This week, I thought it would be fun to have my bandmate in Lemon Knife and girlfriend in lemon life, Mia Blixt-Shehan, write a post for some variety. I asked her to write about her favorite bands and how they influenced her work in Lemon Knife, and you can read her post right below:
So, I’m a Guest Writer for a blog! Exciting times! Really! Look, I’ve had this title exactly once before (https://www.writebynight.net/news-events/wfpl-rats/), where I made the interesting (read: ill-informed) decision of pawning off the first chapters of a thirteen-year-old novel—by which I mean I was thirteen years old when I tried to write the stinking thing (what was I doing trying out novel writing at thirteen?)—about the coming of age of a group of British sewer rats who decide to migrate to America in the era of Beatlemania…???...to promote a now-defunct blog under a now-defunct nom de plume. I’ll gladly take my second chance to appear on someone else’s blog without completely exposing the gaps once filled by my long-lost tween-aged marbles, thanks very much!
Well, anyway…of course, I have a bit of a personal attachment, to understate things—the blog’s author is my dear bandmate and partner, John, so I, Mia, am here to write about my top three favorite musical artists and how they made a mark on the excellent duo that is Lemon Knife! I hope you enjoy my stop by and learn a few things as well. Here we go, lowest- to highest-ranked:
Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story of the air raid siren with the bass. Lowercase—The Air Raid Siren is the formidable Bruce Dickinson, obviously, I can’t take that title. But I’d be an effective red alert nonetheless—“EEEEEEVAAAAAACUUUUUUAAAAAAAATE IT’S A MOOOOOOOOONSOOOOOON!!!!”…new Lemon Knife lyric?
Before my love affair with the Muse discography began just five or so years ago, however, I wasn’t an air raid siren but a coffee shop bulletin board flyer. At this point I’d finally become semi-comfortable with my instrumental abilities, in specific circumstances, anyway, but I was still terrified of singing louder than, like, 25 decibels. I knew my voice was imperfect and didn’t really want to use it for much. The potential use of my vocal imperfections finally clicked on the fateful day where I heard the Black Holes and Revelations album for the first time (of at least ninety since). Loosely recommended by a visiting librarian when I was a library page, it was something I remembered only by fate on my usual very long train ride to college one day—“sure, let’s stream this thing, this train is stuck and I’ve got nothing better to do!” And there it was, as I sat spellbound through the opening track, “Take a Bow”—I was listening to a voice I hadn’t heard the likes of before, though I couldn’t quite place how it was so distinctive at the time. This was something greatly commanding and uniquely beautiful, and something that evoked copious amounts of whatever song’s emotion without sacrificing the ability to sound genuinely stinking good, and I wanted to know how it was done straight away. And so, after the last notes of “Knights of Cydonia” had died away, I set to figuring out the keeper of that voice—the magnificently brilliant Matt Bellamy—and diving into the music and generally obsessing over every recording I could unearth on my lengthy train rides. Good college pals, Muse were…
In the depths of my weekly Muse analysis (weekly classes, you know) I also became fascinated with the instantly recognizable bass work in the band, granted to the listener by the utterly fantastic Chris Wolstenholme. This isn’t your typical fuzz bass by any means. It’s got every amount of effect manipulation and gear tweaking and all—the—pedals—yet it’s combined with a great and distinctive technique that ensures that unlike that of too many other bands of their era and just before it (looking at you, Green Day!), their bass will almost certainly never become a lesser part of the music. It was here that I heard about another distorted bassist that was openly inspired by Muse and took it to the next level—he was Mike Kerr, the sole melodic instrument (well, besides vocals!) in a little band called Royal Blood. And it was THERE that I realized that bass/drum duos could be a thing…and…well…what do you think happened next?
We’re going a pretty hefty step up in influence here—I wouldn’t be a fuzz bassist and air raid siren vocalist without Muse, but I wouldn’t be a musician at all without The ‘Orrible ‘Oo.
