SONG BY SONG-- by Sam

first, a note about songwriting...

Writing songs is a tricky thing. It’s a balancing act. A writer has to walk the line between extremes without going to one direction or the other. Honest but not irritating, poetic but not pretentious, sincere but not too obvious. I write songs in two different ways. Sometimes, I have an idea, a phrase, or an image that I build a song around, and the “big picture” reveals itself later. Other times, I have a larger, overarching idea, and fill in the details.

Either way, songwriting has to be completely natural and unforced. When I really TRY to write a song, it doesn’t come. Or when it does manage to come, it’s crap. Songs come from the sky. Songwriters filter. That’s why you can’t force them. I seriously believe that the reason that half of the bad music out today is so terrible is because of forced songs. It’s like trying to force a baby to be born 6 months premature. It can’t happen.

I also want to make it clear how important collaboration is. One person’s mind can only reach so far in a certain situation. A lot of songs are written exclusively by me, but a good number are written in union with one or more people in the band. Each one of us brings something special and unique to the songwriting process, something that is generally outside of the mindset of each other. In the end, the whole truly is greater than the sum of its parts. Every member of the band has now contributed to more than one song. In most cases, it is many more. And the collaboration will only continue and improve.

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BARE BONES
Our debut album, a conscious effort towards experimentation. I view this album as a record of stories. A lot of them were written to be anti-autobiographical. Of course, nothing a person creates isn’t in some way autobiographical. Although I think the band and I have moved forward leaps and bounds, I still love this album. I think it has great songs.


The fact that More and Less changed so much from the demo version to the final is quite fitting, since essentially it is a song about change. I wrote it in a period of time when I was full of doubt (these periods are common, I’m coming to find), and confusion as to which direction to head. I was feeling alone and caught up in many things, and for me the images of spiders, roots, and angels all added up in my mind.

Lost My Way is one of several songs I wrote in the year or so before Bare Bones was released, and its original version existed on a four-track tape recorder before Grasshopper was even a notion in my head. It follows a lot of the same themes as More and Less, except it mentions specific people in my life. The characters in the song are the members of Hydroplayne, my first band. I suppose I sensed that I was moving away from that group, from that music.

Telephone Wires was written standing barefoot on my cold tiled kitchen floor. Personally, I think it’s a song all about images. In the words there is an unspoken idea of distance, perhaps even in the idea of telephone wires themselves. I have a theory that the vague events in the song are imaginary to the characters. The static is not a sample. I tuned my radio between AM stations, and tweaked the knob slightly. Voices and sounds from strangers and strange lands came through. But if anything, this did not signify connection, just reiterated the distance.

My first attempt at writing a straight-up love song produced Goodnight Sleeptight. Obviously, I failed at making a straightforward love song. But I think I got something much more interesting instead: love, doubt, promises, and dreams.

Down was the first song I wrote after Grasshopper was actually formed. It’s a song that captures a lot of the feelings of traveling as a child. I always was living in my own head, as I think I often am now. The whole song has a warm, sepia sound to it.

In Mind was written right after I returned from a trip to Spain. Although it doesn’t follow real life events exactly, it captures the mood of being alone in a hotel room thousands of miles from home and the person you love nicely I think. When you’re separated from things you hold dear, you start questioning the original connections. And before long, it seems like you’re not seeing things right. The song sounds like it was played by ghosts.

Speaking of ghosts, Silent Ghost is about things perhaps too personal to mention. I can say that it’s about more than one loss. And more than one kind of loss. This is the first song I realized that I could develop my own style as a lead guitar player. This is significant because up until this point, I was definitely a rhythm player only, and was pretty unconfident in my abilities at a guitarist at all.

Morning is a deeply personal and autobiographical song. The events are as follows (risking embarrassment and being altogether too exposed): I was in a friend’s field, in a teepee with a fire in it. There were four of us there. The ground was covered in snow, but had a tarp over it in the teepee. We were drinking. My friend’s mom came out to the field, livid because we were underage. We went our separate ways. Fearing her own parents’ outrage, one of my friends came to my house. Deeply frozen, damp, intoxicated, and shivering violently, we held each other platonically until morning. This may be too much information, but this is the only song based on incredibly specific happenings (with some embellishment, of course). The whole thing sounds like a dream.

From Under the Waning Moon is another song first recorded as part of a solo project on a four-track. I don’t really know what to say about it, except that it’s about two completely different subjects that work together only because their words seem to fit.

