The Songs of Silver Lake
Wednesday 16 April @ 14:07:37 |
 commentary from vic chesnutt & mark howard
1) “I’m Through”
Sample Lyric: “I’m through, through, through/Carrying you on my shoulders...”
Vic: “Well, this song is pretty old, I probably wrote it in 1988. And it had many meanings when I wrote it, several different meanings. At the time, I was trying to quit drinking. It was originally called “Pepe Lopez,” ‘cause I’d drink this kind of cheap tequila everyday. So I was singing to my—I don’t know—my nemesis, or my lover, Pepe Lopez, the liquor that I’d drink everyday. And also, I was trying to break up with the La Di Da’s at the time, which was my rock band. So this was kind of a song about our breakup, and also I was moving out of my house, I was kind of involved with these—my roommates—a kind of weird relationship. So it’s kind of a three-layered, three-tiered song, in that way. It all inspired that song, way back.”
Mark: “The first couple of songs are pretty much in the traditional Vic style, for most of his fans it will be kind of like, ‘Yeah, I get that.’ His lyrics, the tongue-in-cheek aspect, is what I really love. Just his perspective of where he’s coming from.”
2) “Stay Inside”
Sample Lyric: “Well, I guess I’m through stewing/How ‘bout let’s roll the rock away?/My bedclothes have gone all funky/I’ve got to get out of this cave...”
Vic: “That song came about when I got a visit from my friend Howe Gelb from Giant Sand. They were gonna be in Athens and were gonna be staying at my house, and I guess I knew I’d be playin’ with ‘em. And so I said, I gotta write a song for us just to jam on, so I wrote ‘Stay Inside.’ Just kind of threw it together. I knew it was easy, and it was kind of—I called it an atheist response to ‘Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door.’ And I meant it to have a couple of different meanings. One, a very explicit meaning in my mind, and one that could be kind of more universal, or not so explicit. One, the obvious case of ‘How about let’s roll this rock away,’ (referring to) Jesus in the tomb. You know, and then another one, speaking more metaphorically. But one explicit reference to Jesus, and one more metaphorical.”
3) “Band Camp”
Sample Lyric: “Once you soaked a tampon in some serious vodka/Wore it to school...”
Vic: “‘Band Camp’ is fiction. It is, I mean, I was in marching band in high school, and I did go to band camp, but the relationship between the freshman and a senior was all fictional, I don’t know where it came from in my mind or anything. That’s one thing I wanted in this record- once I realized it was going to be a band record. Which wasn’t my first choice, I wanted to make a kind of a lot more arty-farty, overblown, kind of orchestral, I wanted like, a big Van Dyke Parks, quirky kind of orchestral thing going on, and no pop songs or no kinda deal like that. Then when I realized, ‘Oh, we’re going to be making a live, in-the-studio-with-a-rock-band record,’ I started tearing down the songs to make a rock band record. So I wanted to do just certain kinds of things, and I wanted to get my good pop songs in there with a story, and I wanted to get some kinda heavy songs and some kinda funny songs, something for everybody. Not necessarily something for everybody, but something for all moods that I kinda do. That’s quite representative of all the kind of styles of my pop song writin’ that I do.”
Mark: “‘Band Camp,’ with the tampon line—it’s like, wow! He was worried that it might be too early to slap the tampon on people, but I was like, ‘Oh, it’ll be fine!’ I think if people don’t get it, oh well. It was great, everybody was really connected on this record, and it was great to see. Vic really had a blast playing. Maybe one of his high points of making a record, playing with such great people.”
4) “Girls Say”
Sample Lyric: “Girls say/I could use a backrub/And boys say/Why you wanna be a bitch?”
Vic: “I’m not exactly sure how that song came about in my mind, I think it was a funny concept for me to show what dicks, what assholes guys are, in a kind of a funny way like that. And it just kind of happened, I wrote it in about five minutes, it was really quick. And it just really works. It was perfect, but I didn’t play it for anybody for quite a long time, because I was worried people would kill me if they heard it. I’ve had people who come up to me at shows when I’ve played it and say, ‘You can’t say that!’ There are girls who do that. Even some guys say, ‘Boy, you’re gonna get in a lot of trouble for this!’ And then I immediately say, ‘You’re a fuckin’ idiot! You don’t know—you don’t get this song at all.”
5) “2nd Floor”
Sample Lyric: “If you want to see two circling swans/On the surface of the sewer pond/Don’t crane your neck where you are/You’ve got to climb to the second floor...short chore, great reward...”
