Behind The Music - The Story of Song
SIERRA JUST SMILED
The origin of this song is actually born out of disappointment in another song called ‘La Cienega Just Smiled’ by Ryan Adams. I first heard of La Cinega Blvd, a street in Los Angeles, when reading the Motley Crue band biography The Dirt, and a chance meeting between Vince Neil and David Lee Roth which happened at a bar on this street. Years later I was smitten to be actually standing on La Cienega, the way a historian might feel in Gettysburg. I always thought La Cienega was the most beautiful name for a street, the soft ‘C” sound being a favorite of mine since my 10th Grade English teacher pointed out that ‘cellar door’ was one of the most beautiful turns of phrase in modern language. When I saw a song titled “La Cienega Just Smiled”, I was struck by the name that I knew and loved and also the wonder of the concept of a road I knew to be gritty and downtrodden having a personality and possessing a smile. When I listened to the song, I thought it was ok but it didn’t capture the emotion I was looking for, so I sat down to write one that did, and that song became “Sierra Just Smiled."
It’s a song about a young woman who many of us know or even were- a little too big for her small town and heading out to the city with a dream, confidence, and blissful naivete. When you’re from a little cow town, just walking down city city streets feels like a victory, and I admire the sweetness of Sierra; I can see her smiling to herself in all of these moments, moments only someone like me can notice, as I fight to remain impervious to the bustle of urban life and remain focused on the little things. My favorite image is from the song is her mother up late in the dark, in a cotton nightgown, the kitchen light a tiny beacon in a vast desert, where in the daylight you would see tiny rows of houses dwarfed by the Sierra-Nevada mountain range. Down the hall is Sierra’s room, still adorned with her high school life, including that ever coveted homecoming crown. I want to meet Sierra someday, but I’m not sure where I’ll find her, still in the big city or having retreated back into the desert night.
It’s a song about a young woman who many of us know or even were- a little too big for her small town and heading out to the city with a dream, confidence, and blissful naivete. When you’re from a little cow town, just walking down city city streets feels like a victory, and I admire the sweetness of Sierra; I can see her smiling to herself in all of these moments, moments only someone like me can notice, as I fight to remain impervious to the bustle of urban life and remain focused on the little things. My favorite image is from the song is her mother up late in the dark, in a cotton nightgown, the kitchen light a tiny beacon in a vast desert, where in the daylight you would see tiny rows of houses dwarfed by the Sierra-Nevada mountain range. Down the hall is Sierra’s room, still adorned with her high school life, including that ever coveted homecoming crown. I want to meet Sierra someday, but I’m not sure where I’ll find her, still in the big city or having retreated back into the desert night.
CHANGE OF SEASON
This song, like many of mine, has a few Easter eggs- tributes to the songwriters who have inspired me and made me feel understood. In Counting Crows’ song Raining In Baltimore, Adam Duritz’s lonely wail hit me so hard with the lines- I need a phone call, I need a raincoat, and so on a cold winter evening when I was feeling despair in the exact timbre of that song, I found comfort in expanding on his mini-theme, and so I started the first and third verses with those lines and built upon them, capturing for myself the emotion of the moment, which had been defined just that once before. Similarly, the line “I want to hear my name” is a reference to another lonely man’s laments- Bob Dylan, who sang in Tomorrow Is a Long Time: “I can’t hear the echo of my footsteps, or remember the sound of my own name.”
The original end of the chorus was “It’s a long way down” which I inadvertently had copied exactly from a Sarah McLachlan song I had forgotten, and so once the band helped me figure that one out I changed it to “ It’s all I think about” which I think vastly improved the message I was trying to get at. This song is a great example of how music and poetry helps you turn hurt into something beautiful.
The original end of the chorus was “It’s a long way down” which I inadvertently had copied exactly from a Sarah McLachlan song I had forgotten, and so once the band helped me figure that one out I changed it to “ It’s all I think about” which I think vastly improved the message I was trying to get at. This song is a great example of how music and poetry helps you turn hurt into something beautiful.
AMERICAN GIRLS
There are so many songs about American Girls- I can’t think of any single topic that has inspired more great music. After loving so many songs titled American Girls- Tom Petty, Weezer, Counting Crows, Beach Boys- I always knew I wanted one of my own. This song was inspired by two girls in particular, I probably won’t get to revealing who for a long time if ever, but they both had wallflower qualities and I felt about them the way the Luna song Tiger Lily made me feel, and that emotion is the driver for the whole song. The shoutout to this inspiration is written into the second verse- “painting the walls all with tigers and lilies”- basically me giving love to those girls who stand quietly and beautifully in situations where their compatriots make a ruckus. I want them to know I see them. The green eyes references is two-fold: one I don’t think green-eyed girls get enough lyrical representation, and two since the two girls I was thinking of when I wrote this have blue eyes and brown eyes- it’s a bit of a disguise.
