PAS/CAL EP No. 1- 'The Handbag Memoirs'
Le Grand Magistery Records, HRH-031
Released March, 2003

Track Listing:
1. The Bronze Beached Boys ♫
2. I Wanna Take You Out In Your Holiday Sweater
3. I'd Bet My Life That You Bet Your Life
4. Grown Men Go Go
5. Marion/Mariam
6. This Ain't For Everyone

Purchase this CD

Notes on the recording:

The Bronze Beached Boys (Come On Let’s Go)
Can it already be the end of summer? We’ve been either locked away in the basement or crammed into LTD’s tiny upper flat, made stale by the sound-proofing. Friends and neighbors upstairs, downstairs, carry on with their lives. Every so often I hear a child’s playful wail in the street, a passing car with music blaring, an ice cream truck. Anyhow, I arrive at practice late one evening, and LTD is picking a little ballad on the acoustic with Caz on the drum set. LTD hands me the guitar, and I try to figure out what he was just doing. Meanwhile he is already writing another melody on the Rhodes. Several chords later, one microphone set up, and we’ve tracked the demo. It defines the sound that we later seek to achieve with this recording, and paired with Caz’ carefree, summery, and finally reflective lyrics, is the easiest song we’ve ever come by.

I’d Bet My Life That You Bet Your Life
This is a song that wanted to be written for a few years. One day it swept through me and I scrambled to capture it. Tony was handsome; he was either a musical genius, a poet or an idiot savant, and he possessed danger and mystery. Perspective-wise, the song is split in two. In the first half with the past on my side I am attempting to pinpoint the moment when I first began to understand the dull truth concerning someone I revered. The second part of the song is all wide-eyed adoration and myth making. An early version had an extra verse tacked on at the end that bleakly murmured, “Was is ’74, was it summer or fall, was it corduroy, linen, or wool? I don’t know, ‘cause I’m slowly forgetting you…”

I Wanna Take You Out In Your Holiday Sweater
Between songs at practice, I play a descending riff that gets Caz’ immediate attention. I’m kind of embarassed, it’s just a silly progression that I play now and then. But he makes me play it over and again, all the while constructing this bouncy, bright bass line. The verses alternate between he said, she said, with a final kind of call-and-response between the characters. We’ve made a pact to write songs about fashion, accessories, models and the like, and the holiday season is fast approaching

Grown Men Go Go
I am young. I am naïve. I am unsure. I want to be wanted. I am not. I go home.

Marion/Mariam
An exercise in repetition. Marion/Mariam is a departure from the subtle succession of chord, tempo, and key changes normally found in a PAS/CAL song structure. The goal was to take a single melody, have it ever present throughout the song, and to see if by changing the surrounding musical accoutrements I could create a feeling of movement and purpose for the piece. I may have to experiment further.

This Ain’t For Everyone
The weather is cold. I am upstairs all alone in Recordings East (a 1920s two-family flat). Mel Torme’s The Christmas Song is in my head. I really love that melody, ”Chestnuts roasting on open fire/Jack Frost nipping at your nose.” In a week’s time PAS/CAL is to perform in an intimate space---a record store---and I imagine myself addressing the crowd. “Feel free to leave whenever you want,” I proffer. I make a confession and the crowd joins me in a saying 16 Oh-Las for my penance.