#lemonknife

[lemondice]

Songs About Water and Death song origins, pt. 2

Made it Out Alive:

This song started as a jam in the practice space on a riff structure Mia had created, I think inspired by early-2000s rock like Jet and the Strokes.  Lyrically, I wanted to write something with a sense of humor, since we had quite a few bleak songs on the album and plenty more dark ones; the riff and beat had a pretty upbeat feel so it fit atmospherically.  Once I had the basic idea, it was just a matter of coming up with as many ludicrous rhymes as possible - finally, at the end, I decided to add a serious ending to give a tiny bit more weight to the song.

Thirst:

We sat down to figure out the music that would become Thirst together, and I had an idea to write something a little more dancey, a well that I would go back to some more on our later songs, so this song started with the drumbeat and built up from there.  I think there are some later songs that pull off ‘dancey’ more cleanly - this one always feels more like a Nine Inch Nails-style doom march, but nothing wrong with that.  Lyrically, I set myself the assignment of writing a song from the perspective of Hillary Clinton - I was not a big fan of her following the 2016 primary so I thought it would be a nice challenge to get inside her mind during the contest.

Man of Glass:

I believe this one also started with the drum beat and was built up from there with that nice crunchy Sonic Youthy riff.  Lyrically, I was experimenting with writing a fairytale story, the kind you could find in a kids book of legends.  Not too much to say here.

Girl With the Cat Eyes

How to tell we are not Rush in one easy step: this is the only song on Songs About Water and Death in a time signature other than 4/4.  Girl With The Cat Eyes actually had its origin several years ago, when I was living in Pittsburgh.  One day while out walking, I randomly had the idea - what if you found out that a distant acquaintance of yours had gone missing or been found dead, and the last thing they wrote was something dedicated to you and addressing you as “The Guy With the Face”?  It was the double mystery - why were you so important to this distant stranger that you were the last thing they wrote about, and what does “The Guy With the Face” even mean?  I brought this idea to Mia and she liked it, so we set out to write it as one of our rare ballads.  “Guy With the Face” was a little goofy, and Mia was going to sing it, so I changed it to “Girl With the Cat Eyes”.  This was one of our earliest songs, early enough to make it to our first ever gig in September 2017 but not quite favored enough to make it onto Storms and Snakes.

Red Stage

The name of this one is a direct reference to the Pitchfork Music Festival 2016 stage where Brian Wilson performed Pet Sounds.  It was an amazing show, and one I was very glad to witness, but it was also deeply sad - Brian was clearly not in great health, and had to let the other performers take the lead on most of the songs (though when he did sing, it still sounded fantastic).  He also wasn’t playing anything, so for most of the set he was just there in the center of the stage sitting in a chair.  I felt quite bad for him - here’s this visionary genius, on stage performing his masterpiece, and his body has failed him to the extent that he has to put it in the hands of others.  So I turned that into a lyric from his perspective (come for Hillary Clinton’s perspective, stay for Brian Wilson’s perspective!) tied in with some ocean metaphors about wanting to be swept out to sea rather than witness that happen to me (of course, we’ll see how I feel when I get older...)  And of course I got a nice little wink in by putting a Beach Boys title to each verse.  Instrumentally, we were starting from the song concept, so we tried to make it a less traditional beat and more of a Beach Boys/60s style production, especially in the drums, but filtered through our traditional distortion it makes quite a cool blend.  One of my favorites off the album.

[musicgaragechicago]

Amidst the pandemic, many have struggled to stay productive and find outlets to relieve frustration. For Lemon Knife, focusing on their new EP, “Difficult Difficult Lemon Difficult”, allowed them to stay busy and sane throughout the pandemic.  

Mia Blixt-Shehan and John Retterer-Moore met in 2016 and soon became romantic partners. Mia plays Bass and she soon discovered John’s love to drum so they went on a date to jam at the Music Garage. Thus, forming Lemon Knife. A few months later, they wrote their first song and continued to record two albums, I Know That This is Vitriol and Songs About Water, and one EP, “Our Darkest Sour."  

