Steel Bridge Songfest ‘09 tunes: Rattlin’ the Cage, Evidence, Nothing comes naturally

writing tunes at the Holiday Motel

Here’s a few of the tunes from this year’s Steel Bridge Songfest.  These are rough mixes but they’ll be touched up eventually.  Giant, oversized thanks to pAt macdonald, melaniejane, Christie Weber, Anna Sacks, Steve Hamilton and the Holiday Motel and the whole crew for putting us up for the week and being so hospitable and accommodating our crazy hours and hair-brained antics.

“Nothing Comes Naturally”

Wrote this real late the night after the fest with Dustin Welch, who is playing Dobro.

“Rattlin’ the Cage”

Wrote this  rocking little 5/4 ditty the first day of the Construction Zone with Christine Flores-Cozza and Loren Wollerman.  The band is Greg Roteik (bass), Adam Cargin (drums), me (gtr, vox, keys), Dustin Welch (banjo), Victor DeLorenzo (junk percussion) and Delaney Davidson did some slide trombone.  We recorded the drums, guitar, bass and vocals live! … which I love!  Band stuff has almost always been layered one piece at a time for me and it was a good feeling to be able to do it all live.  It’s not perfect but it’s got some teeth and it’s one unedited take of the rhythm section and main vocal.  Loren recorded some horn parts as well, which will be on the final version.

“Evidence”

I had this one mostly completed coming in but still felt like it was missing something, a name…  Dustin aptly titled it “Evidence” and we went in and recorded it in the wee hours as things were winding down.

The recording engineers at Steel Bridge are real champs.  We would be up with Steve recording at 7am and somehow he’d be ready to rock at 11am the next day.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_DeLorenzo

 

Extra spooky sauce

Sometime a few months ago I got up, had some coffee and wrote this…   I think if it has a home, it is in a childrens movie.

 

Everybody Knows (how this goes)

Here’s a tune Robbie Schiller and I wrote sometime back in the fall and kind of forgot about.  We both really liked the words but couldn’t quite find the right arrangement.  We were playing some tunes the other day and decided to tinker with it a little more.  We changed the chords up and revamped the bridge and it turned out pretty cool with the help of an integral bassline on the guitar in the chorus and banjo part.   I’m starting to think that banjo makes everything better…

The bridge has some of my favorite lines in it:

When it starts to feel like ancient history you crane your neck for something you can’t see

You wanna climb the fence with a knife between your teeth but you just stagger drunk out into busy streets

 

We don’t need much but skin to touch

courtesy of youbethemouse.blogspot.com

Here’s a new tune called “Skin to Touch”.  It was recorded by the all-knowing and ever-patient, Andy Hartman with one of the new projects I been playing with, Jeremiah Nelson & the Shifty Switches.

We’ll be at the Frequency on Friday March 6th with John Statz & the Cheap Shots, and Whitney Mann & the Boys.  10pm $6 – best time ever.

courtesy of youbethemouse.blogspot.com

 

THE WILLIS on the Late Night w/ Jimmy Fallon + NYC show 2/26

You heard right – the Willis will be doing a live taping of their song, “Jimmy Fallon: the Plan” on the actual Late Night show with Jimmy Fallon. That evening they will be at Bar 9 in NYC. If you have every spen ten minutes with me, you have probably heard me rave about the genius of this Oshkosh band.  I was able to do a couple shows with the related and equally awesome project, Attack Octopus last year. Check ‘em out! http://myspace. com/thewillis http://myspace. com/attackoctopus ATTACK, OCTOPUS: “Gulf of”

 

Odessa Sand

“Banjo means bathroom in Spanish” as Townes Van Zandt joked at at show once…

I always thought banjo had the most lonesome, ringing sound.  This one is called “Odessa Sand” and it was actually on the scrap pile until recently.  I wrote it on guitar but played it much more drippy and blandly.  I thought I would give it a whirl on banjo and I think it transferred beautifully.  My old neighbor on Jenny St., Clay Collins,  let me borrow his for a while so I’ve been arranging some tunes on it.  Something about the banjo really brings out the heartbreak in songs.

