Hey Folks,
Come spend another evening on the couch with MLE and Mr. E (me) and listen as we talk about making our new album Don’t I Know You From Somewhere? (available here). You can listen to our conversation and read along. We tell the story of how we make an album and the friends that help us. Push play now and click here for side 1.
MisterE: Alright. Side two.
MLE: Side two begins with “Merkin For The Man,” which you know, that’s a little bit of a play where it’s like “Workin’ For The Man.” But if you don’t know what a Merkin is, you can look that up. And this kind of like a cross between The Cars and Devo music-wise and then lyrically it’s basically making fun of Vince Neil. I don’t know what else.
MisterE: Sort of was a mix between Motley Crue and Gene Simmons because it was at the time that Gene Simmons had to sit on stage for a gig in Rio De Janeiro. And the last thing I want to see is Gene Simmons’ fat cottage cheese ass hanging out of this goddamn leotard with that squirrel wig that he had.
MLE: At least Peter Criss just looks like an old lesbian now. He let it just go. The other guys, not so much, uh, R.I.P. Ace, I guess, whatever. I’m not a KISS fan.
MisterE: And it definitely seemed like if I was going to write… I always hated that idea of tribute bands and cover bands and how they were stealing the soul of these other bands, but somehow now some of those cover bands are actually better than old cottage cheese ass.
MLE: Yeah. I mean, my favorite KISS songs are covers, Melvin’s cover, and fucking Red House Painters cover.
MisterE: Oh, and The Replacements. It’s funny as shit. There’s a wacky keyboard line to it.
MLE: There’s a cowbell. There’s hand claps.
MisterE: I’ve wrote some joke songs before, but not a lot. I used to write more joke songs than I do now, but this was one that brought it back. And I think two things happened. Once we started making it the Cars tune, you weren’t into the song at all at first. You’re like, “this song’s not finished,” you know? And then there was a point where the Cars thing was happening. But when she finally heard the lyrics to it and you heard the dig on, “the only guy in the band.”
MLE: Oh, the Mick Mars?
MisterE: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. “The only guy plays in the band, you treat like a jerk” thing. You’re like, “this song’s about Vince Neil!” Well, I guess so, you know, and it wasn’t even guessing so, but it’s awesome.
MLE: But we’ve been making fun of Vince Neil for a while with this fucking chicken wing special.
MisterE: Well, that was the thing. I wanted to title it “The 72 Chicken Wing Special,” but then you came up with “Merkin For The Man.”
MLE: Well, because I was thinking that, “Merkin For The Man” could be like another way of saying like a toupee or a hair piece. Merkin, but “for the man!” So anyway, I feel like we really overthought such a stupid fucking song.
MisterE: Yeah. Yeah. But totally different, cool, like opening thing. And then we move on to “Did I Ever Tell You?” So, just kind of a joke on myself. Because it’s pretty much, I wake up and I say, “oh, did I tell you?”, and usually when I say that, they’ve heard the story like 15 times before.
MLE: Yeah. And also the title of the album is “Don’t I Know You From Somewhere,” which is referencing something else and someone else who says that a lot. So there’s a lot of, yeah, it’s just inside jokes, which that’s what every fuckin’ band should have.
MisterE: So this was another song where I just put my fingers in a different spot.
MLE: Not on the D.
MisterE: Not on the D, but I don’t know what it’s on. And I tried to play weird configurations of how I was setting up on the guitar and, you know, and I was slashing at it a little bit and making like neat noises that wasn’t specifically like, “oh, what are you playing, Steve?” It was like, everyone had to listen and go, “I have to play this for that” because I wasn’t even sure what I was playing. And it’s really cool. It has some very drastic, karate chops to the music and some of the studio effects of the echo or reverb in between those things just sounds great. And that we could eliminate the click things in between because I could never time it right. Nikki and you would be right on and I would be goofing off. Lyrics, I kind of like the whole thing about meeting God.
MLE: More drugs, less guns. Yeah, yeah. If anyone has quaaludes, call me.
MisterE: And if you do have quaaludes, you’ll probably still be awake at 3 a.m.
MLE: Yeah, which is the next song. Which is the last one that’s from the EP, which was kind of like, I feel like that was the single or the, you know what I mean? I feel like that’s a song that people were like, “that’s a good song” when the EP came out. All the songs are good, but I think that that’s the one that really resonated with people.
