Ted Leo
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MAY 2024 - SHAKE THE SHEETS INFLUENCES
🕑 Added 2024-05-31 15:58:34 +0000 UTCComing in under the wire! With all the thinking about, and practicing of, and archival-materials-adjacent-to Shake The Sheets combing-through, I’ve been thinking about the writing; I’ve been thinking about what I was thinking about while recording; and like the longest tape delay, set on a single repeat, looping back, forgotten and unlooked for, from the depths of my unconscious, came the chorus of a song the other day: “In a Whirlpool,” by Cactus World News. I got into Cactus World News when their album, Urban Beaches, came out in 1986. MTv played the video for their single, “The Bridge” (which was a live clip from their performance at the Self Aid thing in Dublin that year) enough that I saw it more than once, and it made an impact on me, but for whatever reason, I never bought the album. But you know how that happens sometimes? You get into something enough that you feel like you’re genuinely into it, but for whatever complex tangle of reasons in your life, you kind of elide the follow-through and wind up in a record store, say… sixteen/seventeen years later, coming across that record, and going, “Oh yeah! Cactus World News! Only $4.00? Hell yeah.” Maybe I righted a minor historical wrong or maybe the universe had a hand in that original elision, but either way, in 2002 or 2003, it hit me at a time in which I think I was even more receptive to it. I was listening, as I always did, to a lot of late 70s/early 80s punk (see cover of Stiff Little Fingers’ “Suspect Device” released between Shake the Sheets and Living With the Living, or cover of Rich Kids’ “Ghosts of Princes in Towers,” you can find on youtube at a Wes Stace’s Cabinet of Wonders show), but also a bunch of off-kilter melodic post punk/early alternative (?), like The Gobetweens (see cover of “Apology Accepted” on the Japanese version of Tyranny of Distance), Split Enz (see the many cover versions of “Six Months in a Leaky Boat” I’ve done hither and yon), late GenX/Empire (see the eventual covers of “Heaven’s Inside” and, like… “Enough of the Same” I’ll probably do), Easterhouse (will probably also do “Out On Your Own,” and/or “1969” at some point), etc., so Cactus World News wasn’t jarring to anyone in the van when I added them to my most recently burned CDR mix. Back in the present, I assume that it was being in the revisiting-Shake-The-Sheets mindset that shook this shard loose from the calcified edifice of the past and brought it forward, and I can hear it’s influence now in ways I probably didn’t at the time. Bigger drums, staccato guitar hits (which come from an even earlier set of influences and have kind of always been omnipresent in my playing, but still point to why this particular song fits in so well), bigger and more hopeful chorus rising out of verses that question… I was like, “Oh - I should cover this,” and then I thought, “Maybe I’ll tease out a few more things and do them for the May Patreon, as well.” So please enjoy first, “In a Whirlpool,” by Cactus World News. Incidentally, before I continue, having not actually followed through on the Cactus World News fandom I thought I was living, I just sort of assumed that they’d continued on apace and I’d catch up with them at some point, but it turns out this was their only contemporaneous album! In news that hurt me to read, they fell victim to the classic trope of making the next one, having the label shelve it (I have no inside info on why, but we all know the story - label priorities go elsewhere, “We’re not hearing a single,” etc.), and the band subsequently falling apart under the frustration and pressure. I don’t know if I’m thus the first and only person to cover and “release” a Cactus World News song, but I hope I can get at least a few people to listen to the rest of the album.
Back in the early PUNK zone, but kind of advanced, songwriting-wise, was 999’s Emergency LP. The obvious choice for me to cover here would’ve been “Me And My Desire,” but it was almost too on the nose to point out as an influence on Shake the Sheets, and I thought it would be more fun to, while acknowledging the debt owed to Emergency, look forward to The Biggest Prize in Sport and the possibly queer-coded (I’m less sure than I used to be, but I like to imagine it was) “Boys in the Gang.” Mid-tempo, simple and repetitive, melodic banger with another big chorus. “Me And My Desire” has rhythm and guitar playing styles that are more directly in line with my first instincts about anything, but “Boys in The Gang” has that actual je-ne-sais-quoi that I so often wish I could just allow to flow, and is therefore, in some ways, just a little more fun, especially for a context like this. ESPECIALLY when the next song is…
“Vital Signs” by Rush. Yes, I went there, finally. Though I talk about Rush a lot, I’ve played Spirit of Radio solo a number of times, and we, as a band, careened into the end of it the first time we played Vancouver (I know they’re not from Vancouver, but we weren’t doing the rest of Canada on that tour), AND though I do have a recording of me testing out some new 70s 421s by doing “Bacchus Plateau” back in 2010-ish, well… I was going to say this is the first Rush cover I’ve really done, but having just listed all that other stuff, that would obviously be a lie. This is the first one I’ve taken seriously, though. As with all of these cover choices, I think it’s easy to see how songs like this influenced me, and how I let ideas and elements - VIBES, if you will - come to the fore in Shake The Sheets more than most other records I’ve made. A little bit of prog, but otherwise mostly very 80s reggae-influenced punk/post-punk. Prescient, as ever, in its exploration of “mixed feelings” re. humanity and technology, etc., I still feel this one really deeply and it makes me kind of giddy that I actually completed this to my satisfaction. I will tell you, unashamedly, that it took me the better part of an entire day to nail the drums. I have a little networked app that allows me to get my work desktop on my phone so I can use it like a remote control when I’m tracking drums by myself (which is always), and it was hours upon hours of PLAY-MISTAKE-STOP-TURN-PRESS STOP-UNDO-PRESS RECORD-PRESS PLAY-TURN BACK-PLAY-MISTAKE-STOP-TURN-PRESS-STOP-UNDO-PRESS RECORD-PRESS PLAY-TURN BACK-PLAY A LITTLE BIT LONGER THROUGH - MISTAKE-TURN-PRESS-STOP-ad almost nauseam until I got it right. As terrible as that may sound though, those of you who know me know that that was actually probably one of the better days I’ve had in a long time.
