You never know quite what to do
You shut up when I'm in the room
You lead me around by the tongue
I see it all clear as the sun
You love me when I play guitar
Then throw me away in the yard
You lead me around like a dog
So lead me around like a dog
Do do do do do do do do do do do do do
All right yeah
You lead me around like a dog
So cook me some breakfast tonight
I'll hold you if you got to puke
I'll hold you 'til you feel alright
Puke puke puke puke puke puke puke puke puke puke puke puke puke
Alright yeah
Lost on North Avenue my job took me there everyday
A different world a new country I found out today
It's like I'm a foreigner born in the u s of a
Tension so thick you can cut it I'm here anyway
Driving on back to my home where the radio's free
Crank up the Velvets and Ice Cube and vintage PE
Pop in the Replacements and drift to a van on the road
Every once in a while I just want to explode
The magic of music's a cascading ballet of junk
Stuck in the middle of metal and country and funk
Sometimes I feel lost when I'm writing I want to be Neil
Every musician I know they just want to be real
Yeah
All of these labels for music mean jack shit to me
Subconsciously divide and conquer the will to be free
I don't want no purists around me it's forrest or trees
Give me a forrest and watch me sink into the leaves
Sinkin deep
Yeah, sinkin deep
Ah-oo lord
Ah-oo lord
sinkin deep
Yeah sinkin
Sinkin deep
Here's some chips and dip
Have a nice party, son
I can see it clear as day
All smiling cakes and fun
Bring my chips and dip
To your party later on
I got some peanuts too
For your happy birthday song
Here's a dirty card
Don't show it to your mother
Here's a briefcase and a check
When's last you saw you brother?
Take my stuff on back inside
It's yours now take it light
Yeah and don't drink too much beer
When you're partying tonight
No
I come from overseas
My dad and me no way
And I didn't see him die
My plane was late that day
My old house like a wall
I ain't ever left them doors
Look how they've wrecked my yard
I left my home
What for
So I got my kid chips and dip
He turned 25 today
I took him overseas
You should really see him play
My son looked kind of sad
When I said goodbye
But I taught my boy one thing
A real man never cries
(That's wrong)
Now I don't ever look back
When I drive my truck away
And I hardly see my kids
Except on Christmas Day
So I walk on up them steps
Take my shoes off and lie down
On my stinking single bed
On the lonely side of town.
When I look in your eyes
The clouds leave the skies
My pain starts to wane
So I'll say it again
Say you love me too
It's good making love
Feels so good making love
Tell my buddies roll on
I'll catch up later on
But we all know I won't
Something I just won't do
They're all down at last call
While I'm in bed with you
Say you love me too
All of my life
I searched for what's true
Without even looking
I found it in you
I guess we both know it's right
Even though we m,ight fight
It's a timeless affair
It's like wind in the air
Because when I look in your eyes
The clouds leave the skies
My pain starts to wane
So I'll say it again
Say you love me too
Do you remember giving me your number
And your address too
Do you remember videos of thunder
Can't ignore you
Come sweetly watch your step and shudder
I thought that you were someone's girl
To another empty form of flatter
But not from me
Hanging with my little sister
But you should be
Around my house at dawn for California
I'm a crazy man I thought I'd warn you
Now I'm too shy to drink you're so specific
This song is for you I hope you
Dig it love is what you make it
But it makes you
Just like dying hell you just can't fake it
But it fakes you
Come loudly watch your mouth and sputter
Faces in a whirl I'm taking cover
So what's the reason for all of this clamor
Build you with a chisel and a hammer
Drinking a 40 on the second day of spring
We just sent off the mailing list
Got a keg flowing in the afternoon
It's time for drinking this
So many cats on the mansion porch I know everyone inside
Girl living in an upstairs apartment
One day she'll be my bride
Picked up D down in old Pigtown
Got a ride in the van inside
Smoking around an ounce of weed
Laughing 'til it hurts my sides
Thank god it's finally spring
Snow's been thawed a couple months
It's still been cold as shit
Keeping warm with whiskey and tequila
And a million beers with it
Keeping numb with pills and something
That I got for lifting weights
In springtime there's so many girls
