Paul Rocha - About Crayons

About Crayons

Crayons is a record I made in 2009-20012 with Matt Cullen, a sometimes mentor, sometimes student, sometimes collaborator, and always my musical conscience. We have a lot of history. Making this record with him was a treat. I wish I could make all of them with him.

I had a bunch of material laying around and in hindsight, I should have known that it would come down to these songs or that I would make this type of album. These songs needed to get out. We started recording in my studio in Florence, MA on August 19,2009 where I was living with my soon-to-be ex-wife. The following January, she and I would split up and I moved myself and my studio into a house on Prospect St. in Northampton. It was there that Matty and I would finished these basic tracks by the following August. This is the order in which we started any of the songs that landed on this record.

In order of beginance: (Don't start with me!)

Peaches and Lemon Lime – Written very quickly in 1992, dosed and it sat around for a few years until Crayons. Easy song to write. Just list the things that you want, even if it's unrealistic and it makes you sound like a brat. Then turn dark with it. Juss cuz. Written on the same day that I found and finished Amelia Earhart.

Medicine Ride – I always heard this as a Neil Young thing where he sings and plays the piano like a child. I mention Suntan Joe, a Northampton fixture back in the day. He used to stand out on the corner with no shirt on getting a tan, even in the winter. Originally recorded in D major, eventually lowered to C. I still have that old version around. All sung falsetto. I sound like a castrato who got kicked in the nuts. You can't understand a word I'm saying.

Got to Keep on Movin’ – Written on a hazy summer day dosed by myself at The Hadley House. Walking around in the yard playing when this came. Went inside, did a quick demo. We stayed true to it. Sam Barnes, violinist extraordinaire, played amazing, freaky stuff on this with a lot of echo. When that take was finished, my heart was beating through my chest. That's never happened to me before or since. I think it was the debil.

"If these walls could talk ..." The famed Hadley House, aka The Elmwood Inn, where I, essentially, grew up. From the years 1979 to 1998 (ages 21 to 40 for me), I lived here, but for two and a half years. I moved out twice: both times, in both cases, it remained empty until my return. This place was essentially in our hands from 1979 until my last roommate there, Hal Benoit, left it in 2006 or so. Behind that enclosed porch was the first-floor bedroom which was my bedroom and served as the defacto studio off and on in the early 80s until I left for the Cape in April 1984. It then served again as the studio steadily from late 1986, when Matty brought his TASCAM 388 down from Plainfield until I moved out in the Summer of 1991. Matty, Aurin, and I did tons of recording there. With each other, with Dear Sir, the Sighs, Bobby Laroche, Rob Skelton, Kevin Keady, Ray Neads, Ray Mason, Supreme Dicks, Veronica Cartrights, among others. Those two second-floor windows are my cramped studio after moving back to Hadley in the Summer 1992. A good portion of what exists on Crayons was recorded in that upstairs room from 1992 to 1995, as well as the Mr. Sherwood overdubs and mixing, almost all of Paulzilla's "Little Town" 2022, was done up there, Forgotten Sons with Mike Trczienski and Dave Montebello, Michael Carrig's "Solome's Dance", Paul Hansbury's eponymous debut album, numerous radio ads with Leo T. Baldwin, Chris O'Connor, and Rich Cahillane... and then I left for good in August 1998.

Don’t Go in the Water Now – This is maybe my favorite song on Crayons. I wrote it mostly up in Northfield, MA in the early 2000s. It plays like a Bergman film in my head. Black and white. Stark and grey. Cold and damp. The hapless romancer trying to be somebody’s hero but he’s just a hapless romantic with good intentions. He recurs from time to time in my writing.

Baby Adolph – This is a song that started out as a joke and an exercise just to amuse myself. I remember singing it at a bar to a couple of friends back in the summer 2007 and they kept making bad suggestions for the still-unwritten third verse.

“No, guys! It requires a unique first name!

Jeffrey Dahmer doesn’t work! Neither does Ted Bundy!”

When we began the recording of it, things started sounding real good right away. We stumbled upon half-speed recording and this was the first instance where we used both the Mellotron strings and flutes simultaneously. The double-tracked Nashville in the coda is an especially proud moment for me and that came last. I knew I was ending the album on that fade as soon as I came up with it.

Tomorrow Soon - Written in Hadley in 1992. Big strummy 12-string acoustic chord circle. I was colorfully productive in 1992. glad to be back at the Elmwood. Matty and I wrote the guitar solo together in 2009. He also came up with the plink piano part in the choruses. This is the last song that we worked on in Florence before moving on to Prospect St in late January 2010.

