Wooden Ships

This song is called "If I Ever Get Around To Living." And it represents this freaky end of the record thing where I was like, give me another one. I'll write another one. And I was playing a rousing game of Jenga one night listening to "Wooden Ships" by Crosby, Stills & Nash, and there's something about the way these guys used to write suites. Where they'd go from one thing to another thing—these scene changes.

So like, if you're listening to, like, Crosby, Stills & Nash, there's a lot of little bumps, and—because it's live—if you listen to, like, "Wooden Ships," you know, it's a gorgeous three-part sort of tune, there's an entire measure that's just a fret too low. But something weird happens, where if you listen to it long enough—and if you've listened to a lot of really well-charted stuff or, like, well-produced stuff for so many years, your ear sort of gets tired of it—you start realizing, like, that's a moment unto itself. I mean, isn't that as much of a hook as a memorable lyric is? If you go, “here comes the part where they—oh yeah," they sort of mark time in the song, you know what I mean?

Well the first song that I heard that really roughed me up in terms of being okay with mistakes is "Wooden Ships" by Crosby, Stills & Nash, and there's this run in there that Stephen Stills does. This is raw like by all accounts as a guitar player, it's just a fret off for like two or three, four notes. And I remember being young being like, That's a mistake. It's like, not really. Because you know where it happens when it were recordings give life to choices the repetition of over the playback of a recording gives life to all decisions and all choices so something's off somewhere it might not be off when you finally hear it or when you hear it again thirty years later there's this little run in "Wooden Ships" that to me now it's just the way that goes and that's how you know where you are in the song absolutely and I get that now where I'm usually trying to buff it out I've had a lot of time to buff things out when I work and there are times I want to make highly ornate statements which the search for everything very much is but I want to make one that's a document warts and all. And you start to learn those worts. I learned how to make mistakes from Dead & Company.

SJ: Like a perfect example of that are Rolling Stones records and James Brown; not only do they speed up but when they do whatever wrong chord, every bar band in the world learns that chord and then the song is not right if they don't play it that way.

When the bass player doesn't change key, the rest of the band, if you don't play it like that, you don't know where the song is. You don't know where you are in the song.

JM: That's what I'm talking about "Wooden Ships." It's a moment!

SJ: Even when I'm doing a cover band or a soul band, and we don't do those weird kind of things that were basically mistakes; if you don't do it, it don't sound like the record!

JM: Repetition validates choices when it comes to records. I mean there are massive train wrecks at Grateful Dead concerts and the people love them.