I’m not sure why I first picked up a copy of Welcome To The Monkey House by Kurt Vonnegut, or what had compelled me to bring it on a family trip to Mexico in 1987. It’s likely that my mother, an avid avoider of sci-fi literature, was telling me to read the story, Harrison Bergeron because it transcended its genre limitations.

The book was a collection of Vonnegut’s short fiction that had appeared in magazines and other literary publications in the 1950’s and 60’s while Vonnegut’s reputation grew as an author. Within the volume are 25 short stories that qualify as sci-fi, comedy, mystery, adventure, and more.

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Vivid characters with names like Doghouse Riley jumped from the page. Vonnegut sculpted worlds of varying complexity and reality to tug at the strands of the human condition. Whether we found ourselves in a smoky piano bar, the deepest recesses of space, or in the compound of a maniacal dictator, Vonnegut ferried us through ever-evolving tableaus with humor, and pathos.

Welcome To The Monkey House became a rosetta stone of narrative, language, and humanity for my young mind. The stories opened a well of curiosity that had been dormant, waiting to come alive. Vonnegut set the flame alight with his empathy, his wordplay, and his wit.

As school began in the fall of that year, I was turned on to a new video program on MTV called 120 Minutes. The show had begun airing late on Sunday nights in March of 1986, and aired music videos by underground and college rock bands like Depeche Mode, Sisters of Mercy, Echo & The Bunnymen, and many more.

The show aired from midnight to 2:00 am in the area where we lived. As much of a night owl as I was, I often struggled to stay awake, or awake enough to comprehend what I was seeing and hearing in the one o-clock hour. I quickly began taping the show each week on our VCR and would then rewatch it after school the following Monday.

By the time I began my junior year of high school in the autumn of 1987, I had this routine down to a veritable science.

One Monday afternoon in September of that year, I came home from school, grabbed a snack and wandered into the living room to turn on the TV and VCR. The screen popped on, and became alit. The TV was still turned to MTV from the midnight prior. I opened the VCR to ensure the tape had rewound to the beginning and started to push the tape back into its cradle to hit play.

Before any of that could happen, my attention had been pulled firmly and completely from the task at hand. I watched as a woman sat in a wooden kitchen chair, and a man rested his head forlornly in her lap. Fireworks exploded across the screen in double exposure.

The song was driven by an urgent snare drum, a distorted guitar ringing out in spare, arpeggiated chords, and the clean, high voice powerfully dedicating the tune to his love, or so it seemed.

’The One I Love’ by R.E.M. struck all of the same chords for me as Vonnegut had a few months earlier. Here was what seemed to be a typical love song like you have heard thousands of times. But as Michael Stipe careens, “This one goes out to the one I love”, something is amiss.

This was a love that was acrid and unhealthy. The narrator refers to his love as a “prop” to occupy his time. It is a song of an abusive relationship, and the ugly side of love. Yet, when people heard it they associated all of the same love song tropes despite it being a song about love in a much more unconventional and unhealthy way.

R.E.M. and Kurt Vonnegut had both taken long-established forms of art, the love song and the short story and turned them their heads. They used wit, and the subtle reversals of tropes to lend new meaning to stories we thought we already knew.

I was fifteen and had no idea what I wanted for a career, but I knew that I wanted my future to involve telling stories in unusual ways like this. Like Vonnegut and R.E.M., I longed to turn an art form on its head. I endeavored to make music that told stories, and opened up new ideas within old forms.

‘Better Off Like This’ was the last song I submitted for our sessions for the Ways To Hang album. At first, it seemed that the song might be too late. We had fourteen or fifteen songs in the can, and while the track was good and we played it well from the offing, it seemed a last minute add that was unnecessary. The tune could easily be saved for the next album, or released as a single.

Being very excited about the song and having the opportunity to record the track ourselves and with no additional costs for studio time, I pushed for us to record it even if we didn't use it right away.

Katie, the song’s protagonist is a seventeen year old working to support her and her tween brother, Isaac. Whip smart, defiant, and fiercely independent Katie plays the bad hand she has been dealt with steely determination and a keen observational eye.

Dad has been out of the picture for the duration, and within the last year, their mother has split as well. Left on their own, they make ends meet while Katie works at a local bar and finishes her diploma. It’s a threadbare existence, but their lives have improved by one other subtraction; the exit of their mother.

With an eye on being a writer, Katie takes in all of the goings on at her watering hole gig. She and Isaac subsist on the cheapest of food stuffs and make their way to school, work and the store through a series of bus stops and interminable walking.

Like Vonnegut’s stories, or ‘The One I Love’, I wanted to take a situation that seemed dire and see it as a step forward. Sure, a mother has abandoned her children, but Katie is far more equipped to be a mother to Isaac than her own mother is.

Over my career selling graduation announcements and caps and gowns, I met so many kids that were succeeding in spite of the world in which they lived. Kids that slept in cars, floated on random couches, and wondered where their next meal might come from. All the while, so many of these students were excelling academically and athletically.

I learned about students overcoming long odds, and living in terrible circumstances who were going on to graduate high school, entering college, winning scholarships, and the entering workforce. There were kids thriving in abhorrent conditions.

