Miscellaneous

Odds and Ends

Think
Out
Maybe Tomorrow
When Kids Die
Owny Woo
Doom
Brand New
Baby Cup

This set is a mish-mash of assorted tracks that don’t belong anywhere else. I’m presenting them here in chronological order, because if I order them in any sort of aesthetic fashion, then this becomes an album. And no, it’s not that.

Horseshoes and Hand Grenades had been well-received by a surprising number of people. It was even reviewed in an indie music webzine, and quite favorably. The first four tracks here are all that Disguising Godiva ever recorded* of what was to be the follow-up to Horseshoes and Hand Grenades, which would have been titled Vulva (originally Khan). Vulva is to Ron Moses as Smile is to Brian Wilson, only without all that genius baggage. This was to be no acoustic demo bullshit like Horseshoes, this was going to be a real album, featuring full instrumentation, with a bunch of new material and an assortment of guest players from around the world, who would make their contributions via mail or Internet or some combination of the two. It would be the most far-reaching project, literally as well as figuratively, I had ever attempted. Obviously I had high hopes, but it just wasn’t meant to be. Because I'm... you know... me.

In fairness to me, the collapse of the Vulva project in 2000 was more a logistical thing than anything else. We were recording in the apartment studio of my friend Scott Lurowist. The studio was a four-hour drive for me, so every minute spent there had to be productive. When you have a real band, you get to try out new song ideas in rehearsal, and refine them long before you start laying anything down on tape. I didn’t have that luxury – I had to program drum tracks and practice guitar parts and write complete lyrics and have everything written in stone and ready to go. So if an idea didn’t work once we started recording it, that was time wasted. The large majority of the Vulva sessions were time utterly wasted, viewed from that perspective. After two long-planned weekends (and 16 road hours) of mostly useless recording, I just didn’t have it in me to continue, and I pulled the plug on the project. The hardest part of that decision was that some very talented friends had made some wonderful contributions to the project... work that wouldn’t be heard by anyone. Until now, that is.

The remaining seven tracks are things I did for side projects, or just for fun, or in preparation for a new album that I may or may not ever complete. Enjoy!

*Okay, I tell a lie. There are two other partially-completed tracks, but there are no vocals on either of them. I don't plan on posting them, sorry.

My Dear Heather

written by Ron Moses

2:15 • right-click to download: mp3 (2.6 MB) FLAC (14.4 MB)

This would have been the cover for Disguising Godiva's Vulva. Click the image for a larger version.

Cover design by Ron Moses

Originally recorded for Musaic in 1990, and again for Digital Dvorak in 1993. That makes this v3.0, and I think you'll agree it’s easily the best of the three versions. Gone is the goofy drum fill in the beginning, there’s a real bass on the track, the whistling section is doubled up (or tripled, I don’t recall), everything just sounds better. Scott, Steve, Matt, and I even gathered around the mic for a festive hand-clapping session. I'm surprised you can't hear us laughing through it.

I think I'm safe in saying that this is my most popular song, certainly one of my oldest. I loved playing this at open mic night at the Ahimsa coffee house on the University of Connecticut campus. You've got this room full of patchouli-drenched proto-PC pseudohippies (real hippies were too baked to be this uptight), all full of righteous huff and Chomskyite claptrap, dourly awaiting some grimy dreadlocked girl’s insightful new poem about how trickle-down is murder, man. And I’d get up in front of them all and sing them this delightful little tribute to domestic violence. Come on, who says burying a woman alive can’t be funny? A few people do, as it turns out.

My dear Heather

I think I might have to hurt you

It’s beginning to look as though I might have to kill you

I told you time and time again

Don’t you mess around with any other men

Never again

My dear Heather

Don’t bother going for the telephone

I’ve already cut the wires and now we’re all alone

I told you once, I told you twice

That it isn’t very nice to make a fool out of me

Now you’re gonna see

My dear Heather

I always knew you’d take me to the cleaners

If I filed for divorce

But I’ll be a thousand miles away

By the time they find your corpse

My dear Heather

You’re never getting out of that box, my dear

It’s nailed and Crazy Glued

Not to mention the locks, my dear

I know you must not have much air

And there’s not much room in there

To go messing around

Six feet underground

My dear Heather

My dead Heather

Stephen Hart • handclaps

Scott Lurowist • handclaps

Matt Menhennett • handclaps

Ron Moses • vocal, acoustic and resonator guitar, bass, handclaps, programming

engineered and co-produced by Scott Lurowist

Ned

written by Ron Moses

4:35 • right-click to download: mp3 (5.6 MB) FLAC (26.3 MB)

Cover design by Stephen Hart

An earlier version of this track can be found here.

