"carry that ball, break that chain" pt. 1

the premise:

make a concept album about steinbeck's "the grapes of wrath,"
in 12 hours.
oh yeah.

the product:
eight "songs" joined together into one 24-minute track,
with the songwriting responsibilities split evenly between michael and i.
we had set out to make the weirdest, craziest thing we'd ever done, yet ended up writing some of the folkiest songs we've ever tried. how to remedy this?

instruments used:
we decided to bring out the theme of technology vs. earth addressed repeatedly in the novel, which is also a huge form of tension in our own music.
when a band listens to everything from doc watson to matmos, there's bound to be some acoustic vs. noise tension. i played acoustic and electric guitars, banjo, vocals and drums; michael played acoustic, electric and slide guitars, mandolin, and vocals. at about midnight (10 hours in), we pulled out electric guitars and all the effects we owned, and recorded about 20 minutes of "experimental noise," as we like to call it, which we then layered under the first two tracks.

the songs:
we decided to go in chronological order according to plot and location shifts. so, where to actually start?
so many themes & characters to choose from, where to start?

why, the horny teenager, of course.
in the novel, al joad is the 16-year-old who sleeps with girls and is obsessed with cars (what's changed in the almost 70 years since?)
his sexual endeavors serve as an apt metaphor for the farming community, thus spawning the opening lyrics of the album (basically me on my knees screaming and slamming on the drum machine while michael played guitar noise)
"i spread my seed..." sung about 50 times. it then slows down into a single tap and the lyrics "fix the car, fix 'er up."

this leads into the personification of the land itself as it raped by "cold steel machines" in michael's song "bare bones." a basic track with vocals, acoustic guitar, slide guitar and noise. in the beginning, it is discordant (purposely done in the chord selection), but leads into a passionate cry of warning to the people, though there is nothing they can do at this point.

the third song is a "macrocosmic" song, covering the general mood of the migrants as they travel westward. this is a minute-long me singing over a drum machine run through a phase-shifter...i know everyone cares.

fourth song: another michael composition follows (after a brief 'bridge' of a track, just us playing a few soft chords to bring the mood back down); this one's called "in on me," and it's about the character of grandpa and how he is connected to the land--he is naked and hollow without oklahoma.

to be continued...