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.
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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...
