<![CDATA[ LIZ + THE BAGUETTES - Bloguette]]>Fri, 28 Aug 2026 07:28:06 -0700Weebly<![CDATA[Notebook Thursday: Dolly]]>Thu, 27 Aug 2026 22:31:51 GMThttps://www.lizandthebaguettes.com/bloguette/notebook-thursday-dollyI had a different post planned for today. The karaoke science project is embarking upon its Lyrics bracket, and I (predictably) have many thoughts. I also happened to submit the song that became the bracket's number one seed, and now I will not be able to get through that song without crying, because it's "9 to 5."

I was very young, maybe five, when someone gave me the single of "9 to 5." It was the first music (and the only 45) I ever owned. You could play it on the Fisher-Price turntable. (In my memory, that gadget was red and beige-white, though a hasty web search turns it up on eBay in blue. Am I making this up? If the toy still exists, it has long since passed out of the house, either in a garage sale or as a hand-me-down to my sister's kids.)

Obviously the song ripped. The acrylic nails! The thumping piano! The horn hits! It would be years before I appreciated it as a songwriter, noticed the canny climb under "crazy if you let it," recognized the variation in lyrical rhythm between the rapid-fire verse and that cathartic chorus. It's personal, political—existential in places—and fully revolutionary. It feels comic, but there are lines that will stab you if you don't know they're coming. You could read Marx, or you could just spend three minutes listening to a perfect bit of country pop. 

Dolly still means a lot to . . . well, to everyone. To us as a band, for sure. Charlie compiled a lovely thread of remembrance over on Bluesky. And if you haven't listened to Julie's cover of "To Daddy," please fix that. (Crowded Table Collective played that version in the first two Highwomen tribute shows.)

Some of my favorite eulogies have come from feminists: Rebecca Solnit, Tressie McMillan Cottom (I am having trouble tracking down the link to her Instagram post), Lyz Lenz. I saw someone call for people to remember Dolly in their prayers, and of course that's fine, but I think we should remember her in our actions. Donate to the Imagination Library, of course. Think about joining your local library board to keep LGBTQ+ stories on the shelves. Take a chance on an unknown artist or an unproven piece of art (Dolly helped produce Buffy). Support programs that get musical instruments into kids' hands. Join a union. Write a song and sing it. We have some very big, very sparkly shoes to fill, and it's gonna take everybody doing their best.
]]><![CDATA[Notebook Thursday: When It Happens]]>Thu, 13 Aug 2026 23:54:03 GMThttps://www.lizandthebaguettes.com/bloguette/notebook-thursday-when-it-happensGuest contributor: Charlie Crane
Charlie is, of course, the lead guitarist (and occasional drummer, vocalist, and book rearranger) for the Baguettes. His other credits include the Dyes, the Parasites, the Unswept, Julie&, Brad Bru & the Crowd Goes Wild, and ButterBean (among many others). He recently wrote and released a solo single, "When It Happens," which he discusses below.

The meaning of this song isn’t particularly mysterious. If you search your favored social media site (as long as it isn’t X) for the phrase “when it happens,” you’ll find countless people openly wishcasting about it. Similarly, searching your favored streaming service for the phrase yields hundreds of playlists with that name, collecting songs to soundtrack an anticipated inevitability. (Here’s my own playlist – feel free to suggest other appropriate songs in the comments!) Nobody needs to say exactly what it is – who wants to end up on a government watchlist? – but it’s clear that this event will cause much rejoicing. So I figured I’d write a bespoke song on the subject. (I should also mention that the wonderful Julie Jurgens encouraged this train of thought, suggested a Twin Peaks-referencing line, and designed the gum-forward cover art.)

As a musician and music fan, I always appreciate when songs incorporate homages or references to other songs. At a time when the lines between tribute and infringement are increasingly blurred, I feel it’s important to show my work and share with you 5 songs that influenced “When It Happens”:

1. “When Will You Die” (TMBG)

This song is mostly an influence for its thematic similarity – its lyrics are also concerned with celebrating the impending death of an unnamed person. So similar, in fact, that I had to rewrite a line from my first draft ("We're gonna get together and celebrate/Just like we will every year upon this date") when I discovered that John Linnell had already used the same end rhyme.

