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For 'Tell Me About Your Song' #82, Jeana Marie DeLaire of Great Gale talked about her song 'Dunes', which is from their album 'Somewhere Moving'.

Somewhere Moving by Great Gale

In the course of our discussion, we touched on the following topics:

The Great Gale of 1815

Bar Harbor, Maine

Acadia National Park

MXR Carbon Copy delay pedal

Provincetown

If you're interested in hearing another version of 'Dunes', Great Gale also recorded it as an NPR Tiny Desk contest submission.

You can hear more of Great Gale's music on Bandcamp, iTunes, and Spotify, and you can also find them on Tumblr and Facebook.

The 'Tell Me About Your Song' icon was designed by Shaenon K. Garrity.

If you want more information about your host, Jacob Haller, then check out my web page, my facebook page, or my twitter account.

'Tell Me About Your Song' on iTunes - rate and review us!

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Episode Transcript:

[EXCERPT FROM 'DUNES' BY GREAT GALE PLAYS:]

And I know where you're going, and I know where you've been, so what is it that gets you by? Do your terrors come when you close your eyes? What is it that gets you by? Do you sleep on through the night?

JACOB: Hello, and welcome to Tell Me About Your Song, the podcast where I talk to musicians and songwriters about a song they've written. Today's guest is Jeana Marie DeLaire of the band Great Gale, and the song she'll be talking about is named "Dunes", from her album 'Somewhere Moving'. Where would you like to start with the song?

JEANA: I think I'll start by talking about my band name, "Great Gale". Though I wrote the songs on 'Somewhere Moving' before Great Gale really came to life, I do all of my shows under the name of Great Gale, whether I'm doing a solo show, or performing as a band with my drummer Jeff and our guitarist. So the band name, Great Gale, is actually named after a hurricane that happened in the eighteen hundreds, that hit New England very hard, and Providence in particular, and so I think that Dunes, which is really motivated by self reflections and nature -- Great Gale (the band name) is definitely as well. This is the most requested song that I have defin-- not that there's many of them. Definitely the song is often requested. I've even had another local musician cover it, and put it on their demo, and it sounds totally different, but it's definitely really flattering that someone felt that inspired by the lyrics to do that, and I really love that the song has sort of become something much bigger than my own experience. Again, it has, I think, almost overly simplified lyrics in many ways. It really doesn't have that many lyrics. Most of my songs tend to be, I think, overly verbose, but this one is very succinct, lyrically. So I've really loved kind of seeing it take on a life of its own in many ways, and even take on different melodies from different people that are singing it, and just mean so many different things to different people. I think what stays the same is the emotion behind it, but the actual lyrics -- they're so open to interpretation. I often moved a lot growing up, and I definitely think that that has influenced me in a number of ways, many positive ways. One way that can oftentimes be perceived as negative is, I don't always feel like I know the social ropes, when it comes to, like, group interaction, and so I've had an interesting perspective, especially at the time that I wrote this. I was in a new city, a new town, a very isolated town, and I was going through this process of meeting new people, and it actually went really well -- I really left that area with a ton of really close friends -- but I've always had sort of this, like, over-analyzing thing that I do in groups, and in social settings, so I think that Dunes really is a song that -- it's the culmination of that aspect of my life. The space of the song was so motivated by my surroundings in Bar Harbor. So, I was attending college in Bar Harbor, Maine -- which, for those that don't know, it's on Mount Desert Island, so off the coast of Maine. and it is actually an island, and it's about six and a half hours from Providence area, where we're based out of. Mount Desert Island is really quite rural, and it's home to Acadia National Park, which is a beautiful gorgeous park. It's crazy packed with tourists in the summer, but in the winter, and the rest of the year, really, all you really hear is the ocean, and the wind, and peepers -- especially when it's peeper season, they're all over -- and the blackflies, and just different parts of nature that -- It's either incredibly calm and quiet, or, depending on your headspace, it's very loud. Though I'd lived in some rural places when I was quite young, I had never lived on an island off the coast of Maine, which was just drastically different, so I think that really, really, heavily influenced the space present throughout the whole song, and it definitely also influenced the process I was going through at the time of really reflecting a lot upon my life, and the life of my good friends, and ... so being sort of like surrounded by nature at the time, I think it's really present in the song, for sure. This song was very different from my normal lyrical writing process. So I wrote it in, I want to say it is 2010, perhaps 2011. So I wrote the lyrics to that song early into attending college there, and it was definitely sort of a culture shock for me, because I had primarily lived in more urban areas, so I wrote the first few words really, really late at night. I had just gotten a typewriter for the first time ever in my life, as a young college student. I had just gotten back from a party, and I had been going through a lot of really intense self-reflection, and a lot of changes really abruptly happened in my life at that time, so it was probably, like, 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning, and I had just gotten back to my dorm room, and I had this new typewriter, and I was definitely a little intoxicated, and I started typing out the chorus lyrics. So the chorus lyrics actually came first.

[EXCERPT FROM 'DUNES' PLAYS:]

What is it that gets you by? Do your terrors come when you close your eyes? What is it that gets you by? Do you sleep on through the night?

JEANA: It was probably weeks until I actually noticed that I had done it [laughs] and then had remembered it, so I found it on my desk, and started to tie in parts of short stories that I had been writing, and restructuring it to make it sound more, like, poetic and cohesive. Usually my writing process is much more organized than that. Usually I sit down and write sort of an outline of a song, and it's actually generally poetry that I write, disconnected from the music. That one, I had the chorus, and I saw it written out, and I immediately had some chords that I had been working on that I applied to it. So I really wrote, like, the syllable structure, and the melody, to chords that were already there. So it all kind of happened at once.

JACOB: Had you done a lot of songwriting before then?

JEANA: I had, but I think -- I want to say that Dunes was one of the first songs that I really completed. I definitely had written a lot of partially completed songs before, but nothing that I had actually played out, and Dunes was the first that I knew I wanted to finish it. I knew that I wanted to play it out.

JACOB: What do you think it was about it?

JEANA: I think that it really represented not only a lot of what I was going through, sort of, emotionally and spiritually in my life, but also musically. So, at my college I took some fingerstyle guitar lessons from a really amazing classical guitarist by the name of Kevin Morse -- he is just amazing -- and I was studying jazz guitar, as well. So, that song, though it doesn't sound like jazz or classical style guitar at all, it really ties in a lot of the stuff that I was learning. It is finger-picked, and the chord voicings are -- There's a lot of sevens and there's, like, a 9 in there, too, so I think that I was really excited about the musics and felt like I just needed to get those words out. The goal of the song, I think, has ultimately been to be sort of minimalist, and really play with the space of the song, and I found a really interesting way to do that was to apply a lot of effect pedals. I primarily play acoustic guitar right now, but I have more of a background in lead guitar, and I'm really into, sort of, like, ambient style lead guitar. And so when I started Great Gale as an acoustic guitarist, I kind of struggled with finding ways to still be able to make really weird, bizarre, spacey sounds, and I think Dunes is an example of where I still used a ton of reverb, a little bit of delay, a little bit of tone modification... I use the Carbon Copy delay pedal a lot, and it has a tone modification button, which kind of creates all sorts of dissonance, and that, matched with with reverb, really creates a lot of noise that tends to linger, and also creates this thing that happens, where the tonality of the song almost blends together, and while it's really just a few chords, because it's it's finger picked like that, the notes tend to carry over into one another, and, yeah. And I really tried to play with the overall meaning of the song, and having some of the bizarre sounds sort of symbolic of the overall meaning, too.

[INSTRUMENTAL INTRODUCTION TO 'DUNES' STARTS PLAYING]

JEANA: The beginning of the song is probably the best example. It starts with the really heavy sort of percussion sound, with really ambient guitar, and I'm privileged to work with Jeff Castelli -- he's the other member, other full-time member of Great Gale. He's also the main producer. We did the recordings all on our own, and Jeff is sort of a leader on that front, and he's really great at bringing in bizarre sounds, just in general. [laughs] It's like his favorite thing to do. So, I think that, right away, the song starts out with a lot of tension, and the overall song -- I guess I should just start talking about the meaning; maybe that would tie it in better. The overall meaning is sort of about our internal reflections on our life, and, like, the things that have gotten us there, and how we all have our different paths that we walk, which are often influenced by by the people that we have in our life. So starting this song with that sort of tension and abrupt drums, with the backdrop of really ambient guitar noises, I think it's a good example of that.

[EXCERPT FROM 'DUNES' PLAYS:]

I'll stop for just a second, to watch the cop cars drive by over the dunes of Provincetown, where your father's ashes lie.

JACOB: In the lyrics, are you referring to real life things?

JEANA: Yes and no. [laughs] So there's some that play on really clear experiences that I've had, and others that are definitely more of, like, metaphors. So, the first few lines about the dunes over Provincetown: I had a really tight, core, group of friends in my adolescence and my teenage years, and we would often take an annual trip to Provincetown on the Cape, and one moment that really struck me, in my adolescence, was sitting at a beach late at night with my friend, whose father had passed away (and I got his permission to talk about this story for the podcast) -- his father had passed away when he was very young, and his ashes were spread over the dunes, which are no longer there because of weather, but the dunes were there at the time, and I just remember, sort of, taking in all of these life experiences that I've had with this group of friends, and it was, sort of, like, towards the end of high school, and it was one of the last summers that we had together, so I knew that I wanted to eventually reference that in the song, and that experience really opened up the song, and sort of paved the way for everything that follows in lyrically within it.

[EXCERPT FROM 'DUNES' PLAYS:]

... Over the dunes of Provincetown, where your father's ashes lie. And I know where you're going, and I know where you've been, so what is it that gets you by? Do your terrors come when you close your eyes? What is it that gets you by? Do you sleep on through the night?

JACOB: Have they heard the song?

JEANA: They have heard the song. I remember they came to a show -- Actually, when I played it with the Novi Giants, before Great Gale, even, I remember being very nervous, because I knew that I was going to play this song, and I had mentioned it to them, and I think I had even sent them a recording, or maybe I had just sent them the lyrics, but I was still nervous. I think that, as humans, we often try to avoid dark subjects, instead of talking about them, and I don't always think that that's the healthiest way to process. So I think this friend, in particular -- He's my friend Eli, and we're very close friends. We've been friends for years. Us in particular, we have a pretty dark sense of humor with one another. So I took his word for it that it was going to be OK, and he heard the song, and he actually was super happy about it. I think he's the type of person that really appreciates talking about things, and our trips to Provincetown were really important, I think, to both of us, in a lot of ways, because it was always when -- It was at a time where both of us were kind of going through a lot in our adolescence, and those trips, sort of, meant a certain freedom for us. So, I think that being able to sing about the sort of dark emotions surrounding that sense of freedom is important for both of us. Getting back to, sort of, the overall meaning of the song: It definitely is a lot about the changes that I've gone through personally, but what it really is, most of all, is just that moment that you have when you start to realize that the people that you're surrounding yourself with aren't necessarily making the choices that you want to make. And, so, it's really about realizing what that means, and developing that, more for yourself. So the chorus:

[EXCERPT FROM 'DUNES' PLAYS:]

So what is it that gets you by? Do your terrors come when you close your eyes?

JEANA: It's realizing that, not only are you feeling that, but, in fact, everybody probably feels that, at one point. So, it's just that kind of thought of, like, we're all here doing this again. Who actually wants to be here? What are you actually doing when you're alone? What are you thinking?

[EXCERPT FROM 'DUNES' PLAYS:]

And hear the howling of the pack who've come to take you in to the place to lose and win, and start again. To the place to lose and win, and start again.

JACOB: And then, the second verse, there's "the howling of the pack coming to take you in" -- like, the obvious thing would be to say, like, peer pressure, but..

JEANA: Yep. It's definitely peer pressure. And it's interesting, I've had -- Some people, a lot of times, will hear the song, and they really, I think, can relate to the simplicity of the chorus. I don't typically write music in a way that's super typical for songwriting, and it's definitely not pop style. Like, honestly, it's everything that my music instructor told me not to do, about writing music, is what I tend to do. So I think Dunes is -- Definitely you can see that kind of style of writing in the song, but it definitely has a chorus that repeats many times, and I think is very relatable, so I've had a lot of folks hear the song, and offer their own analysis of it, and I've heard "peer pressure" -- that definitely was my intention when I wrote that line -- but I've also heard some people represent that, to them, it means more of like their own inner voices and their own insecurities. And I think that those two things are really connected. So I really enjoy hearing people's different ways of relating the song back to their own life. There's also a really intentional shift in, sort of, the sound of the song, which is present in both the guitar and the kick drum, in particular. The kick goes from, I think it's on the 2 in most of the song, and it goes right to the 1 of each measure, and the chords actually change. So it's mostly in A minor, and then when that comes out of -- I guess you could call it a bridge, sure -- the little instrumental break -- it goes from a G, and the G's only in the song a few times, so every time it's there it is quite dramatic, and then it actually swaps the A minor to F, and starts in F, and it's no longer an F7; it's now just an F major chord, just a normal F major chord. So I wrote that part of the song to sort of sound like it was the uplifting part, sort of like the "coming to terms with yourself," and this long process that we continuously do throughout our lives of self-reflection. So it's a, like, happier time where it's, like, "OK. Some of us aren't here any more, but we're all, like, finding our own paths," and it's definitely very, I guess, existential, in some ways, because there is, like, the acceptance of, sort of like, -- I don't want to say, like, depression, but I think of -- there's an acceptance of mortality, I think, in that part of the song as well, so it's definitely part of that existential quest of figuring out who we are, and what we're really here for, and if it's okay if we're doing it alone, and who we are when we're by ourselves, and who we are when we're in a group.

[EXCERPT FROM 'DUNES' PLAYS:]

And I know the roads been long. Some of us have lost our ways. What is it that gets you by? Do your terrors come when you close your eyes? What is it that gets you by? Do you sleep on through the night?

JACOB: In that instrumental section we're talking about, like, the way that it switches from the beat being on the 2, to it being on the 1, is it skips a beat.

[EXCERPT FROM 'DUNES' PLAYS:]

And I know ...

JEANA: The drummer, Jeff, he's really into, sort of, experimental drumming, and beat styles like that, so that was definitely his input there, and I really loved the, sort of, dissonance that it created in the song, and once I was finally able to do it successfully in practice, we started adding that in.

[EXCERPT FROM 'DUNES' PLAYS:]

What is it that gets you by? Do you sleep on through the night? One day we all will fall.

JEANA: I definitely wrote it when I was in a bit of a dark place, so, for me, at the time, it was meant as kind of a dark, like, "This is pointless, because how can we -- We only go so far, and then, you know, we all die!" It's definitely, like, incredibly dramatic, and sort of something that I think a lot of adolescents go through, and I was quite young when I wrote it. But I think that it can also be viewed in line with that, like, F, more major, feel, is kind of coming to terms with what we have and who we are.

[EXCERPT FROM 'DUNES' PLAYS:]

One day we all will fall. One day we all will fall. One day we all will fall.

JEANA: So you'll hear throughout, somewhere, moving throughout those recordings, Jeff tends to -- his backup vocals tend to be very, like, panned backwards, if you're listening in earphones, and have a lot of reverb. Oftentimes, they'll have delay on them, too, and they'll be, sort of, like, very low-fi, and almost overly compressed, and that's definitely intentional. I think that he had just done it -- I think he might have even done it by accident in one of the mixes. It might have been an accident, or it might have been very intentional. I'm not totally sure -- but I remember hearing it, and just being super into that kind of editing for the backup vocals, so it remained very consistent in all of the 'Somewhere Moving' recordings, and, for me, it kind of represented almost, like, this ghostly voice, that just comes back, and returns, in all of the songs, and a lot of the songs are definitely about watching some friends go through things like drug addiction, and go into recovery, and some of them not necessarily make it into recovery, at the time that I was writing them, so I think that it's sort of representative of literally, like, ghostly figures, and this, like, impending doom that is sort of there. Much of the song is just, is so -- It's quite dramatic, lyrically and instrumentally, so I think that it was -- It just felt like a very fitting ending, for it to sort of go out with really playing on space. So, it actually -- though it's technically quieter and softer because the instruments cut out -- it really just, like, gets under your skin, in a way that I wanted to try to to play with. And the beginning of the lyrics start with a pause, so I thought would be interesting if the end started with sort of an extended fade out on that line.

[EXCERPT FROM 'DUNES' PLAYS:]

One day we all will fall.

JEANA: A lot of the songs I tend to write, and -- I'm not super connected to them, because I think that songwriting is just a really fun process, and you can sort of write things, and leave them, and kind of move on. But Dunes, in particular, has been one that I've kinda kept close. So there's different lines that I've gone back to, and either have a different meaning when I hear it again, somehow, or just stick out in a different way that they hadn't before. So, I think when I first wrote the song, the opening lines -- "I'll stop for just a second" -- were sort of the big thing that I thought about, and I -- When I play it live, I tend to play with the space afterwards. It's not always to time, so I'll sort of extend it out -- again, to play with that tension, which is much easier to do live than in the recording. So, I think that because of the sort of playful nature of the opening line, that I can have with the audience -- That line used to stick out a lot for me. That's what I mostly thought about. But it changes. I definitely think that "the howling of the pack" line is one that I often go back to, as well. And I see folks singing along to that. I've been to a few Great Gale shows, which always means a lot to me when I see people actually singing along to songs.

JACOB: So, if people would like to hear more of your music, what should they do?

JEANA: They have a few options. They can go to GreatGale.bandcamp.com to see all of our works up there -- and those are all self recorded works. They can also go to iTunes and Spotify, coming very soon, so by the time that this is edited, they should be able to find it: "Somewhere Moving" by Great Gale on iTunes, and you can also check in with our tumblr: GreatGale.tumblr.com, and find us on Facebook.

JACOB: Great! And my name's Jacob Haller, and I have my own music, which you can find on Bandcamp or at music.jwgh.org, and I also have a couple of other podcasts and various projects I'm working on, that you can find at jacobhaller.com. I'm going to put together, you know, some show notes with links to Jeana's website, and various other things we've talked about, and you'll be able to find that on yoursongpodcast.tumblr.com (spells it), and I guess, with all that said, we're going to go out by listening to the song we've been talking about in full: "Dunes", by Jeana Marie DeLaire of Great Gale, from her album 'Somewhere Moving'. Thanks for listening.

