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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
White Collar Nomads
Author's Commentary
Adam:
It was early in the writing process and if I recall, Bill and I were standing in one room scratching our heads while Andrew was cooking up Genius in the other room. It basically descended into us trying a bunch of things we didn't like, and it got to the point where we seemed a bit tapped and Bill just wanted me to play Something Anything. I must admit that I had The Birthday Party in mind at the time, and as it turns out, if you slow down a Birthday Party bass riff to 3/4 its normal speed it sounds something like the main bass line in "White Collar Nomads".
I took great care when programming the drums to make them increase in intensity as the song goes on, and to incorporate all kinds of weird things like wood blocks, cowbells, tambourines and so forth. I wound up translating the bass riff to a synth bass and we actually worked off of that during intial recording of Andrew's vocals and Bill's guitar part. The bass might have actually been the last thing to get layed down on the first part of the song.
I have no idea at all where Bill got the idea for the absolutely bizarre honkytonk bridge, but I do love it and attempted to propose to it and father its children. The acoustic parts in this are wonderful, as is the alienbuzz guitar at the end of the second part.
The last part of this song was the single most fun thing to record ever. We were basically hunting around Bill's apartment looking for things to hit and clank and make noise with. We recorded an actual frying pan sizzle, scissors, a sink turning on and off, a microwave oven door opening and closing, a knife being sharpened, and some chopping. The sink was particularly fun, as I was in the living room barking out orders for Bill to begin recording as he fiddled with a sink. It was all very professional!
I took great liberty in the mixing and production of this song to make a few cuts and breaks and drop instruments in and out at my leisure. I wanted the hip hop feel to be apparant and I think that the cuts helped. I particularly enjoy the cuts during "The meetings started liked they always started" etc.
Our friend and coworker Bob Perriero joined in on the toast and screaming during the "Here's to John!!" part. We drank actual beer and got a little silly and screamed. If you listen closely, I think Bill is pretending to be an asshole talking about this girl he accosted last night. I scream like a redneck. I think I defnitely had Art Brut in mind when coming up with that part. That was one hell of a good time as well.
Andrew:
This was the first completely new collaborative piece that the group worked on and it was a shitload of fun to create. Because we had a short amount of time to complete this project before I left for Japan (about seven weeks) songs like White Collar Nomads were created quickly. This quick songwriting process was really fun to run with because it forced me to sit down and write to new music that I could faintly hear being created a few rooms away. For this song, I remember sitting there messing with rhyme and speed while listening to the beats and riffs Bill and Adam were creating in another room. It was interesting and relaxing trying out new reading rhythms to live music without the musicians knowing that I was listening in on their efforts.
Before we started lyrics and music for this piece, I told Bill and Adam about an article I read in the New York Times about a new, growing class of people in America called "relos," short for "relocators." This group is comprised of upper middle class business executives who are constantly relocating their families every few years to chase the American dream. In hindsight, I wish that I had cut out the article because I wrote a bunch of notes and phrases on it that I figured I could use in some future poetry piece. It basically profiled a few "relos" who talked at length about the pros and cons of living such a wealthy yet transient lifestyle.
The first section starts with the image of a wife alone at home while her husband is away on business. She hopes that he masturbates while thinking of her in Valentine's Day lingerie, but she's not quite sure he does. I could strongly picture the image of a woman staying in the race of it all with the help of her mother's encouragement and her steadfast focus on very distant, idealistic fantasies. The image of relos passing out at night rather than falling asleep is an image that is both subtle and powerful in suggesting the affect this lifestyle is having on the relo's psyche and overall level of health. I also like the idea of "assumed responsibilities" that is introduced at the beginning of this piece and later touched upon with the phrase "domestic expected behavior" in the song Call. Often, we are expected to assume certain roles in life. Students are expected to start careers after college, wives are expected to put more time into raising children, etc. What is the effect of these expectations? Often, people drive themselves crazy trying to meet expectations that were not even set by close friends or family members. Expectations are usually rooted in the beliefs of people who lived hundreds of years ago. Why then don't more people question and confront antiquated expectations regarding gender and race and age more often if expectations don't mesh with one's contemporary moral beliefs? If you honestly believe you are equal in value to your husband, don't accept skewed childrearing responsibilities that allow your husband to be exempt from lots of hard work. If you honestly believe that life is finely textured and is short and sweet, don't simply work some shit job for years on end because that is what people your age do.
