Hello everyone! The new Los Doggies is out. Selah is our sixth album, I think, although it might be the fourth or seventh depending on what counts as an album.
I always love when artists do a track-by-track commentary. The Flaming Lips come to mind. The Pooh Sticks are another great one, especially since their liner notes are pure fiction. So if you’ll indulge me, below is a write-up of the ten Selah songs.
“Casanova” is based on an old midi I made nearly twenty years ago while watching the movie Spies Like Us. What’s a “midi” you ask? Back when the internet was cool, electronic versions of popular music were all the rage. You could open a midi in a music program and see the actual score, which is how I taught myself to read music. In the midi in question, I accidentally put a wrong note in the bass on the second chord, a C instead of a B, creating a C Diminished Major Seventh chord. I grew fond of this dissonant chord and decided to keep it in there. Recently, I was perusing Casanova’s memoirs and found the opening quote from Petrarch perfectly fit this old midi melody I had lying around but never wrote lyrics to.
Con le ginnochio della mente inchine
Italian is so much fun to say. It makes you want to gesticulate wildly. Roughly translated, it means “With the knees of the mind bowed,” a nice introduction to the spiritual themes of the album. With the pairing of the foreign language and patiently chugging beat, the song sounds a little bit like the band Sigur Rós (or in Italian, “Sigorno Rossini!”)
“Be Not Afraid” was the inspiration for the album cover, designed by UK artist, Natalie Gaynor. As in the song, she embroidered a six-winged, many-eyed seraph alighting in a wood while the local fauna take note.
A pair of lovers share a laugh over whether they should marry or stage their own deaths
Turn your back and go slowly into me
Touch your wings to my shoulders carefully
And then turn over backwards hanging feet
The lyrics are supposed to mimic those overly complicated literary passages that befuddle the reader with impossible descriptions for simple physical actions. Are they making love, dancing, or dying? Only you can say!
This was my attempt to make a Jack White song. How did I do? I think it sounds like Los Doggies. Oh well. This grungy two-parter has a quote from Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, because I’m super old and that movie was huge. The key of F# has always struck me as the most dissonant, perhaps even evil.
This pretentiously-titled song was inspired by John B. Calhoun’s infamous “Mousetopia” experiments. The mice, having all their basic needs met, dropped out of mouse society to spend all their days grooming themselves. Calhoun dubbed these narcissistic mice “the beautiful ones.” Any analogy made to our present day human society is purely coincidental.
Thus begins side B, which is a very side B indeed. “Snowfire” is a bit of a jam band song with an unlikely music theater hook thrown in. But hey, there’s wah-wah, so it has to jam. Surprisingly we’ve never used a wah-wah in lo these many years of guitar pedals, because they’re always breaking. The feel is the classic Grateful Dead beat, a slow shuffle with inappropriate drum fills.
For years, the town of Irwindale, California has been embroiled in a legal battle with the local hot sauce plant. The peppery fumes cause headaches, heartburn, and watery eyes. Huy Fong Foods has tried to make it up to residents with an annual $100K, free Sriracha t-shirts, and all the Sriracha products the poor residents can stand. Enjoy your hot sauce, motherfuckers!
The title is taken from the popular conspiracy author Chan Thomas, whom I believe to be a government spook. Chan is notorious for his apocalyptic book The Adam & Eve Story, which appears on the CIA website as part of a case file. Certain conspiracy types tend to think anything on the CIA website must be the hidden truth, but the CIA is so full of shit, you can’t trust anything they say or don’t say, although you can be sure anything they touch is corrupted. Body 2 is Chan’s other book on ESP, which describes a spirit world, where everyone has a guide or Body 2 to help school them through life, and a Central Command that can answer any question in the universe.
I tend to write lyrics after the melody and the song is already finished, much like a poet painstakingly filling in the blanks with the right rhyme and syllable count, so they often fall short of a specific meaning. Music is just amateur poetry, so I like it to be somewhat ambiguous. The tonality of this song is copied from my old midis with adjacent Major Seventh chords, giving that dreamy, longing feeling. I used to be obsessed with Major Seventh chords and to this day, it’s hard to just go Major without throwing that 7th on top.
The title is a Hebrew word, but no one knows exactly what it means, appearing seventy or so times in the Book of Psalms. Colloquially, it is often used to mean “Serenity now!” or even “Lawd have mercy!” As a musical mark, it could mean “Pause, and reflect on this!” We thought this word association might elevate our guitar solos and jams to the Holies of the angels, but we are mere men.
So there you have it! I hope you enjoyed this musical outing. We’ll be back in a couple months with another new album, because I want to be like King Gizzard and release too much music in one year. Now I just have to figure how to fix this website before Adobe deletes it.
<3 Evan
