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Alan Terrill
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Write a song while recording it.  Appreciate the blemishes.  Validate the surprises.

This song, from October, 2013 catches us at our most spontaneous.  It was autumn, the season of harvest. The light was inexplicably crisp and bright. Carla was 6 months pregnant and we were moving... again.

This is a sad and expansive meditation on home, parenthood, and ancestry. Those who are about to arrive have already been here.    

By now you’ve all met Jon Evans and heard the magic that he lends many of our songs as a player, engineer and producer. It’s impossible to overstate how much Jon did for this particular song. When we went to his studio (Brick Hill in Orleans, MA) to record it, the lyrics weren’t finished yet, the form was still… ahem… fluid, shall we say. Matthias and Jon sat patiently by as I pushed and pulled and scribbled and scrawled.

Within minutes of solving the formal questions of the puzzle, we were doing whole takes, live, altogether. I was terrified in the best possible way. I played piano as I sang, which is something of a novelty for me, trying to follow three notebook pages that looked like archaic maps of arrows, corrections, scratches and clues. Jon learned the uneven chord sequence as we went, while Matthias’ immovable drum beat anchored us all.

We left the song in Jon’s hands, trusting him to put flesh on this skeleton in the way only he could. And he did. What he sent back blew us away. It was the same song we had recorded days earlier, only it had become itself… it’s warm, swirling, creepy, beautiful self.

lyrics

Who looked in and saw a table set for four.

Her name writ backwards in the sun

on squares of color on the floor.

The lark takes a page in its tiny grey mouth

and turns our dreams to shade.

Once I was your only and your all

with one clenched fist, 
the other wide open.

This is the house.

This is the place.

This is the house of our love.

Who looked in and saw the table set for four.

Come, oh come and take your place

in this long line next to me.

This is the house.

This is the place.

This is the house of our love.

credits

from Rabbit Rabbit Radio, Vol. 2 - Swallow Me Whole, released July 8, 2014
Carla Kihlstedt - voice, piano
Matthias Bossi - drums
Jon Evans - bass, acoustic and electric guitars, banjo

Music and words by Carla Kihlstedt

Recorded and Mixed by Jon Evans at Brick Hill, Orleans, MA Additional tracks recorded by Carla Kihlstedt at KihlBossi Studios, Woods Hole, MA

Produced by Jon Evans

Published by Broca’s Fold, ASCAP

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Rabbit Rabbit Radio Falmouth, Massachusetts

Rabbit Rabbit Radio is the song-spinning duo of Carla Kihlstedt and Matthias Bossi. Collectively, they are founding members of Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, Tin Hat, 2 Foot Yard, Causing a Tiger, The Book of Knots, and Fred Frith’s Cosa Brava.

Drawing on their love of both art & folk song, industrial & improvised music and heart-wrenching balladry, their songs are raw, beautiful, sparse and rich. ... more

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