Smally: So why Bob Dylan? And what is your favourite Dylan song?
Keith: Why Bob Dylan!? Because his songs make me feel something. His lyrics are set up in such a way that you think about the topic of the song even after the song itself is over. It’s amazing!

Now, my favorite dylan song in general is different than my favorite one to play. My favorite one to play is “Song to Woody.” My favorite song in general is not a profound song by any means. Its the one that gives me the most feeling. Because, Bob Dylan is pretty well known as a topical song writer. Even when he says that he isn’t or ever was. But he is also a phenominal writer of love songs. I think that “Girl from the Noth Country” is one of the best. It’sa “tell her i love her” kind of thing. It’s genious if you ask me. Which you just did

Smally: How do you pick a song to cover?
Keith: picking a song to cover boils down to a song that i like and that i can figure out how to play. It’s pretty simple. There are alot of songs that i want to play but can’t figure out the original way of playing and can’t figure out a new way. So i just say “maybe someday.”

Smally: Whatever happened to River Speak English?
Keith: River Speak English? It’s still there. It’s fermenting. Taylor and I have come along way musically since we stopped making music together. Taylor recently acuired some new equipment to do his half of the recording so we will see what happens. Maybe something amazing. Maybe something crazy. But i think it will be downright good stuff.

Smally: How long are we going to have to wait for the first original Sucks To LaLa Land record?
Keith: I’m not sure. I am working on it though. Iv’e been playing alot of shows as well as preparing to play a wedding that i have to learn a bunch of songs for. But once that is all done i can concentrate on writing and recording some new stuff. If anybody has any suggestions let me know. I play music to entertain people. I get personal satisfaction from others satisfaction. Therefore i like alot of feedback. People can go onto my Myspace and if there’s a song that they like and would want on a record they can let me know. I’s like to make the biggest impact as possible with this one. I want it to be for everyone else. Not me. I play music all the time for myself.

Smally: What kind of music are you listening to these days?
Keith: Well, i listen to all kinds of music. I love folk music, so, of course i listen to alot of it. Ive been listeningto alot of the older guys lately. Back when it as a little more simple. Just a guitar and a voice. Dave Van Ronk and Mississippi John Hurtcome to mind. Both amazing blues players. If you’ve never listened i highly recommend it.

Smally: Visalia sounds like a happening place for music – what’s going on over there?
Keith: What isn’t going on over here would be a better question. we have music acts coming through from all over the country and all over the world. Mostly small underknown groups. Some on their first tour. Some on their 50th tour. Alot of them are unsigned and the ones that are are generally on small labels. Of course, we have the big acts starting to come through now. But it’s the small ones that i like. For those of you who dont know(which i’m assuming is alot) Visalia is in California in the Central Valley. Were are almost right smack dab in the middle of the state. So, we are a perfect place to have a filler show between Los Angeles and Fresno or Sacremento or San Fransisco. That and the fact that we have Aaron Gomez and the Sound and Vision Foundation setting up our shows. It’s really amazing! 

Smally: Describe your music for anyone who hasn’t heard it
Keith: I’m not sure how. It’s a folky, Lo-Fi mess of sounds. I love vocal harmonies so i try to put some of those is as much as possible.

Smally: Is there anyone else you work with on your music projects? Could you envision someday Sucks To LaLa Land functioning as a band?
Keith: I work with alot of other musicians aon a regular basis. I’m in a band called “The Whiskey and the Devil Chaplain.” we are a folky, roots music kind of band. I play the banjo and sing harmonies is that one. I also play the Mandolin so i sit in on friends shows sometimes. As for Sucks To LaLa Land becoming a band, I’dlike to keep that as my solo thing. Maybe fo some live shows i could bring in some other musicians to fill things out. But you never know what might happen.

Smally:  How do you record and what kind of equipment do you use?
Keith: I just use the family computer right now. Sometimes my laptop. I use Sony Acid. it works well enough for what i do. I also have a Blue Snowball mic that i am in love with.

Smally: What next for Sucks To LaLa Land?
Keith:Who knows. I sure as heck don’t. The Whiskey and the Devil will be recording this summer but i’m not sure what else. Just gonna go with the flow i think.

find out more about SUCKS TO LALA LAND at

www.myspace.com/suckstolalaland

BROKEN MONO

Tulk

download: BROKEN MONO - Tulk

1 6th Age Wonder

2 Brain Hotel

3 Comming and Going

4 Dark Cloud

5 I Don’t Know

6 My Soul Moves Sideways

7 River Runs Dry

8 Rose Morning

9 Searching For Stanley

“Tulk” was recorded in about 1854 on a steam-driven PC - Broken Mono

Broken Mono on MySpace: www.myspace.com/brokenmono

A Quixodelic Record, December 2008

FREE DOWNLOAD TODAY!

(and tomorrow, and the day after that, and so on…)

The Daydream Generation digs deep, the commune swells and sounds even more psychedelic than it did yesterday, and yes you can believe your eyes, that really is the one and only BROKEN MONO you’re seeing in the Quixodelic Record store. “Tulk” is the riffing musical matador like you have never heard him before. Recorded “In 1854 on a steam-driven PC” miraculously these recordings have survived the onslaught of time and have been generously laid on a plate for your feline ears to lap up.

So what are you waiting for? Head to the QUIXODELIC RECORDS link at the top of the site and lap away…

(review to follow)

Out Today!

Rocketships of Love

Electronica – Experimentalism – Microcorg Modular Synthesizers – Covers – The sound of space – Production Transmission – Blast Off – Rocketships – Rocketships – Rocketships of Love

You’ve heard Uberfuzz climbing for stratospheric anthems, now hear Paul Le Keux and the Rocketships of Love freefalling through the atmosphere of your mind. Featuring Kelly Le Keux, Scott White, and with Regal 3/30 at Mission Control, this self-titled debut record is enough to blow any would-be astronauts electrical-brain-stems clean out of the skull-socket.

See QUIXODELIC RECORDS (above) for more info

It’s 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 Free 2 1

Some messages read like a kick in the nuts. 3 months ago one such message landed with all the swiftness of a precision size 10 in my inbox from Paul Le Keux, chief alchemist of one of Rugby England’s leading neo-psychedelic lights Uberfuzz. In a nutshell he explained why after several neon years and a string of exceptional records the band was calling it quits, hanging up the guitars and strobe-lights and ambition for furthr musical escapades. I guess with hindsight the underlying reason must have been that which commonly eats away at most excessively creative brains before finally exploding in an uncontrollable urge to tear everything down – namely the age-old beast of burn-out. When I finally undoubled myself from the comprehension of what I’d just read I promptly emailed him back to thank him for the untimely kick, express my disappointment and suggest that from what I’d heard before that this was hopefully but a temporary blip since music was so blatantly “in your blood”. The thing that bothered me most was having played catch-up with the Uberfuzz back catalogue it was glaringly obvious that record by record here was a band that was rapidly growing in stature with a quite remarkable upwards trajectory – the sound blazed steadily brighter, the songs grew mightier by the month, when they were doing their loud Vietnam soundtrack riff-driven thing they were quickly edging into Kurtz territory, and when they spun their bright-sided space instrumentals the combination of melodies and arrangements were taking you further out each time.

Thankfully I was on the money about the music and the blood thing, because with the memory of the aforementioned boot in the balls still crystal clear in my mind, Uberfuzz are back. The upwards trajectory shows no sign of fading, the sound is brighter than ever, the songs are as mighty as anything gone previously, the riffs smell like tanks rolling into ravaged cities, hash and flowers intermingling in secret underground nightclubs, and the luminescent internal space-explorations are simply too fucking great for me to successfully put into words. As much as I prefer a full-length record to sink the teeth of my ears into, here is one 5-song collection you really should make some space in your head for. “As If It Matters” jump-starts into action with it’s title track, prototypical Uberfuzz, another alchemical fusion of rock & roll, pure pop and blues, alive with synths and fuzzy guitars, vocally a stone’s-throw from Spaceman 3, The Velvet Underground, and early Verve. In the context of the 5 tracks it’s a happy middle ground, somewhere in between the riff driven tracks and the psychedelic lullabies. There’s no doubt that everything Uberfuzz touch these days is pure sonic gld, but its by far the “safest” of the songs, gently easing you into a record that quickly peels apart into a schizophrenic world of sound. 

