Sooj Was Here

Salad of Doom
Words by S. J. Tucker & Betsy Tinney, music by S. J. Tucker
Guitars, vocals: S. J. Tucker
Cello: Betsy Tinney
Army of Croutons: Michelle Dockrey, Torrey Stenmark, David Tinney, James Tinney, S. J. Tucker, Kevin Wiley
Damsels of Doom: Susan Lanphere, Betsy Tinney, Katie Tinney
Doom descant: Michelle Dockrey

"Salad of Doom" was written in less than twenty minutes, with Betsy and Kate, in the kitchen of their Redmond home, and in the floor of the music room next to the kitchen.  It was Vixy's birthday, a fine summer evening, and the Tinneys were hosting K's fire safety class that evening.  Because Vixy knew about the class and suspected that the house was already likely to be overrun with people, she emailed to ask if it would be all right with everyone for her to come over and play with the kittens (and bring her hubby and whether they should feed themselves, etc).  When I asked Dave, Betsy's amazing husband, he said "oh, sure! I'm gonna feed everybody with a gigantic salad bar," or somesuch other amazing sentence.  I wrote Vixy back and told her that Dave had dinner in hand with an uber-grazing salad bar of doom, and that she and her Fishy should come on over.  She responded with "wow, Dave is awesome.  I wonder if I should sing for
my supper.  Do you know any songs about salads?"
There was a beat, Betsy and I locked eyes, and I immediately started typing lyrics.  A song was born.  We retreated to the music room, giggling and grabbing for instruments.  Twenty minutes later, we emailed Vixy back with an mp3 and said "We do now."  She responded with "falls off chair. Woman! I was kidding!"

About the recording: 
I think the only other time I've had such fun getting a goofy choir together was when we tracked "In the House of Mama Dragon" for Haphazard in 2003-2004.  This time, though, there's video.  I'll be linking to that soon.  I wish we could have had even more damsels of doom and crunching crouton militia members.  Special thanks to Tony for gently wrangling all of these tempting and colorful veggie singers, and also for boosting a couple of moments of comedic timing in the mix.

Interesting facts: 
Betsy's been doing the chilling cello slide after the "iceberg lettuce" line since the day we wrote the song.  I think it's a stroke of genius.  Also, the ladies in the crowd have a tendency to echo her at shows, as if going "DOOM nom nom DOOM nom nom" weren't already fun enough!  I love it.
omnistiK has masterminded utensil-schtick during live performances of this song.  Observe.


Lyrics:
Beware the Bleu Cheese of Redmond
and the honey-mustard of gloom
Be careful how you stick your fork into
the Notorious Salad of Doom

An army of croutons comes crunching
while sinister spinach doth creep
invading the heart of your luncheon
and stirring your belly from sleep

Tempting and colorful veggies
seek only to draw you in
and learning your fate, you'll find it's too late
as dressing drips from your chin!

iceberg lettuce
will come to chill your soul
don't say we didn't warn you
as you blindly fill up your bowl!
Oh, HEADS OF LETTUCE WILL ROLL!  Ho!

Dress it in flowers and clover,
but it consumes you still!
In leather and lace,
past the bounds of good taste,
this salad is dressed to kill!

The popping of cherry tomatoes
resounds throughout the land!
Innocence lost when the salad was tossed,
but Dave was just feeding the band!!

Iceberg lettuce
will come to chill your soul
don't say we didn't warn you
as you blithely fill up your bowl, oh,
heads of lettuce will roll!

Oh, Health nuts, seek other nutrition!
Vegans, best run from the room!
Be careful how you stick your fork into
the Notorious Salad of Doom

Woe to the grazers of green things,
whose stomachs will growl all too soon!
We'll lose all we love in the tastiness of
The Notorious Salad of Doom


Special thanks to Dave, Betsy, and Kate, and to Vixy and her birthday party, the first audience this song ever had (falling out of their chairs).

