Deer Tick
Doctor Lonesomeless Come To Call
Jun 22, 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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Dirty Dishes
original version appears on War Elephant
"Dirty Dishes" is an old Deer Tick song. It's one of the first I wrote when I started the band. It was written in part about my roommate who I was infatuated with, to say the least. But overall, the song is more about the house we lived in. It was cold, drafty, disgusting, and the parties would usually happen on nights when I had to wake up early for work the next morning. Over the years there's been a few recordings of this, some are more rockin' than others, but this is how we've been performing the song live lately. I think the song packs a bigger emotional punch when performed in this fashion. It's far from the 60's rock/feel good recording of it that appeared on "War Elephant."
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Nebraska
unreleased
I decided one day that Deer Tick should cover The Boss. "Nebraska" was always a pretty important album to me, and the title track in particular really stood out. Perhaps it's the soft spot I have in my heart for true crime stories. Anyways, we swapped out the acoustic guitar for the electric guitar, and the harmonica with a bad ass guitar solo. The end result, in my opinion, is an exciting new take on a classic song.
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These Old Shoes
original version appears on War Elephant
This song was written by our friend Chris Paddock. I recorded it for "War Elephant." According to Chris, this song is about him maintaining his relationship with his former girlfriend who at the time was attending University of North Carolina at Asheville, and his trips going down there from Providence. Of course, certain details of his travels have been dramatically altered. Honestly, since we recorded this at the Daytrotter studio so many months ago, I can't remember if we performed it as a duet with Chris or not. I know he was there, and I hope he's singing on this, because that was always fun to do when we were on tour together.
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The Dance of Love
unreleased
This is Andy's song. Andy joined the band in August of 2008, and immediately I was interested in his songwriting. In a studio session earlier this year he showed me this song. We recorded it and have been playing it at Deer Tick shows ever since. It's a nice number, and pretty straightforward. Obviously, the song is about doing the usual things to impress a woman in order to dance "The Dance of Love". At least that's my educated interpretation of it.
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Straight into a Storm
original version appears on Born On Flag Day
This song, the only song from this session that appears on our new album, was written sometime in 2008. Originally, it began as a blues song, then it was recorded for the album as kind of a rockabilly song, and through performing it live over and over again it's kind of turned into a swaggering garage rock song based around the typical blues song structure. I wrote it about a relationship that was going nowhere fast while I was still involved in it. It's got a fun-to-be-pissed-off kind of feel to it. Andy and I also trade guitar solos, a Deer Tick first. It's definitely become one of my favorites to perform live.
John Joseph McCauley III has a mustache that is almost always just a little bit too long, to the point where the blondish whiskers begin a coarse curl inward, poking into that upper lip of his and getting in the way of anything brought to the mouth on a fork or spoon or by cup. Bottles are unaffected so that's a point of no concern as the beer goes down smooth without any napkins needed for clean up. The whiskey swigs can be consumed with the same amount of ease and very little residue. It only leads to more of that sort of thing - this lack of complication. It's an enabling of the kind of imbibing that goes on to fill the nights and sometimes the days so that the most painful tribulations can be suitably numbed into vagary or non-memory, whichever it chooses to get reset to when the chips and drinks are slammed down on the wood. It's a choice to always go down the disintegrating and disheartening road of ruin, where broken hearts attract other wounded characters and start buying each other drinks, impressed with the other's capacity for hurt and for the old souls that they've all come to tell of or get their bleeding insides across in other ways. McCauley, who's riding some long-time-coming bit of popularity since his appearance at the SXSW music festival in March (an appearance on the inaugural episode of NBC News anchor Brian Williams' indie rock showcase of all things), is most definitely one of the finest writers of these battered and beaten ballads working today. He writes songs that are brutally specific and filled with such moving soliloquies and jagged lines of true sadness or immovable sorrow that's come from the mismatch of two innocent hearts. The hearts are never innocent in the sense that they've never done wrong, never made another heart take a cold and rocky plunge off a pier, but always in the sense that THIS time - this particular time - they weren't going to do that. They were being good. They wanted better and they had no intention of letting the present follow the past like all those times before. The character that McCauley plays - if it's a character at all and not just his life as an opened book of dark ass misfortune and pains in the ass - is one of the man who's been a dog and also of a man who's been dogged by atrocious luck, bunking up and falling for women whom he can't wash from his mind, but have found it easy to discard him for the next guy in line, even though he was good to them, even though he thought this was finally the one that could work. Even though he adds numerous elements to both his last release, "War Elephant," and his latest record, "Born On Flag Day," McCauley essentially makes classic country & western burners that are rife with the most heartless treatment of sweethearts and the most genuine reactions to all of that heartlessness. He is the king of lonesomeness with everything he touches, singing words that register in so many different ways -- all of which involve at least one person going away torn to shreds and kicking rocks sullenly all over the yard, then retreating to the tavern for a drawn out bender. He sings of true love, the great kind, and true love, the bad kind - and he'd swear up and down that there's such a thing. He lives through the manipulation of feelings only to tell about them with the kind of perceptiveness of a clairvoyant. "Born On Flag Day" is full of destruction and roses, full of embraces that keep a man warm through a winter of discontent and the empty hugs of goodbye that could keep ice cream hard. He hopes that the angel on his shoulder is right, for he's listening to her constantly, taking her for what she's worth, but there's always the outside chance that he's heeding the words of a devil dressed in an angel's garb and McCauley seems wary of that, worried of that through all of the pits and depressions. He sings, "This woman on my mind/Her lies stink the same as mine," and so maybe misery's just finding ways to keep amused. It could be, but we'd prefer to believe in something more uplifting. Or so we tell ourselves, even when the lonesomeness pores us such lovely drinks.
Deer Tick Official Site
Partisan Records
Deer Tick's Debut Daytrotter Session
