To prepare tiger woods pga tour golf game patches for the contemporary tiger woods pga tour golf game patches folk band Midtown Dickens ' concert in Duke Gardens on July 18 , we invited band cofounder Catherine Edgerton to share her personal anecdotes and insights regarding each song on Home , the band's outstanding new record, with a mind toward revealing new layers tiger woods pga tour golf game patches and shades rather than fixing down simple meanings. Edgerton, an accomplished storyteller , did just that.
Last summer tiger woods pga tour golf game patches I went thrifting with Kyle. Afterward, adorned in our neon treasures and faux-hawks, we wandered into a jewelry store to pretend to search for the perfect diamond. We stumbled out laughing, and then, I wrote this tune. It's a love song to the subversion tiger woods pga tour golf game patches of the norm. It describes the friction we misfits feel finding a home in and outside of a predefined trajectory. Our defiance affords us freedom to be home always (and in all ways) because we are creating it.
Playing this in the wake of Amendment One has changed its meaning for me—the celebration of our choice to wander off the beaten path is now also a reminder that that very path is blocked off to us and our comrades.
Every year I go out to the woods for a month or two. In 2009, Kym [Register, tiger woods pga tour golf game patches Midtown Dickens cofounder] and I decided we'd each write songs about animals to keep our chops up while I was gone. I wrote a terrible song about a whale, and she wrote "Elephant." When I heard it, I forgot tiger woods pga tour golf game patches all about the whale. I love the notion tiger woods pga tour golf game patches of herds changing, and of feeling alone even when you're a part of something. I often pretend I'm an elephant when we sing it.
One February, my friend Liz and I spent a week in a screened-in-shack of a beach house in Charleston, SC. It was just after a big break-up, and I was in search of a new start. So we tore off our shoes and over-clothes and barreled off the back step and across the beach to the sea. Our force carried tiger woods pga tour golf game patches us forward, in, and under. The crash was so out-of-body that I was seized, reborn, and expelled onto the beach, all before I could lose my breath.
The baptismal plunge was magical, but it didn't fix the heartache. I realized that there's no such thing as moving away from the broken tiger woods pga tour golf game patches parts inside us; the best we can hope for is to find peace, and if we're lucky, write a song about it.
Liz's dog cut her leg, and after trying everything over the course of several months to get her to stop licking tiger woods pga tour golf game patches it, Liz called a pet psychic. The psychic said that Zoe had been a wolf in a past life, and had chewed through her leg to free herself from a trap. To remedy the problem, the psychic tiger woods pga tour golf game patches gave Zoe an imaginary prosthetic dog-leg. Since there is no way not to write a song about that, I started writing "Only Brother."
Each verse speaks to a different way we seek to fill the caverns in our hearts. There is a verse for love, God, competition, and consumption. And at the risk of fetishizing rugged individualism, the chorus speaks to the development of self-reliance as a foundation from which to accept, tiger woods pga tour golf game patches cherish, and let go of all these precious mechanisms and muses.
There's nothing like a cross-country tour with your best friend to get some shit out in the open. In one particularly unfenced and heated desert moment, we pulled over and Kym climbed up a mountain with the banjo. tiger woods pga tour golf game patches I sat and watched cars pass, hubcaps shooting off rays of sun while she wrote "Apple Tree." At first, she thought we'd never play it out, but the scariest things to sing out are the very things that should be sung. So we sing it.
We tried and tried recording this as a four-piece, but something wasn't sitting right. Finally tiger woods pga tour golf game patches someone suggested that Kym take a pass at it by herself. So I walked back to the kitchen, and listened to the guitar coming through the speakers. Somehow, it wrapped everything in gold and just dissolved me into warmth. We kept the first take, chair-creak and all.
Jonathan [Henderson, Midtown Dickens bass player] and I spent childhood summers slip-'n'-sliding on the Crocodile Mile . It had this little arch with a plastic curtain that you would slide through into a little pool. When my dad first got it for us, he couldn't get the poles to stick in the ground. So he propped them up with cinderblocks. I've got an amazing picture of Jonathan sliding between cinderblocks into the pool.
This is the only tune on Home that Kym and I wrote together, and it feels to me like a letter to each other. Last summer, we got to go on tour with the Mountain Goats , and we decided to open with this number to a sold-out crowd at the Fillmore in San Francisco. I put my harmonica holder over my head and we launched in, dizzy and exhilarated. My heart was bursting and I started in on the solo, only to realize that I had put the harmonica in the holder upside-down. Playing the solo backwards in front of all those people was quite possibly my most triumphant moment ever.
This song broke a mold for us. I was reluctant to venture into an experimental sound-scape because noise performances have felt alienating to me. The shows I've seen are men crouched over a pedal board, tweaking and turning in ways that (unless you've played noise) make no fucking sense. But since we were sticking to the instruments we used in the song, and trying to audibly describe a volcano exploding, I agreed to give it a whirl. I used a tiny spring that comes from a clock, and ran it up and down the strings of the banjo making creaks. And sure enough, I had a blast.
We covered a Townes Van Zandt song and arranged it so that it went from a minor chord progression into a major one at the end of the song. We decided to ditch the cover and write the transition into our own song. So Kym was like, "Well, we need a song!" and I was like, "Oh! We can use the tune from that shitty song about a whale!"
Kym wrote this one awhile back as an anthem for stepping out into Durham, after a tough transition that we both went through. It was hard to wade through that summer, and I got a heart-full of strength singing this song with her. To me, it's a cry to embrace and redefine a home that has changed, but is still home.
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