2. “Something Happened” (Adam Schlesinger)

An unreleased song intended for a Muppet movie, which wasn’t publicly heard until shortly after Schlesinger’s untimely passing in 2020. (Micky Dolenz has reportedly recorded a version with revised lyrics that will be released later this year.) This was more of an unconscious tribute, as I didn’t spot it until the song was mostly finished, but there is a similar melodic and lyrical structure to the verses (both of which culminate on a vague “happening”).

3. “Dame Fortune” (Andy Partridge)

Another unused demo, rejected from the last XTC album. I took several cues from the arrangement, which is also rhythmically driven by a strummy acoustic guitar and a four-on-the-floor kick drum, with a busy bassline providing much of the melodic movement.

4. “Faith” (George Michael)

This classic track by my birthday buddy inspired how the percussion was layered. In this YouTube video, the contagiously enthusiastic Sammy McCormack breaks down the deceptively complex drum programming, which consists of several interlocking rhythmic sounds of natural and synthetic origin (cowbell, cabasa, handclaps, finger clicks, etc). This and the preceding track also were templates for the twinkly/jangly (twangly?) guitar solo.

5. “I Believe She’s Lying” (Jon Brion, live 6/25/2006)

Not the trip-hop adjacent version from his sole solo album “Meaningless,” but a live version that blew my mind when I witnessed it 20 years ago at the Intonation Festival (on my 19th birthday, no less). (There are a few scraggly cell phone videos on YouTube, but a board recording does circulate amongst collectors.) The looped kick drum/hi-hat pattern on which Brion built the rest of the arrangement in real-time is practically identical to where I ended up.

]]><![CDATA[Notebook Thursday: Proposition, Counter-Truth]]>Thu, 25 Jun 2026 20:41:40 GMThttps://www.lizandthebaguettes.com/bloguette/notebook-thursday-proposition-counter-truthI've been learning the terrific Ray Charles song "You Don't Know Me." This also means thinking about its structural similarity to Patsy Cline's "She's Got You," which I used to do at solo gigs (and honestly I don't know why I stopped). 

I'm not alleging any sort of artistic theft, for the record. Both songs came out in 1962, and they're clearly products of the same cultural moment, using a standard compositional approach; these are two examples (of many) that are instructive to compare. Eddy Arnold and City Walker wrote "You Don't Know Me" in 1955, and Ray Charles's version was the sixth or seventh recording. Hank Cochran wrote "She's Got You" in late 1961 and reportedly sang it for Patsy Cline that same day.

There are similarities in the lyrical rhythm, phrasing, and line lengths, but I'm more interested in the interrelationship between the lyrical content and the chords. I-IV-I-V is a common progression, of course, but is there something in it that feels natural for a proposition and betrayal? 

Here's what I mean. The verse in each song begins with a statement of fact, over a progression that centers on the I chord  (I'm transposing each song to C for ease of comparison):
                        C               Cmaj7            C6         C*
 You give your hand to me       and you say hello [Charles]

                        C       G7              C         C7
 I've got your picture   that you gave to me [Cline]

It continues by augmenting that fact with a progression on the IV chord:
                  F                  Fmaj7                   F6            F#dim7
 And I can hardly speak,         my heart is beating so [Charles]

               F                     
 And it's signed with love, just like it used to be [Cline]

Then each song undercuts the first proposition by revealing the real truth on a line that ventures away from the tonic to the dominant, finally landing on the title phrase:
               C                A7                      Dm7              G7
 And anyone can tell,   you think you know me well / But you don't know me 
[In verse 1, this line ends with a jazz progression that takes us back to a fancier G7 chord; later verses go to the C.]

