My Persona

 It's hard to believe that I released the song "One Line Epitaph" fifteen years ago and people continue to listen to it all over the world.  Every month I can see on Apple Music that hundreds of people are listening. That's just one platform. I'm on every digital music platform that I know of, so I imagine that there's many more out that. For some reason I am unable to track that particular song on Spotify or Pandora, but I imagine the song does well. That's not bad for an artist who hasn't toured in over a decade.  I haven't been able to do any promotions, but people are listening.  I don't know who they are, but they're listening. 

A couple years ago I discovered that an album that I had left for dead, Love and War Vol. 1, had managed to get over ten thousand spins. I had done zero promotion for that album, except to mention that it was out. That motivated me to release three albums since that discovery, and the most recent one Belief, a reissue from my band Satori, has shot up to the number two position after "One Line Epitaph." Again zero promotion. 

The idea that I could get so many people to listen to my music by doing nothing but putting music out there goes against the most basic laws of the music business.  It has certainly motivated me to put more product out there. I have had dozens of albums in various states of completion for years, but now I'm starting to finish them and put them out.  It's challenging, because while many people are streaming my music, streaming doesn't generate revenue.  

One might assume that I should do some more promotions, but I'm not so sure.  Not only can I track the number of listens, I know geographically where my songs are being listened to. I live in Louisville, Kentucky, and I was born here. I'm 48 years old.  That's a lot of friends, and a lot of reach, but Louisville is not my number 1 city. That would be Halifax.  At least on Spotify it is. Louisville cones in at number 10. On Apple music it's 19th after San Diego. I've never been to San Diego or Halifax.

This brings me (in a very meandering way) to the idea of a persona. We all have a persona or public self, which is distinct from our more private self.  For some, their persona and their private selves are not very distant.  For others, they are miles apart.  Personas are not necessarily crafted.  Young children have personas that they may not even be aware of, but their parent's have discovered this when their child's teacher describes behavior (good or bad) that the parent's have never witnessed.  Are we talking about the same child?

When I was much younger, I could easily be described as hypersensitive. I always felt most at east either by myself, or with a very close friend. I was a serial monogamist of best friends. Unfortunately many of them moved away.  I cried hard and often at feelings of rejection, inadequacy and embarrassment, but I discovered that I was less likely to feel this way if I wasn't entirely myself. Or more accurately, a different self. 

Our personas are not falsehoods.  They are our public face.  As I grew up I had the public face of a person with a lot of confidence.  I didn't need anyone's approval, so they couldn't hurt me. I didn't need to be accepted, because my acceptance was all that necessary.  This was true to a point. I was pleased with myself creatively, though in truth I didn't understand how I did what I did, and so taking credit for it seemed a bit like showboating. 

I was in high school when I started writing songs, and the key was always to get away from everyone and everything. This was fairly easy since I was usually the only one at home.  I had the run of the place, and I would find a way each day to get to a place where I could by myself and let my creativity run wild. If anyone intruded on my space, I'd have to stop what I was doing immediately. My magic didn't work, if someone could see me. 

On days when I wasn't at home writing music, I was doing theatre. Unfortunately, I was not a very good actor.  The only decent performance I gave was when I wrote the script.  I was pretty good at comedy, because it didn't require that I bare my soul publicly.  As a result, my public persona became more of a comedian.  Thus my public persona did not align well with the songs that I wrote. I occasionally wrote a funny song, but mostly I tried to write "soul" music. Music that was reflective of my deepest self. 

If you listen to one my early songs "With the Wind" you'll hear a song that is anything but funny. I was in the right space when I wrote that song. I had no fear of judgment, and no fear of anyone shattering my private space. As a result something came out of me that I could never have planned. It was more like the release of something. 

I was never able to craft a persona that matched my music, and I had no idea that I had a persona, so I never tried, but as I look at the numbers I find that there are people who know a deeper part of me, and they've stayed with me a long time, but for the most part, the people who know me don't listen to my music that much. You should never try to build a career out of playing for your friends, and I don't like all the music that they listen to all the time either. 