['DUNES' PLAYS IN FULL. YOU CAN FIND THE LYRICS ON GREAT GALE'S BANDCAMP PAGE.]

JEANA: Yep, that was way more articulate, but, definitely. Great. Yup!

JACOB: Didn't feel articulate! [laughter]

JEANA: That was, I think...

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For 'Tell Me About Your Song' #81, Lucas Kwong of The Brother K Melee talks about his song 'Stranger from the Country'. Sorry for the delay in getting this up -- it's been quite a year!

Stranger From The Country by THE BROTHER K MELEE

In the course of our discussion, we touched on the following topics:

Romanticism Pilate's wife The Stations of the Cross The Great Chain of Being Rashomon Happiness is a Warm Gun A Day in the Life WFMU The Seven Second Delay Almost Amateur Hour: set list / audio

This episode contains a brief excerpt from a live performance of the Brother K Melee's song 'Margery', which you can also find on Bandcamp.

For more information about Lucas's music, as well as his upcoming shows and videos, check out his website at brotherkmusic.com. You can listen to and buy his music on Bandcamp, and he is also on facebook and twitter.

The 'Tell Me About Your Song' icon was designed by Shaenon K. Garrity.

If you want more information about your host, Jacob Haller, then check out my web page, my facebook page, or my twitter account.

'Tell Me About Your Song' on Apple Podcasts - rate and review us!

'Tell Me About Your Song' on Android

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Episode Transcript:

[EXCERPT FROM 'STRANGER IN THE COUNTRY' PLAYS:]

What do you have to say?

JACOB: Hello, and welcome to Tell Me About Your Song, the podcast where I talk to musicians and songwriters about a song they've written. Today's guest is Lucas Kwong of The Brother K Melee, and the song he'll be talking about is named "Stranger from the Country." So where would you like to start, Lucas?

LUCAS: There's this, like, capital R Romantic idea of the artist as someone who just kind of flows freely through life, and lets ideas come to them, and what I've realized is, if I let myself do that, then I will just postpone doing things. Like a lot of creative people, I can be kind of lazy. My church had an exhibit inspired by the Stations of the Cross. A lot of artists in this community, Ytu know, each artist was assigned to a different station. So, I signed up to do one about the sentencing of Christ, and so it was, kind of, one of those things where there's a deadline, I have to turn in, you know, produce something by this time, and also there's a limitation of subject. Now, of course, you know, within those broad parameters, I had, kind of, creative liberty to put my own spin on the song, but, you know, it's not going to be about that one time I had a road trip in New Orleans, or something like that, right? I mean, there's a definite set of limitations from the beginning, and it just came in pieces. I remember, in the third section of the song, the part:

[EXCERPT FROM 'STRANGER IN THE COUNTRY' PLAYS:]

First he was silent as a stone cold killer, Or a killjoy filler for the main man.

LUCAS: That whole part came to me all at once. I was in the shower, and I was kind of scared of writing more, because it just felt so perfect, that one part -- I didn't want to ruin it by adding other parts that either made that part sound bad, or weren't as good themselves. The thing about, you know -- I wanted to avoid writing a song, is, the kind of song that is very didactic. You know, when you're dealing with religion, when you're dealing with a song that touches on religion, or sacred texts, you always run the risk of making it, like, you know, an object lesson, and -- I guess the secular equivalent would be, like, a protest song, where it's very blunt and clear: This is what the message is, right? And I don't want to do that. I didn't want it to be that kind of monotonous. So I realized that a way around that could be to make it in multiple sections. And I've always loved the Beatles song "Happiness Is a Warm Gun."

[EXCERPT FROM 'HAPPINESS IS A WARM GUN' PLAYS:]

She's not a girl who misses much.

LUCAS: So I thought maybe I can do something like that.

[EXCERPT FROM 'HAPPINESS IS A WARM GUN' CONTINUES:]

Do do do do do do, oh yeah.

LUCAS: And then, after that, it was pretty quick. Then I had the second part, which is from Pilate's perspective, and then I realized the third part could be, you know, the part that I originally came up with.

[EXCERPT FROM 'STRANGER IN THE COUNTRY' PLAYS:]

And then our mouths filled with laughter when he said we'd see him after On high at the Almighty's right hand.

LUCAS: There's four sections of the song, and I had the third section, but I didn't know it was the third section, and then maybe, you know, two months later, I was walking around outside, and -- you know, when you're walking -- I live in Brooklyn now, and I live pretty close to the Brooklyn museum, so I was just going for a walk, and I was just kind of mumbling to myself, which I sometimes do, without a time signature, and I just had different words coming to me:

[EXCERPT FROM 'STRANGER IN THE COUNTRY' PLAYS:]

Last night my lady had the strangest dream, She was under a white moon. Nothing was as it seemed, Everything was too soon.

LUCAS: And that's how the first section started, because, you know, the first section of the song has no time signature. And I just had words at that point -- and I briefly considered, like, forcing them into a meter, and I was like, "Maybe just leave it, and that can be the introduction."

[EXCERPT FROM 'STRANGER IN THE COUNTRY' CONTINUES:]

... "Man do I know you?" You said "Better than you might think, If you allow me to show you, Cause this is the hour and the power"

LUCAS: And because of those words, you know ... Those words are from the perspective of Pilate's wife -- you know, there's a single verse that talks about a dream that Pilate's wife had -- and, once I had those those lyrics, it kind of -- I kind of realized the song was about different perspectives, you know, on this one event.

JACOB: I had forgotten that Pilate's wife was part of that whole story.

LUCAS: Yeah, it's like a "blink and you --" It's like a cameo.

JACOB: Mm-hmm.

LUCAS: Because it's one verse, and it's so -- It's so mysterious. It's like, what was that dream? And what kind of relation does Pilate have with his wife, anyway? Does she always tell him her dreams? You know, there are all kinds of questions, but it, you know, I only had six minutes.

JACOB: [laughs] Yeah.

LUCAS: And there was a physical restraint, too, because I had ordered a 12" record [probably 10". -editor], so I was trying to write a song I could fit on, because otherwise I'd have had to order a 12", and that would have been way too big, so... And then, actually, the day before recording was when I came up with the fourth section, because I still wasn't totally happy with it, and it was -- I was straddling -- You know, should the third section be super aggressive and heavier, or should it be more meditative and dreamlike? And then I realized, "Well, I can just add another section, and stitch together two of the previous sections." That became the fourth section, and that's how the song came together. It was very haphazard.

JACOB: So, kind of the inspiration for the song was from this, kind of, assignment to write about the Stations of the Cross --

LUCAS: Yeah, one particular station: the sentencing, but it was part of this larger exhibit.

JACOB: Like, the Stations of the Cross, it's like -- It's kind of these discrete parts that fit together to form this, you know, the overall story --

LUCAS: Yeah, yeah.

JACOB: -- and then the song also has kind of multiple parts. Do you think there's a relationship there, or am I just --

LUCAS: Probably yes. It's a -- What is it called? The medieval -- They used to call it the Great Chain of Being, the microcosm, macrocosm, so, you know, that's probably part of it. You know, this is -- This is interesting -- this is the first time I've been asked to interpret my own music. I feel so -- I don't know. I don't feel like I should have the authority to interpret my own music. But I think that's a totally right on way of looking at it, because the Stations of the Cross is already about multiplicity of perspective. It's already about, I don't know how to say it, I think of it a bit like Rashomon. I mean, it's unfolding in time, it's not like it's always looping back to the same moment, but, yeah, you are dealing with an overarching narrative, and yet are these discrete moments, and maybe that was just in the back of my mind as I was writing the song. And I just have always, as much as possible, tried to get around the verse/chorus/verse/chorus option. Sometimes that is what the song wants to be.

JACOB: Yeah. Have you written other songs that have kind of been in parts like this?

LUCAS: A few times, and, in fact, as I was writing the song, I realized there's a specific subgenre in my music that builds. You know, it'll start with like one or two instruments, and I'll build to, like, a crescendo. And so, I think this song has something of that. You know, I tend to gravitate toward that. But I think that's why I was glad I came up with the fourth section, because that kind of took it somewhere new. You'll find a lot of my references are Beatles songs. So, like, "A Day in the Life" is the archetype of this kid of song, right, where it starts off just with John on the piano and guitar, and then it sounds like the end of the world by the end, with the whole orchestra, and that's it, right?

[FINAL CHORD OF 'A DAY IN THE LIFE' BY THE BEATLES PLAYS]

LUCAS: And that's part of my DNA, and in a lot of my songs will just -- If I'm not careful to craft it a little bit, and disguise the origin, I'll want to do that. So, you know, i -- Little things, like the fourth section of the song, help me to make sure that each song has its own character, while, I guess, also having, like, a family resemblance to the other songs. I was playing it for my wife, and she was digging all of it, and I could tell she just thought that that part of [sings] "What do you have to say?" in the third section wasn't quite working, so that was what pushed me to come up with, instead of [sings] "What do you have to say?", like, [sings a different melody] "What do you have to say?" -- shorter and hostile, and from there, the third section became more of the heavier, because once I had that hostility, I felt like the third section wanted to be all about distortion and snare , and ... I don't know. I don't often write songs that are that are inspired by 90s rock, but I grew up in that era, you know? And the third section is definitely inspired by the music I actually grew up with, because I also had Dylan, and the Beatles, and Frank Sinatra in my house, you know, but Soundgarden and Nirvana -- like, that was the stuff, and Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Oasis -- all that stuff was what my peers were actually listening to, so I guess the third section is kind of my salute to that era.

[EXCERPT FROM 'STRANGER IN THE COUNTRY' PLAYS:]

What do you have to say?

LUCAS: That's another challenge, because when we do it live, it's going to sound different than it does on the record.

JACOB: Yeah, have you played it out?

LUCAS: We did once. We did it once, about a month ago, and that was literally a week after we recorded it in the studio. And it was good! It just feels different. It's difficult, first, because there's so many different sections with their own moods, and I think, when you're in the studio, you can layer those moods, and then when you're performing it live, you have to be a little bit schizophrenic. [laughs] Maybe you have to be a bit schizophrenic in general, as a musician, if you want to express a lot of different things, but especially with a song that's going from, you know, this dreamy state, to this interrogation, to this much more kind of alarming, heavier, third section. I think that's one of my goals, is to nail that in the performance.

[EXCERPT FROM 'STRANGER IN THE COUNTRY' PLAYS]

LUCAS: David really is a great drummer, and I kind of put a lot on his plate, because he had to learn this song in 24 hours, complete with different twists, and we did it in -- we did his whole part in -- well, it was in two chunks, but it was one take for each chunk. Sections 2 and 3 were one take, and section 4 was another take. But, yeah, he nailed it! [laughs]

[EXCERPT FROM 'STRANGER IN THE COUNTRY' PLAYS:]

... a king don't need to pray, A king don't need to pray.

LUCAS: The second section of this song is Pilate speaking, and he's kind of -- I wanted it to be more of rapid fire interrogation, so that's why, you know, there's fewer spaces in between the phrases, and the notes are shorter.

[EXCERPT FROM 'STRANGER IN THE COUNTRY' PLAYS:]

Better find the right words to say,

LUCAS: You know, I had this idea -- very martial, you know, almost taking it into an image of, like, a Roman military, you know, with those -- beating the drums of war.

[EXCERPT FROM 'STRANGER IN THE COUNTRY' PLAYS]

LUCAS: What I like about his drumming in the second section, is that he has the menace, but it's not over the top, yet. And then the third section -- Yeah. I mean, he's just banging the shit out of those drums.

[EXCERPT FROM 'STRANGER IN THE COUNTRY' PLAYS:]

First he was silent as a stone cold killer, Or a killjoy filler for the main man. And then our ...

LUCAS: It started with playing with syllables. Like, I was just watching my niece, this video of my niece, and she's trying to sing along to "The Wheels of the Bus", and it's just, and she's not even two years old, and it really struck me -- You know, before we learned to speak as a way of communicating with each other, we're just copying adults' syllables, you know? And we're just playing with sound. That's how language starts for each person, and a lot of time that's how, I guess that's how my songs start. So I was playing with "killjoy" -- "kill", "fill" ... you know, that kind of thing. It's a funny line, when I look back at it, because the word "kill", right, that's, like, a badass word. You know, it connotes badass-ness. But then when you link it to joy -- "killjoy" -- it's almost like, if you really break it down, the first part sounds like it's badass and then it ends up like a wet noodle, you know what I mean?

JACOB: Right.

LUCAS: There's a disillusionment inside -- that's how it seems to me, anyway. I don't know why parsing of "killjoy" is accurate or not, but that's how it feels to me.

JACOB: Sort of the thing that I like about it is, like: Right. But those images are kind of opposed, you know. Like, "the stone-cold killer" and "the killjoy filler" -- Like, "the killjoy filler for the main man" -- I'm just kind of picturing, like, you know, an opening act for the guy that everyone is there to really see.

LUCAS: Exactly. Exactly. No, that's exactly it, you know? And that's the part of the story -- you know, the story that has been told over, and over, and over, and sometimes terribly, you know -- this story of the Passion of Christ, that I think is so interesting, is that, like, the characters in the story have these two simultaneous views of this person: That, on one hand, he's a criminal, and he's a threat, and, you know, might even be a terrorist. You know, because the church tradition now is that he was crucified with two thieves, but the original word is a little closer to revolutionary, right? So, on one hand, they see him as a threat. On the other hand, you know, he's a joke. He's seen as a buffoon. You know, that's why the Roman soldiers, they say, "OK, hail, king of the Jews. Whatever." And they whip him. And it's both at the same time, and that was just always so interesting to me, that the climax of this story in the Gospels is this problem of perception. You know, that this person at the center of it is simultaneously seen as such a huge threat, and also a massive joke. And, not only that, but that's the center of this sacred story. You know, I've always thought it was so strange that, effectively, what this Holy Week story is about, is commemorating, and even treating as sacred, blasphemy: Celebrating the fact that God is being treated both as a criminal and as a joke. You know, both as a killer and a killjoy. And, honestly, you know, in my own spiritual practice, sometimes God looks like both at the same time, too, whenever you see something -- a natural disaster -- or when I do, you know, the killer part, and then other times the killjoy part, and then other times it's, like, something else entirely. That's my experience of it. The last couple of lines.

[EXCERPT FROM 'STRANGER IN THE COUNTRY' PLAYS:]

She didn't have the right time, Cause the time you were serving was the right kind.

LUCAS: "She didn't have the right time, because the time you were serving was the right kind." Because I remember, I actually worked a long time to figure out how to close that, because I think -- I was playing with time, and, at first, it was, like, "She didn't have the right time, but you said, you know, but you had the right time," and, you know, dumb things like that, and then I realized, you know, in the context of the song, "she didn't have the right time" means that she thinks that it's the middle of the night, but it seems like, in the dream, she's meeting Christ, and Christ has been waiting there for a long time. So that's what she means by "she didn't have the right time." But then "serving time" is different, right? Serving time is prison, and serving time is the law. That's what is really interesting, and will, in some way, always be interesting to me about this story, which is that it's about serving time.

[EXCERPT FROM 'STRANGER IN THE COUNTRY' PLAYS:]

... silent as a stone cold killer ...

JACOB: So, if people would like to hear more of your music, what should they do?

LUCAS: People can go to www.brotherkmusic.com, and that's kind of a one stop for videos, concert announcements, you know, new releases. They also go to my Bandcamp: brotherk.bandcamp.com, and help me stave off penury by purchasing my product.

JACOB: I recommend it.

LUCAS: [laughs] Thank you. Oh, right -- and of course, you know, the usual: Facebook, Twitter. They're both facebook.com/brotherkmusic, twitter.com/brotherkmusic.

JACOB: OK. Well, cool. Well, my name's Jacob Haller, and I have music, and other podcasts, and things. You can find out about all that stuff at jacobhaller.com, and I have a website devoted to this podcast, tellmeaboutyoursong.com, and I also have a blog where I post link -- you know, I'll post links to all of Lucas's websites and whatnot at yoursongpodcast.tumblr.com. And, with all that said, we're going to go out and listen to the entire song we've been talking about: "Stranger from the Country", from the Brother K. Melee. Thanks for listening.

['STRANGER IN THE COUNTRY' BY THE BROTHER K MELEE PLAYS IN FULL -- LYRICS ARE ON BANDCAMP]

JACOB: Do you remember how we met, by the way?

LUCAS: Yes I do.

JACOB: Yeah.

LUCAS: We were at -- man, what -- okay what's the radio station?

JACOB: WFMU.

LUCAS: WFMU! Right. Their talent show. Yeah, that was fun. That was my first time doing anything like that, and, you know, that was my only time I've ever done one of those variety show kind of situations. I just remember being very frantic ...

JACOB: Yeah.

LUCAS: ... for the whole evening, because, you know, they thrust you on stage, and give like three minutes to set up, and they didn't have the hook, but I kept imagining someone backstage with, like, a hook, you know, ready to --

JACOB: Right, and someone was going to play the trombone if we went on too long ...

LUCAS: Yeah. That was a useful exercise, actually. I feel like, if I did that every three months, it would keep me on my toes as a performer.

[EXCERPT FROM 'THE SEVEN SECOND DELAY ALMOST AMATEUR HOUR' FROM WFMU PLAYS:]

KEN: Rita did great. Our next guest, Andy -- our first electric act of the evening -- He brings Rock & Roll with a literacy problem -- Please welcome Brother K!

[APPLAUSE. AN ORGANIST PLAYS AS THE BAND GETS ON STAGE. THE BROTHER K MELEE LAUNCHES INTO THEIR SONG 'MARGERY'.]

[yoursongpodcast]

Visit Original Link

For 'Tell Me About Your Song' #80, songwriter Zoë Lewis talks about her song 'Plastic Soup', which is from her album 'The Sound of Wings'.

