Continue As A Guest (Live On KCMP)

This isn't the big announcement I promised, but it's cool!

Last post I told you there was a kind of big announcement or pronouncement coming this weekend but it, how do you say, got ‘delayed in Germany’, if you catch my drift. To overuse that old cliche. That is coming for real on Friday! Also, Dan said he’s gonna get those vocals done for ‘Chump Change’. He’s back from tour with FJ Misty and almost finished his 2 weeks of convalescence. We all convalesce for 2 weeks after tour. Nothing crazy, just bouncing a tennis ball against a wall for 10 hours a day and occasionally laughing derisively at the nerve of people. So that’s cool.

But until then… here is a song that we recorded in studio at KEXP in St Paul, MN, while on tour in 2023. We gave it to ‘Good Music to Lift Los Angeles’ — a fundraising compilation record that was available last month for only 1 day on Bandcamp. 100% of net proceeds went to the LA Food Bank and California Community Foundation’s Wildfire Recovery Fund, with Bandcamp donating their fees to Musicares. We contributed "Continue as a Guest (Live from KCMP)". Attached at the end of this now for paid subscribers. If you feel like donating money to these causes, please do. So many things happening, I know, but LA still needs help to rebuild.

I like that this recording captures our time touring with the amazing Adam Schatz. This guy:

He of the brilliant band Landlady. When I compare him to Randy Newman, know that I understand the gravity of throwing that name out there. Adam’s made of the same stuff, the same dark matter. That’s him opening the song with his psychedelic saxophone. We let him lay the foundation, the texture for the song here and got rid of that weird loop that anchors the recorded version. This one:

Not killing a darling, per se. Just giving the darling a day off. That loop works hard every day, let it take in some of the sights in the Twin Cities while we do a radio session. Like the skyways, which are not at all like the subways. I’m assuming the loop is a hardcore Replacements fan. Oh, you want to know more about the loop?

During the songwriting process I love going through the large back catalogue of noise and music and experiments that I or we have created through the years. The loop that started ‘Continue…’ was just something I found along the way. 2 bars of cool that jumped out at me. It is a fun way to begin writing. I found that Ab and F bar chords worked very nicely over top of it. So that was a good start. Then I found that Cm and Eb also worked. That’s four chords. Easily enough for a song. Four chords and a loop as Woody Guthrie once said. I thought it was a very weird song, slow and moody, figured I might get some pushback about that, but the opposite was true. It was the song that friends and band members were gravitating toward. Even became the title track. Lyrically, I wanted to communicate a very clear idea. A vision of a new beginning that was also an ending. Sorry, that’s not a clear idea, is it? But that’s what it is. We recorded it, mixed it, put it on a record, put out that record, toured that record, which brings us back to….

Back to the session, back to Adam Schatz: I met him when he was a fill-in player on a WFMU session I did in New Jersey. After the session, I was a guest on The Best Show with Tom and Julie Klausner, still a highlight of my life. Adam desperately wanted to come along, being a massive fan of the Best Show empire, Scharpling, Wurster, all of it. Rules were bent a little bit and he was allowed in. He promised to sit in the corner and not make a sound, and he stuck to that. I have to say there IS a visual element to Gary The Squirrel that takes it to the next level of genius, that’s what I learned that night. In the last few years Adam has been in Japanese Breakfast (got to play SNL!) and reigning as most personable guy in rock. He seems to know everyone you’d ever want to know. His name will come up and the response will be something like ‘Yeah, he used to put on avant jazz shows when he was 18!’ or ‘Yeah, he composed and staged a musical based on season 4 of Lost!’ Real things that happened. He was the first person I thought of when I realized we needed a touring saxophone player that was likable and patient enough to live in a bus with the New Ps for a month. I knew Neko would love him, that helped, and sure enough she brought him in later to play on her record and tour with her. I did not know that he was being groomed by Neko, or I might have said something. Hindsight. So I was happy that he agreed to do this session, instead of hanging out with the coolest person in whatever city we happened to be in.

So it’s 5 days until the announcement, the announcement of the special thing, but enjoy this in the meantime: ‘Continue As A Guest (Live On KCMP)’ by The New Pornographers.