Blueberry Boat (Clap Clap blog, 2004)

Back in 2004, I was a 25-year-old finance and legal assistant at a record label, and instead of entering 200 individual paper invoices for shipping 2 promo CDs of Sugarcult from Nashville to Albuquerque, like I was being paid to do, I would blog. At first it was politics, about Bush and the Iraq war, but it was a very good time for music in New York, as you may have heard, so I started blogging about music, too.

I got an early copy of the Fiery Furnaces Blueberry Boat from my friend Mattthew and was blown away. I loved their first album, Gallowsbird's Bark, but it read as a weird, sideways version of "Brooklyn blues-rock" trend; their songs were little slice-of-life travelogues and dense thickets of wordplay, not self-conscious throwbacks to 70's rock. But they were short, legibly rock, and easy to get. A lot of pentatonic stuff. In and out.

Blueberry Boat was something different: nearly the length of a full 80-minute CD, its first song was the 10-minute "Quay Cur," with its ominous instrumental intro and multi-part story of piracy and nautical slang, sung partially in pidgin Inuit. I loved it, but I also wanted to understand it, and so I started writing about it, talking about it, bringing in ideas from other people who loved it. I knew that it didn't really hold together as a coherent "rock opera," which it was often called, but I thought it'd be fun to try. What followed was a track-by-track dissection of most of the album, both the music and the lyrics, both of which were knotty and densely referential. Kelefa Sanneh mentioned it in the NYT. It got me started as a music critic. (I didn't actually finish it, because: see above.)

But as with most blogs from 2004-5, it's now pretty inaccessible. Since the 20-year anniversary of the album is coming up in July, I thought I'd republish it here in a more friendly form, with all of the nonsense of my youthful self's exuberance, unearned self-confidence, and transparent stylistic influences untouched. Enjoy.

BB #01: "QUAY CUR"
 
STRUCTURE
 
Actually a surprisingly simple structure, when you break it apart; go ahead and cheat down to the chart if you want to see just how simple.  Really, you can reduce it to the highly traditional verse / chorus / verse / chorus / bridge / verse / chorus format if you want to (although it's more like briiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiidge and, OK, there's an extra chorus in there). 
  
The track starts with a slight squeak for a few seconds before a distorted drum machine beat kicks in, consisting of two kick quarters and a distorted snare-ish noise that has a trailing tone that goes down for the remainder of the third beat and then up for about 2/3 of the fourth.  After 2 bars piano chords come in, which will form the basis of the verse and chorus melody; these sound like minor sixths a step or so apart.  A synth noise comes in before bass and a strong synth line drops at around the 0:40 mark.  I don't know how they're making the particular "shooting star" synth sound that floats over the beat, but how I would make it would be to hook up a feedback loop through my four-track, compress and distort the signal, and then play with a pitch shifter.  In addition, there are little whistles that play underneath.  The bass follows the piano chords.
 
It continues in this semi-dub fashion until the vocals kick in at 2:06, quieting down about 20 seconds before this.  A more contained version of the "shooting star" synth (sounds like a triangle/sine wave combo with a medium-length attack and then a decently long release, with some chorus in there too) doubles the melody, which settles around a strong tone (either the tonic or the fifth) at the end of the first three repetitions but then descends to a more illogical note at the end of the phrase.  There are two phrases.  The drum machine, bass, and piano continue under this, unaltered as it sounds like.  The first verse is followed by a short chorus, where the piano doubles the melody with the synth accenting the first note.  The melody is all sixteenths that is in some ways a double-time version of the regular verse melody, alternating between two close notes for the first two beats before proceeding stepwise down to a modulated repetition in the third beat and a descent to what I'm guessing is an augmented fifth (?) at the end.  It repeats four times.  The second verse and chorus proceed in exactly the same fashion.
 
There is then a break that starts with a beatless repetition of the chorus melody on piano and synth.  This happens twice.  Then there is a tempo and key shift and the piano and synth play the melody in a lower register for a few times before a counterpoint melody comes in on the synth.
 
Then there's a jump cut to the first bridge part, which is very short and does not occur again.  The backing is an acoustic guitar played with a slide alternating between two notes over tambourine with piano and kick/hat accents at the end of the bar.  Matthew[1] sings vocals here and they're not really a lead, just another interlocking part in this little hook, where the guitar and vocals dominate for the first half and then drop out to make room for the piano and hat.  It's all pretty precisely sequenced and very effective even in isolation.  The slide ascends rapidly at the end of the section and there's a very sudden cut to the second bridge section, a transition (lacking any percussion and suddenly charging to a new instrument) that's highly reminiscent of their live set.  This is the most bluesy part of the song, with a very strong electric guitar pentatonic riff forming the basis, more-or-less doubled by an acoustic.  A kick drum thump punctuates the section from time to time, and Eleanor sings an appropriately bluesy melody.  This repeats a few times and then there's a chord change that's much more Broadway than blues, although I can't identify it precisely.  The electric and acoustic play a palm-muted lower-string riff that sounds like a quick alternation between a sixth and a fifth interval.  Matthew picks the vocals back up and it's another mainly interlocking, three-note melody.  The electric breaks out at the end of the bar and hits some high open strings.  At the end of the section there's a descending sequence of quickly-picked notes leading to eighths, descending into the old chord, with a quick slide up after each note and a longer slide at the end leading back into the previous section.  These two sections repeat as before.
 
After this there's what I'm going to call "The Goddamn Inuit Section."  I don't really like TGIS.  The backing is actually pretty nice, with an arpeggiated finger-picked acoustic, bass and tambourine/kick on the 2/4 setting off a synth line that mirrors the pretty melody.  But good lord, it goes on two and a half minutes!  And you don't really know what she's saying!  Not much else happening besides some synth quivers, so let's move on.
 
After TGIS there's a short break that starts out with a synth/piano variation on the melody of the previous section which modulates into the chorus melody.  Then there's a slight slowdown as it goes into a sort of plodding, bassy rendition of the chorus with basic kick instead of the drum machine.  Then there's another break that's sort of a sea-whistle improv on the chorus melody, with no percussion.  Then back into the verse, which has no drum machine, but a pipe organ is added.  Matthew sings this.  Then they go into the chorus with no change in orchestration, with Eleanor singing her usual chorus bit and Matthew singing a new bit over that.  It then ends with a slower piano rendition of the chorus melody, with some left-hand accompaniment.
 
In chart form:
 
0:00-2:05 Intro
2:06-2:38 Verse 1 ("I had a locket..." to "...safe again.")
2:39-2:53 Chorus
2:54-3:27 Verse 2 ("Up to the quarantine..." to "...up a storm.")
3:28-3:42 Chorus ("We hid beneath..." to "...we're cast.")
3:43-4:27 Break 1 (chorus melody w/key + tempo change)
4:28-4:47 Bridge 1 - Matthew ("The clouds..." to "...Bay Madagascar[sic].")
4:48-4:56 Bridge 2A1 -Eleanor ("Great gulps..." to "...through the fluke.")
4:57-5:21 Bridge 2B1 - Matthew ("A lobby..." to "...Sir Edward Pepsi.")
5:22-5:40 Bridge 2A2 -Eleanor ("Course it wasn't..." to "...without any cares.")
5:41-6:05 Bridge 2B - Matthew (as before)
6:06-8:32 Bridge 3 -Eleanor (the "goddamn inuit bridge")
8:33-9:02 Break 2 (nautical melody of Bridge 3 moving into Chorus melody)
9:03-9:14 Chorus 3 ("And now we live..." to "...our general any more.")
9:15-9:26 Break 3
9:27-9:58 Verse 3  - Matthew ("Down came..." to "...eyes were dull.")
9:59-10:25 Chorus  - Matthew/Eleanor ("And as we pass..." to "...Barehaven to land" over "And now I'll never, never, never...") 
  
I'm warming to this song the more I listen to it, but looking at the structure, I can't help but notice the intro being 2 minutes long and TGIS being 2 and a half, and think that maybe there were some missed opportunities for edits here. 
 
ANALYSIS
 
The song begins with a girl being given a locket for protection.  The girl works the docks, presumably as a prostitute, and feels safe until one day a ne'er-do-well tears off the locket and throws it in the ocean. 
 
It then moves to a specific incident where the girl illegally sneaks onto a quarantined whaling (?(?) ship to get work, presumably because there's a captive audience as it were, but she finds that since the men can't get off the ship, her attempts to exploit the situation are stymied by the fact that the men do not have access to any additional cash besides what they have on them.  She and her fellow prostitutes are waiting for the "all-clear" sign that no authorities are watching so they can get off the boat, but a storm comes up and they are trapped on the boat, hiding behind barrels of blubber.  The storm is very fierce, and they are cast out to sea, which they think is because the anchor has broken, but it is in fact because they have been towed by, apparently, Bornean natives.  They are sold, possibly into slavery, at Kobaba, which I'm going to guess is a port in Japan, but it could also be a misspelling of "Kobala," which is in the Netherlands.  Let's all just chalk this up to poetic license and go with the Japan thing.
 
Meanwhile, we're also getting the perspective of a male crewmember who was, apparently, recruited for his skilled and then pressed into service by an aristocrat with the unlikely (and, indeed, made-up) name of "Sir Edward Pepsi." 
 
After being sold, everyone bands together (or so it seems--both the male and female voices tell of an escape) to bribe the guards, slip down a chimney, and to reclaim their whaler, which they take north, apparently to wherever they speak Inuit, i.e. Alaska.  The girl then either stays with the Eskimos for a while or already knows their language (seafaring father?  Of Eskimo stock already?) because she's able to give a bunch of narration in said language.  The crew finds themselves in dire straits (har har har)--the rigging breaks, they have no food, but five survive until they run aground in Barehaven, which is either in Ireland or Newfoundland, but given the context I'm going to go with Newfoundland.  

All in all, aside from the Inuit section which I can't tell about, it's a whole coherent story, and a fairly interesting one, even if the moments of drama are a bit more buried in the music than they are in other songs--"Blueberry Boat" or "Chief Inspector Blancheflower," say.  Speaking of which (the music, I mean) the music here mainly serves as a reinforcement to the lyrics.  Maybe I need to listen a bit more closely, but I don't hear a lot of instances of the backing either counterpointing or commenting critically on the vocals.  Mainly it just does what it's supposed to do: it sounds nautical in the nautical sections, slightly menacing in the sections about being unsafe, fast and exciting in the escape parts, etc.   
 
CONTEXT 
 
The setting here is unclear.  On the one hand, all signs point to a Pacific setting, except for the very European language of the dockside stuff ("killicks," "Sir Robert Pepsi," etc.).  So there are two options: either they began in England and were towed to the Pacific straits, which seems unlikely, or they were in some European protectorate of an Asian country.  I'm going to go vaguely with the latter, but I don't think it matters so much; it's mainly important that they start out in a Western setting, move into an Eastern setting, and take a detour in a Native setting.  (Using archetypes here because I think it's the most useful thing.)

The way I'm going to frame this, going with the three-storylines idea I mentioned in the intro, is that this is a primary narration for Matthew's character, which is a future incarnation of the one introduced in "Blancheflower."  Eleanor's character, however, is an ancestor of her character in "Blueberry Boat," and her verses of the song are that character's narration of her family history.  I think Matthew's character remains consistent throughout and their occasional intersections culminate in the present-day suburban stuff which isn't present here but which we'll see later, mainly in "Chris Michaels" and "Blancheflower."
 
The song does a very good job of introducing a number of themes on the album, which I think is the best explanation for the placement of a somewhat confusing and relatively less hooky 10-minute track in the leadoff spot.  It certainly does a good job of presenting the general nautical theme of the album, which is an interesting contrast with Gallowsbird's Bark, since in that album the narrator seemed to leap from place to place with little mention of transport.  On Blueberry Boat, the transport plays a key role, and that's one reason why there's more languid sections in this album than on Gallowsbird's.  Additionally, there are the first signs here of Matthew's playing with Victorian language and European settings. 

I should mention the title, since it's actually pretty good.  In the context of the song, "Quay Cur" likely refers to the "killick" who stole the girl's locket, since quay=dock, cur=scoundrel.  But, of course, it also is a homonym for "Quaker," the American religion known as the "Society of Friends" which is pacifist and generally kind of hippie, and who had a large role in the founding of Pennsylvania.  So this suggests a few things (even while quay cur itself suggests both the various port-based situations on the album as well as the general theme of malfeasence that crops up in almost every song).  Aside from fitting in with the suggestion of religion that lurks behind their name, maybe the most direct reference on the album is to "My Dog Was Lost," which aside from explicitly stealing a line from the African-American spiritual "Amazing Grace," also ends up in a distinctly Pentecostal situation, I think, although more on this later.  So there's a fascination, I think, with uniquely American religions, which is also at the heart of the blues, a form the Furnaces play with a lot.  But at the same time, the Quakers were religious outlaws who emigrated to America.  Most of the movement in this album seems to be from America to Europe, actually, but I think it touches nicely on the theme of immigration and movement across national borders that's probably important in some way I haven't figured out yet.

So that's "Quay Cur."  Doing it has suggested a few things I might want to do in the future, like note in the structural layout when there's tempo or key changes, or to maybe do a bit more analysis, but eh, let's go with this.  "Straight Street" next.

UPDATE: Matthew has a translation of the Inuit bridge (#3).

half hour sandglass / seven saker round shot/ ice for the moonshine / and chichsaneg / kiss me, kiss me, kiss me, don't say no / tie tight my coat / in comes the fog / fallen down in the sea, go fetch / look yonder / get out my knife / I mean no harm, I mean no harm / weave us on shore / give it, give it to me / will you have / and I gave a bracelet / kiss me, kiss me, kiss me, don't say no / tie tight my coat / in comes the fog / fallen down in the sea, go fetch
 
"Chichsaneg" is the only word that I cannot find anywhere online - my guess is that it is some kind of food or beverage. Also, I am not sure if a "sasobneg" is strictly defined as being a bracelet. I suspect that it may be a reference to the lost locket from the beginning of the song.

