‘Lonely Island Caldera’ comes from my personal struggle about how music should be made both aesthetically as a song-writer and technically as a producer. Aesthetically, I wanted the lyrics and presentation to feel authentic-more driven by sincere elicitation than deliberate construction. Technically, I'd idealized that a great sound is created by setting up the microphones, putting great players in the room, and performing the songs live without the option of using a click track, punch-ins, or overdubs. I’d been talking about working this way for several years until it was clear to me that I’d become a ‘talker’ without the courage of my convictions. Unsure if my performance as a singer, songwriter, and performer could justify the effort, I kept postponing a production date. Imagine the embarrassment of dragging great engineers and players into the studio for a vanity project with underdeveloped content! Indeed, at the finish of the recording day, loading equipment out of the studio on a dark and wet February Tuesday in 2016, I felt that I’d wasted my money and their time. 


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-Rory Rorshak 2016

Mother

Looking For A Song

Do I Have To Hurt For Two

Carry Me

We gave ‘Carry…’ one last pass after lunch. It was the best of any of the morning takes. I felt an absurd, come-what-may, que sera sera characterization materialize in my vocal delivery. I put on ironically thick sunglasses and imagined I was performing at club in Greenwich Village with Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, or Patti Smith. I stopped concentrating on the nuances of my guitar playing, and started to live out the character. My fingertips were on their own, strumming my nameless antique hollow body orphan of a guitar. Listen closely, there are instances when you can hear it’s strings, pre-amplification, through the vocal microphone.

The afternoon takes began to feel fluent. The nuts and bolts of ‘Do I Have to Hurt for Two’ had always been exciting musical material. Written in 2005, the song navigates multiple keys and has a drastic emotional turns. We gave it an introductory pass or two, discussed improvements, and the stage was set. With each tune, I tried to tell a story to the players over some introductory guitar work to encourage each of us to join in the 'head space' of the lyrics. I imagined one of the darkest nights of my life and refused to break character. I’d no lyrics, and no music written, to justify the first two and last two minutes of the final performance of "Do I Have to Hurt for Two?". New, and true, words kept arriving to my mind. Technically, something was happening with the circuit in my amplifier—the sound was fizzing in a particularly unique way. I kept playing and the words kept coming and the song kept getting truer, and darker. It exhausted us all, and we didn’t even discuss performing it again. No one in the studio wanted to return to that 'head space'.

Do I Have To Hurt For Two?

‘Looking for a Song’ is beat poetry. There were a few lines and chord progressions left over from an old demo recorded in 2001 called ‘Crawling Skin’ that needed a home, so the tune was revisited and new lyrics began to flow. They were impressionistic reflections. It was pure indulgence. I loved playing the character, wearing the sunglasses, and singing in falsetto. Again, my guitar found an irresistibly fuzzy sound at the song’s end. Remembering a sleepless night spent walking under a full moon, I made up some lines about being out on the town too late that made for a nice ribbon and bow for the tune.

Every time I pick up a guitar, my fingers find their way to the chords in ‘Mother’. I must have a dozen versions of the song demoed with completely different choruses. The song became my biggest stumbling block. If ever I wanted to record again, I determined that this song must be part of the effort and had to be completed. Like most of my tunes,I couldn’t construct the right chorus, or a way to make the lyrics cohesive from beginning to end. I walked away from songwriting for a few years. Preparing for this project, I made this tune my white whale. I imagined two lovers trying to secretly board Noah’s ark. It was an absurd construction, but irresistible. Imagine knowing that all future civilizations would be coming from your lover’s womb. Bingo! That’s a song…a gospel cigar song at least. Now imagine that every life has a flood of its own, in some abstract form. Now the song is universal, and true, for everyone! 

We had time to perform Mother only a few times. The band worked like a paint brush, interpreting the song’s expanding sound with broadening strokes. In hindsight, I may have missed an opportunity to take the tune "over the top" with a blistering guitar solo once the seemingly prophetic character begins to emerge, crying “red, yellow, black and white all come to the end of the line!” The tension comes to a beautiful point of release, however, and sonically it feels like sunshine returning after history’s greatest storm.

Rory Rorshak

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