CW41

The final lines (and title) of “Cruel Silk” were improvised while tracking (see CW39), but today’s whole song was.

“Special Extras”

Okay, I know you
You know me, too
Okay, I know that we always do
What we’re meant to

Motorbikes on parade
They don’t do what they say
But that’s why I 
Must do
With you  
What we said we’d do

In a painting in they woods
Where we could
And expended roads would cause me to feel good
But the bowling ball is throwing through untrue
So you must do
What we said we’d do

Tell me I’m wrong 
Twenty more times
I don’t care
I don’t care
I don’t

Just because you’re afraid my wiggling sandals 
Are made of buttercorns
And alone trains of thought 
Would be the mental of your knots
Untied with R.D. Laing in sudden shots 
Of windows coming through
And that Bonaparte is winning in the moon
Like he’s wont to do

I see a face in the painting 
That Chance do
It’s a lot of things and systems coming into view
Don’t cry
We’re alive
Don’t

Full Professor, one of my 2020 albums, was made with fun limitations. Everything, with no exceptions, was hard panned, all the way to the left or right. I.e., no sound appears in both headphones*/speakers. The only way I sometimes softened this effect was to double something, usually a voice, and then put it on both sides. This was all I allowed myself for creating the illusion of a middle.

*Because I listen to music almost exclusively on headphones, I’ve always recorded and mixed (and mastered with friends) entirely on headphones. I know this is wrong. You’re supposed to listen different ways and have it sound good all of them. On the other hand, being attracted to imbalanced and surprising mixes anyway, I’m not really worried about it. In speakers, either my mixes sound about the same, more alarming, or (accidentally) more normal. I can live with whatever. In any case, I will continue fine-tuning my music from my preferred perspective: headphones.

The other self-imposed limitation on Full Professor was not using any effects in my recording app. I just did this one dry digital. The hard panning already makes the sounds flat, like 2D instead of 3D, and the absence of reverb, delay, etc., makes it even worse. If I really wanted, say, some vocal reverb, I sang through the drumhead of my tenor banjo. The harsh aesthetic was fun, and so was finagling some workarounds.

I started playing the studio, too. A crazy hinge on a closet door appears more than once as scattershot percussion. I was drumming on the walls. I didn’t know it yet, but I was in my final months in those rooms, rooms I’d been in for nearly twelve years. The building would sell, and I’d move studios in December. Whether premonition or coincidence, it’s cool I got to the point of truly “using the studio as an instrument” in that last stretch.

Because of the pandemic, no one was around. Instead of recording in my actual room, I mostly set up in an outer office that me and my studiomate, Chance McNiff, used for storage, a room closer to the center of the building—to minimize, if only a little, the chronic problems with traffic noise I used to suffer through. (At the end of the 2010s, when Chance’s room had been Kyle and Luke Thomas’s, this outer room had been Happy Birthday’s rehearsal room—me and Kyle and Ruth Garbus’s one-album band.)

I found myself, in this spot, gazing at a picture of George Harrison I’d hung up years earlier—George in India in 1966 with sunglasses and the first Beatles moustache,* in a sort of garden—but, until then, never had the occasion to drink from, as it were, while I made music.

*Paul usually gets the credit, but as far as I can tell George was ahead, if only by a month. (George in September, Paul in October or November—and, according to Paul in Barry Miles’s Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now, his initial fall-of-1966 moustache was a professionally-made fake! Whether that’s true or not—I think it’s not—George got there first.)

I was tracking the previous song on the album, the penultimate—“Special Extras” is last—and I could tell that if I just looked at this George Harrison picture while I sang and played the steel-string I was already holding, that I could pull a song out of it in real time. So I, uncharacteristically, popped over from the song I was working on to lay down the basic track of “Special Extras” while the feeling was strong. Then I went back and finished the work I’d interrupted. Then I did the overdubs on “Special Extras,” and the album was done.

There’s other improvising on Full Professor—the title track was thrown together quickly and the lead vocal was improvised, and “What Would That Be Like To Just Talk” is as improvised as it sounds—but “Special Extras” is more whole cloth. The other two are repetitive and have few words. “Special Extras” is more like really improvising a song.

