Woman

This song was definitely me "reaching" a bit.  Trippy space funk  like Pink Floyd?  Sure.  I enlisted Adam Fogo and Mike Dubue bass guitar and keyboard players extraordinaire respectively.  They were good at that kind of thing and also played together in a band called Gammahootchie.  That was all ten years ago at least and I don't see either of them around anymore much.  Dubue is lead singer for an Ottawa band called The Hilotrons.  Those guys certainly aren't about making slow, draggy music like I tend to do.

So, Bill played the drums without much chance to practice.  They weren't expertly played and they were worse recorded.  Sounded like the kick drum was a five year old kicking a cardboard box.  If I'd actually recorded  a five year old kicking a cardboard box, it might have been interesting.  It wasn't really the recording engineer's fault, either.  The studio's gear sucked.  I liked the interplay between Adam the bass player (who was playing to a simple acoustic guitar track and taking it very much on trust that this song would have any groove or funk to it at any point) and Mike the keyboardist.  I liked the crazy guitar sound I got by putting a distortion pedal before a wah pedal in my effects chain.  I liked my sister singing like Tori Amos when I'd asked her to sing like Clare Torey.  (Clare Torey sang the wordless, orgasmic vocal parts on "Great Gig in the Sky" on Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon.  Tori Amos did not.  Clare Torey is a little white British woman who can moan and howl.  Tori Amos sings in a mumbly, whispery voice.  But I liked it.)

The song itself was about the wonder and sense of awe that men feel when they meet a woman who makes them think immediately, irrationally of commitment.  (When I was 20, pretty much any woman who smiled at me and had some features I liked qualified.  Many looked like the Plymouth Brethren church girl I drew in the illustration here.)  My friend Mark told me that women "get under men's skin," and that men "let women in."  He said that's why "Hey Jude" says that.  He said sex is God being funny, because it works backwards to that, so the psychology and the physical are opposite.  He said men love their own bodies and their own selves (witnessed by how they protect themselves and their own so unthinkingly and universally), and so they love a woman as if the woman was their own right arm and heaven forfend anyone mess with her.  He said that, by contrast, women were not predisposed to love themselves as naturally and unthinkingly, and tended rather to love from their skin out, taking care of people and places and things that are near them, in their living space.  So I wrote this song about that conversation.

I later recorded Chris playing drums more the way I wanted them, and despite using only a very few, very crappy mics, and my computer putting stuff randomly off beat so I had to end up looping the drums and pasting them back into the song, I was happier with them than the studio work. 

I played a bunch of trumpet parts on it.  I also tried to talk like Barry White throughout, but this made it sound too funny, so I left that bit out in the end. 

I asked Troy to make beep-beep, spacey sounds with his guitar (I could have done it, or asked Joel, but Troy was around and I wanted to give him a part to play, as he had skills and gear).  Today I ran his beeps through (of course) the rotating Leslie Speaker Cabinet and spend the evening messing with stuff.

A facebook friend linked me to a YouTube video of Paul Washer, a preacher, so I "stole" him shouting "That's not Poetry!" and sampled that in to make it sound more "modern" and fiddled and fooled and messed with it until I was so sick of it that I quit.  It ended up like this.