One afternoon, several years ago, as I was driving to the
grocery store to do my weekly shopping, I saw a lady walking along the sidewalk
next to the road.
She was wearing a floral
print full-length cotton dress – obviously homemade – and a little white cotton
bonnet on her head with a matching bib apron tied around her neck and
waist.
On her feet, she was wearing
what looked to be wooden clogs.
She was
so odd and so beautiful and so out of place – like a Rembrandt portrait come to
life in a John Baeder painting - that it was all I could do to concentrate on
driving.
Once I made it home, I
immediately texted Brian about her.
He,
of course, told me to write it down.
(He’s
always telling me to write these things down.)
It was around this same time that Brian came down with a
nasty case of the flu. He shook me awake
in the middle of a fever-filled night to demand that I find my bedside notebook
and write down the name “Kasojeni Bay.”
No explanation … just the demand.
So I did. I assumed it was a
dream he’d had. In a way, I guess it
was, but he didn’t remember anything the next day other than the name of this
place. We spent weeks on the internet
trying to search for a place by that name, only to keep coming up with
nothing. (My dad is still trying to find this place, so
if anybody knows where it is, please let us know.)
Weeks later, on a late Sunday afternoon, Brian and I had
been working in the studio on some other songs.
We came upstairs for a drink and to clear our heads for a moment, only
to find that the only “adult beverage” we had in the house was a half bottle of
Absinthe. Being a Sunday in Utah, the
liquor store was closed. So, yes, we did
a straight shot of Absinthe before heading back into the studio as we joked
about shooting Absinthe because the vodka was all gone.
This was when the story of Kasojeni Bay started to come
together into a song. We’d envisioned it
telling the tales of a group of people so happy and comfortable in their
insanity that they don’t notice they are insane, nor do they care. Sometimes, living in a fantasy world is a
much better – in some cases, maybe even healthier – place than the ugliness of
certain “real” world situations.
Once the song was written, we decided we wanted to have a
few key phrases translated into and sung in a different language. We’d flirted with a few different language options,
but ultimately decided on Slovene.
Luckily, our good friend Jeremy Young speaks Slovene and kindly did the
translations for us, even driving up to our house to teach me how pronounce the
words and what each phrase means. Then
he accused me (jokingly … I hope) of singing Slovene with an Italian
accent.
But the song itself wasn't enough to tell the story of this place called Kasojeni Bay. While we were in the studio recording our album Shall We Live Forever, Brian was spending his mornings busily writing a book. It wasn't his original intention. He just got a little carried away by one of those "Tell me how we met, but don't tell the truth about it" posts on Facebook. In a way, I guess we can blame Hillary LaFrance for starting him down that path. What started out to be a simple, silly paragraph quickly became an insistence by the characters in this book for him to tell their story. It was occupying his dreams, waking him up in the middle of the night, demanding to be written. This book, Kasojeni Bay, weaves many of the stories of the songs on this album into a complete tale of discovery and what is truly important in life.
In her mind, another time
Shufflin’ down the street
Cotton bonnet on her head
Wood clogs upon her feet
She never said, “Hello,” to me
Nor even yet, “Goodbye”
She never said a word to me
Just looked at me and sighed
Nikoli mi je rekla "Zdravo"
Pač tudi ni "Zbogom"
In Kasojeni Bay
Friday did a one foot dance
Looked like a god in drag
He swatted flies and dead magpies
Then tossed them in his bag
Friday was an errand boy
Did favors for the Maven
He brought the message home to me
‘Cause, Friday was the raven
Petek je bil krokar
Petek je bil trčkaralo
Usluge je naredil ker
Friday was the raven
In Kasojeni Bay
(Dance with me! Dance with me!)
Bugs in the dumpsters
Sing oilcan operas to the Lord
He appears in concrete palm trees
And sugar cube fantasies
Fish dance in buckets
The Prophet is one of us
He is now
They shot Absinthe on Sunday
‘Cause the vodka was all gone
Then danced a tarantella
And sang death songs to the dawn
Friday missed his funeral
Although it was his own
The lady she made mourning buttons
Out of Friday’s bones
Petek pogrebu zamudil
Čeprav je bil njegov lastni
Dama je pripravila gumbe
Od Petkov kosti
In Kasojeni Bay
