The River
by Michelle Dockrey & Tony Fabris

Alright, okay, I give in
I can't fight and I can't move and I can't win
I'm staring at the pages 'til I hate every letter
And there's always someone else who has already said it better
And the lines all come out crooked and the words are upside-down
And there's never any room to turn around

So tell me a story, aren't all stories true?
Tell me a story and I'll tell it back to you
There's always someone else there, up the river, up the river
Got to find my own way up the river

Good luck, farewell, bon voyage
To the basement and the attic and garage
In the clutter of the world we keep on diving for our treasure
And with cobwebs in our hair we come parading for your pleasure
And it looks like all I've got's a broken lamp and one old shoe
Just wait 'til I recall what I can do

So tell me a story, aren't all stories true?
Tell me a story and I'll tell it back to you
There's always something out there, up the river, up the river
Got to find my way back up the river

Lullabye, stay awake, no one knows your great mistake
Cities, countries, castles, cats, and gentlemen in dashing hats
Straight & narrow path you you stray from, run a game & run away from
Home, where the heart is laughter, what comes after ever after?

Hit the road, hit the bottle, fear of flying, hit the throttle, go!
Didn't you love that book? That day, the way the buildings shook
The man in the moon, man in space, lost a planet, lost a race
Sex and hate and joy and pain and love, love, love, love, love

Come on, take my hand, here we go
Through the woods and through the desert and the snow
Well I swear we got there last time but I don't remember how
And the map is lost, the road is gone, and what do I do now?
I'm slashing through the jungle word by word and line by line
You have to blaze a new trail every time

So tell me a story, aren't all stories true?
Tell me a story and I'll tell it back to you
There's always someplace calling, up the river, up the river
Got to find a new way up the river

About the Song

Vixy:
I hate songs about songwriting. So naturally, I had to write one.

About the Songwriting

Vixy:
I was trying to write something entirely else— I don't remember what it was, now— and it just wasn't working at all. A half-remembered piece of songwriting advice came to me: write what you're feeling. Well fine, I thought, I'll write this frustration. I thought I'd just be getting it out of my system, in order to be able to move on to something else. But it hung on, and it grew.

It also ended up being such a complete mishmash of references that I'm not sure even where to begin...

I started out with that feeling of frustration. Not only does it sometimes feel like I can't write, it also feels like every other writer is better than I am. Once when I saw Arlo Guthrie in concert, he talked about what he says when people ask him about songwriting. He says it's like fishing; you wait and hope that an idea comes along, and you hope you aren't fishing downstream from, say, Bob Dylan. ("Bob! Throw one back for the rest of us once in a while!") (Bob was apparently not terribly amused by this anecdote.) When I'm at a low in my writing self-esteem, I feel like maybe I'm downstream from Marian Call or someone.

(I never feel like I'm downstream from Seanan, though, despite her being the most prolific writer I know. Seanan kind of has her own private swamp.)

Around this same time, I saw a TEDx talk by lit professor Antonio Musumeci titled "Please, Tell Me a Story." It's a ten-minute talk that shaped everything else about this song, turned it from a song about frustration to a song about joy in creation. Stories. My music has always been about stories.

We artists, we songwriters and authors and painters and dancers, we're always telling stories. What's more, we're always finding new ways to tell the same old stories, because we're telling each other and ourselves about life and living and being human. We take Aladdin's lamp and Cinderella's old shoe and add new polish and glitter. I don't mean that everything is literally copied from something else; just that stories move us and captivate us because there's always a kernel in them that we recognize and relate to.

My partners will all tell you that every time I write a song, I go through a period of despair, and roam around the house moaning "I can't write anymorrrrrre, how did I ever write anything good before, I don't know howwwwww..." and I feel like it's true. Like I look at my best songs ever and I cannot even remember how I did it. Fishy has become quite philosophical about it and will remind me calmly that I've been saying that for years. Then Torrey pointed out that I'm not alone; Neil Gaiman tells a story (heh) of a conversation with Gene Wolfe, in which the older author told him, "You never learn how to write a novel. You only learn how to write the novel you're on." This turns out to be how it is for songwriting as well. I haven't really learned how to write a song. I've learned how to write these songs. So there was my third act.

The bridge came last, as nearly all my bridges do. I've nicknamed Tony my civil engineer, because he's so good at coming up with the bridges when I'm stuck. He gave me the idea to write about the different things people write songs about. Everything in the bridge is a reference to an existing song, mine or someone else's. Perhaps someday I'll make a list here, but for now I'll let you decide what those phrases mean to you.

Tony:
Vixy had all the verses and choruses mostly written, and I think that we may have written most of the music too, and then she asked me about whether the song needed a bridge. But she didn't know what to write for the bridge. I thought about it for a moment, and then suggested that since the verses were all very prose-y, with long sentences and descriptions, that the bridge could be the opposite: Short, staccatto items without real sentences. She instantly clicked with that idea and wrote what you get in the final song: a quick grocery list of songwriting ideas. I think it works perfectly with the theme of the song and elevates the whole song to a new level, what she wrote is just brilliant.

About the Recording

Tony:
Brian took to this drum part the most quickly of them all, having the part essentially fully written before even coming into the studio. I think it sounds great.

This is another song where I reserved the bass part for myself because it sounded like so much fun to play. There are a few particularly fun bass riffs in the song, and I really enjoyed recording it. There's one bass riff during the fade out that I really like because I matched it up with one of Brian's drum fills that ends with a "ting" on the bell of a ride cymbal. That one makes me smile every time I hear it.

I may have fun recording these bass parts, but I'm petrified by actually trying to play bass live: It's not my instrument and I feel like I'm lost on the thing. Everything is just so much bigger. It's like driving a Mini all your life and then being asked to get behind the wheel of a Humvee. It only works for me in the studio because I can sit there and do take after take, section after section, until I get it right.

The strings are of course huge fun on this song, as always. This song is a good example of a common dilemma I have: Needing to choose which parts to emphasize at any given moment in the song. If I'm not careful, I end up turning up all the string parts to 11 at the same time because they're all so tasty, and the resulting mix is a busy mess. I had played a mix for Brian when it was in that state at one point, and he pointed out that I really needed to pick a lead instrument. Good advice. For instance, at the start of the song, Betsy is playing a really great cello riff, but the fiddle wasn't getting enough airtime in the song, so I gave the fiddle the most emphasis on the intro and made the cello more quiet. Betsy plays the same cello riff later in the song, so we still got a chance to hear that great riff.

This is another one where we planned a fade-out, and of course it turned out to be a long one because everyone kept doing such tasty stuff all the way to the end. I also like how the fade out, Vixy's vocal improvs during the fade out, and the song's position at the end of the album, all drive home the theme of the song, and to a lesser degree, the theme of the album: It's an ongoing battle, keep at it.