My favorite section out of all of the different sections in the songs we created is the second section of this song, the one that starts with the line, "The meeting started like they always start...." I was a business major for my first two years of college and I worked a few marketing internships before realizing I was trying to put a round peg in a square hole with the whole business major plan. I saw backstabbing and emotionless working at both internships and this second section is about this sense of false comaraderie and contrived, instilled feelings of importance that business executives sometimes spin to coerce managers to carry out dirty work. Obviously not all executives partake in this sort of behavior, but when the dollar is the bottom line, people say and do things they normally would not dream about saying or doing. There's not much room for Scruples when Sales Rep and Monthly Quota crawl into bed for a power nap.
John's bosses make him feel needed so he'll do what they want, move his family all over the country, and feel good about devoting time to the company. I love the way the bar effects came out! Bill, Adam, and Bob did a great job on this section. I feel like the music and drum beats and the lyrics all fit together nicely in this part and it makes me tap my feet and bop around in my seat every time I hear it. I like the dialogue between John and his children in this section, the lines about ripping out baby roots (I was thinking of small octopus children (like baby minotaurs that have adapted to life in Atlantis) when I wrote those lines) and John's advice to John Jr. that reflects corporate/Old Boy's Club thinking: toughen up, wipe away that emotion.
"Well groomed Martians from outer space" nicely describes the landing of relos in new communities that "never spring up fast enough." I like the Martian analogy and this idea of aliens landing in a familiar, cookie-cutter community, because in some sense, these relos don't fit in anywhere else in American society. They need to live in new construction because they have no time to put a new roof on an old house or install that French drain the basement needs - their lives are dictated by choppy bursts of company-sponsored convenience. It's easier to shop at the new strip malls with familiar names and eat the familiar food of upscale chain restaurants because they greet relos warmly and ease the transition in each new suburban oasis after each new move.
Both new and old neighbors say "They seem(ed) so nice" when the family leaves and the family arrives. By both groups of people using the same line for both departures and arrivals, I wanted to suggest how similar and how repetitive all of the moves are. Also, different neighbors in different states and communities use the same line because, for the most part, these new communities are homogeneous and usually filled with white families or couples. I like the way Mark and Lisa greet the new family and the way Lisa judges how wholesome her new neighbors are: she sees blooming tulips and young boy playing basketball in the driveway. The name of the community "Greystone Cliffs" comes from an upper middle class community near my hometown called "Raven's Cliff."
I love what Bill and Adam came up with for the final section. When we initially tried this with a more uniform drum beat, it didn't sound as strong as the combination of sounds that they eventually came up with. It gives it a creepy feel and I like how the vocals shift and take on a sort of narration feel. I really like the image of a gossipy grape vine with visored white women for grapes. I remember laughing out loud when I thought of that image. When I was teaching, I was able to see how the mommies of rich students sometimes grease the academic gears of a school by sponsoring "toasts" for teachers at the end of the year and giving teachers nice gifts for Christmas and other holidays. Parents will write letters and huff and puff if their children do poorly in school. This unfortunately leads to teachers grading lightly and being afraid to dish out honest criticism. Everyone knows students adjust their academic output according to the level of work that their teachers expect them to produce. When the students know the teacher wants and expects to submit a list of A, B, and C grades for his/her students at the end of the term, they drop down to that level of performance that will most easily earn them a minimum of a B or a C. In Japan, the average grade students get on tests is 60-70% and students work extremely hard because they know there is no parental pressure safety net to force teachers to slide grades. If they fuck up, they get poor grades. Plain and simple. I used the last section of this piece to vent about a few of the ass backwards conditions that exist among certain groups of students and parents.
I like the idea of an unearned grade being a greasy stain on a report card. Too many greasy stains and it turns into a farcical document that is more oily and slippery than a fresh, oval, fast-food hash brown.
Billy:
This one just kind of grew out of us having a discussion before we got started one night; I was trying to provoke everybody and Andrew had this head full of neat beans that just connected. We knew we only had a few nights to write songs together, and we knew that on each night we needed to write a new song, and that it had to be good. It couldn't suck. Any lameness would not be acceptable. That's quite a bit of pressure! So we just started talking about what we had been thinking about, and that got us running, a long conversation ensued about life in northern New Jersey and how crazy everybody is here, and how dangerous it is just to get around, people literally clawing and running over each other to get to the top of a big pile of nothing. From there Andrew started talking about what he calls "White Collar Nomads" or "relos" - upper upper upper middle class people (the kind who got Bush's tax cuts) who relocate every few months at the behest of Father's corporation so that they can move up the social chain of corporate life. They are unmistakably a symbol of our local culture and were therefore a perfect target for our record; we wanted to describe what kind of lives people live around here, which in turn helps to describe our lives with them. At very least it makes for good story telling, as I think anybody can relate to the characters Andrew created.