Lemon Knife’s signature sound can be described as “distorted hard rock with killer riffs of classic rock but the energy of classic punk.” Mia writes the melody and vocal riffs as well as composes their music and sings the main vocals for Lemon Knife. She draws inspiration primarily from her favorite band, Queen. She loves the eclectic sound of Queen and how they pushed many boundaries in rock music. On the other hand, John writes their lyrics, maintains the structure of their songs, and plays the drums for the band. His influence comes from hard rock drummers like Dave Grohl and smart yet angry vocalists, like Frank turner.  

Lemon Knife’s new EP consists of a totally different sound compared to their last two albums. They decided to place their energy into experimenting with different instruments. Utilizing Mia’s ability to play almost anything, each song Mia plays around with an array of instruments from bass guitar to a mandolin. From there, John used whatever percussion felt right with the track Mia laid out.  

As, the pandemic has halted most live performances, Lemon Knife looks forward to performing at some of their favorite venues again such as Reggie’s Music Joint. They want to continue their adventurous run with music and hopefully inspire other musicians along the way.  

“Difficult Difficult Lemon Difficult” is available on Band Camp with all proceeds going to GiveWell, a nonprofit that searches for the charities that save or improve lives the most per dollar.  

[loudlybigtrash-blog]

Kitchen Multifunction Lemon Zester Stainless Steel Fruit Peeler Cheese Zester Microplane Grater Fruit Vegetable Tools & Kitchen (Color: Black)   Kitchen Multifunction Lemon Zester Stainless Steel Fruit Peeler Cheese Zester Microplane Grater Fruit Vegetable Tools & Kitchen (Color: Black)       Kitchen Multifunction Lemon Zester Stainless Steel Fruit Peeler Cheese Zester Microplane Grater Fruit...

[lemondice]

Intro/Storms and Snakes song origins

Hello all, this is John Retterer-Moore, originally from Concord, Massachusetts and currently living in Chicago.  I’ve been meaning to write more about a few of my hobbies/passions, and this not-at-all-new-fangled Tumblr thing seems like the current blog equivalent, so here we go!

Some of the main things I’m going to be writing about:

- Music.  I’m a long time listener, concert-goer (https://www.setlist.fm/user/jram), and fan of many rock, metal, folk, and punk groups.  Two and a half years ago, I finally turned that into on-stage experience as well when me and my girlfriend Mia founded Lemon Knife after discovering that we played well together.  So this blog will heavily feature thoughts both as a music listener and as a music writer.

- Board game design/general game design.  I’ve been a big board gamer since I was a kid, getting into more strategic/Euro board games back in college and playing a ton since.  I’ve always occasionally dabbled in design, but I’ve been delving more deeply into that world in the past year, having started regularly attending design meetups and Protospiels.  Much like the previous, expect to see plenty on board games both as a player and as a designer.

- Maybe travel, food, other stuff.  We shall see...

This first post is going to be a Lemon Knife-centric post.  I’m the drummer and main lyric writer of Lemon Knife, and I occasionally do punk-style vocals, while Mia is the bassist, lead vocalist, and main riff/melody writer.  Our music is a mixture of hard rock and punk, and we try to keep a wide range of styles in our music, together with lyrics that either tell an interesting story or make a political point.  All of our stuff can be bought on Bandcamp: https://lemonknife.bandcamp.com/ or streamed on any of the major services.