In the course of our discussion, we touched on the following topics:

The Coastal Studies Center in Provincetown

5 Gyres (the organization)

Five gyres (the oceanic currents)

Plastic smog aka plastic soup

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch: not how it's usually pictured, but still terrible

Plastic in the food chain

Cole Porter

Zoë's song 'Snow White' (aka 'The Day Snow White Said The F Word')

For more information about Zoë Lewis, her music, her videos, her two musicals, her upcoming shows, and her albums, go to her website at http://zoelewis.com/.

The 'Tell Me About Your Song' icon was designed by Shaenon K. Garrity.

If you want more information about your host, Jacob Haller, then check out my web page, my facebook page, or my twitter account.

'Tell Me About Your Song' on iTunes - rate and review us!

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Episode Transcript:

[BEGINNING OF 'PLASTIC SOUP' PLAYS:]

Swirling around in the beautiful blue somewhere between the equator and you there's a tear in the sky where the albatross flew man and his madness makes nightmares come true unfortunately this is so and that's why I want you to know... There is an island the size of Texas a floating island of piles and piles of plastic it's simply drastic, it's not fantastic because the fishes all eat plastic soup and all the ...

['PLASTIC SOUP' CONTINUES PLAYING UNDER THE FOLLOWING]

JAKE: Hello, and welcome to Tell Me About Your Song, the podcast where I talk to musicians and songwriters about a song they've written. Today I'm talking to Zoë Lewis, and the song she'll be talking about is named ...

['PLASTIC SOUP' CRESCENDOES, THEN FADES OUT:]

... plastic soup! ...

JAKE: Plastic Soup, and is from her album 'The Sound of Wings'. So where would you like to start, Zoë?

ZOË: When you're a songwriter, you start seeing songs all around, and when you get moved by something, or angry about something, you, you know, you're lucky enough to have a platform to be heard -- to put your voice out there. It's lovely! So even if 10 people hear it, that's ok -- 20, 100, you know, and then it escalates. We all have our stories. So, anyway, I'm -- I mean -- I'm pleased with this song, because it's a fun song, but it's Zoë Lewis being political, as much as I am political in my music -- I mean, I am political, in a fun way. You know, people think, "Oh, she's just a funny songwriter," but, you know, you still say your things, you can ease them in, and get your points across -- get them to the people. I'm from a little village on the south coast of England -- I come from the seaside. Now I live in Provincetown, Cape Cod, also by the sea. I need to be living on the edge, and I always gravitate towards beautiful beach towns. Anyway. I love my nature, and, of course, you know, I find plastic all the time, walking on the beach, and pick it up -- have always done so -- traveled the world a lot -- went to India, not too long ago. Couldn't believe how much plastic was strewn all over the place. I mean, everywhere you go, you find it. So I volunteered for the Coastal Studies Center in Provincetown, and they did a beach clean, but it was a fascinating beach clean. I mean, it's pristine -- it looks pristine, at first sight, but when you go underneath the seaweed, and start searching, you'll find all the micro plastic. We found -- In Cape Cod, we get a lot of Maine fishing stuff, because so much is made of plastic -- things used to be made of rope in the old days. Now, you know, everything -- everything's plastic. We use so much plastics. We started documenting the different plastic -- every tiny piece -- the wrappers, the straws, the bottle caps, unidentifiable plastic Styrofoam ...

[EXCERPT FROM 'PLASTIC SOUP' PLAYS:]

... on red balloons, plastic cups for plastic tea, just throw it all into the sea!

ZOË: Anyway, it was very interesting. At the end, you know, when you tally it all up, what you find are where the currents come from, you know, in different times of year, in different beaches on the Cape ... So, anyway, we brought a huge boat back, laden, from the tip of Cape Cod, to the main part of the land, and then, every year, I've been volunteering, and I was really moved by their work, and, you know, I started looking up statistics, and I was just blown away, and that's when I discovered 5 Gyres, which is a great organization, and the Gyres, you know, if you didn't know about them -- all the plastic that goes into the ocean, heads out to the currents, and there were five large gyres where the currents meet, and that's where all the plastic goes, and it never breaks down, because plastic doesn't break down, it just gets smaller and smaller and smaller. So some call it plastic smog, some call it plastic soup. So I imagined the ocean full of plastic soup and, you know, I read a lot of stuff -- the North Pacific garbage patch -- they were saying that

[EXCERPT FROM 'PLASTIC SOUP' PLAYS:]

There is an island the size of Texas a floating island of piles and piles of plastic

ZOË: Now, apparently, it's -- that's, you know, fabricated. But it's gigantic, anyway. And it's not really an island. It's just tons of swirling plastic. And I started looking up more about it, and about all the pollution, and the devastation it causes to the animals, and, you know, the oceans, ocean life -- the fish, of course, and the birds, and the mammals, and the -- They have done experim -- you know, cut the birds open, when they found a dead bird, and found so much plastic in its belly, albatrosses, and turtles, and I collected all the info, and I wrote my song, and it really kind of took off! I made a little video. it went viral, and it's used in schools now, and now I organize -- because, you know, because I sing it all the time, and and people come, and now I'm a advocate for cleaning beaches, and I organize beach cleans, and it just -- For me, it's just -- I don't even feel like joining an organization. I mean, I have played now for 5 Gyres, but, really, it's, like, we have the power! We can just pick up plastic ourselves! We can do it. I mean, if everyone just picked up a few bits, then the beautiful nature would be much better. We can make a dent in the plastic. But most importantly, really -- and particularly when I read about it -- you know, it's fine to pick up the plastic, but, really, we shouldn't use plastic. You know, always at the gigs, I'm given a plastic water bottle to drink from. And now i refuse it. I tell my band, don't -- We're not having wood, you know. So I have to make sure we've got glass, or we've got our own reusable water bottles. You know, you can stand up there and be a hypocrite. It's very easy to put be one.

[EXCERPT FROM 'PLASTIC SOUP' PLAYS:]

And the solution to this pollution? Stop using plastic, cut down on plastic

JAKE: Yeah. The tone of it is kind of like -- I mean it -- It reminds me -- You know, if you tweaked it a bit, it would be, like, a super villain song, right?

ZOË: [snorts]

JAKE: Because you can just sing it with such glee, and, yet it's about this terrible thing. Like, do you know what I'm talking about?

ZOË: Yeah. It's evil.

JAKE: Right.

ZOË: Yeah.

[EXCERPT FROM 'PLASTIC SOUP' PLAYS:]

And all the seagulls and the tiny turtles colossal whales are full of plastic

ZOË: And everyone's screaming out "No" by the end of the song, [laughs] because I make them.

[EXCERPT FROM 'PLASTIC SOUP' PLAYS:]

Do you want some soup? NO Would you like some soup? NO Fancy some soup? NO We don't want your soup!

ZOË: That's funny that it's a super villain song. Yeah, well, it's ominous. I mean, it's ominous, but, you know, I don't want to just say, "Oh, it's terrible. We're killing the Earth. Bye."

JAKE: Yeah.

ZOË: But, really, that's what the song's about, but it's in a Cole Porteresque sort of way, with funny rhymes. And you don't turn people off then, and it still gives you some hope that you can change the world, and that you can -- You can be positive, even though you're screaming "No!", and make a change.

JAKE: Mm-hmm. Did it have that kind of feel from the beginning?

ZOË: Well, you know, I'm English, so it's, like, "Would you like some soup? Fancy some soup?" You know, force feeding people soup, and you're, like, screaming "No!". And always like that part. You know, like, even though my music's not punk, I have a little punk rock in me, and I like to "No!", you know. I like to get people screaming "No!" and be angry. But, you know, with tongue in cheek. I mean, I had fun writing -- you know, I like to rhyme, and I had fun writing some of the lines, but, yeah. I knew it how it was going. When I get the chorus, I usually know how I'm going to add to it.

JAKE: Yeah. And it's also -- I feel like, I mean, that there are so many words in the song. I feel like the avalanche of words also kind of gets across this avalanche of plastic.

ZOË: Huh.

JAKE: I don't know. Is that --? A lot of these are connections that are made up in my mind, but I just sort of put them out there.

ZOË: Oh, good. I'm very -- I love -- I love that you think that. [laughter] Oh, yes, of course it was meant, then, to ... [laughter] No. I actually cut a verse at the end, because it was like, "Come on. It's getting too long." Because I was having fun. You know, this one just spilled off, and it was fun to write. I enjoyed it. I mean, I knew what I wanted to write. There's so many facts you could put in. I mean, it's quite factual, so, you know, basically, I'm just saying all the different creatures are full of plastic, and we're turning into plastic, you know, and it just -- from the food chain, and the jellyfishes, it just gets passed down. And it's a whole plastic society, anyway, and you can read that in so many ways, and we're getting so out of touch with nature. So, yeah, I knew. At this point it was clear.

JAKE: Mm-hmm.

ZOË: I mean, it's just a simple song, but it was written -- I mean, I love the Cole Porter and the rhyming, and, my gosh, there's a lot of words, so if I start the song too fast, especially when I get to the bridge, like, I have a hard time breathing. [both laugh] And, what is it, I go:

Plastic bags, plastic wraps, plastic bottles, plastic caps, styrofoam and lobster traps North Pacific garbage patch! [takes a deep breath] plastic forks, plastic spoons, plastic string on red balloons, plastic cups for plastic tea, just throw it all into the sea!

So it's -- I have to keep calm, and not be too excited, before the song, otherwise I'm race-horsing through it. My favorite line is "Even the porpoise is feeling nauseous." I was pleased when nauseous rhymed with porpoise.

[EXCERPT FROM 'PLASTIC SOUP' PLAYS:]

even the porpoise is feeling nauseous because he can't digest the plastic soup and in the food chain....

ZOË: The porpoise feeling nauseous -- I do like it -- because when I deliver it in shows, I kind of linger, and people give me a little giggle. They give me a little titter at that point. I'm always pleased when a line works. You know, there's usually one point in a song, they like it. But I end, you know, even though it's all "No!", I end up saying, well, we can make a change, and we can -- You know, we've got to cut down on plastic! We can save the world. You know, when I organize beach cleans now, tons of people come, and it's really, it's fun, and then they start their own beach cleans, and then they -- You know, I did a gig in Boston, and the people were like, "Can we do a collection for the 5 Gyres?" "Yeah." You know, people -- It's my pet, you know, thing. People like to put me, they pair me with the plastic pollution now. It's Kind of like, that's what people think: "Hey! You're the beach clean one! Can you do that song?" You know.

JAKE: Mm-hmmm.

ZOE: Good. So I like to -- That's one of the reasons why I chose it, when you asked me, too, because I can get the point across, too, through all the different media.

JAKE: Have you gotten any particularly memorable responses to this one?

ZOË: More that people buy the album, and go back and play it to their classrooms, you know.

JAKE: Yeah. ZOE: And, oh, I did have -- I was contacted from France! It made it to France, for some cleanup group, and they made a video of their beach plane, and they used the song, and then they use it on their website. You know, I always let everyone use it for free. And, yeah, it's out there. So, you never know where a song goes, and who's sharing it. You know, I like to get people to join me on stage, because it shows the more people that help, the more power, or louder, we can be, the more more noise we can make about it, and the more change we can achieve, and everyone's happy to yell "No!" No one wants to keep it like this. So it's universal.

JAKE: Mm-hmmm.

ZOË: I mean, at least the ones who come to my gigs. [laughter] And you don't even have to make an organization. Just go and clean! People often come up to me in Provincetown. They say, "We thought of you the other day. We were dragging plastic off the beach." [chuckles] You know, and then other people are like, "Oh, yeah, since we heard your song, we're gonna go, and -- We always bring three pieces." Because sometimes I say, "Just bring three. You don't have to, you know, bring it all." I mean. But it gets quite addictive. You can't stop. You start seeing more and more of it, and then you can't -- it's -- I always tie it all together, and come back with huge amounts, and then have to call the Rangers and say, "Please, can you come pick it up," because they can't deal with it, you know.

JAKE: Mm-hmmm.

ZOË: And then it goes to show -- And then they always put it on Facebook, and people are like, "Wow." You know, that's another way -- People are, "My God, you found all that stuff." So, I'm like, "Well, you just go and pick some, you'll soon find find a huge pile." So yes. I'm an optimistic, jovial, performer, but this is a bummer. [laughter] It certainly is.

JAKE: Yeah. It's a rough one.

ZOË: I also like to -- You know, try, for a whole gig, I take people on a roller coaster ride, and try and, you know, make some points, and then take them off on a humorous angle, and then hit them in the gut with an emotional song, and then be silly again. You know, it's life.

JAKE: Mm-hmmm.

ZOË: It's life, and that's what I try and do in the show.

JAKE: Yeah. Is there a particular place that this tends to go in a set?

ZOË: Well, on the album, it's the second song. I usually build it -- Because it's got audience participation, I usually leave it till later on. If I'm doing two sets, I'll leave that to the penultimate song of the first set. Maybe near the end of the second set. Depends who's, you know, if there's kids, or what kind of, you know, I tailor-make it for the crowd, but I've had all sorts of people up.

JAKE: Mm-hmm.

ZOË: I've had a whole ton of punk rockers, once, holding to 'No!" signs, and that was great.

JAKE: That sounds fantastic. ZOE: Yeah. [laughter]

JAKE: Because I feel like this song -- you know, it has -- It's not a kids song, per se -- like, there's some sophistication to it -- but I feel like kids also would enjoy, and get the message, and everything, so ...

ZOË: Yeah. I don't write "kids music." I just write music. But I do have a ton of kid fans. I would never want to talk down to kids, and simplify things. But the music's fun, and I find I have lots of kids who come to the shows, and, in the summer, when I play in Provincetown, we do outside gigs, and I have rows and rows of little ones in the front, wanting to come and join in. It's like -- Nowadays, kids music -- Well the, you know -- It's a huge moneymaker. And, you know, nowadays, there's bands that the parents quite like, too. In the old days, they didn't, they couldn't bear kids music. But, you know, I don't classify myself as kids music, but it's, like, for the kids in us. I'm very pleased the kids come. I do have a song called "The Day That Snow White Said The F Word," and that is the most popular song with school children, whether or not their parents like is another ...

JAKE: Not your problem!

ZOË: Not my problem! I don't actually say the F word.

JAKE: No.

[EXCERPT FROM 'SNOW WHITE' PLAYS:]

When she came down to Orlando, she was only just eighteen. Got a room in a condo complex, and a job inside her childhood dream, And she started as a teacup, and she made friends with the spool, and the theme park was an oyster, for her eyes were wider than the moon. And through the little window ...

JAKE: So, if people would like to hear more of your music, what should they do?

ZOË: OK. Well, you can go to www.zoelewis.com, and I've got all my albums up there, there's videos, I've written two musicals -- there's information on that -- and I do a 1920s show, too. And I'm touring all over the world, all the time, in between picking up plastic.

JAKE: Yes. And I saw Zoë when she performed in Providence, and that was a great show, so I recommend you seek her out!

ZOË: Hooray!

JAKE: So my name's Jacob Haller, and, if you're interested in my music, it's at music.jwgh.org, and I also have a kind of umbrella website at jacobhaller.com where you can find the music, and all my podcasts, and all the other crazy stuff I'm doing. Tell Me About Your Song has its own website at tellmeaboutyoursong.com, and you can find it and rate it in iTunes, and any place where podcast can be found, which I hope you do. And, with all that said, we're going to go out by listening to the song that we've been talking about in full: "Plastic Soup" by Zoë Lewis, from the album "The Sound of Wings." Thanks for listening!

["PLASTIC SOUP" PLAYS IN FULL]

JAKE: Yeah, and it's always kind of interesting -- like, you know, the song that she chose to talk about is one of the relatively serious ones, and

ZOË: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

JAKE: It's interesting. I mean, I -- Most of my songs are kind of humorous, as well, so... ZOE: Mm-hmm.

JAKE: I think it's always interesting when someone with more of a humorous bent takes on, you know, something more serious than it --

ZOË: Yeah.

JAKE: It's --

ZOË: Well, it's -- I think it's, like, also when, I mean, if you just think quickly, when you're not, you know -- You think, "Oh, well, I'd better do that has some, that has a story to it. I've got to talk a while about it." [laughter] You know? It's like --

JAKE: Yes. [laughter]

ZOË: Eh. What can I say? I better be saying something important. [laughter]

JAKE: Yeah.

ZOË: Like, it's about a child's tadpole. I just saw a tadpole, and it was nice, so I wanted to write about it. [laughs] There we are! End of interview, thank you very much. [laughter]

JAKE: Yup. All right. This is the fifteen second --

ZOË: Yeah.

JAKE: -- episode that everyone's been waiting for.

ZOË: Yeah.

[yoursongpodcast]

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For 'Tell Me About Your Song' #79, songwriter Marian Call talked about her song 'Oregon Trail', which is from her album 'Standing Stones'.

Wikipedia has articles about the actual historical Oregon Trail, as well as the 1970s/1980s education game 'The Oregon Trail'. The idea of the 'Oregon Trail Generation' was described in a 2015 article named 'The Oregon Trail Generation: Life Before and After Mainstream Tech' by Anna Garvey in Social Media Week.

I also recommend an essay that Marian Call wrote about her song 'Standing Stones', which is the song that follows 'Oregon Trail' on the Standing Stones album.

In our discussion, I made reference to Marian Call's interview on 'Make Me Smart', which you can hear on the Marketplace website.

More information about Marian Call and her music can be found on her website, where you can also find out about any upcoming shows. You can get her music on Bandcamp, as well as most other places where music is sold. She is also on twitter, facebook, and Patreon.

The 'Tell Me About Your Song' icon was designed by Shaenon K. Garrity.

If you want more information about your host, Jacob Haller, then check out my web page, my facebook page, or my twitter account.

'Tell Me About Your Song' on Apple Podcasts - rate and review us!

'Tell Me About Your Song' on stitcher - rate and review us!

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Episode Transcript:

[BEGINNING OF 'OREGON TRAIL' PLAYS:]

And we set out in the springtime with our bindles and our boots, And we reveled in our poverty, abandoning our roots. A brand new path, adventurers, All lonely, bold, and brave, Breaking free and making do, And telling tales of how we'd save ourselves.

