Rubidoux

It's Tuesday December 2nd. Kristin's CASH Subscribers should keep an eye on the new CASH 50FOOTWAVE page over the next week or so. We'll have a special "Thank You" appearing soon.

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Rubidoux was written in the back seat of Rob's car, somewhere between San Francisco and Los Angeles. Rob drove, Billy and I bought the gas and we all laughed hysterically for about six hours. My face ached from laughing that day.

Bernie wasn't with us, he was up in Seattle and I wanted to include him, so I tried to text him everything that was said, then lost track when the sun went down, fumbling with my phone in the dark. I promised him that 50FootWave's last drive down the coast would not be our last ever. "Watch out for owls," he said before I turned off my phone.*

Rob and Billy sat up front, listening to the radio, but Rubidoux played louder and louder in my head until it drowned out the suck-ass songs the boys were dancing to up front. So dark and blue and sweet, this new song seemed to make everything look beautiful. Even the In-n-Out Burger trash on the floor looked good.

Back home in New England, I recorded Rubidoux late at night with Rizzo. In the stillness around midnight, you could hear waves breaking down the street: midnight is dark and blue and sweet at Rizzo's. Still recovering from a bout of laryngitis (the Scotland Sorrow) my voice was creaky and difficult to control, but all the other instruments worked.

Because I'm in California again, Rizzo and I have spent the last few days tweaking the mix via mp3 and telephone. Rizzo's board exploded, was sent away and replaced and we continued to tweak. I'm pretty sure it sounds good now: dark and blue and sweet.

Love,
Kristin

*a reference to the "Owl Qaeda" episode of a drive down the west coast with 50FootWave...we survived, the tour bus windshield did not.

An Important Note To CASH Subscribers:

As this concludes Kristin's year-long series of Speedbath uploads, you may be wondering what's next. We'd very much like you to remain involved in Kristin's work life (life's work?) while she's preparing the commercial release of Speedbath. We know that money is tight, so here are some reasons to keep your CASH subscription active.

• All active subscribers will receive Speedbath the minute we do - hot off the presses.

• We will launch a 50FootWave CASH page in November. Expect to find a full-album stream of the new Ep, "Power + Light", as well as downloads and a link to pre-order the vinyl (which will be offered in 4 colors!)

• January will see the launch of an entirely new CASH project from Kristin. We think you'll love it.

We want to take this opportunity to again express our undying gratitude and appreciation for your support and involvement in CASH's inaugural year. It's been an amazing experiment. We hope you have enjoyed it and found it as fulfilling as we have. We certainly could not have done it without you.

Be in touch any time with your thoughts, comments and ideas.

Lots of love from,

All of Us at CASH

Fortune

I think Fortune's my favorite Speedbath song yet. Not that I have favorites or anything. It's just such an interesting take on Wonder Bread and the East River and gold, smoking devil people. When I finished writing it, I felt like I'd just met someone who's very cool but too weird to hang out with for an extended period of time.

Recording it at Steve Rizzo's Stable Sound with a CASH meeting going on in the next room, I got to know it a little better, pulling the CASH guys in every now and then to critique an overdub or evaluate my girl-drum levels in a mix. Fortune turned out not to be such a weirdo after all, just kinda spacey. Now I wanna hang out with it all the time. I'm a total sucker for lead bass.

And then it just floats away, which I'm also a sucker for. I'm not normally a lyrics guy, given that I don't talk right or understand human speech, so when Act 2 kicks in with only reverb-soaked melody, spooky and sweet, I feel nicely ...I don't know...let off the hook.

Fortune says it's piece and then wanders out of the room, lost in a zone.

Mississippi Kite

I know I just played this song yesterday, but all I can remember is hearing it pour out of the speakers. I guess because I didn’t stop to think before jumping in. All I had to refer to was a seriously scary piece of notebook paper with Sharpie scribbles all over it.

I fished this out of my bag on the flight back to the U.S. from the Edinburgh Fringe festival, dizzy with the flu, and added fuzzy production notes on top of lyrics on top of chords on top of sheet music on top of rhythm and structural changes. By the time we landed in Newark, it was a mess (Rob Ahlers calls my song notebook “an ugly mind”).

So when Rizzo pressed “record” yesterday, I squinted at my notebook, then just started putting stuff down. I could have fucked this song up real bad.

Mississippi Kite just goes, though; I couldn’t really get it in its way. It’s driven by the lyrics, which is something I rarely say about a song. They’re hot and bothered, as usual, but also woozy: this day as a dream.

Those lyrics got happy over the rhythm section and then I could do no wrong on top, adding some rather delicate overdubs and then stepping out of the way.