I think this adds something to the context, but not necessarily to the plot of the song itself, aside from confirming that Eleanor's character did, in fact, spend some time with the residents there.  I'll work it into my final storyline, although I haven't entirely processed yet Matthew's excellent point about the bracelet and the locket...at any rate, go check it out.

BB #02: STRAIGHT STREET

STRUCTURE

Surprisingly basic.  It's three verse/chorus pairs, then a bridge, then two more verse/chorus pairs with a different arrangement (and/or key), but with the final verse having the same lyrics as the first verse.  Since there's less to deal with here, maybe I can delve into the instrumentation and whatnot a bit more. 

The song begins with a shot that's more of a rock explosion than any point in "Quay Cur" was, and it reminds me strongly of (don't kill me) Loretta Lynn's "Portland Oregon"[1]--slide guitar, simple drums miked roughly, bass, very twangy and much lower on the keyboards, despite the clucking noise that plays eighths here.  The contrast with "Quay Cur" is, I think, quite useful, as we actually hear the first crash cymbal of the entire album here, at the very beginning of the track, which is an odd thing for a rock-ish band, although not as much if you know the Furnaces.  Moreover, the crash doesn't reoccur until the section change, and the only percussion throughout the intro appears to be a snare.  This can work sometimes, but here the fact that it doesn't, that it doesn't really hold down the other instruments (the clucking noise is often hugely off-beat) and that it doesn't actually work for the rocky structure being set up, is somehow important.  In the context of following the first song, even that small sop to conventionality becomes huge.  So they're playing with our expectations here, I think.

At any rate, moving beyond the first beat of the song (ahem), the explosion also works because of the particular slide riff being deployed here, which besides being the only significant source of tonality in the intro, starts at a pleasing height[2] before descending to a tone, repeating, and then dipping down before coming back up to the same center tone, and repeating.  This is powerful for two reasons: a) it starts relatively high in pitch for the instrument, and b) it's basically vamping on the same chord, going, I dunno, a fourth above and a fourth below or something alone those lines.  (I should really do these not at work so I could have an instrument handy, but oh well, I'll have to keep doing it by ear.)

The riff also works well because of the way it charges into the first verse vamp, which it does at 0:20.  What happens here are a few important things that represent an almost crash-edit difference between the two bits: the slide and snare cut out, there's a crash hit but then no more drums, piano and bass come in, and the only thing that runs through is the squawk noise.  (Which if you want to get technical about it sounds like a high-res medium-cut fourth-octave half-noise synth burst.)  As for the bits itself, the piano is playing a discordant stagger between two notes with a syncopated swing that resolves to a straighter sixteenth-eighth-eighth-eighth on the higher note at the end of the bar, which actually flows directly out of the tonality established by the slide guitar in the intro; both vamp around basically the same chord.  (I think it suggests a V-7, but I'm almost sure I'm making that up.  Maybe a ninth?  Oh, fuck it, it's called "clap clap blog," not "rigorous musicology blog.")  The bass seems to be riding on the same note throughout.  Near the end of the pre-vocal bit of the first verse here, the drums come in, but end up focusing on a slap-delayed snare and claps on the 2+4.  Similarly, a lead guitar comes in, played sort of furiously and semi-randomly, mostly sixteenths with repeated notes and occasional very brief forays into doubling of the piano part, with some trademark sloppily-played accidental low-string hits from time to time.  This fades out right before the vocals come in.  The first set of verses has a distinctly (and, I think, explicitly) country feel, although the chorus doesn't.  I think this has some relation to the lyrics, but we'll get to that later.  It's also notable that you could play this bit of it live in a conventional band arrangement, unlike a lot of "Quay Cur."

When Eleanor's vocals come in, they display the second brand of melody she deploys.  The first was displayed through almost all of "Quay Cur," and consists of a line that's doubled or even tripled by instruments, one that's fairly closely tied to the backing and which can't be changed very easily; it's highly tonal and tied to some sort of chord present also in the orchestration.  What we see in "Straight Street," however, is a vocal line that's very strong and confident--indeed, this strength and confidence is a lot of what makes Eleanor's delivery and melodies so appealing--but which has only a glancing relationship to the orchestration.  This is not necessarily a bad thing, and indeed, I can think of quite a few Furnaces songs where this works exceedingly well.  (If it doesn't work as well here at first, I think that's because the backing isn't quite as compelling as we've come to expect.)  This second brand of melody is absolutely key to much of the Furnaces' MO--take a melody line that isn't much dependent on any other element of the song, and you can change all of the other elements without disrupting the vocals.  This is how we get not only the different live and single arrangements, but the arrangement switches within a song, which we've already seen to some degree with the final verse of "Quay Cur" and which we'll see again very soon.

The format is this: Eleanor sings a couplet, the backing changes slightly--the bass slides up a third, the piano changes a bit--and then back into the vocals.  This happens four times, the backing pauses with a slight rollantando and an actual coherent chord on the piano, Eleanor sings a few more words, and then we're into the chorus.

The chorus is a basic IV-V blues chorus, and is only two lines.  It starts out at a slightly slower tempo than the verse, and with definitely a more deliberate rhythmic structure, and then accelerates through the last line, which is said very quickly.  Don't hear a piano in here, but there's  a regular chordal guitar and root-note bass with a full drum kit.  The great thing about this chorus--and it's a goddamn great chorus--is the combination of the accelerando with the synth riff that comes in at the end.  It's really just a series of steps up to a fifth, but both the patch (a midrange-heavy tone with a vibrato) and the really deft playing (which sort of lags a few clicks behind the changing tempo), along with the swooshing noise, kill it, and really build to that final line.

The verse/chorus bit repeats two more times, with not a whole lot of changes, aside from the quite notable addition of strings, chorus and viola, sounds like, along with a quick-strummed slide acoustic guitar in the third verse, playing little glissed-up accents that are more rhythmic than anything else.  (It's a pretty rhythmic song, really.)  After the third chorus there's a change into a bridge that starts off with a piano and synth playing doubled lines, then a quiet piano for a few bars that modulates the key down a few steps before being joined by an electric piano and, maybe, a synth, which plays a little dabble between two notes, and then the piano reprises its earlier riff in the new key accompanied by some sort of basic percussion, either a foot stomp or a muted clap on the 2+4.

Then the fourth verse kicks in straight to vocals, and as with the first verse, we have totally different instrumentation all of a sudden.  While Eleanor's singing an electric bass slides from a high note down a fifth to a lower one while a church organ plays the chords and a synth does a sort of parallel line to the riff the piano was playing in verses 1-3.  When there's no vocals, the bass slides up to mirror the wah guitar, which is playing a noisy bit of rhythmic accent which may form its main tonal suggestion purely from the wah, not any notes, but I also might be making that up, and which both, again, mirror the piano riff of the early verses.  After the fourth verse the chorus kicks in, but--and here's the odd thing--exactly as it was in the first part of the song.  There doesn't seem to be any changes.  This is followed by a brief instrumental bit that introduces the fifth verse (which is a repeat, lyrically, of the first verse) by adding the cello/viola from the third verse.  As the vocals start, these play a gliss up for the first two beats and arpeggios for the final two, emphasizing the rise and fall of Eleanor's vocals, but cut out for the inter-vocal bits.  Then another identical (but slightly more intense, somehow--more of an accelerando?) chorus, and we're done.

The second half is odd, stylistically--there's a suggestion of a sacred atmosphere with the organ and the strings, but it doesn't really sound like traditional church music or even gospel--it sounds more like, I guess, a classical combo covering a country song.

In chart form:

0:00-0:20 Intro
0:21-1:15 Verse 1
1:16-1:24 Chorus
1:25-1:58 Verse 2
1:59-2:07 Chorus
2:08-2:41 Verse 3
2:42-2:51 Chorus
2:52-3:25 Bridge
3:26-3:59 Verse 4
4:00-4:08 Chorus
4:09-4:50 Verse 5
4:51-5:00 Chorus

Update: after hearing the acoustic version of the song, Eleanor plays the verse as a I-IV progression with what sounds like a V-7 between the verses, but I'm not sure how well this maps to the album version.  I'll have to try it at home at some point.

ANALYSIS

This song has a lot more in common with Gallowsbird's than many of the other songs here on Blueberry in that it seems more concerned with interesting couplets than a narrative, but once you start to tease it out there's definitely something there.

The basic story is that Eleanor's character is a not very successful global salesperson for a the cellphone company Ericsson, and the song chronicles her sort of Gil-in-the-Simpsons if you will misadventures.  The song opens in a Syrian internet cafe where she's trying to pick up tips from the locals but it studiously looking disinterested, trying not to draw their attention and so having to go by who smells the best (by which I think she means "most affluent").  This scenario to me seems like something plucked directly from Eleanor's travel experiences, where you're in a 'net cafe in some foreign country just wanting to get some sort of connection back to your home life but being surrounded by the cafe's regulars who use it as an information center.  And so here, she hears "all the nonsense in extensia," especially about football games ("Leeds v. Valencia").  She picks out the group most likely to respond to her sales pitch, but they regard her as either: 1) a mere automaton who's there to be an opponent in a very deliberate game, or b) someone they're going to fuck with by taking on ultra-stereotypical behaviors and mannerisms.  This I'm getting from the last line, "but the only thing they care about is to whom to play the Turk," which is either a reference to a famous, but fraudulent, chess-playing machine from the 19th century (later reincarnated as a computer game), or a joke about how foreigners fuck with Americans/businesspeople.  At any rate, her sales pitch is unsuccessful.

In the second verse, she's in a more rural area; I'm going to guess from the context as some of the details that it's a North African area, but it could also easily be a lot of other places in the world (Eastern Europe, southern Russia, Asian steppes, etc., although the stuff about a cup of water and "when the sun came up" do suggest a warmer climate than these).  She's subsisting on very slim resources and ends up in a dilapidated car, suggesting both that she's out in the boonies trying to make sales and that she hasn't been doing very well, cash-flow-wise.  She does make it safely to wherever she's going, it seems, because she's able to put a question to her "local adviser" about the "trucks...parked up by the town" but receives no distinct reply, suggesting that it's a forbidden subject and makes the trucks into even more of a menace than the simple mention of noticeable-but-mysterious vehicles would imply.  I absolutely love this verse--there's a lot of really interesting stuff going on, especially with the trucks at the end, which paints a picture of whatever country (or region) she's in as being under some sort of military or otherwise milita'd control, except so covert that she's not aware of it (or, I guess, she's so oblivious that she doesn't already know and commits the faux pas of asking).  That nice collision of this very stereotypical American-style, door-to-door capitalism with the improvised governmental protection of a private or overly prominent police force (which is the case in not a few areas of our modern world) is really interesting, both because of the revelation that free market sales are only possible when the citizens are reasonably free--or, more accurately, when they're more concerned with comfort than basic survival--and because I think she would be more successful a salesperson if she wasn't so honest.  If she was crooked enough to know who had control of the town, she might be able to sell to them instead of the impoverished residents. 

This inability to make a sale continues in the third verse, where we get specific, sorta.  We're back in a more corporate environment because she's talking to "the head of sales for Western Asia" (aha!  But then why "Damascus"?) who is warning of an encroaching threat from Nokia, who might tell presumably Muslim consumers that Ericsson "uses pig by-products."  The salesperson shows up for a meeting with the Nokia people but "knew that we were Finnished" (a pretty funny actually play on words based on the fact that Nokia is from Finland and Ericsson is from Sweden) because, as the rep tells her, the phones are already being "stoned," which here I think means not "smoked up" but "hit with stones," as Muslims sometimes do to religious violators.  In other words, they have successfully spread the rumor of pig-use and so the phones are being destroyed for religious reasons.

This causes the character to be fired, and the switch in music we have after the third verse is meant, I think, to reflect this change.  In the fourth verse we see her trying to find a new job, in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia trying to learn some of those nasty tricks of the trade and setting herself up as a fence for religious and historical artifacts.  Her friends, though, try and talk her out of this, saying that she could work in Baku (in the former republic of Azerbaijan) for an American cellphone company.  But when she calls her contact at the company in Houston, she finds they have no use for her.  And thus, in the fifth verse, we find her back in the Damascus internet cafe, trying to scam her way into sales to Syrians.

The song seems to be about the conflict between honesty and theft in business dealings, and here the blur of references works for a thematic reason: in a world where there is so much, where local cultures collide with global ones and vice verse, there's no way to make sense of it, no way to go door-to-door.  And that's why the chorus: "So I walked up the length of the Street they call Straight / cursing myself cause I got there too late."  She's trying to go straight (or, even better, trying to go what people tell her is straight) but it's too late--there's no way to go straight anymore.  Everything is tainted, and even when you're trying to be devious it doesn't always work.  The only verse mention of straight street comes in reference to where the religious authorities are destroying the tainted phones, and I think that's a decent explanation of what it's talking about--a place where faith is untainted by doubt or contradiction.

CONTEXT

This is really a self-contained little episode, although aside from the various thematic references I'll get to in a moment, I do think it fits into the character arc for Eleanor.  This is probably what she's doing in between her youth in the US and being a ship captain in Asia, and her frustration here with modern capitalist business practices explains the pride she feels from managerial responsibility and manual labor in "Blueberry Boat," which we'll get to on Monday.

Aside from the geographic similarities with other songs (especially her boss being the head of sales for Western Asia), the most interesting thing here, I think, is in the title: straight street, or strait street?  I.e., a street that's a body of water.  In "Blueberry Boat" there's a mention of the Strait of Taiwan, and I think that's part of what's going on here, with nature as something purer than the cluttered earth.  But maybe not.

