What's This Music For?

In the fall of 2012 I took a class online called “Recording with Reason” (referring to the software package made by Propellerhead); as part of that class I had to choose a reference track from a commercial CD as a starting point in recording and mixing a song.  My reference track was “Girlfriend is Better” by Talking Heads, and the song I ended up writing was “Skeleton Crew”.  It lacked the second verse, guitar solo, and the “second chorus” at the end, but in other respects, it was pretty similar to the end product you hear.  In fact, some parts of the Chameleon Red recording recycle bits from the original class project.

When I finished writing the song, December 1, 2012, I had just been laid off from my day job, which may explain the bent of the resulting lyrics and the fantasy of revenge on greedy corporate dudes.  The “second chorus” is an adaptation of the well-known (and creepy) “dry bones” passage in the Bible, Ezekiel 37:1-3. An engraving by 19^th-century French artist Gustave Doré, illustrating this passage, was incorporated into the Skeleton Crew cover art.

The video was mostly recorded in one evening. I had a hard time keeping a straight face during the filming of the “presentation”, especially when I copped a move from David Byrne’s frenetic performance in the “Once in a Lifetime” video.  The “Night at the Roxbury” skull heads were filmed later and were also laughter-inducing. John designed the actual presentation that is seen in the video quite a long time after those scenes were filmed.

What do you get when you combine a clandestine love affair, a kiddie show host, and two Michael McDonald impersonators?  Why, our music video for “Paragon”, of course.  This is the fourth single from Skeleton Crew, and I think you’ll find that it’s unforgettable.  Whether that’s a good or bad thing is another matter.  Is it a zany tour-de-farce?  Is it the worst video ever made?  Is it both?  You decide!

Here’s a teaser from our next music video, coming soon.  Yes, everything is better with beards.

“Westwood” was written on January 28, 2013, in the midst of recording Skeleton Crew, and was the last song written for that album. I had a dream that I was writing a song with Tom Petty. I was showing him the working lyric sheet, where I had written the original lyrics and my friend Will Henson had made some notes underneath. Petty was questioning me about the story told in the song, to clarify its meaning. I could hear him singing the song in the dream. In the middle of all this, my wife unintentionally woke me up. Fortunately, the melody of the song was still in my head, as well as the words we were working on, which ended up being the third verse and a little of the chorus. I also remembered the title of the song. I lay in bed but couldn’t get to sleep, and bit by bit I began to write down the lyrics in the dark so I wouldn’t forget them. After I while I got out of bed, grabbed a guitar, and finished writing the words and the music; within an hour I had the song finished and a demo recorded. I always felt like the song resembled some other song, but I could never identify what it was. For me, Westwood is where “progress” is always leading us. It sounds great in theory but the results are usually not all they’re cracked up to be.

The video was mostly recorded on the highways around my house, and at a friend’s home. There is also some footage of Trammel, VA, an old coal-mining “company town” not far from where I grew up; it was hit hard economically as coal mines and preparation plants were shut down in latter part of the last century.

More love for mondegreens (misheard lyrics).  Here are a few from people I know personally, including me.  Again, no names have been used, to protect the guilty.

Hannah/Barbera: “Meet the Flintstones”
Misheard lyrics: “Let’s ride with the family down the street/Through the courtesy of Fred’s Boutique”
Real lyrics: “…Through the courtesy of Fred’s two feet”

The Young Rascals: “Good Lovin'”
Misheard lyrics: “Doodle up!”
Real lyrics: “Good lovin’!”

Martin Briley: “Salt In My Tears”
Misheard lyrics: “You ain’t worth the salt in my ears”
Real lyrics: “You ain’t worth the salt in my tears”

The Flying Burrito Brothers: “Colorado”
Misheard Lyrics: “From a rat-hole”
Real Lyrics: “Colorado”

The Doors: “Roadhouse Blues”
Misheard Lyrics: “Back at the roadhouse they got some bumpy lows”
Real Lyrics: “”Back at the roadhouse they got some bungalows”

Carly Simon: “You’re So Vain”
Misheard Lyrics: “I had some dreams, they were grounds in my coffee”
Real Lyrics: “I had some dreams, they were clouds in my coffee”