JACOB: Hello and welcome to Tell Me About Your Song, the podcast where I talk to musicians and songwriters about a song they've written. Today, I'm talking to Marian Call, and the song she'll be talking about is named 'Oregon Trail'. So, where would you like to start, Marian?

MARIAN: This is part of a record called 'Standing Stones,' and, in that record, one of the things I'm interested in looking at is the stories we tell ourselves. Like, the myths that we have about who we are, and the myths of, you know, Western culture, myths of America. And this is one of those myths, the Oregon Trail, right? It's about being stron,g and independent, and adventurous, and setting out on your own, and conquering the landscape, and finding a place for yourself -- You know, all the things that we -- All things we want to do, in sort of our individualist society. It's about self actualization, and about claiming a space in the world, and that myth is so important to us. But I've been thinking a lot about how it doesn't necessarily hold up, either to our experience, or to a good model. Like, it might seem exciting to think of being a pioneer, and going out, and, you know, finding your own way in the world, but the more you actually read about what it would have been like back then, about (a) how horrid it was; (b) about the myths that the pioneers were often being sold about "Free land out west!" when, of course, that land was already occupied, and about the idea that it was our destiny to command and control the landscape and to have, you know, a country from sea to sea. That was not a given; that was a something that we decided, and then we made it real. And that may or may not have been a decision that sat well with everyone who was affected by it. Part of why I wanted to write about this was that it is one of our founding mythologies, you know? It's a real historic event, but it's also a mythos that is larger than this one event, and that's why I wanted to tackle it, and both honor it, and dismantle it, at the same time. [laughs] You know, every now and then, those think pieces come along about generations, and what millennials are doing, and what Gen X is doing, and everything like that, and I was part of this cohort -- and a lot of my friends were, too -- that fell kind of between Generation X and Y and millennials --

JACOB: Mmm-hm.

MARIAN: -- and we never got a name, but I still feel like our experience is kind of fundamentally different, and we're too young to be Generation X, but definitely too old to have a similar experience to millennials, in a lot of ways. And I read several articles in which some scholars and demographers argue for the existence of a Generation Oregon Trail, which is kind of a small cohort. I think it's like 1976 to 1987, or something like that -- or 1986.

JACOB: Mmm-hm.

MARIAN: And that describes the generation of people who started school -- like, started, you know, their first few years of school -- without networked computing, but, by the time they completed school, the Internet was fully fledged and running. And so, like, kids after us grew up typing from the time they were, you know, very, very small. They don't remember before computers in the home, and before computers in school, to do all their tasks. In fact they stopped needing to even offer keyboarding classes in a lot of schools. They didn't teach typing anymore, because the kids would just arrive at school already knowing how to type.

JACOB: Mmm.

MARIAN: And that was not true for my group! We had to go through hours and hours of typing classes, Mavis Beacon and all the rest. So this song is about the peculiar life of that particular generation. I think this cohort of people is really cool, and inspiring, and interesting, and innovative, and has made a lot of cool things, but at the same time, there's a little a little bit of a sense of opportunity drying up, in a lot of ways, and I wanted to write something about that, and I thought the Oregon Trail was a perfect allegory for it. It describes the name of the generation because of that video game we all played, and it also describes a sort of a modern look back at that journey, that has been mythologized as one of the cornerstones of the American story, you know? Did you play Oregon Trail when you were young.

JACOB: Oh yes!

MARIAN: I did, too. Several different generations of it, too, from the, like, big floppy disk, to the little floppy disk, to the hard drive version, to the -- Apparently, someone told me there was an Oregon Trail 2, and, like, an Amazon Trail, and they kind of did a couple of spin offs and sequels, which surprised me. I hadn't heard of those, but --

JACOB: Yeah, I had no idea.

MARIAN: Yeah. Hundreds of people have gotten in touch with me, to tell me, like, how this hit a nostalgia spot for them. So, yeah. I'm kind of revising that history in this song. Like, it starts out really great. It's, you know, 'We set out adventurous --'

[BEGINNING OF 'OREGON TRAIL' PLAYS:]

And we set out in the springtime with our bindles and our boots, And we reveled in our poverty, abandoning our roots. A brand new path, adventurers, All lonely, bold, and brave, Breaking free and making do, And telling tales of how we'd save ourselves.

MARIAN: And then we gradually realised that it wasn't just us. It was everyone else.

['OREGON TRAIL' CONTINUES:]

'Til everybody else we knew Had started on the journey too. Then we were not phenomenal, no, we were not phenomenal. We never were phenomenal, Just part of our whole generation's vague instinctive mass migration. We were not exceptional, no we were not exceptional. We never were exceptional. We were longing longing longing though, And true. We were dreaming that the world was dreaming too.

MARIAN: And maybe we were being brave and individual, and making our own choices, but maybe we were also just part of this kind of global phenomenon that we couldn't really control.

[AN INSTRUMENTAL PART OF 'OREGON TRAIL' CONTINUES BRIEFLY.]

MARIAN: The opening sense of possibility that we had, as young people, when the Internet was new, was very much hit by, you know, two different bubble bursts. First, the Silicon Valley, and kind of that portion of the economy -- realizing, no, the internet doesn't do everything, and it doesn't change everything. It does some things, but not all of them. And then the housing bubble burst -- that, no, we can't all own a home on the income that we have. No, we're never going to pay off our student loans. No, we're never going to get out of credit card debt.

JACOB: Mmm-hm.

MARIAN: No, we're never going to stop moving around the country. I think the number of times a person my age has changed cities is just, like, astounding now. it's really -- it's so different from the generation before. This is also part of a song cycle, and this is kind of in the middle beginning of it, so there's some resolution that answers this song a little bit later in the album. This is in the 'What are we doing?' stage at the late beginning on the record. I wanted it to start feeling like a very wholesome folk song, like -- I'm working on a folk festival this weekend, and I wanted it to sound just like a good old classic tune, you know? Maybe a little more complicated words, but the same chords, and the same feel, as, you know, a Willie Nelson kind of song.

JACOB: And the harmonies, too.

MARIAN: Yeah, the harmonies, exactly, are very straight at the beginning.

[EXCERPT FROM 'OREGON TRAIL' PLAYS:]

Surrendering exceptional to lighten up the load, We woke up ...

[SONG CONTINUES PLAYING IN THE BACKGROUND.]

MARIAN: But the deeper into the song you get, the more your perspective shifts, sort of. I think of it as, like, a moment when the sky opens, and suddenly you realize that the world is so much bigger than you thought.

['OREGON TRAIL CONTINUES:]

And the World Was all a road ...

MARIAN: And that occurs in the middle of the song, and we have this big, kind of -- We have a big, and sort of shocking, key change. It's not the way you would usually change keys from A to E by way of a C major chord, which is not in either key, but it's -- That's the pivot between those two worlds. And it's meant to feel this grand opening into a much larger universe.

[EXCERPT FROM 'OREGON TRAIL' PLAYS:]

We bought some land out west, Though nowhere seemed to feel like home. And digging in the yard we found somebody else's bones. The moment that the shovel hit, We bowed before the things we should have known.

MARIAN: Gradually, our speaker realizes that they thought they were going out into empty space to make a name for themselves, and, in fact, they were going out into someone else's space. And that doesn't feel very good.

[EXCERPT FROM 'OREGON TRAIL' PLAYS:]

Of course we're not the first ones here. We never were the first ones here. Just part of our whole generation's Childish frontier re-creation.

[SONG CONTINUES PLAYING IN THE BACKGROUND.]

MARIAN: But if you don't do that, then there's not enough food, there's not enough security. It's a little bit of a story of getting lost along the way growing up.

['OREGON TRAIL CONTINUES:]

... adventurers We were longing longing longing and so lost We were barely what we needed, and it cost.

MARIAN: And it reminds me of a lot of friends my age. I do have some friends my age who are married and have, you know, houses, and kids, and things. But, you know, coming on 40, it's not nearly as many of us as we thought, right? And a lot of us are not housed, or are moving around the country all the time, you know, not settling in one city, or we're not -- we're divorcing and remarrying, or not settling into a family structure, getting old enough to be like: "Well, I guess I'm not having kids, then," without it really being ever a voluntary choice. I think that's one of those surprises that hits you along the trail, and that's what this song is about. [laughs] After we transition to E, then I start adding chords that are more modern -- chords that were not in the original, sort of, lexicon of vintage country music.

[EXCERPT FROM 'OREGON TRAIL' PLAYS:]

... the first ones here. Just part of our whole generation's Childish frontier re-creation. We were not adventurers. No, we were not adventurers. We never were adventurers! We were longing longing longing ...

MARIAN: So I started adding, like, a flat seven chord, a D major chord, and I start adding minor IV chords, and it gets, basically, just messier and messier. It's like the chord progression sort of starts to disintegrate. And, at the end, the harmonies get weirder, and weirder, and weirder, and then the harmonies kind of fall apart, too. And the two backing voices kind of abandon the main voice, and wander off on their own, and get lost.

[EXCERPT FROM 'OREGON TRAIL' PLAYS:]

No, we have not found shelter yet. We've eaten what we meant to plant, And the twelve ages of man are circling hungry overhead -- And grandmother would disapprove. We will make no more miles today.

MARIAN: It's really -- it's fun. It's like the oxen have run away. [both laugh] Yeah.

JACOB: Yeah.

MARIAN: It's actually a reference to a videogame, too. There's a lot of videogames in this song, not just Oregon Trail. I got hooked on 'Don't Starve', which is a ridiculous -- [chuckles] It's just, it's a very silly videogame. It's a survival game --

JACOB: Uh-huh.

MARIAN: -- and I played way too much of it in the year that I was writing this record, and it informed a lot of my thinking about just, like, what it really does take to survive. When you eat the seeds that you were supposed to put in the ground, you know, you survive another day, but you've jeopardized your future, and that's very much, you know, me and my other, kind of like, late 30s friends, having to spend our savings, or still being in debt, without any sort of assets. And it's not meant to be too hopeless, but it is meant to be, like, a moment of clarity, that I set out on this journey, and realizing we're not as far as we thought we were, and we haven't found anywhere to stop and plant.

JACOB: And it says, "The 12 ages of man are circling hungry overhead."

MARIAN: Uh-huh. And I have 11 songs that are divided by those 12 ages of man.

JACOB: Ah.

MARIAN: Yeah. I really worked on the structure of this one, because I like the idea of -- The 12 Ages of Man is sort of a late medieval pre-Renaissance Western European idea that, if a person lived all 12 ages of man, they could get to be 72. So there were 12 ages, and they were six years each, and they corresponded to, like, the months of the year, and they corresponded to the seasons, and to the horoscope, and to a map of the body, and everything. They sort of connected all these things that weren't necessarily connected. But I liked that idea, and so I have these 11 songs that are about different stages of life, and this one is very much the, like, getting out of college, and then realizing that it's not as easy as you thought, you know? [laughs]

JACOB: Mmm-hm.

MARIAN: Late 20s/early 30s. You've accomplished so much, and you've been set on this grand trajectory, and then you get out there in the world, and you're like, "Oh! Hang on!" it's kind of a letdown. But there's more to come in the story.

JACOB: You were talking about this in terms of it being part of a song cycle, so: What comes before this, and what comes after it?

MARIAN: What comes before this, is a song about about childhood, about being young, exuberant, and feeling like you can fill up your whole world, or like the world cannot contain you. It's a song called 'No Paper'. The original working title was 'Lauds', which is the name of the prayer for that hour of the day, that corresponds to the Twelve Ages of Man, that corresponds to all this big structure that I was kind of plugging into, from early, like, Renaissance literature. [laughs] You can leave that out, if you want.

[EXCERPT FROM 'NO PAPER' PLAYS:]

There is no paper big enough for what I'm going to draw today.

MARIAN: It's a crazy rhythm jam, actually, with very little melody, but it has, like, a horn section, and some really wild harmonies, and just insane electric guitar. It's a very, like, expressive, creative, kind of Jackson Pollock-y song, about being young, and feeling full of possibility. It's also about protests, and protest sign,s and marching. The line is "There is no paper big enough for what I'm going to draw today." And it's just -- There's nothing that can contain me, or that can contain my message, and, you know, that feels very youthful to me. Both about, like, little kids, before they learn that -- Before they learn that art is supposed to look a certain way, and they're just like scribbling filling up the whole page, and, like, just the energy that people have, like, in college, when they're learning everything, and excited, and have a lot of passion, and so: Yeah. It's kind of a younger age.

[EXCERPT FROM 'OREGON TRAIL' PLAYS:]

We never were adventurers. We were longing longing longing and so lost.

MARIAN: And then, we transition to this song, which is a little bit, like, "Well, we thought we were going to go out into the world and conquer it, and then we had another think, after we got out there."

JACOB: Mm hmm.

MARIAN: And the song after it is the title track. It's called 'Standing Stones.'

[BEGINNING OF 'STANDING STONES' PLAYS:]

We drew nine lines from east to west We drew nine from north to south And we stitched our names in concrete veins Through miles and miles and miles of ground

MARIAN: It sort of reconciles that. It's about how our impulse to build things, and make things, and design, and scratch, and leave our mark, and change the environment -- how that impulse is really universal -- we all have it -- and also how it's impermanent. Like, it's going to pass away, but that doesn't matter, because it's just what we do, and that's beautiful. It's really, it's a validation of humanity, in the middle of acknowledging that we have a finite span, so, yep! And then it goes on, kind of more into, like, middle age, and then midlife crisis, of course, and then into a kind of acceptance. Some of the other songs on this record are much, much less complex. This one's through composed. Like, the chords don't necessarily repeat, and the lyrics don't repeat very much. But, yeah, it does reward repeat listening. It's definitely a journey. And hopefully catchy, too. Like, people will be leaving humming it, even though they can't remember any other words because they don't repeat!

JACOB: Have you played this song out?

MARIAN: Yeah, we play it out, and it's hard to communicate that groove change --

JACOB: Mmm.

MARIAN: -- So I just kind of have to do without it. But that's part of why I was so excited to put it on a record, too, and have it sound different on the record. I like doing it out. I wish -- I would love -- I would just die to do it with a trio --

JACOB: Mmm-hm.

MARIAN: -- you know, so we could sing all the harmonies. But that's, again, the joy of getting to record it! There's a video for it, that I really am proud of. Pat Race made an Oregon Trail style video of it, and, as it happened, somehow someone pinged the son of the man who created Oregon Trail -- one of the two men who created Oregon Trail. And he emailed me, and then his dad e-mailed me! So I got a message from the creator of Oregon Trail, which was great! [laughs]

JACOB: Wow, that's awesome! What did they say?

MARIAN: They really liked it! That was -- that made me happy! I was shocked and surprised. His name is Don Rawitsch, and he got in touch just to say that he was honored by the tribute, and that he thought it was interesting. Says, "Thanks for the tribute to the pioneers, and the game I co-invented 45 years ago."

JACOB: Wow.

MARIAN: And I can't believe it was 45 years ago, because I experienced it more like 33 years ago.

JACOB: Mmm-hm.

MARIAN: But yeah. [laughs]

JACOB: Yeah, that video is great. I watched -- Like, I started watching it, and then I kind of had it on in the background, and I thought it was just the actual game, and then I went back and looked at it, and I was, like, "Wait a minute!" One of the things is a cellphone charger, and --

MARIAN: Yep, yep, yep, there's --

JACOB: -- and you come across this pile of skulls, I think, right around where the modulation occurs.

MARIAN: Yeah. It takes some twists. We were hoping, actually, that, at the beginning, people would think it was just kind of a GIF that repeats, you know, and doesn't really go anywhere.

JACOB: Mmm-hm.

MARIAN: But, gradually, it kind of gets wilder, and wilder, and takes you out of our safe little sweet country song beginning.

JACOB: I think that this idea is one that I stole from Kai Ryssdal, because I listened to your interview -- or, I didn't know if it was an interview, per se -- but when you were on "Make Me Smart" --

MARIAN: That was fun. [chuckles]

JACOB: -- but he kind of asked you about, you know, being in Alaska, and kind of engaging in this sort of pioneering spirit that's involved in living up there.

MARIAN: Well, I think the connection is very much that, if ever there were a place where that American mythos is embodied, it's Alaska, for sure. There's there's some very bold, strong, self-reliant, competent people up here, you know? You can love them or hate them, but people kind of assume that you can split your own wood, and maybe fly a plane, and it's weirdly, like, one of the most and least sexist places I've ever been.

JACOB: Mmm-hm.

MARIAN: The most, because we have really difficult rates of abuse, and things like that, here, because there's a lot of substance issues. But it's also the least, in that people -- People here very much assume that I run my own business. They don't think I'm arm candy when I go to a party, right?

JACOB: Mmm-hm.

MARIAN: We've had women politicians at a higher rate than a lot of other states. We have tons of women business owners. And if you're out at a cabin, people won't flinch when they give you a tough job. They won't be surprised if you pick up something heavy to carry it, you know? It's just very -- It's nice! I like it! I like the presumption of my competence, even if I'm not always competent. [both laugh] But the funny thing is, up here in the land of the most independent people anywhere, is where I find that people are very, very clear on the fact that we're not independent. None of us are independent. We all rely on each other, and we're all connected in really concrete ways, like, you know, so and so does this job, and so and so does that job, and, in a tiny town, they're the only people who do it. We need them, and we rely on them, so we have to take care of them. I know people who have literally gone out into the woods, to their own property, to clear logs, use those logs to turn them into a cabin, live in that cabin in the summertime, you know, and have just cut every board themselves, right? But those people are the ones who are the most aware that if they, you know, if they slip up and hurt themselves, and they don't have a friend, then they're screwed. You know, if they don't have help -- if they don't have everyone else to come over and assist at the crucial moment -- then their house is not going to get put up. You can't do it yourself, in this -- The kind of twofold lesson here is, you can be as independent as you want, but you can't do it yourself, and especially when nature is really a factor, the way it is here. And I really like that. So that's what -- that's kind of what this whole record is about, is, you can you can be as independent and strong as you like, but we still need each other. Alaska has had a huge influence on this record. [laughs] It's like embracing it, and at the same time unmasking, the pioneering spirit, as being a lot more complicated, and a lot less pure, and not at all what we dreamed it was.