                           C           Am                         C   Am                     C        G7               C
 The only thing different,    the only thing new  /   I've got your picture, she's got you [Cline]

Next, the verse structure repeats. Then each song has a bridge that operates on the IV chord and lands on the V7. Then they return to the verse. Both go back to the bridge (making it instrumental or half instrumental in some of Charles's recordings, including the duet with Diana Krall), and then there's a final repeat of verse 3. Most versions of "You Don't Know Me" have a half-step key change for that last verse. The "You Don't Know Me" bridge is twice the length of the one in "She's Got You," but apart from that, the songs are so similar that you can easily sing the "She's Got You" lyrics over a "You Don't Know Me" karaoke track.

So that's the shape. When a form becomes standardized like this, it stops being able to surprise, so other differences (lyrics, arrangement, vocal interpretation, fame, charisma) assume greater importance. I suspect Ray Charles's version is the best known because
1. he's Ray Charles
2. he jazzes up the melody in beautiful ways
3. his arrangement highlights the gorgeous descending line built into the chord voicings

In writing this, I've also learned that his version has slightly different lyrics in the bridge. Eddy Arnold sings the last line as "The chance you might have loved me too." (The saddest verb tense, according to John Greenleaf Whittier.) Charles uses a whole different tense, one that keeps a small bit of hope alive: "The chance that you might love me too." Is this desperate hope—a counter-truth to the counter-truth—part of the success of this version? It's certainly relatable.

*In typing out these lines I have just learned that the Weebly blog editor automatically converts a double space into a period. Google Docs does this too, and it cannot be turned off, and if you type music charts, it is very, very annoying. Between that and AI, tech is really chipping away at the sanity of indie musicians lately. 
]]><![CDATA[Notebook Thursday: The Band Chat]]>Thu, 11 Jun 2026 19:35:15 GMThttps://www.lizandthebaguettes.com/bloguette/notebook-thursday-the-band-chatThe band chat has gone heavily goofy and visual. I was going to write "lately" but then remembered that last year we created the Mersey Moose and the vegan leather butt mint, and before that there was a whole riff on the Salt Shed involving Oregano Outhouse and I think Cardamom Cabin. So maybe this is just our default state? Anyway, I am enjoying these:
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Quadrophenia poster edited to reflect an arrangement decision conveyed through a combination of Charlie-speak and Thomas-speak
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Album art adjusted (by Charlie) to reflect the band's abiding faith in the curative powers of rhubarb pie
]]><![CDATA[The Other Work]]>Mon, 11 May 2026 20:18:17 GMThttps://www.lizandthebaguettes.com/bloguette/the-other-workI've been getting our Subvert artist page up to speed, which has entailed a lot of the hidden, unglamorous, nonmusical work of music: tracking down WAV files and images and UPC codes and publishing info from seven years ago, downloading from this archive, uploading to that site, trying to find the graphics that are stuck on the ancient laptop with the swollen lithium battery, refreshing, reordering, entering endless 2FA codes.

This is the stuff people don't really talk about in the world of DIY. Very little of it is fun or fulfilling. It feels like your day job, only you probably won't ever get paid for it. (I might be a little salty because WBEZ just published the Chicago Arts Census finding about how little artists typically earn here, and of course the comments included an internet dude positing that artists could totally earn a living if they just made art that people actually like.) And it all becomes even harder on today's internet, where AI opportunists are ready to prey on anything you upload. 

I suppose I'm also thinking about it because I was just listening to the episode of In Our Time about Handel's Messiah. Handel, lucky man, did not have to deal with tech bros. But he did have to deal with a host of other obstacles: self-producing whole seasons of his work; risking bankruptcy; finding his own venues and singers despite a war; navigating shifting public opinions about Christianity itself. You don't need to know the details of the struggle to appreciate the art, but they're oddly reassuring, in the same way that it's reassuring to see studio footage of the Beatles tripping over cables. 

I think the point is to remember that when anyone puts their art into the world, they have gone through this kind of resistance to do it. It takes madness, folly, stubbornness, and wild amounts of love. 
]]><![CDATA[Notebook Thursday: Past and Pastiche]]>Fri, 01 May 2026 03:01:27 GMThttps://www.lizandthebaguettes.com/bloguette/notebook-thursday-past-and-pasticheI like to pair the Notebook Thursday posts with images of the notebook pages in question, but today's song started about four years ago, and I just don't have it in me to go digging that much. One of the lines was from not long after Arthur died, and I don't remember how it joined with the other ideas. Maybe just proximity in the notebook? Anyway, it's a love song now, or at least a heartache song, called "The Comeback Kid."

