MUSIC FOR AUGUST 2023

‘CAPHEAD’

Whether or not gang-related violence really increased in Maine’s largest city during the 1990s, the public statements of a certain chief of police certainly made people more aware of the issue. And during those same years, whether or not those pronouncements affected my perceptions, I started seeing a lot of young guys wearing ball caps and looking coldly murderous as they tooled around in their small souped-up cars.

All that set the stage for “Caphead,” performed here in August 1999 by Howling Turbines — drummer Ken Reynolds, bassist Gretchen Schaefer, and yours truly. What sparked the actual creation of the song was a nighttime rumble in a Denny’s parking lot in 1998 that resulted in a fatal stabbing, which remains unsolved (despite the 19 months behind bars served by one teenager awaiting trial on an indictment that was ultimately dropped).

Hear “Caphead” below! Buy it on Bandcamp! (Above: Photo illustration by Doug Hubley. Below: Detail from a poster — one of a series inspired by the Three Stooges — by Gretchen Schaefer advancing a 1998 Howling Turbines date at the Free Street Taverna, Portland, Maine. “Caphead” copyright © 2010 by Douglas L. Hubley. All rights reserved.)

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MUSIC FOR JUNE 2023

‘(WAITING FOR A) WESTBOUND TRAIN’

Not to be confused with the Boston ska band or the reggae song by Dennis Brown, this Day for Night number was inspired by a conductor’s announcement on Amtrak’s Lake Shore Limited. The conductor said we’d stopped to wait for an eastbound train, but I had to bend the facts to suit the song’s own reality — hence “westbound.” Alliteration is nothing to be sneezed at in snongwriting songwriting, and the switcheroo also activates the fraught and many-layered symbolism of East vs. West in American mythology. “We’re headed back East as we always must be / To the same old and the good old and the old used-to-be.” (Note, too, that I managed to make use of the time-honored country songwriting tradition of rhyming a word with itself.)

I wrote “(Waiting for A) Westbound Train” on the back porch of a cabin at the Chautauqua in Boulder, Colo., in June 2019. Gretchen Schaefer and I recorded the version heard here in a basement rehearsal just three months later. We now perform it as the first half of a medley that concludes with another Chautauqua product, “Just A Moment In The Night.”

Hear “(Waiting for A) Westbound Train” below! Buy it on Bandcamp! (Below, Day for Night relaxes following a September 2019 performance at the Deering Center Porchfest. Photo by Jeff Stanton. Above: Gretchen Schaefer waits for a southbound train in Brunswick, Maine, 2018. Photo by Doug Hubley. “(Waiting For A) Westbound Train” copyright © 2019 by Douglas L. Hubley. All rights reserved.)

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MUSIC FOR JANUARY 2023

‘THE OTHER ME’

Slow sad songs constituted much of my output after I resumed songwriting, in 2010, after a 12-year layoff. So when I started this song, in 2016, it was time for something upbeat. Typically for me, “The Other Me” is still wordy, overly self-referential and wry — bordering on bleak, actually — but it has a good beat and you can dance to it. And if Hank Williams provided a spark of inspiration for the lyrics, things always go a bit better with a hint of the Monkees. (Or is it Stevie Wonder?)

I wrote most of the lyrics in the bar of the Samoset Resort, in Rockport, Maine, while Gretchen Schaefer, my partner in life and music, was showing her original mosaics at a craft fair there. Performing as Day for Night, we recorded this version at Quill, a coffee shop in Westbrook, Maine, in August 2018.

Hear “The Other Me” below! Buy it on Bandcamp! (“The Other Me” copyright © 2016 by Douglas L. Hubley. All rights reserved. Banner image by Doug Hubley. Day for Night image by Jeff Stanton. All rights reserved. )

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