(Editors note: Captain Reither helms a SUBMARINE. Captain Sand a TALL SAIL SHIP)
Captain Sand: have you reconsidered your mutinous display of insolence from yesterday? will you sail with The S.S. More Powerful Than Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, and the Incredible Hulk Put Together?
Captain Reither: ah i see
you gettin the shivers before the ultimate battle commences?
Captain Sand: yargh
i see your allegiances lie at the bottom of the seas where i'll be sending ye
good day to thee Captain Reither, may the stars keep ye company on your final night adrift in that underground shitbox
Captain Reither: ai mate. from the deepest fathoms is where i be most comfortable.
Captain Sand: deepest fathoms of the cabin boys arse from what i hear, yargh
Captain Reither: ya can't be a sending me to the sea's bosoms, it be where i'm from!
yar, ye best take that last one back there ye swarvy scum!
yar, my harpoon's bigger than yours! what do ye think of thar apples!
Captain Sand: i take thee apples and say, ask yur mum, for she was the whale i harpooned not but a fortnight ago and i can tell ye she felt it in her oily bones
Captain Reither: oh yea, well shut up.
Captain Sand: i win the pirate argument!
Captain Reither: ye aint be talkin about me mum in such a scurvy way, now i be right set on blowin ye timbers to the corners of the seven seas!
Captain Sand: ye be dirty devil indeed
shes a good ship, and yer maker. me an me laddies fear not the underwater shitbox. like a turd in er toilet, ye shall be flushed into eternity
Captain Reither: ai, a most base notion! not unlike yer ship’s base that me and me crew be steering towards filling with our finest of cannonballs! and then we shall finally set our scopes on yer landridden wives and daughters! ai, a good strong scrubbin indeed be just what our underwater souls be needin!
Captain Sand: yer planks be rotted from skanky westerly wenches matey.
yargh
Captain Reither: ai matie! our planks be only the humble vessel that transports those filthy barnacles that yur busty wench of a mum be distributin amongst me crew!
no rum can cure er!
Captain Sand: yargh? did you just spell " matey" as "matie"? i knew you to be a buggering bilge rat, but yer the proof is in the puddin' methinks
Captain Reither: arrr, ye talk of puddin gives breeze to the notion that ye and the puddin be of good acquaintance!
yargh, and what kinda pirate does me think ye be when ye be speakin on another Capn's spelling? arrgh, methinks ye mighta not be a pirate a'tal mate.
Captain Sand: yargh, enough talk, yer a dead man for all yer disrespectin' Captain Reither The Bitch Face
Captain Reither: arrgh, i won't be a listenin to no Capn' Sand talk about me watery repute! What kinda fishy smell surrounds a sea capn' by the salty name a Sand?
ai, ye be a land lugger in disguise, with no business out at sea with the real rum swillers matey!
Captain Sand: i could drown thee with me pinkie
by neptunes trident ill spear thee backwards and fricassee yer FACE
Captain Reither: if ye be speakin on yer lake trout of a harpoon matey, and the watery golden showers ye be a desirin to rain upon me an me crew, than ye do best to leave yer pinkie on deck!
Captain Sand: eh?
speakin' crabbish are we?
shut yer scurvy ridden face
shall we do battle then?
to the pain?
Captain Reither: ai!
none o' the pain be a lain on my timbers friend, only the pleasure of watchin ye sink!
http://jbkphotography.com/beard
i be recruitin this scurvy polack to be mannin me barberin onboard!
he be a man to fear, mark me words!
Captain Sand: yargh
ye can take 'em
all i need is a shot a der rum and a them memries of yer Lady Reither's humpback
Captain Reither: argh! ye boils me blood sand Capn'! ye be queer as the curve in yer harpoon and the world knows it!
Captain Sand: the wenches like the curve methinks
Captain Reither: ai, then they be sailors in wench rags matey, and their whaleholes be filled with that which you be so desirin of!
yargh!