[1] Not that I'm asserting a relationship of influence, here, as the timelines don't mess up, but then the sound Jack White went with on Van Lear Rose sounds just a bit different from most country or blues things that came before, so I don't know a better precedent. 
[2] This is a post for another time, but it's interesting how expectation and context matter to our perceptions of instrumental intensity.  Higher, of course, is generally held to be more intense, but we get so used to the timbres and conventional sonic ranges of an instrument that it's really only high-for-that-thing.  So, for instance, a high weedly-weedly guitar riff that sounds like it's reaching into the stratosphere would still only hit maybe third position on the violin, which still has a long way to go.  (Ah the glorious high squeakiness of the violin!  I love it so.  But that, too, is for another post.)  And when we play outside that range, even on the same instrument, it usually gets regarded as somehow being a different instrument--think, for instance, of the way free-jazz saxophone squeaks were described before we got used to them, or how a pitch-shifted guitar (or one played with a slide above the fretboard) gets described.

BB #03: BLUEBERRY BOAT

STRUCTURE

The general outline is that it starts off with an intro, does a quick intro verse, transitions into the main verse melody after a break, does two verse/chorus pairs and another verse, then 2 breaks, then the intro, a verse, another 2 breaks, 2 verse/chorus pairs, and ends with two breaks.  So this one's a bit more complicated than the rest, but really, if you chopped off that first section and took away all but 2 of the breaks, which could be bridges anyway, you'd just have a lot of verse/chorus pairs, and in this way it's a bit like a Gallowbird's song with extra breaks thrown in.

We start off with the intro, which for my money is one of the best hooks on the album.  After a great little bit of keyboard noise, a distorted drum machine beat kicks in for two bars, and then the great synth line drops on top of that.  I'm having a hard time figuring out how the intro relates to the rest of the song (although, again, I'm not in a position to play an instrument, so I'm doing this by ear).  In a lot of these songs the intro seems like a differently-arranged but melodically/chorally similar version of some other part of the song.  The switches between intro and other things work great here, but is that because of crash edits or an actual harmonic similarity?  I don't know.  But I do know that the intro kicks ass.  The distortion on the drums sends the snare skittering through the mix when it hits, the detuning on the (presumably multiple) synth lines gives it a rough and harsh but intense chorus effect, and the parallel line running in the left channel emphasizes the first half of the line.  And then they go down a key!  Awesome.

This gives way to some "whoo!" noises and rough percussion--sounds like drums, particularly kick and an open hat, miked from a distance, along with I'd guess some feet and hands doing percussion in various ways.  It's recorded very nicely to contrast with the up-front dryness of the wholly synthesized intro; hearing that air makes it feel like you went into a completely different room, or, better, outside.  After a few bars of this the melodic backing for the intro verse drops in, which consists of a piano and guitar doing a high, open chord on the 1, a big thump on the and of one (as the piano/guitar are muted), and a slide guitar slowly descending down from I'd say about a fifth above that chord back to the chord for the rest of the bar.  Eleanor sings a melody that pretty much only consists of two notes here, as the backing runs along uninterrupted or muchly varied behind her.

Then we have a break.  Except the great thing about this break is that it's actually describing the riff for the verses for the rest of the song.  I think we've been trained by "Quay Cur" to expect these things not to cohere too much, and especially when we hear a break like this, with its nautical synth patch, we don't expect it to connect much to the rest of the song.  So when, even better, they follow this break (the "Verse Break") with a wholly unrelated break (the "Keystone Kops Break") and we have some separation between the break and the melody it describes, I think instinctually we assume that the numerous verse to follow which use this melody are, in fact, variations on a break, rather than vice verse, and so not really verses.  But do not be fooled!  This arrangement does a nice job of subverting song-form expectations and making you feel a combination of lost and soothed. 

This second break consists of various percussion and garbage-can melody--I hear a triangle, kick-snare combo, and what I'm guessing is a synth on a "xylophone" patch before it starts getting crazed with the addition of one of those scrapy wooden things (help?), a few bells, and a piano that gets more and more out of time and barrelhouse-y.  I really like this break.  Then we have kind of a recapitulation of the last break with a lower synth line, Rhodes, piano and triangle added.

Then the verse starts with a pretty smooth solo piano transition from the previous break.  The verse riff consists of three pairs of lower-higher swung descending arpeggios that themselves feel like two pairs of augmented thirds, and then a little dip down a step from the higher arpeggio which it lands on for a while.  There's also clearly a center tone, as in later verses the piano will just ride on one chord while other instruments describe the riff around it.  There's also an open-tuned acoustic slide guitar which plays accents sometimes, and then kicks in for real with some of the same instrumentation heard in the two previous breaks right before the chorus, which consists of a higher chord (a fourth up?) with the addition of a whistling riff on top that emphasizes the nautical themes of these verses.  In the verse, Eleanor sings something a lot like the two-note melody of the intro verse, but then swings up a fourth at the end of the rep, which sounds nice with the chord descending to where she's heading.  In the chorus she jumps up to something near the top of her range, which sounds great, and sings another two-note melody that ends up being varied with triplets at the end of the chorus.

We have three verses and two choruses here, with the piano doing the aforementioned riding-the-chord variation on the second verse, and then we have our third break, the "Matt Break."  It features, as the name indicates, Matt on vocals.  The music takes a direct turn from the verse pattern (like it was all a regular song and stuff) and I think the best way to describe it is that it goes the opposite direction of the verse riff after starting in a similar place, joins up briefly, and then falls away.  Specifically, it starts with a muted chord and a descending melody that follows the vocal line, both on electric piano as the whole sections is, which then jumps up and alternates between two notes for 2 bars before dipping down to the previous chord with a lower, 2-note vocal line and then dips down even further with the vocal line dipping proportionately, and the right hand follows the vocals.  I hear it as IV-I-IV-iii, but I could be wrong, although I'm pretty sure that's an alternation between the root note and the second on the second chord there.  This all repeats twice. 

Then we're in another break, which 'm going to call the "Bittersweet Drinking Break."  The tempo slows in preparation, I think, for the next section, and like the previous break, everything is very focused on the melody, which is held in the vocals but echoed in a whistley synth line and then reiterated with a more forceful synth part after the vocals end.  I also think there's a nice metrical transition here, with the previous part keeping the one-two feel of the rest of the song but grouping itself into 6 beats rather than 4, and so when we have the tempo change here, there's almost a triplet feeling.  Very nice. 

And then, boom!  Back into the intro.  Awesome.  I like the intro. 

The intro lasts about 1.5 times as long as it did at the beginning of the song, and then we pretty much charge right back into the verse.  Except it's a short verse, only eight seconds long (as compared to, say, 30 seconds each for verses 2 and 3).  It's quieter than the previous verses and certainly a lot quieter than the intro, hushed really, and I hear an added autoharp, although maybe I just missed that before. 

This leads into the fifth (!) break of the song, which I'm going to pretty obviously call the "Pirate Break."  It's very tense, featuring at the outset only a plunked, augmented piano triad on the first beat and very light, distantly miked hand percussion--maybe some muted guitar strings being struck, or a foot setting and releasing the piano resonator.  It builds by adding a gong, another piano chiming a different chord on the first beat and then adding another one on the third. 

We then have a quick change into what feels like, to me, a whole different break, given the way it less dissipates the energy of the Pirate Break and more just totally ignores it, like a cross-cut between men with knives in their teeth climbing up the side of a ship and sailors calmly enjoying the ocean breeze.  This being the breeze part, let's call it the "Sailing Break."  It's really a piano solo, with the left hand playing the verse progression and the right hand soloing over it.  The only interesting thing here is the way the sort of haphazard, out-of-time soloing recalls Matt's guitar soloing technique (most on display in "Paw Paw Tree"), but aside from that, let's move on.     

We have now come to almost the end of the song and have only six more sections left.  Which is sort of funny, but I think it's fair to say in regards to this song.  At any rate, first comes a verse/chorus pair, with not much change, although the piano does ride the chord a bit before going into the riff and then the chorus.  There might also be a bit more slide, and the whistle riff is more muted in the chorus, and there's a bass double on the main riff as we go back into the verse.

This final verse is simply fantastic.  It totally abandons the riff and instead centers on the main chord until it jumps up at the very end.  The various string instruments describe the tonal with little slide dips down and back up at the end of every bar, and halfway through the piano drops in, really riding the chord, and the percussion builds.  Then everything stops but continues to resonate through the final bar of the chorus, which Eleanor sings a capella, before crashing in once on "boat" and then pausing for about a bar and a half.  I love this because it was the only thing besides the intro that really struck me the first few times I listened to the song (after Matthew posted it), but somehow, hearing the ending, and the subsequent resolution in the final chorus, made me want to hear the rest of the story, to figure it out.  It's that simultaneous reduction and build, and that great pause 8 minutes into a 9 minute song where there really aren't many breaks just nails it home, especially as the vocal line reduces to subtle variations on the same pitch and Eleanor delivers it very forcefully, with the same resolve we hear in the character.  More on this later, obviously.

Then the vocal part of the song concludes with a final chorus, again with not a whole lot of musical variation from previous choruses, but with a very strong delivery on the vocals.

Then there's pretty much a crash cut into our seventh break of the song, the "Stringy Break," which consists almost wholly of a semi-atonal left-hand piano riff shadowed by a two-step melody done on synth strings.  Both riffs are doubled for a while by other sounds.

Finally, there's the eighth and last break of the song, the "Wander Break," which as the name suggests pretty much totally consists of a synth line wandering around.

In chart form:

0:00-0:30 Intro
0:31-1:31 Intro Verse
1:32-1:39 Break 1 (Verse Break)
1:40-2:17 Break 2 (Keystone Kops Break)
2:18-2:31 Break 1 recapitulation
2:32-3:06 Verse 1
3:07-3:13 Chorus
3:14-3:49 Verse 2
3:50-3:56 Chorus
3:57-4:20 Verse 3
4:21-4:55 Break 3 (Matt Break)
4:56-5:23 Break 4 (Bittersweet Drinking Break)
5:24-6:10 Intro recapitulation
6:11-6:19 Verse 4
6:20-6:50 Break 5 (Pirate Break)
6:51-7:17 Break 6 (Sailing Break)
7:18-7:26 Verse 5
7:27-7:34 Chorus
7:35-8:06 Verse 6
8:07-8:13 Chorus
8:14-8:47 Break 7 (Stringy Break)
8:48-9:09 Break 8 (Wander Break)

Some notes on all this:

The transitions here seem less overdubbed or edited-together than mostly organic, almost orchestral in their way.  They might indeed require a conductor to accomplish (especially the first four minutes or so), but they could be done.  Moreso than a lot of other rock songs that might claim to be, this achieves a kind of classically structured interestingness. 

There's about four or five minutes here when they're really only circling around the same two chords, which is odd, and lends the song some of its woozy, drifting character, a fact that goes along well with the subject matter. 

I should be concentrating more on when particular synth patches reemerge, as I think this would be interesting. 

ANALYSIS

A pretty straightforward and uninterrupted story here, really.  We open with Eleanor's character going out to her cargo ship on a sailboat called a sunfish (in the midst of a remarkably wonderful line, "pink wine in the Labor Day sunshine / I'm sliding the sunfish up through the wakes"), negotiating the disturbance made by the larger ship unsurely, and worried about this, because she does not want to look unskilled before her crew, and doubtless some of this unsureness is caused by nervousness as much as by physics.  When she makes it on board everyone is indolent and drinking; she sneaks a peak at their cooler and sees that they have way too much alcohol to be healthy, so presumably she disposes of some of it.

They sail through the Taiwan strait past Taipei, and knowing that their destination is Hong Kong ("old H.K.") , this means they are going West, and thus could be coming from either somewhere like Japan/Korea or North America.  It is Eleanor's first time captaining a ship, and it is actually going very well, and she is filled with a kind of idealistic pride.  This has already manifested itself in the pragmatic-but-also-kinda-snooty move of stowing the alcohol, and further crops up in her insistence that a crewmember turn off some porno in order to properly appreciate the beauty of the ocean in the morning, even as she herself has some scotch.  But this is all OK, as she has won the respect of her mates during previous voyages, and indeed, everything goes remarkably smoothly. 

Eleanor is, as it happens, from Grand Rapids, MI (or claiming to be so for the purposes of the voyage). 

Then at the end of the third verse (which, notice, has no matching chorus), we get a sudden jarring interruption: something, undetected by radar, is coming up on her ship on the starboard side.

Then we have a quick break to Matt, who while drinking some drink involving Triple Sec in the belowdecks of his own boat, recalls standing on shore and trying to pick up a girl there waving goodbye (which is kind of caddish!).  He asks her who she knows on the ship and she suddenly sneers at him and replies, "I don't know no one there yet but just wait see what you get." 

There are two possible interpretations of this.  One is that she's merely reacting to the sexism inherent in Matt's caddish question, i.e. that she must simply know someone on board, she can't be involved with it in some way.  Instead, she is, like Eleanor was, a prospective captain, or at least crewmember.

The other option is that she's actually an advance scout for the pirates, one of whom may have stowed away on Eleanor's ship in order to disable the radar so as to make the pirates' ship undetected in its approach.  Thus she doesn't know anyone on the ship yet, but she will as soon as the pirates board it.

After this nice little jump in location (to Matt's ship) and then time (back to when the ship was boarding), we jump back to Eleanor's ship but also backwards in time slightly, to show what they were doing when the pirates attacked, specifically "pop[ping] the top" of some alcohol.  I like this part very much, because for all the pride and beauty we see in an ocean voyage in the first three verses, we now have a taste of the loneliness and isolation such voyages entail.  And so the traditional drinking song cry of "we'll never go home" has both a positive meaning, i.e. that they're having such a good time that they'll never go home, and a negative one, i.e. that they can never go home.  And it's also an odd premonition of what's about to happen, since they will, indeed, never go home.

And so we hit the fourth verse with a restatement of the third verse of the pirate ship approaching,  and then a quick jump into the ominous break that would seem to represent the pirate's boarding of the ship, followed by the placid break meant to represent the crew's drunken obliviousness to said boarding.  They capture the crew and beat two of the men to enforce order, kick over Eleanor and threaten her with death unless she cooperates.  But she refuses, and after making this defiant statement, we have a pause and then a cut to the revelation that the pirates do, in fact, kill her, and apparently sink her boat as well.  I love the way this is handled, mainly because of the various implications of the captain in this familiar-ish scenario being a woman.  So the blueberries in question could be literal, or they could be a metaphor for her choice of death over rape; she is sad and cold, but she has kept her honor.