Ain't no need to masturbate
Thank god it's finally spring
Now everyone can sing
Birds fly through the wings
Whistling as we sing
Love me
Let me
Love you
Ooh
Let's agree on disagreeing
Let's agree on moving on
Let's agree just for agreement
On second thought don't call me on the phone
'Cause I'm flashing back on days of sorrow
Cold and melancholy like the night
Frown around and feeling stupid
On second thought I'm going out tonight
I ain't going out just for the movement
'Cause I'm liking sitting here just fine
Yeah
Let's argue for just the talking
Let's drive aroiund and talk some more
Buy a twelve pack close to midnight
And never wonder what's outside that door
Let's just keep our heads and rotate
Round and round each other like the stars
Create panic from enjoyment
I'm sick of all these goddamn local bars
I ain't going out just for the movement
'Cause I'm liking sitting here just fine
Hey
Let's agree on being different
Let's agree on being sane
Let's agree that life is awesome
Let's agree that life is pain
I ain't (etc)
Hey, Dad, I'm dying
Hey, son, I done my best
Hey, Dad, you're lying
Hey, son, I done my best
Hey, Dad, I'm thinking
Hey, son, I'm thinking through
Hay, Dad, I'm starving
Hey, son, I'm hungry too
Hey, Dad, I'm running
Hey, son, I'm running through
Hey, son, I'm gunning
Hey, Dad, I'm drinking brew
Hey, Dad, it's night time
Hey, son, it's morning dew
Hey, Dad, it's summer
Hey, son, it's winter too
instrumental break
Build the levee
Hold back every tide
Submerge every wake
Stifle every ride
Raze the pounding surf
Stop the raging wind
Break the tree that bends
Never grow again
Shade the morning sun
Pave the pastures pure
Sweep up all the dirt
Make a tree a door
Shelter from the storm
Melt the smoldering ice
Then unleash the beast
Suckling on you life
Got in my truck and I drove off I didn't say shit
Looking for words when they left me to stew over it
Every once in a while I just can't shrug it off
16 years sober will make you a shiny self cross
So I apologized when we did plug in the gear
All of this time I been wanting it's year upon year
How can a something be somewhere wherever it is
Can't it be nowhere and nothing and not of the biz
Sinking deep
Checking on back with our hero he's feeling his oats
Making his way as a young man with three leather coats
Has one for weddings and such and one to stay warm
His favorite is over his shoulders it shelters the storm
It's meloncholy and it's bright green and newer than new
Every once in a while I don't know what to do
Living vicariously 'cause that's a writer will do
Put it all in here and then some and do it for you
Sinking deep
Lost on North Avenue my job took me there everyday
A different world a new country I found out today
It's like I'm a foreigner born in the u s of a
Tension so thick you can cut it I'm here anyway
Driving on back to my home where the radio's free
Crank up the Velvets and Ice Cube and vintage PE
Pop in the Replacements and drift to a van on the road
Every once in a while I just want to explode
The magic of music's a cascading ballet of junk
Stuck in the middle of metal and country and funk
Sometimes I feel lost when I'm writing I want to be Neil
Every musician I know they just want to be real
Yeah
All of these labels for music mean jack shit to me
Subconsciously divide and conquer the will to be free
I don't want no purists around me it's forrest or trees
Give me a forrest and watch me sink into the leaves
Sinkin deep
Yeah, sinkin deep
Ah-oo lord
Ah-oo lord
sinkin deep
Yeah sinkin
Sinkin deep
The cold and ragged beauty of a winter tree
Struck Dawn as quite odd as she looked to see
A table full of papers but none up to date
No chance t glimpse beauty when you're running late
A far off police siren pierces through the air
But Billy doesn't notice and he doesn't care
Sirens don't mean nothing in the county jail
Doing time's the fine when you can't make the bail
In wintertime
The sun don't climb
The ice it shines
The world's unkind
An accident just happened out on National Pike
Some lady ran a redlight sliding through the ice
Valentines day candy scattered on the street
Now my car is totaled and it's raining sleet
The windows creek and moan as the wind bears down
Whipping through a tree branch lying on the ground
The screen door whistles loudly and the yard is froze
And me I write a song and I can't feel my toes
chorus
Dave - guitars and vocals
Paul - bass and production
Pork - drums and headphones mix
Ian - mastering
The books are kept impeccably
