This is, 95% of it, a song by Jonathan Clark. I did very little for the actual writing process other than help a little with the words, help arrange, add back ground vocals, mix and edit. (That suddenly seems like a lot, but Jon really gets the credit for the meat of this song, though editing was another matter entirely.) Jonathan was hesitant to take on so much of the work, but I forced him to sing it by himself and play the guitar (which was a last-ditch effort for a slide guitar sound made with a porcelain cup.) This is basically his first run through, and I had to do a lot of cutting, copying and pasting and sound work to make this take on Jonathan’s vision for the song.
Jonathan has asked to type a little about this song.
Here he is:
I am a music lover and listener. I am constantly soaking in music and occasionally something seeps out. Sometimes I want to be lifted up on a finely woven mountain of sound by a good Sufjan Stevens song. Lately I have been fixated by sparse, simple tunes rolling in the dirt such as those by the White Stripes and the Black Keys. Listening to those artists eventually led me the artists that inspired those bands, especially Son House. When you listen to Son House it’s like drinking a big glass of his unfiltered soul complete with sweet, bitter, kindness, suffering, all poured into a dirty glass for your consumption.
I started tossing around this tune a few weeks ago and today Emily helped me bring it to life. All I can say about the process is that when I walked away after finishing recording I was frustrated that I could not present it the way I really wanted to. I left for about 20 minutes, feeling really disappointed about the outcome. When I came back and heard the song I was presented with a little EHP crafted miracle. She had edited and molded the mess into a coherent song. She was a little disappointed with quality of the sound, but for me it is exactly what I was looking for – rolling in the dirt.
The Dust Shall Bow
You open up your eyes and you realize
The woman that you love has materialized
Lift up your face in a new place
Don’t know for sure but you’re fallen from grace.
In psalms I read, the Lord has fed
Those who serve him, their souls ain’t dead.
But I don’t mind cause the girl is mine
She lifts me to heaven cause she’s do divine
I know there’s nothin’ really stoppin’ it
You sneak up from behind and you get right on top of it.
(Pearl and the Beard on tour!) Tour is a relatively easy place to write a song, but really difficult to record and post…if it’s not finding a good place to record, it’s not being able to find proper internet to post. Here’s one for your back pocket:
For your listening pleasure, I offer up to you a two-minute and one second look into… I’m not sure, actually. Jonathan and I set up a challenge for ourselves: put together a song as quickly as possible (hence the rough edges and less than stellar mic technique) with odd references but without compromising the building blocks of a good dance song.
Used in this song: scissors, Jonathan, Emily, and the never-failing Garageband.
Encounters with a Drunken Landlord
“Wherever the spirit tells you to go, you go.”
“The system is down.”
“I’m in my underwear.”
“The system is down, man. It’s bringing me down. It’s bring him down. It’s bring us all down…Bring it back up. Yeah!”
1. Set a time limit: 15 minutes: lyrics, 10 minutes: music
2. Set a rhyme scheme: ABBA
3. Set per line beat: 4
4. Alternate author’s lines: Emily – Line one, Jonathan – Line two… and so on…
5. Pick an instrument: Emily – Baritone uke, Jonathan – drums
6. ROCK!!!
It’s okay that neither one of us can really play these instruments… ha! I have been watching X Files. There are a lot of flashlights always waving around in dark places… oh, and a lot of dead bodies and bones, too…
Dead Man’s Bones
Done a bad, bad thing in the neon lights
Got one foot in and one foot out
Ate a dead man’s bones in a summer drought
But I feel all right
God, He sent me down one fateful night
Three dimes in my pocket and a shotgun shell
Stoppin’ in Heaven on my way to Hell
And I feel all right
It’s the meanest thing I ever did
Since I pushed down the preacher’s kid
But I feel all right
That’s right. An Easter Song with an 8-year-old Sam Hurtado and a 3-year-old Stella Hurtado, Jonathan on BANJO-UKE! (TRUE!) and back up vocals with Tom Hurtado! (You can hear Stella scream at the perfect time, and Sam adds his own colorful lyrics. Already a song writer. Excellent!) We are staying with the Hurtado’s while we are in Salt Lake: they are very good friends to us and have helped organize the shows here. Simply amazing people.