This was originally to have appeared on Vulva, but was instead contributed to an album titled Thankyouverymuchgoodnight!, which was assembled by a bunch of Mike Keneally fans as a gift for his 40th birthday. This track represents the largest group of people ever to play on one of my recordings, one of whom I’ve never even met. I played the conga, bass, and the piano part. P. J. recorded the "hockey ring organ" that plays the melody. Then we brought in our special guests.

Steve Hart and Brian Brodeur came in to play on the track, and with all due respect and admiration to those guys, who I love dearly, this is where things started getting a bit shaky. I doubt they’d disagree. I had sent both Steve and Brian sheet music weeks in advance, and I don’t believe either of them bothered to look at it until they got to the studio. Steve recorded his acoustic guitar part after I took the time to show it to him, but the take was unusable, frankly. We credited him on the track anyway, partly as thanks for showing up, partly out of friendship, but mostly to pad the roster. Brian’s task was to lay down the chord structure on the keyboard. This is easily the most difficult part of the piece, as it's basically a series of bizarre key changes – not something you want to walk into cold, and that’s exactly what he did. I think he’d planned on sight-reading it, but when he finally looked over the score he realized that wasn’t going to happen. We ended up recording the entire part one or two chords at a time. We got through it though.

Then we sent the tape out to a fellow named James Moore, who we had found through the Keneally newsgroup. I can't remember where he lived; it was Ohio or Iowa or Indiana or whatever – some place I’d never drive to just to record a sax part. I sent James sheet music as well, and he laid down his part and sent it back. What we got back was not entirely what we were expecting. James was to play the melody part, but it came back with more than a few odd notes in it. Not accidents, either, but notes that had been replaced, repeatedly, in the middle of the melody line. Perhaps I was clueless as to the range of his instrument, and sent him impossible music. Maybe a few notes fell beyond his available options, so he replaced them. I never did find out. [UPDATE June 2008: I very recently spoke with James, and it turns out I did place several notes beyond the range of the instrument. He did his best to eke them out with false fingerings, but to no avail. So... my bad.] Whatever the reason for the change, it just didn’t work. This was the main melody of the song and it had essentially been rewritten. But the sections between the melody lines were perfect. I loved his work on what I call "the Mary Tyler Moore section" (1:59 through 2:42); he really nailed that. And his jamming in the outro was exactly what I was looking for. So we faded him out during the melody line and added the hockey rink organ instead; then we faded him back in during the parts he got right. It actually worked better that way, so hooray for happy accidents. The last repeat is loud enough that we could bring him back up for the melody and you wouldn’t hear the weird line unless you were listening for it. Go ahead and listen to it, you’ll hear what I’m talking about.

The humor of this piece seems lost on many people. Especially the Mary Tyler Moore section. I picture her in her pea coat, spinning on an oversized Lazy Susan, smiling into the sun with her arms outstretched as the camera circles around her in the opposite direction. You know, turning the world on with her smile, making it after all, that kind of thing. I think that’s funny. Just me, huh? That’s okay. People complained about the outro too, saying I should have just ended it, that I ruined it with the extended meander. Same people who complained about the drums in "Dumb." I hate people sometimes.

[instrumental]

P. J. Müller • keyboards

Brian Brodeur • keyboards

James Moore • sax

Stephen Hart • acoustic guitar

Ron Moses • percussion, acoustic and electric guitars, bass, keyboards, programming

engineered and co-produced by Scott Lurowist

What a Day

written by Ron Moses

6:52 • right-click to download: mp3 (9.0 MB) FLAC (44.5 MB)

Listening to this for the first time in almost eight years, it's not as wretched as I remembered it being. But at the time, it was nowhere near as good as it had sounded in my head. The failure of this track was the first sign that the Vulva project was not going promisingly. This is one of the perils of working in a situation where you're driving four hours to get to the studio, one weekend a month: Time is at a premium, so there is no opportunity to experiment and develop things. Plus, the percussion tracks need to be programmed ahead of time, so making last-minute changes is more complicated than simply telling everyone in the band we're going to try something different. So if the track I spent weeks preparing doesn't come off in the studio, it's a major disappointment, not to mention a major waste of time. It would only get worse once we recorded "Think," but this was clearly the beginning of the end for Vulva.