Captain Sand: YARGH!
salty wenches is how i like my chips
right be der
YARGH
Captain Reither: argh, ye be a top scoundrel Sand!
This interview was conducted via email by the illustrious, Johan, of the Swedish music blog, Let's Pretend We're Bunny Rabbits (http://bunnyrabbits.blogspot.com). It is currently being translated into Swedish to be featured on that blog, but we figured we'd post it here in English, since some Baskerville supporters might be a little rusty when it comes to reading that particular nordic language.
Throw Me The Statue will also be interviewed in the very near future by the self-same, one-and-only, Johan, so make sure to check back in here at The Family Gathers to have a gander at that one too!
So without further ado...
0) Who is Black Bear? How and when did you start the band? What were your motivations?
Black Bear is me, Sam Beebe. Everything you hear on “The Cinnamon Phase” is me. I am a solo artist through and through, to the extent that it’s really difficult for me to produce music in any form in the company of others. I am not an extremely private person but when it comes to making art of any kind I have only really ever worked solitarily, and that is mostly by choice, but also partly due to circumstance. I like the idea of working with other people but I think it would have to be in a style in which my elements of the collaboration were still created in privacy.
I have always been the type of person who when he falls in love with a certain art form he can’t help but be inspired to produce some of his own. Black Bear is the direct product of a simple desire to try my hand at making music after cultivating a deep love for what we call, for lack of a better term, “indie rock”. After college (Vassar, in Poughkeepsie, New York), where I hosted a weekly radio show and made countless mixes for my girlfriend-at-the-time, my best friend and already-musician, Scott Reitherman and I decided to take a shared love with us out to Seattle and not only record our own music but to release it ourselves on a record label which we would start (Baskerville Hill). It was a spark, a challenge to ourselves, and we vowed to just give it a shot and see what came of it. While setting the foundations of the label we simultaneously worked on the music. Scott is a true musician, complete with instrument training and an academic understanding of what goes into music, whereas I was just an ex-high-school-choir singer with a small history of writing lyrics to rap over preexisting hip-hop instrumentals into the left ear of headphones that were plugged into the microphone jack of my computer---alone in my bedroom. I was going on guts and crossed fingers, but I’ll admit that somehow I had a certain amount of confidence that I would be able to pull something off that could pass as “worthwhile”. The first song I ever recorded was called “The Birds in the Bushes” and it was short and with very little, if any, structure. Just two keyboard parts---one that came first, one that came second---percussion that I banged out on the edge of the dresser drawer that my laptop was sitting on, and vocals. There is no arguing that musically it was about as simple as they come, but it was the vocals, the lyrics, that made it compelling (if it was). It was a song about a solo camping trip I went on out on the Olympic Peninsula, and it was as honest as I could make it. People I played it for seemed to respond quite well and it was at that point I knew I had a chance of making more music that would interest people.
'Tis I Andrew Rogers Morris signing in with a second construction of a "recipe for a song". Happily I find myself the recipient of enough luck and circumstance to devote some part of an afternoon to this endeavor. It has been suggested that there are ways to narrow this greater whole of an idea down to a more specific, shall we say topical genre of focus. So, I offer up to you the following: A recipe for a song after wandering solo around brooklyn on a fantabulous day drinking wild turkey after arriving here from a late night flight the night before, to be confined only to songs currently found in my ipod which is not as stocked as I could wish because it is a new ipod because my last one was stolen from my mother's car while she was at the gym because someone out there is an enormous dickface. And so, without further ado, my recipe:
Someone wise once said, "it's best to lead by example."
The great "Shoeless Joe" Jackson --- who was especially wise, being that he was a ghost who convinced Kevin Costner to create a baseball diamond in his cornfield for him and other dead guys to play ball on --- once said, "if you build it, they will come." And that was the only truly great thing Kevin Costner ever did.