In this post, I’m going to be taking our first EP, Storms and Snakes, which we released in Fall 2017, and breaking down the origins of each song.  You can listen along to the EP here if you’re interested: https://open.spotify.com/album/4lgqFgscFJiNGuVaPBKChD

Lost at Sea: This was the first song me and Mia ever wrote together; Mia had a riff she had been playing around with, and I believe we first figured out how it would be structured, then wrote the lyrics line by line together, a technique we haven’t used since but should definitely get back to.  This one didn’t really have a thematic starting point - the opening line “There was a time before we launched the ships and waved the world goodbye” just came to me, and from there it was a nautical adventure.  The ending of the song is definitely inspired by Testament’s Souls of Black.

Storm Surge: This was actually the second song we ever wrote that had me on vocals, but we liked it so much it jumped past American Desert to make it onto our first EP.  I basically came up with the structure for this song - I wanted a big buildup bridge, a vocal chorus without words, and a call and response verse/riff, so this is definitely the early song I took the most active role in writing the music on.  The chorus, especially the vocals and drum part, are heavily inspired by the chorus of Orange Crush by R.E.M. - I love the effect of having just a haunting melody for a chorus.  Lyrically, this was inspired by my frustration that so many of the people in areas majorly affected by global warming, like the Texas gulf and Florida, were voting in people who were actively standing in the way of fighting global warming, so it’s kind of a dark schadenfreude imagining those people’s responses when a climate change-heightened hurricane makes off with their house...  People voting against their own self interest is a pet peeve we’ll see on a few Lemon Knife songs. 

Dismissed: In contrast with the previous one, this was Mia’s baby, through and through - she had already recorded it as a solo endeavor, with programmed drums, and it basically stayed intact with no structural or melodic changes except a souped-up live drum part. Lyrically, it covers her frustrations with past relationships and disappointments, and it remains (as of 2019) Lemon Knife’s only love-related song - the two of us are both a little sick of those when it’s all an artist can sing about.

Cold Burn: I guess this one is also love-related, but from a completely different angle - I’m asexual, and there’s not a whole lot of songs out there written from an asexual perspective, so I thought it would be a fresh topic.  I tried to cover both the feeling of being an outsider to a world of familiar rituals that comes with the asexual territory as well as bite back on some of the common insults/minimizations faced by aces. You could argue that it was somewhat cowardly to have someone else sing the song, but I thought the more serious material deserved Mia’s more professional, beautiful delivery, and also didn’t necessarily want to make it widely known.  This song started out as a brainstormed pair of riffs from Mia, from which we jammed to come up with a song structure and vocal melody, before I decided on asexuality as a lyrical topic and then wrote the lyrics.  

Thanks for reading anyone who stuck with this!  We’ll see how often I update this blog.

[lemondice]

John’s top artists and influences!

Following up Mia’s post, I thought I’d go through a few of my own top few artists, and talk about how they influenced my work in Lemon Knife.  I’m going to go chronologically:

Talking Heads

The Talking Heads were the first band I started listening to that wasn’t a group my parents introduced do.  I borrowed Little Creatures from a friend (though I think it was actually his parents’ CD), enjoyed it a lot, and then asked for Stop Making Sense for Easter when I was 13.  I immediately fell in love with the Talking Heads as a kid because of how goofy the songs were.  A song about a psycho killer?  About things burning?  Sign teen John up!  A lot of the other music I had heard (and still a lot of music out there) is myopically focused on love, heartbreak, romance, sex, etc., and as a teen geek/ace (though I didn’t know that part at the time), all of that was the furthest possible from relevance to my life.  I loved the Talking Heads because they sung about different things and quirky things, and that love holds up today and inspires me to try and make interesting lyrics or take on interesting points of view.  They also combined those lyrics with arrangements that were both well-made and extremely danceable, making every element of each song stand the test of time.

Queens of the Stone Age

QotSA were a band I heard from their songs in Guitar Hero and Rock Band as a teenager, quickly enjoyed the sound of, and soon sought out their most acclaimed album Songs for the Deaf.  Songs for the Deaf is a fantastic album all around, but to get particular, that album is probably my biggest influence as a drummer (coupled with the other Homme-Grohl collaboration, Them Crooked Vultures) - I love the raw energy Dave Grohl brings to the drums on it, the hard-hitting fills, and the almost mathematical structure he gives the parts.  Dave knows when to throw in a crazy fill, when to throw in a simple but fast and powerful beat, and when (rarely) to play something more mellow to give space to the rest of the band - I can only hope I end up as good a drummer as he is on that record.

