It's A Trap – Lyrics

Sally Ride – It’s A Trap
Lyrics by C. Howie Howard, “Cause 2 B Uneasy” by Cory Kibler. Thanks for providing attribution & a link when you quote/copy/cite!

“Lookers”

You’re bugged; we’re listening
You don’t quite know
We’d like to keep this calm
Don’t fret; we’re the Lookers
We’re NSA
Trust us. We’ll find the needles
In your email. “Just looking!”

By holy God, don’t you dare look back at us!
Don’t look, don’t breathe

By hell and heaven, don’t you dare look back at us!
Don’t look, don’t breathe, don’t think, don’t speak, don’t breathe!
Don’t look!

“Cause 2 B Uneasy”

Your face was a light
On a coast of new hope
‘Cause back then you had said
I could use you to cope
In the night of my day ’cause I lost my way and
The ship needed light from your heart just to guide me home

But your light it went out and
You were not about to come down on the rocks,
Raise your arms up and shout to make sure I was safe
I was fine, I’m OK
You were tired and afraid so your light it gave way to the dark, well uh-huh

Hey, I got something to say,
So won’t you please believe me?
Baby, I think we both have some cause to be uneasy
When the only thing I’ll ever love gets up, turns the lights out and leaves me
When I’m fast asleep I think we’ve cause to be uneasy

Your heart is a ghost, a cloud of smoke, a cost, a dream, a whisper, a scream, a warmth, a pain,
In the night it’s a flame that burned out in the black,
Only love turned to ash

Hey, I’ve got something to say…
You’re the only thing I’ve ever loved

“Holy Moses”

When you broke into free-fall, ‘fore I had steeled myself to hear you scream out,
“That is not what I’m asking!”
Well, my dear, what can I say?
Our misunderstandings cause real pain

Army ‘chutes over Navy seas
Separation came easy, and
I thought (so it seemed) from the outside these waters supported me
But no one claimed we could jump from love,
End up within a thousand miles of Abilene

The sky is empty; I’m trying to see you apart from the sea
But we both saw we were coming unzipped at the seams, well ahead of our splash landing

I can’t swim, but I do float
You? I don’t even want to know
What happens underwater stays there if you get home
So, holy Moses, where are you now?
If this man ever needed some dry land, he’s making his sound; “Holy Moses, come on, save me, don’t watch me drown!”

“Baby Bells on the Warpath for Profit”

Sit down, son, check this deft maneuver
The cutest thing you’ve ever seen
Let’s put our hand into your pocket
Let’s see if we can make you sing
We wouldn’t say this is dishonest
We just can’t leave it up to you
Who calls our lobbying intrusive?
We “want” a neutral ‘net-web too!

Yeah, we’re coming (paying, scheming, praying…)
Yes, it’s true.
No; we’re faking! We’re with you!
(Really, the Congress sold you out!)

We’re gon’ a-storm the gate and hold it;
We Baby Bells and Company
Give us a corner on the market,
Don’t make us practice what we preach

Yeah, we’re coming…

We claim the title on your ground; we’re taking over.

“Just Observing”

I burned a knot instead of pulling
Stemmed the flow from ends of ropes
I never said (I couldn’t say)
You shouldn’t ask what’s in my blood

Your science taken apart, your heart examined
Laid out to light in harshest blue
I am not a judge, I’m just observing, but
You won’t last my loving view

You’re on your own,
So take some time; something good will come of us
(It won’t be you)
But never mind
Crippled child of broken trust

“Loose Lips Sink Ships”

Whisper; I have something to share
I imagine a thousand disasters
Stay back! You don’t want to hear what I’m thinking
It’s a terrible start
You could have an accident
Your magazine isn’t up to code
Selfish; I’m a gene machine; I’m in orbit
You fall in love with who’s close

Please take your leave – we’ll sail and sink
I slipped; I warned their fleet

Broadsides. Prints and images. Little pieces
That’s what’s left of us after our
Misadventurous flirt with intrigue
This whisper started a wave
Flattened the shore where we lay

And I wanted to make believe their arms were on our side
I thought the war could end, we’d go home
I’d live in your eyes
How did I end up in my own trap???