September's Rhyme
Words & music by S. J. Tucker
Vocals: S. J. Tucker
Tracked & mixed by Tony Fabris, Monkey Brains Studios Seattle

I wrote this song in the lobby of the health clinic in my home town, while waiting for an appointment, almost exactly a year ago.  yuki_onna  is so sweet to me; she always sends me new and secret things to read when she has them ready.  This time, it was the first chapter of The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland.  In that first chapter, heroine September leaves home and has to figure out how to get into Fairyland using her wits.  Her not entirely helpful friend the Green Wind helps a bit.  With a little frustration and with a lot of holding her mouth right and hopping on one foot, she manages it before the chapter ends.  This song is an attempt to detail, in a wacky way, the process she must go through in order to get into Fairyland.  When Cat heard this for the first time, she wrote me and called it "the devil's carousel music."

About the recording:
tfabris  and I got this one where we wanted it in somewhere between one and two hours, I think, at most.  The recording only takes up three tracks, all of them vocals, and I knew what I wanted to sing going into it: the lead vocal, and two demented little harmony voices behind it.  Every time I hear a new recording for the first time, every time I hear played back what I've only had in my own head up to that moment, it's magic.  Devil's carousel music or not, I love this song.  If nothing else, it got me great feedback from hsifyppah, who said it was very evocative of six-year-olds with disturbing grins (totally my goal), and also from otterkin , who said that my voice "is like purple honey crystal".  ...yum.
Interesting facts:
There are three songs on Mischief that are just under two minutes long:  "The Truth About Ninjas", "Love Lies", and this one.  "September's Rhyme" is the shortest song on the whole album, and it's also the youngest of the three that are under two minutes in length.  Three is a magic number, they say... 
For those of you who are curious, I will be writing more music in honor of Fairyland.  Very, very soon.  I like very much what the first chapter brought out of me, and so I'll be exploring the rest of them and hunting for songs between their phrases.  yuki_onna  leaves me plentiful clues in her stories--I'm three albums in already for that reason.

Lyrics are here, and a little bit more of the background story, along with an mp3, can be found here.  Tonight I'm singing in Ann Arbor again, where this song had its live debut back in October. :D




For other songs I've written that were inspired by yuki_onna 's work, try Quartered, Solace & Sorrow, or For the Girl in the Garden.
Thanks to Cat and Monkey for this one.

Love Lies
Words & music by S. J. Tucker
Vocals, percussion: S. J. Tucker
Tracked & mixed by Tony Fabris, Monkey Brains Studios Seattle

I wrote "Love Lies" at Burning Man in 2008, in the shade at the ARTery headquarters. (omnisti  and I work for the art placement team (the ARTery) at Burning Man.  We help make sure that the big sculptures, burned or otherwise, don't end up set up right on top of each other.  We get to use GPS units and drive golf carts when we go to work.  Burning Man is the only place and time you'll find K and me working a day job and keeping a home, oddly enough.  When I wrote this song, I was between tasks on my work shift.)  Lots of amazing things happen in the desert when Black Rock City shows up like a mirage.  This is the second song I've written out there, and it won't be the last.  This one's actually not as autobiographical as you might expect.  It's not about a wild, one-night romance at the Burn, which is what it sounds like to me (though the potential and the fantasies were certainly there at the time, make no mistake).  I just got to thinking about how so many chance encounters can lead to so many different kinds of interactions (and entanglements) out there, where so many thousands of creative people come together all at once for what really is a very short time. 
Fate knocks, as Beethoven said.  Open the door.
There are so many songs out there about love as a predatory force, something that sneaks up on you, something wild and dangerous.  This one's no exception.  It's got everything-angels, tigers, the desert, danger, and a honey-soaked blues melody line.

