Blues for Youse is the print companion to a recording of the same name, blues lyrics by Eckhard Gerdes tuned to cadence and the spoken line, several of them performed and recorded with Hobo Coble, Foghat, Yesayes, Thorazine Hammer, Ember Schrag, Brion Poloncic, Bryan Day, and Penelope Gerdes. Gerdes describes his method, across forms, as simply "how I think," a refusal to bend prose or verse to conventional time, space, and causality. The verse sits in the same lineage as his fiction, shaped by Kenneth Patchen, Richard Brautigan, and the concrete and sound-led traditions JEF Books was founded to publish. Read on the page, these are lyrics waiting for their music. Heard on the recording, they are the same instinct working in another medium. The book is the place to read the words that the band was reading, with the pacing visible.
