********************* DOWNLOAD the song here !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
This song is from the time when I was in a band with Dave Dominique called Cattlebeast, which was named after a short story that Simon Barrett had written about a dumb, confused, lonely cow.
The photo I used for this post is of some naked people drowning by a flood, and I thought it looked cool. But really, I was doing a goggle image-search for “cattle beast” and this random image showed up. Oh, how I love google image search!
OK, so, this song, titled “No More New York” was originally written on acoustic guitar. The drum sample is from like, an old DJ Q-Bert mixtape or something.
The first verse lyrics: “never / on time / I’ll try / but it’s no use…”
The production was done in Digital Performer, we did lots of layering vocal takes. Dave is great with delay guitar noise and reverb noise and layering things to give the song some haunting atmosphere.
The second verse: “no more / new york / moved out / the house is gone…”
This was written after my parents sold our house in New York, the one I grew up in all my life. It was tough to leave, but my parents moved out to Las Vegas and I was now in Los Angeles. My brother remained in New York City. Life goes on.
The chorus is: “all those words we thought we’d never say / came tumbling out of our mouthes / and once the rain falls, you cannot put it back / but at least we can try…”
This was a ton of different ideas all coming together at one - references to fights with old girlfriends, a reference to a TV show I was watching about Greek mythology, metaphors about regret, and a general sadness permeating the whole shine.
We did the bass by playing guitar and then pitching it down a whole bunch. Over the mish-mash breakdown, as the song sort of falls apart, Dave plays some trumpet which blends in almost seamlessly with some other keyboard stuff going on, so it becomes difficult to determine where one starts and the other begins. Right when it seems as if the song is going to completely lose itself, some imaginary key somewhere is stuck in the engine of some imaginary car, and we hear the car start - time to start moving again, and the second verse begins.
“How did / my parents / get to / be so old…?”
This is really a tricky way of saying “how did I get to be so old?” It just dawns on you one day, you are no longer a kid. You are now healthy and stronger than both your parents. I wrote this about five years before my father actually passed away (from smoking cigarettes mainly… so don’t smoke cigarettes!!)
“Just want / some closure / just want / to make me proud…”, followed by an eerie silence and into the final chorus.
This song has an overall dreamy quality to it, especially the very ending when all you hear is the guitar all alone playing the chunky chords of the chorus.
For me, it really does give me closure in terms of thinking about my childhood growing up in Long Island, New York versus my adult life taking place in Los Angeles, and all the changes that take place as families grow older.
