Thirteen
by Michelle Dockrey & Tony Fabris

      Lead Vocal: Michelle Dockrey
      Backing Vocals: Maya Bohnhoff, Seanan McGuire
      Guitar: Tony Fabris
      Bass: Chris Clark
      Drums: Scott Irwin
      Additional percussion: Vixy & Tony

Well I went for a walk on the rocky cliffs with a sunshine sea and a sky of grey
Saw the big black bird with the white-out wings, he called "come with me, child, and fly away"
Said "count my brothers and count my sisters, we'll tell your fortune and we'll tell you true"
"But the path's all covered in claws and feathers, Magpie, there's too many of you"

One one one and two and three
Magpie, won't you take pity on me
The devil himself only counted to seven
Tell me what does it mean
Thirteen, thirteen, thirteen, thirteen

Magpie tell me where I'm going, magpie tell me where I've been
Eight's for a dance on the stroke of midnight, nine's for a sinner and ten for sin
Eleven is for the gates of heaven, twelve's for the man who lets you in
But thirteen's a charm and thirteen's a murder and thirteen's the feathers underneath your skin

One one one and two and three
Magpie, won't you take pity on me
The devil himself only counted to seven
Tell me what does it mean
Thirteen, thirteen, thirteen, thirteen

Magpie tell me all your stories, magpie tell me I can play
I never believed in the signs and omens, I never knew nothing until today
Fly me twelve times round the castle, take me up and never set me down
Take my joy in gold and silver, jump off the cliff and never hit the ground

One one one and two and three
Magpie, won't you take pity on me
The devil himself only counted to seven
Tell me what does it mean
Thirteen, thirteen, thirteen, thirteen

About the Song

Vixy:
This is a song about my lucky number. Actually it's a song about magpies, and about what happens when you see thirteen of them. And it's about my lucky number.

About the Songwriting

Vixy:
"Thirteen" is the only song that I've ever written— from my point of view, anyway— backwards.

I was listening to the radio one day and was completely stopped in my tracks by the song "Black Horse and the Cherry Tree" by KT Tunstall. My God, I thought, I have got to write a song like that. I went home and told Tony I desperately wanted to write a song in this style. Now, Tony's magic. I can say to him, "I'd really like to sing a cover of this," and I give him about thirty minutes and he's learned it. So saying to him, "I'd really like to do something in this style" was a snap; he heard it once, and in no time he had a fantastic riff going— reminiscent of the style, but still different enough to be unique— and we were off and running.

Now I had to figure out what the song could be about. What did the style suggest to me? Somehow it seemed like a good counting song. What do people count, anyway? Then I remembered the various counting rhymes for seeing magpies or crows— one's for sorrow, two's for joy, etc. However many you see, that predicts something that's going to happen. (Look them up on wikipedia— that's what I did.) Of all the versions I could find, all of them only went up to seven. That stuck in my mind. What if you saw more than seven of them? What would it mean?

That gave me a first verse— seeing magpies— and a second verse— making up my own meanings for eight through thirteen magpies. (That part was fun.) I wanted a third verse, a conclusion. I was stuck. What did I know about magpies? Internet research didn't give me much else that felt songworthy. Where else had I seen magpies? Well... when I was getting my teaching degree, I read You Can't Say You Can't Play, by Vivien Paley. (And everything else she'd written. I wanted to be her when I grew up.) The book is about Paley's kindergarten class and about her creation of a new class rule, and how it affects her own thinking, the students, and eventually the rest of her school. One day Paley happens to see a magpie and it captures her attention; for the rest of the book, one of her ways of working out her own thoughts and eventually class discussions as well is with her "magpie stories"; stories about a lonely princess in a castle, befriended by a magpie who breaks a magic spell.

So I had stories, playing, a castle, a magic magpie... I think that's what gave me the idea of transformation. The song essentially implies that if you see thirteen magpies, you turn into one.

I wonder whether it's the only filk song that's also secretly a tribute to a kindergarten teacher.

Tony:
Although KT Tunstall's song was a stylistic inspiration, I tried very hard during the songwriting and production of "Thirteen" to make sure that it was merely an acorn rather than a template. We weren't trying to copy KT's song, we just wanted something fun and bouncy, with that fun beat, that 50's style, a wild, buzzy acoustic guitar (I immediately tuned my E string down to a D, so I could get that nice buzzy drop-D tuning), and a super-catchy chorus with simple words that you could sing along with.

"That fun beat", and the entire style that followed it, began with Bo Diddley, but I didn't actually know that at first. I knew the style had been around for many decades, but didn't know its exact origin point, I only had a vague idea that it came from 1950s artists such as Elvis Presley. I knew that besides "Cherry Tree", there were a lot of other modern tributes to the same style and beat. For example, I remember playing George Michael's "Faith" in a cover-tunes band in the late 80's, knowing full well that the style and the beat were a 1950's homage. As we wrote "Thirteen", I even remember thinking of "Faith" specifically, remarking that "Cherry Tree" resembled it, too.

It wasn't until Chris Clark (our bassist for "Thirteen") came into the studio that I learned its original heritage. He had written "Bo Diddley" onto the top of the chord chart I gave him, and told me where it had all come from. Chris is probably old enough to remember when it first hit the radio! I know that for some people, this is the equivalent of me saying, "You mean Paul McCartney was in a band before Wings?", but you have to give me a bit of a break, since my musical education didn't really start until the early 80's.

