FMN

I really like Marissa Nadler's music. I also appreciate that she actually has a coherent stage persona- I just can't do that. I am a goofball on stage, in between these really harsh songs...I'm fully separate people. Maybe I'll make it a game, see what I can do.

The last song I wrote in Arizona, Cows Are Gone, is a pretty good example. There's a whole side of my songwriting that Pamela was the only one who ever saw. One day she took me to see the cows, but they had moved pastures. Man, she was bummed. Later on, I was singing stupid little songs I was making up for her and she asked for a song about the cows...which, after many silly little ditties, evolved into Cows Are Gone:

On a one-way street
on the wrong side of the tracks
a cowboy sits on his front porch
drinking, smoking crack
'cause the cows are gone
the cows are gone away....

...and it ends up being this terrible sad song about a broken cowboy self medicating himself to death, but it started as non-stop laughter. I guess I wonder if Marissa has these songs? I think she does.

This is really a long digression, when all I really wanted to say is I wrote this song FMN, which is just kicking my ass trying to get a good take of - it's just murdering me. It's this really simple, three chord fingerpicky thing....WITH NO DAMN ROOM FOR ERROR, at all. In time it'll be a piece of cake. Right now, it's like trying to eat the pan, the oven, and the mixing bowl. It's called FMN which means Forget Me Not, and it's another sad war song, and while I was trying to get it recorded tonight I realized that FMN also could be (and so it is) For Marissa Nadler. I'll get a take of it. Damn you.

You should go listen to her, right now: http://www.myspace.com/songsoftheend

Happy Fall. Happy 23rd. Grey Skies Forever...

Craig