Warren Zevon

I got into Warren Zevon later in high school, and his lyrics had a similar influence to the Talking Heads.  Warren would pick all kinds of interesting themes and perspectives for his lyrics, while infusing them with a consistent clever cynicism that I also loved.

Crazy Arm

For those tragically unaware, Crazy Arm are a British folk/punk band who have made a wide range of excellent music but remain relatively little known outside of (and possibly even within) the United Kingdom.  I downloaded their albums Union City Breath and Born to Ruin in high school, and probably the biggest influence they had on me was opening me to the fact that a band doesn’t have to just play one thing.  The Sex Pistols just play punk, and that’s fine.  A lot of folk singers just strum acoustic guitars, and that’s fine too.  But Crazy Arm, and another of my favorite artists Frank Turner, play with a huge variety of sounds.  Just on Union City Breath alone, they have a purely acoustic ballad, a full speed fiery punk song, a lot of midtempo rock songs, and many variations and shades in between.  That variation inspired my songwriting/structure building with Lemon Knife - the first song we ever wrote was a hard rock song built around a Muse-inspired riff Mia had prepared, while the second was a superfast punk song.  From there, we’ve tried to explore as much as possible while keeping a somewhat consistent sonic palette so that there’s still some root identity.  I love that on each of our albums so far, there are several songs that sound like nothing else we’ve made, while still sounding like Lemon Knife.

[lemondice]

I Know That This Is Vitriol!

Hi all, this week marks another exciting creative release for me, as my band Lemon Knife’s second full-length album came out on Monday!  You can find it on lemonknife.bandcamp.com, stream it at https://open.spotify.com/album/23dO6hen0Nx0FiaVqxWlCI, or hear it anywhere you find music online. I thought I’d write this week’s post talking about the album and some of the inspirations and themes on it.

Let’s start with the title - after we had a few songs together for the album I knew that it was going to be a more political album and certainly one that still had a dark tone.  Our debut, Songs About Water and Death, was also somewhat dark, but while it had some political songs it had more of an introspective feel; our EP In Our Darkest Sour was political but through more of a historical lens.  IKTTIV is more direct, and also is written with something more like a call to action in mind, on songs like Thunder Owed and You Can’t Shrug Your Way to Valhalla.  I didn’t want to just complain about how things are but rather also encourage people to take action.  So the title itself is a quote from R.E.M.’s anti-Reagan classic Ignoreland: “I know that this is vitriol, no solution, spleen venting...but I feel better having screamed, don’t you?”  My intent is that this is a big climactic venting of political and societal frustration, and that our next album might switch tacks a little, possibly musically but definitely lyrically. (Hopefully our next album’s release will also see slightly less frustrating leaders in charge, of course)

The songs themselves were written throughout 2019 - Thunder Owed was the first wholly new song we wrote for the new album around the start of the year, while Whaler’s Widow and The Day We Took Our Country Back were the last couple written and recorded towards the end of November.  We’ve got a wide range of songs on this album - we definitely experimented with some different sounds, from the soft-loud 90s style of I Will Remember (which was also a lyrical challenge to myself - I wanted to see if I could write a good set of lyrics without my typical wordiness) to the almost dancey, repetitive groove of Whaler’s Widow or the dramatic temposhift in Endless City.  The songs were all recorded and produced by CJ Johnson, who we’ve worked with on all of our releases so far - we love his no-nonsense, productive studio approach and he has a knack for finding great effects to add to the bass and vocals.

