Trumpeting Survival
Throughout 2011, I hosted an open mic at Copper River Coffee and Tea in Peoria, IL. I had played a few shows there, had gotten to know several of the employees, and was invited to host their newly-forming open mic every Monday night from 5-8pm. It might have been because of my being a familiar face around those parts, it might have been because they thought I was good, but most likely —and let this be a lesson to any aspiring musician— it was because I had my own sound system.
When I stop and think about it, Copper River was kind of where my whole musical enterprise sprouted, the core at the center of my live musical universe. I performed there regularly, hosted the open mic, and met employees who eventually started and/or worked at other coffee shops where I would also eventually play/host shows. But most importantly, it was where I met Collin, who, together with my friend Shaina and I, founded our folk band, Something with Trees. Oh, and Shaina met her partner there too. I hope all those involved in that place know this: It mattered.
I also met my friend, Patrick —an excellent songwriter who you can enjoy here. For all the musicians I met in that space, Patrick has been the one with most enduring presence in my life. I have always felt him to be some type of musical kindred spirit, and so I have always been drawn to him and his songwriting sensibilities. He’s someone I root for, and don’t devolve into jealousy over when he produces something great, something rare when standing toe-to-toe with peers who you can’t help but feel in competition with.
An underrated aspect of open mics with longstanding members is that you get to be present as those musicians bring newly penned songs to the laboratory that is an open stage. You hear songs that are still in development, you talk to each other about ideas surrounding those songs, and you get to watch, in real time, as another musician figures out their own songs.
At some point during the open mic’s life, Patrick was working on a song called “The Sound of the Whistle,” or something to that effect. It was a song about the whistle a commander would blow just prior to a charge out of the trenches during World War I. I don’t know if he ever recorded it, but the idea of that inanimate object driving the destinies of so many soldiers —many of whom would almost certainly die emerging from the trenches— was powerful. More powerful was what it must have felt like to hear that whistle, and what you knew it probably meant for you, the very heart of what Patrick’s song was getting at.
Several years later, I wrote “Call of the Trumpet.” It seems to me that I mostly stole it all from Patrick, except I evidently just changed the war: World War I becomes Civil War; whistles become trumpets. Even the “meadows” language feels a bit more, I don’t know, pastoral —a word rarely used to describe trench warfare. If you like this song, you can definitely thank Patrick for its existence.
The problem that “Call of the Trumpet” faced was that it appeared during a wasteland of my songwriting (2015-16). A working version appeared in late Spring 2015, no doubt destined for the next Metropolitan Guide record. But that record, which ended up being The Grand Revolution of Lakeside, wasn’t to be for almost another two years. “Call of the Trumpet” had nowhere to go. By the time I would reach the next full recording window, the song would feel a step child to its more-recent brethren. And even now, I’m glad it’s not on Lakeside; it just didn’t have a home there.
What saved it was a short lived time where my friend Andrew and I threw around the idea of playing together, and potentially forming a band. We both had a love of the Decemberists, so recording songs about Civil War bayonet charges seemed pretty apropos. I mean, they kind of have a song about that.
So, we recorded it straight away. He brought his stand-up bass, his accordion, and his patience to figure out his parts on the fly. I think we recorded the song the second time we got together. I added in a banjo behind the guitar as Andrew injected his bass and accordion to complete the Civil War ensemble.
For all its haste, I think it came out quite good. It’s by far the best my crappy banjo (playing) has ever sounded on a recording, the song has a real sense of setting, and the pulsing bass feels like a literal heartbeat. I have had way more rehearsed songs come out way worse. We also recorded another song with a similar amount of lacking rehearsal. It had the bones, but didn’t come out nearly as tight. Per usual, the music gods are a fickle, confusing bunch.
The finished recording sat quietly on my laptop for about four years. “Call of the Trumpet,” much like the soldiers within it, stood on the precipice of destruction on an almost daily basis. An ill-timed hard drive crash, or a particularly pointed day of a Brian Curation Apocalypse Urge, could have obliterated it from the face of the Earth. But like every fortunate soldier in a raging battlefield, it survived somehow, and found itself a home on Alternate Histories Vol. I in 2020.