10 years ago, 200 miles away in Asheville, NC, on a night almost exactly like tonight (muggy and almost kind of cool at night but too humid to really feel it) Forrest Jameson and I sat down with a bottle of Ciclon and recorded a call-and-answer Halloween themed narrative song called "Haunted Hell." In it we describe ourselves getting lost from the rest of the "40PF crew" inside a haunted house full of your typical haunted house cliches. Only in our haunted hell there's the ghost that looks like Goldie Hawn (who we dance with!?), and then of course the zombie who apparently used to pitch for a Dodgers farm team ("zombie threw a baseball, hit Wyatt in the balls"). It's a pretty standard haunted house story but there's a sort of odd humor to it that keeps you from dismissing it completely. But that's not why I like it.
"Haunted Hell" to me is great because it recalls the reckless experimentation of our early years. Forrest starting writing, then I started writing a continuation of his verse and it suddenly became a single storyline told by two people, which at that time hadn't been done by us before. Granted we were still pretty new to things back then but it still shows a level of innovation that I admire about us at that time. We didn't second guess it, ever, we just did it. There was a nervous, excited energy that just came from the idea alone where we would be writing and would get anxious to hear what the other person wrote. It was electric and impulsive. It came out of nowhere.
After 10 years that giddy, almost childish impulse to follow your gut and say "fuck it!" goes away because it has to. We force ourselves to re-think our first thoughts because, unless you're a genius, you find out very quickly that your first idea isn't always the best. Like the Milton Glaser etching reads, "Art is work". You have to write a thousand drafts, paint a trillion strokes (sometimes) before you can achieve a meaningful piece of work. Over time you lose the balance between instincts and intellect--between feeling and thinking--and sometimes the work suffers. "Haunted Hell" is refreshing because it worked in spite of this imbalance of head and heart. It was impetuous and succeeded, however mildly, as a result. Having hindsight can damage your opinion of early works, but for me, I never have a negative thought about "Haunted Hell". It's stupid, and silly and fun and I'm glad we made it.
Every Halloween I play this song and every year it makes me smile, and makes me grateful. Forrest has gone on to use the call/answer device we attempted in this song on other songs he has written and performed on and they have resulted in some of the best work any of us has ever produced. Selfishly I can't help but think that this song we wrote and recorded that "halloween night 2003" had something to do with it. Even if it didn't I'm still glad we made something special.
Please enjoy "Haunted Hell" found on our wiki page using the link below.
"Haunted Hell"
Happy Halloween!
1 comment:
This song, without a doubt, was the main influence not only for those two tracks. But also for the "Coming Home" song that Scurvy D and I did using your Dixie Chicks sample beat. In all of those examples, the same method you and I pioneered was used. Talk about a delayed comment. I remember reading this last year, I just didn't have a Blogger account at the time, methinks.
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