Jerry Lee Lewis: “Great Balls of Fire”
Misheard Lyrics: “You broke my wheel, but what a thrill”
Real Lyrics: “You broke my will, but what a thrill”

John: During our Mother Zephyr days, I was wanting for the band to play a few more upbeat, danceable pop type songs. I was playing a guitar at home one day, and the beginnings of the song just came out, along with the first line of the chorus (“I’m getting of tired of waiting for you to make up your mind.”) By the way, the “you” in that line is actually me. It is a recollection of the days when I was trying to decide how to proceed in the relationship with my then-girlfriend (and now wife and mother of our 3 year-old daughter Anna) Inge.   So I guess you can see how that worked out.  🙂  The lyrics in the chorus are all mine, but I could never come up with anything satisfactory for the verses, so bandmate Joe Arrington of Mother Zephyr actually wrote those.

We’re just about ready to start a new series of Stories Behind the Songs for the Skeleton Crew album.  We’re going to do it a bit differently than with Transposition, however; instead of in order of appearance on the album, we will go in a more arcane order.  Just to mix it up, you know.

As the band Mother Zephyr was in its last days, John and I began wondering what to do next.  We both had completed songs we wanted to properly record, some of which had been played live by Mother Zephyr and some new songs were brewing, too.  We decided to resurrect Chameleon Red, dormant since 2009, and record the songs as that band.

We did some recording in the summer of 2012, though it was pretty late that year, after Mother Zephyr’s last show, that we really began recording full steam ahead, still writing songs all the while.  Recording extended until mid-June 2013; by that time, we had more than enough songs to fill an album.  We shot quite a bit of video while recording.

By happy coincidence, I was taking mixing and mastering classes back-to-back in the spring and summer of 2013, which came in handy when finishing up the album.  We selected the tracks and title for the album and commissioned Caitlin Rose Davis to provide cover art, toward the end of the recording sessions.  Because of changes in my schedule, completing the master took longer than expected; that was finally finished in October.  We delayed production of the CDs a bit longer in order to have the finished Chameleon Red logo, created by Mark Ray, on the CD itself.  The album was officially released in mid-January of 2014.

You know, there’s produced, and then there’s overproduced.  When I hear the latest radio fare, be it rock, “country” (quotes because pop country is really bad 80’s rock), or especially pop music, I’m really struck by how overproduced most of it is.  To ears that can hear it, all the sounds have been compressed, pitch corrected and processed until they barely resemble sounds that occur into the real world.  I actually get agitated when I hear pop music, with anger and revulsion.  Yes, my reaction is that visceral, and that may be hard for many to understand.  For an analogy, consider images of men and (mostly) women in glossy magazine ads.  Many of the images are so Photoshopped that they seem to depict Barbie and Ken dolls rather than actual human beings.  I think both the Photoshopped images and the overproduced music betray a cultural obsession with perfection.

I think the Photoshopped images foster an unrealistic expectation of bodily perfection in oneself and others.  Hello, anorexia, bulimia, and obsession with plastic surgery.  Similarly, overproduced and overprocessed music set an unrealistic expectation that musical performances be “perfect”.  Overproduction is not a new problem, but I think it’s one reason that you almost never hear live music in dance clubs and many other venues anymore.  And I think it discourages people from playing music as amateurs or professionals, because no matter now good you are, you’ll never play perfectly.

Fortunately, I see signs that not everyone is taken in by the airbrushed reality we are sold in current mass culture.  There is righteous anger in the air over the slick images we see, the overprocessed food we eat, and, at least where I live, reclamation of older musical forms and live music.  “I’m so tired of plastic faces on every screen; the real world is marked with scars…” Hope springs eternal.

Now that I have that off my chest–have you seen the “Impatience” video yet?

Today we’re unveiling the third Skeleton Crew video: “Impatience”.  It’s an catchy, poppy kind of tune featuring John on vocals (he mostly wrote the song, too), with video we shot while recording the different tracks for the song.  If you like it, please share it with your friends!

Performing at the Acoustic Coffeehouse in Johnson City, TN, back in January.