Songwriter’s Notes

It’s a song about realizing your life is a series of disconnected chapters, different landscapes with no bridges between them. Psychologically, I was seeking perspective on time’s splintering effects. It’s a fitting introduction to the album because, looking back, I see the passage of time is the main theme. I particularly love Kevin Jarvis’s expressive drum playing on this number, though he would laugh to hear me say such a thing.

Marvin’s number entirely. I’ve always admired his deliberate craft. Marvin is brilliant at what Paul McCartney calls “tricks,” witty ways of getting from here to there musically. He’s also a shrewd lyricist who can take a kind of cliché and breathe new life into it, “If I could / You know I would / Never walk down, never walk down / Memory Street.” There’s an unexpected touch of fear in that, if you ask me. Also, it suits the overall theme of time’s passing.

I was 25 years old living in a basement apartment in Southeast Portland, and I’d lost my voice for almost a year when I came out of it by writing “Dreaming of a Kiss.” The song is typical of the “psychic eruption” school of writing to which I’ve belonged since the age of 16, when my first song arrived like a monstrous little thing from my previously uncharted depths. If not exactly like the monster erupting from John Hurt’s belly in Alien, the analogy is worth pondering, and I still think the funniest line in cinema is Hurt’s reprising his role in Spaceballs with the immortal words, “Oh no, not again.” Age 16? 25? 67? Time without desire is hell, so I can understand my needing to put desire back in play, to return to the archetypal garden knowing full well we don’t get to stay there.

A song for my little brother, Brian, who dropped out of high school in ninth grade, took to the road and whatever work he could find, fell afoul of the law, and succumbed to morphine at age 33. His mind was almost opaque to me, but we were brothers in our bones. At the same time, I was getting the knack of writing for Kate’s voice. That’s why the song became a love song.

Portland sees a lot of rain in the winter months. The mood can get downright gloomy, even funereal, and you need spiritual patience to get through it. The song tries to answer the endless rain sympathetically, to move and dance and chant to it. The bridge is simple, but I like how it expands to collect memories of summer and winter. To catch a whiff of spring, I echoed a line from a famous old poem, “Westron Wynde.” That’s Kevin Kraft on the four count, an appropriate start for another song about time.

It started as a fragment that Marvin encouraged me to finish. “After Today” strikes me as uncharacteristic of my writing, more deliberate craft than sudden birth, but that is perhaps a false dichotomy. In songwriting, there is always going to be conscious craft combined with raw creative energy, and the challenge is to know how and when to bring those two poles into conjunction. Bad production is bad because it is too deliberate, usually for the sake of sounding fashionable. On the other hand, I am relatively weak at arranging or structuring my material, and I am always grateful to work with Marvin, who is a genius at that kind of thing.

I’ve always loved the John Lennon line, “Because the sky is blue it blows my mind.” It looks simplistic, but it isn’t. I was aiming for a similar effect, “Well I sat beside a shining pool / All the while reflecting you / And I walked under a sky of blue /All the while falling too.” It was the last song I wrote for the album.

Everyone in the band is a shameless Beatlemaniac. Whether we are writing, coming up with bits, or discussing lyrics, the Beatles are the constant reference point. Marvin is even worse than I am, if that’s possible. Our covering a Beatles song is a tribute to the greatest band of all time. Back when April first came out, Portland impresario Buck Munger, publisher of Two Louies (our version of Mersey Beat) and friend of The Who’s John Entwistle, said it was the best track on the album. He called it “the bomb.” We used to play it around Portland all the time. It makes me think of the taste of Guinness.

The idea for this song grew out of Tennyson’s poem “The Lotos-Eaters.” Because Marvin didn’t like the original bridge, I wrote him a new one. Basically, I did what he asked: keeping the chords straight and simple as the foundation for rhyming with the same sound repeatedly. In this way, the song tries to escape but stays locked in the dream landscape, which leaves the shipwrecked lovers in a state of stasis. Kate and I would soon change our lives and move East. I was reflecting on the question, what if we stayed?

Music by Lee Oser and Marvin Etzioni
Lyrics by Lee Oser

It’s always interesting, when you’re working with the three chords of blues or country music, to see where the fourth chord takes you. It’s like introducing a shade amidst the primary colors. “Sometime Somewhere” has six chords and the chorus hinges on the one minor chord in the song. The melody leaps up and drives home the lyric. It was the last song I wrote for the record, and I recall the raw energy, the drive to write something catchy. Marvin went to work on the structure like a sculptor handling clay. The words are deliberately simple—Dr. Seuss for grown-ups.

Music by Lee Oser and Marvin Etzioni
Lyrics by Lee Oser

A perfect example of automatic writing. I have no idea where it came from. I was sitting at the kitchen table with my guitar, and it emerged as if by ventriloquism. I had the body of the song in fifteen minutes, except that Marvin later came up with this beautiful chromatic trick to set up the bridge. We always said that was our “Lennon-McCartney moment.” As regards the words, the task was to avoid clichés. Not a total success, but there can be life in clichés, if you know how to find it. The “afterlife of clichés,” one might say.

