Detholz! demo – “Stasiland”

Note: Detholz! play tomorrow night (Thursday, 9/6) at Empty Bottle in Chicago w/Numbers from CA & Trin Tran. Show starts at 9. Y’all come!

Welcome to Detholz! Mp3 Blog Episode VII, and apologies for the late posting today. I was negotiating with the Russians.

Speaking of which, in this installment, we take a short jaunt back in time– and return to familiar Detholz! waters– with the song, “Stasiland.”

I. SONG CONCEPT

This song was directly inspired by 2 films, both of which I’d recommend highly:

1. Florian Henckel von Donnerskmark’s film, “The Lives of Others,” a fascinating– if sentimental– depiction of an officer of the Stasi, the secret police of the East German communist state, and,

2. Volker Schlöndorff’s “The Legend of Rita,” a fictional composite of events surrounding the activities of the Red Army Faction, a militant left-wing organization active in West Germany from 1970 – 1998 (and is also a little overwrought, but worth watching).

These two films were some of the first attempts to depict life in the East German state, a society where 1 in 6 people were either in the direct employ of, or volunteers for, the Stasi. Literally everyone was spying on one another. Each citizen had a Stasi file, all of which were made public after the reunification of Germany in 1989.*

*Incidentally, if you’re interested in the history of East German culture, you must read the story of Dean Reed, an failed American country musician who defected to the GDR and became a superstar as “Red Elvis.”

Can you imagine what it must have been like to exist in a nation that cultivated that degree of personal paranoia? If you live in the USA at the moment, I’ll bet you can! Though I try to steer clear of political subjects in Detholz! songs as a general rule, “Stasiland” could be considered a bona fide jab…. Can you say “Larry Craig?” Or “Patriot Act?” Those of you with a wide stance, beware!

These lyrics are throw-away as far as I’m concerned, and I’m not especially thrilled with them. Still, they serve the purpose of the song. Essentially, I wanted to write a bouncy, party song about a brutal Stasi interrogation. The disparity appealed to me.

The “Traitor” motifs– betrayal, blood, and animal imagery– are all present, as everything about the Stasi and East Germany encouraged betrayal in its varied forms: betrayal of family, betrayal of friends, betrayal of self– all for the benefit of the State which, ultimately, betrayed itself and its own people.

II. SONG COMPOSITION

“Death to the Traitor” (working title for the next record) thus far is rife with bleak, medium-tempo numbers, so Karl Doerfer (DH! guitarist) made the point that we needed some up-tempo songs to balance out the album.

“Stasiland” is essentially Detholz! meets “Beach Blanket Bingo”– an inside joke with myself, musically speaking, pretty much from start to finish.

The composition process began with the decidedly flatulent bass line, which is a MIDI contrabassoon (doubled with a few other things). It started as a bass synth line, but these days, I’ll substitute a sound I know sounds ridiculous just to keep things interesting.

The second element was the guitar. An old Detholz! trick is to stack two guitar parts– one playing quartal harmony, either in or out of the song’s key, and the other playing an ostinato that may also go outside the song’s tonality. In plain English, it sounds like there are “wrong” notes. This is a taste thing for me– but a little dissonance always puts some extra spring in my step. For a lesson in how to properly use dissonance without going completely atonal, listen to the chamber works of Stravinsky or, of course, any Bartok string quartet.

The 4-note “Traitor” motive occurs next as a centerpiece of the song, given all of the layers of betrayal referred to in the lyrics, and is hammered home by– my lands– a horn section! (Incidentally, it also reoccurs in the horns at the very end of the song in retrograde.)

This is the song that began the “to horn or not to horn” controversy in the band with respect to horn parts, as the horn break after the drum/vocal breakdown is admittedly out of place and absurd. It SOUNDS absurd since the horns are playing an (almost!) pentatonic line a major seventh apart in– again– a decidedly flatulent fashion.

This one was an adventure in orchestration. Choirs, bassoons, Chinese-sounding horn lines… my apologies to our die-hard fans. I was DEEP in the Zone on this one.

