Safety First

Safety First


About the same vintage as It Shouldn't Be This Way, this song has similar lyrical ambitions (but fewer lyrics).

Musically, it's the mutant offspring of XTC's This Is Pop and pretty much any single put out by Postcard Records.

Provisionally Yours, Someone In There, At Night

Provisionally Yours


Somewhere around the spring of 1985 I had the presence of mind to go shopping for an actual guitar amp.

Through the Auto Trader I found a Fender Twin Reverb for sale. The owner was an electrical engineer who lived in Eclipse, worked for GE and gigged in country bands. He was looking to sell the Twin and get a more reliable Peavey combo instead. I liked the amp, he showed how to check speaker polarity with a battery and that was it.

Soon after I was putting that tremelo & reverb to heavy use recording the likes of Provisionally Yours and working up my Howard Devoto impression.


Someone In There



At Night



This was recorded some years after being written. I like it musically and like the arrangement done here. Even tho' this meant to be a classic unreliable narrator kind of tune, the lyrics still spook me.

Literal minded folk (of either a dark or a protective frame of mind) be warned--this just ain't your song. Go behave.

Comfort Waltz, Winter Palace, Hear Me Call

Comfort Waltz



Winter Palace


Hear Me Call

All three songs were written in the mid 1980s. All bear some grandiose notions-- the latter two wanting to be something like Fairport Convention circa "Tale In Hard Time" with a touch of Mission of Burma, Hüsker Dü, et al.

(Yeah, go ahead, laugh . . .)

Whatever they are or aren't in terms of concept or execution, they are some of my faves.

Gratuitous geek note: Hear Me Call might be one of the first things I recorded with anything sequenced besides a drum machine. Indeed, I used the band's Roland TR-505 drum machine as a rudimentary sort of MIDI sequencer to drive my bandmate Dale's Korg Poly-800. Still doing the passing between two cassette decks trick, I could record the drums, a very basic synth bass and whatever live stuff in one pass.

The versions of the others were recorded later on with, at the very least, the best MIDI gear a Caldor or a Lechmere could offer.