icon-sized Surprise cover, baby with water covering the top half of its forehead

CrackingTheSimonCode
What's This?

What Are the "Cracking Contents"?

Navigating From the Cracking Contents you are one click from any page in the site. From any other page, the baby icons (album covers) are links back to the Cracking Contents. You may find the additional bottom-of-page navigators helpful (most pages).

What's Here? The main table provides choices for each track, including two forms of lyrics, annotations (see below) and then the blog postings and "crackings" from the CrackingTheSimonCode blog .

Start with Annotations If you are new to Surprise (it's devilishly complex!) you'll find the Annotations a good place to start. Pick any track, open the annotations and play the track. You'll see that the different musical sections are color coded.
If you don't yet own the CD you can find 30 second clips of each song at amazon.com. When you get the album, you'll find that viewing the annotations here make it easier to follow these not at all random tracks.

Avoiding the Crackings Until you know these tracks, avoid the Crackings. Get to know the tracks at least well enough to be thoroughly confused. Then you come to a fork in the road. The blogs give some hints for those who want to do their own cracking (which is the most fun!). If that's still not enough, the "crackings" give one man's opinions on what these tracks are about. (Not what they "mean," just what they're about.)

Using the "Surprise (all tracks)" Pages For serious Surprise scholars, the all-tracks pages make it easy to use your browser's find capability (Ctrl+F in all major browsers) to answer multi-track questions, such as, "How many places does Surprise mention the color 'brown'?". (Use the lyrics, either form.) Or, "Where is the heartbeat in the music?". (Use the annotations.)

Other The "Credits" page gathers all credits in one place. The "Reviews" page has summaries of, and links to, lots of reviews, overwhelmingly favorable and overwhelmingly unaware of what's going on in Surprise.

Click Me!

Navigating	From the Cracking Contents you are one click from any page in the site. From any other page, the baby icons (album covers) are links back to the Cracking Contents. You may find the additional bottom-of-page navigators helpful (most pages).
What's Here?	The main table provides choices for each track, including two forms of lyrics, annotations (see below) and then the blog postings and "crackings" from the CrackingTheSimonCode blog .
Start with Annotations	If you are new to Surprise (it's devilishly complex!) you'll find the Annotations a good place to start. Pick any track, open the annotations and play the track. You'll see that the different musical sections are color coded. If you don't yet own the CD you can find 30 second clips of each song at amazon.com. When you get the album, you'll find that viewing the annotations here make it easier to follow these not at all random tracks.
Avoiding the Crackings	Until you know these tracks, avoid the Crackings. Get to know the tracks at least well enough to be thoroughly confused. Then you come to a fork in the road. The blogs give some hints for those who want to do their own cracking (which is the most fun!). If that's still not enough, the "crackings" give one man's opinions on what these tracks are about. (Not what they "mean," just what they're about.)
Using the "Surprise (all tracks)" Pages	For serious Surprise scholars, the all-tracks pages make it easy to use your browser's find capability (Ctrl+F in all major browsers) to answer multi-track questions, such as, "How many places does Surprise mention the color 'brown'?". (Use the lyrics, either form.) Or, "Where is the heartbeat in the music?". (Use the annotations.)
Other	The "Credits" page gathers all credits in one place. The "Reviews" page has summaries of, and links to, lots of reviews, overwhelmingly favorable and overwhelmingly unaware of what's going on in Surprise.