(December 2018 "From the Archive") - "Chill Out!!"

I love music that sounds “icy”. I think my affinity for it started with a song called “IceClock” from our first album, General Winter’s Secret Museum. It's become something of a Tea Club trope, with “Tumbleweeds” from Rabbit, “Mister Freeze” from Quickly Quickly Quickly, and “The White Book” from Grappling. For December, I thought it would be appropriate to share another frozen song from The Archive.

Jokingly (perhaps unfortunately) titled “Chill Out!!” in reference to one of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s terrible ice puns from Joel Schumacher’s 1997 blockbuster Batman and Robin, I wrote this song around 2005 by doing an impression of my brother Pat. He was always really great at writing songs that had a sort of shimmering icy dissonance. I felt that the band’s music had become too melodic and pretty, and I wanted to bring some of that dissonance back. It was another song that was written quickly, with Pat immediately “getting” what I was going for and writing a perfect accompaniment.

We recorded this song on our trusty old Tascam 4 track tape recorder. We included it on our 4th EP, Clouded Gloomy Beloved. This was the EP that attracted the attention of the legendary Tim Gilles, and includes many songs that would later appear on our first album. That EP is long out of print, and unless you were hanging around the Gloucester County/Camden NJ indie prog rock scene in the mid 2000's, you've probably never heard it before.

This was originally intended to be a full band song, with bass and drums and vocals, but it was never fully developed. (There is a demo that exists with drums that will be shared here eventually.) Interestingly enough, the lyrics that I wrote for this song wound up being used about 8 years later for "Mister Freeze" from Quickly Quickly Quickly.

"Cold, cold in the sun
Cold in the moon
Cold from the mountain snow."

Enjoy this song from our archive, and as Arnold Schwarzenegger might say, "Stay cool!"

-Dan

(P.S. The picture that goes with this song was drawn by me from around the same time I wrote this song.)

This recording of “Chill Out!!” was performed by:

Dan McGowan - Classical Guitar

Patrick McGowan - Acoustic Guitar