Even so, I’ve played this for a few people, and the reaction is always the same: a laugh, a smirk, or a slight shake of the head and a smile. Surprisingly, this has been by far the most popular demo of all of the new tunes with objective ears outside of the band. My girlfriend contends this is the sauciest tune yet. Go figure.

The jury’s still out as far as DH! go. We began working on this in rehearsal last week, and my deficiencies as a drummer were showing a little more than usual. Andrew has almost pronounced my drum part “unplayable.”

So, America, should this song be herded into an unmarked car by a group of shadowy men and mysteriously disappear? Or should it be left unharmed?

We’ll be watching.

III. LYRICS

One watching six
And six watching one

Wir brauchen Ihnen
Wir brauchen das Gefuhl
Genau

[We need you
We need the feeling
Exactly]

Someone is telling
On everyone

Wir beobachten
Wir haben das Gefuhl
Genau

[We are watching
We have the feeling
Exactly]

Knock, Knock
Open up
Oh my God
Shake it off
Makes no difference
So make it up
Friends are coming
To set you up

YOU WANT IT AND YOU NEED IT

Ha, ha, oh yeah
We got the feeling
Ha, ha, oh yeah
We got the feeling now
Ha, ha, oh yeah
Come with us now
Ha, ha, oh yeah
You want to come with us now

Komm jetzt mit uns
Komm jetzt mit uns
Genau

[Come with us
Come with us
Exactly]

Over the Wall and under the Wall and
Inside the Wall and outside the Wall and
Slammed up against the Wall and
Behind the Wall and behind the Wall and…

Small room
Hotline
Headphones
All the time
Watching me
Committing crimes
With bird’s eyes
Bird’s eyes!

Seize me
Bind me
Blind me
Shock me
Slice me
Sock me
Make me
Please make me

I WANT IT AND I NEED IT

Ha, ha, oh yeah
I got the feeling
Ha, ha, oh yeah
I got the feeling now
Ha, ha, oh yeah
I really got it now
Ha, ha, oh yeah
I’m gonna go with you now

I’m gonna go with you now

Detholz! demos – “Minnesota Nice” I/II

Welcome to Episode IV of the Detholz! Mp3 Blog – a 2-parter this week.

I originally intended this song to be posted last week, but it was met with such controversy from other band members that I decided to rustle up an alternate, “Detholz!-friendly” arrangement.

So, here are both versions:

“Minnesota Nice” – new, DH!-friendly version
For those who aren’t interested in music geekery, this is the one to download.

“Minnesota Nice” – original version

Today’s song necessitates an apology to any Minnesotan listeners: I have nothing against the great state of Minnesota, or any of its residents. You all had the good sense to elect Jesse “The Mind” a few years back, and that cannot be overlooked. He’s the source of my favorite summation from any political figure, in reference to MN ice-fishing restrictions in early Spring: “You can’t legislate stupidity.”

Also: “I ain’t got time to bleed.”

So, on with the show!

1. SONG CONCEPT

Unlike the previous 2 posts, today’s ditty, “Minnesota Nice,” came totally out of left field. Also unlike the previous two posts, I really didn’t know what this song was about until more than a week after I’d written it.

Unless you’ve been away skinning rabbits in a cave, you know there was a terrible accident in Minneapolis 2 weeks ago where a bridge over the Mississippi River collapsed in the teeth of the rush hour, causing dozens of cars to plummet into the water. Six people were killed and many more went missing. This is a stretch of road I’ve traveled over many times on tour, and when I heard the story on the radio and saw the pictures on the news, I was saddened and a little creeped out.

I guess these lyrics are collections of images stemming from the bridge accident and from recent conversations with an old friend that’s had a hard time in Minnesota, mostly owing to circumstances beyond her control. Subsequently, “Minnesota” serves as a metaphor for death, stagnation or fate.

[Again, angry Minnesotans: it could have just as easily been Ohio or New Jersey… pick a state. Yours happens to have a pleasant sequence of phonemes.]