I will post more about this song and add lyrics, but we are on our way to a feast of goodies and easterly things… so, I will say to you who came to the SLC shows this weekend:
THANK YOU! It was an amazing experience, and I had the best time. You are the best!
Good morning or evening or afternoon to you; whichever it may be right now.
Taken this past Sunday night at Bryce Canyon, Utah by a very kind stranger who put the memory card of our camera into his very nice camera and took our picture. I had never thought of that before, but, man, how nice!
Today is a special song written me and Jonathan Clark. I did the uke playing and Jonathan did the singing and lyrics.
Jonathan and I sat down with the baritone uke, found some chords, and improvised the rest. This was a good exercise in improvisational lyric writing. Jonathan had written the first two lines while we were trying to find a good uke part, but the rest was all improv. I think he did a splendid job. It’s funny how revealing improvisation can be if one empties one’s mind and puts it out onto the table.
Yesterday, I was reading an interview Charlotte Gainsbourg did with Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth. It was super interesting, and Kim Gordon talked about how she wrote lyrics and music and such. It made it all the more interesting to find that even the great artists get stuck with lyrics now and then. Bon Iver does some mumbling and improvising to find his lyrics, too. It’s an interesting process.
We recorded this in about 15 minutes, I’d say.
May your day be wonderful today…
EHP
Nor’easter
I don’t know what the bad news brings
All I know is it brings me to my knees
I find it hard when the sun don’t shine
I will eat lemon pie
(whistling)
Yesterday was just a day away
But it feels like three lifetimes past
We just keep on moving forward
(whistling)
The wind does blow in this cold time
The wind does blow all the time
But it keeps me from thinking about the past
It keeps me moving, keeps me dreaming
It keeps me all the time
Keeps me moving, keeps me dreaming
It keeps me here.
More Pearl and the Beard Tour Pictures!
Pearl and the Beard played in Memphis in a bar called The Buccanneer. This was a huge painting that hung on the wall right behind us. How could I not capture this (about 5 different times!) on film?! AWESOME!!!
If you haven't heard of the band, Lost in the Trees yet, today is the perfect opportunity. This was one of the most amazing live show experiences I've had. Virtually a chamber orchestra of sounds and goodwill. Look them up, buy their work, love it, too. Shot in Austin, TX during SXSW while we were there on tour.
We played in Greensboro, North Carolina for a Monkeywhale Productions presented evening. It was awesome. Jocelyn is shown here mimicking her picture on the poster. The picture on the poster is from a video we shot during our last tour with Harvey Robinson for Harvey's Kitchen: a guy who has bands visit him and shoots a live video of them in his awesome kitchen. He did our song Vessel and Lost in Singapore. Look it up! It's truly amazing!
(Announcing the Debut of Synthetic Strings! Dreams DO come true! Yessss!)