The thing is, for the longest time, it didn't quite work. I had lyrics I liked, chords I liked, a chorus I loved, and it just didn't feel right. I ran it by my buddy Chris. He suggested some alternative chord voicings, and they added nice nuance, but they didn't change enough.

There was other music to work on, and a lot of other life to get through, so I shelved that one. I put the chart in our master Google doc (archives matter!). I never shared the demo with the band.

Last weekend we recorded a handful of songs, and I filled in more cells in the Posthistoric/Backroads spreadsheet (it's so close! we've done so much!). "The Comeback Kid" was one of two songs remaining. Both were shaded green, which means "needs songwriting work." Since we're getting into do-or-die time, I messaged the band that I'd send them the demo and see if anyone had any ideas for fixing it. 

Then, because nothing will awaken your inner critic like running your work past a jury of your peers, I listened to the demo. Still liked the lyrics. Still loved the final chorus. An early harmony suggested itself. It wasn't enough, but it was nice. 

The problem was the verse melody. With the perspective of a couple of years, it was obvious. Too much of the same, both in rhythm and in range. The melody sat high, so I needed to look low. The chords suggested a descending motif I hadn't noticed before. Too low for voice, but maybe piano or baritone guitar? I plugged in my new (used) keyboard and tried it out.

This was how I discovered that the keyboard had for some reason shipped with its tuning set to A433. The collision with the demo guitar was brutal. For a second I wondered if, uncharacteristically, I hadn't tuned before recording the demo; it was from a distracting period of my life. Brief interludes of flailing, testing pitches, wondering if I needed to learn how to shift pitch in Logic for a stupid acoustic demo, then—finally—finding the keyboard's tuning function. This kind of thing can be enough to derail a song, especially if you're already frustrated with it. You have to be very, very stubborn.

When I got it working, the keyboard did change things up rather nicely. The low countermelody shook up the repetition of the chords. It still wasn't enough, but it was something.

I had to do it, in true kill-your-darlings fashion: I had to mute the existing melody track. (I should note that the stakes of this are rather low in a digital audio platform; the track doesn't go anywhere.) What if the verse line started here instead? What if it were lower here? What if I drew out a couple of these notes, so that the rhythm would vary without any changes to the lyrics? It took another day of experimenting before I arrived at something that worked. I sent it to the band and got an approving message from Charlie, of the sort that I will probably revisit as an antidepressant in years to come. 

That all this has been for something called "The Comeback Kid" adds an extra layer of hilarity. The songs can't all take four years, and thank goodness they usually don't. Perhaps an Oblique Strategy or two could have nudged it along faster. It's hard to know what's going to be worth revisiting, what's going to grab you, what you're just going to forget. Things come alive or they fall flat, as Dylan sings. He's talking about love, but after all so am I.
]]><![CDATA[Notebook Thursday: Sadness Index]]>Thu, 19 Feb 2026 16:11:27 GMThttps://www.lizandthebaguettes.com/bloguette/notebook-thursday-sadness-indexFirst, some news: Last year was rough on drummers, from the Foo Fighters on down to us tiny indie acts. Charlie called it a drummerpocalypse, and I have no better term. The two acts I play with the most both had their drummers go on indefinite hiatus. Zach will still be contributing to Baguettes work as he is able, and he'll appear on the new record on both drums and mandolin, but for our upcoming live shows, Molly Walburn will be behind the kit. Any such transition is inevitably bittersweet; a creative ensemble is more than the sum of its parts. Considering that a global pandemic intervened, we were pretty damn lucky to get twelve years with the founding band members.

