Eight-Legged Blues (Live)
by Michelle Dockrey & Tony Fabris

"When you turn out all the lights
When you lock up for the night
We come out to play"

They're lurking in the corners on the ceilings and the walls
They're jumping on the guest bed and they're running in the halls
They watch you type your password, they know where you keep your keys
And they're turning up your thermostat by one or two degrees

They're playing Spider Solitaire and reading all your files
They're logging on your blogging sites to change your default styles
They're typing editorials with libertarian slants
And they're turning on your Xbox to play Rock Band with the ants

"You know we've got a lot to do,
So if you'd just put down that shoe
We'll be on our way."

They're looking into real estate (it's all about location)
They used to lift your free weights 'til that slight miscalculation
They're barbecuing tiny little steaks on your Hibachi
And drafting solemn essays in salute to Fibonacci

They raid your liquor cabinet, though they're not of age to drink
They're staging tango competitions in the kitchen sink
They're critiquing your new painting (your perspective's off, they say)
And they're analyzing your décor for optimal feng shui

"You know we're really not bad guys.
Remember Egypt and the flies?
We're just saying."

They're going through your songbooks and composing extra verses
They're making use of Babelfish to translate Russian curses
They're borrowing your favorite socks (they're sure you wouldn't mind)
And they're working on your steering since your wheels got misaligned

They're singing German arias (their pitch is wunderbar)
They're studying philosophy (they think, therefore they are)
They're reading your old math books, learning vector and diameter
And writing epic poetry in iambic octameter

"Hey we're just trying to get along.
If we had pants, we'd put them on
One leg at a time, at a time, at a time, at a time, at a time"

About the Song

Vixy:
I like spiders. Mostly because they eat bugs, and I hate bugs. I still don't want spiders crawling on me, or hanging from the ceiling at eye level. I made a deal with the spiders in my office; I'll leave them alone if they'll leave me alone! That means not jumping out at me, climbing on me, or hanging where they might hit me in the face.

As a sign of good faith, I wrote them a song.

About the Songwriting

Vixy:
I wrote this song mostly at SpoCon; I remember wandering around the lovely campus and sitting on the benches with my song notebook.

I don't really remember where I got the idea to list all the things the spiders might be getting up to after the humans go to bed, but once I started, my imagination just ran right away with me. I couldn't scribble those couplets down fast enough. I tried not to re-use a single verb throughout.

About the Recording

Vixy:
The strings on this song are absolutely heroic. Betsy goes nuts with what we fondly call Creepy Cello Shit, and although it's not on this recording, Sunnie later added an "oops" sound on her violin at the lyric "til that slight miscalculation", I just about fell on the floor. I seriously have no idea how we ever managed without these two.

Tony:
Our token live song for the album. Also, this song is the second source of typos on the album cover that we only noticed after going to press. It's hyphenated in some places and not in others. These are the kinds of things you agonize over at the last minute when you're under a deadline. Fun!

This was recorded at Wayward Coffeehouse in Greenwood, which was a special place for us, since it's the first location that we ever played as a band outside of filk cons. It's a sci-fi/geek/Firefly themed coffee shop run by our friend Bronwyn, who is a Browncoat of the highest order. The Greenwood location was damaged a few years ago when there was a fire in the neighboring store, and there were some issues with the landlord not completing the repairs right away, thus the Greenwood location had to shut down and go out of business. The good news is, Bronwyn later re-opened in her new location in Ravenna, and we've played there many times since. Now we refer to the old Greenwood location as "Wayward-That-Was".

This recording is our first performance of the song in front of an audience, captured by our good friend John Seghers, who is a wise sound man, wise like Yoda, because he reserves separate mics and tracks just for the audience response. A live recording without the sound of the audience isn't any fun, so we endeavored to get the best audience response we could. We had more than one high quality live recording of this song, and chose this one in particular because the interaction between us and the crowd came out best on this recording.

Even live recordings require a ton of mixing and editing to sound good, though. This one was particularly troublesome because I needed to fix several serious issues. First of all, I had to fix a lot of problems with background and environmental noises from the coffee shop. Then, in the opening guitar part, there was a moment when I played the exact wrong chord, sliding up to the wrong fret entirely. Some mistakes you can leave in (especialy for a live recording), but this one was just too out there, and I couldn't live with it. I also fixed some spots where Sunnie was laughing so hard that the fiddle part was going a little bit wonky.

In the studio, those kinds of fixes are easy since all the tracks are isolated. You just splice in a better take of that part of that track, or do whatever editing you need to do, without needing to touch the other tracks. Live, though, every mic and instrument picks up a little bit of everything else, especially those aforementioned audience mics. So you can't make edits and corrections in a live recording as easily.

Luckily I was able to leverage the polyphonic detection features of Melodyne to make surgical corrections in all of the tracks. Sometimes I would remove the corrected part entirely from the audience tracks and then make the correction only in the lead track of the instrument being corrected. This required increasing the reverb on the lead track for those sections, to fill in the lost natural reverb coming in from the audience mics. Sometimes I would make the same correction in both the audience track and the instrument track in parallel, when it was possible to do so. There were some spots, mostly in the fiddle part, that I couldn't fix perfectly no matter what I did, which caused a bit of a strange sound in the overall mix. In those cases, the audience mics would have one version in them, and the lead track would have another version, and I couldn't just mute the audience track for that section. This resulted in two different versions of the same set of notes playing at the same time. Audio and guitar geeks will recognize this as the technical basis for the popular and common "doubling" or "chorus" effect, and sure enough, that's what it sounded like on playback. So, to fix it, I just added a chorusing effect to the whole fiddle track, so that it sounds the same all the way through. Yes, that's cheating, I know. Sometimes the cheap tricks are the best.

The opening guitar notes are an old blues riff originally meant to sorta kinda sound like a train whistle if you squint. There is absolutely nothing about trains in this song. But I wanted it to sound bluesy (I'm not a very bluesy player) and that was about the best I could do.

Betsy's spider sounds on the cello are just amazing. During writing and arranging the song originally, Vixy had specifically asked me to make the song "sound like spiders" and I couldn't. I don't know how to do that on the guitar. Betsy, on the other hand, can take an impossible piece of direction like that and make it possible. I don't know how she does that, but I'm glad she's on our side.