Please take your leave…

“David S. Addington and Your Democracy”

Lawman don’t care for the Constitution
He thinks he’s a righteous force, and
I don’t care what I’m doing to you
Leaving without a sound, without a word
Lawman’s paradigm made this war seem right, and I’m off

Hey, this city sleeps until the alarm
We’ll come back in our time

Lord, there’s a crisis in our city
Barmy Lawman brought the Marshall to town
Love, we’re alone and fighting a coterie
Now, friends, we take the Lawman down
His “New Paradigm” made this war seem right, and we’re off

Hey…

“We’ll wake up in our own sweet time
Nothing wrong with hands over our eyes
This hasn’t been on TV! It’s too early, we’re asleep!”

“New Slow Sea”

It’s been so long, it’s good to see you home
I’ve missed those arms, been restless in my bones
Walked up and kissed me
For a second I was whole
My anima, my ex. I woke alone

Baby, we never learn

Asked I a thousand times; you never said
What moved you on, who keeps you from my bed
Did you discover I’m a broken man? Or worse?
You breathe the irony so deep it burns

Someday we’ll lay in our dreams (saved for the kids’ return)
Sail upon a new slow sea (showing the same concern)

“We the People”

We all cruise along the Interstate
We’ve all been through Mrs. Quinn’s class
We’re all living like this dream our fathers bled is gon’ a-last
Watch me dive into the roses
Love, I’ll set one in the sky
But now the darkness come, singing “War + Freedom!” and we are blind

There’s a few who would be kings and lords,
High priests of the red, white & blue
There’s a People who won’t stand for it
My kids will have a country too

I don’t put my faith in the President
And I don’t trust in CEOs
Give me space to live and love as I believe, give me soul
Lady Liberty, you’re sleeping
Medicated to the gills
Wake up! And hold ol’ Sam’s feet to the fire!

There’s a few…

Yes! This is an accusation!
Yes, this is a call to arms!
They don’t deserve the Oval Office!
Yes! This is a call to f*cking arms!

“Back in the Fire”

There I was in confession, asking grace for sin of war
Fighting battles of love with faith that I can win by force
You know it’s ammunition that I’m looking for

I’ll see you again, one more time
The way you move in my sights
Speak some truth, let me lie, I’ll be here awhile

By a death that is hot as hell and lying in the mud
That’s how I found you, darling,
Don’t you see that’s good enough?
See the fog of combat left you in my blood?

I’ll see you again…

There’s no need to be single; there’s no need to be fair
There’s no need to crawl back in the fire

And like a foxhole believer,
You get your hope where you can
I’ll take you out

There’s no need to be honest; there’s no need to be scared

There’s no need to crawl back in the fire

Streaming and meta-news

Hit the music section and enjoy the new streaming capability for all MFR releases.  These changes will propegate through to our MySpace page over the next week or so.  We’ll also be updating each release with more detailed album credits.

In the back of my mind is still a revitalized “MR|signal” which would be a flash-based audio player that randomly shuffled songs from our entire catalog together.  It’s been on the shelf for six months or so; if anyone has tips about anything new, I’d love to hear about it.

News has been kind of sparse; with the new WordPress-based site design, I’m finding that most of what I want to say is on the [blog], and new releases are pretty obvious without making mention on this little out-of-the-way news page.  It mostly covers website-related news and events relating to the community as a whole (such as adding a new artist to MFR, etc.).  That’s the word on that.

XMAS is out, but I’m holding back on email/MySpace until archive.org gets the low-fi and streaming files squared away.  Merry Christmas, -h

Mary be the one, unplug…

XMAS ’06 is nearing completion, with Scott’s sax added now to “O Come Thou Dayspring.”  I hope to get it out this weekend, and what happens tomorrow has a lot to do with that.  I also discovered a track recorded last year and saved, which I’d forgotten, called “What’s My Baby Want’n?”  So the new tracks will be:

5. O Come Thou Dayspring – howie&scott
6. What’s My Baby Want’n? – Tape/echoes
7. Jingle Bells – DJ Josh-O
8. Silent Night – Tape/echoes

Then, Sally Ride in another week or two.  Ack – Do you get sick of constant updates to the schedule?  Or is it cool to know where we’re at?

