Issue #6

I’ve always found it easy to write when transplanted in a new environment. This Black Heart was written in a back yard in Kailua, Hawaii. It started out as a simple little pop song. I almost didn’t record it because I wasn’t sure it had the depth I was looking for musically.

A good friend of mine, Daniel Huscroft played electric guitar on this record and came up with this little guitar hook that took the song to new place. The song is full of imagery and the new melodies seemed to give the images a proper home. It’s amazing how such a simple little line can redefine a song and make it something bigger. Thanks Daniel.

My former band Dakona was the subject of a bidding war and eventually signed to Maverick Records in 2001. We toured North America several times before losing our deal during downsizing in 2004. I started recording new demos in an old barn that we had converted into a recording studio. Eventually, I began producing and recording other artists and this accidentally became my occupation.

My goal was to make an honest record and I think I’ve done that. It’s an album full of stories. Some heavy and some light. Producing my own album has been one of the most challenging and rewarding things I’ve ever done. Looking forward to doing it all again.

I’m pretty lucky to have a recording environment where I can step outside and look at the stars and listen to the coyotes. Nothing like silence to clear your head.

I wrote an early version of this song in late autumn 2001 in a dark haze of post-9/11 dread. Its lyrics contained such rays of sunshine as “gas masks for Christmas”, “scapegoats for Christmas”, “fresh scabs for Christmas” and “charm lockets, God-blessed — keep the shame contained and close to my chest.” I put the song away in some kind of mental locket and more or less forgot about it.

I wanted to it go somewhere more poignant and personal. I decided to confront some of my own insecurities, specifically the fear that really caring about the world and the suffering of others would only ever result in profound social ostracization (this fear was rooted in teenage anxieties and was agitated by my struggle to find a niche in the largely apolitical world of contemporary “indie rock”).

I’d love for this band to be a sustainable enterprise, for it to pay for itself. It’s not there yet, but in the past couple of years I’ve been hired to compose scores for a couple of National Geographic Channel documentaries, and those scores funded most of the costs of our last album and they underwrote this year’s tours.

I started putting out music because I had an insatiable itch that would not stop throbbing otherwise.

I’m trying to get at the idea that the act of performing music in the moment connects us to humanity’s deepest and oldest rituals and also to the unseeable distant future, when some kindred spirit might find resonance in an artifact of our performance.

The lyrics were found in a banjo song book full of American traditionals. The lyrics remained mostly the same, though there are plenty of verses we didn’t use. The music we made up without ever having heard the song played as a bluegrass or old-time tune. It likely would have played out as an UP track if we’d heard it first - the traditional arrangement is all major chords and jaunty. We’ve never heard anyone else play it our way.

This record was made almost entirely in the spare room turned studio of our cheap apartment. We stapled some old sheets to the ceiling. We used a couple of condenser microphones, and called on every spare noise making bit in our place to fill out the spaces. Our recordings are mostly live: there is something really special in the moment of playing songs that gets lost trying to multitrack. There are some overdubbed claps and stomps and hollers, but mostly what we record is how we play.

We’re inspired by the showmanship of medicine shows, outlaw country, and roots/blues music from the Deep South. A big part of our interest is the tradition of community that the grassroots movement of music inspires.

We love acoustic shows in small spaces (kitchens, basements, backyards, attics) and will likely play shows like those until we are dead. It would be cool, though, to start a rock’n’roll band once in the city and blow some speakers.

In my previous life I was a musical stand-up comedian but I always knew I wanted to just write and record songs so when my youngest child went to school full time 3 years ago, that’s what I decided to do.

I was wanting to get away from my computer so I wrote this song to pretend I was! And I love writing songs on my ukelele :)

Right now I write a lot for TV/film placements and put out an album or 2 a year. I spent a year writing, recording and producing a new song each week and I do any songwriting challenge I can find. I am lucky enough to have had lots of songs placed on network TV shows, movies and ads. I have 2 wonderful publishers who get my music out there.

I record everything at home in my red bedroom with a Mac, Mackie interface, Joe Meek pre amp and a lovely Blue Blueberry mic.

If you love to do something…do it. No one else is going to do it for you.

I used to be a jazz drummer, my father was a jazz pianist and trumpeter and I also used to work underground in a mine and I miss all of those things except one.

This is maybe an opiate infused dream about things lurking from my past … possibly a story about worlds long gone but who’s message might be important if only we could retrieve it. There’s a stone, amber … and how if you look at her closely enough she has somehow managed to freeze time inside herself in the form of pollen, insects and tiny bubbles, and I wonder about that sometimes.

I imagined that this song would sound best at 4 in the morning when you need to creep away somewhere strange and quiet with your headphones.

I don’t want to rush or hurry anyone along when it comes to the music I try to make, I’d rather be like “hey, welcome and make yourself comfortable, there’s coffee in the kitchen and the headphones are on the couch next to the turntable, take your time, there’s no more need to hurry today”.

There’s no rent, no pet and no way knowing what’s coming up next.

We began writing and recording out of the desire to create something unique and individualized. We all grew up reading music magazines, trying to seek out special artists that may have been overlooked in the homogenized world of pop culture. Ramen seemed like the perfect outlet to share our quirky styling. We’re all nerds at heart, with great love for electronics, science, and anything on the fringe of normalcy.

A retrospective look at past choices in life, moving foward, and growing older, coming to terms with those choices and accepting them as something beautiful, regardless of their outcome.

We love recording just for the sake of archiving our writing, but also as an outlet for experimentation musically. We all daydream of quitting our day jobs to do nothing but song writing, playing, and recording nonstop. Regardless of the job constraints, we do it anyway.