When my band The Navigators would be on tour, we would often stop in Louisville on a Monday, as a night off, so that I could hang with friends, but also because we'd be unlikely to fill a venue of any size.  We'd do better in Lexington or Asheville.  Though in truth, we never did all that well.  I could perform the music, but I couldn't play the audience. On some nights I would sing the songs in a way that surprised even me. There was a gig in Detroit that I just killed, and I remember that the lights were blaring, and I couldn't see the audience. Only now am I realizing that my sense of safety allowed me to reach into myself and to deliver on a whole new level. Sometimes when the audience is far away, and you're standing on a huge stage, you can feel very alone.  For me that was a good thing. 

It's weird. We're taught that to succeed you have to work very hard, and I did, but I have had more success in the past few years by doing nothing but letting the music speak for itself. If you think you know me, you should give my music another listen. To quite my most successful song:

So you say you know just who I am. 

But I'm afraid that you don't understand. 

How to Eradicate Covid 19 in One Single Step: Part One

 Obviously you need to get everyone vaccinated, right?  Or you need to get a large enough percentage vaccinated to where it doesn't matter. So what is keeping us from accomplishing this single (though not simple) step?  Why are people being so hesitant to what is necessary? I hear a lot of anger from my friends that is directed towards those people. You know, the people who just can't get their act together to do the right thing: poor people. 

No, I'm not making this up.  You can see the numbers here. I posted that in May, and I was surprised at how little of a response I got. Okay, I wasn't surprised at all, because nobody wants to hear/talk about poor people. Except that if we do nothing about poor people, we are all going to die.  It probably won't be the Delta variant, but I'm sure by the Omega variant, we'll be toast.  Poor people aren't going to kill us through malice- at least not their malice. 

This will be hard for many of you to accept, because you have likely bought into one of two narratives. The first is that individual freedom must be protected at all costs from the government.  The second is that if people were just educated, we wouldn't have these problems (global warming, racism, etc.) Neither of these narratives address the problem of poverty, and they aren't meant to.  The first narrative leads you to believe that all poverty is the result of personal laziness, and the second narrative suggests that poverty is a result of discrimination. 

The poverty line as a metric has its problems, and there are many who will attest that it misrepresents just how bad the problem is.  Still, 1 in 7 Americans lives below the poverty line, and you can only be okay with that, as long as have no idea how horrible our country is to people who live under that threshold.  The idea that one in seven Americans is lazy enough to warrant cruel economic sanctions is ludicrous, but this narrative can only exist in a world where the counter-narrative (that discrimination explains poverty) thrives.

When you look at the numbers the problem can seem crystal clear.  According to the Urban Institute, 18.1% of Black non-Hispanic people live below the poverty line versus 9.6% of white non-hispanic people (and hispanic people are worse off still at 21.9%).  Those are stark contrasts indeed, but it's important to note that that life is horrible for that 9.6%, and you can't explain that horror by resorting to discrimination. The real reason so many white people live in poverty is the same reason every other group is in poverty: they were born into it.  

There are no doubt many advantages to dividing up society by race when poring over statistics.  One cannot escape the reality of discrimination, but having achieved that knowledge, I recommend that you continue to consider the statistics from other perspectives, because when you begin to look at the raw numbers, you start to see a very different story.  Roughly 17.1 million (5.2%)Americans are white and poor versus 7.2 million Americans (2.2%) that are black and poor, and 12 million (3.7%) Americans who are Hispanic and poor.  Then you add all the numbers up and you get about 45 million people in poverty.  

If we could create poverty parity amongst all races, we would lift about one third of all people who now live in poverty out of poverty.  That would be an amazing accomplishment, but if we could do that? Why not lift everyone out of poverty?  Well, the big reason is that it would require a radical reformation of our economic system.  One of the appeals of the discrimination theory of poverty is that you don't have to lose the winners and losers economic system.  You just have to live with 1 person in 10 falling below the poverty line. 

Now don't misunderstand me.  I'm not arguing that we can stop worrying about race, because the issue at hand is a class problem.  When I took an African American philosophy in graduate school I learned the painful truth that when society speaks theoretically in universal truths ("all men are created equal"), they are not universally true in practice.  So I'm not arguing we replace our focus on race with a focus on class. I'm saying we need to add to our focus on race by looking at class. Otherwise we will end up with a stated goal of eliminating poverty that will value the elimination of white poverty over all other forms.  