It’s a story I’ve told countless times and will forever retell: Right around the extremely tender age of five, I came across a VHS (remember those?!) of the original Who rockumentary, decades before the squeaky-clean presentation of Amazing Journey—I speak of The Kids Are Alright. Familial lore dictates that the music of Neil Young was an immediate sedative when I was kicking hard in the womb, but a few years out of it, this was the first time I’d been exposed to music so raw and raucous and explosive…literally and figuratively. It had clearly seeped into my underdeveloped brain as an obsession grew through the years. (The first piano chords I learned outside of classical training were the ones in “Baba O’Riley,” at my independent request.)
At thirteen—oh, yeah, when I was also trying to write a novel about rats!—I got my first guitar. I took a few lessons for some months with a couple of fantastic tutors and then I was off on my own with a self-prescribed in-depth study of acoustic Who songs. I can’t imagine I was a particularly typical student, because from the very beginning I had absolutely no interest in learning to Van-Halen-shred and very little in the Gilmour bend, even though I greatly admired both—I was in deep with the Townshend -sus4 chords and vicious pick attack. To this day my right hand is ridiculously gritty with sets of both six and four strings, more so with my choice of using coins as plectrums (we’re about to get to that). Eventually I decided to abandon soloist peer pressure entirely and focus hard on rhythmic playing and making songs melodically interesting, which, filtered through The Who, greatly informed my later interests in both musical composition and the deep dive into bass. Rock composition came easily—much easier than lyricism, then and now—after spending so much time with my head in the Who discography, with the instantly recognizable chord structures and ever-expanding boundary-pushing within songwriting (flailing rhythm guitar! Lead bass guitar! ARP-2600s! Rock operas!!), and my decision to pursue bass was solidified by John Entwistle, the band’s resident Ox and my four-string hero to this very day.
Oh, buddy! This is it! This is the point of the article where we start really jumping up and down about things—like, if you thought those other two entries were fanatical, well, ohhhh, buddy!!
Queen! Yes! The greatest band on Earth, then, now, and onward. Well—to me. It’s all subjective, I’m aware. But the greatest band on Earth. Really. Here are four guys that took rock by its legs, stood it on its head, and spun it around until the very soul of it was changed for good. The way I see it, there are two schools of musical artists in the current era—the ones that mostly grew up on everyone else in the 1970s, and the ones that mostly grew up on Queen. You can always tell who they are if you have the innate sense, which often comes to you by being a fellow Queen fan. The Struts. Fun. (fun., actually.) Mika. The Killers. And in news that should surprise no one reading this, three of the most obvious Queen fans in music make up Muse. They can’t be understated.
Let’s look at this further—what did we have here? The most “duh” answer first—we had the greatest frontman in the history of any style of music, I’d venture to say, in Freddie Mercury. Need I say more about him—really?!? We had a bassist that told miniature stories within his prominent sound in John Deacon. We had Roger Taylor, the human drummer who was “more reliable than a drum machine,” the primary utterer of THOSE harmony high notes, and, as it turned out, probably the most experimentally minded member of the band if his solo career is any indication. And last but most certainly not least, we had a guitarist who literally crafted one of the most immediately known tones in rock with his bare hands (from a fireplace!) and pushed every boundary of the instrument in Brian May. Whose musical presence, by the way, essentially saved my life way back when. (I was about to say that there should be shirts made with the statement “Brian May Saved My Life” on them, but I immediately recognized how terrible of an idea that would actually be, although I wanted it known that it passed through my brain, so yup, here’s a parenthetical on it. Voila.) Many apprehensive people who eventually get into music see themselves for the first time in a tough-as-nails leather-clad punk goddess, or a platform-wearing out-and-proud queer, or a genre-blending, every-line-crossing, overall bad-arse POC. I saw myself in a frizzy-haired nerrrrrrrd equally inclined to embroil himself in academics (astrophysics in his case, anthropology and library science in mine) and jet onstage to make himself very known in a rock band. A convincing argument to be sure.
Okay! That was a while. It was. I hope it wasn’t too much of a while. If you made it here, congratulations—and thank you! Lemon Knife is a happy endeavor indeed—maybe we’ll see you at a show!!