From “As If It Matters” in you can cut this record in half. “Evil Kiss” and “Crush” are honed dark electric guitar heavy monsters of songs scorching everything in their way, whereas the closing “E-Waltz” and “Too Good To Be True” are melodic signals on the horizon, blowing electrons around in your brain down unmapped neural avenues. And though the ubercool black rock& roll face has undoubtedly got its place in the overall Uberfuzz family portrait of styles, its the latter two that got me really excited about this EP. “E-Waltz” is instrumental brilliance, at once acoustic and electric like the perfect soundtrack to some psychedelic shuffle of love on the dancefloor of an imagination when everyone is far too wasted to really be moving at all. Closing “Too Good To Be True” is not only this record’s pearl, but historically will perhaps be remembered as the birth of The Grosvenor Suite band, sounds a lot like Arthur Lee just accidentally walked in on Primal Scream’s “Screamadelica”. A real melting pot of sound, clever guitar hooks, Scott White’s angelic multi-delayed vocal rendition at the centre of a dreamlike whirlwind. It’s Uberdelic Ubergenius. Or words to that effect.

Having burst through the blip and emerged on the other side apparently sounding rejuvenated and as up for it as ever before it somehow makes “As If It Matters” matter much more than it would have done if this had simply been another record in chronological sequence. Such a seemingly close call highlights the fragility of even the most impressive and innovative bands – you just never really know when a record is a “last record” and that’s as good a reason as any why you should snap this up now, play it to death until the songs are as embedded in your brain as they are in the songsmith’s blood. Yet somehow I don’t think this will be the last transmission we receive from planet Uberfuzz, and with rumours abound that a sitar has been recently acquired, you can probably expect (but not take for granted) that the trajectory will continue stretching for the skies on the rip of this latest offering.

Download UBERFUZZ “As If It Matters” from the QUIXODELIC RECORDS link at the top of this site. 

Listen to “Evil Kiss” from the EP:

Download audio file (Uberfuzz-EvilKiss.mp3)

UBERFUZZ As If It Matters EP

OUT TODAY

With DG6 just about ready to go I’m sure those of you who frequent this site are busy twiddling your download fingers and wondering what the fuck to do with yourself until it arrives. Well twiddle no more – thanks to Paul and the rest of the UBERFUZZ team we’ve got the pleasure of hosting the latest offering from Rugby’s more recent in an acclaimed tradition of psychedelic space rock & roll.

“As If It Matters” is a 5-track ride through foot-stompingdruggy anthems, synthesized lullabies and damn fine bluesy pop songs. So fill up your ears while you can and download it for FREE from the QUIXODELIC RECORDS links at the top of the site.

Find out more about Uberfuz2 at: www.myspace.com/uberfuz2

JAMES REDMOND – Too Much To Think

And this is how the world works. A guy from Liverpool writes some songs that somehow and somewhy and someway or another eventually come together like some crazy jigsaw puzzle of a record. This collection appears on some humble and oddly obscure little indie website, dedicated to discovering and championing gems of undiscovered bands and musicians who more often than not are simply writing and recording songs for the love of it. The record is available someday in a hazy fanfare of enthusiasm and genuine music lovers around the world download it out of curiosity and love what they hear. Many of them will carry these songs with them through their entire life, and some songs may even trickle down through the generations. Some other day the website fades or implodes and we move on and before long for some inexplicable reason we finally begin to go the way of the dinosaurs, a little kid in an underground cave singing “Les Dennis playing tennis on Ben Nevis” softly under his breath. The surreal brilliance of the words are long lost and nobody remembers where the songs came from or even who sang them in the first place, but the melody hangs like shapeshifting clouds in the great big sky of time.

The guy who wrote the songs is of course James Redmond and the record in question is “Too Much To Think” – 8 songs salvaged from a hard-drive, captured at various points on his travels in various forms, and puzzled together upon the string of a download like multi-coloured juju beads. This is fucking infectious stuff – James Redmond might be just another voice in a long tradition of great Liverpudlian songwriters who endear you immediately with timeless bluesy-pop melodies, but the more you listen the more there is to love. Self-recording for the love of singing a song affords the songwriter a lot more rope and the ability to try and swing a little further than their distant commercially-recognisable and infinitely richer cousin showboating by numbers at a mobile phone festival near you now.

This record swings as far as it can and lets go just because it can. The template for the songs featured is to write catchy experimental pop songs that must clock in under two minutes. As a result “Too Much To Think” clocks in at a furious blink and your ears might miss it 18 minutes. In this case the intentional brevity can be a good or bad thing – on the one hand it leaves you wanting more of the same, but on the other it’s like watching a legendary sprinter poetically bursting down the home straight, breaking the tape in a blur of colour. Thankfully most of us have repeat buttons and there’s a lot of ground being covered so you’ll not get bored if you let it run for an hour or two. Stylistically it’s less the big budget glam of Disneyland and more like a fascinating nocturnal world of some strange travelling 60s fairground, songs stick out like halls of mirrors or dancing bears, one minute mock cinematic Motown (“Wires”), the next minute Arctic Monkey-style ska (“Jamaica House”). It’s part electro comedy (“Ben Nevis”), part profound unashamed lo-fi songsmithery (“History”), the insanity of “Inner Disco” sitting beautifully side by side with one of the catchiest pop songs you’ll ever hear about a Panini football sticker album from the Mexican World Cup in 1986 (“Sticker Book”). “Too Much To Think” from start to finish flies by the seat of its pants and takes you along with it grinning a grin that you can’t quite decide if its friendly or mental, but either way you know is very, very special indeed.

Some of you may know or be able to deduce the historical context of some of these songs when you read the credit notes on the sleeve, and about The Fang’s involvement with great bands like Dirty Ticket, The Sweetcorns, and Tramp Attack. But collaborations and names aside, hopefully it will deservedly show Jay’s own songwriting talents to a wider audience. Like he says in his notes, the world really does seem to be bursting at the seams with music these days and sometimes as a musician you feel truly grateful that anybody would take the time to download a seemingly obscure record and give it a chance. But with this record it seems perverse for it to be this way around – the artist thanking you for 8 songs that could quite conceivably still be stuck in your head 20 years from now. So roll on up, the circus has just swung and landed on your doorstep, it’s time to dance like a robot across your kitchen and marvel at the twisted nature of fate while whistling your way to work in the morning in the middle of a riot.

Last night in a fleeting moment of evolutionary foresight I pulled my 4 year old son quietly aside and like some speccy Scottish Indie version of Christopher Walken in Pulp Fiction I said “Son, I want you to take this CD. It’s not a family heirloom and I didn’t stash it up my ass during the Vietnam War, but it’s still very, VERY special. It’s called Too Much To Think by a guy called James Redmond and thousands of years from now our ancestors are going to be singing these songs in caves under the ground, so you should keep it somewhere really safe”.

He took the disc in his little hands and asked me “Is James Redmond real?”

“Yes” I said, “I think so”.

And then he asked me “Is he hypnotised?”

“No” I said, “…no I don’t think he is”.

“Does he eat beans?”

“Listen, just put the disc somewhere really safe for now, it’s important” I said, and watched him amble off, clutching the future with a look of total bewilderment on his face as he proceeded to unceremoniously dump it in his lego box. Because this is just how the world works sometimes, no matter how hard you try to change it into something that it really should be.

You can download “Too Much To Think” from the QUIXODELIC RECORD STORE link at the top of this page.

Listen to “History” from the record:

Download audio file (JamesRedmond-History.mp3)

So having blown us away with “Baddest Fastest” this summer, and with rumours of a follow-up record cooking away behind the scenes, I figured it was a good time to catch up with the Head Boy who seems determined to burn the system down that is Gil De Ray. Here are the resulting 26 questions disguised as 20 for your discerning brains to digest.

1 CoDY High School – where’d you get the name from and what does it mean?

Gil: CODY stands for Come On Die Young. CODY were a gang in Glasgow that ran around the Southside near where I grew up. They were notorious. That name has had a lot of resonance throughout my life. Then last summer me and a friend, Fuzzy started talking about getting a band together. We were going to be called The Purple Ohm Eaters. So Fuzzy comes round and we’re listening to records and he pulls out an old MC5 bootleg album which was recorded live in Detroit at a school called Cody High School. I couldn’t believe it. It was like a sign. So The Purple Ohm Eaters became CODY HIGH SCHOOL…It’s a tribute I guess to the true spirit of rock n roll. Being in a band is like being in a gang. A lawless, murderous bunch of maniacs.

2 Who makes up the band and what does everyone do?

Gil: I do everything on the recordings, play guitars, bass, keyboards, drums, vocals. Everything. We have a band in place for playing live, which we haven’t done up to now…

3 Records most likely to be playing on the CHS tour bus?

Gil: All sorts really. Some old shit and some new shit, a lot of American music. Velvet Underground, MC5, Love, all the good 60’s psychedelic garage stuff. Doo Wop, Marvin Gaye, Sly, Shuggie Otis…all the way through to new bands like Magic Magic, Miniature Tigers, Crooked Cowboy & The Freshwater Indians…You wouldn’t want to get off the bus…

4 Do you gig and if so where can we see you?

Gil: Not yet but we’re working on something, maybe before Christmas, who knows…

5 You’re a prolific songwriter – where do you get all the inspiration from?

Gil: Everything really. Books I read, films I see, people I meet. Inspiration is just instinctive…you can’t really put your finger on individual moments. It just happens…Some days you wake up and you know something is ready to go. You have to listen to your heart and let it guide you and trust your instinct..

