The Song: Lester Deluxe

Last week was kinda heavy, what with all the psychological fear and tales of youthful misfortune. I’ll own it. It was a bummer. But this week I bring joyful news: There’s a new song in the Giant Lusca universe. It’s called Lester Deluxe and its up on the Bandcamp. I had a great time making this one and my songwriting process has improved in terms of efficiency and ease of production. It’s getting so, so close to a-- tearless delivery. By the way, I dropped my first music video this weekend onto the Giant Lusca YouTube channel. Check that out. This week was like Christmas or something-- the feeling of all kinds of shit coming together in a big way. I hit the weekend and there’s a bunch of stuff just an inch away from completion. Business cards are also in production, so if you’re having trouble connecting with me, the cards will serve as a cheat sheet. They’re pretty spiffy too. (If you don’t mind me sayin’ so.)

Back to Lester D. The idea came together using the new process which contains three stages on paper and a final digital doc which goes into the songbook. I must have order! It’s a chaotic world, after all. The first stage works like this: I get new ideas in the morning, and over morning coffee or even in the parking lot at work after the commute, I write short, super loose notes. This is the part of the process that I think of as the most stimulating. Inception! (If only I didn’t get these ideas while driving. How do I maintain safety? I keep another, smaller memo book in the car for red light creative emergencies.) These notes go into the small notebook. Sometimes what I write is only a couple of lines or a short phrase. It’s nowhere close to the shape or syntax of what the thing will become and lots of these ideas are discarded as I progress through the small notebook. There’s a lot of goofy junk in the small notebook. The first lines in Lester started appearing in the small notebook in October of 2017, though he didn’t even have a name yet. Other ideas would pop up but every few pages or so I would return to the idea. Add a little bit, discard bad lines: rewrite, strikethrough, rinse, repeat. The frequency of returning is how I know that I’m going to make a crude basic idea into a song. What I find interesting is the recycling of lines and (awkward!) evidence of how I think it’s going to go musically during this stage.

But after awhile a song idea is getting kinda wordy for the little notebook and it’s time to graduate to the composition book. I love lined composition books with the speckly cover and rounded corners. I always have (It’s a tactile/look thing!) but only recently have I had the method down to complete these. I would usually just discard a book after scribbling for a quarter or maybe half of the page count. Confusion about the process is to blame. The books become Beatnik Word Salad Abandoned Disasters. In other words, I used to become ashamed of the contents, discard the book, forget about it, and buy another one. Now, I work all the way through with a minimum of truly embarrassing text evidence (to be discovered by my enemies!) The composition book is where the song expands and the verse/chorus/bridge structure emerges. I keep this book right in the area where I practice the songs and I will add chord ideas during morning practice. But it’s still pretty sloppy and unfocused at this point. But with Lester, the enthusiasm continued and it became time for the final handwritten paper stage: the lined yellow pad. It’s actually multiple pads. I’m nuts. There’s one pad for each verse, the chorus, and bridge. (No, I don’t fill each pad with drafts of the current song. Just a couple of sheets each and then onto the next song.) The songwriting gets completed on the yellow pad. By this time the chords and lyrics have been finalized and all I have to do is consider how the song is going to exist as a reference document. Not a whole lot to it, I just type it up and print it out. This works best for long-term practice use.

So there you go, that’s the full circle of the writing process. Very little composition happens in Garageband these days, but I do allow for the recording process to influence me. (Studio-as-instrument and blah blah of course.) I’ll just spend a little time on the recording mixed with my interpretation of Lester Deluxe and then we can wrap this post up. The Lester in Lester Deluxe is a kind of composite character/crazy wise man archetype dealy. Sometimes I want to say that, “Lester is me.” That seems kind of bold (and self-deprecating). But that’s not entirely true in terms of what I think the song does. I have frequently observed real individuals in crisis ranting and dancing at traffic. I wanted observational content to be in there and this Lester was a dude I really did see on my morning commute. Then there’s the Miller character from the Alex Cox movie Repo Man. Miller is a kind of Lester Deluxe and before I graduated to the composition book I became aware of that association. In fact, I think it was misremembering the character name that put me on the path in the first place. But that was unconscious until I made the connection. Nevertheless once I put it together, I included a sample of the Miller ‘plate of shrimp’ monologue. In terms of visual presentation I wanted to reference something to do with oddball evangelism in the song. I went with an ‘80s punk rock b&w layout and selected an image from the HCPLC Burgert Brothers photo archives (used with the Tampa-Hillsborough permission statement in the Bandcamp metadata). It’s a picture of a pentecostal preacher in some Florida backwater town with worshippers-- and he’s holding a rattlesnake. Musically, I experimented with some tremolo on a gained-up bass guitar. There’s also some nice ‘digital tape music’ looping and reversing of the acoustic guitars at the end, which is good because I didn’t go all freak-out heavy on the effects on this one. Other notes: I cannot properly pronounce spaghetti singing at that tempo. So I just left it like that. It wasn’t a twee intention, I simply got frustrated, said ‘fuck-it’ and let it ride. Also, the vocals kind of get over-saturated, especially in the first verse. I twiddled knobs and checked my gain and my conclusion is that the effect was what my throat was doing. Again, fuck it, let it ride. Okay, I feel like I’m just going on a bit. We’re done here. Thanks for reading. Please enjoy the song.