A few notes on individual songs:

Dirty Life and Times of a Gun: I never get sick of listening to this song - this is one where we started with the lyrics and built a song around them.  I was inspired by Murder by Death’s style (they also get a song title shoutout elsewhere on the album!) to try and write a murder ballad, and then to add a twist I left the ending unknown.  Mia was in turn inspired by the western theme to add a slide to her bass, giving this one a really fresh feel.  We both loved it enough to make it the lead track.

Vultures: Probably my favorite song on the album to play on drums - this one is a real killer live!

The Old Bastard Will Be Missed: This was actually written in the very early days of Lemon Knife, but only the first half - I liked the concept but the song itself was a little lacking.  We decided to revisit this and add a second half to make it a little more fleshed out, and the result was interesting enough to keep!

Broken Ankle, Broken Mind: Mia wrote the lyrics here, and they’re great - it’s awesome to see her pushing some new lyrical frontier and tackling something really controversial and direct that means a lot to her.

Whaler’s Widow: This is our 2nd or 3rd attempt to make a song people can dance to - I’m still not sure if it fully succeeded at that, but I love Mia’s vocal melody and delivery on the finale.

Thanks for reading, and be sure to give the album a listen - we’re quite proud with how the songs turned out!  Next post I’ll be back with the year in review.

[lemondice]

Songs About Water and Death song origins, pt. 1

Hello again!  I’m continuing my series on the songwriting origins of Lemon Knife songs.  Last time, I talked about the 4 songs on our debut EP, Storms and Snakes.  Those 4 songs also appeared on our first full-length album, Songs About Water and Death, along with 9 other songs, so today I’m going to look at 4 of those 9 songs and talk about what inspired them and how they were written.

American Desert: This is actually the first John-vocal song we ever recorded as a band.   I believe (but am not 100% certain) that I came up with the idea to do a fast, punk song with a repetitive chorus like Nazi Punks Fuck Off by the Dead Kennedys, and then we jammed on it together during practice and came up with the beat and riff together before I wrote lyrics.  It probably contains the only time I’ve ever asked Mia to make a specific change to one of her riffs - as the melody master I defer to her, or sometimes if she’s undecided she’ll play a couple riffs and I’ll tell her which one I like best, but on this particular occasion the suggestion of having the 3rd repetition in the guitar pattern go up instead of staying the same as the others was mine. Lyrically, this was also the first angry song I wrote, and there’s plenty of standard anti-Trump stuff in there, along with my desire to proactively go after the working class people who voted for him when he’s planning to take away the health care they need to survive, rather than “just let[ting] [them] die” from said lack of health care.  Light-hearted stuff!

Black Site: This one developed off of a killer pair of riffs Mia had written that we rocked out to in practice and developed a structure of a song.  My drumming is certainly very Dave Grohl inspired here (just listen to the intro and the intro to Breed...).  Lyrically, I was trying a new approach of this one by writing a political song with slightly less direct lyrics, trying a more REM-ish approach.  It’s a back and forth dialogue between two characters - in the mid-2000s-setting, my character is new to the CIA and Mia’s character is a veteran agent who tries to teach me the ways of torture.  By the end though, I rebel and testify against her, and “We need to make sure this never happens again” shifts meaning from verse 1 to verse 2.  I thought it would be fun to play against type-casting and make Mia play the villain here.

Not on Mars: The only guitar song on the album, this one was inspired by a riff Mia came up with when practicing Run Like Hell by Pink Floyd and riffing on the bridge.  Lyrically, I tried to mix things up and write shorter but still effective lyrics, going for a Flaming Lips-style (to go with the sound) mix of a little bit of comedy and a little bit of pathos - the narrator misses many things about Earth, starting with mundane, ridiculous items, and eventually getting to the real point of missing his/her love.