Having completed those three (I recorded them in the order I’m presenting them here), I felt like I was still missing a piece - missing in the sense that I needed it to complete this suite and hadn’t found it yet, and missing in the sense that I was mourning its lack, even though I hadn’t yet landed on what it was. I was looking for something that I know was in my brain at the time, that illustrated the trend toward more space on the record, continued to inform the vibe, punker in some ways than the rest of the choices, but still had that dubbiness that is such a big part of what I do. I was first thinking, “another Stiff Little Fingers song? Rudi? Protex? Outcasts?” (Belfast, on the brain). Wait - Outcasts later stuff… almost there. Oh wait again - duh - ferry FROM Belfast (to Cairnryan, A75, M6, etc.), to Sound Affects. The Jam. This came to mind, again, because of how obvious the musical influences are, but this one felt important to put in the list of ingredients in the Shake The Sheets slurry because of the lyrics, too. More so than “Vital Signs,” this is, in retrospect, right in line with some of what I was directly thinking and singing about on the record. Aging and activism, retreating to hardened positions vs. staying curious and continuing to challenge one’s SELF; as the dust has begun settling after the explosions of youth, looking around and asking not so much WHERE do I want to be, as WHO do I want to be. What’s worth compromising for? What’s worth sacrificing for? What, for ME, is a full life, and what is a life of just “scraping away?” In truth, I don’t think I WAS listening to the Jam all that much around the making of this - certainly not in any way that I could point to it as a conscious influence - but it’s in my DNA, like Rush, like Stiff Little Fingers, like all of this stuff. It’s all chicken/egg. It resonates because deep down I’m already there, but I learn more from it, I’m buoyed by it, my thoughts and feelings are honed by it, and I move along with its continued companionship. Music does this for me. Other art does, too, but music is the constant. It’s immediate, and it has the effect of staying with me and echoing back, as these songs and groups did, throughout my life; and along with all the challenging, informing, etc., of course, bringing joy. I hope you dig these. I had fun making them.
Oh, I almost forgot - did you sus out the other common thread among all these? CHORUS (effect) ON GUITAR. Why did I not use that in the studio on Shake The Sheets?? Well, practically speaking, because I didn’t have a chorus pedal, but flowing from that was also probably that it just wasn’t in my guitar playing lexicon at the time. I think had I dabbled back then, I would’ve gotten it wrong, to be honest - too much or too little - so I guess I’m glad I waited? I do have one now, and I know how to use it, so… We’ll see what happens.
And as I look at the way this is all formatted now, I think what I'll do is upload MP3s and WAVs of each song as a separate post and group them as a Collection again, to make it a little easier to navigate the listening and the downloads!
Comments
Ted Leo
Thanks! Right now, I’m using the new Boss Waza Craft chorus, but I also have a little Donner Tutti Love chorus that’s great, small (which is nice for a cramped pedal board), and which you can hear on a few songs on my last album, The Hanged Man.
Cal Cooper
Love everything about this! I love getting to know what led to albums that I love. What chorus pedal are you using now?
Ted Leo
A-HA! I knew there had to be another CWN fan out there! That’s awesome. And in fairness, I think I did that exact skip many times, myself.
Doug Edgecomb
Oh man, these are great...thank you!! Just dusted off my Cactus World News cassette so I can revisit "In a Whirlpool" because teenaged me would pretty much only listen to "Worlds Apart" and then fast forwarded to "The Bridge" - rewind and repeat.
