MUSIC FOR OCTOBER 2024

‘SOMEPLACE ELSE’

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.)

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From left, Gretchen Schaefer and Doug Hubley are Day for Night. Photo by Don Perkins.
Gretchen Schaefer and Doug Hubley are Day for Night, shown performing at the 2023 Mountain Man Jamboree. Photo: Don Perkins

MUSIC FOR SEPTEMBER 2024

‘TROUBLE TRAIN’

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!

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Toothy Boarders in 1994. From left: Jonathan Nichols-Pethick, Doug Hubley, Gretchen Schaefer. (Jeff Stanton photo)

MUSIC FOR AUGUST 2024

‘LAST CALL WALTZ’

Here’s a plain country song for a sultry summer night. It’s also a nod to an old country-music tradition, as exemplified by “Tennessee Waltz” and “New Partner Waltz”: the waltz of romantic betrayal. This time around, though, the situation is experienced not by the betrayed, but by the betrayers, who are suddenly facing both closing time and a big decision.

“Last Call Waltz” is performed here by Doug Hubley and Gretchen Schaefer, aka Day for Night, at Quill, Westbrook, Maine, in June 2018.

Hear “Last Call Waltz” below! Buy it on Bandcamp! (“Last Call Waltz” copyright © 2015 by Douglas L. Hubley. All rights reserved. Doug and Gretchen are depicted at top in a 1988 image in Lovell, Maine, by the Minolta self-timer, and below in a 2013 selfie on a Concord Coach.)

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Doug Hubley and Gretchen Schaefer are Day for Night.

MUSIC FOR JULY 2024

MEDLEY: ‘(WAITING FOR A) WESTBOUND TRAIN–JUST A MOMENT IN THE NIGHT’

Trains have rolled through my songwriting since 1981’s “Shortwave Radio,” and the two songs offered as a medley for my July 2024 “Song of the Month!” share that motif, as well as a strategic D chord. The medley has a fine build-up that nicely ends performances by the Americana duo Day for Night — that’s what you’re hearing here, as Gretchen Schaefer and I close our 2023 Mountain Man Jamboree set. (Thanks, Dennis!)

But I’d like to think that 2019’s “(Waiting For A) Westbound Train” and “Just A Moment In the Night,” from 2015, also have something deeper in common: a perspective on time’s passage that I couldn’t have expressed even a couple years earlier. How do you regard the flow of years once youth’s optimism and impatience have run out and nostalgia is exposed as just another opiate of the masses? — by Doug Hubley

Hear “Westbound Train–Just A Moment In The Night” below! Buy it on Bandcamp! (“(Waiting For A) Westbound Train” copyright © 2019 and “Just A Moment In The Night” copyright © 2015 by Douglas L. Hubley. All rights reserved. Photo credits: Above, the California Zephyr at Galesburg, Ill., July 4, 2017. Photo: Doug Hubley. Below, Gretchen and Doug are Day for Night, shown at the 2023 Mountain Man Jamboree. Photo: Don Perkins.)

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From left, Gretchen Schaefer and Doug Hubley are Day for Night. Photo by Don Perkins.

MUSIC FOR JUNE 2024

‘ROBIN TIME (NIGHT LOGIC)’

For robins themselves, it’s robin time whenever they want it to be.

But for me, robin time occurs in late spring, specifically around 3 o’clock in the morning. It’s the interlude when night is on the cusp of day and accordingly, I am somewhere between sleep and consciousness — with all that implies about the workings of the mind (hence “Night Logic”).

At some point in my 50s I realized how much I value robins (to the extent that I now wear one on my arm). They are welcome harbingers of spring and as the days grow longer you can’t walk a block without encountering at least one. What speaks to me in particular is the robin’s way of running around looking irritable as it makes its living. Been there!