Here’s the story:
I played a show at The Knitting Factory in Brooklyn a few weeks ago. I met this really cool, tall red-headed guy named Christopher Faroe (sweet name, right?!). After I played he walked up to me and handed me a note with my name on it (it kind of awesomely reminded me of passing notes at lunch). On this note read, and I wish my scanner was working so I could just show you how cool this note is:
Dear Songwriting Person, If (when) you become (more) desperate for song topics, perhaps the following will prove helpful? -the possibility of airships in the Byzantine empire-the silk road-ancient sawdust-contemporary sawdust-Lord Byron, himself!-Sea creatures in precarious situations (especially seahorses, starfish, Jellyfish & Narwalls)-falconry (a noble, ancient art)-cumulonimbus-outer reaches of outer space-moi Good luck, if you run out/need more, email me – Christopher
This was so cool. I wish more people were this forthcoming with notes at shows about “Falconry, a noble and ancient art” (probably my favorite one)… I mean, have you ever done this? I certainly haven’t, and I really appreciated it. The other day in the car, with my new uke and a road trip a head of me, I started singing, “Sea creatures in perilous situations”. I didn’t have the list with me so I thought it was “perilous” not “precarious”, and I recorded the vocals before I got home to check the list. But I think it works well as it afforded me the opportunity to use SYNTHETIC STRINGS FROM GARAGE BAND…. YESSSSS! As a string player, nothing beats synth strings. NOTHING. So, curl up with your favorite used copy of Moby Dick and some popcorn shrimp from Popeye’s and push play. You deserve it.
Writing: Jonathan, my lovely companion, was very helpful with the writing on this song. He suggested I relate the perilous situation to something random… like love?! So, I blame that “random” perilous situation choice on him. But, I would struggle with a line and he’d shout out something super weird from the couch like “mollusks in public fornication”. Also, did you know that extroversion means the act, state, or habit of being predominantly concerned with and obtaining gratification from what is outside the self. This will come in handy later I think. I also wanted to use at least one scientific animal name in this song, so I used the name for sting rays: Dasyatidae.
There is another aspect of this song. I love the sea. I love the sea. I wanted to be a marine biologist for a really long time. When I was little, my family would road trip to the Oregon coast every summer for a week or so. We’d go see the glass blowers, fly kites, and stand in the rain. It would rain and rain. I love the rain. One cloudy day we were on the beach. I was flying a kite and running backwards. Not paying attention, I ran backwards right into a huge boulder covered with BARNACLES and slid down it. Wearing shorts, this caused, as you can imagine, some pretty nasty cuts down the back of my legs. Ever since then I’ve had this totally weird, weird, weird fear of little things clumped together. This is a real fear! It has been only in the past few years that I have run into other people with this same fear, which makes me feel a little less strange. The thing about the fear for me is that it doesn’t apply to every single little thing clumped together like raisins, peas or stuff like that… but stuff like: spores on the back of fern leaves, clumps of warts (ahh!!!), ant piles, ahhh… I can’t list them anymore… but you can google this: trypophobia. I attempted to google it for you and link it but couldn’t deal with it. Needless to say, barnacles are at the height of intensity in this song! Funny enough, though they totally freak me out, if I see barnacles in person, they are so fascinating, and I can’t look away and end up grossed out but staring at them. I tried to get you a picture but, again, wussed out… so, there you go.
Recording: I think sound effects are pretty awesome, though I wish I had actual field recordings to use, garageband will have to suffice. Everything was tracked separately. I recorded everything from Sam Stolpe’s apartment yesterday morning (see song no. 43 The Wreck of the Hesperus), got home, felt totally dizzy from sleep deprivation and totally knocked out, so this morning cleaned everything up and have added, synth strings, organ and THUNDER! And TOTALLY messed up and said “Behoveth” instead of “Behemoth” on the lower voice… sigh… oh well. You do a few songs about the bible and it infiltrates everything else…
May your Sea Creatures remain safe this morning…
EHP
Sea Creatures in Perilous Situations
Sea creatures in perilous situations
Sea creatures in perilous situations
Like love is
A lot like love is
Sea creatures in perilous situations
Sweaty Sea snakes in compromising positions
Giant mollusks in public fornication
Like love is
A lot like love is
Pretty mermaids and their topless salutations
Tiny Lobsters in scandalous conversations
Cagey Clownfish with insidious affectations
Like love is
A lot like love is
Narwhals delighting in extroversion
Dasyatidae! Dasyatidae!
Barnacles!
Monstrous Barnacles!
Behemoth barnacles!
Sea creatures in perilous situations
I’ve hit the two-week mark. It’s the little victories, you know?
