Sean was MIA today so we took the time to work on three completely new songs, which, if we can possibly get our shit together in 1 month, we can play them at the Big Vs gig on March 30th or the KVSC show on April 9th.
Starting out, we ran through a song that was written about the same time as Underwater Girl, called “Compliment Sandwich.” It’s in a dusty key of Em6 and I’d always thought it sounded like something from the first Foo Fighters album, but in running through it, Ben and Mason didn’t seem too excited about it… It sounds vaguely like any other Jesse Song. Kinda depressing, because I do really like the song. Suddenly, possibly out of boredom, Ben starts strumming ringing chords on his fretless bass and Mason starts arpeggiating some reverbed guitar part to it, at about half the speed we were doing… WAIT! Make it in Em6, and I start singing the song over it… Suddenly it’s slow and spacey, gloomy and intriguing! The song suddenly sounds like mid-era Pink Floyd… maybe the into to “Time” or one of the instrumental “Breathe”s later on in the album… Another song thankfully salvaged from mediocrity. I am excited to see how this song will evolve.
“Formaldehyde” is another song bouncing around, written around the time of “Catastrophic” and “Saying Prayers”, about panic attacks and social upheaval, something always related to the present, even though written in the November of 2008 (wow, so long ago…). I consciously wrote it as ‘my Dylan song’—menaing the verses are a jumble of lyrical acrobatics that are more speaky than singy, but the chorus is a great hook. And so whenever we tried it, it turned into a Highway 61 Revisited sort of thing, which bored Mason to death. So I played it acoustic whenever I could… I really love the song, I refused to give up on it, but somehow find a way into it that Mason would like. One day probably a year ago, when we were still playing with Bradley and David, we randomly tried something completely new— Bradley played a drum-loopy part, and both Mason and David started playing a drone in G… I began playing this flanged guitar part that sounded a bit like something from “Bull in the Tether” and I began singing Formaldehyde on top and it became a more “Planet Telex” sort of thing than an early electric Dylan thing, which was the facelift my silly song needed! After that, we never got around to working more on the song, we knew it wasn’t going to be on Ultraviolet Fuzz. But we revisited it today, the three of us with a drum machine, recreating that day a year ago with the loopy-droney thing. We seemed to recreate that magic, and Mason thought it now sounds like a Mellow Gold song. That is fine with me!
The third song is called “Lilith” and is a song about feminism I wrote in the fall of 2009, Jesse Song #70 apparently. It was based upon a dream I had at the time, about a woman named Lilith (obviously) whose legs had transformed into hideous horn-like hooves… She was like a beached mermaid, but instead of a fishy torso, it was a tangled, twisted nest of grotesque thorns. For some reason this image was so strong to me, I wondered what that meant… Who was Lilith and how did her legs become this way? I realized that Lilith had sold her body, sold her sexuality, and society itself had morphed her legs into the tangled web of sharp brush. I honestly felt insecure about writing for the female perspective, about misogyny, and how the man forces himself to be the gatekeeper of how the woman is viewed in our society (and others, to a more extreme of course)… As a man myself, am I allowed to write this sort of song? I”m sure I’m part of the problem… I felt uncomfortable singing it, but maybe that’s what’s supposed to happen… and if I hadn’t felt that way, I would be doing something wrong? Either way, progress was made with more fretless basswork by Ben and some spacey slide guitar by Mason. It will (hopefully) be the epic song for Album #3.
We’ll see what happens to the songs next week with drums…