Out of Print and Unavailable


Costa Rica for Christmas (2003)

This was one of our last cassettes, I think.

There were a lot of other Band Of The Land cassettes that I didn’t write whole pieces on, simply because I don’t remember much about them – Moon Love and Dream Child were two others that we really liked, and there was also Two Guys With Guitars, a cassette we made by putting together some of the recordings I did as a duo with a guitarist friend at school, who wrote the guitar riff for my song “Plane Service” – that album was mostly just one guy with a guitar, because I was mostly hitting a hardcover textbook with drumsticks while my friend was playing his guitar, but there was at least one song with both of us on guitars – Beth didn’t play or sing on that album, but she was one of the songwriters on it.

Costa Rica for Christmas was mostly songs I started writing while on Christmas vacation in Costa Rica with my parents at the end of 2002. My mom also contributed some songs, including a song about my grandpa, who’d recently passed, called “Grandpa Kenneth Was More Freer Than a Cigar” – the grammatical weirdness of the title was intentional, a reference to my grandpa’s work as a poet and playwright, and the freedom with which he broke all kinds of rules and conventions about what a poem or a play or another work of art “should” be.

Jesse “Cannonball” Statman in Costa Rica
Jesse “Cannonball” Statman playing marimbas in Costa Rica

Back in Brooklyn, Beth and I finished these songs together – which took awhile, because I had very specific ideas about how these songs should be, and it was difficult for me to put it all onto paper at the time, because I was still very new to songwriting – it was one of the projects we left and came back to a number of times before we finally felt like they were ready to record.

When the songs seemed ready, we recorded them on a cassette, which I still have at least one copy of. I don’t remember if we ever actually released this one – I don’t think it was ever online, and we might’ve only made copies for ourselves.

The vacation to Costa Rica was something that really inspired me as a songwriter, which is why this was an important album for us – and because a lot of the percussion instruments that Beth played on our Band Of The Land albums were instruments I bought in Costa Rica on that vacation.

page from The Band Of The Land Newsletter discussing the production of a planned movie based on the album

from Out of Print and Unavailable Discography (with The Band Of The Land)
The Scarf Soundtrack (2004)
Band Of The Land Beach (2004)
Costa Rica for Christmas (2003)
The Band Jams (2003)
Diet Band Of The Land (2003)
The Band Of The Land and the Mic That Goes Around Your Neck (2003)
Finally Not Just the Two of Us (2003)

(or, go to the beginning for the full list of out-of-print and unavailable projects)

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