ANNALEE'S LULLABYE
This all came from the ghost of a broken heart, decades old, that still wakes me up in the middle of the night. I was drinking coffee through the pre-dawn hours at a folding table in an otherwise empty room in Brookline. Words and unknown visions were pouring through my head as if they were memories, or movies, almost like a daydream in a hailstorm of nostalgia. This whole song creation was me scribbling furiously, trying to describe these stories unfolding somewhere, the back of my eyelids like baby drive-ins, hazy in that space between sleep and awake. It all started dockside in San Francisco with a dark-haired beauty, putting fifty cents into one of those machines that flattens and stretches copper pennies and stamps a souvenir location into what's left of the coin, then on to Indianapolis, where the rumbling of engines is a nod to the Indy 500. There are a dozen other verses, but the only other one that made it into the song holds my favorite imagery- the mesmerizing shadows of a ballerina I once knew, and the romantic notion of the coal-miner's daughter, though I've still never been to West Virginia. The chorus of the song has always been in question- the flashing of red and blue lights prompts worries of AnnaLee's death, but it's not that. I think it's more like she is still sleeping in her small-town bed, and I must've gotten pulled over on a midnight drive over to her house, years after I had last been through town. It's a lullabye because at its core this song was meant to put me back to sleep after being so jumpstarted out of bed by that lingering haunt, but also a reminder to so many loves and lovers I wandered off on in my youth that though they have all moved on, likely forgotten me, and faded into the fabric of America, I still sing them to sleep every time I sing these songs, and in that way, I still see their faces every night.
CALIFORNIA
They are all true stories, but this one actually happened. I've waited a long time for some things in life to come around, and every so often, the wait has been worth it. Still, it came as some surprise- I knew what she meant when she said 'California', and I knew the effect those sunny LA days can have on your heart, and on your memory. At the same time, I couldn't fault her for yearning, these wide open seas of grain no match for what she imagined the ocean to be. It wasn't the first or the last time I had been left for the golden coast, it's a tale as old as the gold rush itself, and so i suppose I'm just another outpost on that famed journey west.
CHASE TWO THINGS
Embarrassingly enough, this song started on Tinder, the sketchy dating app where people post pictures and short bios in the hopes of finding temporary lovers. One woman’s profile simply read something like “My mother told me you only chase two things: whiskey and dreams.” I swiped right, which is the equivalent of something between a wink and a proposition, but I never heard back. However- if you are out there- I know you’re not interested, that’s cool- but please get in touch to at least claim your Mom's songwriting credits. The rest of the song comes from moments of my favorite nights out- the thrill of the weekend and parties in the streets of Boston, on the shores of Miami, and in the saloons of Oregon.
GHOSTS OF HOLLYWOOD
This song is a musical interpretation of the painting 'Boulevard of Broken Dreams.' The painting, done by Gottfried Helwin, is actually an adaptation of Edwin Hopper's Nighthawk, which depicted a scene in a late-night diner in Manhattan, where Helwin replaces the original characters with James Dean, Humphrey Bogart, Marilyn Monroe, and Elvis Presley. This painting and the sorrowful ends of its characters so clearly illustrates the juxtaposition of Hollywood and how intertwined fame and loneliness, success and tragedy, reality and illusion really are. I spent enough nights on Hollywood and Sunset Boulevard to have felt this in my soul, the midnight breeze thick with ghosts as it blows in off the water, the walls covered with movie posters from bygone eras, history echoing loudly against the backdrop of raucous and unaware club-goers as the night ends and they spill into the streets, stumbling over stars who did the same, a long time ago.
ONE MORE NIGHT
MIDNIGHTS IN TOLEDO
Josh Ritter posing with
his tour T-shirt
It was somewhere in the Fall of 2008, and I had fallen in love (or something like it) with a Boston girl named Lindsay. Our first date was an October concert at The South Shore Music Circus to see Marc Cohn perform our favorite song at the time, a tribute to The Band's drummer Levon Helm called "Listening To Levon." As I pulled the Jeep onto I-93 on the way to Cohasset, she told me she was moving to San Francisco. I smiled my best smile, and I told her that I was happy for her, but that smile certainly didn't tell my whole story.