After Friday night’s show in Maine at Hog Farm, I stayed on at Guy Capecelatro‘s house in Portsmouth to do another song with him because he’s so freaking awesome. This song has a history- the first thing you hear is a loop I created months and months ago. Sometimes I’ll take my loop pedal out and just improvise, saving it on the machine if I like it, dumping it if I don’t. In this case, I had just received my black violin from my dad, changed the tuning and was totally just messing around. I liked it, saved it, and played it for Guy today. It ended up the starting point for this song. (Before we worked on this song, I pulled out some improv on the pedal for a few loops he will hopefully use later, so I’m excited to hear what he does with them.)
(Guy can remember everything.) I'm dumb and didn't get a picture of Guy today. Lame. Here's Google's offering of G. Capecelatro.
As I listened to the loop, I had a general melody run through my mind. The cool idea Guy had was to each record vocals independently, neither one being privy to the other’s melodic idea. After we both recorded the vocals by ourselves in his little studio, we came together and listened to them fall into one another, I think, quite nicely. I improvised the second voice under my main vocal, experimenting with my higher, (more falsetto) register, which I don’t get the opportunity to do very often. I like the effect. I always listen to the song of the day on repeat as I write about it here. And the more I listen to this song, the more I love it. Guy’s influence is so good for me; freeing and lovely.
The reason I love Guy so much is his total willingness to try anything. I think this is what makes him such a great artist and musician. He is literally not afraid to try something (or at least, that’s my take on it…), and it was infectious. I was able to begin teaching myself how to let go, which is why when I hear the character of my vocal, though I wish would have allowed for a little space for silence (as Guy did), I hear some things I really like and wouldn’t have done otherwise.
Examples of Guy’s awesomeness for this song: beautiful lyrics, two tracks of electric guitar, thumb piano, and “Hey“s at the end (with Jonathan, too!) that I love. (I will later address my secret wish that as many songs as possible contain “Hey!”, “Yeah!” or “Woo!”. We’ll talk about it soon…) My contributions? A little cello pizz, the loop, lyrics, a want for hey’s!, and a fast hand with a tiny music box. I wrote some of my lyrics on a bus at 2 am coming back from DC to New York just a few days ago.
I’m quite sad to leave Portsmouth and Hog Farm. The more I collaborate with people on these songs, the more I believe the world really is an amazing place full of stunning, beautiful, and talented people, all with experiences to share. It’s so easy to take people for granted, and it’s sharing these experiences with others that I hope will engrave gratitude upon my mind forever.
Guy and I worked on this from about maybe 12-2:30 pm. Not long after we had finished, Aly Spaltro, or Lady Lamb the Beekeeper as most know her, came down to Guy’s home with dear friend Maisie to collaborate. A full day of writing and recording for the 365! It was awesome! Lady Lamb the Beekeeper played the Hog Farm show with me last Friday night and is an unbelievably captivating performer and wonderful writer with an unbelievable voice (more on that tomorrow). Based out of Portland, Maine, she drove an hour to record a song with me today in a cemetery in the middle of winter in New Hampshire. I love her, love her, love her. That post will show up tomorrow, so please visit to hear it! (We took a video of it, too. Oh! Technology!)
Are you thinking, “Wait. Two songs in one day? That means you’ll be ahead tomorrow. Will you write a song tomorrow?” True, and yes! It will even out at some point, to be sure!
Bird in Girl’s Clothing
instrumentation: pre-prepared loop, electric guitar, thumb piano, music box, cello, Jonathan Clark, Guy Capecelatro III
(Jan. 21: I had Guy remix this because I, frankly, did a crappy job. So up loaded the new version today.)
