In the next song from our cycle “Haven,” our protagonist is found by Coie despite the anonymous rural retreat at which he had cloistered himself. “How did you find me?” he asks, and off Coie goes into an explanation that is fanciful to us but completely realistic to her: her friends in the animal community told her.

As with many of our other songs, Coie’s musical explanation is based in real events. Coie is a composite, and this particular belief in talking to animals was explained to me in painful detail one evening when I was first introduced to the lady in question. It was an inauspicious beginning to a relationship that was, fortunately, not fated to last long. “The corgi dog told me I would like you.” Or maybe it was “wouldn’t like me” — judging by the way she acted later on in the evening when she began ranting about how the backrubs she shared with her women friends should not be viewed as anything beyond platonic, then demanding that I bring her all the ice cream in my freezer and put raisins on it, and wrapping up by insisting I abjure the works of the Satanic firemen that had wired her thoughts for sound.

What was most wonderful about the evening was that it had begun somewhat normally and showed no signs of becoming the gunpoint tour of the asylum that it became. I should add that the occasion had been expected to be a happy one; an old friend was introducing me for the first time to the woman he thought he was in love with. I was impressed, though obviously not in the way he intended. You can only hope that your friends’ partners are people that you can get along with half as long as you get along with your friends themselves; the screaming ice-cream junkie with the anthropomorphic delusions wasn’t the kind of woman I had imagined we would one day add to our summer barbeque roster. “On Labor Day, Mary and John will bring the hot dogs, Jane and Chester will bring the potato salad, and Beth and Ralphie will bring the shrill, delusional invective.” Mercifully, the relationship didn’t stick; there wasn’t enough ice cream to go around, and besides, the coyote and wallaby advised against continuing.

In expanding the talking-animal part of the rant into a song, I expanded on what was said that night and paraphrased a few things, changing, for example, the name of New York’s Museum of Natural History to “The Extinction Museum,” something that I have always thought would be a more appropriate title for a building that houses so many dead things. The bit about flying through the air with a polar bear is hyperbolic. However, I do distinctly recall something about her rapport with all the animals in Central Park. As for the “Twilight Bark” itself, I acknowledge a debt to the Disney film “101 Dalmatians,” where it is utilized to find lost puppies in much the same way that Coie uses it to find our narrator here. And hey — everyone should do the twilight bark if they’re capable, but for God’s sake don’t tell anybody lest they lock you up — something that eventually happened to the confused young woman I met that night.

Recorded in Aug 2009, in Rick’s Home Studio

Steve: Vocals
Rick: Acoustic guitar, synth/bass/drum programming, vocals

Steve has an affinity for writing songs about fuzzy animals, and though I can’t say why it happens, much of the time I have trouble writing music for them. I guess I’m always afraid I’m going to end up with “The Wonderful Thing About Tiggers”. Anyway, such was the case on this one — and I ended up punting it back to Steve while I slogged ahead on other tracks.

Drawing inspiration from Steve’s scratch take of the song, I recorded the guitar with a strong martial rhythm, which in turn led me to add the snare-driven drum track. I also wanted the “You know what he/she/they said to me?” parts to sound more ethereal than the surrounding verse, so I added the harp arpeggios and processed Steve’s voice a wee bit through an “AM radio” filter. We also added some simple “ooohs” in the background on the first day of recording, but it was Steve’s suggestion of the “What did he/she/say?” responsorials that I think had the best effect. Turns out that we both had slightly different ideas on when to start singing the first response… so I included both versions on top of one another.

After the guitar and drum tracks were completed, I couldn’t resist going back to my synthesizer “roots”. I started layering on the keyboard tracks — beginning with the theme that comes in with the second verse. Going way back… even before Steve and I started collaborating, I first started writing and recording music with my friend Ian back in junior high school on our matching Yamaha DX-11 synthesizers, using a QX-21 two-track midi sequencer, and RX-120 drum machine (that is, writing music when we were not spending our time figuring out Tony Banks’ keyboard solos…). We wrote a lot of fun instrumental songs back then, many of which only survive in the deep, dark recesses of our memories, or at best on well-worn 60-minute mono cassette tapes. These days, my DX-11, while really quite flexible for its time, sounds a bit dated… but it’s still working (aside from a busted velocity sensor on one key). In fact, it has been given a second life, coming out of retirement as the keyboard I’ve been hooking up to my computer to record the midi notes for the synth parts in all these tracks.

With the fancy visual midi sequencer in Sonar or any other modern digital music workstation, it’s a simple matter to keep adding and arranging midi tracks — I believe this one has about 10 different soft-synthesizers running at the same time. The main constraint is that it becomes a bit challenging for my non-top-of-the-line CPU to handle, and as a result my computer occasionally spits, coughs, and chokes like a Stanley Steamer. I’m sure my trusty old DX-11 and QX-21 are laughing on the inside.

Twilight Bark

“How did you find me?”
I asked her at last
More in amazement than regret
She said, “I’m a true-born child from the Precambrian past
“And my friends haven’t let me down yet.

I was sitting on the steps
Of the Extinction Museum
When I saw this cute corgi dog come along
I said, ‘Hey, little corgi dog! Dear little corgi dog
Where has my sweet baby gone?’

You know what he said to me?
You know what he said to me?
At best I can provide only a rudimentary translation…

So I ran up to North Alaska
Where the caribou roam
Sat on the tundra and I prayed
I opened my eyes, what was the first thing I saw?
A pretty little polar bear maid

I threw both my arms around her neck
And the two of us went flying through the sky
I said, ‘Hey, you ol’ polar bear, poly ol’ polar bear
Where did my sweet baby hide?’

You know what she said to me?
You know what she said to me?
You know, I don’t think you’d really understand it…

The bats in Carlsbad Cavern
Fluttered out into the dark
And carried word to every rat that dwells in Central Park
They swarmed the Great Meadow where the horned owl waits
And told him to wake up the meadowlark

All the furries and the feathers
Fanned out across the land
Even the ferrets fought to ferret you out
And my four-footed brothers, panting little brothers
And my whiskered sisters sussed your whereabouts

You know what they said to me?
You know what they said to me?
They said, ‘You’re the only one who really gets us.’

They said:
Everybody, do the twilight bark! Powered by Hackadelic Sliding Notes 1.6.5