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When I was in high school my friend Scott inspired me to be emphatic.  He was one of the few people around who didn't seem to be afraid to express appreciation for pretty much anything, and he knew how to be happy.  I've never seen anyone scarf down eight taco bell tacos with quite the same level of enthusiasm, nor take a bite out of a raw stick of butter just because.  No project was impossible, either, including bizarre fashion videos and a skateboard ramp built from lumber stolen from a construction site.  But I digress...

It was 10th grade.  I literally decided to try to be like him.  It was a conscious thing.  Dispassion was for sissies.  Apathy was boring.  Life is about gratitude and enthusiasm. 

I'm my own guy, of course.  I don't know if Scott would write The Chatty Bandit, but maybe he would if he were into the sorts of things I am (those things in this case being Wedding Present-influenced guitar pop and a girl named L, I guess.)  Though come to think of it Scott was one of two people responsible for getting me into The Wedding Present in the first place.  The other culprit was Chris Drew, another person who is not afraid of feeling.

Anyway.  This one's tough to write about, and I didn't expect it to be at the time I penned it.  Have you ever acted kind of perfectly, or at least with perfect intention?  Have you ever appreciated somebody with no reservation?  Has there ever been somebody who just made you happy, for no particular reason at all?  Their mere existence makes you glad to be alive and around?  Somebody's whose foibles become something you are thankful for - just another way of making them stand out as who they are?  Maybe they really like cheeseburgers or sing a certain song in the shower (so they say) or have a bipolar relationship with thunderstorms.  In any event, it doesn't happen often, this appreciation.  Only with the best of friends, in my experience.  Family can be that way, but you know how families are.  A perfect friend can be at a perfect distance.  Close, but not so close that you start to resent them for not putting the cap back on the toothpaste tube.  And by perfect, I don't mean flawless.  I just mean perfect.  Exactly as they are supposed to be.  Any other way would be wrong. 

The Chatty Bandit made me happy just by being The Chatty Bandit.  She would cheer me up with her stories and secrets.  We wrote together.  I fell in love with her music.  I wanted to make her happy, just like she made me, and so I wrote this song.  I thought she deserved it.  It was only fair.  The least I could do.  The lyrics and feel and energy say it all, so I'm not going to rehash it.  It's there.  It's properly expressed.

There's nothing flashy about the production here.  Just a bunch of meticulously arranged guitars and some particularly amazing drumming from Daniel.  I like the "poke you in the stomach a little" chord at the end of the first chorus.  And the tambourine and cutesy lyrics floating above the bridge of destruction.  Oh, and there's a little subtle thing where I asked Pat to use the bass line from "There's no I in threesome" as a shout-out because El Bandita liked Interpol.

In the end, I'm glad that I wrote this song.  It's one of my favorite on the record, and so it's impossible to regret it, though sometimes it's hard to sing.  Aw heck, I'll even tell you a secret: The Chatty Bandit was Saucepants.

C'est la vie.

- Jesse Kates / Download our music for FREE

You're Out Of Luck is a song about fear, about this so-called "age of anxiety" of ours.  I'm not putting that in quotes because I think there's nothing scary about our times, nor am I trying to make fun of people who feel fear or worry, because like most people, I do my fair share of that.  Probably more than my fair share.  But a few things are clear to me, and these are:  1. There's always something to worry about.  2. There's never any point in worrying.  

So in a sense, this song is about how not to live.  The chorus is meant to be falsely reassuring, or ironic without humor, if that makes sense.  Consider: "You sit and watch the ticking clock.  Until it stops you're out of luck."  The point is, it's never going to stop ticking.  It's always ticking, or there's always a new clock to watch tick.  Whichever way you look at it, it's the same point.  The only real fix is to stop watching the clock.  Or to realize that there isn't a clock at all, and to watch different things.  Do what you can about whatever's worrying you, if there's something you can do, and then let it go.  Go lie under a tree in a park with somebody you love.

Some of the imagery was chosen to represent things that I don't like about our culture.  Like cul-de-sacs.  Modern architecture is designed for isolation.  Isolation with the wrong stimulus (CNN) leads to paranoia.  In our rush for privacy, we've created echo chambers, and we're often broadcasting the wrong things inside of them.  I love a good front porch.  Front porches lead to community and peace.  If you have to walk past your neighbors on your way from your car to your front door, you're going to say "hi."  Sooner or later, that neighbor may become a friend.  And someday, that friend might come to your aid in the least expected way.  

This song was an experiment for me.  I always try to write songs that I would enjoy listening to.  I appreciate the arrangement, melody and vibe of You're Out Of Luck.  It's well-executed.  It's cohesive.  But I don't enjoy listening to the song.  I almost always skip the track.  Does that mean that a song like this doesn't go on the next record?  We'll see.  I just don't want to be negative.  It's a thing with me.  I feel like it's my responsibility to be uplifting.  But more than that, it's what I want to do!

Production-wise, interesting details include Chad's use of an e-Bow to get that tornado-siren like effect over the choruses.  We took the e-Bow/guitar signal and ran it into a delay pedal, and I manually increased the delay time as we tracked.  For anyone who's played with a delay pedal, you'll realize that this causes the delayed part of the signal to detune.   So effectively, I was creating an electric tremolo arm and simultaneously increasing the echo intensity and detuning Chad's part as he played. 

I also love the drum sound here, and the crazy "ticking clock" effect that Steve put on the extra hi-hat in the choruses (chorii).  Fun stuff, maybe even a little 1970s. :)  Phase effects on cymbals always make me think of the 70s.  But I wasn't really listening, then, so that could be a poorly-informed stereotype.

