When Matthew Sweet launched the Kickstarter to fund his next album in the middle of 2014, he seemed to have a pretty clear mission in mind, as he shared in the video laying out his goals for the project. “I'm going to write all new songs and make demos for the album, focusing on a strong clear delivery, energetic and heartfelt from rock to melancholy and back again.”

“My idea with it is that I would try to maybe go back to the past and approach it more like I would have long ago,” Sweet explained in an interview at that time. “You know, it’s been a long time since I’ve made demos for things, because I can record at home, I’ll just be writing while I’m recording still. I thought this time it might be cool to write all of the songs first, make demos of them and then take what goes on the album out of those demos.”

The longtime singer-songwriter had a lot of things that would end up inspiring the material that he wrote for the album that became Tomorrow Forever, which is being released this week. He moved back to his home state of Nebraska after 20 years in California and found that his new/old surroundings contributed an interesting element that he wasn’t necessarily expecting.

“It makes me think about my childhood more. Not in a way that I want to write songs about my childhood anymore than I ever have, but the feeling of what it was like when I grew up here and my view of the world and nature-wise, I really feel it,” he said in a 2015 conversation. “The changing of the seasons and those things, it’s just really different from what I’ve had for so many years. I’ve toured through seasons and stuff, but to be in a place where I really watch that cycle, it’s just kind of amazing.”

Sweet tasked himself with writing several batches of songs with the idea that he would wind up with a large amount of material to pick from for the album once he was finished. Despite his initial stated intentions, he ended up bypassing the demo process due to time constraints, shifting straight into recording instead. But that didn’t change his overall output -- he wrote and fully recorded 38 songs for the album and wound up with 17 songs on the final record, sequencing an additional 12 for the “bonus” album Tomorrow’s Daughter, which will go to Kickstarter supporters.

Fans will find that the resulting album is more than worth the wait. Sweet has crafted a record that stands tall with his finest work from the past and even at 17 tracks, it’s one that never overstays its welcome. Tomorrow Forever is a wonderfully diverse musical journey that you’ll find yourself going back to time and time again.

We spoke with Sweet recently from his Nebraska home, to talk about the new album.

You and I first talked about this new record back in July of 2014 when you were knee-deep in the crowdfunding campaign for the album. It’s been a long odyssey of activity since then. You must be so thrilled to have this new album done and in your hands!

I just got my first advance copies of the CD, so I am finally seeing something myself, other than the test pressings [of vinyl]. So yeah, I’m really excited about it. I’m excited to be fulfilling everything for the Kickstarter and feeling like I’m finally coming through for everybody.

It really seems like the amount of time you were able to spend working on this album was a good benefit.

You know, it’s not like I sort of overworked the record. I didn’t spend a whole lot of time on any specific things. But I did really try to do multiple batches of songs and have a lot to pull from and I think that really is probably the biggest difference about this record is that I did those batches.

Do you think that you were able to stay in control of the project? I know that you recorded 38 songs to draw on for this new album, but I also know that was part of the original plan, to have a lot of material to choose from to end up with an album that you were really going to be happy with.

I think I was. You know, there was enough stuff in the end to kind of listen to and decide about that I did include a handful of people around me, family members and a couple of other friends. I gave them all of the songs with the instruction to just come up with your favorite 15 songs. Most people wanted about 20. They could get it down to 20 or 21. But I found that in that sort of top 14 or 15 songs, we all had kind of the same ones.

It was an experiment to sort of get that much feedback from people before I decided myself what the record was going to be. But all it really did was sort of confirm for me the things that I felt. You know, we all had certain songs that we were maybe into that not everybody was. But there was enough room for that and I don’t feel like, by the time it was done, anybody was disappointed in how it came out.

It’s interesting to me too, because the album is 17 songs, but it doesn’t feels like it runs long. It’s really well-paced and it doesn’t feel like a record that overstays its welcome.

Oh, that makes me happy. Because I don’t want it to feel like it’s too much. But I had so much to pull from. You know, I did have room to put quite a few things on it. I have to credit my wife, who sat with me when I was sequencing the record and she also has a really good feel for what songs do well following other songs. It was fun to kind of do that together. She was sitting with me with headphones on when I was trying different things and we always sort of agreed. So it was a little bit like having an assistant engineer, which I don’t usually have these days! [Laughs] Somebody who I could actually bounce an idea off of.