JACOB: Mmm-hm.

MARIAN: It doesn't look how we thought, in the movies. [chuckles] In the video game.

JACOB: Right. So, if people would like to hear more of your music, what should they do?

MARIAN: You can hear more of my music -- I have ten albums now, and then a few singles -- at bandcamp.com/mariancall. So just look me up on bandcamp, you can find me on YouTube, you can find me on Twitter, you can find me at a Facebook page, and you can find me on Patreon, now. That's new. The new album is just on Bandcamp, as of right now. It should be up in a lot of other locations very shortly. You know iTunes, and Spotify, and all that.

JACOB: Great. And I'll put links to all of that. I put together a blog post --

MARIAN: Oh, excellent. Thank you!

JACOB: -- for each episode, so I'll put links to that, and that blog is at yoursongpodcast.tumblr.com [spells it]. So my name is Jacob Haller, and I have a website at JacobHaller.com. You can find all my music there, or on bandcamp, and links to my other podcasts and projects, and, as I mentioned, there's a Tumblr blog for the show notes at yoursongpodcast.tumblr.com. And there's also a Web site for the podcast at tellmeaboutyoursong.com. You can write interview us on iTunes, or Stitcher, or any of those places, and I would love it if you did that -- or just tell a friend. If you think they would enjoy this episode, send them a link. So, with all that said, we're going to go out and listen to the song we've been talking about: 'Oregon Trail' by Marion Call, from her album 'Standing Stones'. Thanks for listening.

['OREGON TRAIL' PLAYS IN FULL. YOU CAN FIND THE FULL LYRICS ON MARIAN CALL'S BANDCAMP PAGE.]

JACOB: So where would you like to start, Marion?

MARIAN: [laughs] Um...

JACOB: See? I warned you, and it still is totally --

MARIAN: Oh, you -- you were serious about that! Yeah.

[yoursongpodcast]

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For 'Tell Me About Your Song' #78, songwriter Nicole Alifante talked about her song 'Before I Go', which is from her album 'La La La'.

You can buy Nicole's albums on her website.

The 'Tell Me About Your Song' icon was designed by Shaenon K. Garrity.

If you want more information about your host, Jacob Haller, then check out my web page, my facebook page, or my twitter account.

'Tell Me About Your Song' on iTunes - rate and review us!

'Tell Me About Your Song' on stitcher - rate and review us!

'Tell Me About Your Song' rss feed

'Tell Me About Your Song' on Facebook

Episode Transcript:

[EXCERPT FROM 'BEFORE I GO' PLAYS:]

They got the Father, And the Son, And the Holy Ghost. I got my mind and my body and my eternal soul. That's a lot to fucking juggle, so I'm just gonna make rock and roll. Before I go.

JACOB: Hello, and welcome to 'Tell Me About Your Song, the podcast where I talk to musicians and songwriters about a song they've written. Today's guest is Nicole Alifante, and the song she'll be talking about is named "Before I Go", which is from her album "La La La". So, where would you like to start with this song?

NICOLE: I mean, I think it all -- it all transpired within, like, 30 minutes on my couch. [laughs] I just was laying there, and it came out, and I put the laptop on my stomach, and opened Garage Band, and just kind of, you know, this -- I mean, it, it -- That happens -- not often, but it does happen to me every once in a while -- where just, like, a whole story spills out, and I convince the person that I take it to to that it's going to be cool. And, you know, ultimately, it ends up kind of cool. [laughs] I don't play an instrument, so I write songs -- I write melodies and lyrics that sort of pop into my head, and I can pluck melodies out on the piano with, like, one hand, but when I was putting this album together I wanted to include at least one or two songs that I had written solely on my own. And, so, I was feeling a little weighted by what was going on in the world, and watching the coverage of the upcoming election, and so I had this lyric in my head, and then I sort of had a melody that popped in with it, and then I actually hummed a bass line.

[BEGINNING OF 'BEFORE I GO' PLAYS]

NICOLE: I used that -- I opened my Garage Band, and I hummed a bass line, and then I sang the melody and lyrics over it, and then I brought it to one of my songwriting partners, and he kind of helped me flesh it out a little bit. It came up pretty quickly. I mean it -- I just sort of -- I had a lot of, kind of, anger. It's kind of a spicy song, if you listen to it, and I just had, like, a lot of confusion about what the truth was, and why it didn't seem like anybody cared about the truth, and so it came out pretty quickly.

[EXCERPT FROM 'BEFORE I GO' PLAYS:]

They said to be nice. I didn't think twice -- I wasn't thinking at all. I turned the news on and the man said that Rome's gonna fall. Gonna grab my glass slippers and dance my ass off at the ball.

NICOLE: I guess that line is about me. It's like, 'They said to be nice. I didn't think twice -- I wasn't thinking at all,' you know? And I kind of feel like, especially in this election, I woke up -- I think it was, like -- It was like, "Yeah," you know, "I don't know anything. I don't know anything." You know, I read as much of the paper as I can, and I listen to public radio, you know, NPR, because I feel like I'm getting, you know, "paid for by the people," or whatever, and they're not snarky, and they're not yelling at each other, and being hateful, so it makes me feel better. But I do kind of feel like this, "Just, like, be nice, and, you know, be good to people, and mind your own business, and, you know" -- It's just kind of gotten us all here, where I don't think any of us knows what's going on. [laughs] So, yeah, that line kind of did stand out for me, and, I guess, growing up, just seeing, you know, beautiful girls in dresses going to balls and being saved by boys, and, you know, it's like, I wasn't -- I definitely didn't grow up in, like, this family that was, like, "Be strong, woman!" You know, they were, like, "You know, you're talented, and we love you, and we support you. Be nice! You know, just go out, and be sweet, and do what you love to do!", you know, and so I think: What is my role now in this world, you know, now that I feel like things are kind of really rocky, to say the least, and I'm a mom. Like, it's time to not to be nice anymore, and figure it out.

[EXCERPT FROM 'BEFORE I GO' PLAYS:]

They're gonna spin it, Gonna fake it, Do their time on TV. You can purchase what they're selling cause you need to believe. A ruse by any other name would still smell like bullshit to me. They got the Father, And the Son, And the Holy Ghost. I got my mind and my body and my eternal soul. Well, that's a lot to fucking juggle, so I'm just gonna make rock and roll. Before I go.

JACOB: That second verse: "They got the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost. I got my mind, and my body, and my eternal soul." Like, those are -- I guess, those -- You can think of these in different ways, but they're kind of different examples of, like, these, kind of, trinities: These three things which are different but related, and, also, maybe kind of the same, in some ways. And I thought that it was an interesting way to contrast those two, and I just, kind of -- Like, one seems very, kind of, organized religion, and the other seems much more personal.

NICOLE: It's cool that you got that, because I had always wanted to write -- I actually have a song called "The Holy Trinity" that I had been wanting to write for years, but it was getting very preachy, and I didn't know how to say what I wanted to say. And so, when I was writing this song, I was, like, "Oh! I can use just one verse, and condense my exact feeling into that one verse." So it's exactly what you're saying. It's like, you know, it's, like: Is it this sort of traditional way of seeing God, that is supposed to be the way we -- you know, the way we make rules, the way we control each other. Or is it more like a personal journey? And, you know, when this Holy Trinity was written about, thousands of years ago or whatever, were people trying to say, like, "I'm grappling with these three things! You know, I've got my reason, and I've got this body that's going to just disappear some day, and then I have, like, something bigger, that feels bigger -- like my spirit, or whatever that is. And, so, I think, you know, it's trying to -- It is -- it's like, they're very much the same, they're all so different, and it was kind of my way of never having to write that other song! [laughs] The first couple of verses were pretty visceral, and there was this, sort of, Cinderella part that came into it, that was, sort of -- it was a little more planned. Like, the idea of, just, like -- If it's all going to turn to hell, I'm just going to grab my glass slippers and dance, you know? Like, it's, like, all you can do!

[EXCERPT FROM 'BEFORE I GO' PLAYS:]

Gonna grab my glass slippers and dance my ass off at the ball. Before I go. Before I go.

NICOLE: It might've been Sam Hollande,r or someone in the music biz, said, like, "If you write a good chorus, make it the verse, and then write a better chorus."

JACOB: Hmmm.

NICOLE: And, it's like, that's a good rule. But this one in particular, I was, like, "Yeah, it's kind of flat: 'Before I go,'" you know. And I was afraid it wasn't that exciting, but then I heard the voices. You know, I heard, like, a rich, like, black woman's voice, and I heard a guy's voice, and so we tripled and doubled voices, and I felt like: 'Before I go' is such a simple statement, and I all of a sudden talked myself out of it needing, like, any acrobatics. I just liked the idea that it kind of grows. Like, I say it once, and I think in the second chorus I say it, like, twice, and then, in the third chorus, I say it three times, and I go up high, you know. So, I feel like it was just my, kind of, swan song, in a way. Like, "I hope this shit gets cleaned up before I go. [laughs] I hope I do something, make some kind of mark, before I'm out of here, because, you know, it just seems kind of hopeless right now. So I think it was less of, like, a hooky hook that I wanted people to remember, than it was more of like a statement.

JACOB: One of my problems as an interviewer is that, like, the instant I think of a question, I immediately kind of question ...

NICOLE: The question? [laughs]

JACOB: ... the premise of it. So, like, I'm kind of, like, "Well what is this about?" But then I'm, like, "Well, is it really about one specific thing? Like, how -- is that a good question?" It never is. OK. Um.

NICOLE: [laughs] Well, but that is a good question, because it's not about one specific thing. I mean, I think that, as I was writing it, like, the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost crept in there. So it was kind of like, it started out as just, like, kind of a rage of, "What am I hearing? Who's talking at me? What are they saying? Do they believe what they're saying? Am I supposed to believe what they're saying?", you know, and I didn't want to be too specifically political, you know. I'm -- I don't know if I should disclose my politics, but I didn't want to say I hated one candidate, or I loved another, or Republicans were better, or -- you know, I didn't want to get that specific. It was just more like, it sounds like everyone's lying at this point, and it's hard to find, like, any kind of purity in it. But then, the sort of religious connotation kind of jumped in, and so -- So, yes. So, it became not about one specific thing, and started to become about, what is the truth? We look for it in politics. We look for it in God, you know. It's, like, where is it? And it did kind of snowball into several different topics. [laughs] And I don't know. You know, it's funny how someone may listen to it, and maybe could be just -- First of all, they could hate it, or they could listen to it and think, "Oh, yeah, this is political," or they could feel like it's something else. It's hard to -- It's hard to know. Like, this song, in particular, is the one, when I give the CD to different people, I'm wondering, like, how they'll respond to it. Because it's pretty, you know, in your face in a certain topic. And I have, you know, Trump supporters in my family, and Hillary supporters in my family, and I voted for Bernie in the primaries, and, you know, it's, like, everyone has their different things, and, you know, it'll be interesting to see how people respond to it. But, yeah! I think we don't have a lot of references right now for anything, and I think music is just such a safe and awesome way to express that. You know, I just think it's, like, the universal language that people can come together on, even if they hate it, you know, they hate the song. At least it's it's something to talk about, that's kind of safe, in a way.

[EXCERPT FROM 'BEFORE I GO' PLAYS:]

All I keep hearing is stupid sound bites. People are dying, it ain't black and white. Rise above the hatred, and make everything all right. Before I go.

NICOLE: I love bridges. I am a Bob Dylan fan, but I always wondered what it would be like if Bob had written a bridge. [laughs] I don't think he's got bridges in any of his songs. But I do love them. It's a change for the ears, snd you're saying something that nobody's heard in the song before, and I just think they're always, like, where you find the, like, the little jewel in the song. So, I think almost all of -- maybe all of my songs have bridges. You know, it's funny. So many things were piling on me emotionally at that time, and so there was, like, the initial thing I talked about -- like, the anger of just, what's the truth? And then the religious thing popped in, and then I had been listening to tons of news. I mean, I had to -- I've stopped, thank God, but, just tons of news about the shootings, and, you know, between cops and blacks, and just, like, all the different angles of that subject. And so I -- That it ain't just black and white. it's just like --

[EXCERPT FROM 'BEFORE I GO' PLAYS:]

People are dying, it ain't black and white.

NICOLE: People are dying, and they are people, and it's not just cops, and it's not just black people -- It's people in Syria. It's everywhere, you know, and it just, kind of, -- In those four little lines, I, personally, was saying a lot. However someone else will hear it, will be the way they hear it. But it just comes at you in these little, like, bullet points, and these headlines, and these stories that keep flashing by us all day long, and it's so -- It's kind of desensitizing, and sad, and it's like a whole bevy of things. So it was a lot to say, I think, in maybe less words than I would have ever said it. But, yeah, that bridge did sort of bring in the element of, that people are dying. It started specifically with that issue, and then it kind of morphed. But then, in the outtakes, a lot of what Michelle and I sang about was that the people are dying. I mean, there's a lot of the outtakes. And rising above the hatred, and so, it fed the end of the song.

[EXCERPT FROM 'BEFORE I GO' PLAYS:]

Before I go, you know I'm gonna go.

[SONG CONTINUES TO PLAY UNDER THE FOLLOWING.]

JACOB: Probably one of the things, that I don't encounter that often, that was true in the song, is just the fact that, you know, you sent me the lyric sheet, and basically all of that is in the first third of the song, and then it's just --

NICOLE: There's a lot of song. Yeah, that was sort of a big decision to make for the album, because it's not radio friendly, you know. First of all there, are profanities in it, and it's too long. So I knew I was sort of killing the idea that it could potentially be on the radio, although, of course, I have a clean short version of it, in case anybody wants it. But it didn't have the same spirit as -- You know, the inspiration for writing the song was kind of dissipated, once I shortened it, and took the foul language out. But, so, that was a big decision to make, and it was improvised. Myself and Michelle, the backup singer, went to the studio together, and we sort of sang back and forth to each other, and we did about four tracks, and then the sax player came in, and he laid down, you know, some improv, about three tracks, and we just sort of messed around in that way, and then, there was that crazy task of cutting and pasting it. So I would hear something I liked that I did, that she did. that he did, and then we would slowly pull from each track, and kind of compose a story that leads us, like, six minutes later, out of the song -- or however long it is. So, yeah, I mean it's -- I did it sort of as a little bit of a wake up call. Like, I don't think people do that anymore, and, you know, I wanted it to go in a direction that was sort of a little deeper and a little heavier.

[THE END OF 'BEFORE I GO' HAS BEEN PLAYING UNDER THE DISCUSSION THROUGH ALL OF THE ABOVE. HERE WE HEAR A BIT MORE OF IT UNACCOMPANIED:]

MICHELLE: Before I go! NICOLE: Before you go. MICHELLE: Let go. NICOLE: Make everything all right. TOGETHER: Make everything all right. MICHELLE: Make everything all right.

[SONG CONTINUES TO PLAY UNDER THE FOLLOWING.]

JACOB: Sometimes, while I'm writing a song, the song kind of reveals to me, like, what the important part is. Like, I was writing a song, and it had this big, long, chorus, and I realized that whenever I got to the chorus, I just wanted to get back to the verse. So I was like, "OK! I'm just going to get rid of half of the chorus, and we'll just get back to the verse, and that's what the song is about.

NICOLE: Yeah.

JACOB: And then there was another song where the verses are, like, two lines long, and the chorus is this huge, honking thing.

NICOLE: Yeah, yeah.

JACOB: So, this song, I mean -- More than half of it is that kind of end jam, and it -- I mean, is there a sense in which that that's kind of what the song is about?

NICOLE: No. I think so. I mean, I think I was really excited about letting the song play out, and letting her voice be heard, and it's not, you know, some, like, -- I didn't pick her because, like, "Oh, she had the best voice!" -- she has an awesome voice, but she's also a black voice, and that was important to me, to have that represented. So I feel like that whole duelling long piece at the end is really kind of like what I was getting to. You know? And it was me expressing my anger in the beginning, and then being, like, "Let's just sing it together, you know? Let's just come together, scream it to the mountaintops, kill the hatred," you know? And so, yes. Like, you outed me. It definitely was where I was headed.

[THE END OF 'BEFORE I GO' HAS continued PLAYING UNDER THE DISCUSSION THROUGH ALL OF THE ABOVE. HERE WE HEAR A BIT MORE OF IT UNACCOMPANIED:]

NICOLE: Oooooo, let go...

[SONG CONTINUES TO PLAY A BIT UNDER THE FOLLOWING BEFORE FADING OUT.]

NICOLE: I feel like it also has a little bit of a sense of humor, too. There's some, like, funky horn parts, and the guitar goes a little wild, here and there, and it's kind of like, it's a little like [sings taunting 'nana nana boo boo' melody], you know? I was trying to go there but, who knows? [laughs]

JACOB: And then the way it ends -- It ends real sudden --

[VERY END OF 'BEFORE I GO' PLAYS.]

JACOB: -- on this real kind of discordant guitar sting, or something.

NICOLE: Yes, yes.

JACOB: And I think that was great, too, because I was like --

NICOLE: Yes that was definitely -- I'm sorry, go ahead.

JACOB: Oh, no, I was just, like, "Is it going to fade out, or how do we, you know how do we get out of this?"

NICOLE: [laughs] Yeah. These were the questions. I mean, when we were rehearsing it, too, before the horn even came in, and before I had the voices, and everything, we -- In rehearsal, we would just, like, play, and jam, and then, all of a sudden, like, you know, the drummer would drop the stick, and the bass player would be, like, "Bwaaarp", you know, and it would just end. Like, we would do that on purpose, like, just to have fun, and I was, like, "You know what? I dig it just falling apart," you know, and I guess that was kind of like the theme of the song, which is that I, at the moment -- and some days I still do -- feel like everything is falling apart. So, you know, it's, might as well let it, let the music say it.

JACOB: So, if people would like to hear more of your music, what should they do?

NICOLE: OK, well, I do have a Web site, which is NicoleAlifante.com. [she spells it] My record is up on iTunes and it's called "La La :a", and it's on CD Baby as well, and I'm on Soundcloud and you can just fish around, and you'll find me. And I do play out, every once in a while, in the sort of New York area, so if you're here, come check me out.

