Welcome to Raw Impressions Monday's Music Mini-episode. Hi. Hi. That's the sound of me sifting through cassettes.
Ah. And you had it. And, coincidentally, you're actually looking through a box of cassettes right now. I know.
It was on your chair. It was on your throne. It was on your throne. I like that.
Let's call this my throne. Yes. God, I should really wear a crown when I do a podcast. Yeah.
Why not? You're under waste. Oh, honey. Oh dear.
This cassette tape says, minute men, men, fires on one side. And the other side it says, meow mix. Well, that's the minute men record. What makes men start fires on one side.
And the other side is a mix that someone gave me. Oh. I've been looking through, in the midst of my semi-annual, what I mean, what is semi-annual, Adele? Is it two times a year?
Actually, this happens at least three or four times a year where I go through every single cassette that I have looking for a specific cassette. I think it happens like once every two months, actually. And then you go, I have to find dot, dot, dot. Yeah, I wake up like, ugh, with this crazy look in my eye, I imagine.
Yeah, I just disappear. And I just disappear into the attic. Right now I'm looking for a tape called Insanity Number One, which was a tape that Mark Harris gave me. I recently passed on a friend, who made me this wonderful tape of like prank phone calls.
He picked on a phone in five months. Jesus. Wait a minute. Okay, I'll tell this to react.
Okay. Here it goes. I've got two verses written. You don't have any words for the chorus, and I don't have any words for any subsequent verses that would come.
Here it goes. Sit by his coffee. What you need is a son's sheet. See how we've taken all the sweet time to decide how we've watered that tree and watched it grow and all the together.
Shared at times, right? Shared at times. The rest of this tape is somebody I don't know who sent me a tape. See you later.
Love you. I recorded the cassette over something that someone had sent me. Actually, I listened to it today. It was really good.
It's a band that actually sounds a lot like a band from New Zealand called The Tall Dwarfs. I tried to shizam it and I couldn't find out what the band was, but it was really good. Anyway, that cassette. The last time that I was looking for cassettes, right now I'm looking for insanity number one from Mark Harris from like 1991.
Oh, excuse me, 1981. God, 1981. But I found the tape that I was looking for last time, which was titled Wedding Tune. And I looked at the same thing.
Upended the boxes millions of times. We were going to do a whole episode based on this tape. I never found it. I never found it.
I was like, I'm not going to stand. Of course, I'm looking for the same boxes, the same cassettes and that cassette pops up. I'm like, well, there it is. How did I miss it last time?
I don't know. It's amazing. It's like, does the mind, does my mind not have the capacity to like take in, you know, going through a thousand cassettes? Is there only so much information that I can take in at a time?
So these things just sit in, they sort of are in this huge haystack. There's always these needles in the haystack. I don't know. It's crazy.
Yeah, you should, like, when you're looking through those tapes, have me come up and then have me look through it. I think another set of eyes also, you know, you could. Do you want to do that? Do you want to come up to the attic with me and sit on the dirty floor and go through cassettes?
But I mean, I would, sure, I'd go up there to look for a cassette with you. So do you? Yeah. I mean, okay, let's go.
I'm going to shed some fun. I'm absolutely obsessed with finding this other tape. I was listening to that song and, you know, a couple of things were going through my mind. One of them is just that I love hearing your voice recorded, like in ways like that from a long time ago.
I don't know. I wonder if you would feel the same way if you heard old recordings of my voice. I love it. Oh, my God.
It's interesting to hear like how your voice has evolved or changed over time and it's like, oh, my God, who's that person? Oh, you just like a frog literally came into the room and hopped on the mic. So, okay, the other thing I was thinking is, as you're, as we're listening to the tape of the song, and then you don't have all the lyrics, right? You're saying like, and then my voice will, what was it?
I know the way I want my voice to go. Yeah, but I know the way I want my voice to go. And you're like, and I don't say something here. I was thinking that's almost kind of like the most beautiful unintentional beginning wedding song because you did have the beginning of the story.
But the rest was not written yet. That's still, yeah, so it's kind of interesting, right? I was thinking, well, yeah. I did finish it.
Yeah. I thought actually that tape would be the whole song, but I was surprised today to find out that I didn't do that. And it's actually considerably longer. I didn't, I only did the middle part, which is the sort of middle eight.
I only did that once on the finished version. I did not go back and repeat that part. It's a really beautiful song. Oh, thanks.
I can see why people, I guess I can tell it's meaningful to people and they request it. Well, there's the original version that I wrote for my sister's wedding, which is very nice. And then approximately five years later, I recorded the version for a sebada record, the sebada. I finally did put it on an album.
And then I was writing about my first marriage and things had changed. Like the first, the original version is very, because my mother had sort of commissioned me to write it. When I say commissioned, it wasn't really a commission. It was just that I did not want to disappoint her.
Her disappointment would have been, it would have extracted something from me. For me not to follow through and write the song for my sister's wedding as requested by my mother, would have been a terrible thing to do. So I wrote the song for the wedding, which was, it's very intimidating to be assigned to something like that. I'm not really that kind of songwriter.
Although I actually do pretty well. I have to say, when I do have to write something, I've had some pretty good results. Yeah, you've actually been a good occasion singer. No, natural one.
The most popular song I've written was, that was an assignment. Yeah, so maybe you should change that dialogue. You feel like actually, I'm really great when I'm given an assignment. That's right.
That's right. Yes, exactly. When I'm hired to do a song for your wedding or for your movie, I can be commissioned. I can be commissioned.
That's what people do now anyway. That goes hand in hand with all this patreon and things. We aren't doing it quite with our sub-stack. That's more of a free thing.
It's more free form for us. But our little family general's upset. People are like, here, make me do this. It's a cameo.
That counts. Anyway, so by the time that I recorded the song for Sabado, I was writing from my own perspective and it changed drastically, or not drastically, but some of the key lines are different. When I recorded the song, I was crying. I was crying in the studio and drinking Knob Creek.
The only time I really had Knob Creek, it's a very, very harsh, probably Tennessee or Kentucky whiskey. I was drinking that in the studio while I was doing the vocals, which seems so crazy to me now. Like, why would I sing being a studio drunk? It's like, I mean, the thought of it, I'm like, I can't.
Well, it's also interesting too, that you, why didn't you just let that song exist for your sister's wedding? You then put it on a Sabado album. Well, I had been playing it live quite a bit and I got some good responses to it, and I thought that I needed to do a real studio version of it. The next upcoming Sabado record, which at that point was, became the Sabado.
Okay. Fair enough, yeah. I don't know how those things work, you know, like if you're a musician and you just do... Maybe at that point too, I would, maybe I would start to have a little bit of a writer's block.
Maybe my lifestyle was catching up with me. Oh, it makes me hurt just thinking about it. Yeah, I mean, as the 90s sort of wore on. Mm-hmm.
Things, you know, started to change. Shift. Ooh. I suppose I can talk about that some other day.
The 90s. And on that note, music meeting Monday concludes. Thank you for listening.