What else...  oh.  We used a really cool Wright 5F6-A Bassman clone for Chad's primary guitar tone.  Sometimes we doubled his Vox AC15CC1 on top.  In other spots, we used a silverface twin w/tremolo engaged.  A few more words about the Wright: that thing sounds amazing.  I almost bought it two and a half years ago but I chose my Dr. Z instead.  If you want a great sounding and amazingly well-built tweed and are local to the KC area, check out Wright's stuff at Mass St. Music!

- Jesse Kates / Download our music for FREE

Boy!  It'll be nice when I get through this patch of darker songs. :)

Failing To Play Nice.  Let's see.  I'd hope the subject matter is obvious.  Honestly, I'd hope it's obvious in all my songs.  But let's see what I can add that might be of note. 

The story is half about me, half about somebody else.  The first half, the half about somebody else, was inspired by a true story that involved a child saying, upon his return to his mother's house from staying with his father, that "daddy loves me some, but momma loves me all."  That's all it took.  I had to write the song.  I think it's the first time I've ever written a song for/about a person that actually brought said person to tears the first time she heard it.  I'd say that's kind of cool, but I sort of feel bad about it, too.  I mean, is that a good thing?  Hopefully it is.  This is the weirdness of dark songs.  Is it better to write them?  Right now I think it is, though I've also decided that the next Sexy Accident record will be intensely danceable.  At least once we're done with this first new one... In Heaven.  Aw, hell.  I can't predict what'll happen.  But the SECOND new song, Now That She's Gone - that shit has a beat you can shake your booty by, no doubt.  But now I'm foreshadowing.

My parents got divorced when I was about five, though it wasn't 1980.  This is the strange thing about songs.  The facts are slaves to the song, and even to the sound of the song - to the phrasings and rhymes.  1980 rolls off the tongue like it needs to.  And the woman in the first half?  She wasn't 21 when she got married, either.  Does any of this matter?  Does it matter, also, that my two real stepdads had neither money nor aplomb?  One of them reminded me of shag carpet with cat puke on it, and the other had gone insane from too much exposure to xerox chemicals (my mother's theory.)  He vehemently hated the smell of parmesan cheese and yelled at me for liking his basketball trophies.

Anywho.  I sang this one in one take.  You can probably tell.  I'm glad we kept it, but it's hard for me to listen to.  It's certainly not picture perfect.  But I was upset as I sang it, and that's appropriate.  I was upset partly because of the song itself - it's very naked and emotional - but also 'cuz I was generally stressing about the recording at the time and it was one of the first songs we tried to do.  It's hard to sing a song like this with your back to a control room full of your band and a producer you've admired for a long time.  Plus, Black Lodge is great and all, but that place is a little creepy.  It's a former mausoleum, after all.  We might have even had a tornado siren right before the take.  I can't remember. 

Rewinding a bit, arranging Failing To Play Nice was surprisingly hard.  We tried a country version.  It was a song that got kicked around a lot, for months.  We played it during our acoustic shows, and it worked well in that format, but I wasn't sure it was a Sexy Accident song.  It almost didn't make the album.  We finally hit an arrangement that we liked (inspired by recollections of Steve's work with LOW on the Curtain Hits The Cast) about two weeks before we started tracking.  I *still* wasn't sure it was a Sexy Accident song, but we went with it anyway, and I've had a surprising number of people say it's their favorite track on the record.  Shows what I know!

Other interesting facts.  This song features the only significant use of my blue Heritage 535 on the record, last used as my main guitar during the early Whitford days.  Daniel Torrence manually manipulated a Ross Flanger and that Electroharmonix POG to get the crazy Star Trek IV slash whale-sounding guitar tone that you hear during the instrumental chorii.  That's one of my favorite effects on the record.  Oh, and maybe, just maybe, the verse drum part is a loop.  SHH!  See?  We're as bad as Metallica.

Next up: A Merry Christmas To You

- Jesse Kates / Download our music for FREE

This one's more elusive.  Kansas City can be cold and stark in the winter.  The trees are bare, which happens everywhere that has a real winter, but somehow the barrenness seems like a bigger deal out here than it did when I lived in the northeast.  I think it's the lack of hills.  There's just nothing to look at!  It's like if you ran fast enough and slipped, you could fly right off the earth.   And sometimes the ice sticks on the ground for weeks at a time, if we get a hard freeze. It turns black.  There are a lot of crows, too.  Especially in midtown.  Sometimes the skies are just flooded with them.  And it's spooky, to be driving home at sunset, watching these flocks of crows.

Sometimes stuff's broken.  Maybe it's at home, or maybe it's at work.  Maybe the hesitation (the kicking of fallen leaves and hands in sleeves) is because you worked all day and you looked forward to getting home and something suddenly hits you: a realization that there's nothing waiting for you there.  You don't know what you were so excited about.  Maybe you don't know why you're doing what you're doing, generally.  Maybe you're reaching out in various directions, and it's not panning out like you'd want it to, or the things and people you find don't fill the needs you were hoping they would.  Maybe they can't.  Maybe they won't.

But in the end, it's a season.  Everything passes, winter or otherwise.  Sometimes the best thing you can do is sit tight and ride it out.  Sometimes there's nothing you can do about it, whatever it is.  So just sit tight for a while.  Just sit tight and say goodnight. 

I like Chad's backing vocals here a lot.  And the rickety-sounding acoustic (me playing my Martin.)  I like the whoosh when the drums kick in.  That's a rain stick at the beginning, by the way.

Next up: Failing To Play Nice

- Jesse Kates / Download our music for FREE