A Night at the Roundtable

Once upon a time in college, I started a theater group with my friend Scott.  We called it Roundtable.  Just like King Arthur's Round Table, the idea was that there would be no head.  It was a collective. There were already theater groups, so ours had to have a different angle, so we chose to make it about putting up original theater.  This reinforced the idea that we wanted everyone to have their voice heard. We would create a platform that allowed artists (some good, some not so good) to develop.  We weren't going to decide what was good or bad, but let the audience decide. 

So, we made announcements, and put up fliers.  There was a lot of interest in our group, which was great.  Unfortunately, when we organized our first writers meeting, only one other person showed up.  I'll call him Wolfboy, because I honestly can't remember his name, and that later became his nickname, which I hope if he ever reads this that he's okay with that. He had an idea for an experimental shadow play. He described it as an epic poem about a man who has sex with a woman and then kills her. This sounded like it could be really awesome, or horrible, but it was unlikely to fall anywhere in between, and given that he was a freshman, I suspected the latter was the most likely scenario. Of course, Scott and I weren't going to make that decision for the audience. 

Scott and I both had short scenes, but that wasn't really enough for an evening, and there seemed to be a lot of people who wanted to be involved, so of course we told Wolfboy that he could do his play. So Scott and I concluded that if the writers weren't coming to us, we would have to go out and find them. 

Somehow we rounded up two seniors, John Stinson and John Roberts, and they really helped Scott and I take the evening to the next level.  They were writers, and they also helped bring in even more talent. They were wizened veterans to Scott and I's brash upstarts.  By the end of our open auditions, we were really excited about the direction the evening was going to take. There was a little concern about one of the pieces, though. 

Jen Sampson (John Roberts then girlfriend, and now wife) wrote a piece about which my grandmother (who later saw the production) described as having "very colorful language", which was a complete understatement.  One of the characters in her piece was a drunken frat dude, who spoke in the foulest, crassest language imaginable.  For a moment, and only a moment mind you, we worried that we might need to tone it down.  But we quickly got behind the piece, because censorship is bad.  And since a woman wrote it, we figured our bases were covered.  

At any rate, we were very excited about the night after the auditions. John Roberts described it as when you go and see a local band, and discover that their really awesome.  

A few weeks into production, things seem to be going smoothly.  I had a weekly radio-show on the local radio-station, WKCO, and I used it as an opportunity to promote the upcoming production.  I invited the playwrights to come on different nights to help promote the show, because we took pride in our absolute lack of shame in self-promoting.  One night, I had Wolboy on.  He had kind of fallen off my radar, because he managed to cast his piece himself, and he was kind of a producer's dream, because he was handling all the details himself. This later turned out to be a mistake. 

I definitely noticed a few themes in his writing that night.  There were  a lot of wolves, and a lot of references to women being impaled.  He even had images in a sketchbook, which were pretty gothic and graphic.  I think the case could be made that some of the poems, and sketches were misogynistic, but he really didn't cross any lines that I could see.  Although, I should say that that particular radio show generated my one and only call-in at WKCO that year when someone called to say, "I think y'all are a bunch of fuckin' psychos."  And that was a guy.  

At any rate, the night of the show was coming up, and we needed to have a few run-throughs.  Everyone had been rehearsing the individual pieces separately, and now we were going to see what we had as a whole.  It was an exciting moment, because it turns out we had a pretty awesome show on our hands.  I already had a good feeling about the writing, but the acting was phenomenal.  How'd we string together such talent? 

Now Wolfboy's show posed some logistical problems.  He was doing a shadow play, which required a sheet across the stage (which was tiny), and a lamp to project the shadows on the sheet, and the actors were going to be naked, and because there were no dressing rooms, timing became very important.  We were afraid of losing momentum with a long set-up and take-down time, so we had a few options.  We could do it at the end, which was kind of out of the question. We weren't going to give the freshman the closing slot. The show didn't really need an intermission, but we had to consider that option. Or we could open the show with a shadow play.  Bottom line, we needed to see the play in its entirety to make a decision.

For our first run-through, we hadn't decided where the pieces would fall, so we did the shadow play at the end.  I had been right.  The play could have been really awesome or horrible, and it turns out that it wasn't really awesome.  This had me leaning towards having the play be an opener, because I worried that if we did it before an intermission, people might walk out.  Scott and I were hemming and hawing on the order at that point.  The program had to go to the printers, which meant that we had to decide on an order.  It turns out that the order didn't matter, because the play was found to be so offensive to about half of the actors and writers, that they were contemplating walking out of the production. 