Vic: “This song’s got a couple different layers of inspiration. Years ago, I had a roommate from China, and one of the fun things for us to do together is that he would take his book from college in China of ancient Chinese poems and he would try to translate them for me. His English wasn’t very good, but between us we’d bounce it back and forth, and he would describe these short poems for me. And I really enjoyed them, they were really an inspiration for me. One of the poems that he translated was a very short thing, something about how if you want to see the beautiful scenery, you have to climb upstairs, and it stuck with me for a long time. And then one day I was in East Germany, and I was driving around and saw these two swans on a sewer pond, and then I turned to the left and saw these giant slag heaps that looked like pyramids. And I just kinda scribbled down this song. And then I didn’t put it to music for a little while. It was all metaphorical, the whole song is rather metaphorical. And I love it. This is my favorite song on the record.”
6) “Styrofoam”
Sample Lyric: “Emotion drains/Like the contents of a cooler/My thorax is styrofoam...”
Vic: “It’s a reference to a cooler, a styrofoam cooler, and I’m not sure—this is kind of a rant, in a way, this song, a kind of a poetic rant. I’m not sure where it came from, it just kind of spewed forth. Often, on songs like this I’m working through a certain emotional feeling, and I concentrate—it’s not like I go into a trance or anything—but I concentrate very deeply on these kinds of songs, and it must fit perfectly like a jigsaw puzzle piece, or else it won’t make it in the song. And so it’s gotta fit several different kinds of criteria to fit in a song like this. For one, it’s gotta have the right fit, syllabically, it’s gotta have the right number of syllables. Or it’s got to rhyme, or have a certain kind of meaning that I’m looking for to satisfy this kind of scratchy- or itchy- urge that I have to say this, or convey this meaning, or several different meanings at once. This is from the early ‘90s I think, ‘92 or ‘93.”
7) “Zippy Morocco”
Sample Lyric: “Zippy Morocco with a hat on his head/Set sail for the seven seas...”
Vic: “This song is pretty old, too. It was written probably in 1985. This song is super old. This guy, Zippy Morocco, is a real person. He was a University Of Georgia football star in the 1950s. And I loved his name, and he had a realty office, he was a realtor here in Athens, and I just saw his name in the phone book and thought, ‘Oh, yeah! I’m not going to write this song about him—it’s not going to be his biography, but I love his name, and I’m just going to make a song.’ And I was reading back then in Rolling Stone or something, where Michael Stipe said he didn’t write songs with ‘I’ in it. That wasn’t cool or something. So I thought, you know what? I’m gonna write a song with no ‘I’ in it. At the time I did a whole bunch of these, and it just kind of happened to coincide with him saying that, these kind of weird, surreal character portraits. I was really into that at the time, surreal character portraits, and I did a whole bunch of ‘em. And this just happened to be one of ‘em. And I did this like a mini-novelist, I didn’t know where I was going as I started off. I just started off with that first line, ‘Zippy Morocco, with a hat on his head/Set sail for the seven seas/When his mother took to dead...’ and then I just kind of let my imagination take the story where it may.”
Mark: “When you start getting into ‘Zippy Morocco’ and ‘Sultan,’ the record kind of takes off on a psychedelic trip, and there are a little stranger aspects. And I think that’s where the record kind of peaks, through ‘Zippy,’ ‘Sultan,’ and ‘Wren’s Nest,’ that was a highlight, or a peak for me. We all sang on background vocals, but that’s pretty much a common affair. We got everybody in the room clapping and singing, it’s more of a party atmosphere, and it was great. I’ve been to Morocco, Marrakesh, and I kind of know that world quite a bit. And lyrically, how he says, ‘The sand on the shore does not spell out a hello...’ it was very much like—I know he’s never been there, but I got it from his lyrics. Daryl had also played with Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, who’s an Afghani singer. They had this real Eastern kind of chants in them, that ‘Ahhh-ah-ahhh-aahhh!’ So I got Daryl to do that middle section, during the breakdown it sounds like they’ve gone to Morocco with these Moroccan figures. It really captured the vibe, I thought. And Vic’s voice, on top of it, just kind of nailed it, I thought.”
8) “Sultan, So Mighty”
Sample Lyric: “I’m here because I am a eunuch/I am no threat/I am here to watch the ladies/And to fan away their sweat...”
Vic: “I don’t know what went on when I wrote this song. I think I just thought it’d be an interesting place to go to. An interesting place to explore. This person who The Man, or the power that be, cuts the manhood out of him, yet he retains some sort of—he still has an intimate, subversive relationship, with this threat of violence around him. I was hoping it had a more universal meaning, it definitely evokes this kind of deal. I mean, I’m singing in the voice of a eunuch who’s dealing with a harem and the Great Sultan is looming over him, and he’s in danger perhaps. But to me, it was more a tale of subversive action in the face of the powers that be.”