The point is, I've realized that in regards to the Family Gathers prompt I posted last week the best way to get the fire started will be to offer up one of my own responses to illustrate the idea --- a starter log, if you will.
So here's a recipe for a song. Imagine the essences of these songs being mixed and stewed into one song. Purely hypothetical, purely abstract. I'm not asking for images of all of these musicians together in a studio writing and recording a song, nor a cacophony of all the songs being played at once. It's just a feeling and an idea. Questions of practicality are of zero concern here.
One of our original ideas for The Family Gathers was to create a place not just for people to show off the different things they’re doing, but also for interaction --- be it social, critical, comical, academic, whatever floats the boat. Calls-and-responses. Calls-to-action. Woodsheds. Orgies. Rolled into this spirit is the necessity of a starting point, and I aim to make one today. A prompt. A blinking cursor.
The idea for this Baskerville Hillian tee was cribbed rather directly from a shirt I saw in a store the other day. So it's pretty much plaigiarism unless I put quotation marks on either side of it, but I think that would look stupid so I'm not going to. Let's just leave it at that. At this point it's merely a rough sketch that I diddled up on Illustrator, but you can get the gist. It's a very simple idea with, I think, pleasing aesthetic results. Whether or not it will actually be produced remains to be seen --- I figure it would be a quite complicated print-job. Either way, I will post it here today as an art object.
Would you accept a piece of red cloth torn from the underarm of a GAP sweater manufactured in Taiwan as art?
What if it were pinned to a white wall in Larry Gagosian's Chelsea Gallery? Or pinned to the wall in between a Frank Stella and Gerhard Richter at MoMA?
im sitting on the couch at scott's, we're both completely sedated from the pho and watching the ncaa basketball championships. im filling out my netflix queue, top is 'Cleo from 5 to 7'. its my favorite movie by french director agnes varda. it's the most beautiful film i have ever seen (aesthetically i mean). im also looking online for a van to rent for our show in spokane on monday. . . .
I saw this mural outside of Pablo Nerudas house in Santiago, Chile. It went on for an entire city block. I don't know who painted it but it speaks to me like his poetry does to so many. The world is full of different, unique souls. Some get lost in the sea of life while others stand out, catch your eye and make an impression. Which will we be?
Here, at Scott's suggestion, is a YouTube video of my performance of a song called "Heather" at the Baskerhoot house-concert this past July. I must warn you: I look a little giggly and jiggly. My apologies; I had a bit too much viognier earlier in the day.
i will make my disclaimer now- obviously a blog at nearly 2 am, is bound to be borderline silly and borderline non-coherent. but here we go anyways! welcome to jamie land. . .
Here's another tune from my new joint. Driving down to Portland today with Chris Maher to get this beast mastered tomorrow. It's shaping out to be 15 songs, and about one hour on the dot long. Looking forward to final completion like a holistic bleedin. Hope all is fun snacks in your condiment aisle...
On my first walk in Germany, I passed a poster of a gloomy looking man. Someone had drawn him a little half-Hitler moustache. I found it curious—I knew nothing about how Germans considered their holocaust history at that point—and took a picture.
I've been working on a record for a while now with a host of people helping out. I wanted to throw up a tasty tid bit from the sessions and give a sneak peek at the record which I'm calling Moonbeams and that should be available in a month. Hope you are all warm and loving life.
For weeks now my thirst has been doubling by the day. In time I am determined that Europe will prevail upon me with a royal flush of new music, but at the moment in the throes of my transition that gives me predominantly basic information regarding adaptation to life in Germany and a teaching job at a primary school, I am left with a dry gap in my exploration of the latest and greatest tunes to hit the world. The culmination of this growing thirst occurred today, Mittwoch (Wednesday), September 13th, almost a month and a half after my arrival in Bavaria, and I turned to the corporate standby that could, at the click of a mouse, deliver to me something fresh -- iTunes Music Store. For a week and a half I have been anxiously checking my mailbox for the two albums I ordered from Tomlab (conveniently located in Germany) -- Final Fantasy and Casiotone for the Painfully Alone -- but today I was just plain sick of meeting nothing more than werbungen (advertisements) when I turned my postal key.
