These notes clock in at almost 14,000 words. You don’t have to go any farther to see them, but they’re also on peterstampfel.com where you can also find my Peter Stampfel’s 20th Century in 100 Songs, all the songs, along with the 20,000-word song notes and the 20,000-word overview of the century’s pop music. You’ll also find liner notes from the Wildernauts album there, too (that’s from early 2024; Eli Smith, Walker Shepard and me).
If spiritual stuff annoys you, you may want to skip the first section of these liner notes, which is about prayer, why I stopped doing it, why I started doing it again and how I do it.
I dearly love to annotate every album track, and here I get to do it 46 times, along with details about how I, to my great delight, fell into the super-short-song rabbit hole.
The final section is about the Dunbar number. If you want to know what that is, and I think everyone should know, you’ll have to read it. You may think my take on it is crackpot bullshit. That’s ok. I think it’s one of the best ideas I ever had. I even think it’s Very Important Stuff. Which sounds like crackpot bullshit. That’s ok, too.
Have fun! It’s later than you think.

Welcome to a look at how prayer leads to songwriting, how songs gone forgotten have a way of finding their way back and just how many people you can actually be friends with. Words and ideas by Peter Stampfel, meant to accompany a series of jingles, short catchy songs, created and recorded by Peter Stampfel, along with his daughters and friends. Because maps and guides are often useful in learning where you are, here are the headings and topics you’ll find as you read further on:

Never Wrote about Prayer Before
It’s an Inside Job: Soul Jingles & Stoic Jingles
Soul Jingles & Stoic Jingles, Tracks 1-20
Capitalism’s Sonic Heraldry: Vintage Jingles
Vintage Jingles, Tracks 1-26
The Muse Never Stops: Four New Songs
The Dunbar Number & I