Story Behind the Song – KASOJENI BAY

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.

Kasojeni Bay

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

 

Kasojeni Bay by Brian Bonell

The Story Behind the Song: THE INCREDIBLE SADNESS OF SONIA

One night, back when Brian and I first started writing songs together, I was sitting on the couch with my foot up (I was recovering from surgery on my foot) when Brian came into the room and said he wanted to write a sad song.  “How sad?” I asked.  “Really sad,” he answered, “the saddest.”  He went back into the studio and started writing and arranging the music, leaving me on the couch (with a brain full of post-surgery painkillers) to write the lyrics.  

As you can tell from some of these lyrics, I am a big fan of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass (the books, not the movies – although the movies are really good).  In fact, the original working title for this song was “The Incredible Sadness of Alice” but the Tim Burton movie (the one with Johnny Depp *swoon*) came out just as we finished writing the song, so we had to change the name a bit.  But why did we choose to change the name from Alice to Sonia?  Well …

Sonia is another name for Sophia.  Sophia is a goddess of wisdom.  While the song deals overtly with depression and suicide, the sub context is the death of wisdom (the ability to make correct judgments and decisions based on experience) by the accumulation of too much knowledge (information gained through researching a subject, with the intention to use it for a purpose).  In today’s world, it often seems that people are so full of knowledge and facts that they no longer realize or embrace the wisdom of personal experience.  As T.S. Elliott asked, “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?”

Incidentally, this is also a theme in the book Kasojeni Bay that Brian wrote (you can order a copy here or here or here).  In this book, he meets Sonia and learns about the depth and reason behind her incredible sadness and, in the process, rediscovers his own true wisdom.  If you ever wondered how our songs all tie together, this is the book for you.

The Incredible Sadness of Sonia

In a garden full of little heads
The cat no longer smiled
Mad as any hatter
She looked around and sighed
Children laughing at her
She turned her back and cried
She turned her head and lied
Then turned off her mind and died

Did you hear of what happened?
She died in the black of the night
She was a precious child
She was her daddy’s smile
All that remains is a dream
Did you hear of what happened?
She died in the black of the night
Now my poor heart it seems
Is all shredded and cold
For my dear Sonia

Like the Woolf before her
She loaded her pockets with stones
And not looking back
She waded in deeper
“It’s cold,” she gasped, “Oh, so cold.”
Wine-soaked and sleep deprived
She’d somehow lost her way
With silent screams of apathy
She hummed the song of day

Did you hear of what happened?
She died in the black of the night
She was a precious child
She was her daddy’s smile
All that remains is a dream
Did you hear of what happened?
She died in the black of the night
Now my poor heart it seems
Is all shredded and cold
For my dear Sonia

Sonia, cara mia, quanto ti amo
Non è giusto che ne sei andata

The ghostly embrace of winter’s first kiss
On Ferris wheels in the dark
She gestured with a hand that shook
With the sadness of her soul
The rabbit hole is empty now
The hatter’s no longer mad
The Cheshire cat no longer smiles
The Red Queen only laughs

Did you hear of what happened?
She died in the black of the night
She was a precious child
She was her daddy’s smile
All that remains is a dream
Did you hear of what happened?
She died in the black of the night
Now my poor heart it seems
Is all shredded and cold