Had she ever done that with you on a record before?

I don’t know if she really had. I think she maybe had done it in the sense of spacings, like how long should go in between songs. But I don’t think that she ever really had been there with me when I was taking the songs and figuring out what went first and second and third and all of that. It really kind of defines itself. It’s kind of an amazing thing about sequencing something. At least for me, you can’t just decide it’s going to be this, this, this and this. The songs have a feel to them and certain ones just don’t work if you try and put them in a certain place. Even occasionally, there might be one or two songs that ended up [in a certain place] because we needed a song like that. There may be a few of those songs that were on the edge of the list, one or the other was kind of more needed somewhere in the sequence. So they kind of helped sequence themselves a little bit.

Absolutely. When you and I spoke in 2015, you were wrapping up work on a batch of songs where you said you were leaning “more towards some less incredibly moody or morose kind of music and more of trying to get into having fun playing guitar and recording and having some attitudes about things.” You said at that point that you had saved some “moody specialness” for your last batch of songs that would come next. Some artists don’t necessarily think in those terms and I think it shows that you’re connected to knowing what your fans like from you and delivering on that in some form.

Well, to me, when I was young and a fan of records, more than I am now, really -- I don’t follow music so much. I really liked when records were diverse in what was on them. They had a good balance of different kinds of things. So I had a sense about that for this record. And that is unusual -- I don’t think I’ve ever really done that before where I sort of ... I did have the last batch, it was the ones that I did with Debbi Peterson [of the Bangles] playing drums on them, where all of the ideas were kind of really slow songs. In those slow songs is when the moodier stuff tends to happen. Even though they were only fledgling sort of ideas when we recorded them. That was an unusual thing a little bit, for me.

But yes, that’s part of the thing of doing the multiple batches, was just having the feeling that I’d covered all of the bases. Just going, you know, I don’t really have much in terms of a nice slow ballad, so I’ll do a batch where I’m likely to be able to pull a couple of those from it. And for me, that was just doing a really slow batch. I know the second batch I did, tended to be more upbeat and almost more of a power pop sort of thing. It had “Trick” in it and “Circle” and I want to say that maybe “The Searcher” was in it. I think the first batch was probably more of the wide range, like I would normally just make a record, if I was doing just one big batch of songs. I started with that and then I could kind of specialize in the next couple of batches.

“Trick” is the first thing that people are going to hear when they put on this album and I’d love to hear you talk about that song a little bit, how it developed. I loved this particular lyrical sequence, in the chorus. "Sometimes / It's just a trick of the light we see / Always hard to tell what could be real / Is it just a trick of the light / That only shows / Shows us who we want to be." Those are beautiful lyrics.

I love that you’re quoting them! That’s so nice. You know, it wasn’t something I thought about a lot at the time. In fact, I thought of the song as a pretty simple rock song and it was created easily. It was originally a riff and a melody and Ric [Menck] came and played drums and we just kind of banged it out. It had a certain sort of spirit to it that I really liked. That just ended up sort of being what the words are. And I loved hearing you separate them, because a lot of the time, songs that are sort of the more upbeat, for lack of a better word, the “single” kind of songs that would have been ideas for singles back in the day of the record business, those songs so often tend to be something that’s a lot more of a throwaway.

You know, that’s why I was really excited for instance when “Sick of Myself” was successful. Because it actually had sort of an interesting lyric which was a little deeper than just “let’s all have fun” or whatever. I guess, hearing you say that, from “Trick,” it makes me think the same thing that a sentiment got in there that was interesting and not just fun.

Listening to that one today, it struck me that that song sounds like it could have been a spiritual cousin to “What Matters” from the In Reverse album in another life and that kind of triggered the thought that this album feels very similar to that, in the sense that you really worked in exploratory ways sonically, fleshing out the songs on this record in a way that perhaps you haven’t done as much on some of the more recent records.

I think that could be true. Just the very nature of how I recorded it, made for it to be a wider range of feeling and ideas. More recent records, I just didn’t over-record the way that I did this record. It’s funny, because in the Kickstarter, the original idea was that I was going to make demos in order to achieve the same thing that we’re talking about. Make tons of demos and then pull from them to make the album. But it took me so long to get into working on the record and my mother had passed away and I just wasn’t ready really to start. It became apparent that it would take even longer if I made demos. So instead, any idea I had, pretty much became a real recording. The people who got the demos download actually just get an album’s worth of songs that come up next in everybody’s list, sort of.

