Leonard Cohen wrote this song.  It was one of the first chord progressions I'd tried to learn, which meant I had a lot of evening singalongs at home, which led to a momentarily-awkward encounter with a certain childcare provider at a certain daycare about a certain toddler's excited cries of "feel the devil!" during playtime.  I'd had, at least, the foresight to self-censor "crack," "anal sex," and "destroy another fetus," so: small mercies, and all that.

This version was played on a guitar that reliably goes sour in no more than fifteen minutes, and requires a wrench to retune.  And that "lived-in" feel comes from the hiss that only the internal condenser mic on an iPad can provide, spread and begotten across 10 or 12 faltering layers of multitracking.


The Future

"Going to Marrakesh" is a song by the Extra Glenns.  The Extra Glenns were really a collaboration between the songwriters of two different bands, the Mountain Goats and Nothing Painted Blue, but what I'm getting at here is that we're working with one of those cases where you need to mention three different band names to describe the musical work of only two separate people, and that's just one of those things you're going to have to get comfortable with if you want to get into any kind of situation at all with regard to indie rock.

I went to Marrakesh this one time, too.

Going to Marrakesh

This song was originally performed by the Legendary Pink Dots, on the "Malachai: the Shadow Weaver Part 2" album.  It got me through a lot of those evenings.  You know, the ones in your late teens.

The Dots played this number much better, but their version suffered somewhat from a complete lack of my favorite 4 year old on vocal duties.

John figured out the chords for me back when I thought I'd be able to play it competently as a proper bedtime lullaby.  Thanks, John!

We Bring the Day

This is a song written by Fred Small about the U.S. involvement in El Salvador, which was probably at least 4-5 Vietnams ago, and possibly many more, depending on how you count.  Alan Moore, in a comic written in part about the same conflict, devised the ingenious metric of swimming pools full of blood for visualizing the human cost of violence.  Slightly over-estimating the amount of blood in a human body at one gallon, and estimating 20,000 gallons as the capacity of a typical family pool, he rates the El Salvadorean civil war at approximately 3 1/2 swimming pools full of blood.  That may be nothing next to the 150 swimming pools worth of blood spilled in Vietnam, but it's still enough for a backstroke.

My parents were highly interventionist in my early exposure to media.  I never saw violent movies or television, and I didn't have any toys related to guns or soldiers or even battle robots.  And so, as it ended up, my only early exposures to genre horror came in the form of protest literature and folk music.  This song, with its scenes of graphic disembowelment and "a harvest of human carnage" constituted a first step on the journey that wouldn't bring me to Hellraiser and Lovecraft for another half-dozen years.  I only mentioned ths because I want you to understand why I want you to remember, if you click that <PLAY> button: 3 1/2 SWIMMING POOLS, FILLED WITH BLOOD.

(The timing is way off in this track.  I spent most of an evening puzzling out and recording parts, and didn't realize how stumbling and cluttered the whole mess was until the next morning.  But I'm not really one to come back for retakes, at not least once the fog has lifted, so let's all just be forgiving with that, shall we.)

No More Vietnams

I am trying to teach myself how to play the guitar, and then I get into these situations with an unscheduled evening, a cheap acoustic with scarred nylon strings, and the Multitrack DAW app for iPad.


Asphodel Mead

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