You can listen to me read this post on Soundcloud here, or as Bliss and Drumming wherever you get your podcasts.
The next song up on the docket for re-release is from my first album, Conversation with Francis Bakin from 2008, Cold Snap.
I had been living in San Francisco for seven years or so at this point, having settled here in 2001 after the year on the road with the band BOTTOM. In 2007, I was taken from a 10-day silent meditation retreat to the hospital room of my mom, who went in for an emergency surgery (she’s very healthy now). In that room, maybe because I was in a sort of manic state of being plopped into a very stressful and emotional situation after seven days of pure meditation and silence, a whole album of lyrics and melodies fell out of me. Those songs were recorded with Zepparella with Anna Kristina singing the words.
Shortly after that, I realized that if I was going to keep writing songs and lyrics through this new portal that had opened, I should figure out how to sing the songs myself. My fraught relationship with my singing voice had been a tussle since my early 20s, (I wrote about that in my previous blog post) and I set out to work that out through my own writing. I holed up in my studio and wrote drumbeats. Lyrics came out of the beats, and then vocal melodies, arrangements.
I then asked my dear buddy Gretchen Menn to help me flesh out the songs. She was so wonderful. We work so well together but so differently. She is such a master of her guitar, and such an inspired composer and songwriter, elevated and exquisite in her writing. Even that long ago, she was that way. I forced her to sit there and listen to me say things like “can you make it more boingy?” and “what would you play if you didn’t know how to play?” She put up with my baloney and gently created gorgeous guitar lines from the fractured ideas I had.
COLD SNAP
This song was a breakthrough in lyric writing for me.
We were on the road with Zepparella, and at that point in the band our hotel room stays were not the best. We were in Tahoe and I heard we were in the shoulder season, which is the period between the summer camping activity and the winter ski season. This is a time when the area is devoid of tourists. Locals take vacations or just enjoy the stillness without the intrusion of all the outsiders.
You could feel the desolate quiet. I remember getting up early and sitting in a little breakfast room with a big window looking out on the hotel and the road. The sun was warm through the window, and it was October, cold out, but without snow.
The hotel was well past its prime, and the night before in the room next door to mine, there was a woman who was possibly a sex worker. I saw several men come in and out during the night, and there was some kerfuffle at one point.
This song was written from her point of view. I sort of got inside of her life and how in a life like that, you must feel like you’re outside of time and also that you might be waiting for the next knock on the door to have the potential for great harm.
It was sort of a dark theme, I know, but also we were in this pretty stunningly beautiful forest with the warmth of the sun and light dancing in the tall pine trees and the early morning potential. I thought that a woman in that situation might have a sense of this being just a stop along her path, and maybe hope still lived for the future.
I guess in that way I was recognizing the way I felt in my own life, that I was between who I was and who I was becoming. I was still very much living for the day, but with a sense that someplace I was going, some person I was becoming, was out of reach and taking a long time to arrive. I battled despair at times, wanting something I couldn’t name.
There was this drumbeat loop that I had found, and since it was at the beginning of me creating music, I didn’t know yet how to create my own electronic beats, so while I wrote, I just let this loop live through the whole song.
Later, I added my own live drumming to accompany the loop, something I really love doing. More drums! I love the marriage of live and electronic. The loops can have interesting sounds or patterns that catch the ear, and adding live drums along with them gives a better feel to the track.
As I listened to the loop in my earphones, all those yearning feelings settled into these lyrics, which I wrote so quickly, it was like taking dictation
I love when that happens.
After the song was written, a few days later I got an email about an international songwriting contest and Tom Waits was going to be the judge. The idea of having a hero read my words compelled me to enter these lyrics, and I won second place. That was neat!
Our friend Randy, who ran sound for us at the Mystic Theater in Petaluma, offered to create a video for the song, and you can check that out HERE.
Thanks for going on this re-release journey with me! Here is the video.