I was floored.  I had invested so much of my time and energy into this production, and I knew that it was going to be a hit, but until that point I had simply seen that shadow-play as an imperfection in an otherwise great evening. Now it was threatening to derail the whole night.  I figured that there had to be a compromise.  The offended side (largely led by Stinson) argued for making a statement that they did not condone the piece in any way. This seemed reasonable to me.  Fight free speech with free speech. But then David Skinner (one of the actors, and the only one to advocate for Wolfboy), argued that such an approach would be a betrayal to the spirit of the night.  He had later argued that he didn't really like the play, but argued for its inclusion on principle. 

At some point Scott and I were asked what we thought about the matter, and Scott looks at me as if to say, "Would you like to jump on that grenade or shall I?" So I  have been under a lot of stress and I give a big speech about how stupid everyone was being, to demonstrate that I wasn't really taking anyone's side, and then said that the shadow-play stays in the production, and thought that that was the end of it. 

The next day- the day of the production- I get called into the Head of Student Activities Office.  She's the one who's job it is to make sure that none of the groups on campus are engaging in human sacrifice, or anything untoward. I'll call her Mrs. Desz, because she reminds me of my friend Samantha Desz. Someone from the production had given her the details of the play, and she informed me that she wasn't entirely certain, but that it might be illegal, because we are charging money and there was nudity.  She made it clear that allowing the shadow-play to go on would jeopardize Roundtable's funding, and we might lose our status as a club on campus.  My every interaction with her had been very friendly up until that moment, and she was saying in so many words, "I want to be your buddy, but I just drew a line in the sand." In hindsight, I can see why there was a new Head of Student Activities every year.

Now I had to and tell Wolfboy that we weren't going to let him do his play.  So Scott and I got together with Wolfboy, and we explained the situation. We could make the case that it was the college that had come to the decision, but I realize that Mrs. Desz hadn't actually made that call, she was pressuring me to make the call (and that was a big mistake), and I also recall that there was uncertainty about the matter.  Could the actors be considered naked, if you can't see their bodies?  Really we were taking about the shadows of naughty bits- not the naughty bits themselves. But ultimately, the solution was to side-step the nudity question altogether and focus on the payment question. 

Now there was no chance that we weren't going to charge.  The last production we had done, we had managed to make money for pizza and beer, and I figured that we would have a helluva blowout after this one given the size of the cast and crew. But what if we had the performance as planned- without the shadow-play? We could then allow everyone to leave that wanted to, and anyone who hadn't paid, could enter at that point and see the production for free.  Wolfboy was happy with the arrangement, and agreed that we would only have the shadow-play for one night, because really he just wanted his group of friends to see it, right? The people who had been offended by the piece were okay with the arrangement. How could they object? The show was technically no longer part of the same production.  Scott and I were okay with it, because we had provided a platform for new art, as we had said we would without editorial interference. 

Now Kenyon College is a small school, so by opening night, it seemed like everybody had gotten wind of the controversy, and there was quite a crowd.  We sold out, and when the production was over, a crowd came in- standing room only- to watch the shadow play, which my play-writing professor, Wendy MacLeod described as "a unique instance of flaccid lovemaking," which is a good metaphor for the entire experience: a lot of foreplay with no erection.

I was called in to see Mrs. Desz, and without any formalities she said, "So I hear he did it anyway," and she gave me a withering look that said, "I had better not get fired over this, but it might be my own damn fault." So we had gone ahead and done it, and we were ready to face the music, but ultimately nothing happened.  Maybe she accepted our explanation, or maybe nobody felt it was worth their time in the administration to pursue the matter further.  

I've often looked back at that episode in my life, and it's one of the few times that I have no regrets.  I think to myself, Wow. I did that. And it's not because I stood up for the principle of free speech. I think free speech is good, but contextualization is sometimes necessary. It's not because I helped put on an evening of great entertainment, though I did that.  It's because I got to be a part of a great process, and work with great people who produced great results.  And we did so, by letting everyone's voice be heard.  And when we disagreed with each other, we didn't meet each other halfway, because to do so would be to betray our principles.  Instead, we came up with a creative solution that was on no one's radar initially, but became apparent only because we had exhausted all our other options. We worked our asses off, and when it was my time to shine, I stepped up and did my part, because that is the very spirit of democracy. And if you think this story is about a college theater group, you might have missed the point. 