—-

The best non-pumpkin-pie part of the Thanksgiving holiday was drumming with Ben (and Scott, and others who lent a hand: Nick, Kay, Mom…).  We circled up in the evenings in my living room with traditional Ewe drums, and just started in.  Sometimes Ben assigned rhythm parts to a few people, others times we just jammed.  Scottie got the sax out and did some improv, which was a big hit – I’m guessing Ben (my music teacher and choir-leader friend from Ghana, West Africa) had never heard anything quite like it.  We sang a couple traditional songs that I know/learned.

We also sang some hymns, some with drums and some without.  When the German Bremen missionaries first visited Ben’s area of Ghana in the 1800’s, they brought their hymn book and translated over 200 hymns into Ewe language.  Having grown up in churches, and being currently empolyed by one, many of the tunes are familiar to me.

You’ll be able to hear a little bit of all (traditional African music, new stuff inspired by traditional sounds, and hymns) on Sunday, January 21 when Ben is our guest artist for the morning at SPUCC in KC MO.

Akpe Ma Da Na Mawu

It’s late, I’d love to explain the title above (from Ben) or more about how Sally Ride / XMAS sound, and I will soon.

For now, just this; Katy did a brief analysis on the harmonies Cory and I sang for “David S. Addington and Your Democracy,” and it turns out we’re bitonal at least, maybe polytonal.  Which puts us in the company of some compositional greats.  Interpreted into Rock, that means “backup vocals so weird and awesome your brain will probably explode.”

Coming Soon to the internets near you…

A Bad Feeling About This

Cory and I recorded his parts for Sally Ride today.  It was rad.  We moved FuriousSound over to Jody’s attic (aka Where The Barbies Live) this morning, ran his guitars, then his vocals, then figured out what the hell to do with “Cause 2 B Uneasy.”  Cory’s ideas were amazing and added different colors to the songs.  It’s a rowdy, gnarly mess and we’re super stoked about it.  Serious mixing will begin after Thanksgiving and I expect it to go pretty quickly; we’ll have this puppy out before Christmas, I promise (and mean it).

This is the first time ever we’ve completed a recording project (meaning just Cory’s parts) is less time than planned – we’d figured on working tomorrow afternoon, but will be at Waldo Pizza instead. 

Off to the Hurricane for 5*C late show TONIGHT (one hour, about). -h

—-

This is Cory please help.  Howie (“Master”) made me play “musik” all day and I only have so much time and please send help.  My fingers are all bloody and ruining his computer. 

Seriously though, I really need the police to come to arrest us FOR MURDER BECAUSE WE MURDERED THE CRAP OUTTA THEM TRAXXXX.  I will say that the mixes right now are out of control, but in a good way.  I mean, some of the crazy stuff will get toned down and maybe smoothed out a little bit but not too much because my fingers fell off.

All for now!

Forehead Typingly Yours,

Cory Alan

The Meaning of XMAS

First, a short PSA:

THANK YOU to the gracious, kind phone-answerers at apartment complexes across the KC metro over the past two days.  I am humbled by your patience with my efforts to extract information from you, offering no immediate benefit in return.  As long as we share such courtesy with each other, there is hope in the world.

Howie, C******* Real Estate (this week).

—-

I was flipping through records at a thrift shop in Raytown last week, and was struck by the sheer volume of Christmas albums.  Probably 1/3 of the vinyl in the crates was holiday-related.  Why do artists make this music?  Why do people buy it, then get rid of it, in such great quantities?

And why would Mr. Furious even think about crashing that party?

With the release of our XMAS 2K6 fast approaching (three new tunes from Tape/echoes, DJ Josh-O, and howie&scott) I recognize that our effort may be in need of a defense.  Or justfication, at least.

Despite the superabundance of Christmas albums, the official holiday canon is restricted to about 30 old chestnuts, which is A) stifling, and B) threatens to strip these great tunes (Bing Crosby, etc.) of their meaning and effect through repetition.  XMAS is our attempt to create some diversity in your yuletide listening habits (but that’s the goal of every other record, too).