A happy feel can still make a sad song, though. Mississippi Kite talks and lists and spits and talks some more, never really shuts up, but ends up only telling you that something’s missing.

Love,
Kristin

By the way, if you haven’t poked around CASH Music in a while, do it—it’s worth your time, I swear. Lots of growth and grooviness and it’s all beautiful. These are still early days for CASH, but very exciting ones.

Elizabeth June

This is Betty's song...my friend Betty, whose ghost haunts Palm Springs, or at least haunts me in Palm Springs. She died here, lonely. I was too afraid to see her old to go looking for her. But I bet she was beautiful up to and through the end.

Recorded by the great and powerful Ethan Allen, of the late Kingsway studio in New Orleans and the first two 50FootWave records. Ethan worked on Throwing Muses' Limbo, as well as Sky Motel and the Echo single.

Ethan's Royal Triton in LA is a studio full of lovely old mikes, an iso booth jammed with old National Geographics and undelivered Christmas presents, and a control room decorated with tiny gears, bad lamps, broken tools and Ethan's gentle smile.

No drums, no bass per se, though we achieved bass frequencies by dropping one of the acoustics an octave. The track sounds sweet, yet bizarre. Somehow, a B flat crept in, though there's no such note in the chords I was playing. Maybe it's Betty, singing along. Betty sure liked to sing.

The lyrics hurt my feelings 'cause I miss Betty and I missed her end, but I like to think of her sweet, yet bizarre self having only palm trees to answer to, after a life fraught with tension. Bullied by the entertainment industry, she was riddled with insecurity...a great brain, not given a minute to think.

The song says she found some peace.

Moan

The last CASH track, "Static", was light shining through a crack in the door. "Moan" flung the door wide open.

This jazz-miked drum kit, warm bass and overheated tubes guitar sound set the stage for a flood of songs in keeping with this recording technique. I don't quite understand the process, but it seems as if songs needing a certain treatment wait in the wings until I'm well-versed in that treatment. Then they come crashing into the room, bumping into me and each other...taking up space and demanding attention.

"Moan" brought to life a fistful of Throwing Muses songs. I honestly didn't think I would ever write another Throwing Muses song. For some reason, I assumed my guitars were only capable of bringing about convenient music. Of course, music is hardly ever convenient. It imagines you have nothing better to do than serve it. It not-so-gently suggests that you refrain from eating and sleeping and paying the rent until you've given it everything it asks for.

Which is fair, 'cause it only asks for physicality and sociability. It needs a body (no matter how long it takes, how much it costs and how many people it takes to get that barn up off the ground!) and then it needs to walk out into the world, wearing its new clothes, so that it can start living its new life. It pays us back in dividends by telling us what it learned out there in the ether, before we met it.

And by letting us play. The other Muses are ready to work. Which is maybe a past life re-visited, but it's also a dream come true. Songs don't know the word "past", anyway. Songs are forever now.

CASH and Kristin Podcasts are now available as RSS feeds and through the iTunes store. Sure, having a Kristin-only Podcast would be nice, but why limit yourself when you can have all the stuff that CASH posts in one nice, neat package?

Kristin's Feed
the CASH Feed
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Also - Check out the brand-spankin' new KristinHersh.com -- where there's a list of upcoming live appearances and lots more coming soon.

Static

Rizzo and I hit on interesting sonic vocabulary with this one. Somehow, playing this song by myself, I was sounding like a jazz combo. So we played that up with sharp guitar and "room". Room plays loudly on this track.

Which tends to make a song sound like it was recorded live, in a club. This usually helps the listener hear heaviness and sweat and import in the performance.

I find that it's best to leave the track alone at this point, so that nobody begins picturing the fifteen musicians that'd have to be on stage in order to make all this production possible. In other words, once you begin erasing overdubs, you know you got the core presentation right and should just walk away.

Billy thinks Static is about my friend Mark who died last year. I don't know, really, but Billy's usually right. Mark will never seem dead to me, just...gone. I like to think of him tearing down roads in the sun and rain, still having bones and hope.

Love,
Kristin

Krait

Rizzo says this songs is "big". I agree, as it uses big imagery: Garden of Eden, primordial ooze stuff. It goes humanist biblical on your ass, with a little Raising Arizona thrown in.

Which life tends to do too, sometimes. Not a bad way to be here on this planet, really, if you can stay wide-eyed. So far, my eyes are still wi-i-i-de open.

Krait's a happy song, I think, calling children, "the crawling milk-fed", "ids", and asserting their need to be strong in the face of "wasted time" and "naked shame".

The production technique is small-to-big and the sonic vocabulary unrelated to the natural world. A lot of distorted and backwards and run through this or that. But the feel stays organic, which is part of Rizzo's genius.

Love,
Kristin