All of these stories elicited a sympathy and admiration from those that heard it. The default setting seemed to be to marvel at how a mother might leave her child as Katie has been left.

What we often do not or cannot see is that in some moments, kids like Katie are better off like this, without a parent to get in the way and make things even harder. It’s an awful reality in our world, but some folks are not capable of being involved parents.

It’s hard to know if this will become the trauma that makes Katie successful in her life, or if it is a coping mechanism that will saddle her with untold trauma that she will never overcome. Perhaps it’s a bit of both.

Katie is both the heroine and the victim of our story. And that, that seems awfully Kurt Vonnegut.

Cheers,Matty C

It’s fair to say that I make accidental concept records. In the first episode of Sheddio Sessions, I told the story of my song ‘Cabin By The Lake’, where it came from and how it sparked a record built around the early death of my Great Grandmother.

I never sat down with the intention of crafting an entire album around the separation of two people and their frayed, but ever present connection to each other. Nor, did I sit down to write a record about the hollowed-out denizens of the suburban and rural midwest. Yet, by the time I had finished work on the first Harborcoat album, Brutal Gravity, I had a twelve song compendium of broken hearts in forgotten places that told the inside and out of that world.

While there are no specific protagonists or villains in the album’s story, the narrative centers around a trio of high school students, and their ill-conceived efforts to survive another summer of tedium, heat, boredom and dangerous distractions with grave consequences.

Annie, an impressionable young woman, who’s just finished with her sophomore year of high school, vies for the affections of two young men, both in an effort to pass the time and to validate her waning self-esteem.

Life for these three kids is plainly hard. Their respective families live in a section of The Ravines, a trailer park just west of a small town; the trailers within the park all betraying some form of dysfunction and abject poverty. These are homes decorated with postcards and pink slips from the city’s water department, Consumer’s Energy or the local cable company all signifying an impending shut-off should the bills remain unpaid.

Virtually all of the trailers are in disrepair. Families of six, eight or more occupy a space designed for no more than four. Part time jobs, side hustles and the occasional questionable deal are all pursued to keep mouths fed and lights on. It is a threadbare existence. Poverty is exhausting. Education and the rearing of children often seen as a luxury for which there is no time.

I do not look upon or write about this scene with pity. I see it with gratitude. These are very often good folks working against a difficult system that in many respects has left them and their families behind. As the middle class eroded, folks like these were the first and largest casualties.

Driving past ‘The Ravines’, I am reminded of my own good fortune. To have been raised in a home with economic security, and with loving and supportive parents who were present and involved in my life. I have been able to do much of the same for my own children. But, what if I hadn’t?

It seemed that the margins were so thin. I always feared deeply that I would fail to provide what was necessary for my own children to have a shot at a full and happy life. Even if and when I failed to do that, I always had the help of a supportive family system. So many did not have the same good fortune.

The songs on Brutal Gravity seemed to spew forth in a collage of short stories set across an ex-urban landscape so very much like the city that I have lived in now for two full decades. This universe was built upon on my own reality and the burning idea that any of us could be thrust into that spot and be forced to live a completely different life.

Largely, the songs on the record are my own imagination creating a world in which my daughters are given a different set of experiences, supports (or lack thereof), and circumstances. With a few minor changes to birth parents, parental involvement, education initiative, economic status at birth and more, life just a few blocks down the street can make for a completely different existence. There but for the grace of . . .

‘The Ravines’ recounts the story of a fire that burns up twelve trailers in an evening at the trailer park. It’s days after the conflagration, and the police are hunting down suspects, mostly focusing on the ne’er do well kids that live in the park.

We watch the story unfold through the eyes of our trio, learning their fates and their misdeeds along the way. It is a simple tale of the folly of youth, littered with grave and everlasting consequences. While we may not only be the sum of our actions, we also have deeds that we will never outrun.

My bandmate Ian Walker jokes that this song is his “second favorite song about a trailer park fire”, his first being ‘Kerosene’ by the Bottle Rockets. The joke here being the absurdity of having any favorite songs on such a specific, and frankly bizarre topic. Nonetheless, it makes me chuckle each time I think of my own damned song.

So much of what happens to us throughout life is laid upon a few building blocks dropped into place, often by chance, as we design the physical and emotional home in which our adult self will live. ‘The Ravines’, and Brutal Gravity use the from of song to take a look at what might happen if we shifted a brick or two.

Enjoy,

Matty C

Unless something changes in the remainder of my career as a songwriter, whatever legacy I leave behind will be largely defined by this song. There is no firm count, but I feel safe in saying that I have played this song more than any other that I have written. It’s a song that touches people every time I play it, even when they don’t know the story behind it.

It’s been two decades, almost exactly, since I put pen to paper one afternoon at our family’s dining room table and wrote this song in one sitting. I sat writing at one end and my daughter Maddie, who was not quite five at the time sat at the other end coloring away while her Dad played his guitar and made up songs. It was a beautiful summer afternoon.

We had only just moved in to the house a couple of weeks prior. It was our first house and we were so very excited. My parents had helped us, nee’ carried us, into getting that house.