A Summer Feast: A Summer Feast started with the drum beat, which I fiddled around with a bit in practice before we wrote a riff to go with it.  The vocal melody Mia came up with and the beat had a little bit of a merry jig feel to them, in my mind, so I tried to write lyrics that would paint a scene like that...but with a painful knife twist, of course.  Sharks have always been one of my favorite animals, so what better surprise could there be at a party than finding out your hosts were actually ravenous were-sharks?

[lemondice]

Guest post: Mia!

This week, I thought it would be fun to have my bandmate in Lemon Knife and girlfriend in lemon life, Mia Blixt-Shehan, write a post for some variety.  I asked her to write about her favorite bands and how they influenced her work in Lemon Knife, and you can read her post right below:

So, I’m a Guest Writer for a blog! Exciting times! Really! Look, I’ve had this title exactly once before (https://www.writebynight.net/news-events/wfpl-rats/), where I made the interesting (read: ill-informed) decision of pawning off the first chapters of a thirteen-year-old novel—by which I mean I was thirteen years old when I tried to write the stinking thing (what was I doing trying out novel writing at thirteen?)—about the coming of age of a group of British sewer rats who decide to migrate to America in the era of Beatlemania…???...to promote a now-defunct blog under a now-defunct nom de plume. I’ll gladly take my second chance to appear on someone else’s blog without completely exposing the gaps once filled by my long-lost tween-aged marbles, thanks very much!

Well, anyway…of course, I have a bit of a personal attachment, to understate things—the blog’s author is my dear bandmate and partner, John, so I, Mia, am here to write about my top three favorite musical artists and how they made a mark on the excellent duo that is Lemon Knife! I hope you enjoy my stop by and learn a few things as well. Here we go, lowest- to highest-ranked:

3. Muse

Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story of the air raid siren with the bass. Lowercase—The Air Raid Siren is the formidable Bruce Dickinson, obviously, I can’t take that title. But I’d be an effective red alert nonetheless—“EEEEEEVAAAAAACUUUUUUAAAAAAAATE IT’S A MOOOOOOOOONSOOOOOON!!!!”…new Lemon Knife lyric?

Before my love affair with the Muse discography began just five or so years ago, however, I wasn’t an air raid siren but a coffee shop bulletin board flyer. At this point I’d finally become semi-comfortable with my instrumental abilities, in specific circumstances, anyway, but I was still terrified of singing louder than, like, 25 decibels. I knew my voice was imperfect and didn’t really want to use it for much. The potential use of my vocal imperfections finally clicked on the fateful day where I heard the Black Holes and Revelations album for the first time (of at least ninety since). Loosely recommended by a visiting librarian when I was a library page, it was something I remembered only by fate on my usual very long train ride to college one day—“sure, let’s stream this thing, this train is stuck and I’ve got nothing better to do!” And there it was, as I sat spellbound through the opening track, “Take a Bow”—I was listening to a voice I hadn’t heard the likes of before, though I couldn’t quite place how it was so distinctive at the time. This was something greatly commanding and uniquely beautiful, and something that evoked copious amounts of whatever song’s emotion without sacrificing the ability to sound genuinely stinking good, and I wanted to know how it was done straight away. And so, after the last notes of “Knights of Cydonia” had died away, I set to figuring out the keeper of that voice—the magnificently brilliant Matt Bellamy—and diving into the music and generally obsessing over every recording I could unearth on my lengthy train rides. Good college pals, Muse were…

In the depths of my weekly Muse analysis (weekly classes, you know) I also became fascinated with the instantly recognizable bass work in the band, granted to the listener by the utterly fantastic Chris Wolstenholme. This isn’t your typical fuzz bass by any means. It’s got every amount of effect manipulation and gear tweaking and all—the—pedals—yet it’s combined with a great and distinctive technique that ensures that unlike that of too many other bands of their era and just before it (looking at you, Green Day!), their bass will almost certainly never become a lesser part of the music. It was here that I heard about another distorted bassist that was openly inspired by Muse and took it to the next level—he was Mike Kerr, the sole melodic instrument (well, besides vocals!) in a little band called Royal Blood. And it was THERE that I realized that bass/drum duos could be a thing…and…well…what do you think happened next?