It’s hard to find “blue” Christmas music, sounds that express the sadness, loss, and darkness that accompany the season for all of us one year or another, if not always.  XMAS doesn’t shy away from that.

Most important to me is the contrast between what I percieved in the record bins as artless commercial product, and what I hope we can create – which is 100% free, in no way a commodity, and as artful as we are capable of.  I’ve written before about how being a netlabel, a “free record label,” changes something fundamental about the concept of “pop” music (which is necessarily commodified).

That’s the real meaning of XMAS.  Scraping away the commercialism, the religiosity, the cliches and the tired chords and the sentimentalism – salvaging and recasting a few of the old signs, and forging new works out of our own, true, experience of Christmas.  -h

Forced Vacuum

Don’t forget Sally Ride’s It’s A Trap Preview – click “|>”

 

 

From Ric Ocasek’s interview with The Onion A.V. Club,

AVC: It’s hard to pinpoint any hard influences on The Cars besides old-time rock and maybe krautrock. What were you listening to then?

RO: As a songwriter, oddly enough, my influences were people like Bob Dylan, The Velvet Underground, and Buddy Holly. Some psychedelic stuff, too. Back then, there wasn’t a lot of press on bands. There was Creem and Rolling Stone, and that was about it. There certainly wasn’t the Internet. You would stay in your basement and create something and then come out. You didn’t have anything to rub off on. You didn’t know what the band down the street was doing, because you couldn’t look it up, and you couldn’t see it on TV. I think people tended to come out with things that were different because they weren’t influenced by their environments as much. I find these days, you almost have to force yourself to stay in a vacuum to become different; if you really want to be different. Maybe you have to have something different inside of you as well.

I recognized something of myself, and of MFR, in what Ric is saying.  As much music as I listen to, I’m very isolated from the pop/rock of the moment – I’m six months behind on indie stuff at least, plus I listen to a lot of older music.  I’ve never been immersed in a scene, save the Crete scene which was only us.  And I my two experiences of real musical vacuum, in Ghana, were highly formative.

We were talking about folk music a while back, and there are some ways MFR functions as a tiny culture with its own indigenous music.  When it comes to Tape / echoes shows, I certainly treat it that way, mixing songs from all our artists AND their non-MFR projects!  Especially Cory and I, working together and also separately (but in parallel & conversation) – I think we’ve written and recorded ourselves out into a sort of vacuum; a bubble in which we have our own aesthetic dialect of pop/folk/rock.

That’s maybe what I most dig, and am most proud of, about this wild beast.  -h

It's A Trap Preview

These are rough mixes. Hope you enjoy a peek behind the curtain; I didn’t have anything worth saying this week. The clips are “Lookers,” “Holy Moses,” “Baby Bells on the Warpath For Profit,” and “New Slow Sea.”  Criticize gently. 

-h

Sally Ride / It’s A Trap

1. Lookers
2. Cause 2 B Uneasy
3. Holy Moses
4. Baby Bells on the Warpath for Profit
5. “Organ”
6. Loose Lips Sink Ships
7. David S. Addington and Your Democracy
8. New Slow Sea
9. People Won’t Stand
10. Back in the Fire

Clarity on Transformation

Twice of late I’ve had moments of clarity about myself and my music.  As I keep up this adventure, I thought these were worth sharing and hearing back from you on.

The first happened at a traffic light as I was driving back to Raytown from packing up the studio from the Sally Ride sessions at Matt’s last week.  Under the red signal, I caught myself thinking “I’m a different person than I was two weeks ago when I started this.  I feel noticably different.  Older.  More complex.  Like I’ve been on a journey somewhere completely new.”  As I recognized that thought, I realized that I always feel that way after making a record.  I’ve also felt it after closing musicals in high school, and big concerts that I’d spent a lot of time preparing for.

On the heels of that realization was the Something New; that transformation is why I make records.  It’s the reason.  Not the finished product, not recognition (obviously!), not even for the sake of art.  Before it all, I make records because it changes me, and I always want that.