About the recording: 
Tony and I discovered that when we covered the head of my bodhran with a sheet and I hit it with the tipper, it sounded an awful lot like a kick drum--exactly what I wanted.  So that's me, sitting in the vocal booth at Monkey Brains with a pretty bedsheet wrapped around my Irish drum, whacking it on the first beat of every measure. :D  That's also me doing the claps and finger snaps--this took several takes, and my hands were pretty warm (and just a little sore) when we were done.  It makes you think about how recording worked a few decades ago, how you had to get it right all in one go, for the most part, or else play your part over and over again.  I feel for the hand clappers and finger-snappers of Motown
and the like, all those who've gone before. 
Often, when I overdub all of the counterparts and harmonies I love to add to my songs in the studio, I'm making up the various parts as I go.  In this case, all the girls were already singing their parts in my mind, just about note-for-note as you hear it.  Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? all over again, to a degree.  They were dying to get out, and I'm very happy with the sassy, bluesy results.  My perverse side loves having a very gospel-sauce song about all sorts of things you don't talk about in church.
Most of the songs on Mischief had to wait their turn to be recorded for a long time.  I think they're better for it, but I'm also relieved to have them out of my head at last.  It gets all crowded up with songs in there.  The minute I finish one, another one steps up.  It's a good problem to have, but sometimes I get a little frantic.  Since I had the arrangement for this one fully formed in my mind from almost the moment I finished writing the lyrics down (I'm not always so fortunate), I feel very good to have it out in the world at last.

Interesting facts: 
It's possible that I'll do a full band recording of this song sometime, but I wanted the a capella version to come first.  Singing with yourself is, for me, a lot less time-consuming than hiring (or becoming) a funk band.  In the meantime, you can hear me do this up right live, song-mama
style, with GBMojo's Ginger Doss and Bekah Kelso, whenever we perform together as The Traveling Fates.

lyrics:
love lies downwind waiting
patiently to be found
all day east wind howling (wailing)
angel don't make a sound
unless
you are the one i have been waiting for

i've been downwind waiting
for you to come around
all night west wind wailing
angel don't let me down
i know
you are the one i have been waiting for

there is no one soul that will swallow me whole
and let me out shining and beautiful, no
(spit me out, turnabout's fair play)
in love there is loss of control
but like the rivers i roll
(just the way it goes/we go)
are you in for the ride?

shifting on the thermal and gliding (riding)
where will you sleep tonight?
love lies, downwind waiting
with the silence of tigers
and a hunger burning bright
with a heart song shining bright

desert star, shine a light
shine a light

(love lies downwind waiting)
(where will you sleep tonight?)

Special thanks to Monkey, now and forever, and to K for getting me out to Burning Man as often as possible.

Neptune
Words & music by S. J. Tucker
Guitars, vocals, bass, percussion, whalesong: S. J. Tucker
Cello: Betsy Tinney
Tracked & mixed by Ginger Doss, Eagle Audio USA

"Neptune" commemmorates the painful end of a relationship I had with someone very brilliant, who unfortunately felt that the world owed him a living.  I wrote it in Manhattan, in a friend's apartment, while I was on tour with Cat Valente for the first time, just before Halloween in 2006, more than two years after said relationship had left me cold.  I wrote it in the presence of someone else who was just undergoing the painful end of a  relationship, herself, with a husband who lived on the water, of all things.  It came on like a headache, making me very cranky and restless until I realized that all I needed to do was grab my guitar and sit still for a few minutes.  I did so, and out flowed a song.

Cat wrote this vignette for "Neptune" in the liner notes:

This is what a song does: it ties two tales together. So that one woman, with such a kind face, can sit on a couch in New York and pick out a melody the color of deep blue ink on her guitar, singing shards of a song like a knife, like a burial, and another woman, broken all too recently, can hear it, and find herself crying because it is not only the kind woman’s story but her own. She can see herself in it, her mistakes and her rescue, and the inky tendrils of the song stitch her heart back together, even as they are being written by the gentle woman beside her, even as the song is being made, it heals her. Note by note, stitch by stitch. And it goes out into the world from that couch in New York, and it touches other tales, and other hearts, and we all stand on either side of a song the color of water, and sing along with it.

This is what a song can do. This is what magic is.

Years ago I came to you,
in love and doomed by what I knew,
and though I miss the mystery now
of life beneath the waves,

Thin air's as sweet as water
when your body begs to breathe,
and so I leave when I must leave,
don't weep for love I couldn't save

Love changes us all, makes us broken, makes us brave, makes us deny ourselves and our very breath, makes us refuse to listen when our hearts tell us that the time has come to move on, to break the surface.  "Neptune" is the story of what can happen after you've drowned yourself willingly in someone else's hopes and dreams, and you find that saltwater and shadows no longer sustain you.  "Neptune" is the story of what can happen when you've lived in sin with a god for long enough that the respective piles of dirty laundry and broken promises have started to really get on your nerves.