Crayons – This song went from being called Crayons to Seagulls to Lovebirds and back to Crayons between its origins and 2010. A solo version (as Lovebirds)was included on my earlier acoustic collection, Breakfast Epiphanies in December 1994. My friend, Bob Sherwood had schooled me on Nashville-strung guitars in 1991-92 and it opened up a whole new world for me. I most prefer to play it with dropped Ds while finger-picking it. I wrote at least 4-5 songs like that. This was a pretty ambitous offering because of the overlapping scales and the open-tuning factors. This has a constantly changing picking pattern to suit the melody at times.

Burning Giraffes and Telephones – I had the Salvadore Dali poster on my wall, compliments of my roommate, Nelson Bragg. I knew I'd use it for a title as soon as I got it. The song's about American foreign policy and meddling around the globe. This was at the time of th First Gulf War. I was dosed when I wrote this lyric and music, all in one day. In retrospect, it seems descriptive of Trump 25 years later:

Burning Giraffes and Telephones

"We stand on our chairs and scream, "We're Number One!"

We drink the the Sun, we shoot the Moon

We bleed the Earth and paint the town

We can't recall what makes the world go around

Caught between the child and clown

It’s innocence lost and it’s ignorance found

It’s a paradox, it’s the ugly fox

It’s the bawling brat with his building blocks

It's the innocence of dreams gone by … bye-bye … bye-bye

And later ….

Burning Giraffes and Telephones

We build a wall around our hearts

To keep us in and keep them out

We don’t know the first of what love is about

The wall is thick and all around

So long a ways up and a longer way down

It's paradise on thin ice

Put your helmets on and close your eyes

For it's going to be a bumpy ride

Bye-bye … bye-bye … bye-bye …

Peace Sign on the Wall – I have a wooden peace sign that belonged to my late brother, Phillip. When he died, it was one of the things of his that I said I’d like to have. In 2008, I got the melody and chords to the verse and saw the sculpture hanging on my studio wall in Florence. My brother was a pretty volatile guy, so he owning a peace sign came with its own special brand of irony. But wait, it gets better. He also claimed to have made it in high school shop class and I had trouble believing him. He didn’t have the discipline, let alone, the skill. I always assumed he stole it because he liked it. Sometime later, I married it up with a piece that I had been calling Ridin' With Smiley . That's how it works sometimes. Mixing and matching pieces, then viola! Matty's guitar playing on this is absolutely sublime. The mellotron flutes in the verse is one of my favorite things on the record. The fade at the end is all from the day we started recording this. We played the verse progression for fourteen minutes, drum beat, me playing acoustic 6 and Matty on electric 6-atring, getting those sublimely delicate glistening in glister shimmering moments that just ring out and take you somewhere. Between those things and theoverdubbed mellotron flutes … It's Matty and I sounding as good as we ever have together.

Sevens into Nines – Stumbled upon this chord progression because I made a mistake while writing a keyboard part for another song. This whole song came from that. True story about a girl who mysteriously shut me down after one date. That's okay. I got a decent song out of it.

Sunshine Sue – I often write songs about an infatuation with an idealized woman who doesn't even know I'm alive. I think I do that so that the feeling of rejection is always fresh in my mind. That way, if rejection happens (as sure as it will) I'll have a head start. A dear friend, the late, great Ray Neades suggested the tambourine on the chorus, which was a great idea. He died while I was making this record and I think of him whenever I hear that tambo on the chorus of the song.

Amelia Earhart – After discovering the verse guitar piece on my pocket recorder from months before, I finished it in about 15 minutes. It is the most twisted little ditty of mine. My roommate, Marc Runkel later suggested, “now she’s scattered near Japan” instead of “scattered in the sand.” Thanks, Wunka! I was feeling it this day. I also wrote Peaches and Lemon Lime in this sitting. This song first appeared as a solo performance on Breakfast Epiphanies in 1994.

Fairies in a Yorkshire Glen – "Remember to have fun and enjoy life!" say those crazy elves and fairies. I heard the title phrase on a TV show and immediately sang the first verse in entirety without picking up an instrument. About a month later, while being up all night playing with Matty, I showed him this in the morning and he really liked it. His encouragement made me take this song more seriously. A couple of weeks later, he came back and we recorded three takes with me on six-string and he on the twelve. I did some pitch-controlled vocals in the middle to sound like elves and taught myself a few chords on the mandolin. This was a last-second replacement for Acacia Tree for inclusion on Crayons.