6 If you could resurrect one dead musician to be in your band who would it be?

Gil: Oh shit I’ve been thinking about this one a lot…..The first person who popped into my head was Arthur Lee. I mean I don’t think he was a particularly spectacular musician but that doesn’t matter anyway. He had an understanding like Brian Wilson, an instinct that he pursued to the end…He was just cool and the kinda guy you would want in your gang…Nobody fucked with Arthur Lee..

7 What football team do you support?

Gil: There is only one team to support. Glasgow Celtic. Hail Hail.

8 Beatles or Stones and why?

Gil: Easy, The Stones win hands down…They were cooler, had better songs, made better albums, didn’t give a shit. I don’t have any Beatles records in my collection….

9 A few months down the line how do you feel about “Baddest Fastest”?

Gil: I’m very proud of it, it happened really fast and it sounds raw. There’s a nice balance to it. There was no time to think too much which is usually good. People take too long to make albums these days. The Beach Boys were doing 3 albums a year. Record labels nowadays are strangling the life out of bands. They spend a year making a record, another year waiting for it to come out and then a year touring it. By the end of that they’re usually fucked, sick to death of the songs, mentally paralysed and unable to write…Its groundhog day x 100..

10 Where do you get the funky artwork from?

Gil: I make it myself, copying images, cropping them, putting them together with other disparate images to create something different. I guess there’s usually a Message. The artwork is important as a visual representation of elements you might find within the song. I don’t like lyrics which are overtly political. People don’t care. Its boring. I prefer to make the point more subtly and it seems easier to get that over visually..

11 Chinese, Indian or Chip Shop Takeaway and if so what dish?

Gil: I love Crispy Duck and Dim Sum but I don’t like Chinese with MSG in there, I love Indian food but you need to be careful, a lot of places have it swimming in oil…I like my food to be clean, simple and fresh…Being Scottish I love Fish ‘n’ Chips but that’s a treat every now and again. Overall I guess I eat more Indian food than any of the others…

12 Coolest thing you ever saw?

Gil: I saw Sun Ra play in New York totally by accident. I was walking past a little jazz club and the sandwich board outside said ‘live tonight, sun ra and his intergalactic arkestra’. I couldn’t believe it. The place was tiny and the gig was awesome. I sat at the front watching Sun Ra lead the band, he never played a thing, he just pointed at the musicians and off they went…It was nuts, they had fire eaters dancing through the crowd and the band were selling t shirts after the show. I’ve still got that t shirt too…

13 You wrote a book – what’s it about and will anyone ever get to read it?

Gil: Yeah I hope so. I’m turning it into a script so maybe one day people can see it too…Its called ‘Baddest Fastest’ and it’s a story of growing up, making music, being in a band. Its set in 1990  and centres around the explosion of ecstasy and acid house and the positive effects that had on music, society in general and for the character in the story especially. I wanted to tell a positive drug story. Its not always a slippery slope into heroin addiction, jail and depression. We don’t normally see that and It happens to be true in many people’s experiences, not just my own…

14 What made you start writing songs?

Gil: Shit I don’t really know. It was just an insatiable urge.. I had no choice..

15 If you were going to recommend one film what would it be?

Gil: Right now I’d tell everyone to watch “Zeitgeist Addendum” its free to watch online at www.zeitgeistmovie.com

16 You’ve got a really positive attitude about how to approach music that seems directly rooted in negative experiences of the music industry – care to discuss and potentially help out any kids who might make the same mistakes?

Gil: Well I’ve made records in previous incarnations for amongst others Sony, EMI, Universal as well as a lot of Indie labels. The music industry doesn’t have a lot to do with music, that’s always been the problem. It’s a hard, heartless, wild stab in the dark. People making music need to be protected from it.

17 What’s Earth Calling Music all about then?

Gil: Ah what a seamless link. Earth Calling is something me and a friend who is a music lawyer have set up to help other artists. We both have first hand experience and want to use that to help who we can. At the moment we are working with Magic Magic from Boston, USA…

18 Your relatively recent trip to the US – what was that like?

Gil: It was fantastic. We went to see Magic Magic and hang out with them. I love that band and those dudes are just naturally, effortlessly cool…I love them…They’re going to be big!!

19 In the vaguely remote possibility that you had a life before this one what might you have been?

Gil: A political assassin…

20 What next for CoDY High School?

Gil: Super New Nashville Fuzz. The new album is almost ready. Some gigs. More writing….more everything!!! More more more….

 *You can download CODY HIGH SCHOOL’S “BADDEST FASTEST” from the QUIXODELIC RECORDS link at the top of this site, for FREE. It’s fucking well worth it.

 Out Today!

JAMES REDMOND – Too Much To Think

So this one here is pretty damn special for a whole number of reasons, including the historical context of the record, the many technological hurdles we threw ourselves through to get it together for you, and of course the sheer genius of the songs that make it up. Those of you familiar with previous DG compilations are perhaps aware of who Jay is and what he does, but seeing as it’s been over a year since we last heard from him it’s likely that for the majority of you this is going to be something of an eye-opener.

The 8 songs that make up this unique collection not only clock in under a breakneck 20 minutes, but they overflow with comedy, tragedy, and staggeringly great pop-folk melodies. With a little help from some friends, it’s got names like Dirty Ticket, The Sweetcorns, and Tramp Attack written all over it, but what you hear is 100% James Redmond.

Do yourself a favour and download it for FREE today from the QUIXODELIC RECORDS link at the top of the site.

1 Seed

Smally: “Seed” originally began as just that – a seed of a line that I had stuck in my brain that “the apple bites back”. One afternoon round about the mid-point of writing the record I had a bit of time to kill so I wrote and recorded a song called “The Apple Bites Back” – it wasn’t really meant as a Tigermouse track, more a stupid little song to fill some space with all the music you can hear on “Seed”, and layers of vocal melodies singing throwaway lines like “I think this time I bet you wish you’d bought bananas”. I sent it to Kris really just to show him what I’d been up to, so it was a bit of a surprise when he turned it around and re-wrote the words and vocals from the ground up and sent it back to me. It was also at this time that the recurring theme of starting an imaginary country on that very real floating island of plastic rubbish in the Pacific Ocean arose and so that’s what it’s about. Actually, “Seed” was probably one of a couple of turning points for me during the process of making the record – a kind of “woah… we might be onto something here” moment. I really like the way it sounds like a head-on collision between two very contrasting styles of songwriting (Wheelies Folk-Pop and Warchalking Indie-Rock) and creates this strange, but hopefully worthwhile fusion of sounds. Kris’ lyrics frequently knock me out and “Seed” has some real nuggets like “I guarantee our immigration policy will be lazy” (even though I was initially convinced he was singing something along the lines of “I’ll get the tea on…”).

Kris: This song was the first of many turning points in the process.  I tried the intro with a couple different songs, and it worked best with this one.  The original was really good, I was taken by it immediately.  In retrospect, I should’ve lifted more of the melodies from the original.  The vibe was a bit revolutionary in the original (possibly because its rare for me to have drums anymore), so an introduction to the country idea seemed appropriate.  This record is chocked full of small ideas that explode into palatial ideas.  Every one of these started as a kernel in our respective hard drives.  This was how to start this record.  As I recall, Smally referred to this as a very Wheelies song.

Note: the details of our new country were hatched in the midst of studying the effects of globalization.  It was for the most part an off the cuff rant that began as reaction to futility that sought to be radically pragmatic.  We are a strange lot.

Smally: I think when I described it as being “a very Wheelies song” it’s more with reference to the drum loop and chord structure of the original idea. I’m still relatively obsessive about trying to work out what can be done from a continuous major three-chord structure as so many of the songs that I love from the 1960s seem rooted in that. The finished article is a lot less Wheelie by nature – particularly because of Kris’ lyrical take on the opting out idea. One of the things I really like about this collaboration is that it’s forced us both out of our comfort zones – for me to try and figure out how to become part of that “epic-acoustic” Warchalking sound (answer: multiple piano tracks), and for Kris it’s getting stuck in the gum of melodies that are perhaps more playful than the usual gravity of what he needs to transport his songs. That was really what I was driving at with the “Tigermouse” title, this contrast of styles – the tiger of “surly” and intense Warchalking tunes, and the throwaway mouse of Wheelies nursery rhymes (behind just about every song I ever write is the semi-conscious impulse to try and write the next “Yellow Submarine”, or a song that kids can sing on the school bus). Probably more than any other song on the record, “Seed” captures that contrast.

