Album Notes

11 Sordid Tales of Human Misery and Redemption. "Jake has the blues and has them bad. It ain’t the ‘woke up this mornin’’ styled blues—this is Tom Waits styled, junkie, hard drinking, hung-over, livin’ in the back of a car, singer-songwriter music that will have Leonard Cohen fans hiding the razor blades! Listening to this album, alone in a bedsit, with a bottle of cider is not recommended. But La Botz is undoubtedly a unique songwriter!" Tony Burke -MAVERICK MAGAZINE "JAKE LA BOTZ, Sing This to Yourself…and Other Songs for a Personal Apocalypse (Charnel Ground) Heartache transforms into profound albeit bleak wisdom on this acoustic outing by bluesman/actor La Botz. From the abyss, he delivers stunners like “Depression Brings Me Flowers,” “Hard to Love What You Kill” and “About Who I Am,” which rank among the hardest-hitting, most poetic and melodic songs he’s written. “Sky is Wide Open” ultimately suggests gentle hope: “Clouds take your sorrow when you give up tomorrow/ And yesterday keeps singing itself back to sleep.”" -PASADENA WEEKLY "Film fans may recall La Botz fronting a bar band in Ghost World, strumming for fellow inmates in Animal Factory or, most recently, crooning “Wishing Well” as a mercenary in Rambo. The bluesman’s fifth album, independently released in time for his latest tour of tattoo parlors across the lower forty-eight, is a bare-boned journey deep into dark nights of the soul; La Botz jokes these are “songs to kill or be killed to.” But, notwithstanding the black humor of “The Devil Lives in My Throat,” there’s nothing funny or half-assed about the way he strip-mines bleak, hypnotic beauty from heartbreak and fingerpicked acoustic settings on ballads like “When Your Trouble Gets Like Mine” or the harrowing “Depression Brings Me Flowers” (“The bad news is I don’t believe in happiness/ The good news is I know the ground quite well/ I go to hell and back with eyes wide open/ And come up to smell the flowers by my bed”). Pain rarely felt so sweet." - FADE IN MAGAZINE "Jake La Botz has released "the most depressing album ever." I made sure of it. At the end of "Hungry Again," your heart hurts for more and La Botz obliges you. Each song is another miserable, unfortunate, lonely day in his personal apocalypse. Make no mistake; there is a difference between Ryan Adams' "Voices" and La Botz's "The Devil Lives in My Throat." While Adams is crying and wallowing, La Botz is rolling around in it. Although there is pain and suffering, La Botz teaches us that depression is both necessary and, generally, temporary. We must feel this way in order to feel alive! So rather than feel sorry for himself, he urges others to revel in that pain until it's gone. La Botz hopes that Sing This to Yourself and Other Suggestions for a Personal Apocalypse will be "a comfort to those who are struggling." Oooh, it hurts so good. He's waist-deep in his third tour of performing at tattoo parlors across the country. If that's not enough to get you googling "Jake La Botz," you don't have a soul. Who he reminds you of: Tom Waits if he was only allowed to use a guitar." -INK 19 "Sing This to Yourself … and Other Suggestions for a Personal Apocalypse (Charnel Ground Records) Jake La Botz is clearly going to shoot his own face off. From the opening strains of “Hungry Again (Put Me in a Hole),” he’s a little Bob Dylan and a whole lotta suicide. The next song on his new album Sing This to Yourself begins with the word “depression” sung like Sylvia Plath smoked a carton of Luckys. This is not the evil Jake La Botz we knew and loved, whose deceptively old-man blues-growls emotionally abused his woman in “Things You’ve Got to Do for Me” – “and if you see another woman, just hope she ain’t better-looking, baby” – and who first got drunk at the age of 12, and who then rode the dog (the Greyhound, not Rick Santorum-bait). Now he doesn’t see her purse on the table today, and the world ended yesterday, and his family’s go