When I was making musical tarot decks for Radio8Ball “Traveling Companion” was always The Queen of Cups.
This song from JULIE CHRISTENSEN and TOM MCMORRAN has been my traveling companion since I first heard Julie sing it. Probably at the old Largo on Fairfax in 1990. She gave me a cassette tape of the same group of players performing the song on KCRW the same month and that tape has been copied and dubbed and enjoyed in every subsequent format. Carried across hundreds of thousands of miles. Keeping me company on long drives and walks and bike rides. Shared with only the most intimate friends. Until now…
Julie was singing in Leonard Cohen’s band at the time. Working with Todd Rundgren on a record that never came out for some now defunct major label. Playing with her punk poetry band The Divine Horseman and backing up folks like Steve Wynn. I was very impressed with everything about Julie, and she thought I was cute.
I never got to know Tom McMorran who wrote the music. He was in Leonard Cohen’s band with Julie. I got the sense they used to go out. He probably saw me as a movie guy, which I was at the time. I remember being a little intimidated by him.
You can see them both in this live footage of Leonard Cohen from 1988 at 2:22
Their version of the song, the version I love, has a lot more interesting time changes than my track. Julie thinks my straightened-out version may be more accessible. We’ll see. I’m encouraging her to release the version I love so much in the wake of my release. If this version leads to that I will be very happy.
The crew of folks I got to help me with my straightened out cinematic folk tribute to Tom and Julie’s song did not let me, or the song, (or you) down.
I am very excited to have enticed VEDA HILLE to play piano on the track. She recorded her part at a studio in Vancouver, BC where she was working on some brilliant obscure multi-media theatrical project funded by the Canadian government (or possibly something a little more interesting than that). Veda has written and released several songs which live in the same deeply sensitive and musically precise neighborhood as “Traveling Companion” so, whether or not you appreciate it, this was PERFECT casting. If you like this track, do yourself a favor and check out Veda’s stuff, especially a song called “Precious Heart”. I’m looking at you Julie C. I’d love to hear your version of “Precious Heart”.
FERNANDO PERDOMO, who has been my musical traveling companion in the studio for this last fruitful year, played bass on the track. He also engineered the drum sessions with DAVID GOODSTEIN at his Stairway Studio where I recorded all my parts during sessions for this and a bunch of other songs you may be hearing in the months and years to come.
DAN KALISHER, whose name will be recognizable to those who follow the credits for the songs at the end of movies like “A Complete Unknown” and “Paint”…played the pedal steel that gives the song some of its epic scope.
KEN STRINGFELLOW of The Posies, Big Star and R.E.M. mixed the track in a small town in France between bouts of chemotherapy.
I’ve been working on this track for just about a year. I took it slow because I wanted to enjoy agonizing over every little thing. I’m still not a hundred percent pleased with my part, but I mostly like it. Like 98%. If I agonized for another year, I could probably get that up to 99%.
I shot the music video during a 90-minute period one afternoon last December in Olympia, Washington in three different locations on the State Capitol campus where I was treated to a variety of the different weathers Olympia has to offer. The opening shot of the video is of the house I grew up in, as seen from the other side of the gorge that separates east and west Olympia. If you found that spot and walked east you would easily find the other two locations. This terrain has deep personal significance for me which I don’t expect most people who aren’t from Olympia and haven’t read my book, ”Accidental Initiations: In The Kabbalistic Tree of Olympia” to have any context for. I hope, without this context, it still serves the song.
I was really looking forward to sharing this track with Tom McMorran. I figured I’d meet him as part of the release. Either he’d dig the track or I’d find out he wasn’t into it. Instead, about three weeks ago Julie called to tell me she’d just learned Tom died in February.
When I first heard this song, almost everyone I’d ever known was still alive. As the song traveled with me it’s accrued my ghosts. A father. A best friend. A beloved aunt. A treasured teacher. I don’t expect to rate a haunting from Tom McMorran but it’s every sad sack independent songwriter’s dream that after our death someone will cover our song and draw attention to a creative life we fear will be forgotten without notice.
The world deserves this song. The great singers of the world will want to sing it, if they hear it.
Two of us already have.