Even good boys at times get tired of endless rehearsals, and when weird live shows began to try their patience & good mood (Robert’s voice was literally shot for weeks), a silver lining in the form of the comforting isolation of the home recording studio luckily appeared on the horizon…

As you can very probably hear by this bunch of new (respectively older) songs we’re still good boys against all odds; therefore we assume you won’t mind us for not going into the CD’s title (*) in detail, not wanting

to embarrass the willing listener concerning

the different meanings of the word “boogie”….

A while ago a friend of mine – a passionate photographer – made a series of portraits of friends

& fellows, just for the fun of it. I immediately loved those pix and kept them in mind for a future CD cover. So when in late autumn 2012 I had largely finished the recordings of a new CD (“Final Pay”), me & Rob Viper began to design a cover based on these pix.

Only: the resulting cover didn’t go together well with the songs and vice versa. Being dissatisfied with the CD anyway (for a coupla reasons, mostly personal), without further ado I put it on hold.

Then I tried to look at them pix with different eyes, and out of nowhere a line from

"As you like it" came to me ("All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players"); and so the same day I wrote “The Players”, and things started happening…

TOUGH BUT GENTLE – A Performace Review.....

These songs’ve been released on various albums from 2004 to 2009 (except track 6, which was never released in this version).....They’re still some of my favourite recordings from the first decade of

the new millennium; kinda “Greatest Hits”,

so to speak – only, they were never hits.....

The whole bundle here was produced by

The Bullhead Twins; Gabriel P. Senftle did

the photography & the sleeve design.

Awaitin my promotion....Robert Allen, June 2011

Ye see, I ain’t no political guy, so I never took great pains to write songs that deal with political issues;

say writin “topical” or “protest” songs, as they’re called.

Anyway, a lotta songs on this album deal with the political “global” world in one way or the other -

my only apology for this “faux-pas” is....hm...well....why, let’s say these songs wrote themselves down on their own, dig? 

By the way: what would Romeo (or Juliet)

have done if he (or she) had survived? 

Bet they would’ve written great love songs!!!

See ya next time on the balcony...

Here’s something I learned (besides makin music...

then again by makin music):

Life’s too fractious to rope it in a coupla songs for long & there’s no solutions to the equations of love & art...

but it’s well worth tryin.

My favourite album...so far.