First posted as the Song of the Month! for December 2022, “Blue Shadows” certainly qualifies as a Yuletide number — although, as a song about lovers disappearing without a word, it may serve better to end your holiday party than to launch it.

But that melancholy theme actually suits January better than December in some ways. Where the Christmas season is supposed to provide various anesthetics against the realities of life, January is just the opposite, complete with thin sunlight, ample snow, bare branches, cold dry air, broken resolutions and other symbols of harsh truth.

The sunlight, snow and obstructions like bare branches, in fact, make the shadows of the song title. Yet, thanks to climate change, less and less snow falls in southern Maine. Which raises an interesting question for the (not so distant?) future: What will happen to a piece of work when its dominant image is no longer meaningful to most people?

Will “Blue Shadows,” like the long-lost, still-cherished lovers it depicts, ultimately live on only as an exercise of memory? (And where do I send the bill?)

And by the way, Happy New Year!

Hear “Blue Shadows” below! Buy it on Bandcamp! (“Blue Shadows” copyright © 2022 by Douglas L. Hubley. All rights reserved. Photo above: Saugus and Randolph streets, Portland, Maine, photographed by Doug Hubley. Photo below: Doug in the snow in South Portland, circa 1968. Hubley Family photo. NOTE: This recording uses sound posted under the Creative Commons 0 License by DBlover on the Freesound website: https://freesound.org/people/DBlover/sounds/505999/)

00:00

Digitally colorized in later years, the image above started out as a black & white rendering of a storm dumping snow on Portland, Maine, in 1980. I took it with an ancient Kodak Brownie that stayed in my Volkswagen Squareback for just such opportunities. I was on my way to work one Saturday in the library at the Guy Gannett newspapers.

This was a time when, between college classes and shifts at the newspaper, I had a seven-day work week. I was feeling some strains of adulthood, something expressed a year later in this Song of the Month! — “Looking For That Christmas Feeling.” (The Walter-and-Margaret intro appeared three years later in response to concerns about climate change…and we hadn’t seen anything yet.)

The Boarders were my first band to perform “Looking For That Christmas Feeling” for an audience, in the mid-’90s, and it was part of the holiday repertoire of successor trio Howling Turbines, heard here rehearsing it in anticipation for a 2000 date at the Free Street Taverna. (Gretchen Schaefer plays bass and Ken Reynolds, drums.)

Hear “Looking For That Christmas Feeling” below! Buy it on Bandcamp! (“Looking For That Christmas Feeling” copyright © 2010 by Douglas L. Hubley. All rights reserved. Top photo: Snowy Fore Street, Portland, Maine, 1980. Bottom image: A poster promoting a 2000 Howling Turbines holiday show at the Free Street Taverna: photo by Jeff Stanton, wreaths and Santa hats by Gretchen Schaefer, layout by Doug Hubley.)

00:00

 

Sen. Joseph McCarthy, the Red-scare monger shown above, was a great example of the personality type celebrated (or something) in “Mr. Special.” The brains behind that outfit, though, was McCarthy’s chief counsel during the 1954 Army–McCarthy hearings, Roy Cohn.

And once Cohn has been mentioned, who should come to mind but his most notorious protege — the special-est Mr. Special of them all? His name need not be uttered here (orange you glad you don’t have to read it?), but he in fact was the inspiration for “Mr. Special,” a song that sprouted from a few lines of lyrics I’d been carrying around for years.

Thanks to personifications of the type abundant in all walks of life, it was pretty easy to finish the song (which also owes a certain stylistic debt to the Blue Sky Boys). “Mr. Special” will never be a Billboard No. 1, but the folks that it portrays are all tops in their own personal rankings, so all’s well. Performed here by Day for Night in rehearsal, Sept. 9, 2022.

Hear “Mr. Special” below! Buy it on Bandcamp! And don’t forget to vote!! (“Mr. Special” copyright © 2021 by Douglas L. Hubley. All rights reserved. Day for Night: Doug Hubley, mandolin and vocal. Gretchen Schaefer, guitar and vocal. At top: Sen. Joseph McCarthy in a detail from a photograph by Thomas J. O’Halloran — U.S. News & World Report photograph collection, Library of Congress. At bottom: Doug and Gretchen, 2013.)

00:00

The narrator never can say goodbye as Day for Night performs a 2021 lament about a lover who moved on to more exciting things (and, apparently, people). Recorded in performance on Sept. 21, 2024. Doug Hubley and Gretchen Schaefer, guitars and vocals.

Hear “Someplace Else” below! Buy it on Bandcamp! (“Someplace Else” copyright © 2021 by Douglas L. Hubley. All rights reserved. Photos: Above, On the quay in Trieste, 2003, by Douglas Hubley. Below, Day for Night at the 2023 Mountain Man Jamboree by Don Perkins.)

00:00

Signs along the Androscoggin River in Brunswick and Topsham, Maine, warn that operations at a nearby dam could cause the water to rise suddenly.  A good metaphor for the often unpredictable nature of problems, the signs started me writing “Trouble Train” — the train idea came along later (as it always seems to do for me) and seemed to work better as the enclosing theme. This was one of two songs I wrote for my band the Cowlix (1989–1994) — but the theme is better suited by the heavier treatment heard here by the band that followed the ’Lix, the Boarders (1994–1996).

That theme is never irrelevant, but I must say that for me “Trouble Train” was a bit more abstract three decades ago than it is now, in these years of climate crisis, political hair fires, civic derangement and shooting war — not to mention the creeping curtailments that age inflicts on one’s sense of self.

The Boarders: Doug Hubley, guitar and vocals. Jonathan Nichols-Pethick, drums. Gretchen Schaefer, bass. Recorded in 1995. “Trouble Train” copyright © 1994 by Douglas L. Hubley. Photos by Doug Hubley (above) and Jeff Stanton (below). Hear “Trouble Train” below, buy it on Bandcamp!