Dana Falconberry
Run Little Crooked River Run
Jul 25, 2010
Words by Sean Moeller
Illustration by Johnnie Cluney
Sound engineering by Mike Gentry
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Welcome to Daytrotter
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Please Sparrow
unreleased
i wrote this song while going through a really dark patch in my musical career. i think i was trying to give myself advice. this one was the only song we had trouble recording at this session. we were a bit frazzled when we showed up to the daytrotter studio from our ridiculously arduous trip there. we started with this song and abandoned ship after about 4 terrible takes, but i'm glad we came back to it later.
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Nightingale
original version appears on Halletts
this is an old song that we eventually released on "halletts". i think i thought it was funny when i wrote it, but really it's just very depressing.
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Possum Song
unreleased
we've been singing this song for a really long time and haven't released it on any album yet. gina and lauren sound really spooky and awesome on this version, it's really stark and ethereal. i wrote this song while living in an apartment with possums living in the walls. whenever i would start to feel lonely, they would start up squeaking and squawking just to remind me that i wasn't all alone. how nice of them!
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Crooked River
unreleased
i used to live by this little park with a creek running through it in the middle of austin and i used to take my dog for walks there, especially when i was stuck on a song. i have always been a little obsessed with rivers, and i wrote this song to imitate the way water moves. it's one of my favorites to sing, and i love the subtle banjo part that gina came up with.
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Birch Bark
unreleased
this one's pretty new, i wrote it last year for a songwriting group i'm in and have adapted it to the live setting in the last few months. the assignment was to write a song called "strip", and i couldn't bring myself to actually write about a stripper or, like, the cool part of town where teenagers drive, so i wrote about a strip of birch bark instead. when we play this song live gina sets a loop of herself clicking her drumsticks on the rim of the floor tom before we start, and that all has to happen pretty fast. but since we had all the time in the world to set the loop to record this version, and since there are so many fun little toys all over the daytrotter studio, we just banged and clanked on everything we could find until we came up with something we liked.
The thing that you have to keep in mind, while listening to Dana Falconberry sing, is that she is really a real person, really. She is not something that you're imagining up with a vivid set of notions and ideals. She is not that pretty voice that you've always been dreaming about, hoping that you could bring it out from behind those lacy curtains, out from behind the fog and into a real existence. She's here. Or, she was, and she can be again. Falconberry, of Austin, Texas, can knock you out with one push of a breath and just the introductory notes of a song that will continue to flutter and flit all the way to its high perches. She emits this lonesomeness that seems to stem from an inferiority complex that's directed at that great big world out there and how puny and ugly most everything tends to feel lined up next to it. She questions what this has all done to her - these considerations of the immensity of the sky and water and the diminutive proportion of one girl of the flesh. She looks toward these mystical, but very touchable and largely measurable things - air and water - and sees in them formidable opponents that we tend to never pick fights with. We just look and curse them from afar, the same as we do with fires and most other people. Falconberry, playing on this session with vocalist/percussion and xylophone player Gina Dvorak and singer/percussionist Lauren McMurray, looks at these aspects of the everyday as allies and foes, knowing that they can't be stopped or contained, but also getting drunk on the very idea that they cannot be stopped or contained. She sings on a newer song that appears in this session, "I am not really alone/If there are stars in the sky/How could I be lonely with so many small, winking lights/And I am not all by myself/If there are birds in the trees/How could I become lonesome/With so many songs sung for me?" It's as if she's been plopped down in the middle of this wonderland and she'll be damned if she's not going to appreciate all of it - every last drop of it. Some may see it as a burden, but not her. She's going to enjoy herself - she's going to enjoy being in well over her head though she will never think of it that way. She uses a soft and cooing voice - one that is halfway between that of a Joanna Newsom and that of a mother hen humming to herself, under her breath, while cooking some homemade deserts in the kitchen on a warm day. She's going to offer those deserts. She's going to dish them out and she'll hand you a fork, ask if you'd like one or two scoops of vanilla ice cream on the side and than watch as you take that first bite in, expecting that you'll instinctually pull your eyes closed and let out of a satisfied moan.
Dana Falconberry Official Site
