Bury It

This songs comes to us from yet another novel. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is a tale of an autistic kid who finds the neighbor’s dog murdered (with a pitchfork, no less) and his attempt to track down the culprit, Sherlock Holmes style. Although it sounds gimmicky, the book is from the perspective of the autistic kid and is extremely sad, funny, and enlightening.

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This song is also my rediscovering standard tuning. After years of almost always screwing around with my strings, this is the first of several (more to come soon) songs written in good ole EADGBE.

Lyrics

Leave well enough alone and drop it
If you knew what the neighbors know, you would drop it

Machine hum in head
Reading letters from the dead
Machine hum in head

Liars lying low
Criers crying home
Liars lying low

When you found it all alone, and you carried it
If you knew what the neighbors know, you would bury it

Liars lying low
Criers crying home
Liars lying low

Origins

So some of you are [ familiar with/actually in ] the detholz!. A primo band from chicago. beside being a good band with good songs, they have a special talent at deconstructing bad 80’s songs and reconstructing them into horribly complex and, well, good songs. I have a deep love for reinterpreting, in a semi ironic manner, popular songs as well (more on that some other day). Anyway… I got the idea of taking detholz songs that tend to be more complex and good, and turning them into simple and bad pop songs. I think i have successfully done that to one of them. Sometime I do plan to commit my singer/songwriter version of “behold the man” to .wav

Anyway I had the idea (and it sounded great in my head at they time) to turn the song “sunburned in the sun” into a green day song. When I sat down and tried to get it working, well…, it didn’t… at all. So I ditched that. But immediately came up with the guitar part for this song. It’s in Eb and even has a G drone through a lot of it ala SITS. Other than that, the song doesn’t sound anything like it or have any other similarities. But that is its auspicious beginnings.

Music

The song starts with a muted plucking of the primary chord. Between each verse and between the various later sections, it keeps returning to it. It ends as well, just as it begins, with a muted guitar playing that chord. The song wanders off a bit in the second half so that was a way to keep it anchored.

There are a lot of half steps in this song. The chorus melody is mostly half steps by using augmented and diminished chords (i think that is the technical term) as well as at one point going from Em to Eb. From verse to chorus, it goes from G# to G, another half step. At the end there is a guitar line that walks up mostly in half steps. Can’t say I planned all the half steps. But as I have listened to it, it’s something I have noticed.

The verses have a distinct progression but the notes (in the first part of each verse) are all part of the Eb scale, so in the second verse, I decided to pound out the single chord on top of the mix (the C chord (pattern?) up on the 6th fret has a real nice sound to it with doubled notes.

The drum sequencing in my songs tend to leave a lot to be desired. I am a really bad drummer and tend to be over ambitious in sequencing drums to fit the specifics of a song. But in this case, I think the drum track actually adds to the song, giving it a good groove with its particular bam-bam … bam pattern

The mid section. I wanted to do two things. One is to have it be just a single chord (back to Eb) and have it be a groove. I was thinking Talking Heads (early stuff) like found a job where they build this great vibe with very little complexity going on.

I also had in mind to build it up (which i always seem to do) with a progressively noisier sound. I actually ended up playing one guitar part with a phone just to get a cool sound out of it. The little melody that starts off the mid section is another nod to the detholz.

At the very end, I start playing full chords (of the verses) with a melody over it. Second pass through, there is another guitar line (i mentioned earlier). I ended up turning some chords minor where it would be natural to be major and also the other way around, which actually allowed me to do that half step walk up I mentioned earlier. It did not affect the melody of the song, so I could still sing the same thing over it.

The last half of the song sort of juts off into its own territory without returning. That was inspired by the book. In it, without getting into details, the kid starts investigating the murder of this dog, but in that, other secrets are discovered and his search goes somewhere completely else and the murdered dog turns out to have nothing to do with the second half of the book. I was attempting to do the same in the song. Although, I ended up putting the vocal parts at the end to tie it up and as it turns out, is my favorite part of the song.

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