We never actually completed this track, so what you're hearing here are mostly temp tracks. The keyboard and guitar are pretty much final, if I recall correctly. The lead vocal is only a scratch track (for the non-musicos out there, that's a temporary guide vocal you lay down in the early part of the recording process to give everyone else something to play along to), which is why it's so rough-sounding. Lots of bad notes, and I even run out of breath in the second verse. Obviously I would never have kept this vocal track for Vulva, but I have no intention of recording a new one, so this is what's available. Consider it an artist's rendering of what might have been.

Given time, I probably would have re-done the drums — they're pretty odd — but I'm not going back and doing that either. I'd rather keep the track in its 1999 form to the degree possible, but I did have to do a mix in 2007 because we never did one back then. So there are a few liberties taken with editing and compression and other studio magic, but all of the performances are pure 1999.

The most significant liberty I took in the mix was the ending. Originally the track was supposed to fade out, so we kept playing for several measures and then stopped when the drum track ran out. We would fade that section in the mixing stage. But while preparing this mix, I heard that little improv P. J. does after everyone else stops and I knew I had to keep it. So I edited out several measures of the section, and kept P. J.'s ending instead of fading it. It's probably the best part of the track.

What a day

I almost had a problem with my pen

It wouldn’t write

So I scribbled for a moment, now it’s fine

And I'm sitting in the drive-thru

And I asked her for a bacon-double, please

She said, "We're out of cheese."

And I'll never understand how people make it through the day

Without throwing down the car keys and just blowing everybody else away

I guess I'm strange

Potentially derange

The only thing that's worse than being different

Is remaining just the same

What a day

Go away

Here I'll lay

Come what may

What a day

Today

I smashed my little finger in the door of my car

I'm glad I didn't have to drive too far

And this asshole's screaming up on me

I see him growing in my rear-view mirror

I watch him racing nearer

And I'll never understand how I resisted the temptation

To just lock 'em up right there

And end the day in twisted metal

Spidered windshields full of hair

Gone without a care

The only thing that's worse than being here

Is maybe being over there

What a day

Go away

Here I'll lay

Come what may

What a day

It has been

From the moment I woke up

I couldn't even find the right side of the bed

And the voices in my head

Were wishing I was dead

But I went to work instead

Today

I told a little kid to go fuck off

I made her cry

I do these things sometimes and don't know why

And I'm looking in the mirror at a man who's only

Trying to do his best

And failing every test

And I'll never understand how I get over the desire

To keep hitting that alarm

And give my mind another seven minutes rest

I guess I've grown

My wild oats all sown

The only things that's worse than being here with you

Is being all alone

What a day

Go away

Here I'll lay

Come what may

What a day

[repeat]

P. J. Müller • keyboards

Stephen Hart • backing vocal

Ron Moses • lead and backing vocal, classical guitar, bass, programming

engineered and co-produced by Scott Lurowist

2007 mix by Ron Moses

Think

written by Ron Moses

4:22 • right-click to download: mp3 (5.3 MB) FLAC (28.1 MB)

Please don't listen to this. No really. For both our sakes, just skip this track. I will thank you, and so will you.

This is the one, folks. This is the track that hammered the final nail in Vulva’s coffin. If you listen to this, you’ll hear maybe four really good ideas thrown together in a ridiculous, disjointed mess and wrapped up in an awful lyric that went so far astray from its original purpose that I’m embarrassed to have you listen to it. I swear I didn’t mean for this song to turn into a big Christian-bash, I really didn’t, and I’m ashamed that it came out that way. It started out as a response to a very narrow demographic that embraces Scriptural literalism to the exclusion of even the most harmless application of critical thinking, my intention being to lampoon these folks in an amusing and light-hearted way. And it veered completely off course. It ended up striking far too broadly, not to mention being insufferably smug and condescending and heavy-handed and just fucking awful. It never should have made it to tape in this state, and I apologize to anyone this track offends. It got away from me, and I’m sorry. My intentions were... well... better than this, anyway. See, this is what happens when you don’t have the chance to come back to bad ideas that seemed like good ideas and rework them into actual good ideas.