A few questions here.  First, is the captain necessarily a woman?  S/he is never explicitly referred to as such, and of course it would be a critical error to simply assume and shit.  But it's more fun this way, so I'm going to go ahead and assume.

Second, was the captain's choice really the honorable thing to do?  In many ways it could be seen as reflective of that sort of prissy idealism evidenced earlier in the voyage: she is not the only person being threatened with death here.  It's "you and your men."  So by refusing to cooperate, she once again self-righteously sacrifices her crew's happiness for some abstract value like honor or beauty.  But they're still dead.

CONTEXT

I'm pretty convinced that this takes place in the present day, given the references to the pirates being Asian and this being a relatively modern phenomenon, as well as the modern Sunfish sailboat.  I'm also pretty sure that chronologically it's either the last or second-to-last song in the story, depending on how much of "Paw Paw Tree" you want to incorporate.  This song basically reflects the final end of Eleanor's character.  Unless it's all a fantasy.  Which we'll discuss later.

I think given what I mention above about whether the captain's actions are actually morally defensible, it seems reasonable to assume that this character is an older (or, I guess, fantasy) version of the one seen in "Straight Street."  There, frustrated by shady business practices that she was unable to play along with, arguably because of the traditional business-world bias towards women, she finds this very rewarding form of physical labor and sticks with it long enough to be a captain, but her idealized view of the profession leads her to make some stupid judgments, and once again her inability to practically compromise her values is her downfall. 

What the hell is Matt's character doing in here?  I think I'm going to assume that this is just one of those random coincidences, that years after he lost touch with Eleanor he just happens to be on a dock where her ship is leaving, and he maybe or maybe not talks to an associate of the pirates that will eventually kill her.  But you could also assume that either she or he is projecting himself into this scenario as an almost-but-not-quite savior, which is mainly only valid if you assume that the girl is a pirate and the whole thing is part of a story or fantasy on the part of the younger Eleanor.

At any rate, this is definitely related to the Eleanor we see in "Chris Michaels" and "Blancheflower" and maybe "Spainolated."  She's from Michigan and is taking a load of Michigan blueberries to Hong Kong, in what's interestingly enough the reverse of the journey taken by the ship in Quay Cur, which is hijacked somewhere in the Pacific and ends up in North America before returning to Europe.

This will all tie together later, but for now, let's move on to the next song.  ('Til the break of dawn...)

BB #04: CHRIS MICHAELS

STRUCTURE

A brief note here: I have come to realize that these sections are both the most time-consuming to write and the least interesting to read. (Not uninteresting, mind, just of lesser appeal than the textual analysis/interpretation.) And so, mostly in the interest of my own sanity/productivity, but with the knowledge that I won't get too many complaints, I'm going to try and tone this section back a bit, filling it out if/when I do a full compendium if there's need.

In general, this is one of the few rocking songs on the disc; critics as well as Matt himself (who's following who is hard to tell) have singled it out as a real Who-derived song in light of Matt's comments that Blueberry Boat was inspired in part by Townsend and co.'s "Rael." That never comparison has never really connected for me, but I guess there aren't a whole lot of other antecedents for allegro-paced clean drums/guitar rock songs with melodic as opposed to strictly rhythmic piano stuff. I feel like there's a considerably better comparison outside of the prog spectrum, but since I can't think of one, let's grant the Who thing.

It starts off with a solo acoustic guitar strumming a chord for a few seconds before Eleanor's vocals drop in, followed by a bass leading into the stinger for this opening section, which adds a melodic piano line and drums, which do have a distinctly Keith Moon-ish feel here with their continual fills (never much drop to kick-snare-hat-kick-snare-hat) interspersed with phrase-emphasizing shadow rhythms. The vocal line is quite nice, but has no particular stylistic or allusive quality; I do quite like the way it repeats a phrase twice before the chorus over different chords, then at the end of the stinger rises atypically right into the first note of the verse, a bit like those jump-rope rhymes[1] that head toward a naughty rhyme at the end of the couplet but is revealed to be a non-naughty homophone[2] beginning the subsequent couplet, i.e. "Miss Susie has a steamboat, the steamboat has a bell Miss Susie went to Heaven, the steamboat went to hell-o operator, please give me # 9, and if you disconnect me, I'll kick you from be-hind the 'fridgerator' there lays a piece of glass, Miss Susie sat upon it and cut her little ass- k me no more questions..." Sorry, I could quote that forever. They almost said "ass!" Tee hee!

So anyway, this goes on for a bit, then there's an actual chorus (I don't throw around "stinger" for no reason, kids), in which the piano drops to a minor chord, followed by the bass, and then it ascends back up. Once around with this, then a few more verse/stinger pairs, another chorus, and into the second section, which starts on a minor 7th (I think) that feels like an ascension, adding a synth note following the root and regularizing the drums to a kick thump with crash on the 1. This is the bit where Matt sings "Plume bloom bloom blaby bloom/cheep cheep beep bee-bee beep" and he does vocals for the whole section. So we get a bit of verse, a lower chord, the "beep beep" bit which is louder, it descends to a new chord and has a measure with only 3 beats, then a part with arpeggiated piano and no crash, then another "beep beep" section that ends as the previous one did, and a tempo change into the third section.

Here it slows down and we're back to acoustic guitar, with a strummed/trem'ed electric providing counterpoint. It's structured a lot like the first section: quiet verse and loud stinger/chorus with full drums and otherwise, where the Moon-isms continue (the drum lead-in to the section is a full bar of rolls). The second time around there's a cello. Eleanor sings this, beginning with "Remember that girlfriend of Al's..." The melody is very strong and particular.

Then there's a slight speed-up into the fourth section, which Matt sings as it begins, or rather speak-sings. Again we're back to acoustic and electric, with the electric doing the wandering-wah'd solo that's all over this album as well as their recent live shows. The vocals are laid-back and narrative. Then there's a chorus that Eleanor sings that's a bit more disciplined melodically, and again very nice. The electric drops out and a piano and synth come in, playing straight chords. Also, drums. This repeats.

Then a big whonk on all the instruments and a rest before we go into the fifth section, which is great and kind of nuts. Here's where it stops bearing any resemblance to the Who, unless Pete did some secret side project with Harry Partch when he was really stoned. Beyond that, I'm having a hard time pegging exactly what it is this section sounds like. It's driven by the vocals, which at this point I have a hard time describing as anything besides "sounding a lot like Eleanor Friedberger"; it strikes me as what she'd come up with if you caught her singing to herself, and in that regard it's a lot like the stuff on Gallowsbird's--"Leaky Tunnel" springs most readily to mind. She goes haywire with the meter, sometimes doing a bar of 4 then 3 then two of four, then some random 3, etc. But what's interesting is that it's shadowed by the piano, both rhythmically and melodically. Meanwhile, there are bells firing off in between the notes as they rise at the end of phrases; in some ways, it's the ultimate but different expression of the very live, in-room sound you hear on a lot of Furnaces recordings, in the sense that everything here is acoustic and could conceivably be played at once. Very nice.

This only lasts for about 30 seconds, and then we're into the sixth section, aka the "Subcontinent Section." The tempo slows and we're back into classic rock territory, except not like even kinda proggish, just totally classic-rock, like if this was its own song and the guitars were a bit louder, it'd be Skynard or something. A real groover. Full drums, piano, bass, and two electric guitars, all pounding out a similar rhythm and even melody at the end of the phrase. Almost sounds like the outro to "Layla" but more rocking. Occasional synth noises. Good Moon-isms. Everything pauses sometimes and we get double-tracked Eleanor, or possibly Eleanor/Matt, hard to tell. It could totally launch into a solo if they wanted. Those little breaks.

Then the final section, which Matt sings, and it alternates between verses that sound like the early verses, strummed acoustic and little breaks interspersed with distinctly nautical/naturalistic choruses, all swooning strings and flowing rhythms. The whole song ends on a synth buzz.

In chart form:

Section 1
0:00-0:29 Verse 1 (Eleanor)
0:30-0:43 Chorus
0:44-1:09 Verse 2
1:10-1:25 Chorus
Section 2
1:26-1:42 Chorus (Matt)
1:43-1:55 Verse
1:56-1:59 Chorus
Section 3
2:00-2:12 Verse 1 (Eleanor)
2:13-2:29 Chorus
2:30-2:51 Verse 2
2:52-3:07 Chorus
Section 4
3:08-3:26 Verse 1 (Matt)
3:27-3:46 Chorus (Eleanor)
3:47-4:02 Verse 2 (Matt)
4:03-4:25 (Eleanor)
Section 5
4:26-4:57 Verse (Eleanor, "crazy part")
Section 6
4:58-6:42 Verse (Eleanor, Subcontinent section)
Section 7
6:43-6:51 Verse 1 (Matt)
6:52-7:09 Chorus
7:10-7:21 Verse 2
7:22-7:59 Chorus

ANALYSIS

This song strikes me as a bit like a Wes Anderson film: overdramatized high school banalities interspersed with incongruous or even absurdist flights of fancy. I'm not sure I'm tracing all this right, and it probably wasn't meant to make storyline-sense, but nevertheless, I can make one up that I'd be willing to stand behind. Here it is.

Eleanor is playing a character named Melinda. There is a new girl named Jessica at her high school who is clawing her way to the top of the social hierarchy, and Melinda doesn't like her at all. Melinda especially doesn't like Jessica when Melinda overhears her trying to disparage Melinda to the old folks' home where Melinda does her community service, telling them that Melinda is a woman of ill repute, has a babydaddy (and not the gay kind, either), etc. When Melinda confronts Jessica the next day about this, Jessica gets all alpha-girl and blows her off.

We then get a glimpse of Jessica talking to her hockey-playing boyfriend, Tony, which scenario may simply be a figment of Melinda's imagination, as she don't seem too stable. Jessica is doting on Tony and lets her queen-bee guard down, but Tony is distracted, imagining Jessica as a bird wearing a blue-green sweater--note that blue-green is the color scheme for the artwork on Blueberry Boat--and holding sticks in her beak while drinking dripping water. Tony then asks what went on at school today, which could mean one of two things: either he goes to a different school from Jessica, or he goes to the same school but didn't know where she was at lunch. He then gets shot down for a date, which seems odd, although maybe this is simply Jessica's reaction to Tony being distracted. Again, this could all be taking place in Melinda's mind, which would explain the odd bird imagery and the imagined strife, in addition to making the "Did Kevin and Jenny show?" line a reflection of Melinda's yearning for a relationship.

So Melinda clearly wants to start some shit. But how? She thinks back to a previous incident, in which she flirted with a guy named Al whose girlfriend was a longtime friend of hers. Melinda so charmed Al (go with me here) that it broke up their relationship and pissed Al's girlfriend/Melinda's friend off to an immeasurable degree.

What this suggests to Melinda that the person to go after is not the boy, but the girl. And so she puts the information in Jessica's head, Iago-style (OK, I'm just freestyling now), that Tony has been cheating. But this is not a delusion; it is in fact true, because when Jessica confronts him, Tony gets all nervous and "wondered who had spied." This makes him paranoid, and he starts to take precautions like only communicating with his, uh, mistress[3] (Jenny?!) in baby talk with the windows closed, even though he knows Jessica is out driving. We're not privy to the details behind any of this, either as to how Melinda gets the information, how she relays it to Jessica in a way that retains her trust, nor who and how Tony's a-cheatin'.

At any rate, this apparently fails to break up Tony and Jessica, so Melinda goes a little nuts, again Iago-stylee, stealing the credit card of a guy named Chris Michaels and using it to charge various things, in direct violation of federal law (trust me on this one). Tony has gone off on a trip to Columbia for the hockey team and Melinda waits at the airport to meet him when he comes back and possibly confront him. But he doesn't come back; he has stayed in Columbia to mend his broken heart, although the sounds of nature serve only to remind him that love is eternally fleeting.

Melinda, incensed, leaves a message on his phone. It purports to be a sort of family history that would serve as a fable for what you should be willing to do for love, except it's unclear if Melinda heard it from a relative, heard it from some dude in the Aden airport, or just made it up out of her crazy crazy head.

At any rate, having no idea what a lot of the stuff in this section means, I decided to turn it over to my friend Alex Vaughan, who's spent a decent amount of time in the subcontinent, and what he came up with was so good that I'm just going to let him handle this part. Just to mention, though, he wasn't familiar with the song when he did this interpretation, and he actually didn't even know a girl was singing it. I think it works incredibly well, though. So take it away, Alex.

In sum:

British soldier in India has gone native, picked up a local wife. He's caught, and returned to the army. He escapes with his wife down to Madras, where he works as a military attache of some sort (or perhaps a coxswain) until he decides to get resourceful with a pick-axe.

This is really fucking clever. It's also a weird : really obscurely idiomatic, particularly in Cazee, tindal, and possibly the pick-axe thing. I feel like someone's been reading historical fiction, and decided to rap about it.

Here follows, etymological notes and a transfiguration (though poor) into modern English.