An air of sadness from what couldn't be
And pictures grace the mantle place
All rosy cheeked and freckle faced
Separated tender rage
She got the kids you got the cage
Kids move out a big old house of fireplace memories
Alright
Now don't no kids mess up the floor
A townhouse, baby, no back door
The bank is stuffed forever more
And the bills rise like the tides
It wasn't nothing that you said
You thought you loved her in your head
In your mind together dead
Your graves are side by said
So hold on to your fireplace memories
All that you got left can't laugh at you
And that's the truth 'cause what was true
Was what was wrong and now it's gone
Satisfaction never comes but your standards are too high
And when your gone I'll be right there until your soul floats by
And then is lightening strikes you down and crushes all the past
Fireplace memories won't die of all things they will last
chorus
Dave - guitars and vocals
Paul - bass, production
Pork - drums
Ian - mastering
I didn't see you when I went out tonight
A word or two means nothing to me that don't sound right
I live the life of an empty glass
I'm glued onto my barstool before the moment's passed
If you call the weather I'll call the time
If you say you'll be mine
Tonight I'm feeling lucky so what's the word from you
If I run out of cash before the night is through
If I told you my dream you'd slap me in the face
So ditch that creep and I'll meet you later It's gotta be the case
If you call my number then I'll set the time
If you say you'll be you say you'll be mine
If I can wake up to you my life would be complete
But I compete on a footing unsure
When I call your number
You set the time
If ever you are ever you are
If ever you'll be mine mine all mine
You'll be mine
Happy New Years Baby
The nights go on forever dogs bark through the cold
UPS trucks rumble through holidays grown old
Grey skies hover blindly grey grass lies asleep
Grey roads rise through heaven grey breath slowly seeps
How many people died when live shrinks and melts in pride
Accomplishments are nigh happy new years baby
The fireplace burns forgiving so come in from the cold
Laughter ells and singing false stories here retold
A cat purrs in the corner the music gets a boost
The stroke of midnight passes and everyone cuts loose
Cocaine and whiskey buzz acid and shrooms a must
Heroin and crack for us happy new years baby
Sleep when the sun comes up afternoon and throwing up
See the folks and suck it up happy new years baby
It's just like what Lennon said
Years come and go and then you're dead
Winter sucks or so I've read
Happy new years baby
Can't wait 'til spring comes 'round
Krokus flowers in the ground
Now the stinking fields are brown
Happy new years baby
Dave - guitars, vocals, percussion
Paul - bass, engineering, mixing
Wil - drums
Ian - mastering
Looking at a corpse at dawn in 1993
Hit and run up the tab in 1993
Here I live in Baltimore in 1993
Born and raised wait to die in 1993
Segregate black and white in 1993
Baltimore Harbor night in 1993
It's like an alcoholic's dream
Blue collar bars and disco scenes
Poor rage and shoot up the interstate
Ain't life oh so great
Steaming crabs a baseball day in 1993
No football no subway in 1993
I'm feeling like I'm left behind in 1993
It never changes it never changes in 1993
Dave - stringed instruments and vocals
Paul, bass, recording, mixing
Pork - drums
Ian - mastering
Wake up Monday morning and I look around
I felt bad this morning and my hair fell to the ground
She came by on Wednesday with a wedding ring
I ducked out on Thursday, baby, and hocked my wedding ring
It's hard
So I went out to Seattle to try to find a band
But nobody did want me they wouldn't let me lend a hand
So I cruised on down to LA and got a new tattoo
But nobody knew Chuck Berry songs or "Blue Suede Shoes"
It's hard
So I went on down to Athens but I played too hard
Flew to the Twin Cities but they wouldn't let me in the yard
So I hitch hiked back to Baltimore and I shot myself
Now I'm paralyzed but I have found myself
It's hard
Dave - guitars and vocals
Paul - bass, engineering, mixing
Wil - engineering, drums
Ian - mastering
WHEN CHRISTMAS COMES AGAIN 15 APRIL 2019WHEN CHRISTMAS COMES AGAIN 15 APRIL 2019
When I was a kid I voraciously tore through biographies of the Beatles instead of text books. Even then I had little faith in being educated by people whom I thought were stupid. That's a Bootstrap Theory type of thing caused by reading too many damn John Lennon interviews. Humility would hit hard later.