I thought that was kind of cool, too. Because I’m kind of a completist, I was jazzed about getting all of the demos. When that changed to you curating a second album’s worth of tracks, that had to be pretty fun for you.

Well, it was really fun and it also helped in the sequencing of the main record to know that those things were going to be heard. I kind of thought, I’ll make it this satellite record. Eventually, I hope to release it on vinyl and CD and actually make it available. But for starters, it’s going to only be in these downloads.

You mentioned your mother passing away. It seems like there’s been a lot of change in your world, between you moving back to Nebraska and that. It would seem that would leave you with a lot to write about.

I guess so, I mean, I didn’t think specifically about my circumstances. I kind of never approach it that way. But yeah, so many differences. So many things changing, has to have affected the record. Just being here, where I was when I was growing up, when I first fell in love with electric guitar and was a real music fan, it kind of connects me to the excitement I had about it in the beginning. For me, I’m a person who, I’ve lived so many places and gone all over the place since I had success.

I’m a person that whenever everybody would talk about, “Oh, remember when we did this when we were 10 years old?” and “I remember when you said that when we were 17.” I always kind of felt like I didn’t really remember what people were talking about. Like, I almost had this sort of blank on those years when I was really young for some reason. Coming back here, sort of relieved that. It’s kind of like, everything started coming back to me and now I feel sort of more whole as a person, because I kind of better absorbed where I came from.

Your mother figures in as an influence on “You Knew Me,” right?

On “You Knew Me,” yes. In particular, I remember feeling….the part that would make me sort of tear up is in the outro of the song when it’s saying, “Afraid of yourself / Afraid of me / Afraid of myself / Afraid of you.” My mother and I were very similar. We both suffer from bipolar disorder. But she was never diagnosed and that was never really discussed between us. There was a certain friction, always. Besides the fact that we loved each other a lot. There was always a little bit of awkwardness in how we interacted and I think those words sort of touched on that for me and I know that, because when I hear it, it makes me get a feeling that brings me to the edge of tearing up.

That was the exact sequence of lyrics really dug at me. No matter what our relationship is with our parents, we’ve all wrestled with that.

Yeah, I could see that. “You Knew Me,” it just represents so easily, that sort of [feeling], “I know who you are and you know who I am!” [Laughs] That kind of “I’ve got your number” thing.

“Come Correct” is another favorite on this record. What can you tell me about that one?

That was one that I really thought of as more of a throwaway song. I didn’t think of it as something that I would probably put on the record. It was just kind of a little different vibe to it. A little more of a bluesy thing. It wasn’t something I’ve typically done. I think I’ve done some things a little like it before. But what happened is, it had this sort of life of its own. Not only did it grow on me, but in the realm of people who did listening and choosing, all of everybody picked that song and put it high up in their choosing. That kind of helped me think, there’s something about it, I shouldn’t deny it. [Laughs] I’m going to include it on the record. So it kind of worked its way in by its own muscle. It’s also kind of one of the only upbeat tracks that I did with Debbi playing drums. It has a certain real straight forward [feel] but it’s a little more upbeat than some of the slow things we did.

How much can you see how the individual players on this material kind of colored the vibe of the songs that they played on?

I think a lot. It was another one of the x factors of the record. Anyone who played on it, none of them had me say, “I want you to do something like this or do this or do that.” All of them, I said, “Play whatever you want.” Even for me, it was a surprise and kind of like Christmas when I would receive parts from people. And so very much so, the way people played, helped to color things. Even how the guitar players combined when they weren’t together.

I know there’s a lot of things where John Moreman had played some lead guitar and then I had Val McCallum -- named “Valentine” in the credits -- I said, “I’m going to call you by your full name and he was into it. [Laughs] Val would play a lot of really beautiful slide and some other types of instruments besides just normal guitar. When he combined with what someone else had done, it was beautiful. When he played and it was on its own, it was beautiful. Everybody had something really good to offer, I thought.

A lot of this stuff was organic. If I recall correctly, Debbi ended up playing on stuff because Ric was not available for those sessions.

