LIZ + THE BAGUETTES
  • Home
  • About
  • Press Room
  • Contact
  • Store
  • Bloguette

Notebook Thursday: Bourbon Trail

10/29/2020

1 Comment

 
A little over a year ago, I was en route to Asheville for the workshop of The Maenads with American Myth Center. I had a notebook full of songs and ideas for the score, and Darth Prius was full of musical instruments. The fall color was stealing over the land, through the gray shadows of recent rain. It was a happy drive. 

Then, in the evening, around the time I crossed into Kentucky, a storm hit. I couldn't tell you exactly where; I wouldn't even be able to recognize that stretch of highway. Everything got so black so quickly that every last landmark was obscured. I thought I was driving on a raised roadbed until I saw the taillights of a car that had skidded up the embankment to my right. A little later on, horrifyingly, I found myself facing the headlights of another car that had spun out onto the median. From time to time the lightning would crack through, nuclear-blast bright, and then everything would plunge back to darkness while my retinas tried to adjust. It was fully apocalyptic, as though God himself had finally arrived for vengeance on Mitch McConnell. The car rocked with the force of the wind and rain. I wanted desperately to pull over but couldn't see a place where it was even possible. On my phone's GPS display, the estimated time of arrival began ticking up and up, further contributing to the nightmare sensation of slipping backward.

When the headlights found an exit sign that promised a motel, I pulled off, not even caring where I was. In the parking lot I sat and shook.
Later, in my room, I scrawled out a few ideas for a song. That's the dark blue writing on the verso page. Between songs for The Maenads, I made a few more attempts; that's the wine-red writing. A month or two after that, not thinking it was related, I jotted the line that would become the final chorus. It wasn't until I was in Taos this spring—after another long, solitary drive through empty spaces—that everything coalesced into "Bourbon Trail."  That's the blue writing on the recto side of the spread.

The end version abandoned both the original chord progression and the early melody. The lyrics are so elliptical that I wasn't certain they'd work until I tried them over a percussion loop. (The loop, btw, is supposed to evoke the sound of windshield wipers, though I don't know if it does that for anyone but me.) That somewhat structureless structure might be as close as I can get to recreating the sense of having the world melt away into nothing even as I had to keep going forward. 

P.S. I think anyone who's driven through the heartland will recognize the Adult Superstore sign—the sort of disconcerting landmark that looks halfway familiar no matter where you are—and will also know that the correct name is Lion's Den. I changed it mainly for the scansion—though I like the lower-rent feeling of "Bob's." Bob, whoever you are, wherever you are, no disrespect intended.
1 Comment

Notebook Thursday: NEOWISE

10/22/2020

0 Comments

 
Sometimes you need to give a song space. This one needed literal space—the drafting process shifted from my pocket notebook to the much larger B5 cahier. The switch to bigger paper let me complete the song almost immediately. There was a gap for verse 3, and a pre-chorus line I wound up cutting the next day, but rewriting and reordering longhand has a lovely way of clarifying which ideas matter.
The song itself is destined for Posthistoric. I guess it's a pandemic love song? As much as anything I write is a love song right now?

The title, "Neowise," tells you when I started drafting this (though I did not know until just now, when I found that link, that NEOWISE is actually an acronym, so I guess I'll be capping it from now on). The comet's visibility coincided with my recovery from the kitchen accident that removed a tiny part of my left index finger; I was still playing guitar around a bandage when I wrote the pages on the left. Thus the "scissor off my fingertips" line in the bridge. I am, as you may know, deeply phobic about hand trauma. Despite that—or perhaps because of it—this is my favorite bridge in a long while.

The recording isn't done on this one yet. We tend to get a lot of arrangement ideas spontaneously in the rehearsal room, and being apart is slowing that down. But I like where it's going.
0 Comments

Notebook Thursday: Face Down in the Canoe Shed (Guest Post)

10/15/2020

0 Comments

 
​Thomas Zeitner is the bassist for the Baguettes and the founder of the Loudness War, which means he's also the reason we all know each other.
-----
Homer: Hmm. I wonder why he's so eager to go to the canoe shed.

Moe: The canoe shed? Hey, fellas, the canoe shed! Ooh, la-di-da, Mr. French Man!
Homer: Well, what do you call it?
Moe: A boathouse.

-The Simpsons, Season 6, episode 23; The Springfield Connection

I had never heard the phrase "canoe shed" before it came up in a podcast i was listening to, but it's a real thing according to Google. Good enough. Let's go!
Picture
"Canoe shed" makes me think of a summer camp, and Jason Voorhees. "Minutiae" reminds me of Dave Byrne, who's said in interviews that he likes to write about "small things."  Well, I guess now I'm writing a Fake Talking Heads Song. 

Writing a Fake Talking Heads song gives you superpowers. Ordinarily, you might stay in one key for consistency, or use minor chords where appropriate. We are now free of these rules.

The chorus lyrics come pretty fast, before I write anything down. I use an accordion to try a couple different progressions in C. I really like G F Dm, which becomes G F D, for further Talking Cred (and to give a backing vocalist something to do). Teasing out where the verse goes, I jump to E and just let the chords drone.

I realize the first verse takes place in the cafeteria and the chorus is in the titular canoe shed, so I leave a big space for a second verse, or a possible prechorus, to get our poor protagonist from A to C.
Picture
0 Comments

Notebook Thursday: Makot Mitzrayim (Guest Post)

10/8/2020

0 Comments

 
Mae Shults has been releasing music as Everson Poe for over 10 years. As a queer & trans/non-binary individual, they incorporate themes of gender identity and mental health into nearly all of their songs, filtered through lenses inspired by various forms of pop culture, or simply their own imaginative storytelling.
​"When I write lyrics, I often write in a semi-stream-of-consciousness style. I don't necessarily have a clear idea and so I don't always end up with something cohesive. In this case, what started out as a song about gender dysphoria & body dysmorphia—issues that have plagued me for 25 years—took a turn to condemn racism. From there, it branched off to discuss the Pharaoh's persecution of the Jews in Egypt, according to the stories of Passover. Then it jumps forward in time to discuss the KKK's appropriation of mythological and fantasy concepts as fodder for their internal structure. And then it brings the ten plagues of Egypt to the real world; a plea for god to strike down those who seek nothing but the destruction of those who are different from them. Somehow, I feel like it all works together. And also, as an atheist Jew who doesn't even remotely take the Torah or the bible literally, I'm not actually wishing death upon anyone. Merely telling a story, as I always do."

The song is called "Makot Miztrayim," the Hebrew term for the ten plagues of Egypt. It is due to release on Halloween.
0 Comments

    Liz Bagby

    Songwriter & multidisciplinary artist

    Archives

    April 2025
    January 2025
    October 2024
    July 2024
    June 2024
    April 2024
    March 2024
    December 2023
    November 2023
    October 2023
    September 2023
    August 2023
    July 2023
    June 2023
    May 2023
    April 2023
    March 2023
    November 2022
    October 2022
    July 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    March 2021
    January 2021
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    April 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    September 2017
    August 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017

    Categories

    All
    Baked
    Guest Post
    Notebook Thursday

    RSS Feed

Proudly powered by Weebly