JACOB: Great! My name's Jacob Haller, and I have all kinds of projects going on right now, including music and other podcasts. You can find them all at JacobHaller.com. I have a website specifically for Tell Me About Your Song at TellMeAboutYourSong.com, and I'm also going to put together a blog post with links to all of Nicole's websites, and some of the things we've talked about, and I've been including full transcripts of the interviews, as well, recently. So that should be there, and you can find that at yoursongpodcast.tumblr.com [spells it]. And, with that said, we're going to go out by listening to the song we've been talking about in full: "Before I Go" by Nicole Alifante, from her album "La La La." Thanks for listening.

['BEFORE I GO' PLAYS IN FULL. LYRICS TO THIS AND OTHER SONGS ON 'LA LA LA' CAN BE FOUND BEHIND THIS LINK.]

NICOLE: I have never had to do that before, in such an intense way. I did have one other song that had curses in it -- it was called 'Saturday Bitch', and a music house wanted it, and so we made it 'Saturday Chick' -- 'Saturday Chick'. And so that was just changing a word, and -- So, no, I never really had to do that before. But in this process, we knew -- you know, we knew we were going to do it, so it was -- It's already all laid out, it just needs to be sent, you know, like the mp3, or .wav file, or whatever. But no, I really haven't had to worry about that. This was my first epic Odyssey song. [laughs]

JACOB: Right. So how do you, like -- How did you approach -- Did you -- Does it have the same kind of structure, or did you fade it out, or --How do you how did you make it work?

NICOLE: Well, we changed the curses.

[EXCERPT FROM RADIO EDIT OF 'BEFORE I GO' PLAYS:]

A ruse by any other name would still smell like B.S. to me.

NICOLE: So it's the same exact lyric, except the curses are made to be, you know, I'd say something else that's, you know, just as strong, but not a curse. And then, to be honest with you, I don't know how we ended it. [laughs] I can't wait to hear it!

[END OF RADIO EDIT OF 'BEFORE I GO' PLAYS]

[yoursongpodcast]

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For this special Christmas edition of 'Tell Me About Your Song' (episode #77), songwriter Tracie Potochnik talks about her song 'The Ballad of Harvey the Elf', which can be found on her band Cardboard Ox's album 'A Cardboard Ox Christmas', which is available for free download from Bandcamp.

This episode also includes excerpts from Tracie's conversations with her delightful parents, Ed and Judy Potochnik.

A Cardboard Ox Christmas by Cardboard Ox

I should note that there were some audio problems during my interview with Tracie, which I didn't catch until after it was too late to rerecord. I apologize for the resulting audio quality of this episode (but I think it's still fun to listen to, and I hope you do too!).

In the course of our discussion, we touched on the following topics:

Hermey the Elf from the Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer Christmas special

The Year Without A Santa Claus and the Snow and Heat Miser

The Lifesavers Sweet Storybook

The Hot Club in Providence

The canonical list of Santa's reindeer

Lothario

The Vogues

Tracie's song "So Sad Dad"

Talky country songs, including:

'A Boy Named Sue', sung by Johnny Cash, written by Shel Silverstein

'Joshua', written and recorded by Dolly Parton

'Dang Me', written and performed by Roger Miller

"It already is burning to the ground. It's 2016 December."

Past guest Steve Allain, who, with Tracie, forms the duo Cardboard Ox

This song is one of those included on Cardboard Ox's free 2016 album, 'A Cardboard Ox Christmas'. You can find out more about Cardboard Ox on their website, and more about Tracie on her own website.

The 'Tell Me About Your Song' icon was designed by Shaenon K. Garrity.

If you want more information about your host, Jacob Haller, then check out my web page, my facebook page, or my twitter account.

'Tell Me About Your Song' on iTunes - rate and review us!

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Episode Transcript:

[BEGINNING OF 'THE BALLAD OF HARVEY THE ELF' PLAYS:]

Harvey the elf lived at the North Pole He was a funny little fella with a heart of gold, But all the other elves would laugh and call him names. He had warts on his neck and hair on his nose, An artificial hip, and 15 toes, And a wild side no mother's love could tame.

JAKE: Welcome to a special holiday edition of Tell Me About Your Song. Today I'm talking to Tracie Potochnik about about a song of hers called "The Ballad of Harvey the Elf." So, actually, in addition to my discussion with Tracie, I -- there are some other recordings that I'm going to work in here and there, as appropriate. I have no idea how I'm going to get this together. But Tracie recorded some conversations between her and her dad, and her and her mother, which are also relevant to this whole endeavor.

TRACIE: Why don't you tell us who you are?

ED: My name is Eddie Potochnik. I'm the father of Tracie Potochnik.

TRACIE: And where are we now?

ED: We are in West Virginia, at a place called Berkeley Springs -- a lovely place it is -- up in the mountains, at the cabin of my son and his friend.

JUDY: I'm Judy Potochnik, spouse of the famous Edward Potochnik, maker of the Harvey the Elf stories.

JAKE: So, you know, get out the eggnog, and settle in for this conversation. Where would you like to start, Tracie?

TRACIE: I love a Christmas song. I love listening to Christmas songs. I have written a few in the past, and I just thought that this could make kind of a fun story, in the spirit of those claymation specials that there were all the rage -- and still are, at least in my heart. You know, I think those sorts of characters, like -- you remember the Rudolph special that had Hermey the Elf, who wanted to -- "I want to be a dentist?" Do you remember that guy?

JAKE: Mm-hmm.

TRACIE: And sort of the, um, the -- Like, 'The Year Without A Santa Claus' is one of my favorite ones, and it has the Snow Miser and the Heat Miser. So I think there are all of these, sort of, kind of off characters in those specials, those holiday specials that were designed for children. And so I thought that Harvey kind of fit in that genre, if you will. And so I wanted to write a song that would have lots of, sort of, licensing and merchandising opportunities --

JAKE: Oh, yeah.

TRACIE: -- attached to it.

JAKE: Sure. [laughter]

TRACIE: Yeah. So, my dad -- It's funny. I'll say: My dad was always a really great storyteller. When I was a kid, and when my brother was a kid, there was one series of stories, I suppose you could say, about Priscilla and Rainy, Priscilla being a little girl, and Rainy, the cat that she found in the rain. And the key plot point, or the key, I would say, distinguishing feature of Priscilla and Rainy, is that Rainy could talk, which my dad, I think, conveniently forgot about in the story, but I remember quite well, because they would just communicate, and they had all sorts of friends in the forest.

JUDY: My memories are that Dad had to imbibe a little before his creative juices became apparent, and then he was great telling stories, making up fantasies, for Todd and Tracie as they were growing up.

TRACIE: Did we enjoy the stories?

JUDY: Oh yes. I would be downstairs, and Ed would be up with one -- with Todd or Tracie, whichever he was putting to bed that evening, and and the kids would just be giggling and laughing hard. I was always jealous, because I wanted to hear the stories, too, because they had to be great.

ED: At around the same age -- five years -- oftentimes, I would take her, and put her to bed, and stories would ensue. One of the first was the great story of Priscilla and Rainy, which was a little girl in kindergarten, who on one rainy afternoon, walking home from school, found this little cat huddled up that somebody had abandoned, so she decided to name him Rainy, and a great love bloomed between the two, and they had countless good times together, which I often related into stories for her, about her and Rainy. And some she loved, some she got a little mad at me, but they were -- they were -- they were stories. [laughter]

TRACIE: Why would I get mad at you, Dad?

ED: Oftentimes, she just kept wanting to hear longer and longer stories, so I would add a little bit of distress to the story, concerning Rainy and the animals in the forest, and she said, "Aaaaah! That's enough! That's enough!" Then should would make me get out, so ... [laughter] And I felt good about that. [laughter] It was just talk! Not often, but every now and then.

TRACIE: Anyway, I love my dad's stories, and so he told, you know, when the occasion was appropriate, holiday-themed [laughter] -- I don't know if appropriate is the right word, if you're talking about a five or six year old -- but it's funny, because I don't -- I don't remember, distinctly, the story itself. You know, I don't remember my dad telling me that story in particular. However, Harvey was always sort of a legend around our home. So every Christmas, we would get presents from Harvey. [laughs] I think it was often the Lifesavers storybook. Did you get that for the holiday? It was like a little book, but there was a 4-pack of Lifesavers inside each side, of all different flavors? Yeah, so Harvey was just always sort of a part of the, of the household -- sort of a family legend, if you will, but I didn't remember all of the specific details of the story.

TRACIE: Do you remember how you came up with the story of Harvey the Elf?

ED: Yeah, Harvey -- I vaguely remember, maybe not all of it, but I think I just got kind of a little bit, maybe, tired of telling the normal Christmas stories -- Rudolph, things like that -- so I thought I'd become a little creative, if you will, and decided to tell Tracie a story about a different Santa Claus, who happened to come that particular Christmas Eve, and I figured, why do it in the normal mode? I'd add a little -- I'd embellish a little.

[EXCERPT FROM 'THE BALLAD OF HARVEY THE ELF' PLAYS:]

Well Harvey had good intentions but not much sense, So he headed down south to Providence, And landed on the roof of The Hot Club. He thought he'd stop in for a little rest, But as scores of witnesses can attest, An elf in a bar on Christmas eve gets a lot of love. He got tequila and gin and rum on the house. Spilled maker's mark on the barmaid's blouse. By the time the eggnog came, he was on the floor! As he swallowed down ...

TRACIE: So when I got it in my head to write the song, I went to my dad -- you know, I was home for, I think I was home for Thanksgiving -- and I just said, you know, "Can you just remind me, what were some of the details of Harvey?" Because we hadn't really talked about specifics in a long time. He did not remember anything. [laughter] He remembered that Harvey existed, certainly, and he did remember sort of the fundamental point, which is that Harvey -- that Harvey, like, got really messed up.

[EXCERPT FROM 'THE BALLAD OF HARVEY THE ELF' PLAYS:]

[SPOKEN:] So, everybody knows that Santa's sleigh has no keys. It has no engine. The whole thing is completely reindeer operated, and to get it to start up, you have to do one thing, and one thing only, which is to say the names of the reindeer, in consecutive order, like so: On Dasher, on Dancer, on Prancer and Vixen. On Comet, on Cupid, on Donner and Blitzen. But Harvey was not in full possession of his faculties at this moment. So he climbed onto the rooftop, stumbled headfirst into the sleigh, and this is what he shouted: [One, two, one two three ...] "On Jackie, on Judy, On Mary Ann and Joan. On Myrna, Anita. Why won't you take us home? We're in quite a fix if I say so myself," Hollered Harvey the drunken elf.

ED: So Santa finally makes it back. He sees Harvey in his state. And Harvey's trying to be apologetic, and what have you, and carrying on, and Santa says, "Well, Harvey, Christmas Eve is about shot anyhow. It's going to be no Christmas Eve this year, no Christmas. The little kids, the little boys, because of you, are not going to have anything under their tree. Be nothing but ashes in their stockings. Thanks, Harvey -- you really did it this time." [laughter] And I think that's pretty much about what it was, and that's pretty much the story of Harvey the Elf. There may have been more to it, but that was a lot of years ago. And -- Yeah. It was a good one. I liked it. Tracie liked it. I think, for about a week afterward, she didn't talk to me, however [laughter], when she got up, there was stuff under the tree for her.

TRACIE: The other key part of the story, that Christmas was ruined [laughter], I think, was -- remained consistent. So some of the points that my dad talks about in my interview with him about the song, I do believe he borrowed from the song itself. [laughter] Because I had to take some artistic liberties there, given that this story needed to be fleshed out just a little bit.

[EXCERPT FROM 'THE BALLAD OF HARVEY THE ELF' PLAYS:]

"I ruined Christmas!" Harvey cried in shame, Full of guilt and doubt and blame. But what Santa said then brought him some relief: "Oh, at first everybody was in a tizzy Without new iPads to keep them busy, But then they started to talk and laugh and sing. Harvey, you might be surprised to hear it, but you unearthed the Christmas spirit That no material stuff could ever bring." Santa patted Harvey on the back, And he tucked away his toy-filled sack. They were about to take off through the trees. But at that moment, Santa Claus Looked down onto the street and paused. He said, "Harvey, let's go have a round on me!" [cheering]

ED: The amazing thing about this: Before Tracie recorded this song, she was home with us, and I happened to mention it to her, and we were talking about it, and I asked her, I said, "Do you think you could write a song about this?" And she said, "Sure." So she left the room, and it was, probably, an hour later, she's back with paper with all these words, and everything, and she starts singing it, and it totally blew me away. It's not your, I would think, average Christmas song, but there's a lot of truth to it, that, probably, what happens up at the North Pole on occasion. Not all the time, but on occasion. Yeah. I was flabbergasted with how quick she did it, and how well she did it. Lovely song! Lovely!

TRACIE: Yeah, I really did. I went upstairs to my childhood bedroom, [laughs] while the rest of the family was downstairs, and I just kind of whipped it out. You know, I think it -- I guess I was pretty inspired to do it. And it's a very wordy song, so I'm actually impressed that I wrote that many words [laughs] in a very short period of time, and, you know, certainly refined it a little bit after that, but I think kind of thinking about Harvey as this wannabe Lothario who, sort of, struck out with the ladies, and that being part of his motivation, too, I think really hit me on that -- on the chorus. And so, once I sort of figured out that the, you know, that sort of twist of the chorus is that, you know, he has all these names that he repeats, and then, when it's time to get the sleigh to start, and say the names of the reindeer, he just -- he can't remember anything except for the women. I think that was, kind of, a little bit of the key to the song, and than the rest of it just sort of flowed from there.

JAKE: Mm-hmm.

TRACIE: And I'm a big -- I would say, in my writing, I am a -- I'm a proponent of marinating. So I tend to, you know, get an idea, whatever it is -- maybe it's a title, or a lyric, a concept, etc. -- and just sort of sit with it for a while, and kind of, like, walk around, and let it, I guess, gather steam, maybe, sort of subconsciously, and kind of -- kind of work itself out a little bit. And I think this song was marinating for, you know, three decades. [laughs] So, in some sense, I think, you know, it was just kind of in there, and I was, sort of, ready to write it, and so I think, maybe that's why all of those words that were just somewhere subconsciously sort of floating around and finding their way together, made their way out onto a page pretty easily. Although one thing that was sort of surprising to me, because this wasn't part of my dad's telling of the story, was that, you know, sort of the moment at the end, where it's all fine, and Santa's just cool with it -- because, as I had mentioned, in the original telling of the story, Christmas was just ruined, and that was it. Good night, Tracie! [laughter] Sleep tight! Good luck tomorrow! -- but, yeah, in this one -- You know, I'm kind of a -- I'm not a writer who tends to have, kind of, happy ending to my songs, but I felt like, for this one, it was just so peppy and cheerful, and so I like that it resolves in a way that is just kind of like: All right, everyone! It's cool! Harvey's bad, [laughter] but it's fine. And, of course, my dad loved it. He was so very excited about it. And my dad's funny -- I had written him one song previously, for his birthday, because ever since -- My dad is a, he's a bit of a musician himself. He played saxophone when he was in high school, and he was also in a doo-wop group. I think they were called the True-Tones. This was when he was in high school. I think that's right. It was sort of the -- I don't know if you're familiar with the group the Vogues. They were a 50s doo-wop group, and they came from Turtle Creek ...

JAKE: Oh, OK.

TRACIE: ... and, so, I think they were, sort of, modeled in the fashion of the Vogues, and the highlight of their brief career was singing at the Turtle Creek high school prom, which was a big, a pretty good gig. So my dad is musical, and likes to sing, and he's always given me song title suggestions. [laughs] I don't know if you -- Do your parents do this?

JAKE: Uh, my parents don't, but, definitely, it's something -- it's one of the hazards of the profession, I would say, is that people will have ideas for songs that they want you to write.

TRACIE: Yeah.

JAKE: And I always tell them to write them themselves.

TRACIE: I tell my dad that a lot, too.

JAKE: Yeah.

TRACIE: But he came to me with one title, and he was, like, "You know what would be a good title for a song? So Sad Dad." [laughter] And so I wrote him a song when he turned 71 called, "Don't Be So Sad, Dad." Which was a pretty, kind of like a fun peppy, song, so ...

[BEGINNING OF 'DON'T BE SO SAD, DAD' PLAYS:]

You know I hate to see it when you're feeling down, When you mope and, silent, fix your lips into a frown. You may be feeling sleepy, or a little uninspired, And then there are some days you set The old grill brush on fire. But don't be so sad, dad.

['DON'T BE SO SAD, DAD' CONTINUES IN THE BACKGROUND.]

TRACIE: Yeah. But he gives me a lot of title suggestions. I think his most recent one -- he's suggested this many, many times over, the past year -- was "The Ravages of Time." [laughter] Which is, I guess, fits pretty well in my traditionaly oeuvre of depressing songs.

['DON'T BE SO SAD, DAD' CONTINUES:]

"There's oil in the ocean," sometimes Mom likes to yell, but on such vague unpleasantries, there is no need to dwell. Life can be a struggle, and victories seem small, But you never know when you just might hit the Powerball. So don't be so sad, dad, when you could be glad, dad. It's the latest fad, dad. Go out and have some fun.

TRACIE: And my dad still -- I mean, to this day, he's -- I mean, he really is so funny, and he is -- he is a great storyteller, and I think that was, sort of, evinced in the interview that I did with him.

JAKE: Oh, yeah.

TRACIE: Because it was really funny, you know. I'd asked him, on the -- I had a phone call, and I was, like, "Dad, you know, I'm recording this podcast with my friend Jacob," and then I had to describe what a podcast was --

JAKE: Sure!

TRACIE: And I was, like, "It's like a radio show, but it's on the Internet," and he's, like, "OK." And I said, you know, I was going to talk about Harvey, and that I wanted to do an interview with him -- and this is, you know, a phone call sometime before Thanksgiving -- and he's, like, "Oh, sure." And so, he was sort of -- you know, he was a little shy about it, and a little reluctant, but as soon as the microphone was in front of him, like that, he just sort of turned on, and got back into the storytelling "Ed" mode. (His name's Ed.)