Interesting facts: 
Originally the first verse went like this:
Moons ago I came down to you
down beneath your ripples
wrapped in seaweed splendor
where the coral yields to gloom

Years I floated near you
swimming in your subterrain
rocking in the opium embrace
of Triton's tomb

I might start singing it again this way when I perform it live; we'll see.
The rest of the song's features--time signature changes, guitar parts, lyrics--are pretty much as they were when I finished writing the song that day in New York.

I started learning two new percussion instruments just for this song: Tar (frame drum) and Udu (clay pot drum--the one that goes bwwoOOp).  The list of percussion we used on "Neptune" is the longest, coolest list of different ethnic drums I've ever played: djembe, tar, udu, and doumbek. 

About the recording: 
Ginger, Betsy and I started tracking "Neptune" at Ginger's last home in Austin, and Ginger and I completed tracking at the home of friends in Melbourne, Florida.  We tracked cello and the main guitar part in Austin, and we tracked all the rest in Florida--twenty minutes from the nearest beach.  I didn't realize until we were nearly done with our work that there was a mermaid painting on the wall in the room where we were recording.  Lots of other interesting ocean things happened that week, including a wonderful recording trick that we discovered by accident:  the sound of the ocean that you hear on "Neptune" is not the ocean at all.  That's what it sounded like when I ran my hands gently across the goatskin head of Ginger's wonderful djembe drum, with the reverb cranked all the way up in Ginger's recording program.  We could hardly believe our ears when we played it back.  "So much for hunting down an ocean sound effect!" we decided,
our eyes wide.  Same for the whalesong noise in the intro: that's me, sucking air backwards into my throat with my lips closed, while we were taping the ocean sound from the djembe with the reverb cranked up.  Happy accidents in the studio are one of my favorite kinds of magic.

This version of "Neptune" is one of the finest things I've ever recorded.  Unlike most of the tracks I've released that I'm very happy with, we recorded "Neptune" without a click track.  Normally, when I get ready to record a song, the engineer and I will set up a click track for me to play against, so that I can be absolutely sure that I'm keeping time and tempo the way that I want to, without drifting.  In the case of "Neptune", Ginger and I decided to record without use of a click track, due to the fact that the song changes tempo several times.  All of the drums and guitars and vocals that you hear, I played without the guidance of a steady beat.  The same went for Betsy and her cello part.  We just had to feel it, and somehow, we did.  Over and over, in my case, but I love the result.  It moves the way the ocean moves, and it all moves together.

Special thanks go to Chris in Tampa for the last-minute Mid-east Drums hookup and to the Cooks for the loan of their sweet ceramic doumbek (and of course their house).

Were-owl
Words & music by S. J. Tucker
Guitars, vocals, percussion: S. J. Tucker
Cello: Betsy Tinney
Guest backing vocal: Michelle Dockrey
Tracked & mixed by Tony Fabris, Monkey Brains Studios Seattle

"Were-owl" is a direct result of collaboration with someone I've never met in
person.  I found myself thrown together with artist emilycarding last spring in
the 2xcreative  project.  The idea of the project, hatched by
friend and photographer kylecassidy and others, was to pair creative
people all across the world and give them a month or so to collaborate on something,
anything new.  All we had to do was say "yes" to the following question:  if you
had the chance to make a damn fine piece of art with another human being, would
you take it?

Emily and I talked over email.  We laid out our websites for each other--I sent
her a link to my bandcamp site, where she could listen to all of my recorded
work, and she sent me a link to her online gallery, where I could view all of
her drawings, paintings, and digital art pieces.  We agreed to trade a song about
an art piece for an art piece about a song, and we turned each other loose.
I wandered through Emily's online gallery, clicking on anything that caught my
eye.  The piece that stopped me in my tracks was a photoshop treatment titled
"Were-Owl"--a depiction of an owl with a very human face turning a worried glance
upon a full-moon sky.  I couldn't look away from his expression.  I knew
at that moment that I'd be writing a song about him very soon.

