Good Morning! Pearl and the Beard is up in Connecticut writing, writing, and writing. Right now I am sitting by a lake (very close to a small road, however, as you will hear in the recording). This is a song for yesterday. We were up until about 12 am working on a new song, energy levels waning and brain fried, I attempted to record this last night and failed miserably.
There are some good ideas here, and this is a good draft record of the idea. I will revisit the lyrics and the structure, as it’s a bit loose and indecisive. I had a bunch of people I referenced for melody ideas as I was writing this song, which was helpful for the general movement of the piece.
I wrote the lyrics while Pearl and the Beard was on tour last month and cut and shifted things around for this installment. It’s basically about the stupid and wonderful things people decide to do, how they change us, and how to not regret the outcome.
I’ve been working on swimming like mermaid (among other things), and it’s going pretty well.
One Of Three
I am one, one of threeA service of noise come up from the rootBroken our covenant over your crownWith fire in my throatGo back, go back and do it againI am one, one of threeFour for the sentiments that you have givenKiss white my hands, deep into the nightAwake now with you, with you on my mindGo back, go back and do it againI am one, one of threeShe will ink my name into flesh and boneAnd when, when she is gone, give forth my name to her first sonGo back, go back and do it again
Fashion from garments a head for a crown
Comes from your throat, a beautiful tongue
Meet in the middle, we’ll stand skin to stone
Go back, go back to do it again
I am one, one of threeMeet in the middle, remove all our shoesForget them when we leaveBut we will standBut we will standAnd do it againI am one, one of three
I had such hopes for today’s song in terms of composition, but my schedule takes me elsewhere… and my refrigerator has completely stopped working. Not a good thing for the high 90′s temperatures we’ve been getting here in New York. When it’s hot: it’s hot. When it’s humid: it’s worse than hot… it’s Hell.
I have no idea who made this, but it's awesome.
Emily’s Theory #14: What We’ll Do In Hell
In Hell, they will require us to do the following all day and all night long: FOREVER:
1. Math Story Problems
2. Filing Alphabetically and Numerically
*3. All the while we will have to ride in New York City subway cars packed full of people with no air-conditioning
*This was actually different at one point, but I don’t remember what it was, so I figured this was the next worst thing.
I went to the dentist yesterday after a long bout of avoiding it… but checked out clean apparently, so I’m feeling pretty good about myself (though I secretly think he must have missed something.
It’s been so hot here, I wanted to do a “Heat at Noon” song. This has words, I think, but I will think on that. I’m really enjoying playing with this kind of folk-ish uke at the moment. Though I don’t play it as well as I could, I will keep practicing!
Pearl and the Beard is going on tour ON SATURDAY and coming to a midwestern town NEAR YOU!
We are teaming up with some incredible people (Anna Vogelzang and Holy Ghost Tent Revival just to name a few)… and I cannot tell you how excited I am to hit the road. I think it’s a want to see new people and things… (oh, and let us not forget THRIFT!!!)
So, I have been writing a song today about a sheep… or a lamb, I guess. This entire song started with this line, and I didn’t even end up using it: I have a straw hat and it was fitted for you.
Initially, I wanted it to be quite dark and old, but it just wasn’t coming together. In my mind, I saw a far away place (Israel of all places…) out on an open plain covered by a deep starry sky. Soon, a storm comes. The speaker is the man to the “Lady”.
I decided that the sound that a lamb or sheep makes is very forward sounding in the throat, and I tried to imitate it somewhat, however, I could only attempt it a few times as it’s a bit uncomfortable, and I’m unfamiliar on how to do it correctly. (I am totally abusing the etymology dictionary on this song: I love it! And you can dedicate a word to someone on it! Nice.)
Recording: As far as the vocal goes – a few weeks ago, Pearl and the Beard played a Joe’s Pub festival, and, performing right before us, was a Balkan woman’s quartet called Black Sea Hotel. The way they were singing was really intriguing to me so I had that in my mind. John Houx was also a huge reference for this song as well. His voice is just awesome.
This is the third take and, though I wanted to add cello, I stopped at just a few vocal overdubs to save some time. Always a work in progress. I was unsure how to end it, but wanted to record it – so the very, very end is a bit improvised lyrically, but it fits the purpose quite nicely for what this song was meant for today.
Be well! I hope you are easily staying cool if it is hot where you are and, if it is cold where you are, I envy you completely!
Lady, My Lamb
(Headphones/speakers recommended rather than internal laptop speakers)
Lady, my lamb
He bleats tonight
Face deep in the sand
Won’t you cure us all, cure us all tonight
Mouth, wide, full of coin
Face into the storm
Cries to hear his own voice
Singular violent and warm
Please, brother please
This gamut you will sing
Keep this lovely tune
Into the night, will ring
Please, brother please
Keep this lovely tune
Please, please, brother please
I will see you soon
Pauline Frederick as Potiphar's Wife in her stage hit "Joseph and His Brethren"
I have a neighbor named Sarah who walks her pug Otto. I saw her today and she said, “So, what are you going to write about today?” I said, “I don’t know. Give me a word! Any word.”
