April 2012
2 posts
38. "Harbingers of Change"
The last of four songs we adapted from poems in our friend Oliver Baer’s book “Baer Soul.” The other three will be on an upcoming album of us and four other bands setting Oliver’s words to music. (They can also be found on this tumblr, here, here and here.) This one’s the outtake. We’ve never asked Oliver to explain his poems, but this one seems to be a...
37. "LA You Don't Love Me"
Last July we were in LA, minding our business, working hard in a bunker deep in the Hollywood Hills, when the note came: “Singers, strummers and drinkers: you are invited to The Event. In order to attend you are charged with this task: write an unrequited love-song including the words ‘ink’, ‘print’, ‘quill’, ‘spelling’, and...
February 2012
2 posts
36. "Love of My Life"
This one goes waaay back, and has a special place in our hearts. It was written on a plane on the way to Barcelona, where our friends Tony and Rika Daniel were getting married the next day. It was polished off in a hotel room in Sabadell that night, and performed for the first time — poorly, but with love — at Tony and Rika’s wedding reception in the blazing Spanish sun. None...
35. "The Queen of Queens"
More often than not we start with the music, or at least an idea for the music. But this one began with the words, written at an office desk one afternoon when one of us Dolls was supposed to be working. The first verse explains how to get from the northside of Williamsburg to the house where the subject of the song, who is very real, used to live. The second verse zeroes in on the precise...
January 2012
2 posts
34. "Bad Bank"
You’ve been a very, very naughty financial institution.
33. "O My Body"
Happy new year. The world is one year older. We are one year older. Body parts, like international economies, are slowly failing. Imperceptibly at first, but ever more perceptibly as our lives move from verse to bridge to chorus to solo (and back). And so we dance. And we call on all lost or absentee lovers to join us.
December 2011
3 posts
32-3/4. "Winter Wonderland (Live at Bowery Poetry...
Another holiday extra. This one was recorded way back when at the Bowery Poetry Club in New York, at a show paying tribute to one of the greatest Christmas albums ever made — certainly the greatest one ever made by a Jew. The night was organized by the literary magazine Boog City, featured a lot of our favorite New York bands, and gave us a chance to arrange a song around a sample of a...
32-1/2. "December"
A holiday extra. Today’s entry isn’t a new song and it isn’t part of the Difficult Neverending Second Album. “December” comes from Sticky, our short simple first album, and we offer it here as a free holiday download. It’s a hopeful song written on a particularly sad day several years ago. This may seem silly now, but it made us incredibly happy on that day to...
32. "You Don't Comb Your Hair Anymore"
Sometimes inspiration is hanging on the wall right in front of where you’ve been standing for years. There’s a poster in our rehearsal space of a Dennis Hopper photograph of a couple sitting in a booth at a diner. She’s got fabulous brunette hair and a cigarette. He’s tattooed and shirtless. They are the models for the first verse of “You Don’t Comb ...
November 2011
3 posts
30-31. "Keep It Dark" / "All This Madness Could Be...
Two songs this week, both written in the past half year for soundtracks, both received enthusiastically, both unused in the end. But we walked away with two new songs, so all’s good. They’re not quite standard T-Dolls material — we weren’t thinking at all about our album-in-progress when we recorded them — but they’re still very much us. We’re stretching!
We submitted “Keep It...
29. "Masters of Cock"
This one had its genesis in an epithet that someone we don’t know wrote about someone else we don’t know in an email to our friend and former bandmate Michael Taylor. The epithet was “cockmasters.” Altered to “masters of cock,” it became the phrase of the week around Michael’s house, which we’ve been using as a West Coast base recently. (What,...
28. "Spider Sabich"
Spider Sabich was a ski racer in the 1960s and ’70s. He was OK, nothing special, in the Olympics, but made a name for himself slaloming side by side with the likes of Billy Kidd and Jean-Claude Killy on the pro circuit. He was a free spirit and a playboy, and with his good looks and charisma, he had a lot to do with popularizing skiing in the U.S. This song isn’t about him, though....
October 2011
1 post
27. I Wrote a Song for You
We’re back from the short sabbatical we never told you about. Sorry, and hi again. We’re relaunching with a song that’s basically about writing a song. It comes from our sessions with Bart Schoudel and Ron Haney of the Churchills. The arpeggios that serve as the main riff were a happy accident. They were meant to be added color behind two other guitars, but we killed both...