As we discussed set lists in one of the first rehearsals with Molly, someone (Charlie? probably Charlie) came up with the idea of a sadness index, plotting a song's lyrical content against its musical content. I attempted a rough graph. It's hard. Minor/slow and major/uptempo often correlate, but they don't always, and as it turns out, a lot of my minor songs are on the fast side. I also don't tend to write purely happy yay-for-love, it's-a-sunny-day lyrics. So I had to consider whether the words are sad but funny (a favorite landing spot), or whether the song describes something tragic but responds with catharsis or constructive anger (another one). 

These things are subjective, of course, so rendering them as quantitative data is a little silly. But it's interesting as a songwriting and set-building exercise. I don't think it's a coincidence that the bottom left quadrant (slow/minor/sad) contains the most songs we've never performed; we've played "White Flag," "Ghostlight" (once), "Teflon" (once), and a swamped-up version of "Negative," but that's it.  The main thing I learned (and I sort of knew it anyway) was that I lean into paradoxes—songs whose music suggests some meaning beyond the lyrics, perhaps operating against them.
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]]><![CDATA[Notebook Thursday: Ritual Fire]]>Thu, 01 Jan 2026 20:22:37 GMThttps://www.lizandthebaguettes.com/bloguette/notebook-thursday-ritual-fireI managed to set off the smoke alarm while cooking the traditional black-eyed peas this morning. It wasn't a true disaster; I just got caught up in a band chat and a little social scrolling, and the next thing I knew, a bit of pork fat had scorched and the cat was hiding while I fanned the balcony door back and forth in the cold. But if there is meaning in the tradition—and why else would we do it?—then there must be meaning in the bungling as well. It was as though life was saying, "Oh, you want luck? Well then, fucking pay attention." This is always how luck works. But it's easy to forget.

At my first-ever NYE music gig, in a mixed-arts warehouse space of the sort that has become endangered, there was a bonfire. People were invited to create a symbol of something they wanted to leave behind them in the new year, and then cast it on the fire to burn it away. Someone said it was a pagan tradition, but of course that label is so broad as to be almost meaningless. Nonetheless, I recreated that tradition for a number of years: in the fireplace, when I had one; on concrete doorsteps and balconies. Did it work? I don't know. I remember what I threw on the fire, that first year, and it is still with me more than I'd like. There are some things I've managed to leave behind. Most of the things one wants to burn, though, are too complicated to be purged by a single act. 

This winter, a friend introduced me to a variation on the fire ritual, one in which you write a number of intentions on scraps of paper and burn them at random, one a night, starting with the solstice and ending January 2 with a single intention, which you keep throughout the year. After a chaotic few years, in which rituals of destruction have felt redundant and explicit resolutions laughable, it's rather appealing to leave some intentions to chance. The mere act of writing desires as positive statements felt far more constructive than my previous approach. So, starting at the solstice, I dutifully burned a few scraps. Then I went to visit my family and left the bowl of paper here. And when I returned, Chicago was so desperately cold and windy that I couldn't bring myself to venture outside for the minute it would take to incinerate the nightly scrap. So now I have a backlog of papers to burn. One doesn't want to get too precious about a ritual from Instagram, of course, but the form does matter. If there is magic in the practice, I suspect I have consigned myself to a year in which nothing happens for a long time and then I get it done all at once. That is the opposite of healthy and sustainable. Whether it's art or intention—and for me, they're nearly synonymous—you're supposed to do a little bit every day. In returning to the practice, you remind yourself of what matters, you guide your attention, you build your own luck. 

