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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

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.

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

Morning Birds

We stopped somewhere in the south on the last tour to put my band in a motel and park our tour bus outside of it. On tour, Billy and I sleep with the dumpsters and the parking lot animals.

I like dumpsters; you can throw garbage in them. And I like parking lot animals ’cause they have a hard time but they make the best of it. They’re also fun to watch in the morning while I drink my tea and wait for the band to wake up and bring me oranges and little boxes of cereal from the breakfast bar.

Sometimes parking lot animals are excellent: giant roaches, squirrels, peregrine falcons, snakes. Sometimes, they’re just fine, like the morning birds that wake all southerners at dawn. Morning birds (there are many different kinds — all they gotta do is wake up and start singing in order to fall into this category) remind me of my childhood in Georgia. I love lying on my bus bed and listening to them, wondering where the hell I am.

Except the birds that sang to us this particular morning began singing at a time that was only technically morning, like three minutes past midnight or something. And they sounded awfully…agitated. We spent a restless night hoping they were okay and wishing they’d shut up even if they weren’t.

Somehow, they made it into a song.

I especially like the hypnotic repetition in the first part of this track. Each instrument is playing its own loop; only the rhythm guitar and bass are playing together. The resultant cacophony is not as unsettling as you might think, given that your ear learns a bit more of each part as it goes by.

The quiet part, I couldn’t make quiet enough. I just pulled instruments out, then pulled out more until I had only sweet/sad left. Something about a “purifying sin” demands a certain amount of respect and, for a musician, that usually means get out of the way.

Love,
Kristin