This week, Weybridge songwriter Camden Joy (AKA Tom Adelman) released two new CDs of original music, “Rerouting…” and “Roaming On.”

“There are 27 songs,” Adelman explained. “They are, for the most part, narrative songs, sung in the first person. Many feature bass and drums, accordion and ukulele. Many share the same characters. And yet few of the songs are slow, and few are similar to one another in style.”

Adelman insists that local listeners, “will experience these releases like the Addison County Fair & Field Days: unimaginably immense, intense and full of wonder. The heart pounds. The brain spins. You are drawn deep inside yourself. You taste sugar, perhaps smell animals. A sprawl of appetites are satisfied.”

Although “Camden Joy” is more often known now as a great basic crewneck made in Portugal and sold by the Sundance Catalog (“a draping heathered look and the flattering surprise of a ruffled sleeve”), once Camden Joy was just a guy who earned fleeting fame for a series of inflammatory New York City street postering projects in the mid-1990s. 

Working under that pseudonym, Adelman also produced radioplays, and wrote and published two highly controversial novels, three novellas, and a story collection. Camden Joy was on NPR’s “This American Life.” His story “Dum Dum Boys” appears in MacMillan’s 12th edition of the textbook “Literature: The Human Experience” (2017). His review of the rock band Spoon appears in Library of America’s “Shake it Up: Great American Writing on Rock and Pop” (2017).

Check out these two new albums of Camden Joy originals now available through most streaming services or on Bandcamp.com. 

For more information, visit camdenjoy.net.