I don't always get NYE gigs, but they're supposed to be lucky too. I've never been sure how much I believe in that superstition either. But last night's gig felt lucky, when I recognized the silhouettes of friends who'd come out to listen, when I got to meet the new booker at a venue I love, when I stayed later than I planned because the the closing act was burning up the stage with a series of songs I adore—a fire that felt communal, welcoming, not merely destructive. This, too, is the simple luck of paying attention. If you do that, it can be enough.
]]><![CDATA[Notebook Thursday: Floods]]>Thu, 06 Nov 2025 23:10:11 GMThttps://www.lizandthebaguettes.com/bloguette/notebook-thursday-floodsI have been wrestling madly with distraction lately, and it has been getting the upper hand, which usually means there's some big thing I need to do or write. (I'm fairly sure that in this case there are several such things, but I'm also genuinely overbooked and still grieving, so...those things will come when they come.) Stuff that has kept me going:
  • Watching my neighbors mobilize to protect and support each other. I was able to put in some volunteer hours last week, and we collected tips for CyclingxSolidarity at last weekend's show at Gallery Cabaret. I love this city so much.
  • Rediscovering Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials series through the prequel books (which somehow I was unaware of until a couple of weeks ago?!). I'm enjoying them so far—particularly the way he explores the everyday structures and workings of his menacing authoritarian state, much as Andor did for the original Star Wars trilogy. I love a fantasy series that grapples with the very real banality of evil. And the flood in La Belle Sauvage so perfectly captures the surreal nature of a world-altering cataclysm.
  • Speaking of floods: They Might Be Giants were live on KEXP, and of course it was delightful.
  • I always enjoy Austin Kleon's thoughts on creativity, but this line, from his Tuesday newsletter, got me where I live: "Middle age is really the time, I think, that the tamped-down parts of yourself, anything you’ve ignored, any dreams you left behind, come first trickling then bursting back up out of the place you’ve put them in, and the foundation of the structure you’ve build to survive in the world and get to this point starts to get washed away."

There is plenty of other band news—a flood of it, you might say—but it merits a separate post, so we'll leave it at that. Take care of each other, friends.

]]><![CDATA[Notebook Thursday: Art and Wartime]]>Thu, 03 Jul 2025 22:07:02 GMThttps://www.lizandthebaguettes.com/bloguette/notebook-thursday-art-and-wartimeNot that long after I moved here (Wikipedia informs me, rudely, that it must have been 2003) I saw the Chicago Opera Theater production of a pair of short operas, Brundibár and Comedy on the Bridge. Tony Kushner had recently given them new librettos. Maurice Sendak directed, as well as designing the sets. They were lovely. (It looks like the 2006 production had the same design, as far as I remember?)

Brundibár might best be known as the opera that was performed by children in a concentration camp. The composer, Hans Krása, was Jewish, and developed the opera with the Jewish orphanage in Prague; when the Nazis took over, Krása and nearly all of his artistic collaborators were sent to Theresienstadt. The Nazis used a performance as evidence that conditions in the camps were happy and humane. Somehow—for a while, anyway—they ignored what everyone in the audience knew: the titular villain was a stand-in for Hitler. Eventually, Krása, the children, the director, and most of the musicians and designers were sent to their deaths at Auschwitz.

I have gone on making art as our country has enabled and perpetrated genocides: we need art. We need it as a respite, we need it as a source of connection and joy, we need it as a howl of outrage, we need it as a stubborn reminder of shared humanity. 

Mephisto is another Nazi-related story that has stayed with me over the years. It follows the German actor Henrik Hoefgen (Klaus Maria Brandauer) as the Nazis rise to power. Hoefgen wants to make Brechtian shows on an underground black box stage; he doesn't like the Nazis. But he doesn't speak any language but German, and he doesn't think he can perform anywhere but Germany. In a decision familiar to every performer, he takes a high-profile role to pay the bills. Unfortunately, the Nazis see the performance and declare him exemplary: exactly what German theater and German actors ought to be. Suddenly his artistic career depends on his willingness to be a mascot for the Third Reich.

You have to know where you stand. You have to know what you'll do and what you won't. You have to know if you have a price.

I was in The Designated Mourner with the Right Brain Project in...oh, I guess 2006 or 2007. Wallace Shawn does not write easy work. To do it any justice, you must dig into the squirmier parts of yourself. (Roger Ebert's review of the film does a nice job of that.) Mourner is about a group of artists in an unnamed country where an unnamed totalitarian regime is coming to power. They're a familiar type of New Yorker bohemian, intellectual, arch, certain that their oblique sonnets count as political action. The regime tolerates them, until it doesn't.

You do have to go on making art. You also have to call, write, march if you can, donate if you can, triage when you must, blockade, inform yourself, inform others. And you have to know why. These three works are some of the ones that crystalized it for me.

There's a concentration camp in Florida. What are you doing about it?]]>