Megafaun
Comfort In The Comfort
Mar 6, 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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Gather, Form & Fly
original version appears on Gather, Form & Fly
One of the few new songs we had just started performing at this time, which would become the title track of our upcoming record. Very fitting at that time, as it is sort of a Fall-time song to us. This song can act as a litmus test live. There are so many long spaces, that it can sometimes be very confrontational to a talkative audience. We've had some of our most amazing live experiences with this song, as well as some worst-night-ever moments!
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Kaufman's Ballad
unreleased
This is an early incarnation of this song. At the point you had recorded this performance, we didn't even have a name for it. We have since recorded the studio version, and the song has changed in little ways. Its also one of three songs on Gather, Form and Fly we were performing before we started recording the record. We often open shows with this song because it has a nice textural intro, which lets us ease into our sets, and feel out the audience and the room a bit before we start singing. The words recount the tale of the attempted burning of Graham Parson's body at the Joshua Tree National Forest. This was co-written with our friend Perry Wright, who has an amazing band called The Prayers and Tears of Arthur Digby Sellers.
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His Robe
original version appears on Bury The Square
The version of this song you hear is a result of the tour we were currently on with Arnold Dreyblatt, which required the use of an upright bass. We had Arnold's sawed-in half double bass, and Brad's full upright in our minivan for the entire tour! Suprisingly, it was actually not that cramped! We decided to take advantage of this situation for His Robe (which had sort of been retired from live shows due to the lack of fullness in arrangement). We wanted to explore the groove, using the song as a guide post for spontaneous things to happen, as opposed to just playing the song like it is on Bury the Square. We have since continued to explore this idea with one of our newer songs called Solid Ground.
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Drains
original version appears on Bury The Square
This song represents a major gateway for our extended improvisations. I think we've gotten more comfortable taking these improvisations out further and for longer periods of time since this recording. Its probably a good example of the mind set we were in on that Arnold Dreyblatt tour. Working on his music definitely inspired us to stretch some things out even further in an instrumental way.
Here's what's most attractive about the music that North Carolina band Megafaun makes: it's without any sort of baggage or any tells. It might as well be long-legged and intelligent to boot, with that combination. We enter into any one of its songs and we can't tell you how it's going to play. We might get the kind of desert night flamer like the incredible unreleased song "Fallen Angel," or we might get something closer to a geeky, Mississippi Delta gospel song, with a playfully melodic backbeat as "His Robe" does. The latter features a couple moments of live, open chuckling and perhaps impromptu flourishes, but it essentially still portrays some Biblical themes and the always powerful demands that a mind and society place on finding salvation. Megafaun take us by the hand immediately with multi-part harmonies that are wonderfully taut as well as unpolished and malleable and then we're being led into various rooms within these songs, where anyone in their right minds would be happy to just shut themselves off and crawl over to the abstracted yellowed and bleached out rectangles lying cockeyed on the floor. One step inside any of the obvious shapes - one touch of a heel or a toe striking the carpeting or wood - and it would be evident that this is the spot we've been looking to recline or nap in since we woke up groggily this morning, still hazy from the overnight. "Drains" is a 10-plus-minute song from the group's second-to-last album "Bury The Square" and it goes everywhere, like a hummingbird would, hovering in lengthy instrumental bridges a la Six Parts Seven, then drifting into brief patches of lemon-tinged melancholy like a sad lover, finally letting the freakouts happen (as much as they can be freakouts - though they have been known to perform as the backing band for hippie nuts Akron/Family in the past), with drums flying off in places, before returning to a structure that feels as if we're being courted by a summer's night, all tanned and vital, all full of promise and of combustion. It's music that defines THE reason or a new reason that we're all given our own separate hearts - aside from the blood-pumping aspects. It's because of the weird combinations of troubles and excitement that they can all get into when surrendered for those expressed consents. Songs by Megafaun give us these dimensions of our own rhythms being surrendered for a community rhythm shared with someone else or a few more someone else's. They sing about things - probably days and nights and affairs or dalliances - ending the way we'd sing about our passions and yearnings for beginning them in the first place. It's almost as if when they sing on "Fallen Angel," "Smoke starts to clear…/Dark desert night/Fire is our only light…/Flames wear down about to die/We had no choice we had to try/We had no choice we had to try," it's a justification for always finding it worthwhile to sail off into choppy waters. We'll just do it - against the certainly of fading lights and fires losing their heat, in spite of trepidation and knowing full-well the way that most things tend to turn out for us, and everyone else we know. We find comfort in this comfort.
Megafaun Official Site
Hometapes Records
