writing

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.

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.

Sometimes I Forget Where We Went This Time

Sometimes I forget where we went this time.

Waking up, I take stock: Billy’s big shoulders are partially obscured by a matching set of tiny tan ones. Bodhi must have slipped into bed with us sometime in the night. He can do this because our bed is a mattress on the floor. So we must be broke again.

Through a glass door is a palm tree…did we go to Florida? Texas? Australia? The Mojave Desert suddenly comes into sharp focus and I am briefly disappointed. The Mojave Desert is romantic, but I like Florida, Texas and Australia. Some other time maybe.

This takes about four seconds. By the fifth second, I remember that we’re broke because the bloated monster Recording Industry finally rolled over and died. Hopefully it’ll take some of its crap with it, free up some ear space for real music.

A real musician is someone who has no choice but to play music, whether or not it’s gonna make money or win friends. Or be heard at all. A real musician could be anyone; sometimes they’re in the music business, but they’re hardly ever rock stars.

So our habitat’s been paved over. The low-hanging fruit on which we lived grew on some of the first branches of the music business to fall. But the bloated monster should die. It was an ugly monster.

And we’ve always lived hard, on the move, looking for work. Not by choice, necessarily, but we’ve found that it keeps us…useful. And happy.

Happy because we like raising our own kids. Kids untainted by chemicals and brainwashing. And happy because we like to play our own music. Music unsullied by greed. Beautiful, smart, healthy children and beautiful, smart, healthy, music.

Bodhi wakes up and smiles.

mp3 – “Half Blast” – live in my bedroom

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 song 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

Speedbath

I love to watch musical passages in a song diverge. When the down beat of a melodic phrase falls on a different chord each time it comes around or when listening to the drum pattern and guitar part together feels like doing two math problems in your head at once.

This song is all about half steps and rhythmic skips. It was crazy/exhilarating to play and is crazy/exhilarating to listen to — at least for me. It’s a nice little “yay!” and “f*ck you!” when music shouldn’t work but does anyway.

“Speedbath” is the title of one of my son Wyatt’s comics. It seemed to fit this song, which has the word “speed” in it (that counts, right?). Both Wyatt and the song are equally wacky, anyway.

Love,
Kristin