All of this could have turned out very tragically and nearly did. Isn’t this the way the telling of most romantic beginnings is? The day or time that you met your wife or girlfriend almost didn’t happen, you almost weren’t in that same spot at the same time for that first fateful run-in. The serendipity surrounding our meeting with David Strackany (Paleo) is like this and make no mistake that there is love involved with this tale. It’s the reason that this session is the first of its kind on Daytrotter – a super-sized, nine-song set that practically gives you an album’s worth of material – and it arrives the week of Valentine’s Day. More than anyone else that we’ve had in our studio since we began this project of capturing these revolving and always happening moments in time, David and his music have captivated our attentions. Thankfully, it’s turned out like this. When we first met, it was accidentally. We’d received an e-mail three days earlier from Jesse from These United States, who had discovered Daytrotter through Catfish Haven’s Ryan Farnham, a childhood friend. He wrote asking if we’d be interested in having him by for a session. We loved what we heard so we told him to come in. It was the same day that Tokyo Police Club recorded with us. We ran a touch behind as the Tokyo boys needed bagels and fruit juices before we recorded so we made time for breakfast and got started a half hour late. When Jesse and David showed up, we were still recording and they had to be in southern Illinois for a show at a college that night so they were getting pressed for time. We were crunched for it as well, needing to do other things (day jobs, etc) with our day. I’d had a loose introduction to David’s Paleo stuff, knowing about his Song Diary project and having heard a song or two. We thought that we just weren’t going to have time to record that third session. Pat was basically packing the tape machine away when Jesse said, “The kid’s really fast. He’ll nail four songs in 15 minutes.” Pat got a new tape and when he pressed record, the room lit up. He did nail the songs in warp speed, but it was the energy that he did it with – channeled from that secret inner well that we usually keep fortified and unseen in his outwardly calm demeanor – was staggering. This was the first week in November. We had him back the first week in January. He was looking for a show here in town as he continued his never-ending tour. We told him that the pizza parlor we were on good relations with was available. We had a Saturday night show, recorded a second session prior to it. The idea was to have a love song-themed session, but the first set of songs were too good to not post so this is a mixture of love and other songs steeped in the kind of deep-seeded human spirit that Strackany (whose columns I read regularly in The Daily Iowan when we both attended the University of Iowa at the same time – discovered that first day we met in November) gives to each and every song that he utterly pours his heart into. He stayed in the studio that night, sleeping on the floor and recording his song of that day using our in-house drum kit and other instruments lying around. He was still getting basic ideas and messing around with numerous thoughts floating in his mind when I left the studio at 1 a.m. Strackany’s music is filled with such passion and with such personal sentiments that it makes you involuntary (if only because it feels you have no other choice) look more closely at your life, your family, others you love and you try to make some of the same beautiful connections that he makes effortlessly. We’re lucky to know him. We’re lucky that he’s so generous with his talents. He’s our artist of the year – deserving of copious amounts of fan mail and fawning. I watched the 1965 Bob Dylan documentary by D.A. Pennebaker this morning and couldn’t help but thinking that this country and the England that was the focus of the film couldn’t stand to fall in love with these songs and a man like Strackany, just as they did with Dylan – school girls waiting outside hotels just for a glimpse of the poet. There’s little difference, if any in their talents (in all seriousness) and they both write in a way that’s as compelling as anything you’ll ever likely hear. He’ll be back in our studio as many times as he wants. We’ve given him an open invitation. – Sean Moeller

First song
June 24th, 2006 (Paleo) [2.94MB] [1553 downloads]



This song was written and recorded in Astoria, Oregon. I call it “This is the Life.”
I was literally sitting on the dock of the bay when I wrote this song. Birds were flying by. That night I would be playing in this tiny pizza parlor for eight kids, including Ashleigh and Sally. The cafe paid me in pizza. The tour I was trying to book for that summer was going terribly and I was running out of money. I met with Slim Moon that morning, the head of Kill Rock Stars, in a diner in Olympia. Moon told me he was impressed by my work ethic, but wasn’t interested in pursuing anything at the moment. In an e-mail I would receive from him two weeks later, he would tell me that The Song Diary was “all logistics and no emotion” and that I was “too regular Joe.” After the show, Ashleigh told me she loved me. Right there in the parking lot outside of the Cannery Cafe. I didn’t say anything, she said I didn’t have to. And then I drove to Portland to stay the night on my brother’s couch.
Lyrics and the original recording

Second song
November 30th, 2006 [4.10MB] [1482 downloads]



This song was written and recorded in Patchogue, New York. I call it “Three Stops to the Big Dream I Dream.”
These United States and Adam Arcuragi and I were playing a show at some bar in Long Island, staying with this very generous older lady there who set up the show. She cooked us lasagna and prepared a Caesar salad, and dedicated an entire room of her house to putting us up. Pillows, mattresses everywhere. But the show was madness. After lasagna, she introduced the gang to cocaine and pot and as much alcohol as anyone could drink. Jesse was scribbling things in my notebook as I tried to write it all down in a sea of cigarette smoke and crunching chatter. But I didn’t have a melody. And then it rained. Such a beautiful big rain, and I ran out into it with my tiny guitar and the chords came and the melody came. “My formidable foe!” I put all my notes from the night together into long white rails.
Lyrics and the original recording

Third song
December 6th, 2006 (Paleo) [3.13MB] [1397 downloads]