Still, I can't help but wonder: who told Mrs. Desz about the shadow-play in the first place?

Satori: Dream Transmission

 

The last song that I wrote for the album, "Dream Transmission" was the calm after the storm.  I was living in Old Louisville at the time in an apartment on 4th St. I only lived there for a few months, and I would often go to Anthony's By the Bridge to play at Danny Flanigan's open mic on Mondays or Tuesdays, so I was always in a songwriting state of mind.  My on again off again girlfriend was off and in Pittsburgh.  I was very much alone. 

I think the song began with an image from when I was in middle school, and we would drive out to Long Run park in the early morning or late at night to catch sight of Halley's Comet. The idea was we needed to get far away from the light pollution of the city.  I wasn't all that interested in looking at the comet.  Instead, I remember being fascinated by the radio tower with its red blinking lights.  Something about how radio worked reached a deep part of me going all the way back to when I was a young child and I would use the sleep function to listen to radio as I drifted off to sleep at night. It was always strange to think that there was someone on the other end of the transmission. 

I've often wondered how I wrote songs.  Some songs take a long time, but not to write.  They talk a long time to be born.  It's as if I become aware of them long before I ever write them down.  It always felt like I was an antenna and receiving signals from somewhere else, only I wasn't a very good transmitter myself.  I had/have a hard time reaching an audience. It's not a new experience for me.  It seemed peculiar that I really wanted to chase a dream of being a performer, when I had a hard time finding an audience. 

For all the dreams that I set loose, their ain't nothin' comin' back. 

***

The song was/is real easy to play, if you are in the right mood.  It's pretty much all mood.  I think we did it in one take.  Matt's soloing was live and not overdubbed, which worked out great, but not how one usually records a guitar solo.  Andrew Lee and Brian Gager (our producers) were really thrilled about the song.  

Unfortunately, we did not record the vocals until later, and the flu made it a real challenge. I really strained to hit the notes on that one.  When we were getting ready to remaster the songs, I was going to see if I could overdub another lead vocal on top of the other- because we had not way of mixing out the original take, but Andrew Lee talked me out of it saying:

Perhaps I have an emotional attachment to the way we cut it, and I know you were getting over the flu and your vocal performance overall was not what you might have wanted it to be, but there's also kind of an emotional intensity to the vocal that I think really plays well into the tune, with its themes of desolation, isolation, loneliness, etc. The bridge is one of the most intense parts of the song, and your cracking wails really play into that angle.

That's when you realize how lucky you were to have such an astute and articulate producer in your corner.  I thought both Brian and Andrew helped take the recording to another level. Sadly, Brian passed away several years ago.  I really appreciated his honesty and occasionally I appreciated his persnickety-ness.  If he didn't like it, he simply wouldn't put up with it.  Both Brian and Andrew were at Carnegie Melon focusing on composition, and their trained ears came in really handy over the course of the recording. 

With Brian gone, Andrew did double duty helping to resurrect and remaster the songs, which brings me to the third part.

***

Twenty-seven years had passed since Satori had recorded with Andrew and Brian.  Our masters were on DATs, which fewer and fewer studios can play back for you.  I have no idea where the "original" masters are, but we did have copies of copies. At any rate, we did not have a perfect copy of "Dream Transmission."  It turns out that the best version that we had, had some horrible digital noise towards the end.  Analog distortion and noise can sometimes be nice, but digital noise is horrible, and that meant the only ending we had was from an analog cassette. 

While losing a pristine copy of your original recording is bad, this became an opportunity.  For years, I had always heard backing vocals on the song, and a section towards the end where the song would move transmute itself until returning to its original incarnation, so I saw this as an opportunity.  I added some acoustic guitars, and other sound-effects to bridge the gap from the original master to the casette version.  

If you were a fan of the original recording, I hope this version isn't too much of a departure, but adds a little something that makes it worth listening to again after all these years. 

Satori: When the Well Runs Dry

 

Most people who have listened to my music know me as Dewey Kincade or as a member of The Navigators.  While I was in Satori, I wrote several songs that I later released that were firmly in the singer-songwriter genre- "Christ, I've Done it Again", "Learn to Suffer" and "Lost and Found."  The entire album that I released last year, Victims of the Moon, was entirely composed while I was in Satori. Of course, at the time, Satori was my only outlet for my songwriting, with the exception of the occassional solo acoustic performance.  