It had been in our family for a very, very long time. No one was certain of the exact date, but my great-grandparents had moved into the house sometime in the early to mid-30s when my grandmother and great aunt were very small girls. Just like my own.

Grandpa George continued to live in that house until his death in 2002, despite losing his wife Myrtle 33 years earlier! Despite living to the ripe old age of 93, it was genuine shock to our family when he died suddenly in 2002. Please let me live to be that age and let it be a shock when I go.

After Grandpa Geo’s death, my parents approached my wife Kimmy and I to see if they could help us to buy the house and fix it up for out family. With tears in our eyes and slack jawed looks of shock, we said yes and set to work fixing it up, eventually moving in on July 20, 2003.

Grandpa Geo had split his time between the house in Grand Ledge where we now lived, and the family cabin just north of a little town called Remus. As much as I had memories of the house that now belongs to us, it was not the house that I thought of as belonging to Grandpa George.

Nearly all of the time that I had spent with Grandpa Geo was at the cabin. It was a family refuge, a nature outpost, a swimming hole and so much more. At the age of five while my mother was in graduate school, I spent the summer there with her and Grandpa Geo. She would drive the half hour in to campus each day or attend to her studies by the lake. Grandpa Geo and I would fish, hike, hunt for mushrooms, putter or nap.

Associating him more with the cabin than with the house that was now ours made it easier for us to turn it into our own home. As we renovated and updated the house on a humble DIY budget, I’d been thinking a great deal about making sure to keep the spirit of the house intact in some way.

It was important that I maintain a sense of reverence for the family that had been in what was now our own home. I was beginning to find a balance between making the place ours , but doing with that with a sense of honor.

The day that I wrote ‘Cabin By The Lake’ was one of the first weekends I can remember after we had finished the flurry of renovations and moving in. While I cannot recall whether it was a Saturday or Sunday, it was most certainly a weekend afternoon, and the breeze blew the white curtain in the dining room into my back as I sat at the table and strummed my guitar.

This was usually how I wrote songs at the time. I’d play around for a few minutes, find a chord progression or a melody and then either write new word, or go and find previous notes and see if they might match each other. After just a couple of minutes, a fully formed line came at the same moment at a G to C and back to G folk pattern. The next followed almost immediately, as my hand dropped to an E minor and kept going.

Words were coming too. In just minutes, I had a full verse, and then another with vocal melody and lyrics in fully finished formed. The chorus required a bit of nudging to keep it form design into something rather trite, but with a gentle massage, it rolled out easily and warmly.

I truly have no idea how long the process took, but in memory and soul it feels like minutes. It might have been a half hour, or an hour at the very most. It never felt like work and I was more antennae than inventor. On that afternoon, I was a scribe relaying thoughts and words from some other place. Maybe that is a place within me, maybe it is without. I am not sure it matters to me which it is.

It’s always an anxious and thrilling moment to play a new song all the way through for the first time. Once you feel that you have something nailed, there is a magical window where it holds a grain of impossibility; a sense that you have created something beautiful, but there is no way that it can last. This is too beautiful to have come from you.

As I finished my first full pass at the song, I knew it was great. This was in a completely different league than the songs I had written before. This had depth, and character, and truth. It felt much more like me reporting on someone else’s story than telling my own. Turns out, it was both.

The final chord rang out from the first full playing of the song and as I raised my head, I could see my nearly five year old daughter Maddie at the other end of our dining room table with her eyes full of tears.

I sat my guitar down and rushed to her side. Perhaps I had been so intently focused on my song I had missed her hurting herself in some way. But she wasn’t behaving as if there were any physical injury at all. She was just all teared up and trying to hold it back.

As I leaned over to pick her up, she sniffled, “Daddy, don’t play that song anymore. It makes me sad.”

“Ohhh sweetheart, I am sorry. It’s okay. I can be done with that song for now.”

I wiped the tears away. We snuck a cookie or two from the package on the kitchen counter and sat back down to color together. For a moment, I sat there stunned.

‘Cabin By The Lake’ perfectly told the story of my great-grandfather’s first summer at the family cabin without my great-grandmother. I had never known her. Myrtle died three years before my arrival. Yet, here I was with a brand new song about their first year apart. A house can't write a song on its own, but it can help like Hell.

‘Cabin By The Lake’ ended up being the centerpiece of a record by my band The Pantones, called Sleepless Nights, Silent Mornings. That album is largely based around the separation of a couple due to an untimely death. While it’s not a concept record it is a window into my family history, the ghosts that inhabit the family home, and the ache and loneliness of loss.

The record, and ‘Cabin’ specifically have taken on an entirely new meaning since the sudden loss of my Dad in the summer of 2020. Each line now works double time as it tells its original story and serves as metaphor for the massive hole left in the wake of Steven’s death.

There is simply no way I could have written this song, and made the Sleepless album, if we hadn't moved into the house where my family still live today. We’ve managed to make it our own while always keeping a piece of Grandpa Geo around too. This song is a piece of that house and this house is a piece of that song.

I’ll write more about the actual cabin in the near future. For now, enjoy this musical view.Cheers,Matty C