Definitely the oldest Grasshopper song, Sand and Shadows existed as early as 2004, once again as a solo song on my four-track. My then-girlfriend asked me to write a song for/about her. This is what came out. I’m not sure I ever showed it to her. This is another image-driven one. The name has a certain ring to it. A version of this exists in a more “poppy” arrangement, but after listening to it, I hated it. I gave it a week to ferment in my head, and listened to some Wilco, Radiohead, and Grant Lee Buffalo. The results were unlike anything I had produced up until that point.

Big Sky is simply an expression of my infatuation with America, a theme that has popped up in my songs many times. I tried to capture the scope and drama of the country and its land, and the feelings they produce. Ambitious and arrogant, I know. But so is America.


SPEAKING TO THE DEAD
An album about relationship(s [of all kinds]). There’s some great song work on this record, and some great genre play. I think we started to really come into our own with this one. We started sounding like a real functioning band.

Exactly What I Mean is interesting on many levels to me. Not only do I think it has some great images in it, but I think the whole theme of communication and miscommunication is shown really well. The lines are a collection of seemingly random images and ideas strung together with “I know you know exactly what I mean.” That line contains so much frustration, pleading, assumption… lots of things. The title is funny to me for the same reasons. And I absolutely love the noise freakout at the end.

Fireflies really is a song about the intense (albeit relatively brief) loneliness a person feels after they say goodnight to someone they love and head home. This song was my first foray into the world of sampling and filtering. The results still excite me.

A hard song for me to pin down, Killing Time is mostly about being depressed I think. It has bleak words, bleak sounds, and a bleak message.

She Says started out as a joke between Craig H and I about a mutual acquaintance, but it turned into a portrait of a couple of pathetic people. I was afraid that it would come out as too much of a cliché, but I think we had something unique to say and found a way to say it. This song went through two versions, the final has a classic rock sound I really love.

I Wasn’t Looking is a slice of Americana. The addition of Gracie Jones’ vocals give it a real old-timey feel that, for me at least, conjures up images of the old singing families of days long gone.

I guess an album about (among other things) a relationship has to have at least one breakup song. Out of My Hands is one of them. It contains all the anger and sadness of the death of a relationship, but also a distinct flavor of denial or disbelief, which is something you don’t find all that often in similar songs. It sounds like smooth Neil Young. And something else that I can’t put my finger on. I guess its just Grasshopper.

I did not write the great majority of What Do You Have To Say For Yourself?, so I cannot really speak about it in depth. But I do think we pulled off the soundscape nicely. I did however, have a hand in Answer (Cracking), which is just what it says it is. A song about all the things you’ve ever wanted to say but couldn’t find the right words for. But …melodically with a folk-rock arrangement and Beatles-esque harmonies!

The next three songs have always seemed part of the same cycle to me. They just seem to fit together. So I’ll write them up together. Raindrops was written far before Speaking to the Dead was released (just after “Sand and Shadows,” actually), and demoed on the trusty 4-track. It’s about and sounds like dreams I have had. Coincidence is a pretty straightforward song about being in love and living right outside of DC. We’ve all been in the place Tripping on Words is about: tongue tied, blithering, unable to say what you mean, but with the absolute best of intentions. Plus, I think it sounds gorgeous.

Ambulance Chaser is, in essence, a song about America’s obsession with death. One day, I heard a helicopter flying really low over my house. I walked out the door and saw it landing at the park down the street. I ran down, knowing it was a MediVac and wanting to see what was going on. When I got there, I found that the chopper was called for a Little Leaguer who got hit in the head with a bat. He was going to be fine, from everything I heard, and I was actually disappointed. Realizing this, I was pretty disturbed, and knew I had to write a song. And the song that came out was pure Crazy Horse.

Beach was written at the beach. It is a moment in time, perhaps one of the most content moments of my life and of that particular relationship. Craig H wrote the choruses, and they fit eerily well with the rest of the song (the dialogue actually happened verbatim between my girlfriend and I, and he wasn’t there). It’s one of our shortest songs, and one of our more sonically compelling, in my opinion.

What can I say about Speaking to the Dead? Most of me thinks that its too complex for me to completely understand. But I do know that it’s about losing everything dear to you: love, life, hope, etc etc etc. The bridge has the unbelievable rage to it. I don’t want to sound conceited, but that bridge still astounds and somewhat scares me. The other words are dark, resigned, and sad. The sound is even darker and ghostly. I listen to this song all the time, not because I created it, but because it speaks to me as a piece of music.

Back Rubs for Dan, the hidden track on the album, was written by Trevor and embellished by the rest of us. The voices are saying very definite things. Try to figure them out. The rest is Trevor’s--- you’ll have to ask him.