2 I Made A Cape

Smally: Being exactly 4000 miles apart (from Cape Girardeau to where I live in Fife) the process of collaboratively writing songs is a tricky one – I mean, you can’t just sit down with a couple of guitars and say “What do you think of this idea?” So at the beginning, together we recorded some 20 plus “sketches” of melodies with improvised words and traded these to see if there was anything that could be developed beyond the raw idea stage. In actual fact, very little of this opening exchange is left on the finished album (curiously “Cape” and the following 2 songs by accident rather than design originated at this stage). I think we quickly worked out that there was simply too many good ideas and it needed either one of us to commit to one of these and run with it – at this level at least, making this record was very easy in that we trusted each other’s instincts and even at this late stage have yet to have the seemingly obligatory bust-up over creative direction. From my sketched ideas I ran with the melodies that would go on to form “Cape”, dug up an old bridge from something I’d sung a long time ago that didn’t work and added a new chorus. This old version of “Cape” – like a couple of other songs on Tigermouse – dealt with issues surrounding growing up in suburbia, and attempting to transcend the somewhat pathetic heartache of teenage relationship break-ups. Kris then latched onto the unintentional coincidence of the “Cape” in the song’s title and begged me to let him re-write it (he grew up and lives in Cape Girardeau). Since he’s a much stronger poet than me, I obviously said “aye, too right… go for it”. And thus this split version of it was born, thankfully minus some of the worst bongo playing from yours truly that you very nearly heard and including far more profound and beautiful observations like “why do I keep all this shit around?”

Kris: I love the chorus of this song to no fucking end.  I couldn’t touch it.  “I got an education, it just keeps me up at night” is quite possibly the truest statement I’ve ever seen written down, and it makes me laugh because Smally always downplays his writings skills.  The music is particularly cool.  All the instrumentation is Smally; I wouldn’t change any of it and couldn’t improve on it if I tried, even the now-absent bongos.  All I said was “You gotta give me the verses”.  It was perfect for the time, as I hit one of those points where I was at odds with my environment.  The main idea was here was this sleepy little town, and the more I dwelt in it the more I realized I was changing it.  Over the course of several years I found many tear downs and rebuilds occurring every few years or so.  Its a song about self creation.  I still wonder why I keep half this shit around.

Smally: Wow, I never knew that all the instrumentation was me – how come it sounds so puny when I mixed it all down to begin with? The “education” line is something I wrote and used a long time ago round about the “Oh Happiness” Wheelies album, but I can’t even remember which song it was on (if any). A lot of the words I end up writing are from this perspective of a younger and very mixed-up self, completely alien to the same sleepy suburban town that Kris ends up singing about. It wasn’t that I was particularly odd, it’s just that there wasn’t too many twenty-somethings walking round the estate I grew up in wearing flares and a parka jacket. I draw a lot on the past simply because I feel like it’s somehow more interesting or relevant to sing about fucked-up times as opposed to the position I’m lucky enough to have stumbled to now, which is essentially an incredibly quiet and happy life. I’m glad we did the split on this one and my clumsy verses were replaced, even though I still don’t have a clue what he’s singing about spiders and fruit. Funnily, the first time I ever played this finished version to Linz she shrieked – there was a spider spinning down from the ceiling directly above her at the same time she was listening to the spider line.

Kris: Ha!  The line is “Planted seed and as it grew the thrifty fruit it bore attracted spiders”, and refers to the beginnings of projects I had started (the seeds), the progress made in those projects, which wasn’t particularly stunning due to the size of the pond (the fruit), and the neighbors and denizens that kept circling around the blossoming of those projects (the spiders).  I like starting from big images and narrowing the focus from there.

3 Invisible Strings

Smally: This is one of my favourite tracks on the record. I wrote it early on around the same time as “679″ with first-thought best-thought lyrics around the idea that if everyone and everything had a string running from them/it throughout their life how tangled up and interconnected we’d all be. I thought there was something in it but I wasn’t convinced Kris was convinced and there were times I thought it might end up on the scrapheap of ideas. Thankfully it didn’t – he went back to it right near the end and re-wrote with new words (as always an improvement) some brilliant harmonies and a couple of completely new sections. The instrumentation we use on the record is limited, but thanks to our shared love of multi-multi-tracking and layering a lot of the songs still manage to sound very busy, so there’s something about the more stripped back acoustic feel of “Invisible Strings” that is a welcome shift of gears. Or maybe its just the absence of my amateur un-Manzarek keys.

Kris: One of the major pitfalls in this project was a lot was sketched out over the course of the summer, during which I was taking classes.  So as this flurry of ideas would get bounced back and forth across the planet, some things got tabled as there was no place to put it at the time.  They got shoved into the next available slot and as things got sorted they’d get the proper attention.  I take songs in batches, that way I can power through a couple and feel some sense of accomplishment.  There was never anything wrong with this song, there was just no room in my brain at the time.  I’m glad Smally stayed on me because this one became one of the more playful songs on the record.  I ended up stealing the chorus from another song he’d sent initially that I liked and did a different version of (which I never finished and he never heard).  I like this song because it makes each of us do things we don’t normally do.  Its really easy to find a middle ground in uncharted territory.

Smally: Well that’s another thing I never knew, I thought Kris wrote the chorus melody as I don’t ever remember writing it. When it’s time to write a record I usually spend two or three weeks sketching very loose ideas for melodies, filling up a little mp3 player with a tiny shitty microphone, and then start cutting these back to the ones I think might go somewhere. We’re talking hundreds of melodies here, most of which get binned and forgotten. Even at the next stage where it comes to recording slightly more definite (but still improvised) versions for whoever I’m working with, there is still a lot of perceived deadwood that gets cut. On saying all that there was really only two other finished songs that we cut because the record was running too long – “The Last Kiss” – more of which in a bit, and “Looking Back”. “Looking Back” was one of the first songs we did, and the first of us mixing up the formula for writing, me taking one of Kris’ ideas and writing words and a chorus. It’s about a guy who drowns on an acid trip and is by by own admission not the greatest work of poetry I’ve ever produced, but I’m sure it’ll raise its awkward head again, somewhere sometime. Back on the subject of “Strings” – someday I plan to sing this on a beach beside a burning fire and I’m going to belt out “As nature runs amok we’re always stuck with cleaning up”… I love that line, much deeper than what I had before, which was stuff like “There’s a boy for every girl if that’s what it takes to make the world seem a little bit better not quite so tough/ But if boys are not the thing for you there’s something else to alleviate the blues like another girl or a couple of cats so cool”. Oh dear.

Kris: Yep, this is intended to be a campfire song.  I dunno if its a GOOD campfire song by any stretch, but that was the aim.

4 My Generation

Smally: Of all the songs, “My Generation” has come the furthest and the strings of who did what and why are so tangled that it’s strange to even try and pick them apart. Basically it began during the last Kaleidonauts album when I wrote a song almost identical to this one in melody called “Pettycur Bay”. It was lyrically very weak, so I re-wrote it under the title “Dead Canaries” as a song about the project I was involved in at that time. Jon of The Atom who was writing the Kaleidonauts record with me was musically burning out at the time with me firing loads of song ideas at him, so it got dropped. As far back as August 2007, Kris and I had been talking about making a record together, maybe writing 4 songs each and contributing backing vocals to each other’s songs. When Kris got roped into the original Kaleidonauts record (Spaniard) and sang on “Roll It Up” and “For A Girl” I think it became apparent that it was going to be something a lot less straightforward and a lot more collaborative, each of us playing to our particular strengths. I dug up “Dead Canaries” to see what he thought of it, and he re-wrote the music and lyrics. In hindsight I probably should have left the words the way they were, but when I sang my version I changed some of the lines to try and reflect my own take on it so the finished version is an almost 50/50 mix of his words and mine. Kris then re-sung the main vocals, before I added backing tracks and keys. So what you end up with is this acoustic ballad take on “My Generation” (I called it that because I liked the idea of folk expecting to hear a Who cover-version, and getting something completely different), with both of us contributing at virtually every stage along the way.

Kris: This held one of the rare contention points during recording.  I had been playing a lot of shows with younger kids (strangely, it’s easy when you’re 28), and a lot of them were really good.  Here I was in my late twenties finally figuring out how to write songs and here were these college freshmen coming up with really clever ways of making music.  All I could think about was where I’d be if I started on that level.  So I made the song about that. My argument was we have to look to the kids to understand how to adapt with culture-changing technologies because people older than us offer little help; his argument was after painstakingly sifting through piles of kids’ recording, a frightening amount of them were deriving their music from already derivative sources and I must’ve found some diamonds in the rough.  Thinking about it, he was pretty much right.  All those kids I saw were from WAY out of state, working their way around the country on whatever funds got put in the hat.  Nobody around here has ever heard of the influences these kids were using.  The result became how people our age have to keep an eye on both horizons. The generation referred to is any generation that has to adapt faster than their parents, which I figure covers about 3 so far.