Meanwhile, Emily fell in love with my Wendy songs and decided to include me in
her Neverland Tarot deck (still in progress, right Em?), depicted as Red-handed
Jill/Green-eyed Sue, on the Queen of Wands card.

It's one thing to know that you've inspired somebody.  It's another for it to
be mutual and simultaneous.  Emily's piece brought out of me a tribute to the
wild creature in each of us, to the uncertainty and danger of love, and to the
wonder of loving someone who's a bit outside your ken. 
(I do admit a tiny homage to a certain goblin king, here, but who wouldn't?)

About the recording:
"Were-owl" originally appeared as an internet single, July 2009. 
You can meet that incarnation of him, listen, and read the lyrics here.
He's been remixed and polished up for his appearance on Mischief, thanks to
tfabris , who toiled away for days upon days to satisfy my every
artistic and technical whim.
"Were-owl" is just one of the many songs on Mischief for which Betsy wrote a
gorgeous cello part.  On this song and on all of the others, she recorded
with her stunning black carbon fibre five-string, Raven, beloved of
Betsyfans everywhere.
vixyish  has a beautiful cameo appearance on the last chorus of this song. 
Those of you who know and love her voice should be able to find her
immediately.

Interesting facts:  I composed "Were-owl" in St. Louis, in my friend Stephen's
basement, where Ginger and I were mixing the Tricky Pixie album together.  I
wrote it in the key of B-flat minor, which is the same key it's recorded in.
In order for the cello part to be playable in that key, stealthcello  had to tune
her entire cello down a half-step.  This is why, when we perform "Were-owl"
live, we play it in B minor-so that Betsy doesn't have to re-tune mid-show.
  

Special thanks to Em, Kyle, Monkey, Vixy, and Betsy.

Looking at the US map, there are three states I have never seen:  the Dakotas, and Hawai'i.
Wow.
Time to find places to play in those three states!  Anybody have any ideas?


I clambered around Petit Jean Mountain yesterday with two of my heart's best brothers, one of whom has the wrists of a swordsman and a very impressive film resume.  Hell of a thing, to find out that I'm one degree removed from Weta, as well as the gentleman who did the fight choreography for Serenity.  Really, the fact that my friends are amazing and also have amazing friends shouldn't surprise me so much anymore.  Delight, yes; surprise, no.  Anyhow, we three took Cedar Falls Trail at Petit Jean (pronounced petty jeen around here), two miles of shade and rocks and beauty.  The company and conversation were excellent, the terrain was rugged but not fierce, there was an invasion of blue butterflies on the trail, and once we reached our destination, I found the canyon itself to be a healing place.
Check out the rest of my photos at Flickr, here. 

It's an amazing thing, to sit on the side of a mountain with good friends, watching a waterfall crash steadily down; to realize you've just remembered to breathe, and breathe deeply.  I left a lot of anxiety and sadness and tension behind at the encouragement of those waters yesterday.  I feel a few pounds lighter, healthier.

This is where we went.  Right in my backyard, practically.  I'll be going back.  I do love coming home to Arkansas, more than ever in the springtime.  There are people who will never see these magical places, who will never know what my home territory has to offer.  I'm working on that. *smile*

Our little adventure band is headed, separately, to Thailand and to Indiana.  I've got to get packed to drive to French Lick (yes; whimsical name for a town, isn't it?) for the Beltane event where I'm singing this weekend.  It's been good to be home.  Next weekend, I have a concert in my hometown.  You're all welcome, if you want to make the trip.  Maybe we can all run off and see the waterfall on Saturday afternoon. :)

From good wishes to tangible, monetary ones, all is welcome.

Help SoulFood Books thrive.
http://soulfoodbooks.com/OldRoot/

The concert goes all day, so you don't have to give up any other plans to get there.
If you can't make it out, the above link includes a handy donation button.
Betsy and I are donating CDs to the raffle/silent auction.
Please feel free to spread the word on behalf of our favorite place to play, site of so many of my best concerts in the Northwest.