Subanimal Sounds » The Catbirds

In Magenta Skies IV

Peter Beyer — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 05:04:33 +0000

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]

Catbirds Album Available Soon

Peter Beyer — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 04:23:20 +0000

My group, aptly named the Catbirds (I am, after all, Catbirdman), has a new album coming out very soon. It should be available on my band site within the next few weeks, and physical copies will be in my hands in the next few days. This album, Subanimal Sounds, is the cumulative result of 20 years of backlogs, logjams, listlessness, and unfinished lists. One item on the list has now been checked off, thank God.

The above artwork, fashioned in a dark and woolly place by the great Kurt Lightner, fits the songs perfectly. My music draws from blurry impressions of sources, from half-remembered 70s TV soundtracks and devoured mice left on the doormat, to Beach Boys in the background of the sub shop that my Dad took me to on Saturday mornings, to the haze of self-awakening and the obscure forms that accompanied 90s shoegaze, to the singalongs for one that whirl through my head as an adult, singing to my cat like a fool.

Ah yes, the cat. I have driven away more than one woman when the revelation was made: I write songs about my cat. More accurately, my cat shows up in songs that are more deeply focused on other things: mainly the good old human condition. Why animals speak, how animals speak, if they speak at all, and what it might signify. The animal will. The decomposing guts and bones of a fresh kill. I do not apologize about writing songs about my cat. Her name is Addie, by the way.

If you’re looking for RIYL types of comparisons, well, the easiest frame of reference is Belle And Sebastian. I don’t usually explore the soft pink underbelly of soft rock as purely as they have, but I have been known to adopt the type of “hard melody” usually credited to the Beatles and onwards, appropriating it into a more wistful and stark setting There’s a similar humor in my songs, and this, too, has driven away many women in my life. I do not apologize for my humor. Here’s a song that in my mind illustrates the Belle And Sebastian connection:

The Catbirds: Looking Alive

The Beach Boys are the other easy reference point, and the modular wackiness of When you had babies is an example of that; it was in my mind coming from the Smiley Smile fantasy world of little pads and gentle jungles:

The Catbirds: When you had babies

My songs get dark. I often visit not just the cat, but the prey. I try to find out what happened to the prey, where it went. Every now and then I find myself in the loneliest place imaginable. I’ve written about that, and it is on this album. Sometimes it’s raw (“Wild Cat of Borneo”), sometimes it’s calloused (“Eyes in the dark”), and sometimes it’s a sadness bordering on elation (“The Eternal Meow”). Sometimes it’s naff (the various “chants” and interludes on the album), but don’t tell me that to my face.

The Catbirds will be playing a show to promote this CD, Thursday, March 4 at the Hideout in Chicago. We’re honored to support Baby Teeth and their fabulous brand of spastic stomp and bad-ass kitsch. The Catbirds feature members of the Chicago group Detholz!, and while we can’t promise the same amount of glorious spectacle (I can only dream…), we do hope that at least some of you will respond by throwing underwear onto the stage. It’s a natural response, after all, to psycho-cerebral musings on the existence of the Soul and the various levels of animal life, as told through cute little songs I sing to my kitty cat.

So please, come one, come all to the Hideout on March 4. There will be Baby Teeth merch for sale, and there will be Subanimal Sounds. If you like the samples in this post, we hope you will come out for the live offering and/or check the Catbirds’ website for streaming music, an EP for sale, and the album, which will be available there by mid-March. And even if you can’t stomach songs about a cat, well, just come around to see the Detholz! lads and to get blown away by Baby Teeth. See you then!

Catbirds band site: http://catbirdman.com/
Hideout main site: http://www.hideoutchicago.com/
Baby Teeth band site: http://www.lujorecords.com/artist.php?artistid=39
Baby Teeth MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/babyteethmusic
Detholz! band site: http://www.detholz.com/
Detholz! blog: http://detholz.wordpress.com/
Detholz! MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/thedetholz
Facebook event page: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=289529616916&ref=mf

The Beyer/Crozier 2010 Demos – January

Peter Beyer — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 04:22:47 +0000

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

Subanimal Sounds » The Catbirds

In Magenta Skies IV

Catbirds Album Available Soon

Related show

The Beyer/Crozier 2010 Demos – January