Mulberry Bush

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Ingus -
So it was 1995, and like every indie kid in the US and Canada, the three of us fell in love with ska.  For a little while, nothing was immune to suddenly turning all plink plink plink plinky.  Concrete Shoes?  Check.  Truancy?  Check.  Every Rose Has Its Thorn?  Check.

This is, I believe, our first plink plink ska influenced original, with a couple more to follow, if memory serves me right.

Ah, but, there’s a catch!  This song started out as a Thom song with no plink plink and completely different lyrics!

Most likely, Thom can elaborate on that, and how on earth I took the vocals on one of his songs when I already had like twenty.  Sorry, man…

The title, I believe, came from a discussion on our lunch break when Thom and I worked third shift scanning unemployment documents.  For real.  Worst job ever, except that we were the entire third shift, so I’d be lying if I said that sleeping, illegal copying of VHS tapes on company machines, and clandestine Magic The Gathering tournaments with our friends did not occur on company time.

We took a lot of lunch breaks at 4am, most of which involved Taco Bell, and the discussion of the strange smell Miller Road seems to have at 4am.  We referred to it as resembling “grilled goats”, which I’m sure we stole from something, but I don’t know what.

Anyway, on one break, we walked to the gas station near the office to grab sodas, and in the road was the remains of some sort of explosion involving a shopping cart, newspapers, some clothing and a ton of other difficult to identify items.  Our sleep deprived minds conjured a story in which a bag-lady (insensitive, yes, but… whatever.  shut up.) was whistling “here we go round the mullberry bush” while walking down Lennon Rd, and, without warning, spontaneously exploded, causing the disaster before us.

God, that’s horrible, but that’s the story of the title.  Swear.  Mind you, there was no sort of organic matter in the wreckage.  No actual homeless person or animal was harmed in the events that lead to the imagined events that led to this strange, strange song.

These posts aren’t getting any shorter.

Thermos:
Well, the long and short of how the song got passed to Ingus involves the fact I didn’t like my song and therefore didn’t want to sing it.  I had bet my friend Chuck that I could write and record a song inside of an hour.  I did.  It was called “Everything You Always Wanted,” and it was terrible – lyrically, at least.  The chord structure wasn’t too bad, and the melody wasn’t overly cringe-inducing.  I think the drum programming was the best part of the original tape.  In any case, I played the demo for the band, it was approved for Ingus-ifying, and away we went.

When the official State of Bliss recordings appear, the attentive listener will discern an immense difference between this version and the other in the bass department.  The song was very new to us when we recorded it with Jim, and I still was not completely comfortable with playing bass.  Over the course of the ensuing two years, I wrote a much more ska-friendly bassline, and I made use of it when I did the re-recordings of my parts.  However, when Louis gets the tempo rolling along, the bassline represented here gets a little tricky….

I hated that job.  I remember standing inside the glass doors one night staring outside into the vacant, bloodshot eyes of a middle-aged man who was obviously blasted out of his mind of some sort of drug.  He just stood there, swaying back and forth.  When departing that establishment as an employee, I wrote a letter to the owners and the manager, explaining my position on their company and business ethics – expressly stating that I resigned my position and would not be back.  They called the next day to say they had to let me go.  They then fired Ingus (for no good reason) but didn’t have the courtesy to let him in on it.  Well done, folks.  They wouldn’t even let him in the building to get his Totino’s Pizza Rolls™.

Louis:

Ingus meant the “…we’ll edit that out”, but  that idea was immediately vetoed by me.  I even made him re-do when we re-recorded it.