The Difficult Second Album began life pre-pandemic with the offer to present an earlier Tedious Work piece Trennungssongs of Togetherness as a guest performance at the Frankfurt LAB festival. Two years later as the festival was finally realised, times, minds and budgets had changed and The Difficult Second Album was born. Some aspects of Trennungssongs were brought forward into the performance (any good band knows that you still need to play the hits even at the launch of a new album), other aspects of Trennungssongs were lost to time, too “dangerous” for post-pandemic times, and of course many new “songs” (mostly meaning interactive games that create the opportunity for audience members to bring forth new musical compositions with no previous experience or training needed).

The resulting “work” had two aspects. A “merch stand” available across the duration of the festival where festival visitors could buy a hand designed and drawn t-shirt by Tedious Work for 50 euros by stuffing the money into an honesty box that found the form of a piñata. We were very explicit to say that whilst stealing the t-shirts would be illegal we wouldn’t, in this case, press charges. Throughout the festival, t-shirts slowly disappeared, some stolen and some paid for, shining an interesting light on the cross section of Frankfurt's audiences. The second aspect was a 3 hour long participatory concert presenting song after song, new ones and old ones mixed together alongside covers of songs made by children under 5, people over 70, famous people and a last minute doubling of the t-shirt price, all concluding with the smashing of the piñata and subsequent distribution of any money inside amongst the participating audience.

The Difficult Second Album, a Tedious Work production in cooperation with Frankfurt Lab Festival, Das Bett & Künstler*innenhaus Mousonturm was funded by „experimente#digital – eine Kulturinitiative der Aventis Foundation"

You can find the Comic-style documentation of the performance in Das Bett here