Smally: Yeah, I have a quite cynical view of young people today. That’s not to say that I’m an old bastard, or that there’s not exceptions to the rule (there most definitely are – take for example bands like The Shivas, or individuals like Dylan Gough), but by and large I find the whole fashionably unfashionable EMO thing just a bit depressing. It really comes from working on The Daydream Generation, and from the same feelings that caused me to write “The World Is Fucked” on the last Wheelies album. Doing the DG thing involves a lot of surfing on MySpace not just looking for bands, but also trying to find individuals who might like what we’re doing. I remember pretty vividly this horrible feeling of trawling seemingly page after page of nihilistic kids trying to outshock each other. I guess I got lucky when I was in my mid-teens as it coincided with the Madchester scene with bands like The Stone Roses and The Happy Mondays, and shoegaze acts like Ride and Chapterhouse – and all of that music opened doors to the golden era of The Beatles, The Stones, The Velvet Underground, The Byrds, The Kinks etc. Kris’ original take on “My Generation” I felt complimented too heavily the next generation coming through behind us, but at the same time I really identified with what he was saying about us being lost between the burned bridges of our failed hippy forefathers, and the enviable position of a youth that takes the technological changes of the last 20 years in their stride (as opposed to being caught up in the blizzard of advances like we have). I guess that’s why I threw in lines about faulty parachutes and taking pictures on your phone to somehow try and make sense of whatever the fuck has just happened to us. Not that I own a phone, but that’s another story.

Kris: Returning to collegiate study has brought my opinions a bit closer to Smally’s.  At first I was surprised, then I recalled how awkward and ambiguous the late teens-early twenties phase was for me.  Granted, my collateral damage was less severe than a geometric haircut and super-tight black jeans, but I hung out with people with a lot of facial piercings and flannel shirts, so its not that it disappoints me, its just hard to watch kids fall in the same traps my generation had.  I own a phone, but just barely.  I got it last August out of spite.

5 I’ll Be Your Pavement

Smally: This one’s the other of the two best songs I wrote. It was a melody I had kicking around on my mp3 recorder for months before one afternoon when I had a bit of time to kill I wrote some proper words just for something to sing. It’s funny the way it works out sometimes – you write something you really like but when it comes to the crunch it just doesn’t work, and less frequently on the flipside you write something that really shouldn’t work, but it does. The song is a semi-fictional take on being a teenager, there are lines that are really me and there are others that are simply flights of imagination. The bridge melody is an alternative take on a melody I’d already used on “Pepperland”, which at the time I wasn’t thinking was going to end up on the record as well. It’s quite a repetitive track in terms of music with the guitars and piano, but I like the way it’s the same 3 chords right the way through and still manages to underpin several different vocal melodies.

Kris: This was one I didn’t have to do much to. The music was rich enough, contained its own vibe, and the words were very much Smally.  I lean towards minimalist lyrical structuring that emphasizes using less to say more; Steven uses lengthy and vivid lines that rope into a massive mosaic.  This song was a massive mosaic, so for me to change anything would’ve wrecked an already excellent song.  I agree that the repetition is what makes this song work.

Smally: I had to read that bit twice, get up, go away and think about it to figure out what’s being said. My initial response was on the contrary, that Warchalking tend to be far weightier, and poetically ambiguous, whereas my lines tend more often than not to be very unreal, a cartoonlike exaggeration of ideas. Actually I think what’s being said is the way we phrase things with me cramming words into a line? The thing is, I once read something about how Bob Dylan sought some kind of artistic mentoring and it led him to the revelation that he was using too many words that were redundant and unnecessary to convey what he was thinking. The thing about that though was that this lyrical epiphany coincided exactly with a point where I completely turned off from what he was doing (ie. as far as “Blonde On Blonde” and little to love beyond that). So I consciously choose not to be analytical when I write, just to “get it out”. Hence why I occasionally find myself playing songs about crashing imaginary mopeds with a 2 pence piece (that you can hear rolling around at the very end).

Kris: I’ve heard it broken down that there are two kinds of writers: those that tell a story, and those that paint a picture.  Smally and I do both, but using different approaches, so I guess I’m saying there are two more: Hemingway and Fitzgerald.  Smally likes to layer.  Could it be considered redundant?  Depends on how you like your stories painted.  Its like driving down the same street for a week.  First couple of drives you notice some consistencies, but after enough time those fade in with the trees and you begin to notice the intimate life of the place.  You see the habits of the residents, the personality that exists in thirty second bursts that truly define character.  Its a lot more in sheer mass, but its alive.  It breathes.  I’m more of a side street writer.  There’s a lot less to see, but the things seen are more direct tellings of what ’s going on.  The front of the house is the face we try to put on ourselves, even though the strings are visible.  Its the fights and the bath robes in the back yard that are dead giveaways.  There’s no masking that.  I used to write big, descriptive lyric sheets that set a scene and lived in it a while, but I could never remember all the words.  I cut it back out of simple pragmatism.

6 Let’s Start A Country

Smally: I think more than any other (with the exception perhaps of “Seed”) “Country” reflects Kris’ talent for hearing/visualizing potential in something that was originally mediocre at best. I wrote the song after a couple of emails back and forth about my urge to go and start a country somewhere, incorporating some of Kris’ ideas (tomatoes, stoning, that floating island of plastic in the Pacific Ocean). It wasn’t great to be honest, but he redid the music – a simple guitar line that reminds me of the Pale Blue Eyes era Velvet Underground – and brand new words, including gems like “our flag will float free on a pile of debris that keeps growing”. He sang this second much stronger version of it (I loved it), and against my better judgement I reluctantly added a new set of vocals that have since been incorporated into it. As I write this, “Country” is the last of the songs awaiting completion as we’re waiting on a Jane Gilmore vocal track that Kris thinks will complete it – so I’m looking forward to hearing that if it materialises. I think of all the tracks “Let’s Start A Country” really defines what this record is and how we made it – a throwaway idea from me poorly executed, Kris picking it up off the ground and extracting anything worthwhile from it, sending it back to me for additional work, then finally back to him for all the technical arrangement. I just really hope that its as good to listen to as it was to make it.

Kris: This song wound up complex.  It started fairly straight forward.  It was the main vehicle for the country idea we’d tossed around, but we already had three or four tunes that were acoustic-driven campfire songs.  So I tried a single tremeloed guitar as a carrier, and shot for an anthem.  I don’t know if its an anthem or not.  We managed to sucker Jane in on this one as well.  She added a nice layer on an already dense group of voicings.  One of the major points in this record is that Smally is far better at carrying a primary melody than I am, whereas my strength is in harmony and texture.  Initially I had the lead, but when Smally sent his tracks the better judgement was to have him lead. The motivation of this song went for two directions: one as a voice of frustration.  You can only talk about the problems of the world for so long; at some point you have to introduce an alternative of some sort.  If the world is so wrong, then what should be right?  The second, when thinking about fundamental flaws in political and economic establishments, its easy to get overwhelmed by the complexity of the whole thing.  There are so many methods and opinions, and not all of them are necessarily wrong, just incongruent at a global level.  If you wanted to correct all the absurdities in the human condition, you have to be willing to be equally absurd.  A squad of people living on the Pacific trash heap living on fish and singing drunken chant songs while dancing naked around a fire seemed crazy enough to make sense.  This is the next step in human evolution.

Smally: So since I wrote this originally the song got done, and Jane sang on it, and it was as good as Kris imagined it would be I think. I hope sometime he digs up that original version of him singing it on his own though, I’ve heard it goes down well in front of a rabid coffee shop audience and seeing as you’d need to put me in a binbag and force me onto a stage at gunpoint, the chances are I’m never going to experience what it feels like to sing about trading hash and tomaytoes to anyone but my own shadow. The next step in human evolution? Hmm I don’t know about that one – I have a feeling the personality types that would be attracted to such a project would not translate well to the more practical aspects of survival on a floating heap of plastic junk in the Pacific Ocean. When I was 19, me and the rest of The Wheelies took every item of furniture from every room in our flat and built a giant cube we planned to live in from then on. We lasted about 14 hours, it got grim real quick once we started to sober up and ran out of things to smoke. I see real parallels between the “Pepperland” of our imaginations and that misadventure. Actually the original idea of a country I had was that it would exist only in imagination. I mentioned this to Linz once and she said “For fuck’s sake, are you ever going to grow up?” Haha.

