Blog TARDIS: "Everything's Better With Monkeys" (September 2007)

We came back from Swing Jazz Camp all energised and enthused with the spirit of music... particularly ours. Sarah wrote the music and most of the lyrics for our slow-dance song, Just A Moment. We played some gigs, gave CDs to various people, and sent MP3s to people. Sarah continued to do voiceover work for VoicePrint, reading the news and magazine articles on Canadian radio (here's an example of her in action). On August 25th we had a High Spirits performance party, and Panda became a singalong!

It's worth mentioning one of our best songs up to this point: If We'd Never Met. This is the uplifting and fun-packed tale of a young woman widowed by a drunk driver. I know exactly whence the idea for this came, strange as the story may sound; I was in my bathroom, brushing my teeth and looking in the mirror, knowing Sarah was in her bathroom doing the same thing, and I thought, "I wonder how I would feel if I went into the main room and there was no Sarah." A couple of hours later we had the song, and we were very pleased with it. (There's a sample of it here if you'd like to listen, and it's also on our album (merciless plug)).

At Swing Jazz camp Sarah took this song to her vocal masterclass, where a couple of professional singers were commenting on people's delivery and performance of a chosen song. She reported afterward that she sang through the first verses and chorus, stopped, and waited for comments. The response was: "Oh! We were listening to the song because it's so good. Er, can you do it again and we'll pay attention to your technique this time." So she did it again. Response: "Yessss... and what needs improving about how you sing this? Anything else?" "Well," quoth Sarah, "I often get a break in my voice when I'm trying to sing high." "Oh! Well we can listen to that. Do some scales." Sarah does some scales, which are pretty much perfect because of the amount of singing she's been doing through the week. "... yesssss... that sounds fine. Anything else? No? Oh well." I was very pleased for her because so often she feels that she's not the 'singer' of the two of us, because she prefers me to sing the songs (even though on the album I think she has more vocals than me, tee hee). And to get such praise from a couple of pros must have been very satisfying. I'll take credit for the song lyrics being gripping, mind you...

Looking at our song list, I see that September produced three songs:
- Other People's Business, a comedy song which frankly I'm still not completely sure about... we've performed it once, but it didn't feel right while I was singing it, and I'm not sure I can get behind the anti-Bush message which emerged in the third verse. Not because I'm pro-Bush, more because I want it to be less specific.
- Get Out Of My Sky, a guitar song - written largely because I thought it would be an interesting experiment to write a "singer-songwriter" song. (Most singer-songwriters who show up at open mic nights have a guitar slung on their back and a bunch of overly-personal songs about breakups and so forth, and I detest them, so to prove to myself that it can be done right, I wrote some lyrics about a breakup, using a James Blish novel title which I've been wanting to use in a song for years, and handed them to Sarah with the instruction "On guitar, please".)
- Everything's Better With Monkeys, another comedy song, which we wrote for Alexis.

And that brings me to talking about our brief return to England in mid-September. Sarah had already gone back to Ireland for a week when I caught the plane to England and met her at Gatwick.

Did we enjoy seeing everyone? Oh, god, yes. It was a Posse rave. In fact, it was several of them. It was groovy to see everyone, to catch up, to spend so much time with Phil, Jacqui, and Alexis, and to get in some hardcore gatherage both at restaurants and in the form of All Back To The Twines.

But England still sucks. We'd forgotten just how we don't like Perfidious Albion. The air quality was atrocious: Sarah's asthma deteriorated to the point that she had to go back on all her drugs for a month when we came back to Vancouver. The crowds were rough, especially in London - they complain about the number of people here on Robson Street, but it's nothing compared to the raw fury of Oxford Street. I lost my temper at the toilet attendant at Victoria Station because they charge 20p for access to the loo. It occurred to me almost immediately that I was Verbally Abusing British Rail Staff, which could be construed as a crime, and Sarah wasn't getting any happier about my making a scene so I calmed down after a while, but sheesh. It all feels so small-minded and petty over there. It's not ideal here, but we didn't feel anything to make us want to come home.

Still: Posse!

And because Alexis used to spend a lot of time announcing "Aww, monkeys!" whenever she banged her elbow off a table or suchlike, we had written a song for her called Everything's Better With Monkeys. In fact we wrote it on the train back from London on the Wednesday after we'd been up there to see Parade (he cut Big News! the cad!) and our attempts to sing it quietly for practice purposes were obviously confusing the woman sitting opposite us. We unveiled it for Twiney that evening and it's proven a big hit with people over here since our return... most recently Kim, who almost stopped breathing from laughing at it so much. Exactly the effect we want, really. (Nothing personal, Kim!)

When we left England in January - ten months ago - we were sad, scared, nervous, and committed. Since then we've learned a lot and blossomed a lot. Leaving England again was easy. We'll go back, because England is where our friends and my family are. But that's the only reason.