She is an artist. She said, “Color.”
“Done!” I said.
In the shower, a place of incredible insight, I came up with this idea. Now, I am leaving now, at 9 am EST, to go to a matinée (Matinee’s in New York are before noon. Otherwise you’re paying $12 a ticket to see a new movie until instead of $6 bargain matinée price. In Utah, $6 used to be the “expensive” late night price. Oh, movies. Why must you be so dumb?!) I am trying a new thing for me: writing the lyrics out completely and then putting the melody to it after. I have started on the lyrics and, when I return from my sojourn into movie land (as I haven’t seen a movie in the theatre in a long time!), I will finish it all up. So, here are the lyrics so far. Sarah’s idea of color lead me to ye-olde-letter-game like the version of L-O-V-E by Nat King Cole.
I find doing lyrics first really weird and motivating. It’s like getting a new hair cut and waking up every day wondering what in the world it’s going to want to do today… (is that a weird analogy or what!?)
So far, I’ve come up with the idea of writing about Potiphar’s wife and Joseph in the bible…will discuss this later. This idea didn’t come to me until the second verse, so I might have to revisit the initial bunny line, since that was the first line that came to me… would Potiphar’s wife have a bunny?
**Time Warp**
Hello! I am posting the finished draft of the song. Phew! This was a tough one because I tried to stay within the color theme, but ended up abandoning it for the sake of images I would rather use (rather than bunnies or purple dresses). I kept with the Potiphar’s Wife and Joseph theme as it kept me in line and on track. I’m having trouble finding my “muse” recently. Admittedly, I’ve been lazy with the melody today in section B and improvised it. But, I don’t mind using the letter game to get lyrics out and don’t feel bad with not sticking with it, though I tried not to change too much to keep the integrity of the exercise, as I ended up with some images I really like.
HAPPY AMERICA WEEKEND EVERYONE!
Potiphar (First Draft Lyrics)
Bring back the bunny you bought for me, boyfriend
Love me forever and lie with me softly
U lick the back of my fat little fingers
Everyone knows us, but don’t know what we are
Ring of my finger to cover the stretch marks
Enter the space where my heart use to be
Dye my dress purple to find me so quickly
You have a space in the midst of my summer
Even as elephants trample my flowers
Lie, won’t you lie with me in the deep winter
Lover, I’ve come to you over and over
Olive branch give me, my healing baptizer
Will as I will you, I plead your surrender
This is the revised version I ended with
Potiphar (Second Draft Lyrics and Melody)
Lie with me now, Love me for always
You lick the back of my fat little fingers
Everyone knows us, but no one knows that we’re sinking
Ring of my finger to cover the stretch marks
Enter the space where my heart use to be
Plant there a garden, the shape of which will fill completely
You have a space in the midst of my summer
Even as elephants trample my flowers
Lie, won’t you lie with me in the deep winter
Lover, I’ve come to you over and over
Olive branch give me, my healing baptizer
Will as I will you, I plead your surrender
Lie with me now, Love me for always
Visit to the veterinarian yesterday for Lacey, and yes, I am posting late! Posting late! My apologies, my friend: I have no good excuses other than just being busy. (Well, the vet trip was a bit traumatic, but the doctor isn’t fun for us either, I suppose.)
Here we are… and now I must be off to look at a van with Jeremy (guitarist for Pearl and the Beard), as we are in need of a van for tour, and he has found one to test drive. Let us hope there is no dried vomit hidden in the back seat that we overlook… yikes: kids and those car trips.
Writing: Theme of bells and uke and bass all inter mixed with one other in a conversation about what to do and what to say. No arguing, but discussing. There is a difference between arguing and discussing!
It’s slurpy and sloshy and swishy like water in a bottle… that’s because it is: a water bottle for a drum. Back and forth, back and forth. Slosh, slosh, slosh. I close my eyes and see a little boy with two big pails in his hands, struggling to keep them straight and then it starts to rain and rain. The roads are muddy… everything, even his shoes are sloshing and sloshing: struggling to get home with enough water in the buckets by the time he gets home.
Hope you are staying cool… it’s a hot one out here!
I am in Connecticut this weekend doing a recording session and performing a little…so this is actually only about 45% of the entire song. I thought I would wait to post it and finish it, but in about 2 minutes, the place where I’m staying will be invaded by a going away party (I’m staying at a little cottage on Lake Pocotopaug as a favor from a some very kind friends!). So, I have recorded what I have finalized for you to hear and then I will finish and repost the finished song.