One thing both Lennon and Paul McCartney would talk about was that, being songwriters, they wanted to write songs for occasions that had a chance to become standards. That's why they wrote their Christmas songs, "Happy Christmas (War Is Over)" for John and "Simply Having a Wonderful Christmas Time" for Paul. Both of them songs cut to the essence of them fellas for real. You wonder what each might have added to the other's but that's a recipe for a lifetime of WTF.
In College Park I was writing a rock opera with my buddy Joel Baily. We were in a band called Love and Hate. We changed our name to Forgotten Sons when that crap hair band Love/Hate started getting played on MTV. Joel and I wrote together all the time. We made a point of it. We wanted to be rock stars. As far as we were concerned we already WERE rock stars so we wrote us a song for the occasion of the winter solstice.
Dig - this is pretty much the song we wrote. It stuck with me all these years. If a song sticks with me for decades I eventually record it, or try to anyway. This was around the time of "Do They Know It's Christmas" - all that pre-internet troglodytal ignorance of the cultures that aren't derived from the Anglo-Saxons. I honestly didn't know that the entire world wasn't celebrating Santa and Jesus on December 25th. Holy fucking shit how the fuck did we exist? I think a big deal was when the Cold War ended and then China started reengaging with the world. Collectively the human race began remembering that there were other parts of the globe besides where one is born, lives, and dies. Around the time of the 9/11 terror attacks (which happens to be my fucking birthday) I added the stuff about"embrace all of the faiths that would love to kill me." You know, channelling my inner peacenik. You can add American Christians to that list as well. In general that's a spiteful and mean segment of my beloved Americans. That sentence right there hints at my own unrealized bigotry. It's a constant battle.
Chances are you've already heard this song. I release it every year in December on whatever social media site is available. I'm very proud of it.
Recording wise we did the sleigh bells and the tuned water glasses but my favorite part is at the end when the acoustic guitar doubles the mandolin riff. These things happen during recording. The way I have always operated, or tried to, is that you roll the tape and see what happens during overdubs. That's the funnest part - the spontaneity.
I was anxious to hear how Paul melded together the everything plus the kitchen sink approach I enjoy during recording and fuck if he didn't impress the living shit out of me with this mix. That's something I learned from Brian - trust the guy mixing. HE'S the one spending all the time sorting through vague ideas and sculpting a whole.
So I hope you like this one. The arbitrariness of the release is maybe my favorite thing about this song at present.
Quickly - I purposely avoided any talk of the origins of what for all intents and purposes is an ancient celebration based on the movements of the stars. "Ancient" means, judging by the latest discoveries in anthropology, 100,000-200,000 years old. That deficiency of knowledge outside of one's own lineage is the sticking point that unscrupulous leaders use to aquire and sustain power. It's a useful tool. I have grown profoundly dissappointed in the reaction of the free peoples of the Earth to the vast networks of interwebs. I had mostly assumed that people were generally thoughtful and reasonable where as, if this past decade is taken as a sample of the reaction of civilization to new technologies that are inherently complicated to understand and yet superlatively easy to use, most people are easily swayed and governed by predjudice and place. I'm still astounded that the great experiment of the fouding fathers has survived this long because, clearly, as I sit here on 16 April 2019, the idea is better than the species to which it was gifted in hopes of a better world.
Have a great Christmas this spring!
Christmas means togetherness and love and joy
Happiness and presents for the girls and boys
Old folk come together and then reminisce
Stand beneath the mistletoe and get a kiss
Love your friends and kin
When Christmas comes again
Shout out to the homeless in America
The starving out in Asia and in Africa
Embrace all of the faiths that would love to kill me
The majority of folk through time just weren't free
Go remember them
When Christmas comes again
Make sure that you bring your love at Christmas time
People come and go but love is all the time
People they pass on but their love still exists
So let that love inside your hearts and reminisce
Love brings love, my friend
When Christmas comes again
Dave - guitars, vocals, mandolin, glasses
Paul - bass, engineering, mixing
Wil - drums
Ian -mastering
TIME FOR A CHANGE 1 APRIL 2019
Everything blends together eventually. You can call it entropy, erosion, degredation, there's a millions words through out time trying to explain decay. Maybe that's where we went wrong. Do we need to explain it? Can we just accept it? My fallback position when I get intellectualy lazy is "this is beyond human language." That's an obvious cop out.
