music

I’ve posted the last in my year-long series of CASH tracks. It’s called Rubidoux and it’s here. Another of my “songs from the backseat”.

Love,
Kristin

Find this song and all my recent work, in multiple formats – including lossless, free for download on my CASH Music pages. Information on how you can support the creation and distribution of this music by becoming a subscriber is here.

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.

Love,
Kristin

Find this song and all my recent work, in multiple formats – including lossless, free for download on my CASH Music pages. Information on how you can support the creation and distribution of this music by becoming a subscriber is here.

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

Find this song and all my recent work, in multiple formats – including lossless, free for download on my CASH Music pages. Information on how you can support the creation and distribution of this music by becoming a subscriber is here.

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.

Love,
Kristin

Find this song and all my recent work, in multiple formats – including lossless, free for download on my CASH Music pages. Information on how you can support the creation and distribution of this music by becoming a subscriber is here.

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.

Love,
Kristin

Find this song and all my recent work, in multiple formats – including lossless, free for download on my CASH Music pages. Information on how you can support the creation and distribution of this music by becoming a subscriber is here.