I carried the unripe idea for this song around for a year until, in April 2024, I noticed anew on a Stan Getz album the title of a song by Benny Carter: “People Time.” That sparked this recording. Its four guitars, accordion and voice can’t say what a robin can say even before it’s had breakfast. But it nevertheless conveys my gratitude for the robin’s music, especially when I hear it in those weird hours before dawn — robin time. — by Doug Hubley

Hear “Robin Time (Night Logic)” below! Buy it on Bandcamp! (“Robin Time (Night Logic)” copyright © 2024 by Douglas L. Hubley. All rights reserved. Photo credits: Above, Jeff Stanton. Below, robin tatoo by Phuc Tran, Tsunami Tatoo, Portland, Maine.)

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MUSIC FOR MAY 2024

‘WHY THIS PASSION’

Depicting a lovers’ quarrel, the lyrics of “Why This Passion” never changed after I wrote it, in 1983. But musically, the song shifted shape quite dramatically — from rococo New Wave romanticism to something like punk to something less easily defined — during its long tenure in the repertoire.

I wrote “Why This Passion” for my band the Fashion Jungle, an ensemble distinguished by credible sorties into high drama. But the song’s ornate original arrangement ultimately proved too utterly utterly even for me. So after keyboardist Kathren Torraca departed and Dan Knight succeeded Steve Chapman on bass, I turned the song into a musical hot rod, stripped down and sped up.

We kept that chopped, channeled and supercharged setting when Steve returned to the FJ in 1987, and that’s the version presented here in a rough recording from a Geno’s Rock Club show (at the Brown Street location) in May of that year. Ken Reynolds plays drums, Steve is on bass, and I’m singing and playing my trusty “two-knob” Strat.

(The song would hang on through two more bands, bringing its stay in the repertoire to a total of 20 years. It evolved with the Boarders, whose dabblings in “world music” inspired Jon Nichols-Pethick’s rolling tom-tom beat with its vaguely Middle Eastern feel. That propulsive rhythm worked so well, in fact, that Howling Turbines, with “Rumblin’ ” Ken Reynolds back on the drums, made sure to keep it. Gretchen Schaefer was the bassist in both combos.) — by Doug Hubley

Hear it below! Buy it on Bandcamp! (“Why This Passion” copyright © 1985 by Douglas L. Hubley. All rights reserved.)

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The 1987 Fashion Jungle: from left, bassist Steve Chapman, guitarist Doug Hubley, drummer Ken Reynolds. Photo: Minolta Self-Timer

MUSIC FOR APRIL 2024

‘JE T’AIME’

“Je t’aime” is an interpretation of an affair I had in central Europe in 1976. I changed the setting for the sake of the song because, well, Paris.

Also altered were the emotional facts of the matter. I wanted to make a song about being betrayed in a romantic locale and used that 1976 relationship as  the departure point. The result is hardly fair to the woman in question — there was betrayal but it was mutual, and merely a betrayal of naive expectations.  But it works on its own terms, which is the only basis for judging any song, and remains one of my favorites among my compositions.

“Je t’aime” needed a long time to come into its own. I wrote it in 1982 to perform with the Fashion Jungle, but with that band it has settled into place only during reunion shows since 2021. Instead, it was with The Boarders, heard here in spring 1996, that “Je t’aime” coalesced. Later it was part of the Howling Turbines repertoire. — by Doug Hubley

Hear “Je t’aime” by The Boarders, below: Doug Hubley, bassist Gretchen Schaefer and drummer Jonathan Nichols-Pethick. Buy it on Bandcamp! (“Je t’aime” copyright © 1983 by Douglas L. Hubley. All rights reserved. Photo above: Doug enjoying a happy relationship in Paris, June 2000; photograph by Gretchen Schaefer. Below: The Boarders in 1947, er, 1994, in a photograph by Jeff Stanton. From left: Doug, Jon, Gretchen.)

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MUSIC FOR MARCH 2024

‘SHORTWAVE RADIO’

How did inconstancy, trains and wartime espionage end up in the same song?

Beats me, but I still call “Shortwave Radio” one of my best, even 40-plus years after I wrote it. While it’s hardly mystical, it benefits from being more impressionistic than is usual for me and yet remains a vivid self-portrait.

