Category Archives: Dave Crozier

Aug 10 0 comments
Dave Crozier, Friends, Indie Music, The Catbirds

In Magenta Skies IV

The “song a month” idea hasn’t quite panned out, but Beyer and Crozier are still forging ahead. There are no new tracks from Crozier to post, sadly, but there is a new Catbirdman demo, called “In Magenta Skies.” It’s the fourth song I’ve written with that title. Crozier asked me what it was about, and I couldn’t answer him off the cuff. Given time to think, I’d say it’s a “me against the world” song, in the sense that I felt small, like Brian Wilson felt small when he coined the lyric “I’m a cork in the ocean.” It was an introspective lyric, as many of mine are, and it attempted to dig deep, and it came up with contradictions. Dark and light. The first verse examines who I am, like Meyers-Briggs but more direct. The second verse attempts to look outward but is completely out of touch with reality. The third verse says, “well, just shut up and live with it.” Which I’ve done. Which I will continue doing.

The magenta skies are an otherworld of post-apocalyptic beauty, the celestial backdrop against which the Muses play, and spiritual beings perhaps, and ultimately it’s the clean slate that wipes us all out when Death finally rests upon us. Regardless of hopes and beliefs in an afterlife (which are not addressed in this song; I don’t get that far), the magenta skies will claim the spirit just as the soil devours muscle and bone. The magenta skies are the death of spirit. That’s what this is about, and I never realized it until this very post. There are temporary deaths of the spirit, while we yet live, but the spirit resurrects. My religious background taught me that the spirit never dies a final death, and I do believe that still, though I have no evidence for any of this. I think the spirit is kind of like a cell phone battery – you have to let it drain all its power and recharge it time and time again for it to remain at full strength…      (Um, OK, so chew on that one for a while. Talk about bringing the grandiose down to the pedestrian level…)

Anyway, below are the lyrics. Thanks to Dave Crozier for recording this with me. It sounds great so far, and I can’t wait to hear what happens to it after a bass guitar track and various guitar treatments are added.

Full of sweetness and light
Full of the moon
Empty inside
Dark as a mother’s womb
Bright as a bird whose song belies
Every shade of grey
In magenta skies

Shining actress in white
Hollywood star
She’s to die for
Always seen from afar
Wearing a blurred but bold disguise
Unafraid to play
In magenta skies

Banish darkness from night
Banish the sun
From the daytime
Let it come all undone
Call them absurd, the lows and highs
Let them fade away
In magenta skies

The Catbirds: In Magenta Skies IV [Demo First Mix]

Feb 04 0 comments
Dave Crozier, Indie Music, The Catbirds

The Beyer/Crozier 2010 Demos – January

This year we’ll chronicle the efforts of two young/old Mid-Atlantic musicians as they stave off complacency amidst overloaded milieu, facing bravely the post-post-post rock of a new decade, eschewing nostalgia, yet exploiting it, searching for that personal connection, posing where necessary, and being true to their school. Dave Crozier is one entrant, he from New Jersey, raised on punk, living and dying by the Guitar, buying a house and becoming domestic. Your esteemed blogger, the unreformed bachelor, fighting to keep a chunk of meat in the fridge, cleaning the house now and then, your own Catbirdman, in other words me – I am the other entrant. Together, Mr. Crozier and I will write 12 songs – one a month – and demo them, and share them with the wide world web here on Subanimal Sounds.

January is already in the books, and were it not for my lackadaisical bachelor ways, the songs would have been posted weeks ago. But I had a Natty Boh or three to drink, and a friend or two to see, and I had to sleep as well, and, well, let’s just be grateful they’re here at last. So without further ado, here are the January songs…

Dave Crozier starts off with a greeting to a former, or would-be lover, a fanciful desert mirage named Vera. He chose to play to his strength: taking on a dubious narrator’s voice, telling deluded tales of skewed romance. The narrator is never to be trusted in a Crozier song, and often times the narrative is told second hand, or seen from a distorted reflection. In this case, our protagonist reveals how often he has listened to a cassette recording made by the titular Vera, wearing it out as he wore out his heart. “You can’t put the contents of your life on a cassette,” the narrator moans, yet he must believe you can, or at least he searched over and over for the bottom line as he oxidized that C-90 that Vera gave him years back. Out of necessity, the singer writes in the present, but what ends up in the forefront are the contents of what has been lost over the course of many years. Loss is key to this song, I think. The singer saw a different future, which became the lost past, yet he won’t let go. A nice start for Mr. Crozier, a misty snapshot, a sketch of lost connections. Can’t wait to see what February holds.

Dave Crozier: Hello Vera

Mr. Catbirdman’s January song is called “Lesser Lights – see the lyrics here. In a nutshell the song is about what lasts and what doesn’t last, and what doesn’t last outlasts that which does. These efforts we make, the flashes and sparks, the rises and falls of celebrities, some known the world over (for now), some worshipped in nooks, unseen by others, and all of us trying to be heroic and bright. Me, I write songs. But who cares? Who will care a hundred years from now? No matter, it doesn’t stop me from writing. Nor should it.

