Singin’ the Oesophagus to Sleep (1999)
the first proper cd i ever made, recorded over a period of five days in july of 1999. my original title was “on-the-spot shit”, which is still written on the original disc. i had been recording albums on cassette tape for years, but i had never been able to make anything at even close to this level of sound quality, to say nothing of the possibilities opened up by having more than one track at my disposal. this was my first experience with overdubbing, leading me to the realization that it’s weird attempting to harmonize with yourself when you’ve never done it before.
there are lots of songs about sex and sex-related things (yer boobs, meetings with furry creatures and kermit got laid, to name a few), and i seem to sing in a different voice on almost every track, rarely slipping into anything approaching my real/normal voice, whatever that was at the time. case in point: the opener, tosteestostas, is an epic song about the death of aunt ronita—the first time she was killed off in song, but certainly not the last—delivered for the most part in a faux-british accent. i always tear up around the bit where her breasts are buried alongside her body with a separate grave…it’s truly touching stuff. the title was something i accidentally came up with while tripping over my words during a spoken passage near the end of the song (i was trying to say, “and what it was, no one would ever know,” but botched it completely), turning it into a mantra and eventually screaming it over and over again for a suitably warped and bombastic climax, complete with “orchestral” backing. all at once, my imaginary record label/publishing company had been born, and it’s still going strong today. yer boobs marks the first time i ever harmonized with myself or overdubbed anything, and at the time i deemed it “lou reed on hash combined with dog shit”. it was one of the catchiest tunes i had ever come up with back then—mostly because of the sing-along chorus—and i kept heading back into my little 10 x 12 music room after it had been recorded, listening to it repeatedly and trying to get it stuck in my head in case it disappeared during the night through some stroke of bad luck. thankfully, no such thing happened.
wisdom comes in small doses is a tribute to some of the great teachers in my life, including my stepfather and some high school fucknuts, like ms. temcheff-coulter, the grade nine french teacher i used to engage in friendly conversation with after class, until one day she got paranoid and told me she thought people would think we were having an affair if we kept it up. she was probably in her late forties, i was fourteen, and nobody ever thought of her in a sexual way under any circumstances. she ended up having a nervous breakdown or something at the encouragement of jon grieves and subsequently vanished, but she’ll always live on in my heart. also present and accounted for are mr. damour, a foul-mouthed and memorable grade school substitute teacher, and of course some of the ex-family, with most of the attention given to my stepfather and some of his more memorable sayings. he also has a nice stint as a high school substitute teacher in the middle of the song. meetings with furry creatures is a richard thompson piss-take, with me trying on more of an irish accent and throwing in some vaguely celtic-sounding guitar flourishes. i didn’t realize until eight years later that the music was probably inspired by “time to ring some changes”. it’s the only song on the album with lyrics that were written beforehand, and for some odd reason i had originally planned to record it with my friend peter for the ill-fated starving artists album. girl from gatineau is sort of an imagining of what life might have been like if i had gone after that pretty girl standing on the rocks at the side of the water who apparently waved back at me when i gave a half-asleep wave in her direction, on that epic grade eight year-end fieldtrip. i still remember the sweatpants she was wearing, black with white vertical stripes, and her long blonde hair. i don’t really stick to the plot, though, getting into talk of japanese monkeys and random silliness.
two of the tracks that initially seemed like uninspired filler to me are now two of my favourite things on the cd: foreign waste is sort of a twisted ballad with lyrics like, “band-aids & broken spare ribs / trophies & frisbees for kids”, and, “i couldn’t hold it in / the penis was too wide”, while the title track might be the best thing on the whole album, and i think it remains one of my finest creations even after all these years. at the time i thought it was a fairly uninteresting instrumental, but now it sounds like a very early stab at something approaching rudimentary electronica. the whole thing was recorded entirely live, sans-overdubs, with the primitive looping achieved by setting up a microphone with a guitar-amp simulator effect that was built into the mixer (the only effects i had access to at the time were those within the mixer), allowing me to set a delay in such a way that things just kept repeating and building up with no decay. i left the microphone on my desk and jumped back and forth between making noises into it (including handclaps, armpit farts, animal noises and falsetto shrieking), unplugging it, playing piano, leaning over to the right to play the old arp omni-2 synth, and then running back over to the desk and plugging the microphone back in to add some more layers to the real-time loop. the sound of the patch cord itself making a clunk as it re-entered the microphone became a part of the rhythm. it all builds to an ending of truly twisted proportions. was, was, was really is something approaching filler, but there’s enough silliness to keep it afloat (specifically the weird backing vocals), and it’s short enough to disappear before it overstays its welcome. i do kind of dig the part where i turn the need to cough into a rhythm instrument. kermit got laid brings everything full circle with an epic tale of kermit the frog’s adventures in love and loss, and his subsequent comeback on the late night talk show circuit. i accidentally erased a long spoken passage in the middle of the song about kermit surveying his life and coming to terms with his failures, but i think the song actually works better with the lengthy instrumental bits. i manage to play perhaps my first ever decent guitar solo at the end of the song, though it’s still pretty crude. i liked that 12-string fender acoustic guitar i rented for a while. it sounded good electrified, even with my shitty dean markley sound-hole pickup.
listening today, it’s surprising to me how decent it all sounds for the first cd i ever recorded. there isn’t any of the ugly digital clipping that would show up in some of my other early work, there’s no low end mud from acoustic guitars because i was using the pickup (i didn’t have a mic for guitars, so the sound was pretty thin and lifeless, though i thought it was grand at the time), and the lack of eq and compression doesn’t seem to have much of an overly negative impact on anything. about the only problem is that the master volume is incredibly quiet, but that can be remedied simply by turning it up.
years ago i briefly toyed with the idea of a follow-up album of similarly twisted improvised fare, to be called “feeding the oesophagus via intravenous noodle”. it never came together…though i guess it’s still a remote possibility that someday i’ll be moved to sing silly songs about weird sex-related things again. look for it in 2014.
TRACKS:
tosteestostas
yer boobs
foreign waste
meetings with furry creatures
girl from gatineau
we’ll see
singin’ the oesophagus to sleep
was was was
wisdom comes in small doses
kermit got laid
STUFF TO LISTEN TO:
Singin’ the Oesophagus to Sleep