It turns out that our song, KT's song, George Michael's song, and many songs before them, are all part of a long and grand tradition, tracing its roots all the way back to that original Bo Diddley beat, and perhaps even farther back to Hambone before that. In an interview I found via a Google search, KT Tunstall acknowledges it directly: "We took a lot of inspiration from these old blues guys— Bo Diddley and that kind of thing."

The more I worked with the song in the studio, the more I kept hearing in my head a specific set of hand claps that went with that Bo Diddley beat. We put them in (after some protesting from Vixy), and I found out later that the hand claps were stuck in my head entirely because of Willie and the Hand Jive by Johnny Otis, yet another milestone in that long tradition. Listening more closely, I think that many of the modern tributes to that style (including our song and the other modern songs that inspired it) probably derive more directly from "Willie and the Hand Jive" than coming directly from Bo Diddley's original work.

The verses of "Thirteen" hang out on the one chord outlined by the main riff, basically Just a D major. Wikipedia informs me that Bo Diddley was known for doing just that, riffing entirely on one chord without changing, whereas songs like "Cherry Tree" and "Hand Jive" modulate between at least two chords. I hadn't realized I was sticking so closely to Bo Diddley's formula.

The verses that Vixy wrote have the guitar playing where the lyrics aren't singing, and vice-versa. So I had very little to do with the songwriting portion of the verses other than to play a riff between the lines. The chorus, on the other hand, was an organic thing that we wrote together, with me improvising chords and Vixy trying different melodies to go with the chords, hacking away at it a bar at a time until we had something we liked.

Footnote: As Vixy and I were preparing this entry for our Behind the Music pages, the world lost Bo Diddley. So many modern musicians were influenced by his life's work, I would even go so far as to say that all modern rock and roll has been touched by his hand. As you can see in what I wrote above, his influence was strong enough to be felt even through successive iterations, tributes based on tributes based on tributes. Many of us didn't even realize where the influence originally came from.

About the Recording

Vixy:
This is one of four songs for which we did scratch guitar and vocals and sent to the fabulous Scott Irwin to record drums by the fabulous Kristoph Klover at Flowinglass. We later realized that the song was a bit too low for me, and after Tony became okay with the idea of capo-ing a guitar that was tuned with a drop-D (there was a bit of an adjustment period there), we started performing this song at capo 2.

Just before Christmas, we realized we'd have Seanan visiting us, and we could take advantage (heh) by throwing her into the studio to record some of the backing vocals that she usually does live. But the scratch tracks were in the old key; we hadn't re-recorded them yet. Tony recorded a guitar track at the right capo, and then I hastily recorded another scratch track, so that Seanan's vocals could be in the right key. We tossed her in the basement to sing her part as best she could with literally NO notice at all, and figured we could come back to it later if needed.

Just after Seanan's Christmas visit, we all went to California again, Seanan to go home and Tony and I to spend a few days recording at Mystic Fig— me doing some vocals for the Bohnhoffs, Maya doing some vocals for me, and Maya and Tony and I all doing some vocals for Seanan. (What a musically incestuous bunch we are.) Maya, who would probably have killed me had I not let her do some vocals of her own on "Thirteen", sang some amazing harmonies that meshed wonderfully with Seanan's playful vocals. We rang in the new year with song and then Tony and I came home, as I thought, to record a final vocal and put on the finishing touches.

Only the more I listened to the scratch vocal, the more I liked the energy of it. Plus, Tony had kept in the "woo!" from the original capo-0 scratch track (I'd gotten a little excited that the take had gone well, and he thought it was cute. This is one of the many reasons you want a producer. These things never occur to me.) This is one of two songs on our album where the final vocal you hear is actually a scratch track that just went really well— only on this one it was a deliberate choice. :)

Tony:
We wrote the song and recorded the original scratch tracks in a drop-D tuning. As Vixy says, we later brought that up to capo 2 so that she didn't have to dip her voice down as far in some spots of the song. Then later, at an OVFF, I went to a DADGAD workshop by Michael "Moonwulf" Longcor, and decided to try doing "Thirteen" in DADGAD. I even performed the song for Michael that same evening in DADGAD, as the filk circle in the hall was starting to assemble.

The final guitar track on the recording is done in DADGAD with capo 2, but I've gone back to performing it live in drop-D tuning with capo 2. I changed back partly because it's easier to retune only the one string, but also because I noticed a distinct reduction in the energy of the song the few times I performed it live in DADGAD. I listened back to some raw tracks that John Seghers recorded of our gigs at Wayward Coffee House, and the difference between the drop-D performance and the DADGAD performance was like night and day. I don't think it's a specific fault of the DADGAD tuning, though. My guess is that I'm less familiar with the chord forms in the DADGAD tuning, and therefore spend too much energy concentrating on getting the chords right, rather than just having fun with the song and letting it flow.

I'm particularly fond of Chris Clark's upright acoustic bass on this song. It's got just the right sound and feel to fit that 50's vibe. I'd originally brought Chris in specifically because I knew he would sound good on "Erased", but he took to this song, too, like a duck to water. There's some really subtle but interesting stuff going on in the bass part that perhaps only I would notice, but which really pleases my ear: On the main verse riff, he doesn't match my guitar riff exactly, he hangs out on one note in a certain spot where my guitar is doing an ascending scale. This makes for an interesting subtle harmony between the guitar and bass that I just love. And in the later choruses, there's this descending passing tone he does (you can hear it clearly at around 03:40 on the time index counter) that would never have occurred to me if I were writing the bass part, but which fits just perfectly and gives the song some additional harmonic structure that it wouldn't otherwise have had.