Uncluttering

To celebrate the release of our new six-song EP, “Uncluttering the gutter spouts,” we’ll be posting a blog entry every Monday night for the next six weeks about a song on the album, with the final entry on April 30th: a week before our album release show on May 12th at Hawks & Reed. We’ll also be simultaneously posting a video for each song so you, dear listener, can lean the melodies, memorize the words, and invent your dance moves in advance. To keep things interesting, let’s start with the last song on the album and work our way forward. And since the last song is the title track, perhaps crawling backwards makes a kind of sense…

“Uncluttering” began the way many songs and poems do: with a line or image that floated into my brain while doing yard work. In this case, a succession of lines and images about yard work. But pretty quickly it became clear to me that this one might be “about” more than just weeding and raking. Which doesn’t mean it isn’t also about yard work, one of those tasks in life that are never fully done, but rather, shift in emphasis and amount of exertion depending on the season.

Lyrically, “Uncluttering” actually moves from the yard itself in the first two verses (flower beds, privet hedge), to the outskirts of the house in the third verse (window wells), and ends up on the roof of the house “uncluttering the gutter spouts / of shingle-grit dreams.”

Yards are transitional places. They’re part of the natural world, but tamed nature: nature groomed to accommodate the needs, desires, and vanities of the people who manicure them. And if your yard’s an expression of you, how much more so is your house?

I had fun inventing and blending words in this song. You won’t find “uncluttering” and “unleaving” in your dictionary—at least not yet. Although I’m not sure if “shingle-grit” is a term that’s used outside this song, anyone that’s ever cleaned out the gutters of an older house knows exactly what I’m talking about here.

If you are analogous to your house, what does it mean to “unclutter your gutter spouts of shingle grit dreams?” Well, what negative crap do you need to flush out of your psyche to open it up to allow better, bigger dreams to flow through with the rain? Hopefully this image works for you on any number of levels. One way I like to think of it is flushing out the current administration in the White House…

For a two-minute ukulele song that’s at least partially about simplifying, you could argue there’s a whole lot of clutter in this song. On the other hand, when I think of how many more tracks I wanted to add… Mark Alan Miller (who mastered the album and helped me refine the mixes) remarked that this song made the best use of a Zube Tube he’d ever heard. How do you top an accolade like that? Maybe I should quit while I’m ahead.

I recorded 41 of “Uncluttering’s” 42 tracks at Algorhythm Studios (aka: a wet basement in Greenfield, MA), including three tracks that feature Hilary Weiner’s backing vocals during the outro. James recorded his one-hundred-percent badass bass-line at Lowe Down Solar Studios (also in lovely Greenfield) and sent it on to me. If you’d like to learn how to play it, watch the video! This may well be my favorite J Lowe bass-line. What’s yours?

The “words” take up less than half of the song. The rest is essentially a drone that builds in intensity with the layering of textures and the beats gradually getting heavier. I think of this part of the song as kind of an “ohm of exorcism.” Feel free to hum/moan/groan along until you expel all that nasty shingle-grit from your bloodstream…

… until, at last, you are free to sink tranquilly into the purrs of enlightenment: the sound of a soul uncluttered of every last thing but pure bliss. Repeat as many times as needed.

Last but certainly not least, purrs of enlightenment provided by my sensei, The Cat of Many Names.