This song was written and recorded in Brooklyn, New York, and is called “Ash In My Eyes.”
There’s a piece of my heart that’s been missing for a while now. This piece that I gave to Carie. Ashleigh has been helping me put it back together. We find sticks and branches and leaves and flowers and we gum them all together, we chew them up, and we just stick them on there. It’s almost finished now, Ashleigh.
Lyrics and the original recording

Fourth song
December 7th, 2006 (Paleo) [2.71MB] [1370 downloads]



This song was written and recorded in Washington, DC, and is called “Forest For The Past / Future For The Trees.”
This song was written in a furious blast in a spare room of a friend of mine in DC. It was 4 a.m., and I had to be up the next day at 9 a.m. for the last two days of mixing of These United States’ record at Silver Sonya. Jesse’s record was to be called The Forest and The Garden, inspired in part by the old saying “you can’t see the forest for the trees.” There was nothing in the room I was sleeping in. Next to nothing had happened all day. No one had said anything interesting. There was just me and my memories and my imagination.
Lyrics and the original recording

Fifth song
July 5th, 2006 (Paleo) [2.52MB] [1298 downloads]



This song was written and recorded in Flagstaff, Arizona, and is called “A Moment.”
I tell this story at shows sometimes. I was playing on the rooftop of this bar, and across the street from the rooftop there was this lady in a hostel, this Canadian lady, who had come all the way from Quebec to see the Grand Canyon the following morning. The story goes as I began to play, she was so moved by the performance that she got up out of bed, went down three flights of stairs, crossed the street, showed her passport to the door man, climbed three flights of stairs, then waded through people and tables to stand directly in front of me opposite the microphone stand. She waved her arms a little. I finished the song I was singing and leaned forward, thinking she might have something nice to say. But instead “I’m trying to sleep” was all that came out. “I have to be up in four hours.” I looked at her a little blankly — I had driven six hours from Los Angeles to be there. Still, I wasn’t really surprised; this was pretty much par for the course for my summer tour down the west coast. But I didn’t stop playing, and I imagine she had some trouble sleeping. For whatever reason, maybe out of guilt, maybe to apologize, it seemed the best way to remember her would be to pretend we’d fallen in love, she and I, and that we’d stayed up all night talking. I imagined she was 20 years younger and there with me on the curb across from the tennis courts as I recorded. There is a train that runs through Flagstaff. In the original recording, you can hear it in the background.
Lyrics and the original recording

Sixth song
December 23rd, 2006 (Paleo) [2.79MB] [1231 downloads]



This song was written and recorded in Brooklyn, New York, and is called “Love With An Illegal.”
My sister left for Guatemala in August to be with Clemente. She met him on her first trip down there in March, and fell for the boy. She was crazy about him. Clemente and I have the same birthday, and Jessica believed that was a sign, that the stars were aligned in her favor this time. She could see volcanoes from the kitchen window. There was a lizard on the ceiling over their bed. She wanted to bring him to America. Here they could be happy forever. She could take care of him. He would make her feel beautiful. When our dad passed on, Clemente would be her old man. But as the pressures to deal with the near-impossible immigration process mounted, Clemente flaked. He stopped calling, stopped writing. She thought for a long time he might be dead. In December, she was crashing in Chicago, the dried up hope of their reunion the only thing she had. Clemente’s name means “forgiveness.”
Lyrics and the original recording

Seventh song
September 21st, 2006 (Paleo) [2.59MB] [1223 downloads]



This song was written and recorded in Lexington, Kentucky. I titled this one “Marry My Baby.”
Meanwhile, my dad, nestled in Tampa, Florida, is trying to console my mother over their daughter’s decision to marry a boy in Guatemala. Jessica says her worst fear in the whole world is being an old spinster with a room full of cats. She refuses to get a cat because of this, as much as loving cats is in our blood. I don’t really know, but I imagine as a father your children’s fears become your fears. Their loneliness becomes yours. Their heartbreak your heartbreak. My dad will never truly be retired until all his children are happy. In this way, he may be the hardest working man I’ve ever met. His heart never stops beating.
Lyrics

Eighth song
April 29th, 2006 (Paleo) [2.16MB] [1257 downloads]



This song was written and recorded in Lutz, Florida. It goes by “In The Morning Linda Dies.”
Ashleigh’s cousin Sally is taking pole-dancing lessons. My friend Kelly in Athens tells me that that’s a thing these days, that it’s good exercise. I suppose I’ll have to try it myself to see. Sally told me after my show in Portland on June 22nd that linda means “pretty” in Spanish. I think sometimes when we think we’re figuring poetry out, what’s really happening is that the poetry is figuring us out.
Lyrics and the original recording

Ninth song
August 4th, 2006 (Paleo) [3.07MB] [1265 downloads]



This song was written and recorded Chicago, Illinois, and is called “When Money Talks.”
I was staying with my sister Sarah and her husband Tom in Chicago. They have an attic crawlspace above their apartment into which I retreated for the night to write this song. I had spent the last five days in Elgin, Ill., boxing up all my childhood belongings, determining what I wanted to throw away and what I wanted to put into storage. I grew up in Elgin, an old river town swallowed up by Chicago suburbs, and in August of 2006 the house I was born in, the house I left and came home to and left again, was sold. On August 3rd it was a crypt. All the rooms were empty. Like a body being prepared. It made me think of wakes. When you look at the people you love when they’re lying there in their casket, and it’s not them at all. There’s absolutely nothing there of the person you knew. And the next day on August 4th in the place in my heart where home used to be, there was an empty check.
Lyrics and the original recording

For the original versions of these songs, recorded the day they were written, and 300 other Paleo songs, check out Paleo’s Official Website