The Boxing Lesson
Insomniac Dealings For The Anxiety Set
Feb 14, 2009
Words by Sean Moeller
Illustration by Johnnie Cluney
Sound engineering by Mike Gentry
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Dark Side of the Moog
original version appears on Wild Streaks & Windy Days
This song started out as a live intro to our song "Back From the Dead" from Songs in the Key of C. It's a song of hope and redemption where love, drugs and a collection of synthesizers saved my life. Upon entering Rock Island to record our Daytrotter session the temperature dropped to 1 degree and unfortunately our Moog Voyager froze up and wouldn't work. Jaylinn borrowed an old Juno 60 that was sitting in the corner of the studio, dialed in some cool tones and we just went for it. So, I guess this version should be called "Dark Side of the Juno."
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Wild Streaks & Windy Days
original version appears on Wild Streaks & Windy Days
This is the title track of our recent full length that I started writing back in Los Angeles with ex-boxing lesson member Phil Cobb. It's sad and sweet and reminds me of losing myself, losing my friends and basically losing everything in the city of angels. Wild streaks and windy days are blowing all my friends around. They blew me to Austin where this song was extended and reworked the music but the lyrics stayed the same. It really captures that time period for me. We tend to really stretch this one out at our live shows.
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Muerta
original version appears on Wild Streaks & Windy Days
I wrote this chord progression on an old Crumar Trilogy synthesizer that I bought at a pawn shop in Austin. We were so poor at that time and so full of hope. Fitting to the name of the song, I died that night, came back to life and finished the song and shelved it for a while because playing it reminded us of our darkest days. When we were putting songs together for Wild Streaks & Windy Days, this song came back from the dead to haunt us once again. Now, the song has a life of it's own and has become one of our favorites to play live.
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Room 17
unreleased
This song hasn't been recorded or released yet. In September, our beloved drummer and friend, Jake, and his wife, Tina were sentenced and sent to federal prison for "conspiracy to manufacture marijuana." We wrote this little pop song for them as a tribute to what they were going through emotionally at that time. Even though Jake is in jail, he is still a integral part of The Boxing Lesson. Come home! Free Jake Mitchell!
The Boxing Lesson takes us to those places where we're about ready to witness something that's going to get us racing. We're just about to see one or more people turn on a fight or flight chemical reaction that might cause them to do something or a series of things that are uncharacteristic for them. It could mean balling up their firsts in self-defense, readying their own sack of a body for impact, for the other fists of other hands. It could mean retreating, making like a tree. It could mean opening up and revealing highly sensitive material just to minimize what could come next in the procession. It almost never involves a situation where that sack of a body would just stand there with a head bowed down to rest upon the chest, checking out the ground like a depressed hawk, poised on a fence post or up in a spruce tree. The Austin band presents us with the kind of scenery needed to draw out our own version of action, of the consequences that are coming down the line. They make a fire and like all fires - they start small. They feed and they feed and then soon enough they get so large and ferocious that someone or a group of like-minded individuals decide that its taming should be the next thing on their agenda. So it gets pared down - this time the band does the deed voluntarily - dousing the jolts and the sizzles until they can hear their own thoughts again and soon enough the rabble rousing begins again and there's a new sort of disorder to contend with. The songs on the band's last album, Wild Streaks & Windy Days, are anchored by nothing if not the spacey and hungry vocals of lead singer Paul Waclawsky who finds a way to kind of take us to the dreamy and grungy places that Soundgarden took us to way back when and also the places that Black Mountain and those modern droners/thrashers take us. All the while the music maintains an ambivalence that is a dark side of insomniac diggings and dealings that feels about ready to spring out of the corners and just scare the hell out of us with stark degrees of discomfort and anxiety. It's a buzzing blend of frustration and acceptance and it's a warning to the moonlight that tonight's the night that it might die and it will see the three faces of The Boxing Lesson standing over it as it closes its eyes for the last time, staring back with six eyes of steel and more darkness than the night's ever witnessed.
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