Not only are the lyrics atrocious, but the vocal is maybe the worst thing I've ever recorded. It's not just poorly delivered, it sounds smarmy as hell. I want to slap myself. Real deep hurting here, folks, but hey... I'm sharing it all with you and hiding nothing. I get points for that, right?

Let me defer my hairshirt-fitting for a moment to draw your attention to one thing that deserves it, and that’s Mike Lerch’s guitar work. That’s Mike playing all the electric parts. One of my happier memories of these sessions is not being there while he recorded the solo. My old high-school buddy Matt (who would one day serve as my Best Man) came by the session just to hang out, and we decided to take a break, maybe go grab a bite to eat. Before we left, Mike and I discussed the kind of thing I was looking for. I wanted him to restate the melody and then go wherever his muse led him. He tried a number of ideas that were skillful, but I just wasn’t happy with them in context, and it didn’t seem like we were getting anywhere. So we stepped away from that for the moment, and changed over to record the little bit that appears right after the first chorus – the harmony guitars. I charted the first guitar line for Mike, and he seemed confused. He played it as I wrote it, and said very uncertainly, "Are you sure this is right? I don’t think this is right." I assured him it was. So he recorded it that way, but it was clear he really wasn’t getting it. Then I charted the second (harmony) line, Mike played it, and as soon as he heard it, he got it. That was the key, the trigger, the big epiphany; he knew what to do with the solo, he said. He told me to get lost for a while, so Matt and I split, and when we got back twenty minutes or so later, Scott and Mike greeted us with huge shit-eating grins. They played this solo back for me and it was perfect. I couldn’t have expressed what I wanted, but if I could, I would have hummed something very much like this.

And then the project collapsed and Mike’s work never saw the light of day until now. So please, if you can endure everything that surrounds it, do give special attention to the wonderful contributions of the special and wonderful Mike Lerch. Thanks, Mike. Oh, I almost forgot to mention: This track also features Stephen Hart as God. Nothing blasphemous about that, right?

We did a mixdown of this track way back in 2000, but it was very rough. That rough mix was enough to illustrate the utter uselessness of the track, and as far as I can recall, we never recorded another note in Scott's studio. And so it goes. This is not that mix; Scott sent me all the raw tracks, and this mix was created from those tracks in January 2007. Like "What a Day," I have tried to keep it as vintage as possible, so nothing has been re-recorded, but I have taken a few liberties in terms of processing and effects. Not that it salvages the track at all, but maybe it will be slightly more listenable.

Ugh. My skin is crawling at the thought of you listening to this. Please don't email me, asking me to address and/or apologize for any specific moment in this song. I hereby apologize for all of it in one shot. We good? Good. You can still skip this track, you know...

I’ve heard some people say they’ve read The Book

And it says that a man who lies down with a man

Will be pelted with stones and his cries and his moans

Will be filling the Midwestern air

I’ve heard some white folks say they’ve talked to God

And He told them that dating a black girl is wrong

And the dead saints will cry and their children will fry

And I don’t see why Heaven would care

All around the fringes of the universe

Angels on the head of a pin

Laughing at the situation we find ourselves in

I had a question about inconsistencies

Seemingly frequent and often mundane

I was taken to task and was told not to ask

Every word is exact to the T

I read the chapter about good King Solomon

He built himself a big basin of bronze

They were strange times to live in

The measurements given appear to say π equals 3

All around the clinic where the women go

People spit and scream about sin

Crying for the situation they find themselves in

I can bend

But I can’t break

I can give

But I can’t take another day of blind belief

No relief

Something stinks

Think

I read a passage that seemed to imply

That a woman is better off seen and not heard

And enough with the bitchin’, get back in the kitchen

The dishes lie foul in the sink

Now here’s the punchline: I spoke to Him just last night

He told me most of these folks are confused

Their intentions are good but they’ve misunderstood

And He’s not quite as cruel as they think

All around the table at the meeting hall

People with a head like a pin

Rage against the situation they find themselves in

I can bend

But I can’t break

I can give

But I can’t take another day of blind belief

No relief

Something stinks

Think

I can bend

But I can’t break

I can give

But I can’t take another day of blind belief

No relief

Something stinks

Think, dammit

Mike Lerch • lead and solo electric guitar

Stephen Hart • electric guitar, bass, special vocal

Ron Moses • lead and harmony vocals, resonator guitar, bass solo, keyboard, programming

