o, the yearning!

Now’s when it gets interesting, or begins to.
A slight exaggeration, sure. But this is one of the first songs that really changes what I’m allowing Violet Mice to sound like. Which opens up the whole complicated world of naming something you’re doing by yourself if you’re not going to put your own name on it. I made my mind up years ago that I wouldn’t put out songs with my name on them unless I was really comfortable doing it. There are so many questions in the whole naming game! The more I explain, the more questions pop up! Why am I not comfortable putting my name on something? Is having a band name a shield, the same kind of shield my parents said my beard was when I first started growing it, a needless shield protecting my beautiful given features (their words, not mine)?

So why Violet Mice? At the time, it was very much a thrown together name, because I needed a name for these songs that I was beginning to write that were better than anything else I’d written before, a grasp at something pop-tastic and easier to listen to, something for more than just myself to listen to. Really, isn’t that universally-pleasurable feeling the goal of pop music?

I knew I was going to call the collection of these songs It Would Be Nice. At the time I had a concept (since I’d written the song I Think It Would, which contained the lyric “It would be nice”) that the album would be all about niceties, and I’d cover Wouldn’t It Be Nice. That concept changed (somewhat thankfully) to just sounding nice, which is a much better goal, as talking about things that are nice is not the same as being nice, it can be annoying, actually, just plain not nice.

So to fit with the nice-sounding concept, I wanted a ‘band’ name that would rhyme with the album title. Mice rhymed, and mice are cute. I was walking down Central Ave. in Albuquerque when I was thinking of this, and the neon around a furniture store by my house is purple. Purple Mice doesn’t sound as nice. So Violet it was!

So there it was. A name that sounded nice, to be the banner in which nice music would be played.

Here’s the thing: when I say nice, I mean it quite literally. I feel like there’s a tendency to use ‘nice’ as a derogatory term, especially when talking about music. I’m a firm believer in music that you could call (for lack of a better term) “Harmless but not Pointless.” There’s nothing wrong with pleasing people.

So (digression!) that’s why Violet Mice is called Violet Mice. That, and another theme I realized was there later. I realized at some point (and I may go more in depth on this revelation later) that I was trying to make songs that sounded like they contained a lot of Youth in them. When my songs started sounding Old and Bitter, then maybe it would be time to retire the Violet Mice name.

So that’s why, when this song popped out of my head after a cold walk home in orange streetlight-lit snow fearing that someone was behind me getting ready to kill me, I was really surprised and confused as to where it fit into my steady ideas of what kind of songs I write and where they go. Most excitingly, though. Was that it was something new.

Yearning For Blood (demo)

Here’s the thing about all this, though: it’s not important if you don’t want it to be. The problem with talking in depth about music is that it tends to detract from the joy of listening to it (or hell, even making it). I tend not to worry about all this when I’m reaaally getting down to making music. And no one should really be worrying about this when they’re reaaally getting down to listening to it. But discussion never hurt no one. That’s not true.

Well, like they say, it’s all just words, just words, words, words.