I bring this up because I have two distinct memories of where this song was written - WAIT - they are one in the same! My timeline is off. Phew! I'm only still as crazy as when I woke up this morning.
The year was 1988. I had taken a year off from school to ingest large amounts of psychedelic drugs and then returned. I went to and lived at the University Of Maryland College Park, Cumberland Hall - a co-ed building. The previous year, 1987, was a great year for rock and roll. I spent the summer living and working (ish) in Ocean City, MD. That's also the last time I was arrested. Music-wise, for the under(ish) ground, the Mats had released PLEASE TO MEET ME. For mainstream bros and hos GnR's APPETITE FOR DESTRCUCTION was making everyone want to try heroin. For the collegiate types U2 had THE JOSHUA TREE and REM had DOCUMENT. The good music bled into '88 and provided a youthful guitar heavy soundtrack to my life. Public Enemy and NWA were about to pop.
I played in a band in Bawmer - Kona, the next in a long line of people who refused to play my fucking songs. So I would go to school during the week and come home on the weekends to play fucking cover songs to drunks. It was a way to keep my chops sharp. I can't stress this enough. It was a constant struggle to get anyone to play my songs. They referred to them as "originals" like they were some odd alien lifeform beyond the mere talents of idiot Marylanders. My reasoning was always "somebody had to write these fucking songs we're covering - they didn't just appear!" But the poeple around me who played gyuitars were always "yeah but they're songwriters. We're just people from Baltimore." Baltimore I love you but sometimes you really suck. So not having the resources to actually play all these fucking songs I was writing I categorized them in my own little library code - the Davey Decimal System.
That's a lot of backstory. I wrote "Time For a Change" when my best friend Made Hood was moving to Bali to study ethnomusicology. I was also moving on from my freshman year at college. It was a reset moment. Made was NOT someone who discouraged my songwriting. We actually wrote together. Two of our compositions eventually made it - part of them anyway - to THE BIG OPERA. He wrote the "slide on by" chorus in "The Orphan" and we came up with the riff to "How Do You Like That" after smoking around an ounce of weed.
This song, obviously, works well as an opener. So whenever I needed a first song in an opera I used this'n. It's not plot specific so you can use it anywhere - any setting, any time period. The only detail is "kazoo." It just so happenned that this song found a home in 1993. It was roughly written around this time, me being a young man who didn't know anything yet but was confident enough to try to make poeple learm his songs.
Musically this was recorded at The Shed in rural Bawmer County with Paul Kelley and Wil Berry, aka "Porky." Pork was the first guy EVER who was into playing my songs as the reason for a band. I'm forever grateful. Dig - by this time I was in my mid twenties. In my mind I had lost around a decade trying to convince people that we were worthy to write. It got easier for people coming up after me. There was no stigma to creativity for them. So I wrote this during Kona and a little interim band called Pritty Hary played it and then it sat in the 1993 folder for 20 years. This arrangement is pretty much the same as when it was written and demoed on my little TASCAM 4 track.
If you remember me you see
Think of the blood pumping through
If I remember you playing your kazoo
Please remember me
If I were you and you were me
Then just what would you see
When feeling kind of rough
Looking pretty gruff
Be remembering
It's time for a change
Look around that person
Find out what is certain
Choose the other curtain
Yeah but it might bring the worst in
Right now I feel like shit and that's it
Right now nobody's here
And then I think of you wondering what you'd do
If you see me too clear
It's tiume for a change
Dave - guitars and vocals
Paul - engineering, mixing, bass
Pork - drums
Ian - mastering
WINTERTIME ACOUSTIC 21 March 2019
During a nice hot Maryland summer a couple of years back I was helping my buddy Paul cut down a bunch of dead pine trees on the property his family has owned since somewhere back in the sepia toned days before people realized other people existed. Big suckers they were, full of sap and sharp edges that would slice up your shins and calves if you were foolish enough to wear shorts. I was doing the grunt work for Paul and his mom's husband. They cut 'em down and chopped 'em up and I moved the big shit into a dump truck and the small shit into a succession of burn piles. My dad had recently died and Paul asked how I was doing.