So, my dad is actually from Malad, Idaho and my mother is actually from Hyrum, Utah. I thought I might experiment with taking truths and spinning them out of control. The first verse starts more in realism: my dad’s place of birth and his family – he has one sister and several brothers. My mother, however, though born in Hyrum, was not left by gypsies or cared for by wolves anywhere near the sea (though I can hear my dad’s voice now saying, “We’ve been trying to keep it a secret for years! Who told you?!”)
The further the story goes the more outrageous the twisted actual facts will get (hopefully), but we will see. You never know in cases like this where things will go. I apologize for the incompleteness, but work calls!
Choruses can a be a real bitch sometimes. But sometimes they can come really quickly. This chorus I just pulled out of thin air and didn’t want to think about it since I can see myself doing so and taking forever on it. And I had this goal to do something different from I might normally do… Let’s get this thing done!
Recording: There is a motorcycle that drives by IN TUNE WITH THE SONG- HOW COULD I REDO IT AND TAKE IT OUT?! PRINT!
Stay well and happy Saturday to you! I still have not seen the second Iron Man and secretly keep planning to see it at a weird time in the middle of the day. There is nothing quite like seeing a movie in the early morning and then walking out to go to work thinking to yourself, with the rest of the day to your pleasure: “Yeah, that’s right: I just saw a movie.”
Lovers in the West (working title)
My father, a beggar from Malad, Idaho
Potatoes and Barley were all that could grow
Sister, brothers were fine company
He said, “Now this is the life, just perfect for me.”
My mother, from Hyrum, a mysterious past
Left by the gypsies outcast of outcasts
Cared for by wolves in a cave by the sea
She said, “I’ll will my own way, just you wait and see.”
This a story of lovers in the west (Or – “this a story of lovers in the western states” – which I kind of prefer because it’s funny and weird)
Our past. Oh, how it follows us. Haunts us. People haunt us… well, at least figurative apparitions of people we once knew do (unless you’re one of those people who sees literal apparitions all the time…*See M. Knight Shamalamadingdong)
Sometimes I’ll meet a person, and I might see a faint resemblance to a person I once knew. It always strikes me as something quite significant when it happens. If I’m going to be transparent here, what I’m really talking about is this:
Stupid people in love or in un-love do stupid things. Sometimes they loved you for only one second but, BAM, you find you’re suddenly stuck being in love with them at the totally inopportune time, and you’re left to your own devices to get over it as quickly as possible. I find this person gets stuck straight up in my mind like a marker, a pole in the bog of my mind, if you will. Even if months or years later I’m in a loving, supportive and committed relationship, there is that constant reminder of who and where I was and how I felt at the time. Memory. Then, when I run into people with similar hair or eyes or bodies, it hits me, and I think, “Oh… there you are. That’s right… I really loved you once, didn’t I?” A memory so long ago yet still there, bobbing around in the bog, hanging out until it, well… I don’t know…just hanging out harmless, but imbedded.
This is kind of about that…(but also mix of a few things that happened to me yesterday).
Writing: Was generally very, very fast except for a hang up I had about the B section and rhyming with the word cured. I liked where I was going with the line, but couldn’t find anything to accompany it so I just left it out, sadly.
I wrote to be frank and intentionally vulnerable. I tried not to hide too much from you in the vernacular and just said it. It was a challenge, actually. In the middle of recording I switched the first two verses because I realized it might make more sense that way even if they didn’t come out in that order. I don’t do that very often… and maybe I should look at that as part of the quick editing process as far as a song-of-the-day goes.
Recording: Why must I insist on recording in this wretched bathroom? For some reason it takes time and time and time again to get it right. I can get quiet there but for some reason it NEVER goes smoothly. I had to do this in two sections, and I had a hard time cutting them together. Should we play: Where Is The Splice? Okay… go!
I was working with an engineer once that told me you can’t use volume as expression (which I so often do) when you record. The mic doesn’t record three dimensionally and, though some engineers like to follow the singers up and down with their volumizers or whatever, for some its preferred to just sing straight. Well, if you’re asked to do that, how do you create tension and release and intensity over vulnerability? So, I tried it with this song (though I slipped in and out of it). In a section where I would normally go louder I tried to just give the impression of loudness (or intensity) by changing where I was singing in my voice, not how loud I was going with my voice. I am going to practice this because it’s interesting to me, and it kind of makes sense. With some practice I wonder if it would communicate better than doing automation on really loud singing… I don’t know… anyway….here you go:
Fight Club
I think I’ll join a fight club
See if I can relieve tension
Can you see I’m not dying
So, I’ll see you around sometime
Punch me in the face
Can you see I’m not crying
By my heal, I’m not crying
So I’ll see you around sometime
Am I fated to die with your face on my mind
And your fist in my face and a knee in my side?
