(2012)

Possibly Shapiro's most idiosyncratic recording is 100 Houses: Gatsby Meets Caulfield, a full vocal album of songs based upon the literary masterpieces The Great Gatsby and The Catcher In The Rye. After leaving Conservatory, Shapiro reread both novels consecutively once a year for six straight years and, taking a leaf from both William Burroughs and David Bowie, he highlighted words and phrases in both books over time, put them in a word processor and jumbled them up to form lyrics. According to Shapiro, "The idea was to imagine if Jay Gatsby met Holden Caulfield and had a talk about how they’d do things differently if they had a chance to do things all over again.”

--Mark Prendergast, author, The Ambient Century