The plastic smiles of death and/or fate inexorably turn to all of us, regardless of what we wish for. So perhaps this song is about the fear of fate and the loss of control. In that spirit, I’ll leave the final determination up to you:

“I don’t want to live in Minnesota
I don’t want to float with the dead
I don’t want to go to your funeral
Minnesota Nice up ahead”

[complete lyrics below this post]

2. SONG COMPOSITION

(It was hard for me to discuss this one without lapsing into some music theory. If you have questions about any of these ideas or the terminology, don’t hesitate to ask. For the record, I’m going to try and avoid forced rides on Music School Bus as much as possible on this thing…)

Despite the grisly subject matter, this song was a barrel of fun to construct! It’s an experiment in phase-shifting– one of my favorite musical devices– based on the 4-note fuzz bass line that doesn’t change much throughout the song. In other words, the downbeat shifts. (Downbeat = 1st beat of a musical measure, for any greenhorns out there)

The bass line occupies 4 eighth notes. During the choruses, the downbeat is on the first note of the pattern (imagine me crooning at you here): “BOM-bom-bom-bom.”

During the verse, the downbeat shifts to the THIRD note in the pattern: “bom-bom-BOM-bom.”

I recorded bass first, then drums, then vocals. The downbeat shift between chorus and verse was initially too difficult for my poor pea brain to sing, so I had to mute the drum part to record the vocals. Once I un-muted the drum part, presto! A dramatic change in feel between verse and chorus! Whether it’s effective or not, I’ll leave up to you, but I think it will have interesting possibilities if the band can pull it off live.

I decided to add horn parts next, which I knew would be controversial within the band. And man, oh man, were they ever! There’s a growing debate in Detholz! as to whether or not horns fit within our particular… mileu. After my years of servitude in Baby Teeth and Bobby Conn’s band, I’ve become enamored with a more organic sound, and am attempting to steer the new DH! record in THAT direction. Sorry, folks, but I think it’s time to veer away from the paper-thin synths of our dorkalicious past. There’s some major disagreement on that topic in Kamp Detholz.

Here’s what a few other Holz had to say about the original version of this song:

Jonny: “The bridge is compositionally pretty cool…minus the bird noises. 🙂 I think that’s what cheezes it for me. Also, i’m still not used to the idea of a ‘sax section’ in the detholz. it still doesn’t make sense to my ear.”

(BTW, don’t miss Jonny’s own songwriting blog, jonsteinmeier.wordpress.com)

Ben: “I’m with Jon on the horns and crow sounds. What I dislike with the horns is replacing crazy synth parts for crazy horn parts. It’s good to get out of “New Wave” land, but to jump into ‘Ska-ish/Radiohead with Horns’ land might be worse. I don’t object to using horns, but I would like to see them be soulful, noisy and dare I say smooth. I think these motives would do better with the plastic touch of the synth.”

(And Ben’s delightfully weird music can be heard at www.tinytron.com)

Thing is, I didn’t include horns for their own sake, or to make a point. I think they genuinely serve the purpose of this song. It freely borrows structurally from Fela Kuti, whose music I’ve obsessed over for a while now. The horns are an important part of the rhythm section in this arrangement. They add a blanket of polyrhythms to the drum part that turns it from a standard “Wurlitzer-home-organ samba” into something more convoluted and interesting, at least to me. It’s often difficult to place where the downbeat falls in Fela’s music, as he plays around constantly with phase shifting and polyrhythmic patterns, most of which repeat over long periods of time. While this is nothing new, that’s territory that we’ve never explored before in Detholz! and we’re having some success at it in rehearsal.

In any case, I took Ben’s and Jonny’s recommendations to heart in the DH!-friendly version and substituted the horns with a distorted synth clav. Here’s what Jonny said about the 2nd version:

“This tune is growing on me a lot. I think part of thing with this new arrangement is that i found myself focusing more on the composition than on the sounds, which is a good thing. The writing is really cool. I DID end up liking the horns over the clav i think though. I know, I’m eating my words here. but I missed ’em.”

