Wasting all my time again

Playing in the rain

Guess I still remember getting burned

So I think I’m gonna drown again

I’m tired of the flame

I give into the waves

Hoping I’ll just float away

A cloud in someone’s day

Never gonna get burned

Came back this time just to give it all away

But when there’s nothing left but pain

Nobody wants to take the weight

Some way I know this day is just a start

I’m still on my way it’s just a part

Some way I’ve seen the end-You’ll be there my friend

Sharing just one heart

Keep coming back to stay

I think I gotta learn again

Must be something locked away

Cause I think I’m gonna burn again

Came back this time just to give it all away

But when there’s nothing left but pain

Nobody can take the weight

And I’m taking a look inside of me

What’s left no one wants to see

Nobody can take the weight-got to burn it away

Burn it away so I can learn again

Keep coming back to stay

Looks like I gotta learn again

One day my friend Dan and I were walking around Oak Park, and I happened to have my acoustic with me. We had been up all night as was often the case on Sundays in the nineties, and we were still a little altered. We noticed just on the other side of Harlem Ave in Forest Park there was a ton of activity. Turns out it was Forest Park Days or something and there was even live music. We ended watching a band named Butterfly McQueen for a while. They were kind of a jingle jangle folksy band with a female vocalist, and they were pretty good. Making our way back to the south side of Oak Park we stopped in an open field to sit for a spell, and I started playing the hook for this song. It was one of those things that just came out. I remember singing some improv words that were kind of a joke about our day and we were giggling, but I liked the riff enough to keep it.

This is another song that was on Dr Wippit’s 1st Time Out, and was initially recorded on the old 8 track to cassette machine. I had set out to make the song as trippy as possible, and of course that became the songs downfall. I ran a twelve string acoustic through my pedal with flange on it, had a bass with flange on it, and then added some really trippy lead guitar over the whole thing. At this point I wasn’t sure what the song was about yet, and the cassette I recorded on has the song under the title Butterfly McQueen. I wrote some words about the life cycle as I believe it, coming here to learn lessons, and hopefully starting all over a little smarter next time. I dubbed it Meadow as a reference to the field where I came up with the hook. Like many of the songs on Dr Wippit’s 1st Time Out, I thought it was a great song, but for the most part it sounded like garbage.

When I decided to remake the song for An Anthology of Sorts, I really, really wanted to keep the trippy lead guitar from the original, but that was about all I wanted to keep. I had used a preset from my RP12 that was called freak out or pshycho or something, and working the expression pedal to bring just a little of the effect at a time I found something I really really liked. So the problem is there’s no drums on this song, the tempo fluctuates, so it was nigh on to impossible to just throw down a new rhythm guitar. In the end I programmed some drums, and using time stretch I lined them up with the different sections of the song, and now I had drums to play along with. I lined up the original bass line with the drums and found with a clean acoustic for the rhythm guitar I had almost the sound I was looking for 14 years ago.

As is the case with most of these songs I have been bouncing mix downs off of people for a year to get feed back on them. Danny Brown the drummer for my cover band Tastes Like Chicken was asking if I was going to add any drums. I told him about the tempo issues, etc. and he said, “Not even a hand drum?” Well that got me thinking. A hand drum would be good, so I gave him a copy of the mix down and said you’ve got about a week to come up with something. A week later I had him play hand drums into the handy dandy H4 while listening to the mix down on headphones, brought the recording home and mixed them in. So new vocals, acoustic (6 string this time) and hand drum added to the original trippy guitar and bass and I’ve got something like a finished product. All this reminescing had me go back and see if I could find anything on the band Butterfly McQueen. Apparently the guitar player was from the Freddy Jones band, and here’s the singer – http://www.stonegrooves.com/NancyStone/