Music by Lee Oser and Marvin Etzioni
Lyrics by Lee Oser

The fingerpicking is slightly unusual because I wrote it on piano and then transferred the pattern to guitar. The lyrics evoke what the poet Shelley calls “the desire of the moth for the star.” I was hanging out in Manhattan and reading Don Quixote at the time, and Quixote’s tilting at windmills is a classic example of Shelley’s perception. So I put Quixote’s windmills on the moon. Call it poetic logic or just sheer nonsense. Marvin patiently solved several difficult structural problems, while pushing me through multiple rewrites of the bridge. Hard work, that one.

Music by Lee Oser and Marvin Etzioni
Lyrics by Lee Oser

About a woman who marries her second choice, though her naïve husband doesn’t know it. I like the phrase “just a shot of swing and a fat trombone,” and Dave Ralicke’s trombone solo fits the bill! I love Kate’s vocal on this one—that sexy touch of “Happy Birthday, Mr. President.” Lyrically, it was a bit of a high-wire act. I was stuck motionless in midair until the “Bonnie and Clyde” / “mournful bride” rhyme popped up. That’s a key trick, getting beyond the simple type of “June” / moon” rhyme to working off a phrase. As regards the tune, Marvin came up with the chromatic movement. I remember his magical demo: just him singing and playing the bass line on acoustic guitar.

Music by Lee Oser and Marvin Etzioni
Lyrics by Lee Oser

I love God and I hate partisan politics. Or maybe I love the idea of God. It’s hard to say. I think politics has become a God-substitute, and the constant obsession is sick, a mass psychosis. So I was playing the Druid or Witch Doctor, trying to find a groove to move the dancing animal, the primordial being who is too wise to waste time on hate. Marvin brought a lot of insight into this number. He made sure it stayed on point both musically and lyrically.

Music by Lee Oser and Marvin Etzioni
Lyrics by Lee Oser

The oldest song on the album. It started as a piano ditty based on a child’s magic-marker drawing of a penguin. I taped it to the wall, where it faded over the years, until all that remained was the blue fangs of the sea and the glacial white of the blank sheet. The penguin had vanished like the mist! Marvin liked the song when he heard it. He touched up the chorus, improved the bridge, and put the parts in order. I had years to write the lyrics—a rare luxury in the world of pop songs, but typical of the old ballads.

Music by Lee Oser and Marvin Etzioni
Lyrics by Lee Oser

I’m a writer of bridges, and the bridge pleased me because it starts on B minor and resolves on B major. All the best writing on the record was fluid in that way. The chords were invitations, not formulas or routines. To be sure, rock has its standard forms, and this song started as a blues riff in B major (transposed to E major, since Kate sings higher than I do). Initially, I thought the verses were about corporate types dressed up as political saints. That kind of managerial posturing is rampant these days, especially in my line of work. In retrospect, though, I think I was commenting on my own smelly ambition. Those “no, no, no no’s” at the end should be sung by Doctor Faustus sinking through a trapdoor.

Music by Lee Oser and Marvin Etzioni
Lyrics by Lee Oser

It started with the chorus, writing in a Buddy Holly vein. The verses are poppy and move the song along, but I found my own voice with the bridge. Word-wise, it’s the comical side of the Battle of the Sexes, the ju-jitsu grappling with someone else’s will. I remember Kevin Kraft helping with the verse about the drones. Kevin is great that way. He listens carefully and occasionally spits out the excellent suggestion.

Music by Lee Oser and Marvin Etzioni
Lyrics by Lee Oser

My favorite song on the album. It started as an elegy for my stepfather, David. At the same time, a particular song is not always about just one thing. Its inspirations may cross and intertwine, and this song merged as it grew with another vein of longing and loss—maybe it was the loss of my mother, or a woman I was once attached to. You can also hear it—this emotional doubling—in my rare vocal appearance, which occurs in a different key from the song itself. Also, the bridge features direct address, “Oh darling, the weight of it all.” It all just seemed to fit, though Marvin and I went through contortions before we finally decided to repeat the bridge. “Art loves chance and chance loves art,” says the Philosopher. I think we got lucky.

Music by Lee Oser and Marvin Etzioni
Lyrics by Lee Oser

I wanted an opening of three chords that were instantly memorable, as in Bob Dylan’s “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.” Also, I wanted to say something hopeful at a time when Americans had lost confidence. I went back to the American frontier, which has become a mythology with a horizon of hope. There’s a mystical line: “I asked a fellow crow to help me find my way.” The animistic feeling owes something to the Native Americans, who also inhabit the mythology of the frontier. Hope is something all people share, and our imaginations are vast enough to share it in common. The bridge came to me exactly as it sounds on the record, the organ and the gourd. I feel very grateful it worked out.