2. The Who

We’re going a pretty hefty step up in influence here—I wouldn’t be a fuzz bassist and air raid siren vocalist without Muse, but I wouldn’t be a musician at all without The ‘Orrible ‘Oo.

It’s a story I’ve told countless times and will forever retell: Right around the extremely tender age of five, I came across a VHS (remember those?!) of the original Who rockumentary, decades before the squeaky-clean presentation of Amazing Journey—I speak of The Kids Are Alright. Familial lore dictates that the music of Neil Young was an immediate sedative when I was kicking hard in the womb, but a few years out of it, this was the first time I’d been exposed to music so raw and raucous and explosive…literally and figuratively. It had clearly seeped into my underdeveloped brain as an obsession grew through the years. (The first piano chords I learned outside of classical training were the ones in “Baba O’Riley,” at my independent request.)

At thirteen—oh, yeah, when I was also trying to write a novel about rats!—I got my first guitar. I took a few lessons for some months with a couple of fantastic tutors and then I was off on my own with a self-prescribed in-depth study of acoustic Who songs. I can’t imagine I was a particularly typical student, because from the very beginning I had absolutely no interest in learning to Van-Halen-shred and very little in the Gilmour bend, even though I greatly admired both—I was in deep with the Townshend -sus4 chords and vicious pick attack. To this day my right hand is ridiculously gritty with sets of both six and four strings, more so with my choice of using coins as plectrums (we’re about to get to that). Eventually I decided to abandon soloist peer pressure entirely and focus hard on rhythmic playing and making songs melodically interesting, which, filtered through The Who, greatly informed my later interests in both musical composition and the deep dive into bass. Rock composition came easily—much easier than lyricism, then and now—after spending so much time with my head in the Who discography, with the instantly recognizable chord structures and ever-expanding boundary-pushing within songwriting (flailing rhythm guitar! Lead bass guitar! ARP-2600s! Rock operas!!), and my decision to pursue bass was solidified by John Entwistle, the band’s resident Ox and my four-string hero to this very day.

1. Queen

Oh, buddy! This is it! This is the point of the article where we start really jumping up and down about things—like, if you thought those other two entries were fanatical, well, ohhhh, buddy!!

Queen! Yes! The greatest band on Earth, then, now, and onward. Well—to me. It’s all subjective, I’m aware. But the greatest band on Earth. Really. Here are four guys that took rock by its legs, stood it on its head, and spun it around until the very soul of it was changed for good. The way I see it, there are two schools of musical artists in the current era—the ones that mostly grew up on everyone else in the 1970s, and the ones that mostly grew up on Queen. You can always tell who they are if you have the innate sense, which often comes to you by being a fellow Queen fan. The Struts. Fun. (fun., actually.) Mika. The Killers. And in news that should surprise no one reading this, three of the most obvious Queen fans in music make up Muse. They can’t be understated.

Let’s look at this further—what did we have here? The most “duh” answer first—we had the greatest frontman in the history of any style of music, I’d venture to say, in Freddie Mercury. Need I say more about him—really?!? We had a bassist that told miniature stories within his prominent sound in John Deacon. We had Roger Taylor, the human drummer who was “more reliable than a drum machine,” the primary utterer of THOSE harmony high notes, and, as it turned out, probably the most experimentally minded member of the band if his solo career is any indication. And last but most certainly not least, we had a guitarist who literally crafted one of the most immediately known tones in rock with his bare hands (from a fireplace!) and pushed every boundary of the instrument in Brian May. Whose musical presence, by the way, essentially saved my life way back when. (I was about to say that there should be shirts made with the statement “Brian May Saved My Life” on them, but I immediately recognized how terrible of an idea that would actually be, although I wanted it known that it passed through my brain, so yup, here’s a parenthetical on it. Voila.) Many apprehensive people who eventually get into music see themselves for the first time in a tough-as-nails leather-clad punk goddess, or a platform-wearing out-and-proud queer, or a genre-blending, every-line-crossing, overall bad-arse POC. I saw myself in a frizzy-haired nerrrrrrrd equally inclined to embroil himself in academics (astrophysics in his case, anthropology and library science in mine) and jet onstage to make himself very known in a rock band. A convincing argument to be sure.