That’s how it happened. I love Debbi and I’ve known her for a long time and I’ve recorded her as a drummer before and so I know she’s a really good drummer. But Ric was down with a couple of things he had to do. I was kind of ready to go to make that third batch, trying to kind of stay in the flow so I didn’t get further behind than I already was. But I think it’s cool, because it probably also helped differentiate some of the stuff a little bit.

I know that you had produced her on the Bangles' Sweetheart of the Sun record. When you kind of had the idea you’re going to bring somebody in, you probably had in mind, some pretty interesting things that she might bring to the songs, which would be cool.

I just knew that she was a very strong, direct kind of drummer. And you know, she had to have it laid on her, like all of these really slow things. [Laughs] It was a certain kind of batch of what I needed and it was very fledgling. Most of the songs weren’t worked out and I didn’t have words on a lot of them. Just a little bit more basic melody, so I would give her some melody and a guitar to play along with and she did great. She just kept it simple and played cool little Beatle-like fills and things. I was really pleased by how it all came out. I think she had fun too. You know, it was to me, a big deal that she traveled out here to Omaha to play on my record. I don’t just expect people to want to travel to go play on things. So it meant a lot to me that she came out. Ric was really gracious about the fact that she played on it. He does so many amazing things [on this album] that it doesn’t really infringe on his thing at all.

How did you connect with Val?

I’ve known Val for many years, just through friends in Los Angeles and him being around. In recent years, he’s been playing with my friend Greg Leisz.

Oh right. That makes sense!

He and Val did a bunch of stuff where they were interacting on some Lucinda Williams stuff recently. I went to visit them -- Jackson Browne was playing in Sioux City, Iowa. I drove up -- it’s about a hundred miles north of Omaha -- a friend of mine and my wife and I drove up there to see Greg and say hi. My idea was sort of, I’m going to pin those two down and say I want to get the two of you to play on some songs. I even wrote some certain songs for them in mind. As it turns out, Greg didn’t really have time to do it, because he was so bogged down in touring during the time it was happening. So we decided, okay, well Val’s going to start doing some stuff and Greg can do something later, but Val really ended up delivering the whole thing for both of them. [Laughs]

It was really fun getting to know him, even though it was from a remote location, we had great email correspondence and talked about lots of things in life. I think that Val probably didn’t know too much what to expect from me. Like, I wouldn’t assume he knew my music particularly well. I may be wrong, but it felt like he was kind of discovering something new while he was playing on it and it made it really fun. He played on much more than I expected to have him play on. Because he just kept doing these fresh little parts and things that were so useful and then I would go, “How about one or two more!” [Laughs] And then I’d lay a couple more on him and he’d do them. He ended up playing on quite a bit of stuff. There’s some great stuff he did. There’s great stuff from everybody that isn’t even on the main album in terms of playing. That’s one of the things I think on what I call Tomorrow’s Daughter, the secondary album -- there’s a lot of things that are on there that are really cool that people played.

Val is such a cool player. I first had the chance to see him a few years ago with Jackson. Having heard Val on the records, it was cool to watch him do his thing live. He’s just a really solid player.

He’s a solid player and he’s also a really cool person. You know, he’s a person who, every time I’ve known him and kind of been around him, I just had a feeling about him, that somehow we were kindred spirits. I think that there’s really a lot of feeling in Val and a little bit of a sadness and a thing underneath that I feel like we both have. To see it work out so beautifully, having him play on it...and he got so excited, I mean, even like when I sent him what the cover was going to look like, he was so excited about it. It was so great. The only terrible thing is that I promised him that no way was [Donald] Trump going to win and be President and I was wrong. I was like, “I promised you, I’m sorry!” [Laughs]

I think we all promised a lot of people that.

Like I did, he had a couple of real blowouts with parents and stuff over it. So he was wound up about it as I was wound up about it and many of us were, I guess. I was like, “Don’t worry, there’s no way that he’s going to win, I promise you. Don’t worry.” It’s funny, because my wife and I went and had dinner with some friends of ours here in Omaha and I also deeply promised all of them not to worry. [Laughs] So when he won, I immediately thought, “Oh God, I promised Val and I promised these other guys.” But you know, I realize, it’s not my fault.

You and Gary Louris of the Jayhawks go back. How did he wind up wrapped up in the stuff that he’s on on this record?

