Dark Dark Dark
Cold Cold Cold…Warm
Mar 3, 2009
Words by Sean Moeller
Illustration by Johnnie Cluney
Sound engineering by Mike Gentry
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Welcome to Daytrotter
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A Cloud Story
original version appears on The Snow Magic
"A Cloud Story" is my interpretation of one of Nona's dreams, and was also written after driving through a very heavy fog in the Appalachians. It is one of our more collaborative songwriting ventures, and one of our more fantastical ones, as well. In the song, the clouds are compared to beached whales, waiting to die. This is at first tragic, but I once heard a story that people were trying to rescue whales by putting them back in the water, and they wouldn't go! I was so confused, I mean, everyone wants to save the whales, but they didn't want to be saved! When it is foggy, we all have a chance to 'walk in the clouds.' This song has been a lot of fun because we often get requests from people to use it in videos, and for aerial acts. It was also the opening song for a play on "The Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea." -- Marshall
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Winter Coat
original version appears on The Snow Magic
Time to be honest, isn't it? Isn't the heart unpredictable? Is it just me? At least when it's good, it's really good, even if you (I) change my mind tomorrow. It might be as much about relationships as it is cities that a traveler might visit. I was insecure about how earnest this song is, so I'm surprised when feedback comes from very unlikely places, especially the young punks who say it's their favorite. It's our most seasonal song right now. -- Marshall
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Flood
original version appears on Flood (movie soundtrack)
This song was written during a hard-working summer. Lots on the brain. It's about letting go and letting the spirit of the universe take you, pick your feet up, and move you to a new place. We sang it with a chorus of 50 friends for "The Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea," and it was incredible. -- Nona
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The Hand
Unreleased
I started writing this song at night, on the Hudson River bank. I got the first part. It wasn't until four months later, in Holland, that I finished it. We can't escape what waits for us, but we still try. - Nona
The entire day yesterday was two days at least, if we can base anything at all on perception. And maybe that had something to do with the way it hit me late in the evening on the O'Hare airport tarmac. It began prior to 7 a.m. in San Francisco, California, with a groggy wake-up call, some European coffee and a cab ride through a rainy Bay Area, past all of the moored sailboats and the quiet Sunday morning harbors. It took us to Seattle for a couple of hours and some Burger King, then on to Chicago and a delay and some lake effect snow, creating a terminal full of pissy men and women. Finally, two hours later than expected, is when we boarded a final plane to bring us home. We took to a final flight of steps and then out into weather that we'd forgotten for a good solid week. The door opened and the night's blackness was colder than blue. It was biting and raw. The loud airplanes were idling here and there, none just completely shut off and dead for the evening. The night felt like something else altogether though, the second that we moved outdoors. It felt as if we were surrounded by either a big blobby, winter being - something so alive and haunting, or a posse of invisible spooks bonded together to occupy all of the other space that wasn't us as we walked single-file 200 some yards to the open hatch of the small plane shivering there in the night. The air that was storming out of my mouth was thicker than it had ever been before and thickening as it struck the frigid air. It was like fire-breathing in reverse, blasting and voluminous, so much fun that I just kept blowing as if there was a Cuban hanging out on my lips. It was the kind of startlingly alive and unshakable winter evening that could have borne the Minneapolis band Dark Dark Dark. Though the group triples up on a word that signifies that which is not day, it's our hypothesis that what they actually mean to say is Cold three times over, every time they use the word Dark. There is a feeling of lights gone or diminished to their guitar pickings and accordion and stand-up bass dealings, but it's not the most significant feeling. What's more of note is the slow waltz of characteristic winter month functions, where people cover themselves in as much clothing as possible, barely gaze anywhere outside of their warm walls and windows and ponder all of the weighty and uncomfortable issues that the lively months don't leave time for. It's a time when children are conceived out of boredom or out of some new embrace. We huddle and feel closed in, cursing where we live with all kinds of conviction. Nona Marie Invie and Marshall LaCourt's vocals are as compatible as lovers and give all of their image-heavy words of stark atmospheric recognizance enough illumination to have no understanding of true dark. They're mesmerizing in the way they work human frailty and susceptibility into the foggy membranes of the songs, spraying them with flurries and the winds that make you feel naked. They're mesmerizing in the way that the cold feel pleasurable naked.
Dark Dark Dark
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