The next summer, I set out on a great American road trip, knowing only that at some point, I had to make it to California, to pay a visit to those brown eyes I had so longed for. One of my early stops was in Bozeman, Montana, where I picked out a guitar from the Gibson guitar factory. That guitar felt like it played itself and fit like it was made just for me, though I certainly couldn't afford its hefty $4,000 price tag. Somehow, for some reason still unbeknownst to me, a blond rocker-turned-salesman saw how much I loved it, put it in a case, and asked how much I had to spend. I showed him the last of my savings- $1,700- and he sent me on my way with the gray/black starburst model Hummingbird which I wrote this song on a few days later. It's still the only beautiful thing that I own, and I carefully seat-belted my new companion into the passenger seat and headed for the highway.
As luck would have it, Lindsay's favorite musical artist, Josh Ritter, was playing a show near his hometown in Idaho. A year earlier, I had met Josh on a rainy night in Colorado, and to help me out he called Lindsay from my phone and left her a voice message telling her we were hanging out and how much we were missing her. That moment was one of a thousand reasons why he became my hero too. Since I couldn't actually see her, it did seem that seeing his performance would bring me closer to her, albeit in a more transcendental way than a face-to-face. So from the oasis-like bustle of Bozeman, I again found myself headed west, over treacherous mountain passes and through fire-scorched desert, out of Montana and up into Sun Valley, ID. This time, following a memorable show through Idaho twilight, Josh posed for a photo with the concert T-shirt that I bought for Lindsay and planned to hand-deliver as soon as I made my way to the coast.
Later that week, that perfect combination of highway and heartbreak found me on a friend's back porch in the high-desert dust, picking out notes on my newly acquired guitar with a tune of loneliness and longing in my head. Those solitary moments gave way to a song about a star-crossed couple who passed each other, like ships in the night, from east to west and back again. Longing, in this space, was like knocking endlessly on a door that no one would ever answer. Midnights In Toledo was born in the shadow of Bald Mountain, played a few times to both soothe my heart and ensure it's permanence in my memory, and then faded away like summer itself.
This song caught hold again a few years later when I eventually played it in my parents living room, when my Dad told me that he liked the fact that the rhythmic parts of the song actually sounded like a locomotive. This alliterative musical theme was eventually built upon with the rest of the band, where the percussion tracks have grown to feel and sound like that tireless, mournful chug of a train pulling weight. The first verse of this song is all about a man with the slightly-tempered spirit of a loner, criss-crossing his way across the country in search of a specific train that had somehow always just departed. The inside joke on this, as suggested by a friend, is that the blanket of sin this traveler is wrapped in references an actual blanket I had, a thin, green, cotton comforter that was a hand-me-down from college. That green blanket subsequently survived years of travel in my car, being laid down on carpets and cornfields alike, wherever I was due to lay my head on nearly twenty cross-country drives. The original owner of the blanket mentioned in the song was intended to be the owner of original sin itself, Adam, who is both well-known and long-gone. The actual owner was a friend we all called Little Mike who somehow passed his blanket on to me.
The chorus of the song is a nostalgic tribute to the more jubilant of my road-tripping caravan days, back in the throes of my youth where the planet felt so much bigger and life so unencumbered. As the song progresses, the second verse is woven around a female character I imagine to be a cross between Lindsay and Kate, the character played by Evangeline Lilly on the television show 'Lost', which I was watching on occasion at this time. I don't know many women who would willingly catch a freight train- but she'd have to be some kind of both troubled and hopeful. To me it's a romantic notion, and I see stormy eyes and cutoff jeans, the dust and grime of hanging around the industrial rail yards still unable to mask the prominence of her natural beauty. The bridge section of this song is all about the shrill shriek of the steam engine whistle, and the stoic, monotonous chug of a coal-colored train as it relentlessly labors across miles of track, prairie and mountain alike, from city to city and through countless small towns. The 'witching hour' phrase is an inadvertent throwback to the children's book 'The BFG', a Roald Dahl story from my youth. I'm not sure if he coined the term 'witching hour', probably not, but that's where I learned of this hour and what a dark and mysterious time it is.
The last verse of the song is about just how close two people can come to intersecting lives, yet continually all but miss each other, as they are ultimately doomed to criss-cross the nation until they settle in to separate lives in distant cities. Of course I included the town of Cohasset, the town where I saw Lindsay for the first time, and the last. This song contains a number of tributes to Josh Ritter songs as well, as I was just a few days removed from his show when I wrote it. After hearing his debuting song 'Southern Pacifica', which itself is about missed connections to some degree, I included the name of that train in my song, and the prolific but long-gone colors are of course the red, white, and blue. As well, the whispers at the end of each chorus can be heard in an older Josh song called 'Wings' which ends in very much the same way, beneath a shroud of hush and a bit of prairie mystique. And so, here are the actual words that made it across the country with me and back again, almost completely unaltered from that afternoon on the porch in Sun Valley, thinking abut the glory days of the railroad, of young adventurous cross-country drives, and of the distances we'll travel in our hearts, minds, and over highways for this silly old-fashioned notion called love.