Well, it’s another thing where he came near to me here in Omaha, so he was on my mind. He came to play at a festival called MAHA and I actually played it the year after that. But the Jayhawks were playing and it’s really near my house, so I went down there and after the show, went backstage and said hi. I said, “I’m starting work on this record and I’d love it if you’d do some playing on it.”

Shortly after that, I sent him a couple of tracks and he played and sang on them and did great and sounded great. So there it was, Gary Louris on a record of mine. It’s funny, because I’ve been on records of theirs before, I’ve sung on some things. But I don’t know if I’ve ever had….I could be wrong and be spacing something, but I don’t think I ever had Gary on my records before this. He did some really cool singing along and he’s on two songs, “Country Girl” and “Nobody Knows.” On both of them, he did really interesting things.

I could spend a lot of time talking with you about all of the folks you worked with on this record. You were really fortunate to work with some great people. Rod Argent seems like it would have been a bucket list moment for you, getting him on this record.

Yeah, it was really exciting. You know, it was another circumstance. This time, the Zombies were playing in Denver, doing Odessey and Oracle and I really wanted to see them, even though I hate to fly. My wife and I flew to Denver, just to go see them play the record. I was lucky enough to be able to go back and meet them afterwards. Darian [Sahanaja] from Brian Wilson’s band is the musical director of the Odessey and Oracle thing, keeping track of all of the parts and helping everybody get it to what it was. I happen to know him pretty well, so that was a huge relief.

I was super, super nervous to meet them. If anyone ever talks to Darian, he can confirm that. [Laughs] Because he saw and he could tell how nervous I was, so he was really gracious and introduced me to everybody. I kind of blabbed out to Rod that I’d love it if he would play some keyboards on something and he acted like he would be into it. I kept in touch with the management and I sent songs and I never got a no. It was always like, “We think it can work out,” but it took a really long time. It was frustrating, only because I wanted to tell the Kickstarter supporters, guess what, Rod Argent’s going to play on my record, but I couldn’t. You know, I couldn’t say, “There’s this one person I’m really hoping I’ll get, but I can’t tell you who it is!”

But in the end, it worked out and he ended up getting an engineer to his house and he played grand piano on two songs. One of them’s called “Hello” and the other one’s called “Haunted” and on both of them, his piano just blew me away. I can remember, I’m having another memory with my wife Lisa, she’s the only one around at my house, so she often shows up with me in the things I’m talking about! [Laughs] But I remember when we received those piano parts and I put them in the tracks for the first time and cranked them up and we were just so blown away by the musicality.

You know, I’ve played in the past with some of those classic ‘60s piano players. Nicky Hopkins played a bunch on Altered Beast, so I knew what it is, that feeling of somebody that’s really great in that way and what they can bring to a performance. But it still blew me away, all over again, hearing Rod play. It just had such incredible sensitivity to the music, but also a real strength and kind of backbone in it. I’m eternally grateful.

I had a chance see Ian McLagan play at a local studio once here doing some rehearsing. It’s always fascinating to be sharing the same air with guys like that, watching them do their thing.

Yeah, I was about to say Ian McLagan too! I did a session with him one time. It was a song for the movie Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

“Silent City,” right?

Yeah, “Silent City!” Ian played on that. The other noteworthy thing about it is that the day that he did that session was the day of the L.A. riots. At the studio, we were in fear to get across the street to get to our cars, because people were running past and they’re like, “They’ve taken the 7-Eleven up the street.” It was really mayhem. Robert Quine was there with me as well and he was really wigging out about it. We were staying at the Hollywood Roosevelt and ended up that it was sort of on lockdown where you had to be in the hotel. So when I think of Ian, I often think of that day.

When I saw him, he was rehearsing with the Faces for their induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. When he wasn’t rehearsing with them, he would go over to the grand piano in one of the side rooms and he would just sit down and play on that. It’s really cool to see somebody like that that when they don’t have to be musical, they’re still musical.

Yeah, piano players are amazing. I am really in awe of guys like that that really have control over the piano. It was the same way with Nicky Hopkins. He was so musical, he literally would come into the session, he’d never heard the song before and we’d play him the song on the console and then he would go in the other room and write a chart. He didn’t have to hit a key and find what the notes were and then adapt it -- he had in his head what he’d just heard and could write out the whole chord chart for it without hearing it again and then just play it perfect the first time. It was one of the craziest things I’d ever seen. You know, guys like Greg Leisz sort of have that ability and Val probably does too, but I’ve only seen it a few times.