---
chillum - pot? No, a pipe.
chillumchee - a basin? Perhaps the two are the smoke and the bowl, respectively. Sign of wealth, or corruption?
---
Cazee? Probably an English surname, that of the judge.
---
Devi Desi - "native woman". (Devi is goddess, but really woman. Desi means 'of the country'.)
--
Um, choke is probably "chowk", which is like a square (as in Cambridge) or a circle (as in Piccadilly). Rhymes with broke, anyway. Clever.
--
Bombay Army - He's been conscripted (or returned to the army) for his misdeeds, and sent to join the British army. The army those days was almost entirely conscription anyway, so you would see this kind of class rivalry between the gentleman officers and the working class. I don't, though, think he's a sepoy or a gurkha (native soldiers). Although it would explain the vocabulary, I don't think it fits socially.
---
Naracan - not sure. A place, but it's not clear whether he's been deported. Naracan are iron arrows, so it could end up as a place if the arrows are said to have fallen there. If it is a place, it's likely in northern India, or western (Bombay-ish) India.
---
> My Devi 'n me had to scram:
> quick down to Madras a'lamb

This is lovely. Run, killer, run!
---
Tindal:

English translator and Protestant martyr; his translation of the Bible into English (which later formed the basis for the King James Version) aroused ecclesiastical opposition; he left England in 1524 and was burned at the stake in Antwerp as a heretic (1494-1536)

or more likely:
\Tin"dal\, n.
[From the native name: cf. Malayalamta??al.]
1. A petty officer among lascars, or native East Indian sailors; a boatswain's mate; a cockswain. [India]--Malcom.
2. An attendant on an army. [India]--Simmonds.

So he's run off to the sea, where he'll be out of reach. If it's the right year (1746), then he could run to Madras because it's occupied by the French. But the coxwain makes a bit more sense.
---
> pick up your pick axe and rend!

What an odd line. Conceivably he's been put into a prison gang on the Andaman islands, or somesuch. That's about as harsh a punishment as the British gave their own. Or perhaps he's rebelling again? (That I know of, there were no
major rebellions as far south as Madras - the big rebellion in 1856 was entirely northern.)

Anyway, this is as close as I can come (with less attention to metre than the original)

-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-

Smoking his pipe and bowl he,
the Magistrate, did sentence me:
my white butt to the army
to abandon my darling,
(though her butt be shaded darkly).

As I'm perp-walking on down the street,
my shackles did fall off of my feet,
and I thought Mein Got,
this is a tough spot,
I should escape the militaree.

While picnicking in the bucolic hills,
my love got down to business - what thrills!
But all of a sudden,
we weren't cummin - but runnin!
down south to Madras cotton mills.

I thought I'd blend in with officers,
and command a small boat of the lascars
but soon as I'd lain,
as a coxwain again,
I was revolting all over the comforter!

(Last line somewhat amended. Sexual
content unlikely.)

One of the things I really like about the song is its title--before I actually went through and traced the character lines, I thought Chris Michaels was somehow an important figure in the narrative. But he's not: he's just the dude whose credit card Melinda steals. We never even see him. Moreover, given that the credit card is stolen from a purse, presumably the credit card was actually not even the purse owner's to begin with, and thus was in the possession of someone in high school whose parent had given them the parent's Visa for emergencies[4].

Some of the music/text pairing make a lot of sense; in fact, it makes sense the whole way through until we get to the subcontinent section, really. The Who-isms at the start evoke a period high school piece in the way the more literal Who-isms did in Freaks and Geeks. When it shifts to the crazy bit is actually when Melinda is going crazy with the credit card and the phone call. But the actual music of the section in India doesn't fit much, even though it's very nice. It would probably have been cheezily literal to have Desi-esque music during the colonial Indian bit.

CONTEXT

This is basically the backstory, or to see it in explicitly novelistic terms, the first chapter/section, of the characters we see in all the rest of the present-day songs. (Quay Cur and another song yet to be named here being conceived of as flashback or ancestral memory/story.) It takes place in a Michican suburb of Chicago such as , which I'm calling because of a) the Michigan reference in "Blueberry Boat," b) the Chicago reference in "Spainolated" and c) the mention of Gunzo's in this song, which is indeed "the major hockey equipment supplier for the Chicago area." If anyone has any more specific guess about what town it is, feel free to chime in--the only other place-specific name is "Wolf Road," of which there is one in many towns, I assume, but sometimes it's a more major thoroughfare, such as in Albany, where it's one of the big commercial strips. Then again, a Michigan suburb of Chicago would be way unweildy, so maybe they've moved from Michigan to the Chicagoland area. It could, of course, also be Oak Park, IL, where the siblings F. are from. So maybe it's best to assume Eleanor's character was born in Michigan and moved to somewhere like Oak Park, which would explain some of her social awkwardness.

At the end of the song, I think Eleanor's character ("Melinda") flees to Spain to escape the law as a result of her credit card fraud, and Matt's character ("Tony") has settled in South America to mend his broken heart. This song, along with "Blancheflower," are the only two places on the album where it feels enclosed, lyrically--everywhere else it feels impressionistic and expansive, like with the great distances traveled in "Straight Street" or "Blueberry Boat." But here everything is hemmed in and small, little disputes and little places all circling around and around. And so you can see the end of this song as kind of a good thing, with the two characters in question managing to totally escape their small town for a more rootless existence (although only temporarily in Tony's case, I think). Or, if you're more Biblically inclined, you can see it as an expulsion from paradise for their sins, especially given that in a recent interview Matt spoke of Oak Park as "a very pleasant place...very easy." But either way, most Chicago suburbs where teenagers would have their own credit cards tend to be places limited by their priviledge, in a way, places where you aren't forced to make the kind of compromises you see Eleanor's character making in "Straight Street," and the fact that these kids have to face those realities instead of being able to ignore them from their position of affluence is probably a point in their favor. So again (and there's a Wes Anderson comparison here, too), it's sort of about the corrupt world, but in a way seeing that as a good thing. Or maybe not--Melinda certainly does seem to be unhinged. And, of course, the crime she commits that forces her to flee is explicitly one of commerce, while Matt is almost literally swallowed by the outside world. He goes and does not return.

To tip my hand a very small bit here, I will say that Eleanor's story continues with "Spainolated," and Matt's continues with "Blancheflower." But we'll get to those later.

BB #05: PAW PAW TREE

STRUCTURE

Starts off very quiet, with some sparse, delayed scufflings, which then become tonal, sounding like a mid-octave synth-bass patch with a 100ms 75% feedback delay on it. After 30 seconds some higher-pitched synthesized warblings come in. Then 5 seconds later we get a bass line and a reverbed, distant snare on the 2/4, while the scufflings and warblings continue behind, with some guitar feedback added. Then at 1:10 the delay becomes a cyclical clicking and a sub-bass rumble as everything cuts out, and the full backing comes in as it decays.

The full backing consists of a bass playing the same line it did in the intro, a drum part that's the 2/4 snare with a kick added, an acoustic guitar, and Matt's signature wah-wah electric guitar noodlings. After 12 bars or so, the vocals come in with a line that was presaged by the lead guitar. Eleanor sings a stepwise melody that then shifts up a fourth when the chord does on the acoustic, as does the bass. The electric plays on behind this quieter, often out of time or tune or just making atonal noises. Then a little break with the guitar mixed louder, and back into a verse. Then a quick change into the chorus, with the only actual difference being the vocal melody. Here Eleanor sings a loping little line that starts a little late on the first chord and then breaks on the first beat of the second chord, and then resumes in a slightly different form for another line that breaks in the same place. It puts some air into the vocals, where there was already a lot of air, but it works really well to differentiate, and it's a great little melody. The lead guitar plays through the vacant chord.

For the third verse, a LFO'd organ following the chords, which continues into the chorus. After the second chorus. After the second chorus there's a solo, with the lead guitar pretty much playing the vocal line from the verse. It's harmonized below, I'm not sure whether simultaneously or not.

In the fourth verse, another electric guitar is added playing a rhythmic chord that doesn't seem to actually be particularly near the key of the song, and the wah'd guitar echoes this. They stop doing this for the final chorus, then resume in earnest for the outro. After the guitars handling it for four bars, they change key slightly and add a piano banging out a ringing chord on the one, along with a crash on the one, I think the first cymbal in the song. It increases in volume and intensity through the end of the song, totally against the mood and tonality of the rest of the backing, but then segues strongly into the first chord of "I Lost My Dog," which we'll get to later.

In chart form:

0:00-1:15 Intro
1:16-1:54 Verse 1
1:55-2:24 Verse 2
2:25-2:43 Chorus
2:44-3:02 Verse 3
3:03-3:22 Chorus
3:23-3:40 Solo
3:41-4:00 Verse 4
4:01-4:19 Chorus
4:20-4:39 Outro

ANALYSIS

A pretty simple storyline here, at least self-contained, and kind of like a boy's adventure story mixed with a blues narrative, which form I think the lyrics definitely reflect, although it's unclear whether this was a conscious decision or just the usual Fiery Furances lyric-writing mode.

Eleanor's character was on a ship that was forced to stop in a tropical bay. She was taken to shore and sentenced to work in the silver mines, but she tries to escape by cutting her bonds with a pickaxe. When caught, she is sentenced to death, and is tied at the top of a tree to await her fate. Word is sent back to Spain, but the King there will not intercede and so, presumably, she is put to death, or they "make mango mush" out of her.

This song has grown on me a lot, and I really like it now--the melody is very pretty and the arrangement is sparse but effective. Lyrically, I like that there are a lot of places you can go with this, and a lot of questions left unanswered despite the straightforward premise--what exactly is her punishment? Why the King of Spain? And so forth.

I also like the inversion being practices on traditional adventure stories--normally the escape would be successful, or there would be another escape, but here, no escape at all, very bluesy. It mingles different traditions to interesting effect.

CONTEXT

First, let's address the issue of setting. Everything in here, as I said, indicates a tropical setting: mangos, silver mines, a bay, etc. But what exactly is a paw paw tree? Well, it's actually a tree native to North America: "Our Pawpaw, which grows as far north as New York and southern Ontario, out west as far as Nebraska and Texas, and south to Florida, is known by several other names including the American Custard Apple, the West Virginia Banana, and the Indiana Banana."

However, the page also notes: "The name of this plant is sometimes spelled Papaw - and in that form is often confused with another fruit that sometimes goes by that name, the Papaya, Carica papaya. (The latter is in a totally different family than our Pawpaw, and can only grow in tropical areas.)"

So there's an interesting, and possibly useful, confusion here. I've already noted that there are links here both with North America and with more tropical areas, and I think in the end this confusion will be key to the particular way the timelines interact on Blueberry Boat, on the way present-tense is interrupted with backstory without any warning. There is a perfectly legitimate reason to place the papaw/papaya tree in the tropics, and to place the narrative there, too. But it can also take place in Michigan or Texas.

The song begins with the line "At last when the choice was neither nor," and so the song begins as a continuation of something. "At last." I think this song is the end of the story of Eleanor's character in "Quay Cur"--this is where she eventually ends up. Matthew's character goes to Ireland, but Eleanor's heads the opposite way from Eskimo-land, to the tropics, once again taking her chances with the shipping industry, but meets an unfortunate end. That part of the story we're left to figure out for ourselves.

Of course, going with the above, she could also just head south from Eskimo-land and also end up in paw paw tree-country. But we'll see.

BB #06: I LOST MY DOG

STRUCTURE

Ends with a little bit of the last chord of "Paw Paw Tree" on piano, which then continues, following the vocals as the previous instruments decay, playing one chord per bar, with the whole thing a bit rubato (am I using that right?), i.e. not to a beat but just free-flowing. This is an intro, and it is capped with a wah'ed electric guitar noise that Eleanor describes as "This is where Matt makes a big jump and he says 1-2-3-4."

Then the piano comes in, plays a little vamp for two bars, is then joined by tom-toms and the Rhodes for another two bars before the vocals come in. It's a pretty basic blues progression, staying on the I (which I think may even be an E major, but no guitar here, rats) for 4 bars while Eleanor sings a descending, half-spoken line. It then shifts up to the IV (A) for 2 bars and the vocals go up proportionately, and finishes on a iv (A minor) unless I'm being retarded and it's a iii. Eh. Anyway, the IV-iv/iii bit of it are the chorus, where Eleanor says "My dog was lost but now he's found" twice. A hand-muted crash is played all metal-style on the chord change. This all goes around twice, the electric guitar comes in, and there's a little instrumental break formed around a descending line on the Rhodes for 3 bars followed by a one-bar descending line on the electric. Then we do another two verse-chorus pairs and a break, with the electric chiming in sparsely.

After this second break, the tempo drops considerably all of a sudden, and the chord changes are played by an acoustic guitar strumming a swinging, eighth-quarter pattern, with the electric soloing over. This goes for a verse/chorus, and then a drum machine beat drops in, strongly reminiscent of the one that starts "Quay Cur," with a gabba-ish reversed sub-bassy kick and a crumpling snare, and the guitars drop out, with an organ droning on the chords. This again plays for one verse/chorus pair, and then a bunch of the previous instruments come back in for the break, with the electric guitar and bass playing the line, the Rhodes doing something different (rising and falling lines, sounds like), plus a bass and a tambourine.

Then for the seventh verse it's back to the form of the fifth verse, i.e. just guitars, with a little phased noise on the threes accenting, and another electric added for the chorus. Then the eighth verse is like the seventh, with organ and drum machine, but for the chorus the electric kicks back in. This is followed by a break mostly like the second one, with the main melody line a bit more subsumed for some reason.

Following the usual electric-and-bass bar that ends the breaks, we're into an outro that's just organ and vocals, again somewhat (but less so than before) out-of-time. Same melody as the intro. Then some delay noises that bear no particular connection to what came before nor to the following track, although they do sound a bit "Turning Round"-y.

In chart form:

0:00-0:13 Intro
0:14-0:28 Verse 1
0:29-0:34 Chorus
0:33-0:40 Verse 2
0:41-0:46 Chorus
0:47-0:53 Break
0:54-1:04 Verse 3
1:05-1:09 Chorus
1:10-1:15 Verse 4
1:16-1:19 Chorus
1:20-1:28 Break
1:29-1:43 Verse 5 (slower)
1:44-1:50 Chorus
1:51-1:57 Verse 6 (drum machine)
1:58-2:04 Chorus
2:05-2:15 Break
2:16-2:30 Verse 7 (guitars again)
2:31-2:38 Chorus
2:39-2:45 Verse 8 (drum machine again)
2:46-2:52 Chorus
2:53-3:02 Break
3:03-3:29 Outro

All told, this three and a half minute song orchestrates the same basic verse chord progression four different ways. Which is impressive, but since that's for 8 verses, it doesn't really match up with the Pitchfork theory.