The next summer, I set out on a great American road trip, knowing only that at some point, I had to make it to California, to pay a visit to those brown eyes I had so longed for. One of my early stops was in Bozeman, Montana, where I picked out a guitar from the Gibson guitar factory. That guitar felt like it played itself and fit like it was made just for me, though I certainly couldn't afford its hefty $4,000 price tag. Somehow, for some reason still unbeknownst to me, a blond rocker-turned-salesman saw how much I loved it, put it in a case, and asked how much I had to spend. I showed him the last of my savings- $1,700- and he sent me on my way with the gray/black starburst model Hummingbird which I wrote this song on a few days later. It's still the only beautiful thing that I own, and I carefully seat-belted my new companion into the passenger seat and headed for the highway.
As luck would have it, Lindsay's favorite musical artist, Josh Ritter, was playing a show near his hometown in Idaho. A year earlier, I had met Josh on a rainy night in Colorado, and to help me out he called Lindsay from my phone and left her a voice message telling her we were hanging out and how much we were missing her. That moment was one of a thousand reasons why he became my hero too. Since I couldn't actually see her, it did seem that seeing his performance would bring me closer to her, albeit in a more transcendental way than a face-to-face. So from the oasis-like bustle of Bozeman, I again found myself headed west, over treacherous mountain passes and through fire-scorched desert, out of Montana and up into Sun Valley, ID. This time, following a memorable show through Idaho twilight, Josh posed for a photo with the concert T-shirt that I bought for Lindsay and planned to hand-deliver as soon as I made my way to the coast.
Later that week, that perfect combination of highway and heartbreak found me on a friend's back porch in the high-desert dust, picking out notes on my newly acquired guitar with a tune of loneliness and longing in my head. Those solitary moments gave way to a song about a star-crossed couple who passed each other, like ships in the night, from east to west and back again. Longing, in this space, was like knocking endlessly on a door that no one would ever answer. Midnights In Toledo was born in the shadow of Bald Mountain, played a few times to both soothe my heart and ensure it's permanence in my memory, and then faded away like summer itself.
This song caught hold again a few years later when I eventually played it in my parents living room, when my Dad told me that he liked the fact that the rhythmic parts of the song actually sounded like a locomotive. This alliterative musical theme was eventually built upon with the rest of the band, where the percussion tracks have grown to feel and sound like that tireless, mournful chug of a train pulling weight. The first verse of this song is all about a man with the slightly-tempered spirit of a loner, criss-crossing his way across the country in search of a specific train that had somehow always just departed. The inside joke on this, as suggested by a friend, is that the blanket of sin this traveler is wrapped in references an actual blanket I had, a thin, green, cotton comforter that was a hand-me-down from college. That green blanket subsequently survived years of travel in my car, being laid down on carpets and cornfields alike, wherever I was due to lay my head on nearly twenty cross-country drives. The original owner of the blanket mentioned in the song was intended to be the owner of original sin itself, Adam, who is both well-known and long-gone. The actual owner was a friend we all called Little Mike who somehow passed his blanket on to me.
The chorus of the song is a nostalgic tribute to the more jubilant of my road-tripping caravan days, back in the throes of my youth where the planet felt so much bigger and life so unencumbered. As the song progresses, the second verse is woven around a female character I imagine to be a cross between Lindsay and Kate, the character played by Evangeline Lilly on the television show 'Lost', which I was watching on occasion at this time. I don't know many women who would willingly catch a freight train- but she'd have to be some kind of both troubled and hopeful. To me it's a romantic notion, and I see stormy eyes and cutoff jeans, the dust and grime of hanging around the industrial rail yards still unable to mask the prominence of her natural beauty. The bridge section of this song is all about the shrill shriek of the steam engine whistle, and the stoic, monotonous chug of a coal-colored train as it relentlessly labors across miles of track, prairie and mountain alike, from city to city and through countless small towns. The 'witching hour' phrase is an inadvertent throwback to the children's book 'The BFG', a Roald Dahl story from my youth. I'm not sure if he coined the term 'witching hour', probably not, but that's where I learned of this hour and what a dark and mysterious time it is.
