Sooj Was Here

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

"Witchka" is one song that grew to be something entirely other than what inspired it. It started with the words of a small child and ended with the image of a beautiful goth girl/priestess-in-training who's coming of age, stealing hearts as she goes. I wrote it in December 2006, in Ann Arbor Michigan. It was inspired by a story that yuki_onna told me about justbeast 's young niece Nika, and the first time Nika watched Sleeping Beauty. (They had to pry her away from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which she loved for all of its scary parts, such as when the forest attacks the mildly annoying soprano heroine and the owls go for her face.)

I am told that in the Russian language, "-ka" is one of many diminutive suffixes that you can add to a word to make it mean "cute little _________". My friends who speak Russian tell me that you can just keep adding and adding diminutives to a word, one after another, to show affection. (The first time justbeast called me Soojinka, I melted. Still do.) In this case, justbeast 's niece Nika, at the wise age of four or so, looked at Maleficent, Sleeping Beauty's lovely black-and-purple, dragon-making villain, and called her "Witchka". Nika is my heroine, for life.

About the recording:
I never thought I'd go out of my way to buy a tambourine, but I decided I needed one for "Witchka", for lack of a badass drummer with a full kit. In the end, a rock drummer might have been less trouble to find. There I was at a SamAsh store in Tampa Florida, being looked at by the staff as if I'd grown eye stalks and scales because I asked for a tambourine in the key of G or D. "They don't tune tambourines," I was told. So I thanked them and started walking around on my own. I just played with every tambourine in the place until I found one that had a good sparkly sound and was, in fact, tuned close enough to fit a song in the key of G. It didn't actually take very long.
This is part of why I only go into guitar stores when I absolutely must.

"Witchka" was tracked in Texas, Kansas, and Florida. I tracked guitars and most of the vocals in Austin, I tracked the rest of the vocals and all of the percussion in Melbourne Florida (see above story about the tambourine), and I tracked the bass part, along with the bass part for "Neptune", in the stage right green room attached to the concert pavilion at Camp Gaea just outside of Topeka Kansas, during Heartland Pagan Festival. You literally can record just about anywhere these days, thanks to digital recording gear.

Interesting facts:
There's a goth industrial version of this song simmering in my mind, with live drums, gorgeous crunchy beats and
wah pedal guitars, but that will come when I'm not as impatient to get this song out into the world where you can hear it.
People have been asking me to record "Witchka" for over three years now.
When my cohorts and I perform "Witchka" live, it's anyone's guess how many other songs will make cameo appearances
at one point or another before we end "Witchka".
The list so far:
Personal Jesus
Are You Gonna Be My Girl
Bloodletting (The Vampire Song)
The Hand That Feeds

Why? Because they all fit the same tempo and feel, with a little bit of creative license on the part of my bandmates and me. It's a fun game. Modern music is an entertaining thing, even in the details. Also, we are incorrigible music geeks and we're proud of it. I want to thank vixyish and stealthcello for being so game to jump into wacky cover territory with me there.

Here's a vid of us performing "Witcka" live (with bonus Alec! Also background noise. Sorry.) at the Mandolin Cafe in Tacoma back in March. (including things from that cameo list up there.) Nah, we're not having fun at all... :D



To abuse the vernacular...Witch, please. Where my Witchkas at?!?

Lyrics posted in this entry.



Special thanks to gingerdoss , stealthcello , yuki_onna , justbeast , celtic_elk* , otterkin , the Cooks, all my Witchkas (you know who you are, my wicked and dangerous dancing goth girls. Please don't ever stop dancing), and of course Nika.

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).

Cheshire Kitten (We're All Mad Here)
Words & music by S. J. Tucker
Guitars, vocals: S. J. Tucker
Tracked & mixed by Ginger Doss, Eagle Audio USA

I started writing "Cheshire Kitten" in the winter of 2008, at a restaurant north
of Portland, Oregon, between a bookstore concert in Portland and an appearance
at Conflikt 1 in Seattle.  I finished the song that July, sitting outside the Camellia
Lounge in Portland, Oregon, before a Tricky Pixie concert.  The concept arrived
as a "what if", and I don't remember what, if anything, prompted it.  The same
thing happened with the Wendy songs, when I wrote them--a lightning-bolt idea
snuck into my head unannounced, and I asked "what if?"  What if the Cheshire Cat
isn't always so sure of himself?  What if there's more than oneCheshire Cat? 
How do subsequent generations of Cheshire Kittens feel about living up to their elders'
reputation of madness and mischief?  And suddenly, a Cheshire Kitten walked into
my mind and told me all about how she felt.

Maybe anyplace outside of Wonderland
is not for me, my friend.

In July, her story filled itself out, all at once, pulled together by that
delicious line in the chorus:
If I leave my grin behind, remind me
that we're all mad here
and it's okay!

All of us dreamers must find a balance between Wonderland and the real world,
and it isn't always easy.  Some of us are broken by it.  Some of us are made
stronger.  You can't spend all your time in one place or the other.  You have
to visit both, and you have to trust yourself to find your way back.

About the recording: for the recorded version, I wanted to capture a bit of frenetic
silliness, something like what the voices in your head might sound like when they're
all trying to be helpful at once--hence the devolution into kitten-talk and scat
singing in the last minute or so of the song.  I recorded those vocals in our friend
Karla's basement laundry room (just about anything can become a vocal booth
on short notice when you're on the road.  Ginger and I are pretty adaptable), in
Hendersonville, Tennessee.

Interesting fact:  the opening guitar lick of "Cheshire Kitten" is a direct nod
to and a near carbon copy of the ending melody of Michelle Dockrey's "The Girl
That's Never Been", a song inspired by a story about grown-up Alice meeting the
Cheshire Cat for a drink.  Michelle (aka Vixy) and I often put those two songs
back-to-back in our setlists at shared shows, completely on purpose.  Vixy was
one of the first people to hear "Cheshire Kitten", after I finished writing it,
and we sing it together nearly every chance we get.  Spookier and spookier: I
started writing it a few hours before she and I met, and I finished it exactly
one week after we had our first shared concert.  ooOOOOoooOOOOOOOOoooo

Special thanks to Karla and family for use of their space, Gingy, and my Kitten
Sundae tribe.