Yes.
You look just like him
Eyes weigh twenty pounds and then some
I’m not lonesome
Can you see I’m still thinkin’ about you
Cut my hair to the white bone
Sob in your sleeve cause I’m ugly now
Can you see I’m still bleeding
So I’ll see you around sometime
Am I fated to die with your face on my mind
And your fist in my face and a knee in my side?
Yes.
Jocelyn Mackenzie and EHP at South by Southwest in March
Pearl and the Beard is on the road, again! We played our show in Providence tonight and got back to where we are staying, and Jocelyn and I worked on a song for my sick late face today…
I have been listening to come songwriters who write songs with very intelligent but “direct” and to the point text. I have tried a direct word song before, but I still feel like I compromised the exercise by going back and redoing it and hiding some of the true meaning in it.
In this exercise, Jocelyn and I wrote just a few lines a piece. I handed my lyrics to her and she gave hers to me, and we each formed a quickly melody based on each others’ words. These were both done in less than 3 minutes a piece, I’d say. In my version of Joc’s words, I was hearing different chords on the uke than I could play and since I don’t actually know all the chords on the uke, I had to guess. This is a good incentive to learn this instrument.
This was a really helpful exercise. There will be more of these. This kind of thing also helps relax us and eases us into the writing process together. Even though Joc and I love each other and respect each other immensely as musicians, writing openly in front of one another can still be a challenge because of a little insecurity here and there. This is a good thing to test and try to rid oneself of, I say.
The lyrics you see below are just how they appeared on our pages when we traded them with each other. We took the exact amount of time on them: between 30 seconds and a minute. We spent only a few minutes alone devising a strategy for melody and structure.
The Only One For Me (Emily melody, Joc lyrics)
Sitting by the fire in a tent down by the sea,
Here I see my honey comin’ down the shore to me.
And heaven knows that he has been the one I’m dreaming of
Cause he’s the only one for me, the only one I love!
I Love You, But I’m Angry (Joc melody/Emily lyrics)
I love you
But I’m angry.
You knew that.
I wrote it in my letter to you.
The note I sent, it got lost.
But, in it I said that I loved you.
In my letter I said I was angry
But in it I said that I love you.
The New Community Church: 614 S Street Northwest, Washington, DC
In Keene last week, Anna Vogelzang, Guy Capecelatro and I played a venue called The Starving Artist. In this venue they had a few poetry books laying out with a few card games and such. The morning after our show, Guy and I were madly putting songs together while waiting for Anna to wake up (as we stayed the night right above the venue and got in the next morning to play around…). Guy began playing this uke part and I opened up an anthology of poetry to use as lyrics. The random poem that I opened to was Alice Friman’s The Squirrel. I used a portion of about two stanzas which occur in the middle. I linked to Google Books below to the entire poem which is found in Friman’s book called: Zoo.
The melody was mainly improvised as we were just writing as fast as we could with the time allotted us. In order to fit the general rhythm I felt we had going, I made some slight changes to the wording when necessary. I think it came out nice for an unprepared piece and might have some promise to work on a little bit further. Guy is a great inspiration for songwriting. He has a kind of abandonment I really need in times of writing trouble.
The Squirrel
Close the curtains
Wrap us in hymns
Twist all our hands something beautiful
Bury it, bury it, bury it
God, don’t open it.
Don’t open it.
Flesh, sorry flesh
The dirt that dampens then smells
Rubbed glossies hidden
Between mattress and box spring a little fat jammed between
That closes, that closes when life doesn’t want us
That closes when life doesn’t want us.
In Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Anna Vogelzang and I drove to the coast and sat in her car on a rainy afternoon to write a nd record this song. I came up with a quick chord progression on the uke, and I gave us a 30 minute writing time limit. I also gave Anna a list of words that she fashioned into lyrics. The list of words was:
tunnel
excavate
sea
foam
fire
bleach
rock
buoy
serendipitous
crash victim
gasoline
machine
hypocrite
In Anna’s words:
Things I think are important: the mermaid took on a crazy/manic character to me while I was making words to fit the melody (why do we only write about crazy ladies?!) obsessed with the love/partner/fella or lady who left her, who presumably is on land. It’s kind of like a really twisted little mermaid. I see her as creating as much destruction as possible, but not in malice, in hope. She would rather die than be without this person, and she will do whatever it takes (destroy whatever she must, maybe) to get above. I also came up with the churning-waves-machine from what you said about believing in mermaids, and that it looked like someone was hand-making the waves sometimes.
The Mermaid Song
i’ve been (OR silent? would have to listen to the take) down here digging tunnels now for weeksslowly excavate your heart
