Moonswept Away

In the early 1980's I lost track of the Roches. I had moved to California and gotten busy with a career in film and didn't spend much time listening to anything. CD's were becoming more common, and my vinyl started collecting dust. I viewed the prospect of replacing my record collection with CDs with some trepidation, and so began moving with all the speed of a sleeping sloth to do so.

This past Fall I started processing what is left of that vinyl into MP3 files to store on HD, import into iTunes and then move to my iPod. When I came across my Roches records from 30 years ago I fell in love with the band all over again.

I had caught them in Houston while staying with my sister Nell in 1981. One of the best concerts I ever attended, in a smallish venue that was perfect for them, and packed without seeming crowded. Granted, a part of me wanted to scold Suzzy for beating on a paperback copy of The Tin Drum with a wooden drum stick during the performance, but the rest of me had to chuckle at the impish practicality of her choice of percussion. Sitting in my home office, digitizing old vinyl recordings, I wondered what had happened to them after they made the No Trespassing ep in 1985, which I had found about a year after moving to southern Cal. It was the last Roches recording I was aware of, and as I started digitizing the vinyl I had left it's brevity fed my imagination and I imagineered a fate for the band, of dissolution, in quiet despair.

Since this would never do, while I digitized the discs that I had, I googled Roche sisters, and found the website, complete with message boards, PR area, contact and booking info, videos, online shopping, a calendar, and all the things you'd really want in a fan site as a fan, which I am.

So if you are looking for a sober, even, dispassionate assessment of the disc, well - look elsewhere.

I was suprised and pleased to find that, although they had apparenly gone their separate ways after that recording, they had all kept working. In fact, a new set of recordings from the three of them, working as a trio again and called Moonswept, was due in the new year.

The Roches new release, Moonswept, blends the band's trademark witty and soul searching lyrics with catchy melodies and enveloping harmonies that result in one of the best records of the past several years. I expect it will be the best record I will find this year, and selfishly, I almost hope that nobody else recognizes it as such.

While it would be nice for this group to make a bundle in album sales, that isn't so important to me, as long as they make a nice living and keep working at this craft. I feel about this group kind of the way some people feel about an undiscovered-by-the-public-at-large favorite neighborhood restaurant - you don't want it getting too too popular, lest it ruin the intimate, precious experience. Still, I guess it might be nice if they could replace the napkins and waiters uniforms regularly, or tour a bit more.

This disk seems to answer the question I posed to nobody in particular last fall regarding what these ladies had been up to for the past 30 years, it poses a rather general answer to the question "What would Jesus do?" in Jesus Shaves, (written by Paranoid Larry, who is apparently a homeless guy with a nicer website than me... grrrr)

You can check the band's home page, for info from the source on all the songs, but the tracks, with my personal misinterpretations of their meanings, are:

• Us Little Kids:
Spins a tale of childhood loss and foundation.


• Only You Know How:
This one seems to be about 9/11 and reincarnation and self determination, and asks the big question (How did we get here?) without offering any sort of concrete, or solidly trite, answer, preferring to leave that up to the listener?


• No Shoes:
A charming and quirky tune, a life lesson and a standup routine. It is a round trip, but not a round. Written by Paranoid Larry


• Moonswept:
A mystical view into what happened to the Roches, and how they found their way back. Or Maybe not; Suzzy doesn't really say, on the Roche's website, but does talk about how it came to be. The lyrics "It's isness was obvious" but now "it's the burnt heart of a small witch" then "when the moon came up, all we saw was broom, all we saw was the broom" seem to mean, to me, that they decided it's time to get back to work. Whatever may be true, and I suppose that is negotiable in the sense that art has different meanings depending on who is looking at it, I am grateful for this record/wreckerd. I feel like this cut answered my question about the missing years between when I reconnected the bands music to my life and the days when I started to lose track of them, or at least, gave me the hint of an answer I needed.


• Family of Bones:
A heartbreakingly tender song that seems to be about the importance of family, and how the familiar can seem protective. On the site they reveal that it is about a scary event from their early childhood. It seems somewhat reminiscent of Malachy's to me, but I am not sure why.


• The Naughty Lady of Shady Lane:
It's a quirky, funny, traditional song, an arrangement by The Roches of a song from their youth. Tonally, it hovers right on the cusp of mystery and danger at the start which is about right, and periodically morphs to a more celebratory mood, and back and forth.


• Long Before:
Lucy Roche's song, sung by her. Mom Suzzy produced a singer with crytalline clear tone. The song might be about catching up with an old friend in absentia, or some other closer loved one perhaps. Reminiscing. Growing up. Maybe someone she'd like to talk to, like an estranged parent. Brilliant and touching and beautiful.