MisterE: And Mahoney had used previous on some of these other songs, the Mellotron, we have a Micro Mellotron. And the string section’s cool. It kind of, again, this was like, I was so many just open chords and barre chords that, you know, I didn’t often mess around with the F chord, but with the other strings open around it. And this kind of had a similar thing happened in part of the “Song from the Bed,” from Berlin, the Lou Reed record that, if you listen in there, I kind of say a line that’s similar to one of those in that song. And it kind of also has a weird Zeppelin feel to it. The chord change.
MLE: I could see that like when it gets to the chorus.
MisterE: It’s a cool song. I really like it. How it goes down and just sounds great. Everything sounds good on it. I think we recorded it well.
MLE: Yeah. I’m not mad at the drums on it.
MisterE: Yeah. And I think with “Zeppelin, Faeries And All Of That Shit,” I don’t think you even really had come up with a drum part. Other than like two weeks before we recorded it.
MLE: Yeah. Well, I mean, barely, and I was just like, I’m just gonna play this extended shuffle and not fuck around.
MisterE: So on the first EP we knew the songs really well. And then the other seven or eight songs or even more, some we knew well, the cover, one of the covers we knew well, with both of them probably by that time. But, the other ones, we had a few solid and a few that you mostly came up with the drums pretty late, and they’re awesome on here.
MLE: Yeah. It works. So the next song is “Lance & Bridget,” which is about my dad and my dad, same dad, or my brother likes to say our dad and our mom, but not really. It’s our dad who was a crossdresser, but he didn’t know we knew, and also we didn’t at the time. We were kids, or actually my brother didn’t really know about this until I told him way later. And anyway, his alter ego, we’ll call it that, “Bridget,” is a woman, I guess he wanted to be. So he used to paint her and draw her from like the 70s up until 2003 when he kind of stopped painting because he had a stroke. And Steve wrote a song about it, and then he died because Steve writes songs about people and then they die right after. True story. Um, it’s not that cut and dry, but, one of his artworks of Bridget is the album cover. So you get that.
MisterE: One of his last ones.
MLE: It is. Yeah, that Bridget, that was a 2003 Bridget. So yeah, that would be one of the last paintings he did of this version of himself, I guess. And one of his pieces of art is also on the back of the record. It’s different. It’s not like a figure of a woman, but it’s a lot of the style’s very pop art. So we went with that for the cover and it doesn’t say anything else on the cover except for what it said in the original painting, which is “How do you like me now asshole?” I guess that could be the alternate title for the album. “Don’t I know you from somewhere?” “How do you like me now asshole?” We’re just asking people questions. And man, that song’s good. We got Broadway superstar Harris Milgrim, AKA my brother, to sing, to do some Merry Clayton stuff on there, which he recorded in a closet in Queens. And it’s fucking awesome.
MisterE: Yeah, it was great fun too, it was a good wordplay. The title of the song had something totally different that happened and we pulled off some crazy prank with this title and this song to begin with, but there was already this mindset of us writing a song about Lance. And it came to fruition actually, Emile, a few Christmases ago, had given my wife Tina and I one of Lance’s paintings. And it was Bridget down on Route 66. So some of those lyrics are in there, but by the time we had decided to make a record, that album cover art, just this painting in general was, I don’t want to say his masterpiece, but it was the one that would look great on an album cover. And I see it places now and it’s sticking out of the thing and you only see this part, and everyone sort of faces it up. And anyone that I’ve shown it to, they’re like “whoa, that’s a great album cover!” It is cool. And when I visited Lance the first time, he had probably eight or nine of them up in his room. And I very much felt that there was some Pettibon feel and some manner from what they said. And then also,
MLE: Lichtenstein was his big one.
MisterE: Yeah, for sure. But also “Songs About Fucking,” you know, there’s something that was like, “oh, this is something similar to this and it works great.” Yeah, album cover art. It’s a great song. Sounds cool. Good guitar work going back and forth with, with Harris too. We worked that together.
MLE: Oh, yeah, that’s right. And it’s nice and short too. Like, I feel like it gets the job done, you know. It didn’t need to be a longer song.
Mr. E: And then we sort of end it off with a cover of “Candy Says.” We’ve been doing “Candy Says” for about three years.
MLE: Why did we start doing it? Oh yeah, for that art thing where I stood on the $30,000 concrete sack or whatever.
Mr. E: Yeah, were about 12 sacks of concrete in a hotel on Biscayne Boulevard that still had hourly rates.
MLE: Oh, yeah.
Mr. E: I think we did the Lou Reed thing after that.
MLE: We did do the Lou Reed thing after that.
Mr. E: Yeah, so this was a start of that.
