LYRICS

At the end of 2009, Eric Ambel sent me some instrumental demos he had been working on, wondering if I’d put some lyrics to them so he could use the songs for a solo record he was planning to do.

“The Wrong Light” was the first song I wrote for him. I wrote it in a little apartment in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany over the course of a couple of hours.

Whatever you hear in there, that’s what the song’s about. We spend too much time suppressing some of the darker, uglier things that live inside of us because we think they’re not supposed to be there. I’m a firm believer that people are inherently kind, but the world doesn’t turn on righteousness alone, and it’s real dangerous to pretend it does.

LYRICS

With apologies to the 1970 - 1978 Rolling Stones.

I’ve had this tune around for a couple of years now; I think this is maybe the third version I’ve cut, with the third different band. We never cut a version of the tune I didn’t like but, up until these sessions, we never cut one that sounded “right” to me. It’s a tougher tune than the chords suggest - way low in my register and I refused to change the key or go up an octave because I dug the way it sounded that low. Andrew played his ass off during those sessions but especially on this tune (that’s him on every guitar you hear except one*). It’s Stonesy without sounding like some shitty bar band playing a Stones song. I hope.

Tunes like this one, somebody has to tell me when to stop or I’ll just keep piling shit on there until we run out of instruments and voices. At different times, “Mercy” included two pianos, two different organ parts, a choir, Wurlitzer, Rhodes, claps, about fifteen guitars, god knows how many horns. It was like fucking “Born to Run” for me. I couldn’t stop. This time through, though, Andrew, Sean and Julian made it really easy. There’s so much already there with their playing that the impulse for overkill was non-existent. All we really had to do was make all the other pieces fit.

*The “other guitar” is me; it sounds like two guitars (electric and acoustic) because it’s an old hollow-bodied Gretsch so that “acoustic” sound you hear is my strumming bleeding in to my vocal mic.

LYRICS

“Exit Ghost” is a stage direction that appears in Hamlet, Macbeth, and Julius Ceasar. It is also the title of a Philip Roth novel (and a good one, at that) but Roth’s novel was not in my mind when I was writing “Exit Ghost.”

This is one of the few tunes on Heart of a Dog where I’m playing guitar. Whenever you have a songwriter playing in front of a “backing band,” the natural tendency of the band is to let the songwriter drive the tune - it’s his or her song, after all. That had gotten really boring and repetitive for me. I didn’t want to dictate the rhythm of this record, firstly because I can get pretty static in my playing sometimes, and secondly because I believe that when a band falls into that pattern of depending on the songwriter to carry the songs, they can get lazy. I wanted to have to adjust my phrasing and my melodies to what the band was doing, and I wanted everyone to be present from note one. It was important to me that these songs sounded immediate and alive. I think we accomplished that. That said, I’m pretty proud of the couple of melody lines I hid in this song when I did finally pick up the guitar and play.

LYRICS

Everybody’s got a place they can’t (or shouldn’t) go. This song is about those places. But it’s also about that line: “now I’m getting down to pray to the nearest thing to God I found,” because everybody has that, too. Bruce Springsteen said you can boil every song down to one line. For this song, that’s the line. Everybody’s got something that saves them; where we run in to trouble is the assumption that the thing that saves you is the same thing that saves me, and vice versa. And where we run in to worse trouble is trying to take those things away from one another.

Andrew got that enormous Crazy Horse tone for this tune - I have no idea how. We were all blown away listening to the playback; it’s just this sprawling sound. When Jordan and I sat down to mix the tune, we started running different things through this old Space Echo box. It was just the vocal and piano at first but then I made a joke about how “we oughta run everything through that for this one,” to which Jordan replied, “I’m going to.” So, that’s the sound. Andrew’s guitar and everything else from tape to tape, through an analog delay box.

LYRICS

Writing Nowhere Nights kind of exhausted all of my “Here is how I’m a fuckup” material, which is fine because you can only write that song so many times before people get tired of hearing it.

The solution, obviously, is to write “Enough about how I’m a fuckup, what do YOU think about me being a fuckup?”

One of the things I tried to do with this record was have more of a sense of humor about things; this song has got a few of my favorite lines on the record.

LYRICS

This was the last tune I wrote for the record, and the last song we tracked. After we finished tracking the rest of the record, I knew Andrew and Julian were coming back down to Portland for a day of guitar and percussion stuff and I figured if I could write a tune before they did, we could cut it as a trio and see if it was any good.

I had this idea to write something like the stuff Dylan did on Love and Theft, using an old blues form and writing around that. The tune started out as a shuffle when I cut the demo at home, but then Andrew and I talked that really hypnotic ascending riff thing and it seemed like a good idea; Julian’s playing something that is almost like a disco beat but you can’t make it out with the way we fucked up the room mics. I think we cut it in two takes, just the three of us. Dave Harding and David Lipkind came in the next day and put bass and harmonica on it, respectively.

