Did you know that ants can lift twenty times their body weight? Did you know that ants take 250 power naps a day, each one lasting approximately a minute? Did you know that a colony of 40,000 ants has collectively the same size brain as a human?
I’m reading up on ants, because the guest house where I’ve been temporarily living has been under seige of late. It started about two weeks ago when the weather turned warmer, and despite my best efforts to keep them out, the ants keep on finding their way in.
Yesterday, the pest control guy came out with ant bait gel. It’s a sweet tasting poison that ants can’t resist. Sounds very Acme Products, right? Like the sexy female roadrunner with the time bomb inside. The ants carry it back to their colonies, and within a day or two, it wipes out the entire population. I feel a little bad about being involved in genocide (antocide), but I can’t abide these little creatures. They’re getting into everything. I can’t turn my back on a piece of toast for thirty seconds without an ant finding it.
The pest control guy cut a plastic drinking straw into segments and filled them with the gel, then placed them around the areas where I’d seen the ants. Within an hour, scores of ants were crawling all over the straws, carrying the gel off to their queens. By this morning, the ants had completely disappeared.
For now, at least.
Posted in Diary
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Tagged ants, bait gel
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As a songwriter, I love a challenging assignment. A few times over the years, Swan Dive has been asked to write jingles for Tokyo’s big radio station 81.3 J-Wave. They were either :15 or :30 second spots, which meant every second had to count. No room for fat or dilly-dallying. Make it fizzy, nail the hook and get out, ending it with the station ID tag.
Back in the 60s and 70s, radio stations here in the states used these jingles too, but you don’t hear them much anymore. Kind of sad. But you can still hear the old ones on sites like reelradio.com
One of my favorite jingles I wrote was for a program called Good Morning Tokyo. I liked it so much that I decided to flesh it out into a song. Molly came up with the B-section, and we used it as a bonus track on Until.
Posted in Diary
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Tagged J-Wave, radio jingles
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The word “saudade” (sow-DAH-djee) is at the heart of bossa nova. While difficult to translate, it means, roughly, a longing, yearning and sadness, all felt simultaneously. It’s often associated with homesickness, but it can apply to a feeling for a person or thing also. The most poetic translation I’ve seen for it is “happy sad.”
From the moment I first saw those two words together, I knew I wanted to write a song with that title. Without getting too analytical about it, I believe that my basic disposition is, and always has been, happy sad. I’ll sometimes see pictures of myself when I was a little kid, like three or four years old, and I have such a melancholy expression on my face. What could possibly be weighing on my mind? By all accounts, I was a pretty happy kid. But there was always an undercurrent of sadness there too.
I think that’s one of the reasons I’m so attracted to Brazilian music. French music too.
I wrote the melody to this song and tried to put words to it. Months passed. Nothing stuck except that title line. Finally, I gave the melody to one of my favorite collaborators, Boo Hewerdine. Accomplished pro that he is, he came back to me in a matter of days with the perfect lyric.
There’s an alternate version of this song with a lush string chart. But in the end, we felt like the combination of the trombone and the alto flute were a more complimentary color to Molly’s vocal, and the song.
This was written during a Jill Sobule recording session. As I recall, her producer Brad Jones was working on a vocal comp and there was an hour or so of downtime. So Jill, Robin Eaton and I started to mess around at the Wurlitzer electric piano in the studio, and out popped this song. We finished it just as Brad was finishing his comp, and with the song fresh out of the oven, we cut a version that ended up on Jill’s Underdog Victorious record. A few years later, Molly and I recorded it for the Swan Dive album. It’s a deceptive song. Sweet on the outside, dark on the inside.
In its life beyond our albums, it was featured on an episode of The L Word, and used for an in-store compilation sold in the Meijer discount store chain. In the second case, I’m pretty sure they didn’t listen very closely to the lyrics.
The performance segment of the video, directed by our brilliant friend Kip Kubin, was filmed in New Harmony, Indiana, inside the garden labyrinth. Surely one of the most picturesque settings ever for a video. That’s Molly’s nephew Elliot on pedal steel. He doesn’t actually play, but he did a great job miming it. The Mexican dream sequence stuff was shot at Kip’s house. I enjoyed shrinking inside my suit, and becoming a mustachioed baby.
I’m delighted that Microcosmodischi is making this the lead track.
Here’s another song written in Toronto. That city has been good for my creativity. This time, I was there as part of the Creative Coalition, a weeklong event that brought songwriters together for co-writing and recording. There were about thirty of us in attendance. We’d meet every morning at a local studio, be assigned our partners for the day, then get down to writing and recording. The goal was to have something finished to play by the end of the night. A lot of pressure, but a blast. I like the kind of friendly competition that springs up in those situations. A touch of the Brill Building in the early ’60s.
My partner on this song was Rebecca Valadez, a Latin Grammy winning vocalist with a terrific voice, and a silly sense of humor. It was one of those songs that seems to get written in between jokes, one-liners and lots of laughter. Rebecca were sitting together in the corner of a dimly lit room. That much I remember. There was a real sweetness about the melody and lyric that made us think it would be a great wedding song.
The recording came together easily, and the beautiful sax solo is by my old friend Bryan Cumming. He used to play with Molly and I a hundred years ago in another band, Wild About Harry.
Did you know that ants can lift twenty times their body weight? Did you know that ants take 250 power naps a day, each one lasting approximately a minute? Did you know that a colony of 40,000 ants has collectively the same size brain as a human?
