Please Me

This week’s submission has a some history behind it. Last summer, way back in ‘06, Bobby Conn, booking agent Derek Becker, producer Blue Hawaii, Detholz!’s Karl Doerfer and I started having weekly meetings, with the intent of starting our own mp3 record label. We’d exist as a modern-day Brill Building or Tin Pan Alley or Motown: a songwriting factory, studio, and label all in one. It ended up being a too ambitious to exist in this world (at least for now…), but, in trying to envision what sort of music this idealistic project would make, I came up with this song, “Please Me“.

The idea was to do one-off collaborations with people that you don’t normally play with. The personnel here: Snokilla, the amazing singer of much-missed Chicago band Jitney, on vocals; H. Carl Lowendorf (Sprinkles, Pornado, Platonics), my erstwhile roommate and one of my guitar heroes, on the axe; the inimitable Ben Schultz (Sprinkles, Platonics, Ofays UK) on drums; and yours truly doing odds and ends to fill out the song. It’s a heavy, sultry song, swinging in an old dress made of canvas.

The recording is about a year old, and the song itself is a year older still. When I wrote it, I was sitting at the piano trying to do some kind of variation on the great Nick Drake song “Fly”, which begins with the lyric, “Please / Give me second grace”. I was trying to use the word “please” in the same way, if that makes sense. I envisioned it as a moody piano ballad, but, as was the case with “Is This Love”, I couldn’t help dirtying it up as the recording process went along.  I don’t know what will become of this recording, but I’ve always liked it a lot, and I wanted to share.

After two listens, I think that the new M.I.A. record is the real deal… fantastic, original lyrics as always, and a very progressive production style. Even if you yourself make music that sounds very different from hers, she throws down the gauntlet and makes you think. In other news, I am prepared for the Cubs to break my heart soon, but in the meantime, it was an exhilarating weekend to be a fan, as they crept ever closer to stealing the division that no one wants, the clownish National League Central.

I Do Little Things

This week’s tune, “I Do Little Things“, forms part of a continuing series of the word becoming the flesh, i.e., a song’s title unintentionally informing the recording process. In this case, it was for the good. I had some time this week for a change, and also, I was working here with a relatively simple idea. The result was, I was able to do a little thing well, or at the very least, in a fully-realized way.

But enough of this self-satisfied drivel already… it’s unbecoming. On to what you’re really here for: shop talk. “I Do Little Things” is a tribute to oldies radio. Lots of Spector-esque string flourishes (he’s on my mind, what with the murder trial wrapping up), as well as hidden thefts from “Time of the Season” by the Zombies, and “You Can’t Do That” by the Beatles. More than anything else though, I’m borrowing from Del Shannon’s “Runaway”, to which I owe both the tone and the cadence (one-and-TWO-AND-three-and-FOUR-and, if you’re keeping score) of the organ part.

I pared down the lyrics until I had just enough to get by. Lots of repetition, and a nice, simple story of emotional indentured servitude. What are your thoughts?

P.S. Go see the new David Cronenberg movie “Eastern Promises”.  It’s delicious!

Hard to Find a Friend

To continue my trite pattern of opening each post with a reference to the song title, it’s hard to find the influence for this week’s song, “Hard to Find a Friend“. It’s kind of either everyone or no one. I’ve been writing songs in this vein since I was about thirteen, and I don’t think too much when I’m writing them. Randy Newman? Billy Joel? Sinatra’s “saloon songs”? Andrew Lloyd Webber? Springsteen? Your guess is as good as mine… we all drink the same water.

As for the subject matter, we are definitely in a neighboring area code to last week’s song, “Kathleen”: nostalgia, or what your local alternative weekly might call “missed connections”. The narrator is singing to a love interest who repeatedly comes into and departs from his life. In the end, he throws up his hands and goes back to basics: “What does it mean? / We come from slime / Just do me on time / Do me on time.” (Note: this post not sanctioned by the Creationist movement.)

The arrangement, to the extent that there is one, could be classified as “no-frills”. Piano-vocal, just like it was 100 years ago. The vocal performance is a little uptight, in my opinion — the performance of someone proving that he can sing on-key… a rather clinical exercise. But the piano coming through that dictaphone — ah, there’s nothing better. I’m quite tired and beginning to drool on myself, so the rest of the commentary is up to you, dear reader.

Kathleen

Ah, my second straight week of writing a song that turned out unintentionally self-prophesying. Last week, I tempted fate by writing a song that opened with, “I tried to figure you out / But I can’t”, before arranging it and finding that, indeed, I couldn’t figure it out. This week’s song, “Kathleen“, opens with the couplet, “Leaving town / Long before you got it down”, which turned out to be exactly what happened. I left Chicago on Friday to see my family in Louisville, leaving this song pretty undercooked. But not necessarily bad.

I was attempting a Motown or Philly-soul sound here… the Delfonics filtered through Darryl Hall and Bobby Conn. The verse sections turned out pretty well, I think, as well as the vocal breakdown section (“Must’ve been something in the water…”). The chorus proved a little problematic, because I just couldn’t get it to open up like I’d intended. Would’ve been cool to get more of an epic, Elton John piano-ballad moment there. And maybe if it gets recorded with the full band, we could nail it. Also, I realize my singing’s not exactly in key, which spoils some of the smooth-soul effect. (Check out Darryl Hall’s interview on Pitchfork, by the way. He drops a blend of craftsmanship and arrogance that is quite entertaining. He is the man, of course, so he can say whatever he wants.)

Lyrically, like so many of my songs, this one is backward-looking, using the ultimate device to create instant wistfulness: the elderly! The song is about an old man looking back on a girl who may have been “the one that got away”, and then meeting her years later and deciding whether to give it another shot, even at their advanced age. I didn’t really intend this to be comic… maybe it’ll come out that way, and that’s fine too.

The chorus’s use of the name “Kathleen”, stretched out to three syllables — “Cath-o-lene” — is a nod to the Four Tops’ great “Bernadette”, in which the central name occupies the same meter. And I couldn’t resist throwing in a little current events: The second verse begins with the lyric, “Cruising you / Used to be a thing I’d do.” I’d never really pondered what it meant to “cruise” someone until the Larry Craig gay-sex scandal broke last weekend. (One man alleged that he had been “cruised” by Congressman Craig at a Home Depot or something like that for over an hour!) Anyway, gotta stay relevant, right?

I don’t consider this song a knockout, but I think it has some good moments. Happy Labor Day one and all.