Aw, do I really have to come in now? Gosh dang it. I don’t want to do my homework. I want to STAY OUTSIDE AND PLAY. I want to SPEAK IN CAPITAL LETTERS.
Oh, hi. I was just undergoing some cheap psychiatry. I think it’s called regression analysis … or something like that. Here’s how it goes: you close your eyes and imagine you’re Brett Kavanaugh … I mean, a 7-year-old while Marvin (my personal robot assistant) plays 8-track tapes of Peter Frampton. Yes, it hurts, but sometimes the truth does hurt. And this is about getting to the truth, right Marvin? Marvin? Marvin! Turn down the 8-track player … I’m asking you a question.
Why are we doing this, just a few days from Columbus Day? Random chance. And we don’t celebrate Columbus Day, so even more random. Actually, one of our neighbors said I should have my head examined. It took me a while to work out precisely what he meant by that. (Long enough, in fact, for Mitch Macaphee to stick my head under an electron microscope.) The neighbor took exception to our kind of loud rehearsals, our strange plantings around the front entrance, and the occasional explosions emanating from Mitch’s subterranean lab.
What was the results of my regression analysis? Well, it looks like I should have put more effort into eliminating relationships between variables. And I should have kept my focus on the relationship between a dependent variable and one or more independent variables. It’s all about co-dependency, you see? You don’t? Right. Neither do I. And apparently my rent-a-shrink is actually a statistician by trade. I don’t understand a word he says, mostly because he just talks so fast, but partly because his comments are so unbearably dull I just can’t keep my eyes open. And you’re not supposed to fall asleep on that stereotypical therapy couch, but I did. So maybe I’m on TV, now.
I hate to seem arrogant, but psychiatry is kind of lost on me. At least the robot-based variety. If someone comes up with a method of therapy that doesn’t involve robots, let me know.
Well, I’ve wandered a bit. But the point I’m trying to get to is this: we tend to write happy little songs about big nasty things. This month we appear to be back on the fascist beat again. Next month, who knows? Some other grave subject matter that can be turned into a nursery rhyme or a mambo. That’s the way it works round these parts. Those are our principles. And if you don’t like them … we have other principles. (Yes, I’m a Marxist. My favorite is Groucho, but it’s not a strong preference.)
Of course, it’s not like it was in the old days. Way back then, we would write songs the old-fashioned way: by knocking branches against rocks for a few hours, then scratching the changes out in the dirt floor of our primitive caves. A little later on, the trombone was invented, though that was of little utility since none of us actually plays the trombone. (True story: Every time Matt tries to play trombone, he loses a tooth … which is just another way of saying that he only has a limited number of plays in him.) No, it wasn’t until the discovery of the Lowery Organ that we began to move forward expeditiously into an era of serious songwriting. Then we got silly. Super silly.
So, if I’m treating every songwriting project like the evolutionary ascent of man, that amounts to a lot of banjo-plucking primates. And that’s where many of my songs start out. I’ll find a chair somewhere in this big old barn of a place, throw my cheap-seat Martin D-1 across my leg and start playing the five chords I know best. If I stumble upon some progression or melody worth repeating, I can’t rely on memory alone. Fortunately, Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has an audio recording module, and if I can get him to stand still long enough, I can capture whatever the hell it is I’m working on and play it back later. If it happens in the middle of the night, the playback sounds like …. you guessed it …. banjo-plucking primates.
Well, so … how to celebrate? Our plan is to reissue songs off of International House via 
As you may have guessed, I am trying to re-acquaint myself with recording technologies after a summer of copying tapes and taping copies. A few weeks in that garden shed and it all looks like an undifferentiated tangle of wires and metal boxes to me. That’s kind of what our studios always look like, but the fact that I’m taking note of it now tells me that I’ve got some remedial learning ahead of me. Fortunately, with the assistance of Marvin (my personal robot assistant), I can reconstruct my keyboard workstation to a point where noise comes out of it and goes into the recorder thingy. Do that until the blue smoke comes out, and then you have a record. Or at least I think you do.
Okay, well the wind is kicking up a bit, and my little shack is swaying from side to side, making the set lists flap like little white flags nailed to the wall. It’s almost as if the place is hoping to surrender to our extreme weather. I’m going to pack up my ripped up duffel and scurry back into the relative safety of the Hammer Mill. Hopefully Mitch Macaphee, our mad science advisor, is not running one of those land drone experiments of his. Last week he was running some dog-like autonomous robot around the ground floor, programming it to shoot deadly lasers at anything that moved. Frankly I’m surprised I didn’t have more company out here in the shack.
Sit out here long enough and your mind starts to light on all kinds of things. Random stuff, like … why didn’t I get some handyman to fix the roof on this shed? It leaks like a sieve! Then there are thoughts of what might have been, the kind that creep around the corner when you’re sitting idle, then climb in through your ear and squat down on your brain. Why didn’t I call that handyman? Finally, you get the occasional flash of inspiration, like you’re seeing the world for the first time. Stuff like, I want to join the Space Force! or I want Marvin to join the Space Force! One or the other of those might be workable.
Since I’ve been in an archiving mood pretty much all summer, I will likely start posting selections from International House (our 2008 album) in the coming weeks and share them here, forthwith, etc. Not new material, of course …. just a cheap-ass retrospective on where we’ve been. Something for you to chew on while we work out where the hell we’re going. I don’t know, maybe another interstellar tour, or maybe we’ll go all in on another album, or maybe just watch Marvin try to do cheap circus tricks. So long as he doesn’t dress up like a rodeo clown and start juggling bowling pins. That’s a bridge too far.
While he’s been busy with that and Matt’s been busy with falcons, I’ve been woodshedding a bit, trying to teach my arms to play the piano again. (It’s faster than teaching your legs.) The archiving project is nearly complete, at least the part about digitizing songs from analog tapes. I still need to clean them up, sort them, etc. Some of them are pretty spare; others come with a vest and a second pair of pants. The whole nine yards, as they say. (I don’t know why they say these things.)