Talking about that soundtrack cut, I was thinking earlier about all of the stuff you’ve done over the years. B-sides, things from soundtracks and all of that. Your cover of “Speed Racer,” the cover of [Walter Egan'] "Magnet & Steel,” it seems like you could put out a pretty mammoth odds and sods collection. Would you ever have interest in pursuing a project like that?

Sure, I would be into it! You know, always highest on my list is making new records, but it’s not something I would be against, if it came together somehow. It would be fun to see how many of those things we could sort of pull together and how it would sit.

I have a collection that a fan had put together in the ‘90s that was like three CDs. So there’s an epic amount of stuff that’s out there.

It’s amazing to think about, to me even, how much stuff there is. I did an interview recently that was specifically about soundtrack stuff. I had so many songs that were songs from my records that ended up on soundtracks, but also, I did quite a few things specifically for stuff. There’s a guy named Ralph Sall, who was doing a ton of teen movies in the early ‘90s when I was starting to be successful and quite a few projects of his, I played on. Some of them, I was just a session guy, like, I would play bass and it was Jennifer Love Hewitt singing some song for a movie. So we had a lot of fun times.

How did that cover of “Magnet & Steel” come about? Lindsey Buckingham’s on that, right?

Lindsey is on it. I believe, if I’m not mistaken, Susanna Hoffs also sings on that.

That’s right!

I forget what it was for [ed. note: Sabrina the Teenage Witch]. It must have been for a movie, I’m thinking, and the movie must have wanted that song. I remember that Lindsey was over recording in one of the other rooms. I believe we were at Ocean Way, either Ocean Way or what used to be United Western, which became Cello. I think that Lindsey was over in the part that was Cello and we were in the part that was Ocean Way. But Ralph knew Lindsey a little bit and we kind of got to know him a little bit, because we were around a bunch of times doing these soundtrack things and he was over there for a real block of time recording Lindsey’s stuff. And a lot of what he was recording at that time, is just amazing stuff. But it kind of went by the wayside for them to make another proper Fleetwood Mac record.

So there’s another wealth of Lindsey stuff that I’m sure is around by this point. I had CDs of it at the time that somebody gave to me. But anyhow, so we would see him and I would usually smoke weed in the studio and he was smoking weed at that time. We’d hang out and do some smoking and hang out in one of the lounges. I remember one time, he handed me that guitar of his, the Ron Turner guitar that’s the kind of classic electric that Lindsey played a lot. I got to sort of play that guitar while we were sitting around. And so it was an easy thing to say, “Hey, come and sing on this!”

You mentioned Susanna and it seems like there’s a wealth of things that are in your vault and still unreleased from the albums of covers that you’ve done with her in the Under the Covers series. There are some pretty tantalizing things in there as far as some of the songs you guys chose and put on the shelf. What will it take to get you to put out some of that stuff out?

I think there is hope for that. I know that Susanna would really like to do it and that’s a big part of it. I’m totally open to doing it. It’s just that we would have to spend the time to wade through the stuff and finish some of it and we’d have to finish out how exactly to release it. But it’s definitely something I would be open to.

Having seen you do the Girlfriend full album tour several years ago, did you record any of those shows? Would there be a possibility of a live Girlfriend tour release from that?

You know, I’ll bet that probably some of it got recorded. I don’t know of anything specifically, but these days, people will tend to record shows sometimes and give us CDs of it at the end. You know, they can’t use them unless we say to use them. That could easily exist, but I can’t say for sure.

Here at the end of this whole odyssey, are you happy with the record you ended up with?

I’m happy with the record I ended up with. I’m happy to be finally fulfilling on all of the other things. We’re really excited to go tour. We’re going to tour really extensively this summer, starting in July and go a lot of places that we haven’t been in a while. I think it’s going to be a fun record to take around and we’re certainly going to play at least three or four songs off the record, which is unusual for a new record, for me to drop that much stuff on an unsuspecting crowd, but there just seemed to be things that scream out for us to play live. So we’re going to try to really incorporate it.

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