The Catbirds: Lesser Lights

Jul 07 1 comments
Dave Crozier, Friends, Indie Music

Dave Crozier

crozier2Turns out a good friend of mine can write and record perfect pop gems. “Judy’s In My Head” is as good as it gets when it comes to working your way out of the weeds of a one-sided relationship. When one person calls the shots and shoots down the rest, the other person dies. We’ve all been there. It’s not a matter of being strong. You can be Atlas, carrying more than you can answer for, and you can build up quite a physique that way. You get pretty damn strong. But in the end, why should you lift that load? Being sweet and pure and creative and true — that is light stuff. I decided recently to let the world drop, and to be myself. A relationship ended in the process. I have to admit that the echoes are still there. Judy is still in my head, “telling me what to do.” But I no longer “play Prince Charles to her Queen Elizabeth.” I am much lighter now.

Dave Crozier: Judy’s In My Head
Dave Crozier: Her Heart’s Inside A Circle

Energy is a priceless commodity. We burn it away on lost causes and second-rate concerns, and then we wonder why we’re left staring at a blank page. Tonight I tried (and failed, for the moment anyway) to create something positive, something lyrical. But I’m still building up flex in my muscles. I’ve held the world on my shoulders, and I built up bulk, but I don’t have the speed. In Crozier’s “The Last 20 Saturday Nights,” the singer is not a man who’s light on his feet. He’s a man who doesn’t believe in regrets, yet is left looking at the past. Dave Crozier is one of the fiercest men I know. Not in the usual gnarly teeth manner, mind you. He’s just utterly convinced of the need to forge into the fiery here and now, and he doesn’t buy into the culture of vicitimization. Good for him. We are all responsible for ourselves, and for making something slightly less flimsy out of the straw huts we live in. It’s that pursuit that we need to focus our energy on. Sometimes it means pausing, going slow for a moment, “staring at the stairs on [the] way up to the second floor.” No need to beat ourselves up when we get side-tracked by external dead-ends and “unholy marriages of ABBA and Sting” in our desperate searches for inspiration. After all, as Dave reminds us, “I’m not the only one who walked away when everything went wrong.” Just keep going, Mr. Crozier.

Dave Crozier: The Last 20 Saturday Nights
Dave Crozier: Staring At The Stairs

Jul 06 1 comments
Dave Crozier, Friends, Indie Music, Palace Brothers, Palace Music, Rock/Pop, The Replacements, Will Oldham

Work Hard / Play Hard

beyeratwork1

An ex-coworker of mine had a sign on his cubicle wall: “A good song can make you late for work. A great song can make you quit.” Most of us struggle with the work/life balance, and few of us get it right. Rock and roll is predictably uninsightful when it comes to this subject, because most players in this game have done just that all their lives: played. Look at Morrissey: he was essentially a blogger before blogs existed, and next thing he knew he hooked up with Johnny Marr and the rest is history. By the time the Smiths covered “Work is a Four-Letter Word,” Morrissey had already given us odes to David Brent-like bosses from hell who wrote “bloody awful poetry,” musings on how miserable he was after he found a job, and statements like “I wouldn’t bother” [going to work]. Well, sod him. What does he know?

And what does Paul Westerberg know, either? He pulled his bandmates out of school to gig with the ‘Mats. Now, I’m sure his work ethic was as bad as this demo claims:
The Replacements: Bad Worker (Paul Westerberg home demo)

But the point is these are not real people. They’re rock stars. So what of the rest of us?

Well, we’re left with a balancing act. Some of us merge work with play. Others punch our cards to fuel a hobby. Tonight I worked late, and now I’m blogging late, and I’ll be up early again tomorrow. The trick is to engage in both, to become vested in both. If you just punch a card, heaven knows you’ll be miserable. If you work so hard that you have no play to come home to, then not even rock and roll can save you.
Palace Music: Work Hard / Play Hard

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The dedication, then, goes out to another ex-coworker, a regular visitor to this blog, Dave Crozier. I salute him for finding the right balance and carving out his own home studio (thanks for all the demos over the years, Dave!), and for taking weeks off here and there to create. This particular track was the result of one such sabbatical, back when he was advising me in project management for direct mail campaigns. He poured all of himself into both pursuits, took each seriously, and kept each in perspective. He has a wall full of guitars, real beauties, and they speak to him in primordial overtones. He is a disciple of the mystical Eighth Note Pulse. He thrives on the buzz and the growl. He just simply loves guitars. He also puts in a hard day’s work and takes pleasure from it. Here’s Dave Crozier’s heavy creation:
Dave Crozier: Heavy Creation