"Start a Fire" notes

So this EP that we’re releasing on May 9 at the Nomad is a collection of studio-recorded versions of the songs we’ve been playing live over the past three months or so. The recordings don’t feature the whole band; rather, the band brings to life the songs that Big Cats! has produced when we play live. It’s a good introduction to our style and what we’re going to be doing on our full-length, “An Unwelcome Guest,” which should be coming out in late 2009. A few thoughts from me, Guante (maybe Big Cats! will do a version too):

1. The Calm (An Open Letter to the Living)
This is the song that really foreshadows the stuff we’ll be doing on the full-length, especially in terms of tone and subject matter. I actually thought about putting this on “An Unwelcome Guest,” but it’s a natural intro track and the LP already has an absolutely monstrous intro. When I used to run a newspaper, one of my columnists had a regular feature called “J’Accuse,” a reference to the old French film about WWI vets returning from the grave to demand justice for being killed for nothing. That image always stuck with me, and this track really comes from that.

2. Old English Letters
There was a version of this song called “Ink” on my mixtape, but this is a re-recorded, re-mastered version with a completely new hook. The idea here is that tattoos hurt a lot, but out of that pain you create something beautiful. I think that’s a perfect metaphor for art, life, pretty much everything. An all-instrumental version of this beat was on Big Cats!’s “Sleep Tapes,” and it fit really well on this song. As tattoo-crazy as this city is, I hope people feel the song.

3. The Hero
It’s no secret that I love storytelling songs, and I think this is one of the best ones I’ve written. This concept—a hero figuring out that in order to really fight evil, you have to attack its foundations, not just its symptoms—is something I want to expand on, as a graphic novel, as a longer album or series of poems, we’ll see. It was fun doing the voices of the two characters and the narrator; I always loved Biggie’s “Gimme the Loot” where he’s playing two different characters and changes his voice around. This is another song where I stole one of the instrumentals from “Sleep Tapes.” I like both versions. This song also fades into a live recording of our band doing an impromptu jam featuring MPC, drums, bass and saxophone.

4. Dragons (Premix)
It’s called a “premix” because this song is actually going to be on our full-length, though it’ll have a pretty major lyric change that completely shifts its meaning. I wanted to record a version of it that was a more traditional love song, and I think it’ll be fun to see how people respond to both versions played side-by-side. Love songs are so ubiquitous (well, not in hip hop, but in general), so I feel like when you write one it has to be on some other stuff to stay interesting. This song isn’t quite “Love in the Time of Zombies” weird, but if you pay attention to the lyrics it’s pretty strange. Which to me, makes for the best love songs.

5. 1 10 20 200
This is probably the most straightforward track we’ve ever done, a nice little flexy hip hop joint about the power that the music has to put people together in the same room who would otherwise never be in the same room. The live version is bonkers, but this one is pretty good too. I hope people catch that the “Uptown Saturday Night” line is referencing Camp Lo, not my love for Uptown Minneapolis. Also had to shout out Big Zach because he’s where I first heard the term “underground famous,” which is funny on a lot of levels. Finally, I’m actually 26, but I wrote it when I was 25 and “25” keeps the internal rhyme going so I just left it.

6. One of These Mornings (Remix)
The success that the original version of this track had really caught me off guard. The Current picked it up and was playing it every day this past Fall, and everyone was telling me how it was their favorite song on “El Guante’s Haunted Studio Apartment.” I liked it a lot as a recorded track (Eugene, OR producer G-Force put together a beautiful beat), but wanted a more lively, uptempo version to play at shows. Big Cats! delivered. One note about the lyrics: I think a lot of people hear this as a “slice of life” song, a song about me walking around and talking to random people. The song is about DEATH. The sample in the original (and the hook in the remix), “one of these mornings, you’re going to rise up singing,” is referring to the fact that someday you’re going to die. It’s from Porgy and Bess, “Summertime.” Again, I like this song a lot, but the live version with our band is on another level.

7. Catasterpiece
Sometimes I worry that Big Cats! might be better off doing straight-up instrumental stuff and that I’m ruining all his songs by rapping on them. This instrumental track really supports that fear. He’s good.

So yeah. Come to our release party at the Nomad on May 9. It’s going to be fun. Both me and Big Cats! will be posting some of these tracks on our MySpace pages soon, so keep checking back.