The whole thing is an unusual track in that it's a very Gallowsbird-y one, with sparse and short instrumental breaks, a bluesy chord structure, and speak-sing vocals. I quite like it, albeit in a different way than I like "Chris Michaels" or "Blueberry Boat"--left with an acoustic guitar, I often find myself playing and singing it, which is nice. I'm kind of interested what the songwriting process was like on this, given how much it sounds like a song from the first album, ostensibly Eleanor's, when it's actually from Matt's album. Was he trying to write in her style or is it a holdover or are they just simplifying things for us? Guess it don't matter much.

Also: here is the old version of the song, which Matthew (who it comes courtesy of) says is a pretty accurate representation of how it was played before the recording of Blueberry Boat, and is from the SBN session. Totally driven by the electric guitar, no tempo change, no drum machine, the only keyboard part is a siren-y noise. I was going to map this but there's sort of no point--intro {[(verse chorus) X 2, break] X 4} outro is how it goes. I think I like the new version better.

ANALYSIS

The nicest thing about this song is the way the structure mirrors what little plot there is--the major events happen in the intro and outro, and in the very vampy and repetitive midsection, nothing actually happens aside from a lot of lookin' around.

The other nicest thing about this song (shh!) are the lyrics, probably, which are just wonderful and specific and free-associative and evocative. (Dude from Interpol, are you listening? More Super K references!) To presage things a bit, they're reminiscent of the first section of "Blancheflower," cramming a lot of syllables into a short space.

Plot? Uh, hmm. Eleanor is mean to her dog, kicked him, etc., so the dog leaves, like a woman, except a dog. Or like a man, I guess--shouldn't be sexist in my evocations of blues-mythologized domestic abuse. Anyway, she goes to the laundromat and asks either the actual or figurative cats there, then goes to the vet, then to the bar, then to the gym (where she thinks they might have offered her dog/man/woman some sort of physical exercise--whoho!), then to the dog run where they are too distracted by the existing dogs to pay attention, then puts up fliers, then to the either person or newspaper referred to as the town crier, then to a corner, the coroner, e-mails the police station to see if anything's turned up, the Dairy Queen, the Super K, the market they used to shop at, the adoption agency (or "dating service" if we're going with the man/woman metaphorical interpretation) where she got the dog in the first place, then mortgages her house and checks with the police, goes either into jail or into the police force (a bit of a "Blancheflower" presage here too) to see if the dog's there, goes the pound where she donates some money, twice, but during none of these visits or activities does she turn up the actual dog. Finally, at the end of her rope, she goes to church on a Wednesday, where the dog is preaching a sermon, having converted to Christianity. (Presumably.) She has found him, but he has already found himself, and is lost to her in an emotional/spiritual way.

I'm making light of the metaphorical implications for human relationships above, but in fact they're probably there, just cloaked a bit intentionally by all the comedy. It's obviously an inversion of the old blues/country songs about losing your woman, except unlike most of these songs, the other party was 100% right to leave, plus the other party is a dog, and so this particular bit of silliness paves the way to blow past a lot of the self-pity that typically accompanies such my-woman-done-gone narratives. Of course, such narratives also sometimes involve the male narrator's dog leaving as well, but usually for no reason--it's just a sort of sign of the particular malaise of loserdom that's settled on his shoulders, chasing everything away--dog, truck, job, etc. So it's a man's I-lost-my-woman song (a modern version being Poison's "Shut Up And Make Love"--more examples welcome), except it's a woman who lost her dog. Who then finds religion. Which, again, is a common theme in the particular genres being played with here, "seeing the light" and so forth, the salvation of the church, sometimes the only one for those whose shoulders bear the loserdom miasma. Except here the salvation is for the one who left, and so in this way it's almost this song from the woman's perspective. But with a dog. So it's pretty much taking this conventional theme and twisting it nine ways from Sunday while still crafting a song that's rocking, catchy, and smart. Good job kids.

The other other nicest thing about this song is the melody, although I don't know really why. But it's fantastic.

CONTEXT

Pretty much no narrative context--this is pretty much self-contained as far as I can tell, although I may change my mind later, which of course I am free to do. So let's talk themes.

As in a number of other songs, things don't work out like we'd expect them to--the dog is not regained, and, indeed, becomes a preacher, which dogs don't do that often. But plus, it doesn't even start from somewhere we'd expect--the simple fact that Eleanor's singing it calls attention to its oddness. In this particular case it's casting the woman out of the victim role and oddly enough casting her again in the kind of Jack-Lemmon-in-Glenngary-Glen-Ross loser role we also see prominently in "Straight Street." It's one that typically male, with the sort of failure leading to desperate grabbing that doesn't really characterize, say, the loser-archetype of chick lit.

Viewed in the context of the I-lost-my-woman song (ILMWs), where the dog leaving is usually the sort of last straw, the one thing that will love you unconditionally finally giving up, what's striking is how they've given agency back to the dog, who not only makes the choice to leave, but makes a further choice to improve his lot in life (arguably). Dogs can get hurt, as can people, and it's a remarkably un-self-centered song, refusing to view everything that happens through a lens of your own near-infallibility. There are possibilities out there for all of us, and the unexpected happens all the time. This is all further reinforced by the particular references that pepper the lyrics, most far removed from the mythologized Southern gothic (or Weimar Sunset strip) setting that characterize ILMWs--Dairy Queens, Super Ks, and e-mail on one hand, town criers and coroners on the other. Some things remain constant, like the police, the pound, and the market, but the way this is all intertwined with solidly modern realities makes the whole thing grounded in what we actually feel and experience than what we'd like to feel and experience, something at the root, I've always thought, of traditional blues and country songs. It's anti-romantic, and it's very nice.

But what separates this from the typical alt/art take on traditional forms is that it neither rehashes an outdated version of the form in miserabilist ways (the "Uncle Tupelo Thing") now does what I'll unfairly call the "Watchmen Thing," i.e. exposing the dark and troubling underlying assumptions etc. etc. The Furnaces make something related, undefensive, and new, gaining stength from the tangential connection with tradition but not depending on it. It switches so many elements it's no longer a simple twist or inversion--it's like an alternative summation of the form, a new history not interested in the old.

BB #07: MASON CITY

They said it wouldn't happen! Uh, and by "they" I mean "me."

STRUCTURE

Another song with three very discrete sections, although they're all linked in various musical ways this time. Uh, except for the intro, which has not a damn thing to do with the rest of the song.

The song begins with a synth line that goes like this: half note->sixteenth note octave up->sixteenth note octave down->eighth note octave up->eighth note octave down->eighth note octave up->new bar with note a step down. This cycles through four times and then repeats. Under it is an organ accompaniment and a simple drumbeat (quarter-quarter-quarter-eighth-sixteenth-sixteenth). After two cycles the synthline goes from descending to ascending and the drumbeat becomes fuller, with a delay applied to it with a feedback sufficient to build instead of decay, so that after a cycle and a half the sound of the delayed drums has totally overtaken the track and you can't hear the keys very well. Then at the end of the second cycle, everything cuts out, the delay begins to decay, and the verse begins.

The first section begins with just claps, a piano playing chords in an eighth-eighth-quarter pattern, and Eleanor's double-tracked vocals. The latter in particular sound weird for some reason--they are maybe EQed with the bottom cut off to make her sound thinner, older perhaps. The reverb, too, is dusty, and overall everything has an aged feel. The chords for the verse are C-Am-F-C. A drumfill comes in at the end, and then full Moon-ish drums run through the chorus. The chords for the chorus are F-G-F-C-F-G-G-G. For the second verse, a heavily reverbed, frequency modulated synth line comes in, and this ensemble continues through the second chorus and the lackluster guitar solo, which takes adds a bass and, obviously, an electric guitar, and takes place over a verse-chorus cycle. Then for the third verse the drums and electric guitar drop out, the bass stays in, and an organ chord doubles the piano chords. This continues through the third chorus, halfway through which a totally out-of time kick-kick-snare drum part comes in that will form the basis for the next section.

The section section begins with said drumbeat, an unaccompanied piano line doubling the melody, and Matt singing single-tracked, with light chords coming in halfway through. Then for the chorus the left hand joins in on the piano more strongly and plays a counterline. Matt sings a line, then whistles a line, then sings a line, then shouts "Wait!" and the drums play along for a few bars. The piano then comes back in and plays the verse and chorus melody, with a synth line gradually being added, and more enthusiastic drums (including crashes) coming in as they move through the chorus melody. Then there's another break, and we're on to the third section.

Which starts off with Eleanor singing, what sounds like a nylon-string or baritone acoustic guitar, and a piano (the throughline on this whole song). In contrast to the previous section, which was ominous and open, this one has an immediately more upbeat feel, and soon resolves into a specifically laid-back vibe. A clean electric guitar plays along. The chords are A-F#m-D-A. (Down a third from the first section, you'll note.) After each line, a whistling synth riff plays. Everything's well-reverbed. After two lines, the guitar slides down to a third to a F#, then to an E, accompanied by piano and voice, then goes back into the regular verse progression. This time, there's a muddled, out-of-place sound in the right channel, that to my ears sounds distinctly like the bass riff from "Paw Paw Tree" passed through a bunch of filters. Then another chorus, then a noise-heavy guitar solo over a repeated A chord until the end of the song.

In chart form:

0:00-0:42 Intro
FIRST SECTION
0:43-1:03 Verse 1
1:04-1:23 Chorus 1
1:24-1:44 Verse 2
1:45-2:04 Chorus 2
2:05-2:43 Guitar Solo
2:44-3:03 Verse 3
3:04-3:21 Chorus 3
SECOND SECTION
3:22-3:43 Verse
3:44-4:08 Chorus
4:09-4:17 Drum break
4:18-4:43 Instrumental verse
4:44-5:10 Instrumental chorus
5:11-5:21 Instrumental break
THIRD SECTION
5:22-5:32 Intro
5:33-6:03 Verse 1
6:04-6:14 Chorus 1
6:15-6:52 Verse 2
6:53-7:02 Chorus 2
7:03-8:14 Guitar Solo

ANALYSIS

First off, let me just note that this entry would not have ever been written, more than likely, had not two people responded to a previous entry and sent me some thoughts about "Mason City." I'd like to recognize those people at the outset here, and they are Dan Beirne, "an occasional (read: rare) contributor to Said the Gramophone" and Hayden Childs, of The High Hat. I will reprint their thoughts after mine, but first I'll run through what I came up with, with their aid.

"Mason City" is the story of Eleanor, an old maid living with her overprotective father who has developed a career as a mail-order conman--er, con woman. As she has been shut into her house and is not allowed to leave because of past misbehavior (running around with criminal types and the like), she has been forced to turn to self-advancement by less than legal means, in this case insurance scams. Her con is to befriend lonely old men as "pen pals" and then cause them to fall in love with her. Consequently, she then takes out insurance policies on them, with their blessing, and with her as the beneficiary. Inevitably, the romance is broken off, but as she was the one corresponding with the life insurance companies, she then asks for extensions, borrows some money against this policy, and then uses this money to pay for a killer, who then offs the old man.

In this particular instance, as she's pulled this scam a few times, she's working through an intermediary, an insurance fence of a sort, who refers to herself as "the Riceville widow." The fence sends her the loan (the "kill fee" if you will) along with a self-addressed stamped envelope in which Eleanor should return the fence's share of the insurance money, 2.6%. But Eleanor has problems--after this many times (or, it being her first time--hard to tell I suppose) she's having a hard time working the scam, and can only get Aetna to give her a policy on the old man's life. Two others reject her, and she's worried about actually getting the extension. Nevertheless, she sends off for the killer, Matt, who in the second section recounts his travels to get to Chicago, where the old man lives. We do not see the killing.

In the third section we have a sort of flashback to Eleanor's golden days hanging out with the criminal element, and it seems she was actually the head of a whole con mob. It's just a bunch of slang, really, her giving a Guys-and-Dolls-ish monologue to the gang. To go line-by-line:

"How are you my nabs?"
How's it going, guys?
"Little tender footed crabs,"
You're all so inexperienced.
"Meet my knuckle duster."
Why I oughta punch your eye out!
"You geeches that gazoon's gow / tried to break into the bow"
You brought the mark all the way to the end but then took it too far and got nothing!
"go wipe your nose."
You snot-nosed brat, get on with ya.
"Prussian who got jackered,"
The German tourist you conned,
"my snapper til you knockered,"
you used my trick so much it became obvious,
"get on the snam."
so get outa here.
"The chivman wants your chip,"
The guy who keeps track of the money wants to account for your share, so where is it?
"better dummy up then go dip,"
Better go look sympathetic before you break the bad news.
"you're outa turn."
But don't shove.
"I learned that the lowest form of life is the buffer nabber,"
i.e., the jewlery thief--
"even worse than the dicer stabber"
i.e., the gambler robber--she's all pissed off at a jewlery theif for stealing her make.

Thanks to David W. Maurer's The Big Con for some of this.

Now, here are the two interpretations.

Dan Beirne

This song is about money.

Eleanor's character is posing as an accountant for a Mr. Nelson (fictional
or actual, I don't know, it's possible it's her father). As his
accountant, she takes out a loan "for him" from Aetna Life.
[footnote]Which is weird, because Aetna is an insurance company, not known for
loans. However, it's possible it's a policy loan, which would mean the
receiver of the money, probably Mr. Nelson, is a policyowner with Aetna, which
means there is money to be had when he dies. Her secrecy regarding the
letter, she doesn't even tell her father, or Mr. Nelson, that the loan came
through, makes me think she kept the money for herself, and then proceeded to
spend all of it. She writes to a rich widow from Riceville asking for
money, saying that other people (the Dunlay heirs) have set bad examples and she
will not be able to get an extension, so she needs immediate help. She is
not hopeful of getting help, but she does send a Self Addressed Stamped Envelope
anyway. The widow turns her down and she is forced to ask for an extension
anyway, in the name of Mr. Nelson.

