Dear Friends,
Saturday came and went. I watched The Morning Show, well, binged it really, and also the Cardinals game. I also spent some time with Teresa discussing Nosferatu, which we saw on Friday night. It is worth seeing and that’s all I am going to say.
If you love a good forehead (or six-head), I highly recommend it.
Today I will go see Granny and get some more writing done. I can’t believe that I am just about done with 2024 and this blog. It’s been an experience and it has made me want to give up writing about music.
But I won’t. Not yet.
*****
Getting high on my own supply – one last time, at least for now.
I’ve been fortunate enough to spend a fair amount of time in the recording studio. Most of those experiences were very positive and I’m really proud of the vast majority of the music I have recorded in the studio. It’s not luck. It is the result of hard work.
When I look back at Heavy Lifting, which was the last full-length record The Father Figures made together, I will remember the hard work we did to make it happen. I will remember the hard conversations, too, that had to be a part of the experience. I will also remember, with pride, what we accomplished together.
After the disappointment that Steps and Processes was for us, we wanted to do something great for our next record. We were stoked on the songs that we were coming up with and we put in a lot of pre-production work on the record that became Heavy Lifting. There were a lot of moving parts.
I had been working with Slope Records and the offer was on the table for Slope to put out Heavy Lifting. Our first three records and EP were on AZPX. Rob is our brother, but Tom at Slope wanted to put vinyl out. We were torn, so we went out to dinner with Rob and talked about the situation.
It sucked. Hindsight being 20/20, I can’t honestly say that I would have pushed for the record to be on Slope if I had it to do over again. Being on vinyl was a plus and I’m stoked to have it in my collection. Tom put together some killer packaging, especially with our friend, Micah’s excellent layout, and Heavy Lifting looks great. It just sucked that we hurt Rob’s feelings the way we did.
The water is long under the bridge now and we are all friends again. There is a lot of “woulda, coulda, shoulda” thoughts, but that’s all they are. I’m only speaking for myself here, too. I wish Slope would have done more for us, but we also didn’t want to give Slope a lot of reasons to invest heavily. I was on both sides of the fence and that was not fun.
But we made what I consider a really good record, and I wish more people would have heard it.
The songs came over a period of a couple of years, but I don’t exactly recall which ones came first, so I’m going to go in the order they appear on the record, so here goes:
The first track on side one is “Ego Vs. Ego.” This was a riff that Michael brought to the table. It’s a rocker and I enjoyed putting a heavy bass line to it and writing lyrics that commented on Donald Trump. It just never mentions him by name because he is not the first politician (nor the last) with a big ego.
One of my favorite lines from that one is: “Take a chance/Watch the blind man dance.” Sometimes you have to put your ego aside and just be a person. If you can do that, you can just be a person in this world who is contributing to making it a better place. That’s what so many political types forget.
“Medicine Ball” is probably my favorite of all the songs that I wrote for the band. It just flows so well, and I loved playing it. When we played our last show, it bummed me out to think that I wouldn’t be playing it again. It’s about the way that people with mental health issues often get prescribed these medications that don’t really help. These medicines can act like chains, instead, that tether them to something that keeps them from being healthy and whole.
Track three is another one of mine and that is “USS Destroyer.” I remember writing the riff while sitting in our living room. I was playing my acoustic guitar, and the song practically wrote itself. I brought it to the practice room and we had it dialed in pretty quickly.
“USS Destroyer” is another political song, but by this time I had gotten a good feel for making the songs not beat people over the head with my political views. It’s mostly about people buying into things that just aren’t true or real or, if they are true and real, things that aren’t good for them at all. It’s about having a spine and thinking for yourself.
Sadly, that’s something we seem to have turned our backs on in the USA and my song is about that very thing. The last line says it all. “We destroyed ourselves from the inside out/From the inside out.”
“Nigerian Prince Charming” is a really cool riff that Bobby came up with and we figured out to make it kind of a play on those weird emails that you get from scammers trying to get you to give them your personal information. We had some serious fun with this one and Bobby came up with a great arrangement. I struggled with the idea of singing and playing it, so we only did it live with the help of buddy, Mark, so I could just play the riff and sign the chorus with him.
“Heavy Lifting” is a song that Michael came up with and the words were something that came from rocking it in practice. “This is not for me/It’s barely for you/This is not for me/It’s barely for you and completely true” is the opening lines. At one show, I dedicated it to Ron Reckless who was an acquaintance of mine that had passed away and it seemed to mean something to his wife and daughter. “Heavy Lifting” kind of became Ron’s song in a weird way and I was always okay with that.
The last song on side one is “(The Man Said) Scorsese Is A Hack” and I wrote it in Maine in the summer 0f 2015 or 2016. I can’t remember which one. It was originally kind of reggae-ish when I wrote it on the acoustic and the lyrics were inspired by a conversation I overheard at a funky little store in Rangeley. This guy was talking nonsense to another guy, and he said, “Scorsese is a hack” and I thought it was funny.
This is how songs are born.
Side two starts with a killer Bobby song called “Borrowed Records.” I am particularly proud of the lyrics on that one. It is about being fifteen and borrowing records from a friend. Life seemed like it was so easy back then in some ways and hard in others. Maybe things don’t really change. What I do know is that the riff is great fun to play, and the bridge turned out killer.
We did write some great bridges together, that’s for sure.
“Four Mile Circus” is a Michael riff, I think, but it could be a Bobby riff, too. I apologize for not remembering clearly. Bobby loaned me this killer book by Albert Bester called The Stars My Destination. I loved the book so much that I wanted to make this song about the book. Like the rest of the songs on this record, I love to play this riff. We struggled for a bit to really get this one right, but once we did, it was fucking magic.
“Kennegbago” is another one that I wrote in Maine. It’s our instrumental on the record and it has a cool skateboarding intro. Our friend, Bob, did the stunt skating for us. Not a whole lot more to share about this one other than it is fun to play, and I love the homage to The Damned that it has in its second half.
“Rigged” was a Bobby riff and it is about the oligarchy. Bobby added some cool backing vocals to it, but we didn’t play it live too often. It’s one that we never really got a good feel for, unfortunately. I do remember playing a pretty good version of it when we played the Skatercon pre-party one year.
“Hotel San Pedro” is a Michael riff. If I remember correctly, he came up with it in the hotel in San Pedro after our first show there. It’s about our love for San Pedro. I can’t really explain it, but The Father Figures should have been from San Pedro and in some parallel universe, we were/are.
The last song on our last record is another Michael riff called “The Controls Are Broken.” This was done in drop D and we didn’t play it live more than a couple of times. I listen to it and am still not sure exactly where my head was when I wrote the lyrics. “To get your attention, why do I have to do wrong?” I think that kind of says it all.
We recorded this one, like our others, with Byron at Villain. We had another wonderful experience and lots of laughs. Bobby and I played our fair share of video games, and we had some good meals. Michael spent a lot of time on the guitar, and we chided him about it.
The record release party was a really fun show at Valley Bar. We had a blast. It’s a fun memory, just like the band itself. I can’t believe I don’t have any more records to write about…but I’m not dead yet.
*****
See you tomorrow.
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