Are you making a nest up in that treeOr are you spying on me?Are you some bird in girl’s clothing?Can you sing something soothing?I’ve sometimes likened myself to a squirrelFurtive, nervous and furryWill you be there as I come awake?And head into a brand new day
You are five, five miles wide (Going home)
Stay the entire night
Sad boy with wings to come
To this house you brought me home
Clothed you are but nigh forsaking
You, some sweet, worth the taking
Will you be there as I dream?
When I awake to some new day.
All at once, a sweet second and gone
Yet still living
Did you fly away when I wasn’t looking?I thought you were some kind of something.
I have a best friend. He is my best friend in the whole world. Relationships are funny because when one person is having a wonderful day, the other might be feeling two inches tall. Knowing I had a song due, it was a perfect excuse to sit down with love-of-my-life Jonathan Clark to create a song describing how miserable it feels to be…well… miserable. I really wanted him to sing on this track with me, and, though it took some convincing, I’m glad he did. (Those of you who know or who have met Jonathan, I challenge you to guess which lyrics are his…) It was written fairly quickly. Maybe an hour on lyrics total? On one of these installments, I think I will scan my notebook pages as a matter of interest. Looking at them, I think they would tell you a lot about how I’m working the lyrical side of things.
The melody and accompaniment was very instantaneous. And sometimes, it just happens that way.
As song writing usually goes for me, my initial intention often turns into something I hadn’t expected. In this case, we set out to write a song about how sad life can be; this morphed into a song about two people, one feeling happy and one totally lost in his unhappiness. I think it’s even strayed a little to becoming a really, really sad song about loving someone even after they’ve died (?!). Use your best judgment, I guess. What it means to you is what it means.
Yep, that's us.
In any case, there are things I really love about this song and those things are so deeply personal that even if I shared them, they’d just be extraneous info. (And you’ve read enough already for six days.) There are a few technical things I’m pretty unhappy with which I might redo at a later time, but the most important thing for me was the act of creating it with someone I love. I think many of these songs will fall this way as I continue. Even now, I fear posting this because rereading the lyrics has made me insecure, but I want to post it. The lyrics aren’t gold medal winning, and I see its weaknesses, but we had a good time coming up with them together: finding words to describe how it feels to want to be anywhere else or be anything other than what you’re feeling now.
Another little something I learned today: writing a song expressing sadness or struggle is very healing. Even if it doesn’t heal a wound or make it go away; it puts it into a physical form, and you can stand back and say, “Oh, look, here it is…”
Recording: Done live with a totally sweet shiny black violin (with lime green purfling) my dad bought me for $15 on ebay (played with altered tuning). You might be asking yourself: why in the hell don’t you just use a uke?! Well, a) I don’t own one (yet) b) the sound of this instrument just can’t be reproduced! My strumming skillz are a little wanting but working on it. Bells were over-dubbed.
We did a lot of takes, unfortunately. Recording numerous times can be frustrating and at the end you have to just accept that the dog decided to take a huge, one minute, sloshing drink of water right in the middle of it. (Though that was too much for me, and we did it again.)
My favorite parts? The way we ended up singing “days for every song” the first time it appears. It makes me laugh- suddenly it’s a Woody Guthrie song. And I like that whole line: Still I’ll write you days for every song – there will be so many songs for you that I’ll have to create more days to hold them.
(Quiz time: One my favorite movie lines of all time is whispered at the end of the track…)
Little Sunshine
It’s so hard/Rain does fall/I’m a ghost/Nothin’ matters at all
Butterflies and candy canes/Got nothing on me/Where is my little house/Out by the sea?
Broken down bicycle/No where to go/I’ve lost everything/Buried by snow
I will love you when you’re dead and gone/Still I’ll write you days for every song
See here my little one/We’ve waned and we’ve borne/Deep goes our sorrow down/Down to the core
You are my sunshine/That comes through the pane/And I would give anything/To see you again
I will love you when you’re dead and gone/Still I’ll write you days for every song
It’s so hard/Rain does come/Wanting to see your face/Is like needing the sun
You are great, just the way you are. Really. You are.