Kris: Come to think of it, I’ve got enough pipe dreams lying around to float in an ocean and live on.  I’ll be saving that for “Let’s Start A Country 2″…

7 679

Smally: For a long time this was going to be the opening track on the record, until Kris came up with “Seed”. I preferred “Seed” as an opener to be honest, and when he added that lifted fade-in from the final song “Pepperland”, it really confirmed it was the right song to kick the record off creating a symmetry between the start and the end. “679″ was one of the first songs I wrote from start to finish specifically for Tigermouse (or “ww” as we were calling ourselves at that point). Prior to that I think we’d only done “My Generation” taken from an old idea, and “Looking Back”. I was pretty pleased with “679″ when I wrote it, feeling like it encapsulated a lot of what I do and how I look at my involvement in The Daydream Generation, and it was also the beginnings of the starting a country idea that increasingly became a part of the whole album. My liking for it has diminished over time, but I think it might be as much to do with the fact we went on to write even better songs (as well as over-listening to it). It was called “679″ by my three year old son when I played it to him and was stuck for a title. I don’t have a clue what it means.

Kris: This tune was one of my favorites in that there wasn’t much actual writing to do.  It was done.  The trick was to fill it out and make it pump blood.  This was at the top of the playlist for a very long time, partly because it was one of the first batch to be finished and was the crown jewel, for sure, and partly because this was the song where we started to get a focus on where the record was gonna go.  I’ll fess up, we robbed the Beatles blind on this one.  At least I did.  And the Beach Boys.  Fucking Brian Wilson…

Smally: Well I never intentionally robbed The Beatles and if I did then I can only apologise – would be nice if someone could point out which Beatles song we’ve ripped off, but if it’s just the sound then that’s cool – if you’re going to try and sound like anyone then I can’t think of anyone better to try and sound like. Since I wrote the first time around about “679″ we remixed it, brought it back to it’s original lo-fi roots and consequently I think I really like it again.

Kris: Its not that we’ve robbed anything specific.  We’ve stolen technique, which since I last checked wasn’t subject to copyright law.  And thank fuck for that, otherwise I’d be screwed.

8 4000 Mile Dream

Smally: The origins of this song can be traced as far back as November 2007. I spent a day writing and recording an unreleased Wheelies record from scratch called “7 Hours” – 10 songs, 5 of which went on to feature on the Kaleidonauts “Spaniard” record. This one was called “Holy Smoke” about a kid in a tribe who’d “run out of matches and nicotine patches and ideas baby”, but it was all verses and I always felt like there was something seriously missing from it (eg. a chorus). After the initial “sketching” phase at the beginning of Tigermouse, and while Kris was struck down with tonsilitus I was hitting a seemingly endless vein of songs and wrote the “if this is a dream” part, patching the two melodies together. Over previous records I’ve worked on I’ve fallen into a tradition of writing “Dream” songs and this was initially #4 in the series. I changed all the words around based on some nonsensical dreamlike storyline where the protagonist like the real Descartes is holed up in a tin shack thinking, along with his Russian friend (Dostoyevsky) lamenting the fact his bike has been stolen by Atticus Finch (To Kill A Mockingbird). The bike stuff I wrote with Kris in mind as he’s a keen cycler and thankfully he liked the song and redid the music, with me adding some keys at the end. It’s got one of my favourite lines I wrote on the record – “Fucking Atticus Finch is out riding around on my bike!”. I don’t know why I like it so much, but I do. The title comes from a dream I actually had – I’d been obsessively thinking about a name for the project and woke up one morning with “The Bespin Black Lotus Basement Band” in my head. I dropped the “Bespin” bit from fear of being rumbled as an unconscious Star Wars geek.

Kris: The music on this was fun in that its got a gallop, and I love playing songs that gallop.  I can’t count how many times I’d sung the Atticus Finch line in the shower, attempting to mimic the accent horribly.  I identify with the Atticus in the dream as he’s a cycling nutter, drinking his beers and singing songs at civilization, harassing poor Descartes lovely slump with ideas like “If nobody’s watching, then you can do what you want.”

Smally: Haha, yeah Kris’ British accent – it was actually pretty great but sounded probably as comical as it is for me to sing “tomaytoes”. He also sang the “fucking Atticus Finch…” part with this beautiful spit of what sounded like sincere pissed-offness in the role of someone whose bicycle has been chored, but with me singing too it kind of gets lost. Again since writing what I did before this song got renamed and is now called “4000 Mile Dream” as we had to get it in somewhere. While I was trying to think of a title for the record I went onto the internet and on a hunch calculated the distance between Cape Girardeau and the beach I live on in Fife Scotland. It was near enough 4000 miles exactly (4000.38) which I thought was kind of spooky. I’ve told a couple of people about it but I usually just get blank looks – I’m like “Yeah, but it’s 4000 miles exactly… not 3999 or even 4001…” It’s amazing enough though that you can find people on the other side of the world on a different continent and make records that sound like they’ve been written in the same room… if you could sniff it, it would smell like a revolution.

Kris: None of my people are all that impressed by the neatness of the geographical distance either.  And, unfortunately, I’m a conscious Star Wars geek, so I suppose I’m grateful we didn’t go with “Bespin Black Lotus”.

9 Oh No

Smally: For a change I don’t really have much to say about this one. I wrote it about two-thirds of the way through the record and it was relatively straightforward, initially called “I Hope You Kept The Receipt”. I wanted to write something that sounded like it had been lifted off The Beatles “Rubber Soul”, but as Kris pointed out to me “we overshot Rubber Soul and landed in Abbey Road”. Not nearly as great obviously, but you see where I’m coming from. After I’d sent all the tracks away to him to mix and replace guitars and add vocals I think we both knew that “Oh No” was missing something, and so arranged for the brilliant Jane Gilmore to help out with some vocals. As great a job as she did, I still think this song is missing something, but at the same time I figure that the more we add to it and mess around with it, the worse it could potentially get.

Kris: I agree.  This one lacks the magic.  But I can’t get rid of it.  Jane did awesome.  We ended up prodding her for another take, and wound up using both.  I love how her voice fits in with our mess.  Makes it classy.  And she gave the song a new depth.  I think ultimately this song was a casualty of a mad period for me.  I may have tried too hard and it wound up a little short on the pop we wanted to give it.  On the other hand, its a really honest song.  An aspect of music I’ve always enjoyed is it always asks you to put the best, or worst, or whatever you’re feeling immediately to work.  Its like working a life lesson out on paper, because whatever you make that song about becomes an aspect of you or your past that you have to constantly revisit time and time again.  You work through you shit, like it or not.  The words were so genuine.  You get in these relationships, and there are times when you can’t just trade out for a new one.  This has been a lesson I’ve struggled with.

Smally: Another one that got a makeover after I’d written about it here. I thought a lot about this song in the build-up to the record coming out, trying to figure out the missing piece of the puzzle so to speak. In the end I asked Kris to turn the reverb down a notch to hear what it sounded like stripped back. The version on the album is the stripped back version and I’m much happier with it – I agree completely about Jane’s input and have written several times how amazing her voice is. As a singer she’s like some kind of maverick racing driver taking staggering chances that more often than not find combinations of notes that sound very original and melodic. In other words, thank fuck for Jane.

Kris: I’m still amazed she helped out.  This record was a total sausage fest prior to her contribution.  Thanks Jane.

10 To A Concerned World

Smally: This one is more of a Kris-song than any of the others on the record. It was one of the sketches he recorded at the beginning and I really liked it, imagined at the time it turning into this Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young type long rolling guitar song. The lyrical content of the song was helped along by some conversations we were having about America’s place in the international community and its insular political view of the world. I was trying to explain how electing a Democratic president at the next election is perhaps even more important to the rest of us than to America itself. All the people I virtually meet from the USA are great people and very switched on, so I counter my bewilderment that they would allow the election and then re-election scummy $-fixated right-wing Republican scumbags by ripping them about the state of America. It must have struck a chord with Kris. It was really great to hear this song growing from the ground up, with layers and layers going on each time I heard updated versions. Like getting to watch a songwriter or sculptor at work. I added some pretty basic keyboard parts and some backing vocals that hopefully he liked. I doubt he would tell me even if he hated them mind you. With every record I’ve been involved in there’s always the ambition to write some political songs and actually say something, but I usually retreat back to the simplicity of druggy love songs… Tigermouse was no exception, just this time I had a running mate to do all the important dirty work.

Kris: Political songs are always hairy.  Part of the problem is you immediately date the song.  Another part is its really easy for people to misinterpret any of the messages you try to convey.  Take Springsteen’s “Born In The USA”.  Smally was my gauge on this one.  One of the neat things about working with him is he’s a terrible liar, even though I’ve never actually spoken to him directly.  If it was too preachy, he’d say so, but he didn’t, so here we are.  The concept is as such:  “Dear World, many Americans understand that there are things immediately impacted by what happens here.  It’s fucked up, we know it, but understand that this is a strange place.  There are a lot of very loud voices.  There are a lot of interests.  Trust that we are not all idiots.  We’ll get there.  Please don’t stop criticizing from the outside as that’s the only way we can change things in here.”  I think that’s simple.  Maybe not.  The discussions we had on the impact the US had on the rest of the world were great in that here was a voice from outside explaining what were stepping on, which is quiet information round these parts.  Smally got really intense on me for a minute, and it had a lot of impact.  This was the response.  As for his additions, I don’t know what the fuck he’s talking about.  What he put in was perfect.  They serve the song brilliantly.