—-

Last Friday night, I played a set of Tape/echoes stuff for the church conference I was at; a late-night “afterglow”-type event.  Joe Rowley joined me on djembe, dropping his rhythms behind complex songs he had never heard before.  If you’ve played with me before, or seen a friend coping with my changes for the first time, you know Joe’s brave, and he killed.  The set was five or six Ventura songs, followed by a cover from every decade of the rock era (’50s – present), and closed by “Where Did I Go Wrong?,” “Race Car Driver,” and two more Ventura tunes.

After the show, as we were packing up our instruments, Joe told me that he could really see my “true self” in the Ventura songs (the “true self” language relates to the main speaker at the conference – I might like the Quaker “inner Light” even better).  It took his outside (but now partly inside!) eyes to show me how true that is.  Not that my other music isn’t “true” – but Sally Ride, h&s, and other things have all been more like parts of me blown up or put under a microscope.  That works, and I like it.

But Ventura spilled out of me unbidden, and as I sing the songs back I’m a little shocked at how true they are, in the sense that they represent, and require, my whole self showing up to write and perform the songs.

I ought to do more playing like last weekend.  Because of busy schedules with 5*C and recording as quickly as possible, I can’t say that it will happen.  When I’m 35 and spent (hopefully not, but it’s a fear), at least I’ll have this record of my inner Light speaking its truth to love, loss, life, death, and a trip from New Jersey to California.  -h

It's A Trap Sessions & New Music

Weekend-before-last, I packed up FuriousSound and took it to Shawnee, KS, to Matt’s house (Matt drums for 5*C).  I started straight in on Sally Ride guitars that afternoon, using a different guitar pickup than usual and cranking out a nice, Midwestern, Tom Petty-sounding tone.  For a few days I just went song to song, putting down whole takes and doubling a few parts.

As I got close to the end, my amp developed a nasty, breaking distortion sound that wasn’t intentional; I think after eight months of semi-abusing it with my synth, I’ve torn the speaker up a bit.  Consequently, the planned album closer, “Goddamn,” was never recorded.  Right now Cory and I are thinking we’ll work the b-side, “David S Addington & Your Democracy,” into the album track list and still have a full ten songs but no Furious Instance.

Vocals, beginning last weekend, have been about the same; line them up and knock them down.  It took a couple sessions for me to kind of back off and remember how to sing properly in the studio.  The past three days, I’ve gone over for a few hours and done 3-4 songs, whole takes, sometimes the first one.  There are a few punch-ins with the vocals, but not many.

The whole album has a more 70’s feel than I expected, but I’ve tried to go with it.  The programmed drums are really working I think, and that juxtaposed with the guitar tones and songs themselves will be pretty unique.  When I work with a project for so long, I can forget how different it will end up sounding production-wise from most other pop/rock music.

Kibler and I are currently conniving on how to get his stuff down.  It’s going to be pretty wild; stay tuned.  -h

—-

Here’s a bunch of new (to me) music I’ve been listening to;

From the internets:

Common Like Water For Chocolate
Sigur Ros Takk
Mos Def Black On Both Sides
Elliott Smith XO
The Cure Pornography
Sonic Youth Rather Ripped
DragonForce Inhuman Rampage

From Half Price Books – all from the >$3 rack except Songs of Faith and Devotion:

My Morning Jacket It Still Moves
The Lemonheads Come On Feel The Lemonheads
Soul Coughing El Oso
Depeche Mode Songs of Faith and Devotion
Depeche Mode Ultra
Pete Yorn Musicforthemorningafter
At The Drive-In Relationship of Command
Batman Forever
The Crow

Matthew Sweet 100% Fun
Oasis (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?
Nine Inch Nails The Downward Spiral

I basically knew what I was getting, so everything is pretty good.  Depeche Mode, especially Songs…, has been incredible.  I wasn’t indie enough in the 90’s to listen to Soul Coughing, so to me it sounds like really weird Mike Doughty b-sides (instead of his original band & sound, which it is).  Common’s older record is a little dissapointing, but compared to Be anything is I guess. 

On the other hand, Mos Def has been banging pretty hard in the car.  Imagine that for a second.