Welcome. Me, three, you would mean him. Oh. Music Monday.
Me, three, you would mean him. Oh. Music Monday. Me, three, you would mean him.
Oh. Hello. Welcome. Hello.
And welcome. And welcome to Mini Music Monday, of subsidiary of the Raw Impressions podcast. Go, take it away, Luna Doe. Welcome to Raw Impressions.
Monday's music mini episode. Raw Impressions presents Mini Music Monday. Here I am with my classical guitar, and the strings do need to be changed. Okay.
But I'm not changing them. Not today. Not today. Not tomorrow.
Not anytime soon. Okay. Well. I might change them if I go on tour, or when I go on tour.
Yeah, that's not an if. When I go on tour, I'm going to change these strings. Which tour are you talking about? I don't know.
Does that guitar go on the full conclusion? No. Nope. This is for my solo performances.
I think. I don't know. I always decide sort of at the last minute. Oh yeah.
Wait. You and John don't use acoustic guitars, right? Oh no. We're an electric duo.
Electric duo. Electric duo. Yes. Power duo.
You guys, it's a mini music Monday. What? Oh my God. Oh my goodness.
This has been so long. You're going to play? You're hitting right off the bat? You look ready.
I'm waiting for the prompt. Oh. It's been so long since we've done the mini music Monday, you're forgetting that I don't play a song until I receive a prompt. Yeah, I've, that's gone from my brain.
Yeah. Well, I get, I get a count and a prompt. Uh huh. And then I play the song.
So we just have to fill all of this time with what? Chatter? Us? You?
Me? Yeah. Life? The things that, the things that we talk about these days, we just can't even share them.
It's just between the two of us. God, ain't that the truth. Holy shit. I'm so sorry.
I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. God, ain't that the truth.
Holy cow. So much stuff that you and I have to cash out to. There's a lot to unpack everyone. Yep, and you just unpacked.
You're still, are you still? I just literally unpacked. Well, I'm still actually finishing the last packing cubes. So the suitcases are empty.
The cubes that go in the suitcases. That's the final, the final little unpacking. And actually I'm proud of myself. That's a lot sooner than I typically do it, which usually I just want to ignore the suitcase forever until I go on a next trip.
And then I'm forced to deal with what's in the suitcase. But a lot of times trips, what they do when you come home from a trip, you then create clutter that remains for possibly months, years sometimes. Yeah, that's me. I do, yes.
I create that. So here we go. Oh, fine. All right.
Now before I start playing, I have to explain what I'm about to do. Please do. Okay, so I was asked, asked, why is that such a hard word for me to start? And I asked by Vish Khanna, who's sort of a, he's kind of a musician, podcaster.
He was a DJ, personality, like almost like a media personality in Canada. Okay. Of the indie variety. Independent, really into indie music, huge music fan.
And a really fun guy to talk to. Okay. And I've talked to him over the years, interviews that I've done with him. I really like him.
And everybody seems to like him. So he has a podcast now. He's not working, because he's had radio shows on national broadcasting up there, CBC. He even writes for a magazine called Exclaim, which is this big nation.
You've heard of that, right? Really nice guy. But now he has a podcast called Creative Control, two-case, creative control. And he was doing sort of a fun drive for his podcast.
Fun drive? Oh, fun. But for sure, fun. For sure, it was really fun.
It was like fun drive. He's a pretty fun guy. Fun drive. Fun drive.
I met him in person several times, and he's kept in touch. You're practically family at this point. Sure. I consider him a friend.
I don't know. So I better meet this guy. So he asked me for a part of his fun drive for his podcast, Creative Control. He asked me, he's a drummer himself.
He's played in a band called Clark. I've never heard of them. I'm sorry, Vish. Don't say that part.
Sheesh. That you never heard of them. That's true. I didn't have to say that.
Yeah. I'm going to show how human you are. Yeah, surprise, surprise. Unfavorable.
So he's a drummer. So what he did was he laid down these drum tracks where he's just playing drums, and then he passed these drum tracks along to Mike Watt. Okay. Watt from Pedro.
Watt from Pedro. Yep. Huge influence on me, the minute men, of course. I mean, immeasurable.
So much influence that the minute men had on me and beyond. I saw him playing the 7th Street entry. It was one of my faves. It was so fun.
I'm Mike Watt's show. That was cool. So I don't know what the name of the group was, but... It could have been his Watt.
It could have been his thing. Like late 90s? Yeah, he had the guitar player from Wilco played with Watt before coming. Oh my god.
So he was... I dropped it, but that's not too bad. So Watt, as he's called, laid... Or bass to Vish's drums for a bunch of tracks.
Okay. Okay. For the fun to drive. For the fun to drive.
And then Vish contacted me and said, hey, do you want to listen to one of these things and see if you want to put something else on top of it and I'm going to have some other people work on it too? Hmm. So he sent me some tracks that Watt had laid bass upon. That Watt had kind of improvised bass on.
And then this guy Alan Licht. I don't know why I'm trying to... Licht. He's really Alan Licht.
He's a guy. He was a band called Love Child back in the day that played with Sabado back in the end of the day. But he's kind of an experimental guitarist. So he did a bunch of guitar on the stuff that Watt and Vish that Watt had done to Vish's tracks.