Smally: I think the rest of us know that America is not a nation of idiots, but it was horrifying enough to see Bush elected a second time to not exactly be filled with confidence. I mean, this election should be treated like a War. If people are saying to you “All politicians are the same”, then they’re just trying to make you feel bad about giving a fuck. It’s difficult to gauge what kind of impact an Obama presidency would have, but all the signs point to a dramatic improvement, or at the very least an attempt to improve things for the whole rather than the individuals at the top of the social ladder. In Kris’s words, it’s time to start throwing stones at “the old white men on the thrones”.

Kris: One thing that can be gleaned from the last few elections is that there is a growing mob unhappy with the US’s current direction.  57 million people voted against the Bush presidency, and mind also that half the people in this country don’t vote at all.  This year we’ve got a bunch of highly motivated people that really want to steer the ship for a while versus a bunch of confident people that have been steering for a while.  Paradigm changes don’t happen overnight, but the worse things get the more motivation there is to make the switch.  I dunno, I partially feel bad for taking a side, as taking sides limits you to the options available within that side, and straddling the fence allows you to be more objective.  On the other hand, I personally, ethically, and logically disagree with most of the dominant stances my government has taken.  Its become time to pick sides in this country, unfortunately.  Believe it or not, this election has become war on many levels.  We’re about two degrees away from taking to the streets, and I fear a McCain election may go as far a three degrees.  Then again, that’s what I thought last election, and it seemed crooked as hell where I sat.

11 The Somewhere Song

Smally: This is the first of what I feel are the two best songs I wrote for the record (though now with Kris contributions not necessarily the two best songs on it). I wrote it really late one night strumming some chords while I was waiting for some files to upload that I was sending to him for mixing. Very occasionally you pick up a guitar and a whole song comes out completely intact, words and everything – a lot like “The Sometimes Song” that I wrote for The Wheelies, so the title is an unsubtle nod towards that. It’s essentially about a relationship breakdown, or the strains of long-term relationships, so I’m hoping that somewhere there’s going to be somebody who hears this and knows exactly what I’m singing about. I recorded it all in one takes the following day before shipping it off and for a long time it hung around the project like a weird little rain cloud of unfinished business. Irrespective of how Kris feels about the atmospheric guitar parts he added to complete it, I really love it and think it makes the song, like what he’s done carries the melody and lets the song just be what it is. At times it sounds spookily lo-fi orchestral and that small guitar line in the middle of the song is one of my favourite musical melodies on the whole project.

Kris: I’ve begun to come around on this song.  I’ve been in so many bands with really creative guitar players, so I judge what I come up with based on that example.  To my ears it sounds like a terrible attempt at mimicry.  It is a good song, but in the hands of a competent melodic guitar player it could’ve been great.  This, along with Blood Music and Oh No, was in a batch of intensely personal songs Smally was shipping me at the time, so much so that it felt like a sin to change any of it.

Smally: Just to clarify about the “intensely personal” part. The reality is far from this “we used to be friends/ but sometimes it ends” – every relationship has its highs and lows and mine is no exception. There are elements of daydream license in pretty much every song I ever write, some are complete daydreams, others (like this) grow from the ground but are very caught up in the moment and still have a whole lot of sky in them. Music has a lot of different functions, but for me the most important is using it as a tool for communicating something. Going back to something Kerouac wrote about attempting to externalise these feelings for the sake of getting to know each other is that if we didn’t do it, it would be “a travesty turned on ourselves”. So that was the thinking behind it – write something that other people might possibly relate to. Walt Whitman told me when I was about 18 to “Delve! Mould! Pile the words of the earth! Work on age after age, nothing is to be lost…”

Kris: I should clarify as well.  I use ‘personal’ in that the song describes some fragile emotions, and the particular wording used to express those emotions was very profound.  I saw a rewrite as potentially damaging, and chose not to dabble.

12 Blood Music

Smally: Like a lot of the songs, “Blood Music” has been on a bit of journey to get to the final version. To begin with, it was one of Kris’ sketches that he recorded at the outset. I really loved the verse melodies and wrote some words, and a chorus and an outro for it originally called “Blood Music”, but then later changed to “The Last Kiss” from the subject matter of the song. Over the course of time two versions of the song emerged – one a ballad called “The Last Kiss” with my music, vocals and words, and the other was this much more guitar-driven version called “Blood Music” based around the new structure I’d written with Kris’ singing, words and music. He seemed to think that it was a tough call between the two for which should go on the record, but for me it was a no-brainer – again, lyrically this is at a whole other level and obviously struck a chord with the whole Don Quixote-Daydream theme. One of the last contributions I made to the record was to attempt to write some keyboard tracks for “Blood Music” and spent 3 long nights at it, tearing what little hair I’ve got out trying to find sounds and melodies that would fit. In the end I said to myself “fuck it” and sent Kris everything I’d attempted (some twelve tracks of sprawling piano, multi-delayed glockenspiel and so and so on) and let him figure out how to put it all together. Which miraculously he managed.

Kris: Probably the most collaborative song on the record.  It bounced back and forth so much and evolved so dramatically that it almost became a dare to twist it a little more each time it showed up in the inbox.  Smally’s original lyric set was really intense and personal.  I was worried about compromising the gravity of it.  When I rewrote his version, I was fully prepared to scrap it completely.  Granted, I did sweeten the pot with the interpretation of the Quixote story; intimacy is hard to compete with.  And the fucking keys…he sends a link saying he had a few piano tracks, twelve or so, and that I could use whatever I wanted.  I was thinking that it was twelve little spots that laid over each other, no huge deal.  I open it and its twelve four minute piano tracks.  I had to walk away from this one for a few days just to wrap my head around twelve unique piano melodies and how it was at all possible to make them work.  All of them.  I think because he had gone to such an unfathomable length, I felt obligated to justify the effort.  And I wanted to see if it could be done.  I think I cut and pasted on this song for all of eight hours.

Smally: Haha – yeah those keyboard tracks. That was painful. Anything longer than five minutes sitting at a piano and not managing to come up with a melody and I start to get very frustrated. Normally I’ll just press some keys and something happens but with “Blood Music” I pressed a whole load of keys and a whole load of happenings never really happened at all. Factor into that the fact I really wanted to do a good job because I loved the song so much… oh man, it was a nightmare. But all’s well that end’s well. I can’t even imagine how brutal it must have been unpicking all those knots of melodies I’d been tying. Just to clarify again – “The Last Kiss” was not a personal song at all. I drew on elements of a break-up a long time ago, but by and large virtually all of it is fictional with the exception of “some story standing on some stairwell”. I hated the lyrics of that one, so the Don Quixote reworking was like the original daydreamer charging in at the last minute with a chamber pot on his head to save the day.

13 Pepperland

Smally: I thought I had an hour to write and record a song one sunny Sunday afternoon, but the house was invaded some 40 minutes earlier than anticipated (as you will hear). Rather than sink into a songwriters sulk, I battled on regardless never really thinking that this would be something useable on the finished record (hence why it sounds so ragged), but when I mixed it down the end of the song somehow seemed as fitting as any way to finish the record. To be honest I think Kris has indulged me by putting this track on here, particularly as all of the original tracks were lost in a computer meltdown so it’s a brutal Smally-mix as opposed to a shiny Warchalking-mix. But in a way I’m glad we used it as Smally Jr has been something of an invisible and occasionally audible part of the Tigermouse songwriting process – one of the reasons behind me writing “The Apple Bites Back” (Seed), being with me when I wrote “679″ and naming it, and he also named this one too. Immediately after putting the mic down he pulled on his plastic rollerskates and shouted “Off to Pepperland!” I thought this was a funny little mix of Peter Pan’s “Neverland” and The Beatles “Sgt Pepper”, and somehow seemed like an apt name for the mythical country we’d been singing about. Hence as well the DG5 cover with the flag that has the middle-finger, a symbol we’re also using for The Daydream Collective – designed by a friend of Kris’ at our request – that flag (at least in my head) is the flag of Pepperland, and why I can’t help but grin when I sing “tomaytoes” on Country. For a few minutes I considered proposing that we call the album “Trees Will Whisper To The Sun And His Face Will Shine On The Children Who Play In The Places Only They Know Exist” after a line from this song. In hindsight I’m glad I didn’t.

