses so elegantly in his songs emerges as a hilarious candor, both about himself and others.

Damon Krukowski - Interview with Tom Rapp of Pearls Before Swine (paywalled article)

I wrote about Tom in an obituary of sorts for this website when he sadly passed away in 2018.

At the end of the album is a short hidden track which is Tom relating some classic 60s drugs stories from the stage at Terrastock II in April 1998 … “he came in one day and he said ‘Man you’ve got to try this, they put dogs to sleep with it.’”

• Catalogue Number: AHFOW 10/101
• Artist: Tom Rapp
• Title: A Journal of the Plague Year
• Packaging: Digipack
• Format: CD

† - the picture is tiny and from the Playback Singers booklet - wouldn’t it be nice if Playback Singers finally got a long overdue release on LP, then this picture could have been clearer!