And then I was giving these tracks with... And I decided what I wanted to work on. So there was a little piece that had an Alan's guitar and Watt's bass and Vish's drums. And I said, oh, I can make that into a song.
And not only that, part of the fun drive was that one of the listeners would decide what the song was going to be about. Oh. And then pro-opey, like the theme of the song. Yeah, I'm not entirely sure.
But I think the song has then just delivered individually to this person. Oh, who's then paying to help fund Vish's podcast? Yes, a big creative control fan. Right.
Besides the theme of the song. So I was handed the theme, the instrumental, and then I was meant to and I did. Oh. Yeah, I create a song out of it.
It's all totally news to me. It's all news to me. I did it while you were away. I did it while you were away.
I told you about this. You said you didn't tell me about that. You didn't tell me about that. I'm like, you didn't tell me about that.
You didn't tell me about that. But the thing is, when I get missions like this, I really take it seriously. Like I really... So Vish had asked me to do this in November and I kind of took my sweet ass time because I was really just trying to think about it.
And so... Marinate in it. When you laughed for your trip to Wisconsin, that's when I started to do it. And then the first few days that you were gone in LA, I finished it.
Yeah, I've been kind of out of Greenfield for almost two weeks. So, yeah. Unusual for me. So anyway, the listener, this is what he wanted this song to be about.
Okay. It to be about hope. And particularly about sort of the political climate. So like not lose hope or okay.
Yeah, and how do you maintain hope when you feel kind of dark? Yeah, this isn't Canada. I don't know. He could be an American listener.
I wonder. He could be an American listener. But hey. Okay.
I'm saying politics are perfect in Canada. Have you ever heard of the Queen of Canada? Boy, this is a woman that wants to murder nurses. But...
So yeah, so there's an extreme element up there. Don't worry. It's there too. So he was saying, how do I keep hoping?
I'm not necessarily, this is quoting him. Not necessarily talking about taking to the street, storming barricades, things like that. I'm thinking more about how one stays hopeful and fights for community and their small regular, maybe even mundane day-to-day actions and living. And you know, eight years ago or so, I had the same, I was asking myself the same questions.
Like what do I do to counter this sort of, this feeling of kind of fear and ambivalence that I have. My thing was like, yeah, in my day-to-day way, I have to be more friendly. I have to enter the world in kind of this docile state and really truly make more eye contact. That's how I...
I think you approached it by also, yeah, like that and adding love, like a loving kind of response. Yeah. I didn't want to enter the world feeling as brittle as I can make myself feel, you know, in my thoughts I can create very dark scenarios. Yes, you can.
I mean, it's a sort of you're saying kind of around the time of writing reason to live. Yeah. Exactly. That's why I was thinking like love and tramine and reason to live.
These songs where you're battling these kind of dark things with how to bring light to it, right? Yeah. And you know, so I took this and I started thinking about it and then I also read this really beautiful piece by this woman's 80 Smith. And I read it in the context of a email that I get twice a week called The Marginalean, which is written by this woman.
I should do a link in your show notes. This woman in New York City, Maria Popova, she features writing by classic writers by just throughout history, you know, she gathers writings and then just and assembles it into a novel. She assembles it into a novel. She's also a beautiful writer herself.
She's so good that people have actually mistaken some of her writing. Like she did a piece about James Baldwin, beautiful writer and people actually thought that what she wrote about James Baldwin was James Baldwin. She's incredibly articulate. So I read this piece by Zadie Smith, which I found that she had written eight years ago, you know, on the heels of our first time through with Uncle T and a beautiful piece.
So I read that and then I kind of was like, okay, I'm going to, I can, because I was very daunted by this subject because the subject makes me anxious. Yeah, you're very, it's very triggering for you. So triggering. So, but anyway, I went ahead and wrote this song.
It's very short. Is there any way to find a link to Zadie's piece that you could do in the show? I will. Okay.
I will put the link. So I haven't read it. This is again, this is the first time I'm hearing about any of this song. Beautiful.
Anyway, so. So this is the song. Oh, look who just showed up. Because our cat pumpkin reminds me so much of our previous cat bob.
Anyway, they look so similar. So similar. Okay. I'm excited.
What's, can you tell me the name of the song? No, because I don't have a name for it. Oh, okay. We don't have a name for it.
I call it, um, Kana Watt Licked Barlow. It's all the people that contributed to the song. Okay. This is the Barlow aspect.
A story is old as a story, a story that won't ever end. Okay. All right. It's time to stop counting.
What? It's the end of mini and new. It's fine. That's all for that long.
Oh, we can talk. Oh my God. No, no, no, we'll sing it after. Okay.
Keep just sing it now. That was a little shaky to be honest. Okay. All right.
All right. We'll sing it out. The story is old as a story, a story that won't ever end. Trapped in the present perfectly, perfectly out of control.
Open the door for a stranger. Let the truck in. Give that cashier a smile. You're everyone's friend.
Oh, how to be hopeful in dark times. That's my struggle today. How can they? How can I?
How can I get up into the pain? Hear the world moving around you. Stepping outside. It's bigger than what you are thinking.
Be patient and hide. That's beautiful. Aw. That's the end of mini music Monday.
That's all folks. Thank you for listening. Raw impressions.