Then Matt's part doesn't seem literally related to Eleanor's (it's not like
he's one of the Dunlay heirs, or Mr. Nelson or something) but it does seem to
relate in theme. He seems to be a manual labourer, riding the rails all
across the country (whereas the rest of the song takes place strictly in Iowa),
doing whatever he can as a job; blacksmith, forgeman. But he doesn't
mention masonry, maybe because if he only went to mason CITY (instead of Oregon,
Utah, Michigan, Wisconsin, New York), would he realise you can make money by not
even trying (Eleanor is a scammer). But his part does note that he's not
really trying to make quick cash, "none on the make", but there is no
implication that he would refuse it if he could only figure out how to get
it. He seems more occupied with the more immediate problems associated
with being a labourer in what appears to be the turn of the century, his hands,
and their subsequent stillness.

The last part...damn. I'll start by listing all the words I could not
find ANY meaning to anywhere, each followed by what I think they may well
mean:
nabs - seems to be a term of endearment, like this might be the starting of
Eleanor's letter to the Riceville widow, or some other person from whom she
scams money.
tender footed crabs - perhaps it's literally what it says. if so,
it's beyond me.
knuckle duster - this one I did find: brass knuckles.
geeched - there's a lot of contemporary definitions, but none of them
fit.
gazoon - whew. no idea.
gow - part of a gazoon. I get the 'nickname' feeling again, like it's
a made up name for a real part, but used strictly to rhyme with "bow".
noler knockums - 'nole' means head, so perhaps this is like "stupid people"
or "my dumb friends"
jockered - perhaps jipped, or swindeled, which would fit with part I.
snapper - if it's literal, it would fit with crabs.
knockered - if it were "you're" knockered, I would say 'drunk', but it's
"your knockered" which seems grammatically amazing, so maybe it's a typo.
the snam - I'm reminded of that Simpsons episode: "get on the trolley,
Dad."
chivman - that commenter on your entry pleading for help: "a
knifeman". maybe they have more help than me.
chip - "money" or "life"
dummy up - "give up" or "settle with the house"(perhaps in terms of
death)
go dip - "go swim", given we're probably on a boat again, or "die"
buffer-nabber - I'm thinking it's a real thing. a bbc quiz asked
"would it be better to be a buffer-nabber or ______(not dicer stabber, something
else)" I don't know what it is, but to see it used again was certainly
encouraging.
dicer stabber - probably similar to a buffer-nabber, but still,
nothing.

Okay, all that said, here's what I THINK is going on: it's one of Eleanor's
letters to someone she is asking for money. Well, more like
threatening. "Meet my knuckle duster" is a pretty clear threat, and the
rest of the letter starts from there. I think it's like blackmail: "You
geeched that gazoon's gow" is like "I saw you do something, I caught you".
Then she says she's just wasting time until her 'stock comes' which is probably
like easy money that she's very sure she's going to get (perhaps the very money
she's asking for). The Prussian who got jockered is perhaps the person
affected by the geeching, another referral to act she hangs over the head of the
person receiving the letter, and from "get on the snam" all the way to "you're
outta turn" is like "wake up, you're done for, either pay or die". And
then the last two lines are the final threat/insult, as in "YOU are the lowest
form of life". But also, in the larger scope of the song, Eleanor also
seems to be talking about herself as well.

Whew. That's what I think, anyway.

Hayden Childs

The first third of the song, as sang by Eleanor, is from the point of view
of an Iowan attorney sometime in the 1920s. I don't know what the deal
with the dad is, but presumably Eleanor is only secretly practicing law or is
using the family name to get things done, despite the father's
disapproval. First, she gets a letter from an Aetna Life Insurance
agent in Mason City. Aetna has lent a gentleman money on the attorney's
recognizance and taken a 2.6% fee. Then, the attorney is attempting to
keep a widow in Riceville, Iowa from being thrown out of her house. She is
presumably a Dunley (check out the story partway down here) but
the other Dunleys won't help. Eleanor is worried that the Banker's Trust
won't give the widow an extension to get her mortgage note together because if
they give her an extension, they'll have to give other extensions.
Finally, the attorney writes a flattering letter to Des Moines, possibly to the
Banker's Trust in relation to the Riceville widow, but maybe on other
matters. Mr. Nelson, who may be the attorney's father, is too proud to ask
for an extension, but the attorney is asking for one instead.

OK.

Then, Matt sends the listeners cross-country on extinct railroad lines
across several years. The Oregon Short Line ran along the Oregon Trail
through Oregon, Idaho, and Utah, including a leg through Salt Lake City, which
was sold in 1903. The Pere Marquette ran across the Midwest into New York
starting in 1900 (although it didn't run to Salt Lake City). The Michigan
Central refers to an abandoned railroad station in Detroit. I suspect that
West Madison doesn't mean the street in Chicago, but western Madison County in
New York, where Crumb Hill Road and Crumb Hill Cemetary are. I don't know
for a fact, but I'd guess that this was the site of some sort of Prohibition
booze route, thus the reference to the railroadmen (forgers, molders,
blacksmiths, and boilermakers) who weren't on the make and the cure for shaky
hands.

The third part of the song with the nabs & such, is a Artful Dodgerish
combination of British and American working class slang. "How are you my
nabs?/Little tender-footed crabs?" - Eleanor/Artful Dodger greets her street
gang. "Nabs" is either an ironic reference to cops or made-up slang for
thieves. Crabs is Brit slang for disagreeable persons or people who borrow
money without returning it. "Meet my knuckle duster" - El/AD smacks them
around with her brass knuckles. "You geeched that gazoon's gow" - Many
articles claim that this is nonsense, but that doesn't seem right.
"Gazoon" seems to be some kind of Asian slang for pompous person, but I don't
have confirmation on this. Geeched & gow -- this is a guess, but "pai
gow" is a Chinese gambling game played with dominoes, and the high play is a
"gee joon". Say it fast and you've geeched a gow. "Tried to break
into the bow" - of a ship, presumably. "Go wipe your nose" - more
dismissive artful dodgerisms. "Noler knockums" - There was a trucking
company called Finke and Noler. I guess the knockums are those who knock
over Noler trucks. Eleanor is waiting for the stolen shipment (the stacks)
to come in. "Prussian who got jackered" - the hijacked shipment,
maybe? "My snapper till your knockered" -- I think this should read "My
snapper 'til you're knockered," meaning "my accomplice (in old Brit slang) until
you're marked for burglary."

I don't know if El/AD is speaking to a hijacked Prussian who's her
accomplice until she can rip him off or if they're both waiting for the same
shipment and she intends to take him for everything. "Get on the snam" is
her order to her accomplice. Snam is a natural gas provider in Italy who
also provides fiber optic service (which plays into the overall "flow of capital
& information" theme of the album). If this is right, it fixes the
time in the present, rather than the Industrial Revolution, which is where the
rest of this section appears to take place. "The chivman wants your chip"
-- the guy who's very good with a knife wants your shilling. "Better dummy
up then go dip" - Pay him, then go pickpocket more. "You're outta turn" -
I don't know in context, but it seems in general to play into their themes of
entropy & the winding out of time. A "buffer nabber" is a dog-thief
who sells the pelts, a la Cruella de Vil. "Dicer stabber" - I would guess
it's just what it sounds like, but couldn't find a reference to it.

Overall, I can't see how this one stands on its own. It has to be a
transition part for the larger narrative of the album, but I'm still working on
that.

CONTEXT

The only thing is that Eleanor's character here is a precursor to, and maybe even an ancestor of, Eleanor's character in "Chris Michaels." Otherwise, the only thing it's close to in time is "1917," sorta, except that doesn't have much to do with anything else either. So it's of a piece.

BB #08: CHIEF INSPECTOR BLANCHEFLOWER

Off we go once again, armed with my new understanding of their equipment set-up.

Note: I am not doing "Mason City," at least not at the present time, because I have no idea what the hell is going on in "Mason City." If anyone out there has an idea what's going on in "Mason City," drop me a line, and we can collaborate on it or something, but man, I can't make a coherant heads or tails of that sucker.

STRUCTURE

Very clear three-part structure here, to the degree that you could make clean cuts and have it be three separate songs, all. Part one is the typewriter section, part two is the mystery section, and part three is the relationship section.

Part 1

Begins with just synth and drum machine claps on the 2 and 4. The synth is doing something I've heard done before but I don't know how to do--I believe (although, again, could be talking out my ass) the oscilator is randomized and acts as a sort of irrational arpeggiator, playing a succession of eighth notes within a certain range but with no rhyme or reason. Even better, while the notes and the claps start off roughly in sync, they are on slightly different cycles, so after a bar or two they're firing at very different intervals, sort of like sitting at a red light behind another car and having your turn signal be slightly off theirs. It's fascinating to listen to, a weird, counterintuitive, and very effective choice. This continues throughout the entire typewriter section, although it occasionally changes volume and range.

After 15 second to appreciate these two things alone, the full arrangement of voice, percussion, and what I'm going to assume is autoharp (although it could be a mandolin or some other high-pitched, strummed string instrument). The percussion seems to be just toms, reverbed and either delayed at the same BPM as the claps are playing at, or just played like a 4-note mid-low feedback delay, firing off every 4 bars. The autoharp strums a single chord every 2 bars in the verse, but in the chorus changes chords. The verse chord is C. The chorus progression is C-C-F-F-G-G.[1]

Vocally, the verses consist of more or less free-spoken lyrics for two bars followed by a melody for the next two bars consisting almost entirely of quarter notes and almost all E, G, and A. The chorus melody is almost exactly the same as the melody in the last two bars of the verse, except with a transitional F thrown in for good measure. It is exactly the same for all three chords; there is some rhythmic change, but this is mainly on account of the lyrics and the chord changes are simply there to provide the illusion of movement. It's almost ADD...

In terms of arrangement, we've already covered the first verse. For the first chorus, everything stays as before except a droning organ drops in on the left channel, the autoharp plays changes, and the synth gets detuned slightly. For the second verse, all beats drop out and a second randomized synth comes in on the other channel; after two lines, the toms come in double-beat where they usually would. They're definitely delayed here. The fourth line has a overdriven, bassy, dipping synth noise. For the second chorus, the tom hits every two bars but is not delayed, and the organ comes in. I also hear a piano here, although in retrospect that was probably somewhere before. The third verse is as the first verse at first, except with the additional randomized synth. Then there's the aforementioned synth noise, and we're back to the intro arrangement, and then it's just muted randomized bass synth for the final vocals here, which get muted as well and processed.

Part 2

A beat runs through this section that's the stereotypical disco beat, kick-hat-kick/snare-hat, and I'm going to assume it's a drum machine. The chord structure is driven by a piano, although there's also an acoustic guitar here. A synth plays a leadline and I don't hear a bass. The whole thing has a sort of loose, boogie-woogie feel, although I may just be making that up. The impression is largely shaped by its contrast to the first part, given the very consistent, regular beat, and the more conventional vocal line, which Eleanor sings. The verse progression is D-G-Bm-A/Bm/A. The chorus progression is G-A-D-C. So unless I'm a dumbass,[2] the verse is in D and the chorus is in G. Sorta. Or there's just an extra C in there for no reason. Oh, and the end of the chorus is 6 Gs and 10 (?) C#s.

It all proceeds as above for 2 verse and choruses. Then it holds G for 2 bars and there's a minor-key bridge, which has the same arrangement. I'm too lazy to figure out the chords here, but it proceeds in stepwise form with the synth holding whole notes and switching octaves every bar; it reminds me progression-wise of the "My baby's got a stick..." section of "Chris Michaels."[3] Then there's a backwards-masked solo over indeterminate chords with, again, no significant arrangement change, followed by another verse/chorus pair as before. Then there's another breakdown outro with Eleanor freestyling (uh, sorta) over a murky drum machine beat and we're out.

Part 3

Starts off with a roughly similar arrangement to the basic one for Part 2, except slower, and with a clap instead of a snare on 2 and 4. The synth line plays a more organized, scale-y line, which repeats regularly. The nice thing here is probably the way the 2nd chord hangs on through the third, making the dip to the fourth chord good, as it's really just two chords with a transitional one back into the resolving tonic at the end.

Then we have the second part, which dips into a lower chord to mirror the lyrics, a common practice in this section; it's almost a Broadway song in the way the melody and progression follow the narrative arc, even as the arrangement stays consistent. It hits a nice resolving chord at the end and does a similar thing, plus tremelo, with the next part.

The fourth part is vocals and a very prominent acoustic guitar, with some synth stuff going on in the background and no beat, although the guitar strumming is fairly rhythmic and continues the groove feel of the previous section that followed through here. I'm having a hard time following the chords in these three sections, especially whether they're regular or not, and what the logic is. It doesn't sound weird in the way the first section does, but it also doesn't sound conventional. I could map it out more thoroughly, but eh, what do you expect for free?

Then we have a fifth section that's just Rhodes (?) and vocals, with the same melody and chords as in the first part of this section, except slower.