My bike ride to and from school is magic. Magic like the kind of spell that someone casts onto someone they deeply care for, like an arm waving a wand whose gesture initiates an immediate altering of the state of things. Even in rain, which still comes often and on a predominantly unannounced basis, I revel at the massive and threatening sky. This is no flat British wash of dull grey. This is a sky like a churning ocean, inspired and bubbling and curling. There are bold shocks of white and blue, and they are not so far off, but there is no telling if they will hold. After a poor morning’s sleep (for some unknown reason, this has been common) the tired crank in my mood untwists as I coast from the last giant pedal of my uphill climb, out into the open fields and past the family of cows. The bull moans, the calf blinks, and the heifers rip and chew, rip and chew at the grass. The hills roll away from us like curtains on a window to the world, and the villages announce themselves in the distance with red, earthen rooves. My breaths are deep and quick. I say, “Guten Morgan” to the woman and her Terrier, and they say the same back to me. Down the gravel I nod at the farmer and his tractor.
It is wild to me that come noon tomorrow I will have been here in Bavaria for two weeks. It feels like twice that, easy. I suppose it is akin to the summer-camp effect, which can effortlessly turn two weeks in your teens into an entire phase of your life, complete with the discovery and loss of love, epiphanies of self-realization, and a general overhaul of what kind of person you want to be. Not that I’ve experienced any of those kinds of things here, but its the mysterious condensing of time caused by newness and change that is similar. There is so much to take in! When I walked into my apartment yesterday evening after a two-night trip to Prague, I felt like Odysseus returning from, well... the Odyssey. You’d think that while travelling time would do its usual flying---like during fun---but the fact is that travelling is much more complex. Visiting a new city, or moving to a new continent for that matter, is a very involving business. It is provocative and confusing, envigorating and challenging. Fun is bland and shallow compared to travelling.
My bike ride to and from school is magic. Magic like the kind of spell that someone casts onto someone they deeply care for, like an arm waving a wand whose gesture initiates an immediate altering of the state of things. Even in rain, which still comes often and on a predominantly unannounced basis, I revel at the massive and threatening sky. This is no flat British wash of dull grey. This is a sky like a churning ocean, inspired and bubbling and curling. There are bold shocks of white and blue, and they are not so far off, but there is no telling if they will hold. After a poor morning’s sleep (for some unknown reason, this has been common) the tired crank in my mood untwists as I coast from the last giant pedal of my uphill climb, out into the open fields and past the family of cows. The bull moans, the calf blinks, and the heifers rip and chew, rip and chew at the grass. The hills roll away from us like curtains on a window to the world, and the villages announce themselves in the distance with red, earthen rooves. My breaths are deep and quick. I say, “Guten Morgan” to the woman and her Terrier, and they say the same back to me. Down the gravel I nod at the farmer and his tractor.
It is wild to me that come noon tomorrow I will have been here in Bavaria for two weeks. It feels like twice that, easy. I suppose it is akin to the summer-camp effect, which can effortlessly turn two weeks in your teens into an entire phase of your life, complete with the discovery and loss of love, epiphanies of self-realization, and a general overhaul of what kind of person you want to be. Not that I’ve experienced any of those kinds of things here, but its the mysterious condensing of time caused by newness and change that is similar. There is so much to take in! When I walked into my apartment yesterday evening after a two-night trip to Prague, I felt like Odysseus returning from, well... the Odyssey. You’d think that while travelling time would do its usual flying---like during fun---but the fact is that travelling is much more complex. Visiting a new city, or moving to a new continent for that matter, is a very involving business. It is provocative and confusing, envigorating and challenging. Fun is bland and shallow compared to travelling.