Geography

is what this one is all about, running into the same emotion all across the country albeit on a fictional trip.  I wanted to open the tune with a town I’d lived or spent time in but nothing fit the meter as good as Atlanta.  The next verse starts with my favorite line,

I miss the mountains like my Grandfather’s smile

Troubles all around me don’t seem worth their while

I wanted to evoke a geographically specific type of imagary in each verse so the next and final verse ends in Odessa, TX with carnitas, friholes and mezcal.

 

Breakin’ the Daisy Chain

This tune is called “Drugs to make you sober”

This tune is called “the Daisy Chain”

It was my birthday

on Saturday – I’m 27 – and I threw together a show at the Reptile Palace in Oshkosh with the Love Badgers, John Statz & his band, This Bright Apocalypse and I opened the with a new outfit I’m calling the Mysterious Bruises.  Kiki Schueler happened to be hanging out and took some video of the show.

I’ve been doing stuff under the name Patchwork for a few years and I’m really itching for a change-up.  We pretty much do all new stuff, things written in the last few months.  I’m sure we’ll pull out some old tunes for all-nights slots but as of now it’s really fun to play things that I am not completely sick of…

The band is Shawn Drake (fiddle/vox), Matt Donoghue (bass/vox), Willy Schultz (elec. gtr) and me.  Laura got me a series of wonderful birthday presents including but not limited to the camo Miller High Life hat you’re seeing on the video and I think it made my voice twangier… and the show was a success!

that's my baby...

On tour

in August and September, I was able to just totally drop off the grid and spend my days driving and writing and my nights playing shows or relaxing.  I anticipated a few off nights and just blocked off the time to write.  I find it’s simply not worth it to stress out about trying to fill a date if it’s an off-night – you’re time would be better spent working on tunes or taking in some scenery.

This daisy chain tune I wrote while I was in Winter Park, CO hanging out before the show.  It was the first of a batch of tunes that came out of the trip.  I was coming off a month and a half of solid promotional-publicity bullshit that I totally hate doing for the new Patchwork record.  So it was good to leave my laptop and phone off for a while and get back into something with a little more soul.

The lyrics came fast

and the form is very concise, which is new for me.   I have had a problem with overwriting things to the point where nothing repeats and I am just now kicking it.  Shawn was saying last night how shitty it would be of me to give these songs to sing harmony on where they were just paragraphs without a single line being repeated.  It feels good to sing something that feels like it’s worth repeating AND something that isn’t weighted down by excessive emotional woes-me jibber-jabber.  After a while that stuff just feels completely expressionless,  you know?

 

I don’t mind being lonely and I don’t mind hotel rooms: a song and a conversation with Kristin Diable

Louisiana native and Brooklyn resident, Kristin Diable, has been touring regularly and releasing albums on her own imprint, Speakeasy Records since the early 2000’s. Recently her tune “Gypsy Queen” was picked up by the TV series, One Tree Hill.

We bumped into each other at a college music conference last year. She happened to be coming through WI for a show so I thought we’d get her down to Madison for a special night at Mickey’s Tavern, sharing the stage with Jentri Colello.

After the show we recorded one of her new tunes called, Minnesota and had a chat about the writing process.

I thought I would notate the interview but that proved to be excessively laborious and I had audio for it so I thought this piece could be more mixed media. I concluded that my interviewing voice is akin to a stoned monkey so I did my best to edit out myself asking the questions.

The hook line

of the tune is, “Most days I don’t think of you at all” which is a powerful and interesting line, in that it is both intensely personal but also accessible and relatable as a listener.

