Dial-a-Song 2006: “Hot Love”
Song by song commentary by Erik Sanden
This marks the resurrection of Dial-a-Song for Buttercup's upcoming album, Hot Love. Each week we'll place a new song on our state of the art answering machine for your listening pleasure. We will feature all 12 cuts off the album, plus two bonus tracks that can only be heard via Dial-a-Song. Call us every week for the next fourteen weeks at: PET-ABLE (210.738.2253)! By the way, regular old land line telephones are strongly recommended. It pretty much sounds like doo-doo on a cell phone. It might help to follow along by clicking on the lyrics links for each song.
Week of 1.23.2006: Hot Love
I think our greatest moment is the bridge that Joe wrote for this song. It is magnificently layered with Beach Boys style harmonies. I love the high note that Jamie sings on the very end of the bridge: it's so precious. This was perfectly mixed by Mark Rubinstein who is producing this album. He claims that the bridge was like a stack of cards just waiting to crumble, and only through great efforts could he strike the balance that you hear.
I'd like to note that although this is our most ostensibly happy song, Hot Love has a secret abject core and ends on a dark note. We're suffering and it's fucking hot.
Week of 1.30.2006: National Spelling Bee Contest
This week's song, Spelling Bee, is a love song for dyslexics. This is one of our more rocking recordings, and a pleasant surprise. I'm particularly proud of all of the vocal work on this one. Underneath these rocked up choruses is a full-fledged Beach Boys sing-a-long. Joe wrote the music for the bridge, which takes the song from a purely pop major chord structure, to all minor chords. When we get there I always picture some sort of Mayan princess throwing my body into a volcano. Overall, the song has a female hero, victor over 10 thousand others. And she's mean. I found the word "Bellatrice" in the O.E.D. It's no longer in use, and seemed perfect for the song: typical of an archaic spelling bee challenge. Plus its meaning suits the song. It means "warrior woman."
Week of 2.06.2006: Unlevel
This week's song, Unlevel, is another guitar driven song, but its true moment of chaos comes from Odie and Joe's rapid-fire palmas. The chorus of this song might be the quintessential Buttercup chorus, evolving into pure nonsense: Uh-huhs, ohs, and ahs. I think we always say it best with musical nonsense. I love that element in the Kinks and the Beatles and it definitely permeates our writing.
Lyrically, the song is about Ramon Sampedro, the Galician poet who broke his neck on the rocks diving into the sea. My girlfriend Saleta is from Galicia, so we went this summer to visit the spot where he dove. I stood in the shallow pool where it happened and I sang this song. This was just a few days after Ram Ayala was killed at Tacoland, so it felt like a song to him, knowing how unleveled all of San Antonio is now after that horrible moment.
Week of 2.13.2006: Egypt
This is the only song that Mark Rubinstein did not produce for the album. Joe Reyes took over on this one. We recorded it live in his kitchen, with me playing guitar and Odie singing with me. At the top of the song I was laughing because Odie was making such horrible phlegm noises from his cedar fever. He was really overdoing it, and it was ridiculously loud in the microphone. But it broke the tension and it helped me to forget about the recording machine and unselfconsciously sing the song. I like the way this one came out, all warbly on the vocal. And there is no perfecting the performance because it is a live recording.
Odie overdubbed wineglasses at the top and the end of this song…filling up wine glasses with water and running his finger in circles on the rim to make a ghostly note. Sergio Lara played the mandolin on the choruses and he said some nice things about the song. That was cool. His mandolin helps give the song a timeless aura. But ultimately Egypt has such a sad lullaby feel chiefly because of Odie and Jamie's glockenspiel work. I think Joe's production is amazing on this one, in that he kept it raw, leaving the door literally wide open to accidents: birds, phlegm, and Joe Shortt's table saw in the back garage.
Week of 2.20.2006: Johnny Appleseed
This has been a staple in our live set, so I'm glad to get it on the record. I first wrote this song right as Joe Reyes joined the band and it was one of our first songs that really began to toy with tempo. The chorus of this song always takes off at a breakneck speed, jumping way ahead of the verse tempo. It's like we're all racing towards the end of the song, to see what instrument can get there first. I really love Jamie's drumming on this song. His part with all of the tom toms makes the song for me. It should be noted that John Aselin is singing with us on the oohs, and that he has perfect pitch. He basically sang like a bird.
The lyrics are from the perspective of Johnny Appleseed's mother. I can imagine her looking at her son thinking "why can't you settle down, get a job, put on normal clothes, take care of yourself?" I imagine this plea sort of desperately, like it's too much, like I can't even think about you sleeping outside in a log all winter with a wolf. But also knowing inside that this boy is a prophet, like Gandhi or Ralph Nadar.
Week of 2.27.2006: You and You Alone
This song is so beautifully produced by Mark Rubinstein. The strings you hear are real: friends from the San Antonio Symphony (Dee Dee Fancher, Karen Stiles, and Ben Westney). I think Mark's genius is clearly evident in the beauty of the double tracked acoustic, and triple tracked vocal: it's totally thickly produced but it only furthers the song's raw emotion. I don't know how he did it, but the song got raw-er.
