Lake
A Darkened Matter Over Lightness
Jan 1, 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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Oh, The Places
original version appears on Oh, The Places We'll Go
I wrote this song while Ashley and I were living at my sister's straw bale house on Whidbey Island. I came up with the chord progression on her piano. A few days later, while messing around with a Casiotone, I tried playing the progression again, a little faster, and magically the drum machine and auto bass kicked on at the fourth chord of the progerssion. It was an amazing way to start the song, totally accidental, and really suprising. The lyrics and melody came the next day, and of course, I can't deny that the Suess book Oh, the Places You'll Go was sitting on the coffee table in front of me. Cheers Theodor!
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Gravel
original version appears on Let's Build A Roof
Lindsay wrote this song on a laptop using the "musical typing" function in Garage Band while LAKE was visiting Ashley's dad in northern Sweden. She stayed at the cabin, we all went to the sauna, sometimes it pays off to skip the sauna. I was really glad when she consented to record the song with LAKE, cheers Lindsay!
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Bad Dream
original version appears on Oh, The Places We'll Go
Ashley and I wrote this song together, first recording the drums and keyboard live. I added the bass, she added the guitar. I wrote some lyrics and she sang them, then she wrote some lyrics and I sang them. Then we cleaned it up a little more and had Ashley sing the main vocal. It was the second song that we wrote together. The drum beat comes from a song by the Green Arrows, a fabulous band from Zimbabwe. Cheers Green Arrows!
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Together In Confidence
unreleased
This song is from a "song-a-day-athon" session that Ashley and I churned out in the spring of 2008. We kept it up for a week. A lot of these songs like "Acorn," Breathing," and "the Roof Caves In," ended up on Let's Build a Roof, a couple ended up on Oh, the Places We'll Go.
We ended up not using this song for Let's Build a Roof because we just had too many songs, but It's fun to play live. You can find it on a "What the Heck Fest" compilation from this last summer's fest comp. Cheers to What the Heck Fest!
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LMJ
unreleased
Ashley wrote this song about a friend who died in a car accident in highschool. There is a crazy raegge version on our first album. This is the live version we play now and then. The melody is from an old Irish folk song.
Cheers Ireland!
The first record that Olympia, Wash., band LAKE made a few years ago took on the title of the Dr. Seuss book most likely to be given to a graduating senior following the tassel-switching ceremony in the high school auditorium. "Oh, The Places We'll Go," was a smattering of lightly swooning melodies, using broke-ass toys, keyboards and guitars, giving off a sensation that this was a collection of songs that were bred from quaint missives and given out as pieces of art free of any sort of consternation or jadedness. The album was, through-and-through, nine tunes constructed from the purest snowflakes - ones that had just begun a tumble from the clouds, still thousands of free-falling feet from the ground's surface. They were the unsullied feelings of newness and some kind of awakening, tender-hearted songs that left you feeling nostalgic for early 80s television show theme songs (this is all assuming that you were experiencing those early years of childhood then) and those stowed memories of childhood when you received the biggest hugs and the brightest smiles from mom and dad because the smiles that were on your face, at the end of a running start and a leap into their thicker and stronger arms, were even brighter and gaping. The LAKE material that Eli Moore and Ashley Eriksson are showing us with their sophomore release - "Let's Build A Roof" - this time with a full five-piece band behind them and with production from the great Karl Blau, is a group that's still rooted in those salad days of stand-alone sitcom theme song writing, but has decided that there's something just as interesting on the other side of comfort. Instead of songs that are the equivalent of a good, strong, warm tea at the culmination of a long evening of supping and conversing is something slightly more spooky, slightly more abstract and unclear. There is still plenty about the songs that make them feel like the world's largest and most effective lozenge, but they are exploring the details where the devil's said to exist. It's in these various crevasses that they find the powders of black magic, the mystical spices that they were looking for to add just a little bite to songs that still feel as if they could be inserted into the nursery rhymes of children. It's just as "Ring Around the Rosie" is believed to be about the black plague - there's a happy and lovely tone to everything on "Let's Build A Roof," but there is an underlying feeling that there is more to the story and that this is not just a dash of cheeriness, lined with blooping keys, pleasant guitar sounds and Moore and Eriksson's crystalline vocals, which sound like two kittens embracing when melting together as they tend to do. The two have made a second record that is just as assessable and wonderfully hummable, but as there is never always sunshine or light, they've added some darkened corners and chosen to think the scarier things through a bit. Eriksson mentions on "Sing 99 And 90," "Death is sharper than a thorn," and there seem to be plenty of thorns descending, even as there are memories of camping out in the front yard and a general touch of squeezing a river of chocolate syrup overtop a mound of vanilla ice cream. It must just be because they trust in heaven and death going hand-in-hand, no matter what happens.
LAKE Official Site
LAKE's Debut Daytrotter Session
K Records