August 2011
3 posts
2 tags
26. "A Girl Named Pam"
Everyone knows the bass is the most important instrument in a pop band. Or, at least, everyone should know this. Herewith, we celebrate our own, with apologies to Dr. Seuss.
25. "One Slimy Person"
Written after a particularly gnarly encounter with a co-worker at the corporate media farm where two of us worked. Why punch in the face when you can poke in the ears with a jangly guitar?
22-24. "Cross It Out"/"Turd Bomb"/"Crucial Thing"
Cross It Out by troubledolls
Turd Bomb by troubledolls
Crucial Thing by troubledolls
We joined a cool little group called the Immersion Composition Society. It consists of songwriters who each try to write and record 20 songs in a day, once a month. Speed-songwriting, basically. It turns out almost no one ever actually gets 20 songs done, but the point is to keep trying. We came up with...
July 2011
3 posts
21. "Stand On"
We were asked to write and record a sea shanty and we had one night to do it. If we had one more night, we might have written another verse.
20. "Distant Early Warning"
Another would-be TV theme, this one for a series about a government agency that knows a little too much about you. We were given two phrases to work with: “distant early warning” (a Cold War reference; also, of course, a Rush song) and “pattern recognition.” Conveniently, they both have six syllables and the same rhythm. The rest came quickly and easily — unlike...
19. "Reindeer Boy" featuring Mouse Pack
The goal: Bring a laptop to a friend’s house, order dinner, write and record a song, have dessert, go home.
The result: Mouse Pack.
Mouse Pack is Cheri and Matty along with our friends Mark and Lynn Bacino and Mark Creel. Mouse Pack existed for exactly one night, though we reserve the right to reunite someday. Mouse Pack’s only song was recorded at Mark and Lynn’s...
June 2011
5 posts
18. "Little Surprises"
Lyrically inspired by a friend’s script about weird goings-on at yard sales. Musically inspired by the old-timey yacht-rock bounce of classic TV theme songs by Harry Nilsson and John Sebastian, and maybe even by our musical brother Mark Bacino, who turned us on to them and does a pretty amazing job of capturing that vibe himself. But maybe we’re not supposed to be quite so...
17. "Under the Summer"
Happy¹ summer² everybody.
- - - - -
1. This is song is not completely happy. But it is not completely sad either. 2. Today is the longest day of the year (15 hours, 5 minutes, 51 seconds of sunlight here in Brooklyn). This is the longest original song we have ever released (3 minutes 50 seconds). Put this song on repeat at sunrise and it will play 236 times before the sun goes down.
16. "Outrunning"
As we mentioned before, we adapted three of our friend Oliver Baer’s poems into songs to celebrate the publication of his book “Baer Soul.” But we ended up with four songs because we wrote one of them twice. We can be weird that way. So if you’re wondering why this one and “Smudged Makeup” seem to have the same lyrics, that’s why.
15. "Cut a Long Line"
Born as a slow, trippy score to a drug scene in a movie about struggling Lower East Side artists (shoutout to director Tony Daniel). Rhythmless and dominated by a piercing wail that sounds like trumpets being run over by a car while melting in an equatorial heatwave, it had its charm. Bear witness:
(featured above: Rika Daniel, Lisa Raymond)
Reborn when we whipped it into a...
14. "Don't Pass Me By"
A Beatles cover, from an unreleased Ringo Starr tribute album. At least we think it’s unreleased. We turned this in (a little late, admittedly), and then never heard another word from the guy who was putting out the record. Maybe he didn’t like it. Maybe it’s a hit in Finland. This was a long time ago. The Beatles had six covers on their first album, and another six on their...
May 2011
5 posts
13. "Loop"
As a general rule, you can’t beat your demo. Every band learns this sooner or later. That first day of practice, that first night on the four-track, that first spark, wherever/whenever it may be — that’s when it sounds like you’ve set the moon on fire. And you can’t re-create that. You just can’t. You rehearse, you arrange, you re-arrange, you spend time...