Okay! That was a while. It was. I hope it wasn’t too much of a while. If you made it here, congratulations—and thank you! Lemon Knife is a happy endeavor indeed—maybe we’ll see you at a show!!

[lemondice]

In Our Darkest Sour Song Origins

Continuing the earlier series of posts, I thought I’d post about each of the songs on our second release, the EP In Our Darkest Sour.  

Aryan Girls:  I asked Mia to write lyrics for a new song on our EP, to keep mixing things up, and she came up with the main lyrics for the verses as well as the song concept, tying societal anxiety to a more ominous broader threat.  I like how it works as a song both about internal feelings on inferiority as well as a topical political concern, and I added on my little pseudo-rap bridge to put a clear political button on it.  Musically, I suggested we try again to make a danceable song as Thirst had wound up a good song, but certainly not particularly groovy, and I think this time we succeeded.  Both lyrically and musically we’re both very happy with where this ended up.

Jeannette Rankin 2020: This one started with one of Mia’s awesome riffs - pretty much everything about the bass part, including the intro/verse/bridge, was fully formed when she showed it to me and I came up with a drum part.  Lyrically, Jeannette Rankin is a fascinating woman who’s always been an inspiration to me - she’s the first congresswoman ever elected, but also has the honor of being the only woman to vote against the United States’ participation in both World War 1 and World War 2.   I don’t necessarily personally agree with staying out of World War 2 specifically, but there’s no denying that Jeannette took a bold, unpopular stand purely driven by what she felt was right.  For this song, I wanted the spotlight to be on those 2 anti-war votes (there’s certainly plenty else going on in Jeanette’s career, but in particular I wanted to emphasize that this isn’t just somebody who’s a historical footnote because of their gender, but a person who made bold, conscience-driven decisions and would be worth remembering for that if nothing else), so each verse gives some historical background on the WW1 and WW2 vote specifically.  Then to keep the song from being too Schoolhouse Rock-y, I wanted the chorus to get more emotional and direct - I switched it to 1st person from Jeanette’s perspective as she made the decisions, while working as many direct quotes by her as would feel natural into the lyric.  This is another favorite of ours.

Children’s Crusade: We started this one with a cool drum beat I had thought up, jamming on it to elaborate and make it the dark, dirgey sound it has.  The children’s crusades are a truly bizarre, fascinating piece of history, with multiple parallels to modern politics both in the role of religion and in how easy it is for someone charismatic to swindle people into doing foolish things, so the lyrics wrote themselves.  

Harper’s Ferry: Harper’s Ferry was the last song written for the EP - at this point, we realized that the first 3 songs all had a historical theme to them, so if we added a 4th, we’d have a concept album on our hands.  Having written about Jeanette Rankin, it seemed natural to write a song about another of my historical idols, John Brown.  John Brown was an abolitionist right before the Civil War who led an unsuccessful (and to be fair, somewhat foolhardy) attempt to start a rebellion and free a large number of slaves at Harper’s Ferry, WV.  The lyrics flowed pretty naturally, with the verses being told from John Brown’s perspective during the raid and the chorus quoting him to generalize his life to all conflicts where the situation has gotten so bad that only extreme measures will suffice.  I believe the instruments followed the song concept, if not the lyrics themselves - I set Mia with the vague idea of “let’s make something kind of in the vein of Foo Fighters with a big chorus”, and we created the parts from there.