Girlz. With six extra Z’s.

Today’s a day, my hands are cold.  Oh, and today I finished Honeybear.

But that’s news for a fierce different day, my friends.

I’m holding on to the Girlz/Violence (fake) era as long as I can.

And to further that point, this is the post where you get the skinny on the Girlz EP.

So, it was May 2007, and I had finished all the music for Violence (including frantic guitar solos from Jesse before he got on an airplane).  I was home, and didn’t bring the recording equipment I usually use to record with me.  I was taking a break, I told myself! No more for a while.  I’m spent.

Well, I wasn’t spent, and starting writing new songs pretty quickly, but not too many.  The first to come was just a piano riff that sounded so good I couldn’t let it go.  That riff became the basis for a song called Heart Like Toast, which I think had a title before it had any words.  The title comes from a paraphrased poem a friend of mine wrote in her, what, middle school journal? Anyways, the line was “I am a woman who will cook you dinner.  You spread my heart on toast.”  Ha!

Heart Like Toast (piano)

Heart Like Toast, as it is, is about meeting new friends and allowing them into your group.  It’s also more romantic with that.  Funny that the particular person the song’s about is now our total enemy.  It’s a long story you don’t want to know.

Heart Like Toast (earliest)

That was the first song written.  The next was a song called Fool, and it certainly has the best story behind it’s writing.  I love Sam Shepard (playwright) and while at a used book store found a copy of Fool For Love that had a poem someone had written in the inside cover:

Lisa—

I was at your door

At the crack of dawn

But out into town

You had already gone

I wanted to buy you the sunrise

Or at least tea for two

tea for two.

I couldn’t possibly pass that up.  Later in the summer I was walking in an alley in the rain, but the light made it look like dawn.  I don’t have a picture of the alley, nor do I have a picture of the poem (someone else has it and i am unlikely to get it back), but maybe later I’ll take a picture of the alley and show you what I was talking about.  This particular alley inspired many more lyrics down the line.

Fool

The thing about many of the songs on Girlz is that the lyrics are often stolen from life, conversations, things people have written, or books.  The song Sparrow Camel (the title of which is taken from what Marianne Moore called Ostriches) came from messages I’d received on the internet (which is sort of embarassing to say, but they were so good I couldn’t resist).  Literally every line in the song comes from something that was written to me, re arranged into some bizarre romance narrative.  This early version comes from me being unsatisfied with my singing and trying to mask them with flange.

Sparrow Camel

The song No Life In Oh came from the worst response you can get from someone when you tell them you like them: “oh.”  The song is built around that and another thing said to me, which is “see how you feel after the summer.”  That line had already been used on Violence, but since this song is more directly about the person who said that to me, it made sense to use it.  I recorded it at night and recorded two tracks of cricket sounds to emphasize the room I was in.

The last two songs that was originally on Girlz were called Total Coward and Violence.  Violence is the title track that wasn’t on the album, but more on that at a later time.

Total Coward was another appropriation from a terrible message sent to me that summer.  It reads like this:

“Here’s another one for the cheap seats in the back. Bye, kid. It’s been terrible. I think you’re a complete and total coward. I’m not unfriending you again, so why don’t you be a gem and do it for me? You probably think I’m crazy and irrational, eh? Despite the fact that we used to share root beer floats and Dr. Pepper lipsmackers and go on walks where you’d buy my slurpee and that time you gave me your jacket when I was cold… despite, or perhaps because of all these things I’m going to have to hate you forever. I wish we could have said goodbye the proper way. I wish you’d know I didn’t message you about that photo comment because I wanted or expected an answer. I promise I didn’t. So I basically blame you for faux-starting this up again. Fuck you for doing this to me twice, you insensitive asshole. I’ll miss you. I hope I never run into you again.”

Total Coward

Anyways, I was so upset that I just haaad to put it into song.  So I recited it over and over again, adding harmonies that didn’t quite add up. And that was Girlz as it existed the summer I began it.

Unfortunately, I found it unlistenable.  I had used the recording equipment I used in high school for all of my Artiste songs, and found myself going right back to all the usual tricks I used back then.  So when I got back to Chicago, I immediately re-recorded Heart Like Toast.

Heart Like Toast (earlier)

But for some reason, one of which being the beginnings of Honeybear and the emergence of another strange set of songs about a Sea of Blood, Girlz got sidetracked until the next summer, where I had a burst of arrangement inspiration for Heart Like Toast, re-recorded Sparrow Camel, used a later version of Fool, and dropped Total Coward.

Heart Like Toast (early)

Right now, at this moment, I have no words of summation for Girlz, other than maybe adding that the title is a pun about the recurring joke about what all my songs are about.  Anyways, if you don’t already have it, here’s the EP as it is and will be forever:

Girlz EP