‘That old broken toothed graveyard’ from Long in the Tooth is the Locust Grove Burial Ground right behind my house in Elmwood. I’ve always liked old graveyards, I dunno why. Maybe because they DO remind us of where we’re going. As they say, “The time of death is uncertain…”

You’re not getting any info on Annalee, except to say that the “news of flood and famine and war” line was written around the time of the Tsunami that hit South East Asia around the new year, 2005.

Gabe Luddy, still the most talented songwriter I know, had a chord progression and bass line to which in a fantastically boring college forestry class I wrote a lyric piece called ‘Top of the Hill’, inspired by a poem I wrote in elementary school. The beginning of it went like this: “There was an old man at the top of the hill/He was a kind old man/He let the children caller him Bill/A teller of tales/Bill the Tale Teller/Told stories of the rich or any old feller.” This song might be about Bill a little farther down the line.

I performed Top of the Hill with Gabe, his brother Alex, and James Terris in Low School—a good rock and roll band while it lasted. When I started playing Top of the Hill with Edward it didn’t sound quite right. During a practice session jam it evolved into _ time and the bridge took on the Latin feel it now has.

King Solomon and Zen Master Nam Cheon is one of the few songs here that was written before Swampland Flowers. I wrote the instrumental section (officially called ‘The Happiest Fucking Day’) sitting outside the library skipping some class at URI. The track might sound a little empty without Edward and Fran and George’s contribution, but lyrically it’s a folk song, a story-telling song, and this is what it sounds like without help from the band.

The lyrics were written during the same infamously terrible forestry classes at URI. (Man, it feels good to type that). If you want to check out the source material for this song… For the baby story see the Old Testament, Kings 3:16 to 3:28. For the cat story see Zen Master Seung Sahn’s Ten Gates, or if that’s out of print, Thomas and J. C. Cleary’s translation of The Blue Cliff Record. More importantly, though, when Zen Master Nam Cheon holding the cat in one hand and his sword in the other says to you: “You! Give me one word or I will kill the cat!” What can you do?

Chris and Adam’s Song (Green Mountain Blues) is about some friends who lived with us for a while and then moved up to Vermont when they got preggers (in the House of Fertility on Congress Ave.—as my Mom said, “I don’t know what’s goin on over there: Use protection.”)

I helped Chris and Adam move up to the Green Mt. State and wrote the beginnings of this song with my feet in the Mad River which runs through their back yard. Their little girl Isabelle was born the day after this song was recorded.

Country Boy in the City is dedicated to Mary Truit and her brother Sam. Mary taught the first college creative writing class I took and Sam, a poet from RI—this class was in Washington DC—was a really inspirational guest speaker. This is a good opportunity to pass on one of the funnier stories Mary told us.

“I was walking down the street in New York City with a friend of mine. It was summer and I was pregnant and it was hot and I was wearing only a sundress. Some pervert came up behind me and lifted up my dress. I turned around and saw that he had his pants around his ankles and his penis was waving back and forth [I’m pretty sure she wagged her index finger back and forth here as a demonstration]. I had a copy of War and Peace in my hand and I cracked him over the head with it and her ran away.”

I can’t say what makes a good writing teacher, but Mary and her brother were good teachers. So, thanks. Wherever you are.

Julie Song No. I: Three Birds. I wrote the music to this at a bayside park on a warm spring day in Bristol, Rhode Island and later fitted it together with a poem Julie Restivo gave me some years before. I had just gotten heavily into Ani DiFranco (this was around when ‘Not a Pretty Girl’ came out) and I was listening to a lot of Frank Zappa at the time. I don’t know if anybody else can, but I can hear both of those influences here.

The evening I wrote this I decided to celebrate with vodka and fruit-punch Kool Aid: the first and last of the vodka and Kool Aid celebrations.

Even When You’re Not Here. Gawd, I almost did not put this on the album. This is a platonic love song, if there is such a thing, written many years ago for a friend of mine. I never played it (but then I never forgot it either) until I was looking for material for this record. An oldlady-friend of mine got teary-eyed when I played it for her and I knew she was thinking of her dead husband, so maybe it still has some use even if it is a little sentimental.