Mark: “For “Sultan,” it was all about Vic’s vocal. He was kind of afraid that he was going to sound stupid singing it. I was like, ‘Vic, you don’t sound stupid, I love this one, I love the way you sing in falsetto!’ And I really had to encourage him to do it. And on the demo, he’d done all the background vocals himself. And he goes, ‘I really wanna have some singers.’ So I told him I’d been working with these really great black women here in L.A., CC (White) and this other girl, and they’re amazing. And sure enough, I got them in, and wow! What a thing! And that’s a live vocal right off the floor for these singers. And it was magical, when we listened back to it, we were like, wow, we really nailed that one.”
9) “Wren’s Nest”
Sample Lyric: “”Oh, so horribly intensely I prayed/Let me evaporate/But the dying autumn leaves are beautiful too...”
Vic: “I was writin’ it for a friend of mine who died soon after I wrote it, I dedicated it to him on the album, John Ryan Seawright, he was an anthropologist and a local historian/poet here in Athens. And he was a big mentor of mine. It’s all these kinds of references to Georgia points, the Wren’s Nest was the place where Joel Chandler Harris wrote Uncle Remus stories. And there’s all kinds of other touchstones in there—Rock Eagle is a certain kind of ancient Indian mound where I went to camp when I was a kid. And then there’s the reference to these deer and things like that, and these other rural images, the owl and then this kind of empowering declaration of how ‘I have prayed to evaporate...’ but I guess, now, it’s in the past. You know, have prayed. It’s not like I’m praying now to evaporate, but I have prayed.”
Mark: “That’s the heavy song on the record, and the one that I think surprised Vic, in that it came out to be a rock song, and it wasn’t a rock song to begin with. The demo was softer, a folkier vibe. We took it to this strong, Led Zeppelin-y kinda like, ROCK track...and I think it really opened some doors for him, like, I CAN ROCK! I’m really proud of Vic’s guitar playing on this record.”
10) “Fa-La-La”
Sample Lyric: “Fa-La-La is running around/All over the grounds of the hospital/I would crank up the head/Of my hospital bed/Then I’d gaze out at the lawn...”
Vic: “Oh yeah, it’s a pop song, alright. It was fun to sing and fun to write. It’s kind of complicated for a pop song, it’s got some weird text in it, it’s a kind of weird, odd story to be in a happy pop song. It’s all fiction, I might’ve used some of my knowledge about hospital stays. But there was never anybody named Fa-La-La running around, and I never cranked up my hospital bed to see this chick running around.”
Mark: “We really ran with a lot of things, and everything we tried worked, which is one of those great surprises. And sometimes nothing works. And with Vic it was, ‘Yeah! That’s great, let’s go!’ He had the excitement built in, that was perfect.”
11) “In My Way, Yes”
Sample Lyric: “Do you think you deserve it?/In my way, yes...”
Vic: “I wrote it kind of quickly, just a month or two before we recorded this record. Oh yeah, this is a really personal song. And it was just a kind of little experiment that I wanted to work through. A kind of Greek chorus, asking a question and then answering it. There’s a couple of different things here that I refer to that nobody else would realize. There’s one Victoria Williams thing, I was on tour with her one time, and she was singing the song ‘My Ally,’ and she improvised this one line, where she originally said something about in a hug—a kiss and a hug—and she said a kiss and a rub, and I laughed my ass off. So I made a reference to that in there, as a kind of secret homage to Vic, who I think is a brilliant songwriter. And then there’s a lyrical reference to Lucinda Williams. In her song ‘Sweet Old World,’ she kind of makes a list of the things that make life worth livin’, and I always hated that song. I mean, I’m a big Lucinda fan, but that song, I always thought, coming where I come from—not the South, I mean, but where I’m coming from in my philosophy- so as a slap in my face, to say, ‘Fuck you, you cynical asshole,’ I kind of made a list of some other things that were worth living (for) like that, as a kind of, slap me in the face, shut the fuck up, you asshole thing. It was kind of an homage to her. So there’s those two references. It was immediately the last song on the record, it’s the perfect last song. Kind of like ‘Good Night’ on the White Album, I mean, how else are you going to end the White Album, and I was like, how else am I going to end this album?”
Mark: “That was one that wasn’t going on the record, and at the end of the day, we ended up saying, ‘You know, we need that song. That song is a big part of this record.’ And it was kind of connected to the front of the record, so we put it at the end of the record as a sort of bookend. That song is pretty much raw—what, four acoustic guitars?—I think even Patrick was playing one! And singing, which was rare. But it was one of those heart-felt ones, you couldn’t deny it, no matter what. We thought about leaving it off, and then kept hearing it and went, we can’t leave it off. I think Peter kind of pushed for that one to get it back on there. But at the end of the day it made it, so I was really happy.”
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