Waterbugs!

Hey there you with a sad face…live it up. The words in the middle were omitted because they are really bad lyrics…but hey it was the early 90s. While we have been touring for the last 6 months we have adopted a few techniques of stress relief. This is not the kind of stress that comes from an annoying boss or the crustation of a cubicle, but from the sheer insanity of driving and driving and driving in an enclosed space with the same baboons. These mood enhancing rituals have often included: making up strange parodies to songs (especially our own and friend’s bands), buying fireworks in states where they are legal and letting them off defiantly in states where they are not (this we will blame on our Road manager JV), looking for useless items in truck stops that we simply don’t need (Thorry recently purchased a police light…which is useful but we really shouldn’t have it at all), we hit the push up bar as we pump the gas (something akin to a bad Levi’s commercial), make JV do his strange voice that consists of him sucking air inwards (this should be at the top of the stress relieving list), eat eggs every single morning at diner’s that have over enthusiastic Italian or Jewish mothers working the tables, meeting our fans and hearing their stories as talking about ourselves bores us to painful painful tears …as you can tell from this here blog. The rest of this list will not be told yet for fear of being tracked by the F B I

When we were recording THE UPside with Jack he kept thinking we were singing ‘Have you seen the Waterbugs’ as opposed to ‘Waterbreaks’ (for anyone who thought we were singing ‘Watersnakes’…it was even more superb when he looked dissapointed that we werent singing about a plague of Australian locusts.

Waterbreaks is the first song on the new album and it came out quite like Never Be The Same…quite accidentally. Especially lyrically. Musically, it was a cool riff that Thorry had been playing during a rehearsal at the Engine Room down on Canal one day and we all looked over and nodded our head. But lyrically it happened over time. Our grandmother is a very wise woman who was an English teacher in Adelaide, Australia. Her name is Jacqueline. She sat us down one day and told us the story of Mark Twain and how he would walk the docks and watch as the ships would come in. She pointed out that he chose his name to sound like the phrase that the salty old men on the warf would cry out as the ships would come in, “MARK TIME, MARK TIME”. This immediately grabbed us because it was like a warning to stay sharp and alert otherwise you would grabbed by a moving rope and get sucked off the wharf and under one of these old ships. We took it as the motto of the song and Thorry and I went to work on a call and response type vocal jam…the chorus lyric came out phonetically and had no real meaning behind it, however Isaac had a recurring dream over a few years of tidal waves (yes he was washed away a number of times). At the end of the day the song is about the tidal wave of the moment, as big and daunting as a maritime ship approaching, coming at you so ‘Mark Time’!

So if its waterbugs or tidal waves…we go it.

Thanks for reading this blog and watch out for moving ropes!

Love

I, T

Tags: Jack Douglas, Mark Twain, the kin, the upside, Water bugs, Waterbreaks