What are you talking about? I was very careful in my deliberations about this get up. If someone’s feathers get ruffled, well … it’s not on me, man. Folks got to just calm down.
Yeah, it’s Halloween again, everyone. Kind of a big holiday around these parts. Why, I’ve known these quiet suburban moms and dads to take their kids out in gale force winds, forcing them against the elements to have a good time, damn it. That’s how memories are made, my friends. Here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, we try to make this old barn of a place seem inviting. We can’t afford pumpkins or corn stalks, of course, so we just slip the mansized tuber a fiver and ask him to stand by the front door with a citronella torch. He looks, uh, kind of autumnal … if you squint.
Now, I’m not a big one for dress-up, as you know. Never liked it, never. That said, I did put on some old jeans and borrowed one of those blue denim shirts, then combed my hair forward and put on a fake beard so that I would look like George Harrison on the cover of Abbey Road. Set aside the gray hair, it almost works. Anti-Lincoln, however, accuses me of being culturally insensitive. I keep telling him, none of our neighbors are from the north of England. Who will care?
Hah. Anti-Lincoln should talk. HE chose to dress in a seasonally inappropriate costume. Whoever heard of going out on Halloween dressed as Santa Claus? You can’t muddle the major hyper consumer holidays in that way. You’ll make people’s heads explode! Then they’ll expect presents from you. I told him he should go as Lincoln, but he didn’t want to offend our crazy upstairs neighbors, who I believe are from south of the Mason Dixon line somewhere. No one thinks much of my suggestions on this topic, and with good reason.
Look at Marvin (my personal robot assistant). He’s going as a hot water heater again this year. No matter what I say, that’s what he’s dong, even when those people up the street mistook him for an actual hot water tank and installed him in their basement next to the furnace. (It took weeks to get the smell of natural gas out of him.)
Try to help and what happens – am I right?
Well, the pendulum has begun to swing back in the other direction. I think we’ve put about six months into these songs, and we’re only now at the mixing stage. Mind you, we have just a few hours a week to do anything on this at all, then it’s back to the salt mines. Still, taking time allows us to experiment a bit more, which is what Marvin (my personal robot assistant) was calling me out for just then. Not sure when he graduated from Julliard, but apparently the sight of me playing a coronet with a violin bow blew a few breakers in that little brass noggin of his. It’s called innovation, Marvin. Deal with it.
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.
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.
Then there’s the interstellar tour idea we were kicking around. What happened to that? Well, apparently someone kicked it into next week, figuratively speaking. I’m not ruling it out, but no one aside from Marvin (my personal robot assistant) and his inventor, our mad science advisor Mitch Macaphee has any inclination towards doing the fucker. And frankly, neither one of them can play an instrument (though Mitch can use instruments in his work … and Marvin sometimes makes a noise like a fire whistle). That’s not the kind of band I can bring to Neptune! Those crystalline ice creatures would laugh us out of orbit, and THEN where would we be.
I’m guessing there’s a little pill we can take for stage fright. And there’s probably one we can take for 290 degrees below, too. I’m sure we’re not the only band to grapple with these types of questions. Why, I hear Mumford and Sons spent a week on Neptune waiting for a connecting flight to Proxima Centauri. Nobody said this was going to be easy, people. Look on the bright side. We have Mitch Macaphee, our own in-house mad scientist, who will no doubt contrive (or perhaps borrow from one of his fellow madmen) an appropriately appointed interstellar spacecraft. We’ve got, I don’t know … Marvin, who can … lift very heavy things. We’ve got the mansized tuber who … will not be joining us because he’s taken root in the garden. Okay, scratch that.