• Piggy Mask:
A slowish, jazzy number about love and affection, with a sense of humor ("I'd like you to think of me as somebody you'd put your teeth in for") and, at first blush, a senior set seductiveness that seems to push back a bit as it progresses. The significance of the title you will need to either get on your own, or find at the band's web site.


• Huh:
The best well organized, completely disjointed mess of a song I have heard, as far as I am able to recall. Wonderfulness in audio format. Maybe just a wee bit silly, which will always appeal to me.


• Stop Performing:
"Stop it, yer killin me!" is part of the message. Most of these you just have to listen to.


• Gung Ho:
A fun timey song, from a band that really knows what it means to be Gung Ho.


• Instead I Chose:
I was very surprised to find out what this one is about, or apparently inspired by, anyway.


• September 11th At The Shambala Center:
Written by Terre for a memorial held on the one year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.


• Jesus Shaves:
Who knew the Second Coming would find work and love as a welder?! Also a Paranoid Larry tune. A ballad celebrating the extraordinarily ordinary among us, and the good we all mean to do.

Moonswept has everything you would want in a record, poetry and magic and lovely music, exceptional instrumentation and production values, a minimum of guest artists who all seem to be family members, or close enough that they belong there. This record (wreckerd, if you prefer) has swept me away, and will stay on my iPod for a long time to come.

Little Big Lie

A lot of hot air has been expended to keep our troops in a conflict they should never have been sent off to. One popular argument lately is that, if we pull out, we open Iraq up to a full scale civil war which will surely blow up beyond all proportion, bringing unimaginable levels of violence. I have to wonder how those who predict this are somehow able to know such a thing.

If what is going on there now isn't a full scale civil war, what is it?

The idea that Iraq will blow up is based on false assumptions.

There is a civil war going on their now. It has been for over a year, and the first that we tumbled to it was a year ago when the golden temple was blown up. It is still not repaired.

What will happen in the future is unknowable. It is remarkable that the people who put our troops in harms way so frivolously now object to taking them out of the direct line of fire out of concern for peace in the region.

As far as I can tell, our troops, and some of their standard operating procedures, such as driving without stopping, bumping cars out of the way when needed to keep motion non-stop and thus harder targets to hit, are bound to cause issues outside the basic nationalistic response that many Iraqis will have over being invaded and occupied. For safety's sake, these practices will not, and ought not to, change. However, trying to ignore that the troops being in this foreign nation is one of the factors contributing to the violence is disingenuous at best, and looks an awful lot like something much nastier from here. We need to start moving troops out of the immediate area, while remaining ready to move back in if actually necessary by staging in spots where they will get bored, but will be safer.

The Iraqi army may or may not be ready to deal with this situation. As long as we stay there, doing the job for them, they will never need to be able to do the job. To borrow a bad metaphor, at some point you have to just take your hand off the bicycle seat and watch to see if the bicycle stays up. If you don't, then the Iraqis will never get the chance to show you how ready they are. There are Iraqi heros waiting to be made, and we are enabling them to stay in infancy, which is doing nobody any favors.

This administration is resisting the idea of a timetable for withdrawal. As more time goes by, the idea that they may not have a timetable for withdrawal seems less and less like poor planning, and more and more like dereliction of duty - at the White House.

When Did Congress Declare War, Exactly?

Dear Mr. President,

What are we doing in Iraq? I know that you took your mandate from the Congress and then used it to depose the evil dictator Saddam Hussein, but that was really all that you were authorized to do. You declared victory, and that is when you should have begun formulating a plan for getting us out of there. Well, since you neglected to have any such contingency previously plotted. Better late than never.

Why are we still there?

It is clear that our presence there is not contributing anything more than targets. It is more likely creating more terrorists, and hate for Americans, with every passing hour.

Don't get me wrong, the troops are to be commended for putting it all on the line for the rest of us, but they are being used by you for no clearly defined real purpose, fighting and dying in someone else's undeclared war.

Why is that use of our nation's armed forces appropriate? Putting our troops in harms way with no workable plan either for their use in that theater or for extracting them in a clearly definable time frame is not what they need or deserve.

A lot of people say that we cannot leave for fear of creating a vacuum. That seems a load of crap to me. There will be more bloodshed, to be sure, but I don't believe this story that we have been told, that we have to stay there. We have tried staying for almost 4 years now, and look how that tack is paying off. Violent deaths are up in all categories, and not showing any signs of letting up, surge or no. Saddam is dead and not coming back. We are done.

It is time to try a genuinely different track, rather than more of the same with a new marketing campaign. Let's try moving troops out of the immediate area, to Kuwait and other surrounding regions, then see how it goes from there. Let the military create the time table, please - they know logistics, and this is an important step that should be based on military needs, not political ones.

Please set getting the troops out to be your number one priority, or, step aside so that someone who actually wants to support the troops can do so.

Thanks.

Your friend,

Michael Sprague
A Concerned Citizen