The title is something I had written down from a podcast ad. Using this title for this song is funny to me. It’s like I called it “Less-Good Bonus Thing.” It’s like throwing a tomato at someone who’s already on wobbly footing. On the other hand, clearly the song is already not taking itself too seriously. Some of it’s pseudo-Liverpudlian (see my pronunciation of “care”), but it sounds even more like a parody of The Incredible String Band, sans sitar. I’m not trying to say the song is “just a joke,” though, to ask you to look at it as counting less. (Nothing counts! Everything counts!) This is just my biased opinion, but I think this song is funny and good. Both.

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“Motorbikes on parade”:

This album was made in the late spring, when downtown Brattleboro is rich with the terrible revving of motorcycles waiting at traffic lights and then getting to go. As I said, I was attempting to avoid those sounds in my slightly better location. Nevertheless, you can hear a motorcycle under the end of the previous line—on the recording, but certainly much louder for me in the room—instigating this lyric.

“In a painting in they woods”:

The “they” is just me saying “the” weird. But it felt right, here, to write it like that. (It’s cool to think of the added y as a “Special Extra.”) “They” is a significant word for me.

In the autumn of 2008, in my first months living in Brattleboro, I had a dream. It took place in the little apartment on the hill where I’d recently moved to, and still reside today—in the room I was sleeping in. I’d recently boughten, in real life, some LEGO—the plainest, most classic LEGO set I could get new. In the dream, I was sitting on the floor with John Lennon. I was my actual age at the time: turning 33 soon. John was 40, his age when he died. It was one of those dreams that feels like a real visitation. We were playing with the LEGO. John also made some drawings, and when he signed one, he signed: They-L

This, almost sixteen years ago, was before I’d heard about they/them pronouns. But when I did later on, I made the association with John’s name in the dream right away.

You can hear They-L as a way of saying “J.L.” I also, in 2008, heard it as a way of saying “they love.”

Right after having the dream, back in Kyle’s room of our shared studio, we searched “They-L,” in quotes, online, on Kyle’s laptop. This seems less likely now, but there was precisely one hit: a PDF. The highlighted “They-L” (it might’ve been lowercase) was in some scary-looking government document, with the redactions and everything, that had to do with al-Qaeda! (Weird to think, now, that 9/11 was only seven falls previous.) We quickly became afraid something bad was going to happen to his computer, or us, and got out of there fast, never to return.

“In a painting in they woods” (again):

Back in 2020, my friend Hannah Brookman was doing a lot of en plein air paintings (painting outdoors from life) around this time. (She still is. 💕) Her partner, my friend Omeed Goodarzi, was super into it: the fact of it, the name, and different ways the practice could be transposed to music. I was thinking of all this when I sang this lyric.

“But the bowling ball is throwing through untrue”:

Plainly, in my opinion, the best line of the song, and the best part of the music.

“Tell me I’m wrong / Twenty more times / I don’t care / I don’t care / I don’t”:

Obviously the defensive words of an artist who’s been told their entire career that they’re going about it wrong—too much of this, too little of that—and that’s why they’re more obscure than they “should be.”

“And alone trains of thought / Would be the mental of your knots / Untied with R.D. Laing in sudden shots / Of windows coming through”:

R.D. Laing is the psychiatrist that Pink Floyd tried to take Syd Barrett to, but Syd wouldn’t get out of the car. My crude gloss of Laing’s stance, having never read him (not for lack of buying the books), is probably too reductive. But, however off, it rhymes with something many of us Syd Barrett heads have allowed ourselves to flirt with: the idea that a “crazy person” might be having an uncrazy reaction to a messed-up society. The hope, though it never came to pass, is that Laing may have found a middle path between pathologizing Syd’s genius and romanticizing/enabling his illness—like, the latter, some of his hippie friends were potentially doing.

Once I sing “knots,” I think of Laing’s book Knots, which I’ve seen a lot in used bookstores (and bought—it may have been in a stack behind me when I was reeling this number in), and so namecheck him in the next line.

“And that Bonaparte is winning in the moon”:

I sing the name odd, but here it felt better to write it proper, let it just be sung weird.

“I see a face in the painting / That Chance do”:

Another painting. 💕 This one was in the room. My friend Chance McNiff, who I mentioned above, was my second studiomate at that address, after Kyle and Luke left. Some of his abstract canvases were stacked against the wall within eyeshot of my little setup. I saw a face, pareidolia-style, in the one on top.

I like the double meaning of “Chance,” though, too. Like the song I was extemporizing, Chance makes his paintings quickly and freely. Me and Chance both court chance this way. 💕