Welcome to the Fangio listener's guide. I've put this together because I'm willing to concede that there might be one or two people who will hear this album and not bring to the experience an exhaustive pre-existing familiarity with the biography of five-time Formula One World Champion and Argentine icon Juan Manuel Fangio, and even if they did, might not understand why it would seem from these songs that he is still alive, for one thing, and seems to be involved with all kinds of international intrigue that has nothing to do with auto racing besides. Fair enough. The simplest place to begin is by expaining this album's origins, to the limited extent that even that's possible.
Back in the day, at the tender age of seventeen, I wrote a song for my Casio-powered solo project, Party of One, in which I imagined the retired legend Juan Manuel Fangio piloting a then-current model Saab Turbo across the Andes mountains on a covert mission to assassinate the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. I don't know why. What I knew of Fangio was that he seemed like the ultimate bad-ass of all time; I must've read something about what Pinochet was up to at the time and decided that Fangio would be a good candidate for a wish-fulfillment fantasy involving the former's demise. As for the Saab? No idea. I was a huge car nerd in high school (obviously) but regarded Saabs, as I recall, with not much more than incurious bemusement. It was only a decade later, after borrowing a friend's '86 Turbo to move, that I discovered their astonishing versatility and ingeniousness, and determined to one day own the car that accompanied Fangio on his fateful mission.
After yet another decade, that car is mine. And it is so brilliant that it compelled me to revisit the story of the assassin Fangio, and to bring him into the present day (to act out my remaining revenge fantasies, as it were). This entire project is essentially an album-length sequel to the bizarre little song I came up with in my bedroom in Chino, California in 1987. The Casio has been replaced by GarageBand.
Feel free to click on the above photo for the full-size by the way, and use at your discretion.