So full disclosure I run a record label and I’ve come to an agreement with Blood Makes Noise to let me promote releases every week. The idea is every week I will present a playlist with some new Mint 400 Records music and what I think inspired our songwriters. This week it’s pretty easy for me to get inside the head of the songwriter because it’s me. It’s a little weird to write about my own music but I’ll give it a try anyway.
The first track here “Strange Tourist” was more that I came up with the lyrical content first. Like I knew what I wanted to say, which this is a song about a person who is out of their element, an impostor trying to fit into a place where they don’t belong and getting angry when they are recognized as being incompetent. Musically immediately my band said this kind of sounds Smashing Pumpkins-ish and the opening riffs are the same kinds of chords that the song “Drown” starts with. I would say this song mixes elements of Silversun Pickups, lots of 90’s stuff, especially the keyboards to me are a mix of Weezer and OK Go. We actually in the recording session used the song “Get Over It” by OK go as the reference for how we wanted the keyboards to sound.
Next the track “Love Like Razorblades (For Twin Band)” was an attempt at 50’s-60’s throwback structure mixed with power pop like Fountains of Wayne. I had written a handful of songs like this and I liked this one the best because of the Pixies-ish break before the chorus each time. Lyrically I came up with a chorus while thinking of my feisty 5 year old who shows love like a cat, she’s only interested in your attention when she is being ignored but never any other time. So I devoted one verse to each daughter of mine. The reason for the “Twin Band” designation is that is the name of my daughters imaginary band they hope to form some day, by the way, they aren’t twins.
“House On Fire” was one of the later tracks to be written for this album and it came along because we threw away another track we were working on. I told the band I really want to write something in the vein of Tom Waits “Jockey Full Of Bourbon”. So I kind of figured out the chord structure of that song and just started there. As I prodded and re-wrote it started to take shape and moved pretty far away from the initial inspiration. I did love the line “hey little bird fly away home, your house is on fire, your children are alone”. I wanted my lyrics to reflect that sentiment of a house on fire representing society having a melt-down. Originally when I wrote it one of the bands on the label, Reese Van Riper had an album called “Electric City” out and the words Electric City originally fit really well where I said “And the city is relentless tonight”, I wanted to use “And the city is electric tonight” but didn’t want to steal his thunder.
“The Devil, The Wolves, The Vampires” was made during quarantine and written without the advantage of bouncing any of the ideas off my band. I wanted it purposely to be kind of stripped down and to have a little bit of the feel of The Shins “New Slang” to end our album. At the time I was working on it was June 2020 when the country seemed it was going to explode. The Devil is the Republican politicians, the wolves their supporters and the vampires Fox news. A fun concept that I had an animated video planned for but never finished.
Finally in order to lengthen our originally planned EP we threw in a cover. We tried “The Air That I Breathe “ by The Hollies a while back and we just couldn’t get it to feel right. We tried “This Magic Moment” kind of in a Lou Reed way like when he covered it for the Lost Highway soundtrack and it just felt too boring. So I had been kicking around the idea of doing the Weezer “Good Life” cover for many years but there was a couple notes that were out of my range and I just still couldn’t get there. So our bass player suggested to me where to capo the song at and what key to move it to that might be way more comfortable and it just flowed really well for us. It flows a little more than the original and the tempo is sped up but our drummer tried to stay true to some of the drum fills, although we did cut out a section of the solo because it didn’t really fit our version. Listening back I wish I was more emotive like Rivers with the vocal delivery but that also wouldn’t really be me. But I’m ok with what we came up with.
- Neil Sabatino, BMN Contributor