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Eric Anders and Mark O’Bitz Latest Release, STUCK INSIDE

By Kath Galasso on May 6, 2022

Award-winning Singer Songwriter duo Eric Anders and Mark O’Bitz continue their expansive MTC (music in the time of coronavirus) collection with the atypically electric full-length album “STUCK INSIDE”. “STUCK INSIDE” is the third installment in the MTC collection.

From the Artist:
Many of the songs on Stuck Inside are about the extreme self-centeredness and pathological narcissism that goes hand-in-hand with the Santa beliefs I sing about in the song “Big World Abide”–being trapped inside yourself, stuck inside, and lost at sea.

I believe that millions of people have responded to the trauma of the pandemic (combined with the trauma of Trump and the effects of global warming) by retreating into their narcissism, commodity fetishism, fundamentalisms, and the simplistic right-wing ideologies that grow out of all of these.

More info on “STUCK INSIDE” and the upcoming “VARIANT BLUES” is available here: https://www.andersobitz.com/post/small-world-abide.

Listen or buy on Bandcamp.
Stream on Soundcloud.
Stream on Spotify.

Track Order

Morton’s Pillory Plea
This Bird Don’t Fly
Lost At Sea
Tell It So
Trapped in Me
Stuck Inside
I’m Ceded
A Closed-Eye Seer

All Songs Written by Eric Anders and Mark O’Bitz

Artist Biography:
Northern Californian singer-songwriter, Eric Anders, and southern Californian guitarist-composer, Mark O’Bitz, will release their multiple-song collection “Music in the Time of Coronavirus” in four installments.

Their single, “Careful Now My Son”–the only truly Americana song in the collection–was released in December 2020.

The 8-song album, Sirens Go By, was released in February 2021 and contains songs done in the singer-songwriter style typical of the Anders/O’Bitz duo. Their 11-song album, Stuck Inside, was recently released (11/9/21) and contains songs with a bit more edge–a more rockin’ style. The 10-song album, Variant Blues, will be released in December, 2021.

All of the songs for this collection were written and recorded during the pandemic, and all of the work so far has been done remotely. The same goes for almost all of the musicians who contributed.

Eric, Mark, and Mike released a climate-change single, “Searise,” on March 5th, 2021. Soon after they released the “Searise” music video by Basque artist Joseba Elorza (Greenday). Eric and Mark wrote “Searise” with Eric’s daughter, Evelyn, when she was only eleven.

Eric and Mark released their twelve-song concept album, American Bardo, on July 31, 2020. American Bardo was recorded, produced, and mixed by Mike Butler of San Diego. All the songs were written by Eric and Mark and inspired by George Saunders’ Mann-Booker-Prize-winning novel, Lincoln in the Bardo. All the songs on American Bardo are what Eric calls “readings” related to one or more of the characters in the novel. Popmatters listed American Bardo among their top fifty Americana albums of 2020.

Eric and Mark took sixteen songs into the studio. The four songs on their forthcoming EP, This Mortal Farce, were not directly related to one of the characters in Saunders’ novel so they thought a separate EP would be a better way to release these four songs. This Mortal Farce will be Eric’s eleventh release (just counting EPs and LPs) and the duo’s fourth release.

Eric got into writing and recording songs in the early 2000s when he met Mark at one of Mark’s shows and the two decided to collaborate on music. Eric then tried to make up for lost time by releasing three critically-acclaimed solo releases in four years: Not At One (2003), Songs for Wayward Days (2004), More Regrets (2005), and Tethered to the Ground (2006).

In 2007, the duo’s song “So Wrong” from Tethered to the Ground was used in the Michael Schroeder film, Man in the Chair, starring Academy Award winner Christopher Plummer. The song “Big World Abide” from Tethered to the Ground was used in TV shows: the Dutch soap opera Goede Tijden, Slechte Tijden, and the Courtney Cox TV show, Dirt.

Eric wrote the majority of the songs on these early releases with Mark and this would hold true for his 2011 solo release, Remains In Me, his “best of Eric Anders” retrospective Big World Abide in 2016, and his anti-Trump album Eleven Nine in 2017.

As a duo, Eric and Mark would release Of All These Things in 2018 (their debut release as a duo), Ghosts To Ancestors in 2019, and American Bardo in 2020.