Some Words Of Encouragement

I just wanted to mention a fuckin' thing I was thinking about today because it's extremely true and it's good news in these trying fuckin' times.

When I was 22 I figured I was over the hill to be Rock 'N' Roll Choadface Idol. At 26 I laughed at the ridiculous and uselessly undermining thoughts of my younger self, knowing however that by now it was too late for me to be a Defining Voice Of My Generation.

When I was 32 I looked back (in retrospect) and realized what a whingeing puss my younger self had been, knowing however that by now I was beyond the wheelhouse age of being An Established But Ever-Innovating pop chameleon.

Et-fuckin'-cetera.

See what I'm getting at here? I'll try to be a little less knobberific if you will.

Here's m'band fiction's last three studio recordings from th' big label days. Probably early '00. Icily competent stuff, this. This is being done by a group that's pretty assured of its own ascendancy and the material came from the stage where you're scribbling on tour and running through arrangements during soundchecks. The band was a trio and we recorded as live as we could but there's obviously the old Lightfoot touch at work in th' harmonies. We had the tensile thing together by then, the less-is-more going on. That all comes from being tired on stage, by the way. You can't help but want a song you can reach for your beer during.

The drummer, I'll call him Hank Dooley, is just fucking frighteningly precise. He was also fucking precisely an asshole and we could only handle him for so long. Big pussy, this dude. But listen to him play. I would much rather've made more records with him and not spent three months in a van with him.

We ended up calling this "The Rebecca EP". We only got rough mixes but they're pretty epic.

"Love Reaches Out" was written on tour in '98 in Lake Tahoe, CA. "Rebecca Understands Me" was written in a field on a summer day in '99 in Bowling Green KY (as evidenced by the first line, "Sitting in a field in Bowling Green"). The song is a funny sort of meobius strip of a narrative about a man's implausible fantasy of the perfect woman. I had to find a loop to use for the drums during the verses and I didn't have much time and I ended up ripping the intro from a Sarah McLachlan song on Fumbling Towards Ecstacy (I'm far more aquainted with fumbling away from Ecstacy to be honest) and slowing it way down. Thanks Missus.

"Call On Me" was written on tour in New England in Octember '98. This one's supposed to put some dry leaves under yer boots. The high note that I hold at the end for 27 seconds is not in any way fucked with by a computer or anything. And it's doubled. Wa-CHAAA.

This is interesting music. It's kind of leaning into that whole Talentmetal thing a little, that whole Kings X thing with the keyboard-precise harmonies. But I think there's enough new wave to it (the pointillist Police guitars on "Call On Me", the slinky open spaces of "Love Reaches Out") that it doesn't fall in.

Um, oh, yeah- fuck George Bush, that cunt.