William Caxton Fan Club

I am honored when people want to get tattoos of my stuff. I have a whole schtick about “let your tattoo artist help with the idea,” I believe in that, but whatever the case it is an honor for me to know that stuff I made meant enough to someone that they want to permanently have it with/on them. 

I didn’t write that song! It’s by Trembling Blue Stars. 

Sometimes we mosh, sometimes we stretch, sometimes we dance

sometimes we need some help getting dressed

sometimes we put on our own pants

sometimes we’re at 100%

sometimes we need to rest a little while in the tent,

but sometimes we mosh

my name is Daddy, I mosh with Roman when the day is new

if you come to say hi, we could mosh with you

but maybe it’s naptime, and we’re sound asleep

neither moshing nor dancing, just dreaming of sheep

but when we wake up, it’s on once again

fire up the boombox

turn it all the way up to 10

‘cause sometimes we mosh

sometimes we mosh

sometimes we inside skate, sometimes we outside skate

and sometimes...we mosh

There’s a storied tradition of bands naming themselves after lyrics from other bands/songwriters so that’s obviously an honor. The more obscure the better imo, like in the ideal situation it’s something nobody gets and so then when somebody says “Why is your band called the Mayers and do you mean Mayors?” you could say “no It’s a Sex Gang Children song called Mauritia Mayer, go listen to it it rips” only if the Mayers got really successful I guarantee the singer ends up wishing he’d picked a more boring name because he gets tired of giving this answer especially in an age where there’s Google. 

General rule “the more obvious and literal, the worse it is” applies here. If a band has a song that says “I knew the singer from Nebula Clubs,” then naming your band the Nebula Clubs is not so good, let fiction be fiction I think I’ve done this shtick here before but anyway. 

I don’t have a ready answer for this, even though I’m sure I do have one - I think Lear has some of the most stunning poetry he wrote, and like all past-and-future goths I love Titus even though it’s hardly top-shelf Shakespeare next to the heavier hitters. Of the historical plays, we dug deep on I King Henry IV in college so I have fond memories of that but Richard II, which I read on my own but didn’t make a formal study of, is one I remember fondly. 

Lots good to say about all the ones I’ve read, how can anybody not fiend for Hamlet, but Lear, you know…if you’re a Shakespeare person, I guarantee that if you make a practice of returning to “Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks!” every five or ten years, it’ll hit you a little harder every time. Like,

I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness.I never gave you kingdom, call’d you children,You owe me no subscription. Then let fallYour horrible pleasure. Here I stand your slave, A poor, infirm, weak, and despis’d old man.But yet I call you servile ministers,That will with two pernicious daughters joinYour high-engender’d battles ‘gainst a headSo old and white as this!

…the answer is King Lear. 

Well thank you so much! The way we usually work in the studio means that that wasn’t necessarily going to happen - I lost the ability to write musical notation (I could re-learn it I’m sure but it’d be a slog) when I stopped studying piano formally when I was young, so when I play in the studio, I’m playing from my own charts, which are chord names written in sequence on the cards they use in comic-book bags. Every take’s a little different, especially as a session progress - I’ll throw in different beginnings or whatever to keep myself anchored in the moment. (I envy the steely discipline and spiritual presence of session musicians who don’t need any of this romantic hoo-hah and who just keep playing until the producers get what they want.) I think that was a third or fourth take - or possibly a revisiting of one we hadn’t been able to nail the day before - and since the song starts with unaccompanied piano & voice waiting for the band to drop in, I had leisure to start it however I wanted. So I hit that note and it just sorta went I AM HERE, LISTEN TO ME and held it & I think the vibe of it translated to Peter & Jon too (the instrumental is live, I’m pretty sure the vocal is too on that one) and we got a take we liked.

So nobody proposed it -- it was spontaneous -- so according to me God gets the credit but if that’s not yr deal you can credit the band for delivering such a great take that the one with the opening note got the nod! 

Wild! No, I haven’t read it. 

http://www.sciencealert.com/a-fossilised-skull-has-revealed-when-the-last-siberian-unicorn-lived-on-earth

No, when I was younger I was a three-chords-and-the-truth guy. It’s a great stance to take for a while and a great stance to reject when that while has passed. I don’t trust anybody who holds the same aesthetic values at 50 that they held at 24: the whole point of having any aesthetic at all is to be continually interrogating it, questioning it, refining it, rejecting it entirely, etc etc. One of the things I judge myself for is not doing the complete reboot more often, but life’s long and there’s plenty of time, right? Right? 

You know, I didn’t know his stuff at all but I bought whichever one has “Hill Country Rain” on it at Zzzz Records in Des Moines....somewhere around the time I was writing AHWT & Tallahassee, so maybe? I don’t know his work ~that~ well, but some intersection might be there or not, I’m not sure!

This strikes me as a really good question, and I don’t know the answer to it. I feel like thinking about it for five minutes and then saying “I’ve got it!” would be exactly the kind of poseur stance I seek to avoid. It would wanna be a movie where the action level is low but the descents into serious emotional territory are really stark - that’s the vibe I was going for, writing it, something where the music is good & interesting & harmonically complex so that when the “Rage of Travers” lyric finally registers above the groove, it doubles its strength, the sadness of the guy who can’t sell out the Rainbow any more assumes the proportions that it already has in his head. As you can see, I think more in terms of tone & mood than I do actual plot -- the palette is more interesting to me than the shape. Tod Browning’s Dracula, maybe?