MLE: Oh, and that was the whole idea because you and Nikki were playing. So I sang through the contact mic tin can thing that I made to do that performance. Because was it like an Art Basel adjacent thing? So we wanted it to be a little weird. I think that’s what it was.
Mr. E: And so, some of the comments I’ve got is like, “you’ve made it your own.” And of all, Kramer, who masters our records, was like, “oh, that’s a nice version of ‘Candy Says’ you have.”
MLE: Even though you have this fucking idiot singing it. I’m singing that song. And I’m not the best singer, but I think what really works is the phrasing, which is what Ferny said too, because I don’t sing it like the original. And I don’t sing it like how you sing it when we do it live. Because when we decided we were going to record it and that I was going to sing it, I kind of like researched versions. And the one that really, really jumped out at me – again, I’m not saying I sing well like this person – but in terms of the phrasing, was Beth Gibbons doing a version of it live. And I just really thought the phrasing was so emotive that I was like, “okay, I’m going to sing it with this cadence.” And that worked.
Mr. E: For some reason, I feel this is the version that Candy would have liked the best.
MLE: Maybe.
Mr. E: It has a little more sympathy to it. Or empathy? I never know what’s the difference between those words.
MLE: I mean, potato, potato. No, they are different, but yeah, I get what you’re saying. You know, because I kind of feel like the original, even though it’s supposed to be, it’s almost a little bit first person perspective. It’s hard to feel it. Just because, I don’t know, still a great song, maybe this just kind of, again, I think the phrasing, Beth Gibbons’ take on it really resonated with me. So there we go.
Mr. E: And I think also cool that it’s another place where the Mellotron shows up. And at the very end, Mahoney sort of plays a French horn-sounding thing that makes it for better or worse, almost Beatle-esque.
MLE: Yeah. And triumphant. Yes. Because I feel like this song is very bittersweet, it’s melancholy, you know, like “if I could…”, you know. And then we kind of take it into that, with the end, we are kind of like “if I could walk away from me” and we’re like, okay, now we’re walking away, now we’re going into that, you know.
Mr. E: Yeah, kind of Steve Drozd too, from the Flaming Lips when he played keyboard parts, that’s like somewhere in between symphonic and late 60s-sounding music. So it’s awesome.
MLE: There you go. Yeah. There is a hidden track on this, which I love that there’s a quote unquote hidden track, but it’s on vinyl, so like you can see it. You know how you get the CDs with hidden tracks, but you couldn’t see it. And you’d just be like… it would keep playing. And then you know, you’d be tripping and it’s like two a.m.? And then all of a sudden it’s like “akfhlfiashflaiushfluhsf!!!” after like 30 minutes of silence or something.
Mr. E: You say that… So that Zaireeka record. My friend, Rob Hall had conjoined the whole thing. So we could listen to it ourselves, but he added weird shit on the end. Like, really weird shit. And he did personal ones for everyone. And like maybe an hour after the thing or 45 minutes or whatever it said, “Steve and Tina wake up!” And I would turn it off before that would ever happen. You know, like, “oh, just nothing going on.” And I’d leave the room, but occasionally… it took me like a year before I got to the “Steve and Tina wake up!” part. I think he had a lot of long stuff, but then there was a long space in between. So we have this hidden track that when at first I told Kramer I said, “wait 30 seconds before it comes on” but he said “no one’s ever going to listen to it if it’s after 30 seconds.” He said “seven to ten seconds or they’re going to take off the record.” And I wasn’t so sure about that.
MLE: People leave it going. I mean, I sometimes I’m inside and a record finishes and I’m walking around and forget
Mr. E: I’ll go over night where it’s…
MLE: Whatever, Kramer.
Mr. E: I couldn’t convince him.
MLE: Anyway, it’s there, but you can literally only hear it if you buy the record. It is not online. It is not digital. That’s it. So deal with it. But if you are a South Florida musician or music scene or art scene or whatever scene person who has spent time in South Florida over the past 40 years, you will appreciate this track, or we think you will. So you know, it’s up to you. It’s free!
Mr. E: Yeah. It’s free. If you buy the rest of the record.
MLE: Yes. It is a bonus.
Mr. E: I think I think that’s awesome. I think we’re good.
MLE: Totally awesome. And I’m just going to say – we’ll see if they put this out – but we did this for the Jitney instead of writing a piece. Hopefully this will be transcribed. But if not, yeah, I don’t know.
Mr. E: Awesome.
ME: Cool.
Mr. E: Okay, then.
MLE: Alright!
