Postcard From Holland (demo)

postcard from holland (demo)
volume 4 number 8
this painting was my tenth.
done on august 11, 2002.
rarely do I try to make my paintings actually look like something.
but in this case you should be able to make out the crumbling cookie, the cafe' au lait, the postcard of a Van Gogh, and a stubby pencil.
the ingredients mentioned in the following lyric:

in holland there is a table
in front of me
with cafe' au lait
and some kind of cookie.
outside the window
there's a wide and gentle canal.
two swans swim in it,
in their mirror images,
they must be in love.
the handsome holland people ride ecological bikes.
or sometimes their dogs might take them along for a hike.
I stood by the tall ships
and stepped in some old dutch dog shit.
it began to rain a strange enchanted mist.
and I love the cookies here, I could live forever here with you.

those are the words I wrote on a postcard to my girlfriend martha in 1990
while on the david bowie sound and vision tour.
I was in the habit of writing long letters on a typewriter I lugged around
but at the time I was sitting with a pencil at a table near a harbor.

some time later while riding in the bowie tour bus
safely tucked into my comfy bunk
I began to imagine the music and melody for the song,
just as I had done with lone rhino.
as the bus rolled across the euro countryside
I laid there memorizing it as though it was a record playing over and over.

it wasn't until august 10, 1992 that noah* and I recorded
a vocal demo of the ideas for the cello and french horn parts
I had heard in my head on that bus ride.
why a vocal demo?
it's quicker than working out cello parts
only to realize they're not what you want.
the vocal demo makes up the first half of this download.
the "bah bah bah" bits were meant to be cellos.

back in the dreadful seventies when I had no work
except to play drums in a Holiday Inn band I had
purchased my first decidedly cheap-o-cello.
cello ranks high on my list of favorite things.
the first ELO records had a guy named Roy Wood
who played most of the instruments including cello
and I figured with enough practice I could hack away
at a cello about as well as he had.

those were the real hard times for me.
when "The Sound Assembly" didn't work
I literally alone lived in my van.
shaving in the mornings at rest areas and state parks.
I remember practicing cello on a bench in Devou Park
not far from where I grew up in northern kentucky.
I had worked out the lines from Eleanor Rigby.

by the second half of our download,
recorded on march 27, 1993,
I must have realized the key (A furnished flat) was yucky
and so changed it to the key of F.
the cello parts I ended up playing were different
(good thing I did that vocal demo).
and french horns? they're a cinch to imitate with a guitar synth.
the second half is the backing track for the complete version
found on my little beatle record here.

*points of interest: if you look on the fold out inside the here record you can see noah going into the kitchen area. (and it was a photo he took!) gary platt and ken latchney mastered here at Full Sail, which was the first time I ever worked with ken.

instruments and vocals: adrian
recorded at home in Williams Bay, Wisconsin
engineer: Noah Evens
length: 2:55