engineered and co-produced by Scott Lurowist

2007 mix by Ron Moses

Out

written by Marc Ziegenhagen

2:01 • right-click to download: mp3 (2.3 MB) FLAC (11.0 MB)

This was recorded during the Vulva sessions but was never intended to appear on the album. This track is unique in the collection: I’ve done a few covers, but this is the first time I’ve recorded a never-before-released song written by someone other than myself. I met Marc Ziegenhagen through Mike Keneally. Marc played keyboards on Mike’s tours for the Sluggo! and Dancing albums; he’s a very talented guy. We hung out on a number of occasions and began corresponding from time to time. He sent me a cassette he’d made of some rough demos and answering machine messages. The answering machine messages were all very entertaining, but a very rough demo of this song was the thing that caught my ear. It was obviously incomplete, intended as a simple sketch just to get the idea on tape and come back to it later, but I liked it as it was.

It’s not the kind of song I would have written, but I felt like recording it, so I did. When it was done I sent a copy to Marc, who was flattered and impressed, but asked me not to distribute it because he didn’t feel the song was ready to be sent out into the world yet. Of course I agreed. So don’t say anything, okay? The six people who will ever see this page hardly constitute "the world" anyway.

The recording features me on vocals, three acoustic guitars, bass, and about two dollars in pocket change. And yes, that’s a police siren. Hey, at least we remembered to unplug the fridge.

I get so lonely I can’t sleep at night

I got the feeling that there’s something right

I get so lonely I can sleep all day

I got to get outside I need to get away

Help me get away

Won’tcha help me get away

Help me get away

Won’tcha help me

Help me

Help me out

Me get out

I spend my life inside this gilded cage

I need to find a way to justify the rage

Help me get it out

Won’tcha help me get it out

Help me get it out

Won’tcha help me

Help me

Help me out

Me get out

Ron Moses • vocal, classical guitar, bass, pocket change

engineered and co-produced by Scott Lurowist

Maybe Tomorrow

written by Mal Evans

2:48 • right-click to download: mp3 (3.4 MB) FLAC (17.5 MB)

Cover design by Ron Moses

In 2002 I was hired to create the artwork for a Badfinger tribute album titled I Guess That’s Just The Way The Story Goes (although Amazon lists it as Remembering Badfinger). Eddie Imbriano, the executive producer of the album, is a friend of mine, so he asked me to contribute a track as well. I didn’t know much about Badfinger except for a few tunes, but I figured what the hell. This song dates back to the pre-Badfinger days when they were called The Iveys. The original is standard somber British mellotron music, a la The Moody Blues. I felt a bluegrass approach would be a good way to update the tune. Plus I stripped out a middle verse that just wouldn’t translate.

I’m not very happy with the end result... Eddie mixed the track (I wasn’t able to attend the mixing session) and although I love the guy like a brother, I just don’t care for the way this track sounds. There’s way too much reverb on the guitar, for one thing; I sound like I'm playing in a cave. And originally the beginning of the track faded in, which sounded stupid. I assume it was necessary; something must have happened to the first few seconds of the recording that necessitated that. Fortunately I was able to edit together a fix for this box set, so you don’t hear the fade here, but I would have liked the opportunity to try and fix it before the album was released. I guess I would have done things differently, but it is what it is, and I appreciate the time and effort Eddie put into it

In fairness to Eddie, I made my share of mistakes on this track as well. I clearly chose the wrong guitar for the piece... the resonator I used sounds way too metallic. And raising the key a bit might have been a good idea for the sake of the vocals, which sound downright languid in this key. So I’m sure Eddie did the best he could with what he had to work with.

But wait! Holy crap, it’s a competent guitar solo! How the hell did I pull that off?

Listen to a lonely sound

See the grey and sadness all around

See the people go their way

Care not of me and love I've lost today