A Good Night Was Had For Days

We pause our regularly scheduled program to inform you of my band’s latest release, “A Good Night Was Had For Days”.

Because we think this is something you should know about.

(We also humbly request that you sign up here to read all my columns, because I need you.)

It’s on all the streaming services. It’s also on Bandcamp, which we like because Bandcamp actually pays us. A quaint concept to be sure, but we like it.

A little backstory first. Tom Flannery and the Shillelaghs released albums in 2012 and 2019. This is our third. We started working on it in 2020, at the height of the Tiger King plague. We’d toss ideas back and forth from our respective bunkers, and waited for the world to re-open so we could sit in the same room together. Because we are all grumpy grown-ups, finding a time when all of us were available was difficult, so even though the record was started in 2020, and finished 4 years later, that didn’t mean we labored over the thing for 1500 days. More like a dozen. Maybe.

I always bought the beer, for which I almost gave myself a production credit. In the end it was Wiggy who put it all together. He deserves the credit for making such a disparate set of songs recorded over such a long period of time sound cohesive, as if we knew what we were doing all along.

This is why producers never have to buy the beer.

Somehow 10 songs emerged. I’m still not sure how. Gaps between sessions could stretch into months, so it was easy to forget what we had already done. We’d listen to playbacks and say “which one is this?” Some didn’t have titles until the last minute. All we really knew when we started was what the album cover photo was going to be…..

It was snapped by Tom Borthwick, the Godfather of Sound Investment Studios, who also played piano and Hammond on the album. It caught Wiggy adding an overdub from the control room on his brand new Les Paul. It looked very rock and roll-y to me, and it was free.

The title is an old Irish saying from the Blasket Islands, because of course it is.

So now I’ll take you through it track by track….

Burden

I think this is one of the 2020 ones. I was trying to get Wiggy into the Tragically Hip at the time, and when he sent me this track I knew I’d won him over. Hip fans will recognize the “It gets so sticky down here…” reference in the lyric from their song “Little Bones”.

Wiggy created the track at home, and sent it to me for lyrics. I added a guide vocal from my home set-up. Lenny and Chris eventually added bass and drums three years later. Wiggy would re-do his guitars. And then re-do them again. Once we had a rough mix of it, it was the one we’d play for anybody who asked how things were going. Having this song in the can early made everybody feel good. We knew we still had it in us. Whatever “it” is, this song had it.

Stuart Adamson

Stuart Adamson was the founder and leader of the band Big Country. You can read all about him here. I just scribbled the lyrics in my notebook one day, found the E Bm A chord progression, and that was that. At first it seemed so simple that I didn’t even bring it to the rest of the band. But eventually I sat on the studio couch and played it during a break in the action, and if I remember correctly Lenny just fell in with his harmony. Wiggy build the guitars up, Big Country style, and what had once sounded slight suddenly wasn’t so slight anymore. When things like this happen it’s what makes being in a band worth being in a band.

Dirty Frank’s

Wiggy’s track. We all loved it but I couldn’t get the lyrics right and it was starting to piss me off. I wrote them out completely at least twice, and we actually cut a vocal and thought it was done. I can’t remember what the words were, which is what happens when you write some connect-the-dot shit lyric. During a very disinteresting playback, Lenny started telling us about the night he and his girlfriend Jackie went to see the Red Hot Chili Peppers in Philly. They got a hotel room for the night and after the show were looking for a place nearby to get a drink. They found a little dive called “Dirty Frank’s”, having no idea it was, at least that evening, one of the gayest bars in Philly. They ended up staying for multiple rounds, and had a great time. Everybody is welcome at Dirty Frank’s.

Alas, the name of the bar fit the chorus perfectly. Somebody in the control room started singing “Dirty Frank’s….” (it may have been Borthwick) over whatever was there, and everybody else joined in on a gang vocal. Clearly this was much better, so I went home and wrote a completely new lyric, perhaps the only song in history that mentions Bob Weir and Archie Bunker in the same verse, and that was that. It’s Lenny’s favorite song on the record, which seems just about right (Jackie has a different favorite, as you’ll soon see…)

It’s not a song about the bar per se. But rather one about the search for a place that accepts us for who we are….

Now he’s at Dirty Frank's
looking for love
tired of searching all the stars above
raise your glass gotta give thanks
at Dirty Frank's

My plan is to write the bar an old fashioned handwritten letter to thank them for the inspiration.

Valley Train

A happy accident. Wiggy was teaching a recording class at a local college, and wanted to give his students some hands on training. So he asked if I could write a quick song that they could work on. He implored me to not make it about trains, which he says is all I write about, so I dashed off “Valley Train” in about 10 minutes, and we recorded the basic track, live, in less time than that. Cheesy live ending and all. This was the very definition of a throwaway.