This from Joe:
Unlike Erik or Odie, whose songs seem so organic and natural in all their various states from beginning to completion, my songs all seem to start from some phrase or conceit that I then work backwards from, sort of like an acrostics puzzle, where even I don't know what the secret word at the end will be, and this song is no exception, but the sentiment is fairly clear — waaaaaaaa.....
Week of 3.6.2006: Hello, Goodbye
This song was inspired by Elliott Smith's death. For some reason that particular tragedy really stuck with me and seemed to hurt a bit more than many of the other horrible things that transpired that year. Of course there is a nod to the Beatles here, same song title...that sort of thing makes me a bit squeamish, but it seemed necessary. The first line is from "Tired Eyes" by Neil Young: he tried to do his best, but could not. This song is not just about Elliott Smith, but so many people I've loved, close and far, who've had terrible problems with self control.
I particularly love Jamie's drumming throughout this song. It has all the necessary frustration and loss in it. Plus the drum sticks that he overdubbed on the bridge make that part interesting to me.
Week of 3.13.2006: Contagious
Mark Rubinstein captured a particularly rock and roll version of another of Joe's great songs. It really blisters, alternating between so much noise and so much silence, like brief skipped heart beats. The horns are layers of Rob Hardt, Curtis Calderon and Dan Klein. One warm November afternoon in my apartment I lay in my bed reading Ulysses while these men were playing the horn parts in the other room and I was just giddy.
Joe says:
"this song happened all in about 30 minutes and all I wanted to do was write something a bit more up tempo. But all the lyrics came in a dark rush and the form was fairly straight-ahead, so it didn't take long, once I had it somewhat arranged, for the band to once again rescue the thing from mediocrity and give it some balls. Plus I like singing the word "fuck". It's just fun. And the backup vocals are nice. We can't seem to stay away from oohing or aahing or bopping our way through a chorus, but I don't consider that a bad thing at all."
Week of 3.20.2006: We're Easy
To me this song feels particularly adventurous. As odie says, "it takes some sort of courage to rock this soft." It continues in the vein of "Hot Love" and celebrates the onset of the San Antonio summer with some of the same delirious sentiment. "We're Easy" is as much about open love between a couple and the world as it is about the non-exclusive love between a band and the world. It's a statement of a band's necessary emotional promiscuity.
Mark Rubinstein built the ersatz bossa nova with a bevy of claves, congas, and shakers borrowed in the middle of the night from Krazy Kat Music store. Joe and I kept checking in to watch him go from instrument to instrument, basically shaking his ass off. The flute was played by Rob Hardt, a man who is just plain flowing, full of music.
Week of 3.27.2006: Anti-Antarctica
This came from a dream I had where Californians were carving out big chunks of Antarctica and drinking it. I kept thinking what would be anti-antarctica? Who would be anti-antarctica? Don't you long for one last untouched, cold, clean place? So the vampire is at the front door in this song, and wants to leave nothing unexplored, anywhere. I remember when scientists recently got their subs to go so far deep that they photographed the giant squid, and I kept thinking why can't we leave some things untouched and mysterious? Why do we have to go everywhere?
Week of 4.3.2006: Shiyoganai
I remember sitting at Salmon Peak studios in May, almost a year ago, and listening to Odie sing this song into the microphone that Elvis once sang on and I remember thinking this is the perfect vocal performance. It was sorta like watching someone hit a grand slam using the bat that Jackie Robinson once hit a few balls with. I know that shiyoganai is Japanese for "whatever," and that lyrically this song is about letting go. I picture a supernaturally ambitious sister driving herself to an ulcer, and the narrator of the song, wishing for some kind of peace, some kind of antidote. A mantra in a word: "shiyoganai."
Week of 4.10.2006: Cool Kids
If you don't like guitar, you probably won't like this song. Cool Kids has an almost Sonic Youth edge in how chaotic and guitar driven it is. Lots and lots of guitar noise, but it ends in a disco beat. Nothing makes one want to dance like a suicide.
Lyrically I can picture the anti-hero of this song, neglected by his horrible parents, no clothes, no bed, no friends, doing an amazing transformation. A butterfly bursts forth with violence.
Week of 4.17.2006: You'll Just Have to Wait
We recorded this song several times. The version you hear was ultimately tracked in Joe's house, just a few beats slower than some of the previous takes. And it's the track that really swings like it's supposed to. Notice how the tambourine swings: that's quintessential Joe Reyes wrist action.
This song began with Joe's guitar part. I knew that it sounded very Elliot Smith—like so I consciously tried to take it into the ditch. I put a radically different, Joni Mitchell style vocal on top, which I think serves the song well. This is the single most difficult song for me to sing, but also one of my favorites. This song goes either way lyrically: "dear wife, you'll have to wait to start your affair" or "dear lover, you'll have to wait to start our affair" or both. Either way it's a study of how heady love lies within small gestures: the hand held overlong, the soft words, the careful note.
You'll Just Have to Wait Lyrics
Week of 4.24.2006: Randomized
Every few days I will cycle through these songs listed above + "Wonderful" an outake from the Sick Yellow Flower CD. Feel free to call when you need a song! This will continue until later this summer, when Dial-a-Song will feature new material for upcomming Buttercup projects and material for the sake of just doing it.