As far as the music, the opening riff is classic for me - pretending I'm still a bassist. So the guitar and the bass together sounded a bit rage against the machine to Adam and I. Which is why the slide guitar break down is so necessary, but I'll get to that. For this part, I really love how Adam's bass part ended up deviating quite a bit from the guitar, making some really neat sounds. It was originally a synth-bass loop, but this is way better.
The break down: originally just written as the chords, with intent to drop the slide guitar on later. For most of the first movement until that interval I had intentionally backed off on all the guitar layering that I did on the first song (Target Market), as I wanted to give Andrew's lyrics way more room this time through. The slide guitar is tuned to an open F chord, and it was a real bitch to record, because I don't often play slide. It took me quite a while to nail down what the part should be and to actually play it on pitch. The final take is still a little off, but that's why I wanted the jangly slide guitar - so that it would be always just a hair off on some chords (at least with me playing the part).
So the second movement. "HEEEEEERE's TO JOHN!" That's actually Adam, me, and my roommate Bob recording some bar-room ambient discussion being surprised with cheer time, and then clinking bottles and beer glasses together so hard it's a wonder we didn't break anything. What a blast that was. We did it over and over again into two different microphones to make a real cacophony of people, and we're acting the parts of really vile people shooting the shit after work. I can't believe how well this came out, especially after Adam mixed it.
Later on in the second movement we recorded my acoustic, still tuned in Open F from the slide part, to do the lilting melody that accompanies and sympathizes with the sadness of the kids in Andrew's story. The lazer guitar that comes in at "They land from the sky ..." is actually the same acoustic in the same tuning with a bit of distortion, delay, a phase shifter, and an e-bow. If you're going to have ships from outer space, you've simply got to have lazers, and there's no point in arguing.
In this song I think I've done the least "jamming out" with the exception of those two solos, opting to really just work the grooves and let Andrew dominate the piece, let Adam rock out with the drum beats that are really well connected, and then mixing in spaces like a DJ cuts a record. Very hot.
The third movement. Our original idea for this part was that Adam and I would hammer away like crazy at some hand drums while Andrew recorded his part along with us (no click track/metronome). It ended up sounding like a big mess, and we figured, hell, let's just put the basic beat on and let Andrew work out a decent rythm for his lyrics, and we'll come back later and add the accompaniement. So the accompaniement for this whole section was recorded while Andrew was already in Japan (in August).
My original plot for this was to create the feel of Japanses Kabuki or Noh theatre, and from there we added a few other elements. I wanted Adam and I to be the nutballs in the pit who are clopping together hardened gourds and cracking away shakers to dramatize what the actors are doing on stage. Yet we have no gourds nor shakers (save some bottles from the medecine cabinet). Right away it started off with this layered mechanical sound concept. Do you remember those videos you saw in gradeschool, the ones about how Combines work or how cars are made, and how awesome it would be to work in an assembly plant? Many movies use the trick of one mechanized noise, layered over time with more and more noises in rhythm, to create complex rhythms (think Lars von Trier's amazing film Dancer in the Dark, featuring Björk's song "Cvalda").
I wanted to get that layered mechanized orchestra effect with around-the-house-cooking sounds. So what you are listening to there is Adam and I doing things like opening and closing microwave doors, turning on and off water faucets in time (took a few takes to get that right), chopping into a wood block, cutting with cooking shears, I don't remember what else. Oh,the CHICK! in the beginning is a beer being opened and the sizzle that follows was a precarious thing to record. It is Adam and I trying not to horribly burn ourselves as we hold a microphone over a pan of hot oil and toss water onto it! One must sacrifice oneself to hot burning oil if one is to make great things.
We didn't just sample the noises and then use a wave editor to put them in rhythm, oh no, that would be easy and therefore cheating. We are actually peforming the repetition of the noises to an ambient beat from the next room (causing a time delay for all things recorded in the kitchen).
Continuing on with our theatre pit orchestra theme, we are making noises instead of "playing" our instruments to dramatize certain lyrics, or using our voices. The "oooooooo" after "Greasy un-earned A's!" took a few takes to get right, and recording the vocal shouts was a lot of fun (you're hearing mostly Adam who has a much louder voice than I do).