12. "Patterns"
A rock mini-opera. Five songs in 144 seconds, consisting of: I. Patterns Overture II. Dana Jackson III. Spring Forward IV. You Stupid Fool V. You Wait Up for Me
We Interrupt This Album to Tell You About a Gig
We’re serving as the choir this Saturday for “Here Come the Warm Jets: LIVE!” which, as the title suggests, will be a live performance of Brian Eno’s great first album, Here Come the Warm Jets. Indie music stalwart and all-around good guy Rob Christiansen, from Eggs, and also from Grenadine, not to mention from East Ghost West Ghost, has put together an all-star band to...
11. "Song for Ashlee Simpson"
Any resemblance between the countermelody of this one and the main melody of the younger Simpson sister’s “Pieces of Me” was probably intentional. And that’s probably why we wrote a different main melody and reduced that one to the countermelody. If you still want to sue us, you can find us through the contact page on this site. But we’re fans. Or at least...
10. "Come for Me Blues"
Two paranoid songs in a row. Hmmmm. This one was inspired by an unproduced TV project that T-Dolls co-founder (and current T-Dolls spirit guide) Michael Taylor was working on last year. So blame him.
In other statistical news, this is the second “blues” song on the album, though the last one was most definitely not an actual blues and this one we’re unclear on. Can blues...
April 2011
4 posts
WatchTrack 9: “You’re Not Telling Me Something”
Paranoia, suspicion, accusation, release. Actually, the basic idea of this one is that we just wanted to try out Pam’s new bass distortion pedal. Everything else fell into place from there.
That’s Ron Haney of the Churchills doing the harmony on the last chorus. That’s Matty singing about an “orangey sky” in...
WatchTrack 8: “Jody Is Right for You”
Go to googlism.com. Type the word “Jody” in the search box. That’s what we did. (Better yet, type another name in the box and write your own song.)
The name “Jody” is meaningless to us, as is the idea that any particular person with that name might be right for any particular one of us (or you). But like a lot of T-Dolls...
Track 7: “Giant Moon”
6. "Sugar Free Blues"
Technicolor boy unexpectedly falls for black-and-white girl. Or maybe technicolor girl falls for black-and-white boy. Works either way.
Music note: Cheri is always saying a song should be faster than we’re playing it at any given moment. She got her wish on this one.
Lyric note: We’re not thrilled with the word “gingerbread” in the second verse. We remain open to...
March 2011
7 posts
WatchTrack 5: “Smudged Makeup”
Adapted, like “Dream Corridors,” from a poem by Oliver Baer. He writes dark poems, and this is one of the darker ones. For reasons understood only by us, we wrote two songs to the same poem, one fast, one slow. We played him the fast one first and he asked for something more depressing. Then we played this one and he nodded in approval. The fast...
WatchTrack 4: “Purple Plastic Cloud”
Recorded last weekend on Cheri’s laptop. This is how it generally works when you hear Matty doing a lead vocal. Cheri says, “You should sing this one.” Matty says, “Really?” “Really.” “Um, OK, but you have to sing along.” Deal. Then sometimes we erase her in the mix.
The drum/guitar intro is a...
WatchTrack 3: “The Tiniest Entertainers in the World” The title came from an entry in a book of vintage circus posters. We like how it’s simultaneously boastful and self-deprecating. Yin and yang. This was an early album-title candidate. It’s also probably the oldest song we’ll release as part of this project. It’s been on our Myspace forever, in unmixed form. Now...
WatchTrack #2: “Dream Corridors”
Written and recorded three days ago, inspired by and including words from a poem from our friend Oliver Baer’s book “Baer Soul” (which we’re told you’ll be able to buy online shortly, and you should). We originally wrote a song called “Decibeled Passages,” which was based almost verbatim on the poem, and we will...
WatchTrack #1: “My Pony Plays the Mambo”
Starship (post-Jefferson) goes to Ipanema Beach (way post-Astrud Gilberto). That’s pretty much all we can say about this one, except it’s an instrumental with harmonies and it’s the mascot song for our album, which is why we’re posting it first.
Who What Why?
The first album was called Sticky and came out on CD. You can find it here. This is the difficult followup. Difficult for us, that is. We took an unbelievably long time to start making it and then realized we had no idea how to stop making it. But then we realized we didn’t have to. We could just put it out even as we continued to make it. No more being so goddamned deliberate. No more...