Jonny brings up an excellent rule of thumb: the orchestration/arrangement of a song should NEVER distract from the song itself. In this world of gadgetry and innumerable options, I have a major blind spot with respect to “over-arranging.” I really wrestled with that this time. Esp. given the weighty subject matter– this was no occasion to be riding the “Gimmick Train.”

Which leads us to the most difficult part of this composition– and one I agonized for hours over– the bridge. Originally, I opted for the standard “Jim Cooper Bridge” = meandering harmonic changes, no strong melody, plenty of room for either goofy narration or a novelty sound effect (cf. “Heather via JC” on Baby Teeth’s “For the Heathers” EP, “Jukebox of the Dead” theme song from the post-college camp era– click links for free downloads on both) Though I attempted to paint a picture of the aftermath of the bridge accident, I’m not sure I succeeded in doing much more than pasting part of a bad Danny Elfman movie score in the middle of a song that, as DH!/Baby Teeth producer Blue Hawaii would say, is “pretty OK” (meaning “pretty bad”)

In the DH!-friendly version, the bridge accomplishes its compositional function between the A and B sections more effectively, and introduces a flute line that reoccurs near the end of the song. It also reduces the “goof” factor quite a bit. The guitar effect is heisted from the end of the Shuggie Otis song, “Strawberry Letter 23,” from his album, “Inspiration Information” which is forever burned in my brain as the death-song of one of the characters from HBO’s Six Feet Under. While the original bridge with the prominent crow samples was a valiant attempt to conjure images of a death-laden ravine, I’m afraid it lapsed into pure frippery.

The chorus, as you’ll notice from the start of the song, consists of 4 notes in keeping with my “less-is-more” approach to chorus melodies (see the “Tammy” post below for more on that subject). In keeping with themes of fate and tragedy, the rhythm is unrelenting and the background vocals more primal: “Minnesota…ahhh, ahhh!”

The verse vocal is not improvised– mainly because I’m a terrible improviser– but the melody purposely darts in and around a strong tonal center, giving it an improvisatory flavor. The harmony is mostly static, and the changes are simple to leave room for all of the rhythmic interplay between the groups of instruments.

Lyrically, the song contains two of the three images I’m trying to include in every song on the new record: blood, animals, and betrayal. The “betrayal” element is missing this time, so I left the “Traitor” motive out (see the “Catherine Zeta-Jones” post below). However, the flute parts use the same descending intervals as the “Traitor” motive, so it’s referenced indirectly. A great device to unify a number of songs or movements, incidentally, is use of the same intervallic material.

So, doughty readers, which version do YOU prefer?

I think the newer version is cleaner, though I miss the horns and the dulcimer (the stringy sounding instrument) from the original. The horns also strike me as more chaotic-sounding, which I prefer.

For some reason, the dulcimer evokes images of the snowy Northern reaches of Minnesota, where the ghosts of Scandinavian ancestors roam the countryside, hooting spookily in their native tongues.

Thanks for reading, friendly ghosts… and, as always, thanks for listening!

3. LYRICS

I don’t want to live in Minnesota
I don’t want to talk to the dead
I don’t want to drown in the water
Minnesota Nice up ahead

Brutalized by the 3rd degree
Stuck in traffic, in the heat of the heat
I saw you smile
Before you were exploded
Your guts spilling over my feet
The sight of your blood–
I really thought I could, but–

I don’t want to live in Minnesota
I don’t want to talk to the dead
I don’t want to drown in the water
Minnesota Nice up ahead

Minnesota, ah!

Don’t forget your water wings
on the Overpass over watery things
A stream full of eyes
They’re sinking ever deeper
Their bloated bodies doing nothing
You’re crossing a bridge
A bridge that won’t hold you
And then it’s over
Over Minnesota
Drowning in the heart of town

I don’t want to live in Minnesota
I don’t want to float with the dead
I don’t want to go to your funeral
Minnesota Nice up ahead

I don’t want to die like a monkey
I don’t want to die in your stead
I don’t want to live in Minnesota
I don’t want to talk to the dead

Minnesota, ah!

I don’t want to talk to the dead