TRACIE: How did you come up with the ideas for your stories?

ED: I wish I knew that. [laughter]

TODD: [in the background] Beer!

ED: They just, just came out of the blue, and they were there! Whether a word would set off something in my mind, or in my goofiness, silliness, whatever. I couldn't actually say that I thought them out. That they were just spontaneous.

TRACIE: OK. So you were just a creative spirit.

ED: I would like to think so, at times. But it would have been great if it would have been on a continual basis. But, yeah, I think, at times, creativity hits all of us in flashes, and we either -- some work for great good, and some for entertainment, I think, like these stories did for the kids.

TRACIE: Because storytelling is a tough thing to do off the cuff, I think. You know, as a writer, I'm able to put together a song, or a story, but I'm not a great, sort of, off the cuff thinker, and my stories tend to be, [laughs] as you have witnessed in this interview today, a little rambly, and kind of all over the place. But I think he really can put together a cogent, funny story that, you know, at least for my brother and I, when we were kids, and I think for, you know, our family and friends, and other folks that my family knows -- because his stories aren't just kid's stories, you know. He could just tell stories about something that happened to him, you know, in the parking lot of the Shop & Save, [laughs] or something, and sort of make it interesting and funny. Yeah. My dad's I do thank you for everything. Yeah, but my dad's definitely very creative, and I think does underestimate his own creative powers, and that's why I always tell him, when he gives me these song titles, I say, "Dad, you write it! You know, you write the lyrics! I'll help you put together -- you know, I can play a little guitar, or something." But he can he can write melodies, you know, and I think he could probably write some pretty good lyrics, too, if he -- if he set himself to it.

JAKE: Yeah. If you're out there, Ed, I encourage that, too.

TRACIE: Yeah, consider it a challenge, Dad.

JAKE: yeah.

[EXCERPT FROM 'THE BALLAD OF HARVEY THE ELF' PLAYS:]

He had warts on his neck, and hair on his nose, An artificial hip and 15 toes, And a wild side no mother's love could tame,

TRACIE: My brother, at, sort of -- Somewhat near the time that I wrote this, my brother had had a hip replacement, so I think that -- so the artificial hip came from that. But, otherwise, no, I was just trying to paint a picture of someone who was distinctive. Distinctive looking. He had a lot of toes, warts, you know. I guess just the one wart. A wart on his neck, which is not so bad, I mean: One neck wart, I think, as far as things go, that doesn't really preclude anyone from being considered attractive. [laughs]

JAKE: Well, yeah.

TRACIE: Someone was asking me today, my friend Mary was asking, about the women's names, too, and, sort of, how I selected those, and mostly it was that I wanted them to have a kind of a vintage -- like a retro feel to them. You know, it wasn't like Britney. [laughs]

JAKE: Right.

TRACIE: That sort of thing. But Judy is my mom's name, so she is in there. She has a cousin named Jackie, and so she was in there. I have a friend named Anita. I don't know any Myrnas, although I would like to. [laughs]

JAKE: Any Myrnas out there, hit us up.

TRACIE: Look me up! Send me an e-mail!

JAKE: Yeah. And then, I kind of assumed that you started with the reindeer names ...

[EXCERPT FROM 'THE BALLAD OF HARVEY THE ELF' PLAYS:]

On Dasher, on Dancer, on Prancer and Vixen. On Comet, on Cupid, on Donner and Blitzen.

JAKE: ... and then kind of back formed women's names so that it would fit into the same rough scheme.

TRACIE: Yeah, sort of syllabically.

[EXCERPT FROM 'THE BALLAD OF HARVEY THE ELF' PLAYS:]

"On Jackie, on Judy, On Mary Ann and Joan. On Myrna, Anita. Why won't you take us home?

TRACIE: Yes. [laughs]

JAKE: Trick of the trade, folks.

TRACIE: Count out those syllables! [laughs] I definitely wanted it to have this sort of retro vintage feel, and sort of -- It's definitely inspired by some of those kind of -- I feel like, early, like the 60s country songs. And definitely -- I mean, it sounds a lot like "A Boy Named Sue."

[EXCERPT FROM JOHNNY CASH SINGING 'A BOY NAMED SUE' PLAYS:]

Well, my daddy left home when I was three, And he didn't leave much to ma and me. Just this old guitar and an empty bottle of booze. Now, I don't blame him cause he run and hid, But the meanest thing that he ever did, Was before he left, he went and named me "Sue."

TRACIE: So I think that talky part definitely kind of draws from that, as well as -- you know I'm a big Dolly Parton fan, and I feel like Dolly will often have -- not that she necessarily -- Well, she actually does have some songs in that style. I don't know if you know that song Joshua by Dolly Parton?

[EXCERPT FROM DOLLY PARTON SINGING 'JOSHUA' PLAYS:]

Well, a good ways down the railroad track, There was this little old rundown shack, And in it lived a man I'd never seen. Folks said he was a mean and a vicious man, And you better not set foot on his land, but I didn't think nobody could be that mean.

TRACIE: And in fact, similarly, -- Ooooh, I'm sensing a theme on the talky songs -- because, you know, A Boy Named Sue, obviously, is someone who is this, sort of, is an outcast because of factors beyond his control, and the Dolly Parton song Joshua, too -- it's about this sort of man who lives in a shack, who is sort of like an outcast of the town, but then becomes a perfectly suitable love interest [laughs] for the narrator, Dolly Parton. But, yeah, but it definitely has that kind of, like, rapid, really quick, talky kind of feel that I think some of those early country songs have, and, you know, and I would say it's probably a little bit influenced, too, by Roger Miller songs. You know, Roger Miller, 'King of the Road,' and he has some kind of funny songs like 'Dang Me'.

[EXCERPT FROM ROGER MILLER SINGING 'DANG ME' PLAYS:]

Out all night and runnin' wild. Woman sittin' home with a month-old child. Dang me, dang me. They oughta take a rope and hang me, High from the highest tree. Woman, would you weep for me?

TRACIE: So, the story is about -- and now I'm going to get deep about it, oh no! [laughs] -- but, obviously, you know, Harvey, as you can tell from the first verse of the song, is a little bit of an outsider. You know, he's kind of a misfit. Which I think is sort of a common theme in a lot of kid's stories, and certainly in those those Christmas specials -- you know Rudolph, and Hermey the Elf, who is sort of the same thing. They were just a little bit different, kind of, outsiders. And then Santa, I think, out of the kindness of his heart, you know, sees Harvey, recognizes him as a hard worker -- even if he is maybe a little down on his luck, and was certainly down on his luck with the ladies -- and so Santa kind of gives him this extra responsibility. It's like, "You can come out with me, join me in the pinnacle, I would say, of an elf's year, and many people's year, you know. Christmas Eve, you deliver the toys." And then, for -- Can I swear on this show?

JAKE: Yes!

TRACIE: Yeah. And then Harvey just fucks it up royally. [laughs] Which I think is -- You know, I feel like we've all sort of been there, where, you know, you get a little something. You're feeling so good about it, and confident and you're, like, "Yeah, man! I'm going to, you know, this is real. I'm going to celebrate some good times," and then, you know, Harvey celebrated a little -- a little too much, and wasn't totally up, I think, to the responsibility that Santa gave him. Who can blame him, though?

JAKE: Mm-hmm.

TRACIE: Yeah. So that's something that I hope that many of us can [laughs] -- well, maybe not hope that many of us can relate to, but I think we can. I think we've all sort of been there, when you're, like, "Oh, my god, what have I done?"

JAKE: Yeah.

TRACIE: And, you know -- and certainly the concern about disappointing a lot of people -- in this case, it is the world's children [laughs] that he has disappointed. That's probably a little worse than just your boss, or, you know ...

JAKE: And his boss, too!

TRACIE: And his -- that is true. But his -- Your boss and the world's children would be kind of a heavy load.

JAKE: That would be tough.

TRACIE: You know, I think, in the end, when Santa comes and finds Harvey, you know, one, I appreciated that in the song Santa is benevolent. He's a benevolent dictator. [laughter] But, you know, I think he -- he hits upon that key point of, you know, that Christmas has become so about materialism. And Harvey, in fact, maybe did everyone a favor by not just dispersing all sorts of toys and gifts that, you know, children will likely forget about in a couple of weeks, too, and then will just rot away in a landfill somewhere. Not to disparage all the hard work of the elves. I mean, they're making quality products, I'm sure, that bring joy to many.

JUDY: Now, think about how hard these elves have to work to get all these toys for all the little children all over the world, and I bet they had some more than eight hour days. Do you think maybe that they abuse these elves a little bit?

TRACIE: Oh, yeah. I don't think there's an elf union that I know of.

JUDY: Hmm. Very true. Very true. So I think they probably worked really hard, and so when they got some time off, they wanted to relax.

TRACIE: You can't blame Harvey, is what you're saying.

JUDY: Well. [laughs] Overindulging. You know. Not good on Christmas Eve.

TRACIE: He ruined Christmas, but was it really the conditions -- sort of the systemic inequities that are foisted upon elves -- that caused it to happen?

JUDY: Oh, wow. That's a tough one. That's [laughter] -- that's a, that's a deep question. That is a deep question. I don't have ... Yes. [laughter]

TRACIE: I guess the overall theme is that sometimes the impact that we think that a situation, or an action that we take, might have, can end up being, sort of, vastly different, or have sort of a different -- a different set of impacts and outcomes, that we couldnt have predicted, and wouldn't necessarily think of from our own perspective. In this case, it was that, you know, families were forced to actually kind of talk to each other, and just enjoy one another. Now, if this were a true tale, and children did not get anything, [laughter] any presents on Christmas, I don't know that it would go that smoothly, but, you know, I think eventually --

JAKE: This country would burn to the ground. [laughter]

TRACIE: It already is burning to the ground. [laughs] It's 2016 December.

TRACIE: So where do you think Harvey is today?

JUDY: Well, I don't know. Ed thinks he's in some home. But I don't know that elves really age. I don't think elves really age. And, besides, with his drinking problem, he probably just became a little pickled. [laughs] And so, he hasn't really -- No, I don't think elves age.

TRACIE: So you think he's just still working at the shop?

JUDY: I think he's probably a supervisor.

JAKE: So, if people would like to hear more of your music, what should they do?

TRACIE: They can go to CardboardOxMusic.com. Cardboard Ox is the name of my duo with my good friend Steve Allain --

JAKE: Past guest, as well.

TRACIE: Yes, and so we're putting out a holiday EP, and The Ballad of Harvey the Elf will be on it, so you'll be able to find that on our website. You can also look me up at TraciePotochnik.com. I will spell that for you. [does so]

JAKE: Yeah. Well, thank you for talking to me for this special Christmas episode.

TRACIE: Thanks, Jacob.

TRACIE: Thanks dad. Is there anything we haven't talked about that you would like to add?

ED: Not really. I think those who may have the chance to hear the song, or watch the podcast -- if I come off a little goofy, or whatever, it's, uh, -- Look at me! But I think you'll enjoy it, and see the creative touch that Tracie has put to it. Just visualize -- close your eyes when you listen to it. You'll enjoy it.

['THE BALLAD OF HARVEY THE ELF' PLAYS IN FULL. YOU CAN FIND THE LYRICS, AND DOWNLOAD THE RECORDING FOR FREE, FROM CARDBOARD OX'S BANDCAMP PAGE.]

TRACIE: Here's a question for you: How bad was Harvey's hangover the next day?

ED: Oh, it was terrible. Terrible. When Harvey finally woke up, and got his head a little bit clear, and started recalling what he did -- how he just tore 'em up to no end. And he tried to talk to Santa, but he had a hard time seeing him, and, when he finally did, Santa told him, "You'll never get in my sleigh again, Harvey. Never." And Harvey was confined to the yo-yo, making toys, on a bunch of yo-yos.

TRACIE: Wow.

ED: So, yes, Santa was mad.

TRACIE: I don't remember those details. [laughter] So, Dad, do you think -- Was this a one time occurrence, or do you think that Harvey had a drinking problem?

ED: No, it was a one time occurrence. And that was -- Before the following Christmas, Harvey was -- he was put on Social Security, and he had a -- he had a steady income, and Santa forbade him to go to the shop, and even go near the other elves, lest they get corrupted.

TRACIE: I see. Harvey! Santa is a punishing boss, huh?

ED: Oh, yeah, yeah. Well, Santa's not all happy "Ho Ho Ho!"s all the time! He has his mean streak, too, when he has to have it.

TRACIE: Well, hey, I'm sure if you're delivering presents to all the children in the world, then you have to have pretty exacting standards.

ED: Oh, you do! It's -- You know, you've only got so many hours to do it, and, after so many years, you do lose a little bit of the magical powers that he had, and, sometimes, that's why a lot of kids don't get anything. Their parents tell them, "Well, you were bad." Nah! They weren't bad, Santa just didn't get there.

TRACIE: [laughs] OK.

[yoursongpodcast]

Visit Original Link

For 'Tell Me About Your Song' #76, Sonny Roelle and Geoff Griffin of the Sentimental Favorites talked about their song 'Roelle Family Christmas', which can be found on their album 'The Unrelenting Sentimental Favorites'.

The Unrelenting Sentimental Favorites by The Sentimental Favorites

In the course of our discussion, we touched on the following topics:

Christmas

AS220

Taking the Christ out of Christmas

Past performers at the Sentimental Favorites Holiday Matinee:

Jacob Haller

The Superchief Trio

The Double Decker Dance Band

The Iditarod

Deer Tick

Dan Blakeslee

Will Schaff

Richard Goulis

Garfield

Eggnog

Cool Whip

LEGO sets

Mad Magazine

Model Railroaders

Bowling shoes

Nerds

Combos

Durkee french fried onion rings

'Put The Plow Down', another Sentimental Favorites song

For more Sentimental Favorites music, invite them to your house or event, or go to their website, their Bandcamp page, or to 75orLess Records. The next five people to order an album through their Bandcamp page will get a free poster with all of the lyrics from 'The Unrelenting Sentimental Favorites' on it.

The 'Tell Me About Your Song' icon was designed by Shaenon K. Garrity.

If you want more information about your host, Jacob Haller, then check out my web page, my facebook page, or my twitter account.

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Episode Transcript:

[EXCERPT FROM 'ROELLE FAMILY CHRISTMAS' PLAYS:]

Egg egg eggnog in the ma-ma-moustache of my fa-fa-father is funny, ha ha ha ha Egg egg eggnog in the ma-ma-moustache of my fa-fa-father is funny, ha ha ha ha

JAKE: Hello, everyone. Welcome to a special holiday edition of Tell Me About Your Song, the podcast in which I talk to musicians and songwriters about a song they've written. Today, I'm talking to the Sentimental Favorites.

SONNY: My name is Sonny.

GEOFF: And I'm Geoff Griffin.

JAKE: And the song they're going to be talking about is named 'Roelle Family Christmas', and it's from their album 'The Unrelenting Sentimental Favorites.' So insert jingle bells here. [Jingle bells play.] Where do you guys want to start?

GEOFF: We are proud of our holiday engagement with our audience. Sentimental Favorites had a holiday matinee that we did for many years at AS220. We would pick an afternoon in December. It was a number of different acts, and -- Musical acts, but we also had performance art, and people doing readings -- and the idea was to introduce some of the Christmas spirit into that AS220 space, and also celebrate with a family friendly rock show. The Christmas element of it was what's left when you take Christ out of Christmas.

JAKE: Mm-hmm.

GEOFF: So, we discovered, in the -- when we thought that through, that it's about candy, and presents, and nice people, and music, and family, and --

SONNY: Decorations.

GEOFF: -- decorations, so we would decorate the AS220 performance space, and had left out crayons, and dishes of candy for the kids, and there was coloring -- which was fun, because it's fun finding random black and white art for kids to color. We would announce a gift swap, which is a fun thing to do with strangers. So, and we would seed -- Under the tree, we would seed it with five or six gifts out of our basements, and then people could leave a gift and take a gift, which was a fun way to introduce people to each other. I was, would fry dough during the whole show, so there would be something hot and savory to eat. And performers over the years included: you, Jacob; also the Superchief trio performed; we had the Iditarod; Deer Tick; Dan Blakeslee ...

SONNY: Will Schaff played one year.

GEOFF: ... The Double Decker Dance Band; Richard Goulis did a performance piece with a toxic Santa Claus, and that was a little scary, but still fun. And it turned out to be -- It was a lot of work for us to do during the holiday season, but it turned out to be a lot of fun, too. Oh! And the other thing was that we would make a holiday CD, which was only available at those events. And, someday, we ought to do a compilation of all of those, because they were fun versions of songs that never surfaced again.

SONNY: It'll be in the box set.

GEOFF: It'll be in the box box set. So 'Roelle Family Christmas' -- Oh! And then the other idea was also to nudge people into writing their own original holiday themed material.

SONNY: One of the caveats of playing was you had to play a holiday song.

GEOFF: Yes.

SONNY: Not -- You know. At least one.

GEOFF: Yes. And it being AS220, we were encouraging people to write their own originals. And the song that we've chosen for today, 'Roelle Family Christmas,' is in many ways a celebration of what happens when you take Christ out of Christmas in America in the 1980s. Sonny, can you talk about the song?

SONNY: Um ... I don't remember writing the song. [laughter]

JAKE: Perfect! All right.

SONNY: I think it happened really quick. In five minutes, maybe, it was written, and it was just me describing what the typical Christmas celebration with my immediate family is like. More so what it was like in the 80s and 90s. Things have changed since we've gotten older, and moved away, and have our own families, etc. So, yeah, it was really just almost a bullet point list of things that are involved at Christmastime with my people.