I wrote "When the Well Runs Dry" when I was living in New York with my room-mates Nick and Tonya.  I was twenty years old, and I had moved to New York City, largely because I didn't want to go back to school, but also because I wanted to be near a woman I had fallen in love with (a theme that would happen again and again).  

I lived on 29th St. between 3rd and 2nd ave.  I was working at a place called New Dramatists, which was a playwrighting organization.  This was at a time when Times Square was still seedy.  I got to sit next to Edward Albee for a performance of The Marriage Play.  I got to meet Sigourney Weaver and Olympia Dukakis.  At one point, I found myself running sound for an off-off broadway production.  The sound cues were all on cassette.  Once a week I would take a figure-drawing class at Fordham University.  How I managed to pull all of this off, is a bit beyond me. 

Of course, the only thing that mattered to me was my girlfriend, who didn't seem to feel that strongly about our relationship.  So I wrote "When the Well Runs Dry."  It's a pretty conventional song, and the choral refrain has been used for generations, and I think there are at least a half a dozen songs with the same title.  This seemed like an unlikely candidate for a Satori song.

I moved back to Louisville in the New Year, and I set up shop in Old Louisville.  I worked at the Kentucky Center and took some classes at U of L.  I had a lot of music in me, and not a lot of outlets, but Danny Flanigan had an open mic every Monday, I think at (then) Anthony's by the Bridge. My girlfriend and brother would also frequent, and it was a nice weekly place to showcase music.  I met a lot of song writers there like Dan Killian, Butch Rice, and Kelly Wilkinson. I began to see that there was a lot of talent in Louisville, and I wasn't in such a hurry to get back to New York. 

So I began playing "When the Well Runs Dry" and I got a lot of positive feedback.  A lot of people I respected seemed to dig the song, so I began to think that I had to make it part of my band, but it really didn't fit into our sound.  Still we worked it up, and I was surprised that the band was amenable to it as they were.  We would go into the studio just a few months later, so the song was only few months old when we recorded it with Andrew Lee and Brian Gager.  The song was so new as an arrangement, I didn't really hear what we had until I was listening back to the recording. I really loved Matt's guitar part.  

For me, the song makes me think of a brick wall, because the apartment I lived in in New York had an exposed brick wall, and I remember playing it at an open mic night in Louisville at the Rudyard Kipling- which was right by my apartment in Old Louisville.  

Unfortunately, I don't think I did the song justice when we initially recorded it.  I had come down with the flu, and being able to sing was a real challenge.  For the longest time, the strain in my voice bugged me, but listening back, I actually like it.  It gives the song emotional depth. 

Satori: Mercy

If you haven't heard the song "Mercy", then you should brace yourself.  It's thirteen and a half minutes long.  Now, I've written long songs in my life, but this song never succumbed to the problem that many long songs succumb to: they're boring or repetitive. It's a bit weird having one of your best songs be so long.  There weren't a lot of ideal opportunities for playing the song live.  Which is too bad, because it's not only one of my best songs, it may be one of the best songs period. Yeah, I said it. 

First, let me make a recommendation.  At the end of your day, instead of watching Netflix, put on your headphones.  Clear your head for a few minutes and meditate on the silence, then press play.  I promise that you won't be disappointed.  Go do that before you read any further. 

See? I wasn't lying. Okay, so the first thing I want you to know is that the four of us did that live in the studio without vocals.  We just had to remember where we were in the song as we played through the entire thirteen and a half minutes.  

***

So I wrote "Mercy" when I was 20 years old.  I had finished my second year of college, and I would not be going back any time soon.  I had a lot to process, and I don't need to go into details (that's another album entirely), but I left school feeling like a villain. At Kenyon, we lived a pretty sequestered life, but occasionally images would filter in from the outside world.  One of the enduring images was that of the compound in Waco, Texas burning down as it took the lives of the Branch Davidians inside.  I can't say that I had been following the story closely, but when I watched the footage in April, it felt quite surreal. 

The song "Mercy" was about a standoff.  It was also about a group of people who were cornered, but while there was some inspiration from real life, it wasn't exactly about Waco.  "Mercy" was more of a Western.  The song is about what happens when you can't run any further. If you want to know peace, you have to stop running on and on. 

