#songRoots

[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.

[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]

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]

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.