Kris: TWWTTS&HFWSOTCWPITPOTKE would’ve been the most advanced album title out of the many we had proposed.  Spirits were definitely down on this song towards the end.  As the only song I didn’t have individual tracks to, we had been saddled with the demo version to overdub and massage as much a possible.  It still sounded markedly different, no matter what was done.  Smally’s computer had taken a dive over the summer, so I was under the assumption that the originals were gone, and we had discussed pushing it as far to the end as possible as a bonus track.  Then, through some feat of providence, the original tracks turn up, Smally puts some finishing vocals on it, and all of a sudden its one of the coolest spots on the whole thing.  What started as the last song because it never got off the ground became the last song because it was a great closer.

Smally: I’m glad I found the tracks and Kris could remix it as the version we were going to use just didn’t sound quite so. Every computer I’ve ever owned has let me down at some point, mainly under the weight of the DG music and songs I record, so when it started to meltdown, I saved only the stuff that was outstanding (I think at the time this was “Pepperland” and “Pavement”) – then when I went back to retrieve them all the individual tracks were scattered all over the PC and had to be found and reordered. I’m pleased with the finished thing considering it was melodically improvised and the words were written in about 2 minutes. I added the “Love/love/love” parts as a throwback to “The Somewhere Song”, which itself was a throwback to “Roll It Up” on the first Kaleidonauts record, which in turn was ripped straight from The Beatles obviously. That one’s deliberate, like a nod in the direction of songwriting masters. OK, I’ll leave it at that, I’m away to go rollerskating on the pavement.

www.myspace.com/janegilmore

1 What inspired you to start writing your own songs?

Jane: Bob Dylan, hard to pin-point

2 What are your favourite albums?

Jane: That’s tough. Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? by Of Montreal (going to a concert for them Nov. 1st!), definitely Graceland by Paul Simon, Odelay by Beck, and I’m going to cut myself off at Transatlanticism by Death Cab for Cutie

3 What instruments do you play?

Jane: I play the guitar technically, but my vocal skills far surpass anything I do on that.

4 If you could be an inanimate object for a day what would you be?

Jane: Um… probably a book or a camera, but I’d have to be a high quality book or camera.

5 How do you feel about your last record (“Knowledge Is Dangerous” free to download at our store)?

Jane: Mixed feelings. When you’re recording with a crappy $30 mic, it’s not like it’s easy to get the exact sound you’re looking for, that said, you always have a few songs that you’re thinking, “Man, I killed that one! (in the good way)”

6 What’s the first word that comes into your head?

Jane: Pineapple (I’m making Pineapple-coconut loaf cake next week)

7 Who are your biggest musical influences?

Jane: Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Paul Simon, Martha and the Vandellas (the first kind of really good music I ever got into was Motown in about the sixth or seventh grade on a family trip to the Grand Canyon), Neutral Milk Hotel, and probably more recently several female (usually)acoustic artists (Mirah, New Buffalo, Kate Nash, etc.)

8 How does it feel to be a “voice for hire”?

Jane: First of all, that implies I’m getting paid. I have mixed feelings like I’m not wholly involved in the record enterprises and all the creative juices, but hopefully that will be amended in the near future.

9 What’s the story with mollusks vs philosophy?

Jane: They’re both great, but biologists I have found are often quite pretentious and have their minds set on “proving” things that are really inferred so recently I have been getting into more theoretical methods of discovering truth. So right now, I’m double majoring in both, but it might just be a matter of time before I dump mollusks. I haven’t really, REALLY decided yet.

10 What are your favourite films?

Jane: Anything Wes Anderson, especially The Royal Tenenbaums. Anything Jeunet, especially Amelie, quite the inspiration for my life. I guess V for Vendetta even though it’s pro-terrorism, it was well done and pretty libertarian.

11 Who are you voting for in the US election?

Jane: Why must we mingle things as pure as music with things as dirty as politics? I’m writing in Ron Paul

12 What makes you happy on a shitty day?

Jane: Plato, Emilyn Brodsky, Mark Twain, Dr. Nina Mikhalevsky

13 If you could be someone else for a day who would you be?

Jane: Probably Dr. Nina Mikhalevsky IF I had to. I’m perfectly content with me

14 Flying kites or building sandcastles?

Jane: Definitely the former. For a budding marine biologist, I really hate the beach. I mean, the water’s cold, sand gets blown really hard against your body, and you get burned… always.

15 If you weren’t a legendary singer/songwriter what would you be?

Jane: I think your premise is wrong. First of all, I am not a legendary singer/songwriter, nor is it my main desire to be so. I will end up in the end as a 1. Malacologist, 2. Philosophy professor, 3. Entrepenuer

16 What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever been given?

Jane: Live the philosophical life with integrity (arete) and examination (paraphrased) from Dr. Nina Mikhalevsky

17 What was the last gig you went to?

Jane: Um, if you mean for me, that would be never, at least really. I did perform Ben Kweller’s “Lizzy” at a talent show in 12th grade which started one of the most disastrous romances of my life. Otherwise, I went to an Islands concert in DC in May.

18 How would you describe your music to anyone who hasn’t heard it before?

Jane: Acoustic Cynicism, Vulcan Sterility

19 Who’s your favourite Beatle?

Jane: N/A! I don’t really like any of them. If I really, really, really had to choose, I would say George Harrison because he seemed to be most down to earth, however, I refuse to evaluate the actual truth value of that statement.

20 What next for Jane Gilmore?

Jane: Open a bakery in the mid-west because college is a waste of time and application is more important than multiple guess and because baking is so satisfying. But before that, I will live the Thoreau/Walden lifestyle at some point. I will never cease, hopefully, to evaluate myself, reasonably and objectively (of course, how can we count on that?)

“The Passionate Misunderstanding”

That’s what I should have called “Hugs and Smiles”. It was a phrase uttered by my good friend Alan while talking indirectly about a situation that was happening in my life at the time, the gory details of which I have only shared with one other person. This situation was well documented in, though at times obscured by the language of the lyrics in most of the songs on “Hugs and Smiles”. I was too chickenshit to call that album “The Passionate Misunderstanding”. I though that the person that I wrote most of the songs about would find it offensive… Or something. I honestly regret that decision, and have ever since I put out my last album.

And so this EP, I guess, is about regret. These are fragments of a bygone era that I have been trying to revisit ever since learning how to write rock songs.

War In Space was recorded in Mom’s Basement sometime in 2000 or so. Trying like hell to emulate Beat Happening, this was the first song I ever recorded that had lyrics (more precisely, the first song that I had the balls to actually sing on).

Front Porch/Cars Passing was recorded sometime in 1999 in my bedroom. Originally called “A Misguided Attempt At A Wednesday”, I had an idea to put out a 7-song EP, writing and recording one song a day for a week. I lost interest on Thursday, the intro of which mistakenly (but fortunately) can be heard fading out at the end of this song.

Light 100s is a direct and unabashed reaction to discovering Sonic Youth. If reading into SY’s genesis, one will inevitably become familiar with at least the name Glenn Branca, as two of the members were regular contributors to his performances. After reading about Branca’s multi-guitar symphonies, and before ever hearing a note that the man recorded, I wrote this song, comprised of 12 guitar tracks recorded on my little four track. I attempted a cigarette-themed album called “Camel: The Album”. This is the only surviving piece.

What A Day is about feeling stuck, bored, and lonely. One winter I found myself drunk, missing my friends, disgusted with society and desperately needing to get laid. And there you have it.

My Dreams Are Boring:  I don’t dream. And when I do dream, mostly it’s about regular, everyday shit. I lived through a period of time around 2004 or so when I dreamed every night and had an almost constant and unshakable feeling of de-ja-vu. So I wrote this song, which really is not about that specifically. That’s just the inspiration.

Requiem For My Puppy Dog:  One night in 1999 or so (maybe 2000, but no later), I found my dog Pepper lying on the floor, breathing heavily. I couldn’t get her up to walk and knew that she wouldn’t make it through the night. I couldn’t deal with it, so I convinced myself that she was just tired and went to bed. I woke up and found Pepper dead the next morning, and realized that her last moments were spent alone and terrified because I chose to ignore my own intuition. I buried her in the back yard, and wrote this song immediately afterward. I’ll never regret anything more than going to bed that night, and still cry when I think about it.

They’ll Be Here Soon (Full Moon):  This is an account of a booze-soaked, acid-influenced freakout that happened a few years ago with my friends. One night on a full moon, we decided (as we have in the past and will in the future), to go up to the Valley View Golf Course in Utica, NY and howl (literally). The Real Burnouts had been doing this since they were kids, and I had only accompanied everyone a few times before this night. I brought my tape recorder, and got whatever I could on tape (I’m the one who tried to push the bench over, but found that it was bolted to the ground). The fact that the recording ended up underneath all that backwards music is the result of not knowing what the fuck else to do with the sounds… I thought it was just what the song needed after playback.

You can download THE PASSIONATE MISUNDERSTANDING at the Quixodelic Record Store (the “Store” link at the top of the site), find out more about Fig Mints at www.myspace.com/figmints - download Fig Mints records for free at www.cozyhomerecords.com