Italia

We are currently on vacation in Italy after playing two very fun shows. Castello Sforzesco in Milan and the Anfiteatro del Venda in Padova, both spectacular venues. It’s funny that I added tour dates to a vacation. It’s usually the other way around. Italy isn’t an easy place to break into touring. It’s not really on the UK-based industry circuit. We just happened to find a great promoter here: Giuseppe from Ponderosa Productions. He does Blond Redhead and a lot of piano-based Indie rock.

Now we are in a small town in Umbria, where we have come for the last three years. I’m no good at travelogues. What is there to say? “Italy is nice?” Every time I try to talk about leisure i.e., biking or vacations, it feels unnecessary and indulgent. So let’s talk about this new song I’m working on called “How Long Have You Been Standing There?” It’s definitely the weirdest song of the new batch. I can’t really pin down what time signature it’s in so when it comes to recording with the band, it gets awfully tricky. It’s one of those tunes that makes sense in your head or when you’re playing alone, but when it comes time to communicate with others, it has to be standardized somehow. But once you have one section in 4/4 with odd bar lengths and another in 6/8, it’s just too many fractions and that’s the wrong part of the brain for making good music.

It employs a new technique that I’ve been messing with. I often experiment during sound checks and just start playing things that are unusual or feel exciting to me, and I started finger picking on the 5-string violin. This is where I play two notes simultaneously: one with the thumb and one with the forefinger. The interval is pretty far apart, like a 10th or a 13th. The way those two notes rub together has a distinct timber. (I think of the way Duke Ellington would play octaves really far apart on the piano as textural accents.) Our attempt to record this song gave us mixed results. It’s proving hard to get this effect to sound big enough. Sometimes when you try to make something sound huge, you get the opposite result. When I record pizzicato on my phone, the compression actually does something to make it sound present and powerful. The intro to “Roma Fade” was done that way. So this morning I snuck into a church here and recorded the solo parts of this song on my phone. (This tune has lyrics now, but I’m focusing on the instrumentals.)

Oh, I did observe something in Milan. It was brutally hot, nearly 100*, and yet men were on their Vespas and walking about wearing perfectly tailored suits with neck ties taut. Some were linen, but many were wool, and they don’t appear to be suffering much at all. I find it admirable, as I appreciate a nice suit, but I couldn’t pull that off. One of our first tours with Bowl of Fire was in the south in July, and it was subtitled “No Matter How Hot It Gets We’re Not Taking Off These God-Damn Suits” Tour ‘98, but we would at least loosen the collar a bit.

This Milanese look somehow doesn’t come off as conformist, even though it’s 80% navy blue with a starched white shirt and loafers with low-cut socks. The tailoring and grooming are so good that it just comes off as a high standard for beauty rather than “suits” per se.