The students took the track back to school, and dove in. They added some handclaps and maybe some cowbell and there’s a plonking piano in the chorus. Wiggy added soaring guitars. Things were getting interesting.

It ain’t gonna win me any songwriting awards, but it’s a good after-midnight burner in a bar. The world needs them too…

You Never Talk This Way

Setting the house on fire
with untapped desire
window dressing to hold in place
all them dreams like a broken dam
there you are and here I am

Another Wiggy track. The melody is built right in. I sang the lines to the chorus, intending them as place-holders. But they dug in and stayed, so the verses just fell from that. Somebody told me the other day that it reminded them of R.E.M. I’ll take that. And I don’t once mention trains.

Chris plays his ass off on this one. They really are quite a good band. aren’t they?

You Did It Once (But Can You Do It Again)

Wiggy asked for another track for his students, who were split into two socially distanced groups at the time. I had this lyric in my notebook, and the night before just banged on an E chord while listening to Keith Richards long enough to come up with a sort-of melody. Any excuse to sing this line…

We’re all liars in retrospect
from what the fuck to what the heck

….which gives the album an EXPLICIT sticker. There’s also the “thank you CLEVELAND!” ending, compliments of Chris our drummer, which should be a requirement on all rock and roll records.

We Even Took the Circus Away

For some reason I called it that even though I sang “chased the circus away” throughout the song. I must have had my reasons.

Another Covid-19 inspired song. In 2019 the circus came to the Taylor Wal-Mart parking lot, and of course I was there because when the circus comes you go to the circus. Duh.

We even chased the circus away
Center ring buried in the clay
In case they want to make a stand
consider this the promised land
Return when the nighttime falls
Prop up these big-top walls

It’s like sweeping up an old dirt floor
I gotta wonder what we’re down here for
Test the tension of the wire
Bucket brigade for the ring of fire

But now the pandemic even took THAT away. When something sidelines the fucking CIRCUS, it’s time to write a song about it. I sent Wiggy a Tragically Hip song called “Crack My Spine Like a Whip” and said “we need something at this tempo” and being a man of few words he said “sure” and a few days later I had the track. I think this was the last thing Chris added drums to. In the midst of the killer bridge Lenny gets his John Entwistle funk on, which triggered a friend of mine to drool and ask “who the fuck is your bass player?”, to which I replied “he’s MINE, get your own..”

If You Don’t Know Me By Now (You Never Will)

One of the first things we did. Wiggy may have had this track laying around from a previous session (he is a man of many bands). Definitely from 2020. It didn’t sound like anything else we’d done. It’s more of a pop song.

It’s 2020 but you still can’t see
The wreckage that you left behind for me
Find the needle find the vein
Find the vaccine that will drive you out of my brain

We were all going a bit batty at the time, so this might have been a plea to vanquish Joe Exotic and Carole Baskin from our lives. In retrospect, if you were living with a stranger in 2020, you suddenly had plenty of time to get to know them.

I added the (You Never Will) bit at the end so Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes wouldn’t get mad at me. As it stands, I don’t think anybody is going to confuse our song with theirs.

Two Coal Cars

Written in 1996. Originally recorded in 2000 for my second solo album. When we released our first Shillelaghs album and were booked to do an hour set on live radio, I realized we needed another song to reach the finish line. So it was in our repertoire. If we needed it to last 15 minutes, it lasted 15 minutes. If we only needed to fill 3 minutes, it lasted 3 minutes. It’s very friendly and elastic in that way. When we started making this album we always knew we were gonna record it.

I asked my friend Hannah Bingman to sing it with me, and she added her bits from her home in Lancaster. She was so good Wiggy asked her to sing MORE bits. Which she did. Once we had her vocal, we knew the album was done.

When Jackie Drinks Whiskey

Wiggy and Lenny Mecca and Chris and their significant others were camping at Knoebels, drunk as monkeys, and late-night texting me proposed song titles. When I saw this one, I dashed off the lyric in full and fired it back at them….

After hours of 100 proof
It could be cannonballs off the Mecca’s roof
I’ve got no eyes so I can’s see
Just what this woman is doing to do
When Jackie drinks
When Jackie drinks whiskey

They loved it. Especially Jackie, who is Lenny’s longtime girlfriend, and Wiggy’s older sister. And an excellent whiskey drinker I might add. She was now immortal. Or would be if we ever decided to record the song, which we did one drink-fueled night in the studio, sitting in a circle like some punk bluegrass outfit. We did two takes. The first one fell apart. The second didn’t. Or at least didn’t fall apart as badly as the first one. A song that opened with the snap of an open beer can seemed the perfect closer. A good night was had for days, indeed.

In a bit…

—tf