El Olio Wolof
The Wizards Are Here
Dec 28, 2008
Words by Sean Moeller
Illustration by Johnnie Cluney
Sound engineering by Patrick Stolley
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Welcome to Daytrotter
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Apathetic Apple
original version appears on A Tedious Task
This is one of our dearest songs. The song starts with the birth of an apple tree, and goes on to tell about how over time the tree was forgotten. The tree begins to think that even after all it has provided for the people it is not appreciated. At the end of the song the tree is cut down, and as it is falling it sees that all the people have come to pay their last respects. So even though it is sad to see the tree die, it is comforting to know that the last thoughts the tree had were good thoughts.
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King Refugee
original version appears on A Tedious Task
"King Refugee" is the story of a king that was taken from his village during an attack. The king was taken to be a slave on a ship. After about a year on the ship, the slaves decided they would be better off dead than enslaved. The King and the others burnt down the ship in mutiny, and sailed away on broken pieces of the ship, they have no idea what direction they are going, they just know that they want to go home. The last line in the song is "Go to sleep counting waves my love, and awaken when you're done".
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The Red Witch Of My Dreams
original version appears on A Tedious Task
This song is about being in a long relationship where you love someone so much. Then going directly into another relationship that is amazing. But you never had time to rebound or heal or breathe. You know what I'm saying?
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The Tedious Task Part 2
original version appears on A Tedious Task
This is the second song of a three-song series. I love playing it. The way it moves, drops, and changes. The song is about a boy, a dragon, and a wizard. We wrote it over three or four months. The story was written by our old bass player Amber and myself. We wrote the story to this part after load in at Plush in Tucson. We went down the street to a place called Revolutionary Grounds. Their patio was a nice place to get lost and write. My favorite line is "The babbling brooks were long and fast, they babbled tales of untold torn and tattered pasts". I have to be careful when singing, so that I don't come off like I am trying to rap.
We use the term "sprawling" - or other people do in travelogues and architectural digests - to express the layout and dimensions of a city like Chicago and all its never-ending suburbs or Mars Volta songs, in pontificating rock and roll zines. There are serious amounts of tedious droppings and drummings, achingly painful parts about some things so sprawling and non-compact. Sprawling is the archrival, at times, of appropriate, of idyllic. We'd typically rather not have our eyes and other senses so completely full when it comes to such things that are appealing on so many levels because then they can never be fully taken in and loved.
The sprawling nature of an El Olio Wolof song doesn't fit this criticism. It spans and bursts at the gills, taunting simplicity and getting carried away with a story made for a science fiction novel that's been converted into a major motion picture featuring all of the essential details and geeked out particulars that send it up as anything but a normal bit of writing. The Merced, California band is led by a bearded and often stocking capped fellow who goes by the name of Radioactive Cauliflower, RC for short. He's one of the most unassuming lead singers that you're ever going to find, bringing out an Elephant Six-approved, quirky smooth voice that doesn't come along more than once every 10 years or so and throwing together narratives that could get all of the Dungeon masters and those with a Shel Silversteen fetish woozy.
If the Athens, Ga., scene of the early-to-mid 90s needed a band the likes of which Brian Wilson treated the Four Freshman, El Olio Wolof could have served that need, making music that isn't determined by its smallest parts, but by the beginning, middle and end, all pasted together and understood as a complete thought. The words that the band pens seem to be mostly mythological, unrestrained by conventional subject matters meant for pop songs and unwilling to just discuss girls and breakups. They are about wizards, witches and apple trees with feelings. It's some form of anthropomorphism, but containing enough human sensation to make it so much more than that. A dying apple tree in "Apathetic Apple" sees all of these people coming and going from the proximities of its withering roots and living and hibernating branches and realizes that they don't think about it the way that it may deserve. It thinks out loud, "Just remember how much apple pie they ate in '83," and there's pride and sadness in the line. It's the gentle way that RC takes with his subject matter that keeps it from reeking of pretentiousness or self-satisfying word dribbles meant solely to entertain the writer and few other people. It doesn't apply to El Olio Wolof, which proceeds with tune after tune of highly literate and fantasy-filled songwriting.
El Olio Wolof MySpace
