I record a lot of slow songs, it's true, so much that one reviewer referred to the album's "hypnotic sounds and lullaby voices," but as a firm believer in eclecticism (or maybe just as someone with a short attention span) I like to mix it up. Rockets, the second song on Underhill Downs, is upbeat and happy. Like when you are falling in love, and you feel like you have rockets strapped to your feet, shooting you into the stratosphere.

The main thing I love about this recording is the spontaneity that was captured on tape. Capturing spontaneity is super tricky when you are recording, because recording is such a self-aware procedure. I think I've only really captured spontaneity when I wasn't taking the endeavor seriously. Like on Auspicious Moment, from Should Confusion. This keeps happening to me - I furrow my brow and try to deliberately write something really good, only to find that my half-assed dicking-around songs sound much more vibrant and fresh. I've gotten some comments that Auspicious Moment was a bit hyper compared to the rest of the album. Some people felt that it didn't really belong with the rest of the songs, and ruined the mood. Even more people, however, tell me it is their favorite track. Like I said, I like to mix it up.

The story behind Rockets:

One evening I was hanging out with a young lady with whom I was quite infatuated, and we were drinking contraband Cuban rum. She was talking about how her little brother used to write his own songs when he was 5 years old. She sang the chorus of one song to me ("take one vibe-eration, take another bloody patient") and I loved the nonsensical charm. I insisted on setting it to music then and there. She is pretty shy but I got one take out of her and then she wouldn't do any more takes. The key she had spontaneously started singing in was in between any of the notes of standard tuning, so every time I added an instrument I had to tune it to this weird key we were in. Now I needed lyrics for the verse. She had been telling me other stories of her early childhood so I quickly wrote some verses about her major events (launching herself out of a crib, not talking in preschool, knocking her teeth out) and then rhymed Mr. Pibb with crib, because who cares! We were just playing around, amusing ourselves. It now sounds like such a forced, arbitrary rhyme that it makes me laugh, but in a good way.

Later, I returned to the song and decided it was worthy of finishing, but it needed real drums. I called in Greg Thorne (formerly of M Headphone) because I knew he'd have just the right energy for this kind of drum beat and I was right.

Link: How I know Greg, or What Norm Coleman and Throwing Muses Have in Common

I finished Rockets gradually. Anand Nayak added some guitar at the Slaughterhouse. Matt Steckler (Dead Cat Bounce, Lavender Jones and the ---) came over to Underhill Downs and laid down some saxophone. We spent most of the session, however, putting flute and recorder on this medieval ballad called The Queen and the Potter which I thought was hilarious but nobody else was digging so it got cut from the record.

Matt also played saxophones on 3100 Miles from Should Confusion, and he's in the video, too. Any of you who are on an academic track absolutely must hear his song about grad school, topic for dissertation.

Mark Alan Miller composed the synthesizer parts and also helped me realize my favorite moment: simulating the experience of removing your headphones. We placed headphones on two mics that were set up like ears and recorded what was coming out of the headphones as we ripped them off and put them back on.

I think this song does a good job of capturing the giddy feeling of falling in love. On the chorus, it doesn't matter what the lyrics are, they are nonsensical, you just feel "whoopee!!!" to your core. And then you start learning all about someone's history, meeting their friends and family, and there is just so much newness! And you just dive right in. (Well, not always, but being guarded and wary as you start a relationship is not what this song is about. Go ahead! Knock your teeth out! Is more the spirit.)

This song has morphed a bit in live performance and it rocks harder and is really fun. Here's a version of Rockets from Piano's in April 2009.

lyrics to Rockets.

- Sep 8 2009