The last verse of the song is about just how close two people can come to intersecting lives, yet continually all but miss each other, as they are ultimately doomed to criss-cross the nation until they settle in to separate lives in distant cities. Of course I included the town of Cohasset, the town where I saw Lindsay for the first time, and the last. This song contains a number of tributes to Josh Ritter songs as well, as I was just a few days removed from his show when I wrote it. After hearing his debuting song 'Southern Pacifica', which itself is about missed connections to some degree, I included the name of that train in my song, and the prolific but long-gone colors are of course the red, white, and blue. As well, the whispers at the end of each chorus can be heard in an older Josh song called 'Wings' which ends in very much the same way, beneath a shroud of hush and a bit of prairie mystique. And so, here are the actual words that made it across the country with me and back again, almost completely unaltered from that afternoon on the porch in Sun Valley, thinking abut the glory days of the railroad, of young adventurous cross-country drives, and of the distances we'll travel in our hearts, minds, and over highways for this silly old-fashioned notion called love.
MARY, QUEEN OF ANGELS
Jayne from the LA Guns Music video
I was in Nashville in December of 2012, visiting my ninety-three-year-old grandmother. She still has the same loving hum in her voice, and the same joyful cackle of a laugh, but at her age it's tough for her to see and she didn't always recognize or even remember me. While she was resting, I wandered around the assisted living residence hall she stays in, and overcome by the smell of hospitals, I stepped outside to an entryway that reminded of a hotel valet stand (only moving considerably more slowly). There in the distance, on a manicured grassy hill at the end of the drive was an illuminated sign bearing the name of the home: Mary Queen of Angels. I thought about what that meant, to be the Queen of all the Angels. I thought about my Grandmother, whose rosy disposition certainly can be felt within me in my warmer moments, who could very well be a queen herself. Seeing as I was in Nashville and had been handed a song title in the unlikeliest of places, I began to hum a bluesy kind of riff and picture who I might imagine to be the Queen of the Angels. In my failed Bible studies, it turns it to me, it wasn't Jesus's mother at all.
Instead I was taken back to the 1980's, to the embattled brunette heroine Jayne, from the poolside video by LA Guns for their tragedy The Ballad of Jayne, written in memory of Jayne Mansfield. Seems like everyone, and especially those in the music world, knows someone who was so beautifully tragic that the world as we know it could never contain them. The juxtaposition of beauty and tragedy was the impetus for the first verse, as I penned it in my mind while my feet soaked up the chill of Tennessee winter. My Mary, who looks to me just like Jayne from the video, was both the storm and the refuge, the fire in the night and the safe place to hide. A woman somehow more at peace amidst the chaos than among the calm, she became "at home amid the deluge", like the crazy sleepless girl who runs out into the pouring rain at midnight just to feel the drops streak her skin. The second verse is about being the person who tries to save that girl, what it's like to find her in the hell of drug addiction or simply burning way too bright, when no amount of shelter can bring her in from the weather. When sometimes a person passes through this world, and there was no earthly way that they could make it here, you have to imagine that they don't simply then follow rank among the angels, but that the light which once burned so brightly here, well, "as it is on earth so shall it be in heaven". Yes, those shooting stars that we must say goodbye to way too soon, I have to believe in passing they preside instead over the angels, and with much less pain than when they lived under the sky, instead of in it. I may not be a true believer, but when I do look up, I know Mary, the Queen of the Angels, is up there.
Instead I was taken back to the 1980's, to the embattled brunette heroine Jayne, from the poolside video by LA Guns for their tragedy The Ballad of Jayne, written in memory of Jayne Mansfield. Seems like everyone, and especially those in the music world, knows someone who was so beautifully tragic that the world as we know it could never contain them. The juxtaposition of beauty and tragedy was the impetus for the first verse, as I penned it in my mind while my feet soaked up the chill of Tennessee winter. My Mary, who looks to me just like Jayne from the video, was both the storm and the refuge, the fire in the night and the safe place to hide. A woman somehow more at peace amidst the chaos than among the calm, she became "at home amid the deluge", like the crazy sleepless girl who runs out into the pouring rain at midnight just to feel the drops streak her skin. The second verse is about being the person who tries to save that girl, what it's like to find her in the hell of drug addiction or simply burning way too bright, when no amount of shelter can bring her in from the weather. When sometimes a person passes through this world, and there was no earthly way that they could make it here, you have to imagine that they don't simply then follow rank among the angels, but that the light which once burned so brightly here, well, "as it is on earth so shall it be in heaven". Yes, those shooting stars that we must say goodbye to way too soon, I have to believe in passing they preside instead over the angels, and with much less pain than when they lived under the sky, instead of in it. I may not be a true believer, but when I do look up, I know Mary, the Queen of the Angels, is up there.
