It's been good to try to remember what was going on in my life at the times this one was written and then when it was recorded. The Iowa Opera House Project was just a twinkle in my saucey, bloodshot eye. It had begun, I suppose the IOHP, but was not yet under full sail.
I am listening to it now for the first time in a long time..
I finished it at Helmer’s house on his gear during the pandy shutdown. Me and Dave did little EQ fixes and some subtle averaging FET compression. He was hands off, but it was his toys and his time.
Andrew Brockman and I started almost all the songs on what became Donkey Island with just me and a tenor guitar, singing and playing, then added everything else.
Bob Black picks banjo. I picked him up and drove him to the studio from a gravel lot at a crossroads near Kolona where is wife drove him. He told me a story about the guy who replaced him in Bill Munoe’s band playing Jimmy Carter’s inauguration on acid.
It was the beginning to what is now a beautiful friendship with Alma Drake who's work I knew from long ago and recently. It was 2010 or 11 or 12- right in there.
I wrote it sitting on the porch where I live now, downing cans and smelling the restaurant smoke blowing into my neighborhood and hearing the summer frogs and bugs and stumbling.
Sometimes you can't tell how good you have it. You assess at the end of a rough trip and it might seem to have all gone wrong. But we are walking a path. We are all approaching, knowingly looking down in and then getting back into the ground from which we all have sprung by whatever means you believe are true. It's all true, what you believe.
You don't always get to, but when you get to, make it nice. Everyone else is coming.
Denison is a real place. Donna Reed is from there. I had lunch with her daughter once. But I have never been.
Denison is beerese for “a den of sin”.
*clears throat*
Inna gotta davida baby…
Denison
As night begins to fall, smells of town are on the wind. Hello, goodye cicadas call. We fly so life begins again.
I start to walk along the road toward where lights shine up on the clouds. Denison, I have been told, there's more than gods law will allow.
I hear the frogs up in the trees..smell the dust up in my clothes. Below me I see lights and streets. My bride awaits me there I know.
You can treat me like fool. I’m told that is what you do. Just love me like them girls from school, and I will stay in love with you.
As night begins to fall smells of town are on the wind. Hello, goodbye cicadas call. We fly so life begins again.
We fly so life begins again.
Nothing makes me more confidently poetiphylisophiclish than being alone and in the bag. Here is some evidence that it occasionally can bear a little weight.. maybe helped me attain a long clear vision of a metaphore made up of the things in the air around me.
Ryan Bernemann plays lovely, rooted well-spaced upright bass.
Bob Black plays banjo great. Every time I listen to it I remember us confessing to each other about acid on the drive to town.
Alma Drake sings her fiddle over top, just right, right in the fiddle holes.
I plunk a harmony tenor revisiting the bag on the porch from the bag in the studio. adeno’sin.
Thank you Andrew Brockman, for putting up with my bad dance-dad attitude. It turned out great.
Buy one:
https://samknutson.bandcamp.com/track/denison-2