GEOFF: With all of Sonny's songs, Sonny comes in, and it all seems -- he will sing the song, and often the -- 90 percent of the time, the structure's all fully formed already, and it's always pretty obvious to me what to do, which has been a nice way that he and I have clicked for a long time, so there's not a lot of suffering over -- he has, trusts whatever harmonic motion I'm putting underneath his notes, or at least is nice to go and change his melody to match whatever it is that I happen to playing underneath him. So that whole side of it's been really quick and easy. One thing that I like about the song is that it's a sentimental family childhood Christmas song, but, instead of being sort of melancholy or old timey, It's manic and fired up in the way that a seven year old at Christmastime is, and it's a hectic song, and it's hard to even tell what's going on, and it's full of stammers, and stutters, and stops, and starts, which I -- which I appreciate, because that's what I remember. "I can't sleep because I'm -- I'm just tearing through the Garfield books, trying to get as much out of this whole 24 hours as I possibly can."

[EXCERPT FROM 'ROELLE FAMILY CHRISTMAS' PLAYS:]

Egg egg eggnog in the ma-ma-moustache of my fa-fa-father is funny, ha ha ha ha Egg egg eggnog in the ma-ma-moustache of my fa-fa-father is funny, ha ha ha ha

SONNY: Every Christmas, my mother makes this amazing eggnog that is just -- it's -- It's weird. I was thinking on the way here how I was going to describe this eggnog, and I couldn't -- I couldn't come up with a way to describe it, that didn't sound disgusting.

JAKE: That's the way of eggnog.

GEOFF: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Eggnog is gross.

SONNY: This eggnog -- It's not like, you know, if you buy it in the store, it's really liquidy, it's, like, a kind of a beige color -- Like, it's not that. There's no alcohol in this eggnog. It's -- it's kind of like a really fluffy Cool Whip, but tastes more like eggnog. You know, it's gallons of heavy cream.

GEOFF: Butter and sugar.

SONNY: Yeah, whipped up. And so it's -- [sighs] -- It would be made in this gigantic yellow Tupperware bowl, and set out Christmas Eve, and there would just be a ladle in it, and you would ladle it into these little glass mugs, that you could fit, like, one finger through the handle of, and you would kind of plop it in there, and you -- you know -- you would kind of drink it, but really, kind of, just, like, tip the glass up to your mouth, and kind of slurp it out, like -- It didn't move very quickly. And so my father, having a mustache, of course, every time he tipped this glass up to drink out of it, his mustache was full of this fluff, and as children we were endlessly delighted by this. You know, and then, when we got older, it became, like, shtick. I mean, it was probably schtick when we were little too, but it just had to happen, you know -- my dad had to tilt the eggnog up, and we all had to go, "Ah ha ha! It's in his mustache! Ha!" and he'd be, like, [adopts dopey voice] "What do you mean it's in my mustache?" [laughter] And then he'd kind of, like, mug, you know, and, like, just make faces, and then kind of, like, blow it up into his nose. And so, you know. Yeah. That was hilarious.

GEOFF: Mm-hmm.

SONNY: Yeah.

[EXCERPT FROM 'ROELLE FAMILY CHRISTMAS' PLAYS:]

Christmas time with the Roelles: Lego sets and stockings, sweaters, socks, and magazines. Someone always gets a bowling shoebox from the 80s that later will hold the angel 'top the tree that Grandma made.

SONNY: So the first verse is talking about -- it's, like, presents, right? Or it's, like, Christmas morning? -- So, typical presents: Every year there's a LEGO set in the stocking, which was my mother's way -- We were allowed to open our stockings first, like, before everybody was up, and stuff. You would get up, you'd get your stocking, there would be little presents in it, and you could open those, and do whatever, and it was a way for my parents to, maybe, sleep in a little bit, and be able to wake up, and make a pot of coffee, before opening presents. So there were Lego sets in it, which would keep us busy, because we, of course we'd have to open them up and build them, and that, you know, would save 10 minutes.

JAKE: Yeah know we had the same system. There was always an orange in the toe.

SONNY: My grandparents always put an orange in, and then an envelope from the bank with a crisp dollar bill.

JAKE AND GEOFF: Nice!

JAKE: Ooh! I like that! Classy!

SONNY: Yeah, yeah. Oh, and magazines, because you could sit and read a magazine -- it was usually Mad Magazine, or, like, Model Railroaders, I don't know, really. One of the things that was always under the tree, wrapped up with someone's present in it, was a shoe box that was from my dad's bowling shoes, and it was always, like, "Who gets the shoe box this year?" And somebody would open it up -- "I got the shoebox!" And it was just, like, wherever present conveniently fit in the shoe box, but then, as we started bringing, you know, significant others home for their first Christmas with the family, they would get the shoe box, just to kind of, like, welcome them, and make them part of the -- right. And then after. After Christmas, when things get taken down, the crocheted angel that my my grandmother had made -- it's, like, crocheted over, I don't know, a cardboard cone that has tinfoil wrapped around it -- that would get put in the shoe box, and then get packed away. So my --

GEOFF: Oh! So it wasn't just your dad's current pair of bowling shoes.

SONNY: No, it was, like some time in --

GEOFF: It was some specific bowling shoe --

SONNY: -- it looks like, the early 80s, he bought a pair of bowling shoes, [Geoff laughs] and this box somehow survived much longer than the shoes.

GEOFF: That's wonderful.

SONNY: Yeah, so -- and that helped keep the box preserved, was, you know, you pack it away with the Christmas decorations for the next year.

[EXCERPT FROM 'ROELLE FAMILY CHRISTMAS' PLAYS:]

Christmas eve is shrimp cocktail, li- ttle meatballs, cookies, and fudge, and Christmas day we will eat lasagne. On the ride home, I'll snack on stocking food, like Nerds and Combos and Durkee french fried onion rings that I love. I can't wait for -- Egg egg ...

SONNY: So the first verse is presents. Then the second verse is food. And -- Because food is pretty important, even though it's not, like, a giant production. It's -- For a long time, it was -- Christmas Eve, it would just be the immediate family, and we'd go to church for the Christmas Eve service, and then we'd come home, and, you know, people would go off into bedrooms, and wrap presents, and there would kind of be a buffet of these little cocktail meatballs that my mom makes, that are awesome, and shrimp cocktail -- which was always, like, set out that morning to thaw, because it was a frozen thing -- and Christmas cookies -- like, sugar cookies that were frosted -- and fudge, a couple different kinds of fudge, and, yeah, just a lot of junk food. And then, like, Christmas specials on TV -- like, old Christmas specials. And then, eventually, we'd all go up to our rooms. The only thing I didn't talk about in there was, my personal holiday tradition was: Christmas Eve, you know, not being able to sleep because you're so excited, so I would just read Garfield treasuries until I fell asleep, and I would just, you know, I would get through an entire Garfield book, and then just pass out. So every time I see a Garfield treasury now, it's -- it's Christmas Eve.

GEOFF: Wow.

SONNY: Yeah.

GEOFF: I really don't like Garfield.

SONNY: Speaking of Garfield, one of our Christmas traditions, briefly, was lasagna on Christmas Day.

JAKE: Oh, yeah.

Geoff: Mm-hmm.

SONNY: Which, I think mostly because of this song, my mom then felt, [laughter] like, the need -- Like, she felt like I had to have lasagna on Christmas Day. And I remember, there was a year or two, not too long ago, where she was, like, "I'm not making lasagne. I'm sorry. I'm not making lasagne. Is that OK?" Like, I don't care! I'll eat anything. I mean, it's just what was happening at the time of the song, so that's what -- And the other food is my stocking goodies that -- You know, from the age of seventeen on, I lived 400 miles away, so I would be home for Christmas, and then I'd have a 400 mile drive back to where I was living, whether it was Baltimore or Providence, and the whole ride was stocking goodies, you know, to snack on, and there was those bags of Combos, and Nerds and those Durkee french fried onion rings, which are those onion rings that come in a can, that you put on bean casseroles. One can is probably a thousand calories but, you know, I would eat the entire can on a car ride, and a bag of Combos. It was really disgusting, but delicious.

[EXCERPT FROM 'ROELLE FAMILY CHRISTMAS' PLAYS:]

I can't wait for -- Egg egg eggnog in the ma-ma-moustache of my fa-fa-father is funny, ha ha ha ha Egg egg eggnog in the ma, ma, ma, mana, mah [continues to become more indistinct]

[SONG CONTINUES IN THE BACKGROUND]

JAKE: So, at the end, it kind of descends into incoherence.

SONNY: You gotta end the song somehow, I mean ...

GEOFF: Yeah and I wanted to sing, so I did the little, um, that [sings] "Eggggggnooooog. Eggggggnooooog."

SONNY: Yeah. Which, it just sounds good. The incoherence -- I mean, like, I could have sung that verse three times, but, like, why not let it break -- I mean --

JAKE: Like, I feel like I've seen you do it live where that part of the song goes on a lot longer.

SONNY: Sometimes, live, a lot of our songs go on a lot longer than they should. [laughter]

GEOFF: Like in two minutes. Yes. [laughter]

SONNY: One time, I kept the Snow Plow song, I kept going so long --

['PUT THE PLOW DOWN' PLAYS:]

I set off to work one morning, And it had already started to slow.

['PUT THE PLOW DOWN' CONTINUES TO PLAY IN THE BACKGROUND]

SONNY: -- that -- You know, this is a song where it kind of, through the song, I kind of count up the inches and feet of snow, until it gets to a hundred or, like, yeah, until a hundred and then, like, that's the end.

['PUT THE PLOW DOWN' CONTINUES TO PLAY:]

... but they weren't doing a very good job. I mean, it's like they're afraid to let the blade actually touch the snow! Instead, it just skims right across the top. And that is no help at all. So I say: Put your plow down, mister. Help us out. It's getting deep, four inches, about. Now, put your plow down, mister. Help us out. It's getting tough to drive around here with all the snow. So put your plow down, mister. Help us out. It's getting deep, eighteen inches, about.

['PUT THE PLOW DOWN' CONTINUES TO PLAY IN THE BACKGROUND]

SONNY: So, typically, now, it's like, four, eighteen, thirty, fifty, eighty, a hundred. But there was one Christmas holiday show that we did that I started four, and then I kind of, I might have went to ten, and then, like, eighteen, and twenty-five, and ...

['PUT THE PLOW DOWN' CONTINUES TO PLAY:]

... tough to drive around here with all the snow. Well, put your plow down, mister. Help us out. It's getting deep, eighty inches, about. Now, put your plow down, mister...

['PUT THE PLOW DOWN' CONTINUES TO PLAY IN THE BACKGROUND]

SONNY: It just, like, went on, like, forever, to the point where Geoff stopped playing. [laughter] He just stopped, and just waited for me to get up to a hundred, and then we finished the song. That was --

GEOFF: Yeah, I'm sorry I left you there.

SONNY: I felt really bad. No, I felt really bad about that.

GEOFF: I shouldn't have done that.

SONNY: I was like like, wow, I went on way too long.

['PUT THE PLOW DOWN' ENDS:]

... put your plow down, mister. Help us out. It's getting tough to drive around here with all the snow.

JAKE: Do you have any stories about performing the song?

GEOFF: I think of it as a solid "go to" song if we're starting to lose the audience, that is a hit.

SONNY: I think every holiday show, probably, and maybe because we don't -- our songs are short, so our sets are short, and we only have a few holiday or winter songs, so we can't do a whole set, and a lot -- The holiday shows, we always kept family friendly, because there were kids there, and most of our topics aren't really of interest to kids. Anyway, this is a long way to say that we would start the show with Roelle Family Christmas, and end the show with Roelle Family Christmas.

GEOFF: And probably play it a couple of times in the middle, there, too.

SONNY: Yeah. it was -- maybe when there was -- it was, we were starting to lose the crowd. "OK, we'll play this one!" and then, that's it, Merry Christmas everyone!

JAKE: So, if people want to hear more of your music, what should they do?

GEOFF: Well --

SONNY: Invite us over. [laughter]

GEOFF: Well we have, um, I think we have sentimentalfavorites.com.

JAKE: You're definitely on Bandcamp.

GEOFF: And we're on Bandcamp as well.

SONNY: 75orLess still has, I think, all but one of the CDs that we heaped on them years ago.

GEOFF: Because they sold one of them.

SONNY: Did they? Or -- I don't even know.

GEOFF: And if you -- If you order a CD through Bandcamp, the next five people to buy them through Bandcamp will get a free poster --

SONNY: -- that has every lyric.

JAKE: Nice. So we're recording this in on September 1st, and I haven't taken my air conditioner out, but I'll probably release this in early December, so, you know Christmas shopping.

GEOFF: There you go. It makes a great gift.

JAKE: Yes.

SONNY: If you -- Yeah. We have. Um. Yeah. It's -- Man, everyobody will just love this album.

GEOFF: It's a good record.

JAKE: I like it a lot.

GEOFF: Good.

JAKE: If people are interested in checking out my music, or my other projects, I have a -- well, as I record this -- a new Web site, jacobhaller.com, that has links to everything, and I have a website for this podcast at tellmeaboutyoursong.com, and I'm going to put together a blog post with links to the Sentimental Favorite albums and everything, and maybe some other things we talked about, and people can find that at yoursongpodcast.tumblr.com, and I've been trying to put together transcripts for all the episodes, and post those as well, so that will be there too. And, with that said ,we'll go out by listening to the song we've been talking about, Roelle Family Christmas by the Sentimental Favorites. Enjoy!

['ROELLE FAMILY CHRISTMAS' PLAYS IN FULL:]

Egg egg eggnog in the ma-ma-moustache of my fa-fa-father is funny, ha ha ha ha Egg egg eggnog in the ma-ma-moustache of my fa-fa-father is funny, ha ha ha ha Christmas time with the Roelles: Lego sets and stockings, sweaters, socks, and magazines. Someone always gets a bowling shoebox from the 80s that later will hold the angel 'top the tree that Grandma made. Egg egg eggnog in the ma-ma-moustache of my fa-fa-father is funny, ha ha ha ha Egg egg eggnog in the ma-ma-moustache of my fa-fa-father is funny, ha ha ha ha Christmas eve is shrimp cocktail, li- ttle meatballs, cookies, and fudge, and Christmas day we will eat lasagne. On the ride home, I'll snack on stocking food, like nerds and combos and Durkee french fried onion rings that I love. I can't wait for -- Egg egg eggnog in the ma-ma-moustache of my fa-fa-father is funny, ha ha ha ha Egg egg eggnog in [becomes indistinct] Oooooooooooo

GEOFF: The shoe box makes me think of -- so now -- And, being a parent, we're, my wife and I are always surprised, and delighted, but often -- often surprised, and we will forget what has become a tradition, because we don't realize it, the sort of irrational way that something that happens once can become the thing that we do every year, and the things that we knock ourselves out on, the kids are completely oblivious to, to the point where we -- So we raised our kids as Santa Claus atheists, and they -- We've never, we've been quite up front with them with that Santa Claus doesn't exist, and that "From Santa" is a nice way to, is just a nice way to give a gift, totally anonymously, from one person to the other. So the kids, when they were little, would pick out something for mom from Santa, you know, and that would be, like, even more fun, because then they wouldn't know that it was Judy's present for Mom, and that game -- But then it quickly curdled from -- well, curdled is a strong word -- but they went from -- whereas other kids believe in Santa, but suspect that maybe it's not true. We found ourselves with kids that were having -- we were telling them that Santa wasn't true, and they began to suspect strongly that maybe Santa Claus -- their parents were not telling them the whole truth, and that there was really a Santa Claus, and that they were on to us --

SONNY: Wow.

GEOFF: -- and their little secret, because they -- so they would -- each year, there would be some kind of, like. "Well then how did this get in the house?" Or like, well, but then, "Oh, who ate --" and Judy would still say, you know, "Who ate the carrot for the reindeer? Because Dad doesn't like carrots, and so it couldn't have been dad, so it must have been a reindeer."

SONNY: We -- we're still debating what to do about the Santa dilemma.

GEOFF: Your guys are two? three?

SONNY: They're three. Yeah, they just turned three, and -- It wasn't anything we did. I mean, they go to daycare a couple of days a week, and, other than that, Santa is everywhere, and they just -- they just know about Santa, through all of that. Santa came to their daycare ...

GEOFF: Oh, man.

SONNY: ... you know. And, so, it was like -- It wasn't because we told them, they're all -- They love Santa, and they're all about it. I don't think that they understand what the concept of Santa is, and that he brings gifts, or anything, it's just, as a character, they love Santa. So we're not going to fight that. Like, go ahead and love Santa, you know, that's great. We're not telling them anything is real, or isn't real, we're just, you know. And it kind of, like, has grown to tradition, in Pam's family and in mine, where, you know, the big present of the day, is what's still written from Santa. I mean, there's no -- I think that just tells you that, oh, this one you open last, kind of thing.

GEOFF: One thing my parents did to move us off of the Santa thing, and sort of break it to us, because it was getting -- we were getting a little old for it, which we do in our house too, so I guess it's a tradition that, in spite of -- it's an anti-Santa tradition -- they would give me a -- when I got a baseball glove, it would be from Reggie Jackson.

JAKE! Hmmmm!

SONNY: That's cool.

GEOFF: Or the 'From:' would be a clue. So our kids get presents from -- and it's fun to be obscure, and not to have it be from Harry Potter, but to have it be from Neville Longbottom, and then they're like -- and to the point where then they say, "Well, you know, Dad doesn't know about the Harry Potter books, and so, must be Santa who wrote Neville Longbottom on there."

JAKE: Your kids are Santa Claus truthers! [laughter]

GEOFF: But that's fun, and that's a fun game, though it does get a little, like -- 1:00 in the morning, on Christmas Eve, it can be a little bit patience-testing, to be sitting there thinking of clever things to make all of the gifts from, but ...

SONNY: My mom used to make codes -- like number codes -- and put them on the gifts that were put out, you know, like, the week before Christmas, that, like, stayed under the tree. So we would have that week to, like, do -- like, figure out math riddles, to figure out whose present was which one.

GEOFF: Ohhhh.

SONNY: Which, the first couple of years, we were, like, really into, I think, and really tried to figure it out, and sometimes we did, and sometimes we didn't. But then, you know, it continued for a while, and we eventually were, like, "You know, if we don't figure it out, she's just going to hand us the right present anyway. Like, it's not like don't get it if we don't figure it out." So it kind of, like, lost its luster, and we just got presents.

GEOFF: That's a good example of the kind of tradition that a parent will knock themselves out on, and the kids are completely ungrateful.