Finally, a minute-and-a-half guitar solo, at a more moderate tempo than the rest of the song and with live drums, I'm fairly sure. The piano describing the chords gives the whole affair a sort of outro-of-"Layla" feel, although the drums are, I think, played by Matt, and thus fairly simple. The main thing to note here, aside from the actually very good solo, are the weird little breaks that happen starting at 8:28, where the drums play a fill and there are all sorts of zappy synthy noises which, were I being unkind, I might suggest were injected in order to disguise the out-of-time fills, but which actually work very well, so never mind. Although, let's all just take a moment and notice the fact that the song ends with a minute-and-a-half guitar solo and I'm not sure this has been mentioned in any write-ups of the album, and given that there are not a few other lengthy guitar solos on the album, this is notable. I guess after a 3-minute section focusing primarily of out-of-sync drum machine and randomized synth and free-jazz vocals, it doesn't seem like such a big deal.[4]

In chart form:

Part 1
0:00-0:15 Intro
0:16-0:46 Verse 1
0:47-1:11 Chorus
1:12-1:45 Verse 2
1:46-2:09 Chorus
2:10-3:03 Verse 3 (outro)
Part 2
3:04-3:20 Verse 1
3:21-3:31 Chorus 1
3:32-3:48 Verse 2
3:49-4:01 Chorus 2
4:02-4:19 Bridge
4:20-4:34 Solo
4:35-4:51 Verse 3
4:52-5:02 Chorus 3
5:03-5:10 Breakdown (outro)
Part 3
5:11-5:27 Intro
5:28-6:05 Part 1 (hangin')
6:06-6:18 Part 2 (conflict I)
6:19-6:40 Part 3 (conflict II)
6:41-7:11 Part 4 (dialogue)
7:12-7:25 Part 5 (breakdown, aka Part 1 mk II)
7:26-8:58 Solo

Did I say something a few entries ago about toning this section down? Ah well.

ANALYSIS

This is one of my favorite songs on the album, a real winner, although also something of a grower, in the final analysis; it took a while to catch on, but once I paid attention, man oh man. Gimme some of that sugar.

Part 1

Fairly straightforward, plot-wise, so let's run through that so we can get to the juicy thematic bulldada. Kid wants to be a typewriter repairman, because he loves the whole experience of it, especially the idea of sleeping late, doing a quick repair, and being back for an early dinner. His uncle even owns a typewriter repair business. But he doesn't get enough good grades, partially because he is ADD.[5] He spends some time in the remedial room, and looks for other jobs, but gets distracted by the graphs, and in the end launches into a somewhat extensive fantasy about being a detective.

Now for the goodies. This is definitely the best song about ADD I've ever heard[6], and, in the Fiery Furnaces tradition, this stems in no small part from the specificity of it: not only raisins as a reward but "from her Ziplock bag," "Now I'm playing In My Own Little House," etc. Then on a slightly higher level, there are the evocations of things pleasing to ADD kids: the tangibility of typewriter parts mixed with the laziness the job would afford, the graphs in the career book, the "diamond plastic piece of wood" the street repair people are using as a warning sign. And on a higher level, there's also the fact that the verses feel ADD, rushed and unstructured and wobbling quickly from one subject to the next; even the chorus, while more organized, is a rush of words, really one sentence but covering a lot of ground.

But the best thing about it is probably how obvious it is that Matt himself is ADD. You can compare the Furnaces to prog on the basis of this album, but really, while this song is 9 minutes long, if you read through this analysis you see that there aren't any complex keys or time signatures--C major and D major and roughly 4/4 throughout--and it's really just three separate songs. Matt's just so ADD that he wants to throw as much in there as possible to keep his interest and it ends up getting long as a result. And it's blindingly obvious from the live shows, which are nothing but a near-perfect expression of ADD. It's different from a jam band mashing up a bunch of songs for creative or interpretive reasons; Matt just seems like he gets bored of each song so fast there's no reason to play the whole thing, or if you do, you have to break it up and put other songs in between the different sections. Now, this is more a guiding impulse than an actual night-by-night reason, and it ends up being creatively and interpretively interesting, but still, it's very ADD. So here we have an ADD song about being ADD. Pop affords this.

Part 2

Matt's fantasy here is very boy's adventure story: clearly set in England, full of farmers and lords and weapons and bars. The detective gets word from a nobleman that there's been trouble with a farmer who may have been involved with foul play. When s/he arrives (Eleanor sings this part, so it's sort of hard to tell what's going on gender-wise, although see my previous points about this in "Blueberry Boat") s/he encounters the farmer in question, who is carrying a gun and muttering about his son. The detective arrests and confines him and has tea with the lord, Sir Robert Grayson, but the farmer escapes and burts through the window with a sword. Luckily he is very polite and begs forgiveness. Were I to fill in the gaps here I'd assume the farmer then gives evidence that he's been wrongly accused of killing his wife, and perhaps his son is to blame. The detective then meets with someone who has, in fact, killed his/her father (the "young son"?) and get the 411. So to speak. It's disjointed, but hey, it's ADD.

The best part here is the wonderfully ambiguous line "No where you'll see."

Part 3

A very sudden shift here from 19th-century England to 20th-century America, and from the pre-adolescent version of Matt's character to the 20/30-something version. Having done the adult thing, he comes back for a visit and stays with his younger brother Michael. They drink, take painkillers and drink beer and watch a DVD, but something's up. Michael admits he's dating Matt's ex-girlfriend Jenny. Matt goes to see Jenny at her father's bakery and a confrontation ensues where it's hard to tell who's in the right: Jenny says she's dating Michael because she likes him, but Matt sees dark ulterior motives in that she's simply dating Michael to get back at Matt. We then find out that Matt's married and possibly not doing too well financially as he has to use his wife's new car to go have a drink at the bar his friend owns, it's unclear where. He doesn't like that Jenny is doing this.

Overall

The main question here, of course, is: what the hell do all these sections have to do with one another? Below you'll find my idea of what they all have to do with the other songs on this album, but why specifically are they all mashed up here? Or is it just a cop out? Sorta yeah, sorta no. There's a clear and easily-constructed narrative flow between the first two sections: the first part is a description of this ADD kid, and then the second part is his daydream, which makes just all kinds of sense and hopefully I don't have to explicate that, because, well, I'm not gonna. But then the third part just makes very, very little sense. You're dropped into a whole new situation with this character, which is fine, but nothing ever actually gets explained, although you do get a few facts: he dated someone named Jenny, he's now married to someone's who's not Jenny, and he has a younger bro who's currently dating Jenny. But what did he end up getting employed as? (A clerk at Gunzo's?) Who's his wife? When did he and Jenny date? And so forth. It's very believable that it's the same character, but it's somewhat inexplicable why the artistic choice to leave so much of the story out. Although I guess it was 9 minutes already, and focusing on small scenes is always a better idea in pop songs than trying to give the full picture. Still. It's good, but also somewhat confusing even with close analysis. Unless I'm totally missing something.

CONTEXT

The way to think of this is mainly in relation to "Chris Michaels." Part 3 here is what happens afterwards; part 1 is what happened before, at least with Matthew's character. I'll admit to being sort of unclear as to how all of this relates, whether it's a parallel narrative or the same one, and while the naming differences would suggest the former (there's no "Jenny" or "Michael" in the previous song, although note the last name), but I prefer the latter because it's more fun. As I tangentally suggested in my entry for CM, I think Matt's character is Tony, and Tony's unnamed mistress is in fact Jenny. To change a bit what I said there, I think Tony gets dumped by Jessica, comes back from Columbia after Melinda's fleed the country, and enters into a serious relationship with Jenny, which ends sometime around college in a nasty way, and then a few years later Jenny starts dating Tony's little brother Michael. Many things are pretty much left unexplained: why they break up (although clearly Tony cheated on Jenny, in classic cyclical fashion, since he assumes she's trying to get back at him), where Michael was all this time, what Tony's doing with his life, but I'll try and fill this in with my wrap-up, to come by the end of the year (promise). Or hey, maybe a future Fiery Furnaces album will get into it.

"Spainolated" and (if you're lucky) "Birdie Brain" to come tomorrow, or I eat an entire mattress.

[1] This is much easier when you're doing it at home with a guitar at your side. Stupid work. Alternately: stupid me not having perfect pitch.
[2] And I am.
[3] "Shouldn't you use the same section name you used in your analysis of that song?" Eh.
[4] Were this more of a critical post, I might note something here about the way this contrasts with coverage of Wilco's A Ghost is Born, but that's for another time, I suppose.
[5] Yeah, OK, "ADHD," but ADD is one letter less, so in the spirit of the disorder, I'm going to use the shorter version.
[6] Not counting, of course, the brief Atom & His Package line: "At the punk rock / academy / where all the students / they're diagnosed with ADD." Great song.

BB #09: SPAINOLATED

Last "programmatic" song on the album. Whee! Look for wrap-ups soon.

Probably won't be doing "1917" anytime soon for the same reasons I'm not doing "Mason City," as described in the previous entry. Would definitely like to do "Birdie Brain" and "Turning Round" sooner rather than later. Taking a hesitant peek at "1917," I'm struck by the degree to which sections of this album are avant-garde noise music with pretty melodies over top. Awesome. I still don't know what the fuck is going on, though.

STRUCTURE

First of all I have to bring up the fact that the live version of this song is, if not better, at least more immediately appealing, and I doubt I would have focused on it to the degree I have without the MP3 Matthew posted a while back of this played live in between "I Broke My Mind" and "Single Again." It's worth a listen, and while it does greatly streamline the structure, there are certainly things to be gleamed from the album version as well, so let's set in on that.

The song begins with what might as well have been a negative-timing countin (you know, how on the CD it'll go TRACK 3 TIME -0:15 and so forth) as it has zero do do with the rest of the song. Two lo-fi/kiddy keyboard parts, the first one midrange and the second one bassy and oddly nautical--I swear--alternate bars, playing scalewise. There's phased static in the background and there's a piano chord on the 4 of every 2nd bar.

Then we have what I'm calling the "verse intro" and it's fairly lengthy, at least for this song, which is only 3:21 total. The arrangement is a open-tuned acoustic guitar played with a slide doing the chords, an electic guitar wah'ed fairly rhythmically, alternating notes, playing a stepwise descending figure over the chords, a high-pitched synth playing whole notes mirroring the root note of the electic's figure, gutbox percussion, and electric bass. After a while, the electric/synth settle into playing the verse melody kind of lazily, and a piano plinks along in. The chords for the verse are F#-F#-B-F#. It's maybe interesting to note that there's a minute-long instrumental intro here for a 3-and-a-half minute song.

Everything cuts out and it's just piano and vocals for the first verse. Afterwards the bass and drums and a weird squeaky noise come in for the chorus. The chords for the chorus are D#m-C#-B-C#. Then the second verse is as the first verse except with a hand-muted crash on the 1 and 3. Following this there's a little Rhodes break/solo thing. Then there's another verse intro, played by slide electric guitar (not in open tuning, I don't think, just sliding along the top 3 strings) and piano. When the vocals come in an acoustic comes in too. No processing on any of this except a light reverb on the vocals and amp reverb on the electric. Then there's a tempo shift downward to a sort of head-banging clod as full drums come in along with a Rhodes solo and a synth line and a wah'ed wash of white/pink noise. The vocals go on a bit, and then we end with just a delayed plop, a bassy synth line, and a melodica. The whole thing ends on like a ii-2 chord, I feel like, although I'm too lazy to check.

In chart form, with transitions noted:
0:00-0:12 Intro
Regular tempo begins.
0:13-0:58 Verse intro
Arrangement change.
0:59-1:11 Verse 1
1:12-1:28 Chorus 1
1:29-1:40 Verse 2
Slower
1:41-1:55 Break 1
Faster
1:56-2:23 Verse 3
Slower
2:24-3:01 Bridge
3:02-3:21 Melodica outro

ANALYSIS

This feels like an Eleanor song more than anything else on the album except maybe for "Dog." It's short, focued on international impressions rather than imaginings, and even the imaginings seem more personal than character-based. (Not to favor one or the other, but still.) Starting from details that specific but much more recent than in, say, "Chris Michaels" or the previous track, when it descends into a daydream (presumably) it feels much more mature, somehow, than the ones in "Blancheflower." Plus, it's arguably real, more along the lines of the India section in "Chris Michaels," a melding of fantasy and fact. Let's take it literally to begin with.

Eleanor is in Spain but broke, presumably due to the fact that she's an American fresh out of high school and can't get a work permit. And so, she is serving as a subject for medical experiments, but is homesick, and so goes to TCBY (aka "This Can't Be Yogurt!!") to get that lovely franchise connection back to the states. Apparently she's there somewhat late, because she feels like she should be afraid, but she's not, or at least pretends not to be. One night she is walking home by the water because it's so nice out, but is lured over by an old man who throws her into a bag and imprisons her in his old ship, where she is forced into religious gestures and anti-growth pills. She does have a guitar, however, and when she's not helping to row the boat, she is doing sad reinterpretations of songs from "My Fair Lady."

Now of course the latter part of this doesn't really make much sense, but the key to it is the line near the end: "I wish I wish I was back in Chicago." Now, those two "I wish"es may only be there for rhythmic convenience, but they're just great, and plus this is the second line of the couplet directly following the little Rhodes break, setting it apart pretty deliberately, I think. Basically, she's homesick there in Spain and only 18 years old, but she's intelligent enough to know that her depression isn't really justified. And so she makes up this elaborate metaphorical scenario to sort of legitimate the feeling: trapped in an old rusty ship (the country/city), forced into religious display (Spain is a more publicly religious place than Chicago, or at least suburban Chicago), stunted in growth because she's regarded as immature, even though she is, and the only saving grace is her portable guitar, which was small enough to bring over on her flight. I think the sad-sack line that closes the song--"The pain, the pain, in Spain, falls mainly on me"--is a lovely little wink, a sort of exaggerated, back-of-hand-to-the-forehead-eyes-rolled-"oh-woe-is-me" gesture that acknowledges the fact that she is actually pretty lucky to be just hangin' out in Spain (in Barcelona maybe?), so she shouldn't complain, but still, she's not happy. The guitar helps, though.

CONTEXT

Eleanor's character here is basically the same one in "Chris Michaels." She's decamped internationally after the hubub in the US, and Spain is just one of her stops. However, it's her final and most significant one, as it turns out. You can make a case in this particular area for the kidnapping being metaphorical or literal, but regardless, the "pain in Spain" is real here, the result of an old curse, and the particular details and scope of the kidnapping story are ancestral memory. Her family is cursed, disgraced, and she's come back to the center of it. Key line here is from Paw Paw Tree: "the King of Spain don't care." I'm trying not to tip my hand too much, but this is where it all ties together, more or less. Wheels within wheels...uh, have I said that before?