Zephyr Device

"Departure"

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Lyrics

Target Market
White Collar Nomads
Fugitive Plastic
Call
Response

Authors' Commentary

Target Market
White Collar Nomads
Fugitive Plastic
Call
Response

Call

Author's Commentary

Billy:

Crossing the Rubicon

I liken this to be our jam song. It's recording is an improvised performance in which the only known variables are Adam's bassline and the various drum loops. Even then, Adam's bassline was subject to change at any time, although generally staying within the key. It was a real leap for us to decide to do a whole song like this, without planning out how the various parts are going to sound and such. At times there are a few chords I go back to, but for the most part I'm improvising for the entire performance, trying to make it match the mood, the lyrics, and the lull or swell of the tune at any moment.

This song got started in a neat way. When we decided to do this project, we were really interested in experimenting with different ways to write songs as a group. None of us really had any methods beyond the usual garage band way of doing things: bang your head against an idea until divine inspriation hits you in the face or, well... just keep banging your head. We were keen to be using methods unfamiliar to us (just about anything fit the bill), which we thought would greater inspire us and help us meet our deadline. Morgan LeMaître from The Meltdowns suggested that we look through some of the exercises in books she had from her creative writing classes in college. I started going through Author's Book Title, and soon skipped right to the section "Writing the Erotic", where there were some good samples, ideas, and exercises. I butchered one of the exercises down to all three of us freewriting on a sexual experience or experiences for some twenty minutes. It was slow going at first, but soon we all got pretty into it, which is the cool part about freewriting. Helps to cure any writer's block. Then we read our pieces out loud, picked out ideas and turns of phrase that we really liked, and Andrew decided that he wanted to make one big long sexy piece using themes and even lines from all three of our free writes.

In the end, Andrew had written this long piece that seemed like it was two distinct but coupling songs, spoken from the point of view of two partners. We broke it up and the first became "Call" and the latter is "Response".

Andrew's lyrics are really quite celebratory of human sexuality in general, and the hot sex specifically, and Adam and I wanted something that was very James-Brown-style funky to match: music for having sex. We jumped to the hand drums, cranking out variations of different funk beats while Andrew was scribbling away in another room and listening.

From there, Adam made a hot bassline, and I was just jamming over it. We had a few good jams, and then Andrew presented the final lyrical piece, and we created a kind of basic idea or map of how the song would go. It has peaks, and drop-offs, which is us trying to work with the whole ebb-and-flow idea that's popular with our jam band friends.

We didn't ever practice the song with Andrew, so on the night we had to record this song we just recorded some live takes with him, until we got a good one - I think the seventh or eighth. So the recording here is pretty much a live performance, except for the fact that the drums are programmed, and for the very last verse Andrew went back and redubbed his performance (everything else was so good on that take, that we didn't have the heart to do the whole thing over again and lose it all).

I don't often get to use wah pedal, because I find that more often than not it ends up being a pain in the ass and really messy, but every once in a while a song like this comes along where it works really well.

There aren't many secrets to tell about this song, it's fairly naked. I hope you enjoy listening to it as much as I do.

Andrew:

This was another really fun song to write. Bill found an interesting freewriting exercise and proposed that each of us try writing about a sexual experience for a certain length of time (I think the original prompt said the writing could be fictional or non-fictional -- to this day I still don't know if we all wrote about past experiences or not, and it doesn't matter -- but the final set of lyrics for the last two songs on the album have taken on both fictional and non-fictional feels. To me the lyrics read as if two people are describing confessions at a support meeting for sex addicts that may or may not have taken place in the past). We completed the freewriting and read our writing to each other. It was interesting to see how each of us approached the task from a different angle. After reading and listening to the pieces, we talked about the main ideas that came up in each, moved into our separate rooms (music makers in one room, I in the other), and I went through each piece with a fine-toothed comb to look for lines and individual words/ideas that I would use to create a new piece that combined the ideas of all three pieces. I loved writing in this way because I felt as though the few lines and phrases that I plucked from each piece acted as my anchor points as I wrote. Whenever I felt as though I was straying from a certain idea, I would look at the next line that I had cut from our freewrites, a line that I had mapped out and placed in the overall plot of the song, and figure a way to get back to an idea that supported that line.

The idea of an erotic call and response came from Bill's freewrite. He wrote this piece about people starting a conversation using physical and verbal call and response exchanges during a sexual experience. In Adam's piece, he explained that conversation and the feelings from which that conversation arises by coming up with the idea of bedroom payback, this idea of women taking advantage of men and dominating them as a way of turning the tables and getting revenge on man for centuries of believing in "expected domestic behavior" and other things of the sort. I took a line from Adam's piece about sweat rolling over a booby and used that for inspiration for the "mammary rollercoaster" section. I used Bill's image of insecurities falling and floating away from us like ashes from a fire. I took the idea of starting a conversation with a slap and contributing to that conversation by way of physical grabs and moans and shouts from Adam and Bill's pieces. Basically, this song was as fused as they come. This piece would be a lot less meaningful for us if one person wrote it. I think that the fact that this piece was born out of the actual lines and ideas from three separate pieces of writing makes it more universal and more applicable to the general public. If you tap a few minds as opposed to one (your own) when you're trying to write about human behavior, you run less of a risk of being mislead by your own individual thoughts about the world and stand a greater chance of nailing down some of those shared beliefs and the behaviors they spawn, the kinds that make good jokes universally funny and good tragedies universally sad.

I like the idea of "the realness of an 'Oh fuck' fuck" acting as a bug zapping outdoor light. People are sometimes drawn into this sexual realm even when they are too tired ("tired lovers holding onto tired waking moments") or really wish they could be doing something else. This pull can be a recipe for a heart attack for the out-of-shape and weak-hearted, it can lure busy parents with full 'To Do' lists into wasting precious time, and can lead to parental punishment and loss of trust for the teen who races against the clock to make use of an empty house, yet still, people are drawn to the bed sheets. "For the "Frankenstein fuck" I pictured a "fuck" (if it's possible to imagine an action as a creature) that had been electrified, a soft rumble and purr under the covers that sprouted monster truck tires and dried fans of mud spray, a "making love" that morphed into a "fuck" without anyone's consent or a moment's notice. I love the end of the piece and the way the image of "word barges" floating down "ear canals" leads into Response, the female response to this song.

Adam:

The lyrics from this song were pieced together by Andrew from three separate pieces we all put together about a particular sexual experience. Most of the words for this song came from Andrew and Bill's contributions, whereas my stuff was the inspiration (mostly) for "Response".

This is the one song that we actually attempted to do "live". The beat was kept intentionally simple to focus our attention on working up a really hot groove and making parabolic changes in intensity, playing off of each other's performances. Most of the time I sat back fairly cool on the bass, and let the other guys milk it for all it was worth. I'm very impressed with how Andrew (in only a few takes) was able to take his vocal lines and inject them with so much intensity! Also, Bill does some really incredible things, especially on the quieter parts and all the crazy shit he pulls at the end of the song. Like I said, I was fairly content to let those two just fucking run away with this one and it came out fantastic. In doing the mix of the song, I wanted the intensity to be really obvious so I compressed things pretty heavily and added a slight distortion on the outputs of the mix. The best part of this recording is how all the mics in the room picked up sounds from the instruments they didn't intend to pick up, so Bill's guitar, the beat and Andrew's voice can be heard bouncing around in the other channels on the mix. This recording is full of sweat!