S'il Pleur Tous les Jours

This translates roughly as "I don't give a damn if it rains every day," which is more or less the theme of this CD. The place where I grew up is hard and mean in its own way. And generations of Seminoles, blacks, and whites survived, I think, out of pure cussedness and a sense of humor. You can go through the old graveyards and find what seems to a sizable chunk of a town wiped out in a year's time by yellow fever. Any slaves or poor white sharecroppers cutting cane down there must have been absolutely miserable in late summer when the temperature would hover near 100 degrees and the humidity reach into the 90 percent range. I used to work in a paper mill down there, loading boxcars and semis by hand on such days. The worst feeling in the world was when "the bear got ya": the beginnings of sunstroke when your head would get light, stomach go queasy, and your legs turn to syrup. But people survived, by sort of looking at nature and saying, "I don't give a damn."

On this track, I use a cheap Japanese Epiphone banjo and my Strat directly into the board. Sean puts down some more of that bowed alligator bass. On the background vocals, you hear John Toebbe and Tom Gould. Eloisa Pope has the neat witchy voice on top of our harmony. It all works really well for me because now when I hear the cut I imagine a group of those mushroom people on the inside of Eat a Peach, marching through the swamp with their harvest like umbrellas and singing in French. This usually happens late at night in circumstances I'd rather not delve into. At any rate, I love having Eloisa's voice here since the next song is about her.