Plenty of Dylan stuff made its way in there but, at the time I was writing “Kasey Anderson’s Dream,” I became briefly obsessed with the story behind “Ring O’ Rosie,” and that’s what gave the song its refrain and the voice (“Rosie”) that counters the narrative.

Mostly, I just wanted an excuse to work Sharon Jones into a song.

LYRICS

This is as close to a “State of Me” song as I put on this record. And it’s not even so much a “Here’s where I’m at” thing as it is a song I wrote as an exercise in brevity (not my strong suit as a writer), that I looked back at afterward and said, “Oh, this is about me.” It’s a thing that just came out one evening in my apartment and those moments - those effortless moments where the universe just hands me something - are rare enough for me that I know not to ignore them. The only thing I did was focus on making sure I didn’t get long-winded because a song like this can be really beautiful and arresting if done right for three or four minutes but it can get incredibly redundant if stretched much beyond that.

The idea when we cut the tune was to give it that spooky thing that Dylan and Lanois did so perfectly on Time Out of Mind, where there is an evident separation between instruments but it all bleeds together into one swirly, murky, spooky sound. Lewi Longmire came in and put some organ and farfisa on it, and Jenny Conlee played that really beautiful accordion part.

This song reminds me of winter in Oregon and that strange calm that comes when you just accept whatever is living inside of you at the moment and understand that it will be replaced by something else soon enough.

LYRICS

It’s not a record without a song about how somebody’s made a mess out of you, right? I wanted to write that tune without being maudlin. I think the fourth take of this tune is the one that made the record. You can probably hear Andrew, Julian, and me laughing in there because the second verse contains the words “stain” and “come” in close proximity to one another and we’re all fucking twelve years old.

Every take had laughter somewhere in there, for one reason or another, but that’s kind of the point. They call it playing music for a reason.

LYRICS

Wrote this in a hotel room in Minneapolis. I don’t think I even picked up the guitar because I knew it was just gonna be a blues thing and the key would figure itself out when we got around to cutting it. It’s about a few different things but mostly, it’s about those people who, you know, it’s always gotta be a production, whatever they’re going through. Everything’s a Shakespearean tragedy until the next hurricane blows in and then it’s, “Oh that? That was nothing. THIS is the storm. THIS is the tragedy.”

The blues thing: it’s almost a setup/punchline cadence with the way the verses are structured. I love that form, so I tried to use that and not take the thing too seriously. Once we got in to the studio and Andrew had that solid-but-jagged riff, we just sort of took it from there. I love the bass on this tune, and the two drum tracks; real caveman stuff, but it grooves.

Garth Klippert put a really great trumpet part on there - almost like a Waits “Hang On St. Christopher” thing - but it just wasn’t working with the rest of the tune, so we had to cut it. You can hear Garth groaning in the background, though. Every time he’d fuck up the horn pattern, he’d groan or shout, so we left those in to thank him for playing that great part we had to cut.

Tune sounds good in headphones. Jordan and I fun mixing it.

LYRICS

There was a record we started to make before Heart of a Dog, ten songs I had written in the span of a month or two in 2008. “Chick songs,” to use Steve Earle’s parlance. There were two sessions for that record, up in Bellingham, with some friends from other bands more notable than mine.

I say “more notable than mine” because, when it became incredibly clear to me that this was not working - the songs were not working, the band was not working - it was really hard not to second-guess myself. Who was I to tell these guys that we fucked it up and I was going to scrap it and make another record? They had been generous with their time and their ideas and, really, who the hell did I think I was? It was a strange position to be in, letting reverence and admiration (and probably some envy) threaten to dictate my decisions.

It worked out fine. I called everyone involved and said, “Look, it’s nobody’s fault - well, it’s my fault, really - but this record isn’t going to work. I don’t think any of us would be proud to have our name attached to this. I gotta start over.”

So I sat on it for a while, spent a year away, and then came back and called Andrew McKeag and said, “I’m sick of my records. Let’s make the Rock and Roll record we talked about last year. Give me two weeks to write it. Can you be in Portland in two weeks?”

“For Anyone” is one of three songs on Heart of a Dog that were left over from the 2008 sessions (“Mercy” and “Exit Ghost” being the other two). When we cut “For Anyone” in 2008, though, it was this really absurdly heroic-sounding Mellencamp thing. Like the theme song for a television show or something. Just abysmal. But I loved the song - I’m very proud of the writing - and I wanted one or two songs to temper all of the noise on Heart of a Dog, so we cut “For Anyone.” I love the way it came out, and that’s largely because of that parlor-sounding piano that Ralph Huntley plays. The arrangement owes a pretty big debt to Tom Waits’ song, “Come On Up to the House” - that really prominent kick and snare thing.

This is one of my favorite songs I’ve written. I’m glad we found a way to make it work.