Early and late, the song was a repertory pillar of my band the Fashion Jungle (1981–1989), and various FJ lineups can be heard performing it in 1981, 1982 (and 2023, in a reunion show excerpt). It also appeared in sets by the Boarders and even the supposedly country Cowlix.

But for the March 2024 Song of the Month! I present, instead, Howling Turbines playing “Shortwave” in 1998 — by which time drummer Ken Reynolds and I had been doing the song for many years, starting with the FJ. That long familiarity infused with the energy of Gretchen Schaefer’s bass make this one of the rockingest “Shortwaves” I have on tape. — by Doug Hubley

Hear “Shortwave Radio” by Howling Turbines: Doug Hubley, Gretchen Schaefer and Ken Reynolds. Buy it on Bandcamp! (“Shortwave Radio” copyright © 1981 by Douglas L. Hubley. All rights reserved. Photo above: Hallicrafters shortwave radio in an apartment in Portland, Maine, 1989. Below: Howling Turbines photographed by Jeff Stanton outside the Free Street Taverna on a hot day in 1999. From left: Ken Reynolds, Gretchen Schaefer, Doug Hubley. Additional Fashion Jungle personnel: 1981, bass by Mike Piscopo and organ by Jim Sullivan; 1982, bass by Steve Chapman)

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MUSIC FOR FEBRUARY 2024

‘BITTERSWEET’

“Bittersweet” broke a 12-year dry spell in my songwriting, a drought that began after 1998’s “Caphead.” I finished a few lyrics during that trek through the desert — making singable words out of other peoples’ translations of a few bossa nova classics, so those weren’t even my own ideas. That was it and it wasn’t much.

I never gave up on songwriting during those years. I just never finished any songs. If excuses for that lapse aren’t interesting and the root causes are hard to pin down, it’s nevertheless clear that what roused me again was Day for Night, the acoustic country duo in which I perform with Gretchen Schaefer, my life partner inside and outside music.

Once we had stopped trying to be so darned eclectic and had focused on antique country music, my songwriting path became clear. And what better topic than an invasive plant as a metaphor for love gone wrong?

“Bittersweet” began as a few lines scribbled in my pocket notebook during a lunch-break stroll around a Maine downtown. In 2007, I spent several graphomanical hours in a hotel room roughing out ideas for it. Several years after that, at the dining table on a gray cold day, I polished off the lyrics in one intense session. In the basement studio on a different cold gray day, I devised and recorded the music.

And I was a songwriter again . . . just like that.

Hear “Bittersweet” below in a 2018 performance by Doug Hubley and Gretchen Schaefer — Day for Night. Buy it on Bandcamp! (“Bittersweet” copyright © 2012 by Douglas L. Hubley. All rights reserved. Photo above: A Day for Night selfie taken on Peaks Island, Portland, Maine, in 2010. With “Bittersweet” new to us that year, the viney pose was no coincidence. Below: Day for Night at the 2019 Deering Center Porchfest, in a photo by Jeff Stanton)

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Day for Night relaxes after performing at Deering Center Porchfest, Sept. 8, 2019. (Jeff Stanton photo)

 

 

MUSIC FOR JANUARY 2024

‘BLUE SHADOWS’

(encore presentation)

First posted as the Song of the Month! for December 2022, “Blue Shadows” certainly qualifies as a Yuletide number — although, as a song about people exiting relationships with neither warning nor explanation, it may serve better to end, rather than launch, your holiday party.

In fact, that melancholy theme may suit January better than December. Where the Christmas season is supposed to provide various anesthetics against the realities of life, January is just the opposite, complete with hard light, bare branches, cold dry air, broken resolutions and other symbols of harsh truth. (Not to mention snow, something central to the song but hard to come by along Maine’s south coast in recent Decembers.)

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. Below: Doug Hubley, with mitten, and Gretchen Schaefer. 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/)

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Gretchen Schaefer and Doug Hubley pose for a winter selfie.