Musically the song has a lot of influences.  Fugazi, sure.  And a little bit of Slint, but frankly, the song is better than Slint.  Yeah, I said it.  I'm going to have my Louisville underground license taken away for good, which is fine, because they never really liked me anyway.  

***

So we managed to record the song with the band playing the song live, but the song was far from over.  First, Andrew Lee and Brian thought that the middle part needed some rhythmic glue.  It wasn't really clear until we had started trying to mix it.  We had run out of tracks, though, so they had to trigger the percussion track live every time we tried to mix it.  

Another problem was the vocals. I was having a hard time hitting the notes, because I had gotten the flu while we were recording.  One solution was to sneak in a flute solo that was playing the melody that I was singing, which added another layer of complication to mix-down, because Brian played the flute solo live everytime we mixed it down.  And of course the song was 13 and half minutes long, so if we messed anything up, we had to start over.  At one point, we felt we had gotten the mix we wanted, but we were listening back and we had to go through the whole process again.  

Fast forward thirty years.  I had always been unhappy with how my vocals sounded. As we began remastering the songs, I decided to add some backing vocals- which I had been singing along with for decades.  I was fortunate enough to be able to bounce the idea off of Andrew Lee, who approved, and so we went ahead and added vocals to a song that I had recorded when I was 21.  

Satori: Mercury

There are a lot of questions about "Mercury" , like what the title has to do with the song.  As engrossed as I was in mythology, the title has to do with the element, though I can't tell you precisely why. This was a period in my songwriting, where I wrote on the edge of consciousness.  The song sprang-forth fully formed like Athena, and I sang it with conviction, but what does it all add up to?

Bands like Slint and Fugazi had seduced me with their lyrical opacity.  I don't know if it was the goal to bury meaning in obscurity, but that was certainly the effect.  At any rate, I strongly recommend that you try to unravel the meaning of the song, because I feel you would be rewarded for doing so, but I don't think my doing so would be any help...

When the band first started playing the song, it was loud and aggressive.  When we went in to record the song for the record Brian and Andrew gave our arrangement a thumbs down, so the night after we tried a take of it, we sat around with acoustic guitars trying to re-arrange it.  I guess we liked the vibe of the song on acoustics, because that's how we recorded it the next day.  

We began tracking the song by recording a layer of shaker tracks first, which in retrospect was a little crazy.  While the technology existed, we didn't record any of the songs to a click.  Brian may have tried to get us to do it, but we didn't think we needed it, and I think most of the songs were well-rehearsed enough that we didn't need to (and didn't have time to) record tracks one by one anyway.  

At any rate, after we got our shaker tracks, we recorded the guitars and bass, and then added Dan playing just toms on the track.  All the vocals were recorded later (which turned out to be a bad idea, but I'll get to that in another post).  At any rate, a good song can't be tied down to a particular arrangement. 

I sit in my rooms and I plan my riots

I know the walls are coming down soon

I burn a candle, my only diet

I lay my soul to the bludgeoning tune

There is a voice in the empty quiet

Beyond the stars, beyond the moon

There is a pull, and I won't deny it

Pulls off my flesh and opens my wounds.

Here is my hand, it's an invitation

To escape this grip that's dragging us down

Make no mistake: this is no liberation

We won't embrace that risk-free sound

You must abandon that familiar scene

Open your eyes, 'cause there's no going back

Don't imagine the break will be clean

Tonight's the night, we begin the attack.

You say you don't care, but I know that it's there

The lingering beast that cries for release

The answer is clear, your imprisoned by fear,

'Cause it's bigger than you and it's bigger than 

You say you don't care, but I know that it's there

The lingering beast that cries for release

The answer is clear, your imprisoned by fear,

'Cause it's bigger than you and it's bigger than you

Tonight's the night the struggle commences

And tonight's the night, the struggle will die

It's nothing more than an attack on the senses

But don't be afraid, 'cause you understand why

It's all a part of the tension you feel

It's the last time you'll be able to choose

Let it sink in and know that it's real

Give it away, you've got nothing to lose

You say you don't care, but I know that it's there

The lingering beast that cries for release

The answer is clear, your imprisoned by fear,

'Cause it's bigger than you and it's bigger than 

You say you don't care, but I know that it's there

The lingering beast that cries for release

The answer is clear, your imprisoned by fear,

'Cause it's bigger than you and it's bigger than you.