“I know exactly what those words mean… and it’s what they’re not saying…It starts off in all different ways like sometimes I’ll get a line and that line says everything – that one line – it’s just it. And I have to write the song around that line. Those are the best songs I think – and those are rare – those are the really special songs”

“Generally I’m not trying to condense my experience into a song

because I’m experiencing all of these things…. It’s slow… It processes really slowly and you know three months after I’ve experienced something it’s like this fuckin’ revelation and everything makes sense all the sudden. But I didn’t even know that I was aware it made sense. All the little pieces were just sitting there in your person and you put them together and suddenly you have this great song and you understand your life… and songs are uncannily insightful in new scenarios that you haven’t even figured out yet…”

Links:

http://kristindiable.com/

http://myspace.com/kristindiable

 

We’ll fall to bits like wet paper mache

I wrote this tune called “Paper Mache” and I’m trying to remember where I wrote it

and the circumstances but I have absolutely no idea when or where this song came about.  This is troubling because my mental filing system lumps songs written in a particular city, surrounding a particular event or around a certain time into the same category and that comes in handy when you are piecing your setlist together on the fly.  I know for sure it’s like about a month or two old…

I find that when I write tunes it isn’t so much about getting something out

that I have been thinking about but more the process of finding out what exactly I am thinking about if that makes sense…  I think they call that “tapping into the subconscious” in the biz…

There’s a little venom in the words but I assure you it’s all in good fun.  That’s Shawn Drake singing harmony and taking the whistling solo.

Also, for the obligatory show plug, I’m playing Montmartre on Thursday (12/4) with the new band.  Should be rad.  We are playing all new tunes.

Here are the lyrics:

Call my number point the gun I’m under

Well I’m late what can I say

You’re always acting like I’m distracted

Well I ain’t I got nothin’ to say

The world is at a disappointed age

It’s growing old and knows it can’t sustain

I know you’re tryin’ to help but you’re just in the way

Now we’ll fall to bits like wet paper mache

Endless winters and whiskey dinners

I’ve heard this story before

Old bad habits are just automatic

so please would you hold my hands

I got tired of chasing you around

So I’m cuttin’ off my legs to settle down

I was tryin’ to help and just got in the way

Now we’ll fall to bits like wet paper mache

 

John Statz’s Disclaimer

So this is my song-journal-mp3-blog…

It’s brand new!   I’m liking WordPress quite a bit too.  Every week I will have new material on here… a new song by myself or a guest post by another writer.  The whole idea is to give new songs a place to live and talk a bit about their inception.

In true blogger form, on this first post I will let someone else do all the work for me then copy and paste their content…

I just so happened to have a meeting with John Statz

at my place last night so after taking care of business, we set up a few mics and recorded one of John’s new tunes called “Disclaimer”.  I heard the song last week and knew it was an instant favorite.  It’s got a hell of a hook for a melody and a nice groove to it.  Lyrically, the song really spoke to me too; it deals with the emotional trauma that a traveling musician’s relationship endures.

Here’s the track:

And here is John talking a bit about the process of writing “Disclaimer”:

So I wrote a new song today, and I thought that I would try and take you through the process with me.

Just to set the scene, I was called early this morning to substitute teach (I do this occasionally for extra dough) at Waunakee High School, where I went to school as a teen. I was to teach orchestra that day, but the teacher just wanted me to put in videos and hold study hall, so it was a really easy day. I had a whole hour with no classes, so I sat in the absent teacher’s office with my guitar and began to write a song.

I started with the simple chord progression of G – Am – C – G and played it over and over again until some words began to come out. Lately it is the music that has been coming to me first, and then I decide on a topic and begin to wrap my words around the chords. The song was to be, I decided, a song about jealous, and this is the first overprotective verse that I put down:

“You better tell me where you’ve gone
and when you will be back.
There’s better men out there than me,
and I can’t help those facts.”

Feeling off to a good start, I laid down a second verse that seemed to have little to do lyrically with the first verse, but I really liked the sound of it: click this link to read the full post on John’s blog: http://nothingthattheroad.blogspot.com

John will be playing at the Brink Lounge with Mike Keane and Kris Adams on Dec. 18th