CW105
Yes, I have already strongly suggested you buy Cozy & Twisted Vol. 1 “Grandma’s Favorites,” the new King Tuff album that I made with Kyle Thomas, currently available only as an LP through MUP.
This thing is: we are in the home stretch, the MUP engine sputtering to life up in the Northeast Kingdom. There aren’t that many left, and when they sell out the album will be available for everyone to hear online. I’m excited for both of those.
And so today I present the lyrics to one of the Cozy songs Kyle and I wrote together. To nudge you again, and also because I love this song.
“Rats, Above You” Rats They’re all around us Rats Scrambling in bamboo Rats Above you Rats Behind the wallpaper Rats The floorboards too Rats Above you Dog is barking The doggie don’t know what to do Rats Above you Rats They’re all around us Rats Scramble in bamboo Rats Above you Rats Behind the wallpaper Rats The floorboards too Rats Above you Dog is barking That doggie don’t know what to do Rats Above you Rats Above you Rats Above you
It would be contrarian to say “Rats, Above You” is the best song on the album. It isn’t the first one you’d grab in a fire (and it would probably survive anyway). But it is my favorite.
Kyle moved to Los Angeles in 2011 and then to his place in Mount Washington in 2014. Mount Washington is a neighborhood in the city built on a very steep hill. The name was funny to me because I grew up in New Hampshire, hiking in the White Mountains where Mount Washington, the highest, looms very large. It has, the one in New Hampshire, a road up it—perhaps you know the iconic This Car Climbed Mt. Washington bumper sticker—and is famous for its record-breaking wind speeds. I’ve actually never been up that mountain, but even in Southern Vermont you can sort of feel it up there. (I picture one of those panoramic CGI flying camera shots transporting you from one place to another in the Lord of the Rings movies.)
(It’s only while writing this post that I learned the neighborhood Mount Washington might be named after the mountain in New Hampshire—people aren’t sure.)
Being at Kyle’s place in Mount Washington for the first time was crazy. It was an environment so lush and foreign to me it seemed like a dream. I lived in Los Angeles for a couple years as a baby—we moved there right after I was born, for my father’s post-doc (organic chemistry) at UCLA—and then we were off to New Hampshire. When I returned to the city in 2017 (in March I believe) I hadn’t been there, to California at all, since… 1977.
Kyle and Ruth Garbus and I did a tour of the state, as three solo acts, so Ruth and I flew out there. Donald Trump was newly in the (undemolished) White House, and I had gotten sober a few months earlier. I was actually a few years into what I thought was maybe the end for my songwriting (CW = cry wolf), but I put together a set of my old material. Fidget spinners exploded. Our tour (two weeks? a little less?) was exactly during peak fidget spinner. (We got fully onboard.) I was trying to quit sugar and I was eating an extraordinary amount of fruit.
Kyle’s house was on the “mountain,” but there was a whole lot more of it up above. You could walk up these very steep winding streets, looking out at incredible views, and go to the Self-Realization Fellowship International Headquarters at the top, go meditate in the meditation garden. (I was already into Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi via George Harrison.) The flora was astonishing—I was especially taken with the huge and various cactuses. The absence of cannabis in my system did not diminish the psychedelic grandeur of it all. New England, despite my best efforts, is not a Beatley place, but in Los Angeles, cartoon Beatles seemed to peak out from behind the giant fronds.
Kyle’s porch was paradise. Sitting and looking out through the palm trees across at the other hills. Foggy early morning; “beautiful blue skies and golden sunshine all along the way” in the day; the steep temperature drop with desert darkness, the city now bespeckled with lights. And night was fire time: around the corner in Kyle’s side yard he’d make a nice warm fire to cut against the cold, high bamboo behind us walling off the next property, close and looming over. (Such is the logic of that staircase place.)
It was up in this bamboo you’d hear the scampering. You wouldn’t see them, but they were rats.
This house was incredible to me in 2017, the whole trip was. That apartment I lived in in 76/77 with my father and mother (brother and sister not yet born), on a side street off Santa Monica Boulevard, just a walk down to the beach and the pier—my mother used to take me in a stroller—was still there. She found the address, so me and Kyle and Ruth went there. The crazy thing was: I remembered it. Especially a chunky red cross on an American Red Cross building across the street. And the taste of the air down at the beach. It was totally unlike the beaches I grew up near in New England, and yet it was distinctly, uncannily familiar.
And then I spent a lot more time at Kyle’s place in Mount Washington in 2022 and 2023. I’ve written about it some, but the life-peak quality of those month-long trips (five weeks the second year) to work with Blake Mills at Sound City—it’s too much, too rich. I have to leave it at that right now.
And on top of all the stuff with Blake, and all the bouncing around the city with Kyle (and late-night teatimes on the porch—RIP PG Tips pyramid bags!), the 2023 trip ended with me and Kyle writing and recording Cozy & Twisted at that house.
I’ve been into haiku lately. I remember writing them in elementary school: 5 syllables, 7, 5. That strict 5-7-5 is what I’ve been into doing. And the goal of haiku: to almost shock you into a place, a moment, with those radically limited means. And that place, like a dewdrop on a cobweb, is a tiny mirror that also takes in the entire universe surrounding it. In a snap you’re there, and you’re everywhere.
“Rats, Above You” has that haiku quality for me. Just the image of those comic, freaky rats up above you in Kyle’s side yard while you sat by the fire—it somehow contains the whole of the feel of that incredible house, my three trips out there, Kyle’s entire time out in California, now in the past.
And when I hear “Rats, Above You,” barely a song but fully a song and even more a song because of that, it’s still funny, but it’s also sad now.
I feel the panoramic scale of life. A sweeping depiction of something that is infinitely detailed, but is also zipping by. I met Kyle a few weeks after he turned 21. Now he’s in his 40s, and I’ll be 50 in a month and change. Neither of us is born yet, we’re both already dead. It’s all always all there, all the time. All the time at once, contained in every part.
Scrambling in bamboo Rats are up above you there Nightfall getting cool