"I'm more relieved than anything else." I said.
"You aren't depressed or anything? I was when my dad died. I didn't know it until later and then it hit me."
I shrugged. I WAS relieved. I was the executor for his estate. I had carted him around to all of his doctors appointments for his COPD which he had although he never smoked. He was a doctor. He had a formality to him that, as I got older, I found endearing. Due to some arrangement with him and my mom he never paid any child support. So although we lived in a big ol' victorian in Old Catonsville times were tight. He always bought me shit, though, and having divorced parents both buying Christmas presents was, hmm, something that happened.
So cut to a year later and my wife and I have dedicated my dad's old Jeep Grand Cherokee to Baltimore Animal Rehabilitation Center and it hit me. That was the last physical bit of my Dad's shit that was still hanging around. So I sent ol' Paul a text message along the lines of "dude you were dead on it just hit me today my fucking dad is dead."
Paul's a musician, a bass player, and he's been a dedicated listener to all the wacky shit that Brian and I put out on the Society Fringe Podcast Podcast. Somewhere between Circle 9 and SFP, Circle 9's drummer Wilmer Earl Berry Jr (Pork) had joined Paul's band, Pearly Goats, one of my favorite fucking bands. I had all my operas lined up to record with Brian. He said he needed a break (after only 13 albums in 2 years? Crazy, right?) so I figured I'd record 1993 during the break with Paul and Pork. This being life, things happen and now I'm working on the Brian-Andy SFP concurrently with the Paul-Pork SFP. It's still one long narrative that takes place over the course of centuries and eventually millenia. The 1993 stuff is rooted in young adult ennui devoid of romantic roadtrips and gunfights in the vast American desert and the Far East. It's a companion piece to Travelogue - happening at the same time, but rooted in realism. The main relationships are the fella, his dad, and his girlfriend. Mainly it's about him and his dad getting on each others' nerves. I didn't realize it until I returned to it when it became clear that it could actually be done. By "done" I mean recorded andreleased.
So, dig, each act is a season in the year of Bawmerhun 1993. "Acoustic Wintertime" starts it off because musically it foreshadows a song in WINTER and we had changed the arrangement into what eventually became "Stoner Wintertime." It was important that the jarring strum patterns were heard because they get revisited in SPRING in a song actually about jarring strum patterns. I like how it starts with "ready?" and we're off. Paul's on his standup. This is a demo for Pork. I initially wanted to put the version from the original demo I recorded while Circle 9 was working on THE WAR BETWEEN THE STATES but this version came up and inserted itself into the equation. In these long narratives I take these kinds of things as signs that this is how the story wants to be told. It's fun to see patterns that you didn't know existed. It's like submerging your ego in pursuit of something "other."
So here you go. Paul and Pork ain't as into talking about their art as Bri and Andy so I'm going to do essays for the 1993 stuff. It will save a dickton of money, relatively, because this'll just be songs without the hour long spitball session Briy and I tag onto everything. I told him we still had to do some because it's become a clearinghouse for mental shit we go through. Lucky you for getting to hear it.
The bold and ragged beauty of a winter tree
Struck Susan as quite odd as she looked to see
A table full of papers but none up to date
No chance to glimpse beauty when you're running late
-----
A far off police siren pierces through the air
But Billy doesn't notice and he doesn't care
Sirens don't man nothing in the county jail
Doing time's the fine when you can't make the bail
-----
In wintertime the sun don't shine
The ice it shines the world's unkind
-----
An accident just happened out on National Pike
Some lady ran a red light sliding through the ice
Valentine's Day candy scattered on the street
Now my car is totaled and it's raining sleet
The windows creak and moan as the wind bears down
Whipping through a tree branch lying on the ground
The screen door whistles loudly and the yard is froze
And me I write a song and I can't feel my toes
chorus
Dave - guutar and vocal
Paul - engineering, stand up bass
Ian - mastering