The Man Who Lost His Fear of God. This is a dark one. I did a 5 day backcounty trip in Denali National Park in Central Alaska the summer of 2004. There are no trails in Denali. You have your map and your compass and if you get lost you are probably fucked. The going is slow. If you are climbing a mountain, you have to bushwhack, if you are walking through a valley you want to stay out of the willow thickets for fear of bears, and the ground uneven from the huge grass tussocks makes for surprisingly laborious travel over what the contours on your map told you was ‘flat-land.’

Towards the end of a long hard day of hiking the wind got really intense. I had to keep going: I was looking for a flat, sheltered place to camp and I could not find one. As I had just stopped and unpacked for a quick dinner (rice and red-lentils, man) I saw a big-ole bull moose trotting up the hill toward me. Singing and chanting and making other human-sounding noises is the best way to let animals know that you, Homo sapien, are there. I was already cooking so instead of breaking camp I chose to sing. I started off with the fiddle tune ‘I Truly Understand,’ but as I was taking water at a stream I started singing the first line of TMWLHFOG, “I’m a-divin’ in the water, have you seen my daughter/I’m a-divin’ in the water/Hey! Hey!”

That sort of became my chant for the rest of the night. As a lyric and a melody it had a dark, guttural quality that both came out of my own fear on this dangerously windy evening and intensified it. After a very precarious decent down a rock-sliding scree slope I came, shaking and really just about terrified, to the bank of a river. There I saw in the damp, grey mud the print of a wolf’s fore-foot. I put down my pack and followed the wolf prints as far back as I could. The sky was a roiling grey and the wind rushed through the valley at a good thirty knots. When I lost the wolf’s trail I set about for a place to camp. I lashed down my tent as tightly as possible, further weighing it down with large stones. I watched the thin metal frame of the tent deform dangerously around me in the gale. The fine silt of the riverbed on which I camped easily made its way in to the tent, and into the pages of my books, my pockets, my ears and my nose.

In the morning I awoke to a warm, still, sunny day. I made my usually breakfast of oatmeal with raisins and nuts, and with coffee and later an orange, I sat by the river and wrote a song about a man diving in after his drowned daughter and his angry admonition to God.

Incidentally, relaxing after a morning of work, this is the morning I first learned to pick Elizabeth Cotton’s ‘Freight Train’ in a more true country-blues style.

Leaving in the Morning. This is not a complicated song. Different verses were written at different points in my life. It is not the most complex of songs, but it is honest. I think it’s more about leaving Washington D.C. more than it is about a woman. (And it is NOT about leaving a woman in D.C. though I’m sure those songs will come up at some point.)

Lowland. I think the two biggest influences on the writing of this song were the great songwriter Gillian Welsh and the great novelist Cormac McCarthy, with the slightest trace of the dark side of Peter Matthiessen.

Caroline and Matt’s Wedding Song. I will say, with a good dose of hubris, that I wrote this the day before the wedding after a day of labor with some carpenter friends of mine and after a stop on Cranston Street for some soft-serve vanilla ice-cream. (If I meet a woman with a soft serve ice-cream machine I will probably marry her.)

It was really touching to sing this at the wedding, just Carol and Matt on the dance floor, all of our family there, Carol crying, my mom crying, me trying not to mumble.

Cadence Emma. This piece was hacked out and worked on in my Congress Ave. Studio. When in doubt, name a pretty instrumental song after a baby you know.

Me and Curby. First of all, I know it ain’t spelled ‘Curby’ but by the time I found that out I had written it as ‘Curby’ too many times to change the title.

I think there is good teaching in every moment of our lives if we are present for it. But sometimes something happens or you meet someone and that meeting has a resonance that you can use, if you are a writer, in your work. Not so much that you can TELL someone how things are but you can use a situation as a point of exploration. One of the special thing about performing music is you get to explore that situation or those emotions every time you perform the piece.

Curby is a man I met in the square in Arcata, California. I had just come out of the rains in the Pacific Northwest; he was headed that way with nothing but the clothes on his back. We shared a couple of hours on a park bench. We talked, I played him a few songs. We watched people come and go.

notes © 2005 Christopher Monti
chris@christophermonti.com