Annotated Songs: July July!

Blood and guts

JULY, JULY!¹

There is a road that meets the road that goes to my house
And how it green grows there²
And we've got special boots that beat the path to my house
And it's careful, and it's careful when I'm there³

And I say your uncle was a crooked French Canadian
And he was gut-shot running gin⁴⁵
And how his guts were all suspended in his fingers
And how he held 'em
How he held 'em, held 'em in

And the water rolls down the drain
The water rolls down the drain
Oh, what a lonely thing
In a lonely drain⁶

July, July, July
Never seemed so strange
July, July, July
It never seemed so
Never seemed so strange⁷

This is the story of the road that goes to my house
And what ghosts there do remain
And all the troughs that run the length and breadth of my house
And the chickens, how they rattle chicken chains⁸

And we'll remember this when we are old and ancient
Though the specifics might be vague
And I'll say your camisole was a sprightly light magenta
When in fact it was a nappy blueish grey⁹

And the water rolls down the drain
The blood rolls down the drain
Oh, what a lonely thing
In a blood red drain¹⁰

July, July, July
Never seemed so strange
July, July, July
It never seemed so
It never seemed so strange
It never seemed so strange
It never seemed so strange
It never seemed so stra-ay-ay-ay-ay-ay-ay-ange¹¹

1. “July, July!” was written in July of 2001, by my best guess. It’s not dated in my notebook, but the song on the previous page, “Song for Myla Goldberg,” has 6/22/01 written at the top. I wish I dated lyric pages more; I did it a lot when I was younger, but got more and more out of the practice as the years went on. I don’t know what’s stopped me. Maybe it has to do with the fact that putting the day’s date on a song in a notebook gives it too much credence. It becomes a fixed thing, a thing worth noting, and I’m loathe to do that to most songs till they’ve had their full due. Also, it feels a tad self-serious, dating things. Whatever. Anyway, this song was written shortly after “Song For Myla Goldberg,” which was written on June 22nd of 2001. I’d forgotten that “Myla Goldberg” was written earlier than “July, July!” Makes me realize that, at the time, I didn’t feel like “Myla” was good enough for the Castaways and Cutouts sessions. I seem to recall worrying that “July” was a bit too poppy and upbeat — I was wanting to make strange music at the time, being surrounded by a musician peer group who all seemed to be trying out-strange each other. I must’ve lost some of that worry when the sessions for Her Majesty The Decemberists came about. I think “July” passed muster in these early days because, even though it was as upbeat a folk-pop song as you could possibly conjure, it at least featured blood, chicken ghosts, and people with their innards falling out.

2. I have no explanation for this line or where it came from. This is a song about the building that I lived in at the time, the Oak Street Building in SE Portland, but the thing about a road meeting a road that goes there… who knows. If I was pressed, I’d say the bit about “and how it green grows there” is some reference to the fact that one of the tenants had a bonsai tree greenhouse on the roof of the building. I’ve always worried that people would read that line as a reference to smoking weed. For the record, it’s not about smoking weed.

3. This, too. Your guess is good as mine.

4. Here we find harbor in more grounded reference: this was based a distant relative of mine who ran a grocery in Windsor, Canada, and he got tied up in a booze-running operation between the US and Canada during prohibition. It was a scandal to my grandparents, who were chagrined whenever it came up, which it often did when the younger generation gathered. It was a good, salacious story. Something went awry, in the cellar of that grocery in Windsor, and this relative ended up shot in the belly by some nefarious gangster. I don’t know if his guts were falling out and he had to hold them in, but it made sense for the song. Besides, this isn’t about *my* relative who was a crooked French Canadian, it’s about yours.

5. In the original lyrics, posted above, the French Canadian is a “crooked, cold Canadian,” which is not as good. It must’ve been changed on the fly during recording.

6. More scattershot poesy. But we did have a toilet in the kitchen, in this particular warehouse apartment. There was a shared bathroom in the hallway so we called the kitchen toilet “Plan B.” It was also good for food disposal, though probably not great for the plumbing. Ah well. Not like we ever got our deposit back.

7. A few thoughts on this chorus. For one thing, the central motif, the “July, July” bit is a direct borrowing of an Innocence Mission lyric, from their great song “July.” (“July July / The man I love and I…” I imagined it was an homage to that band, whose songwriting accompanied me a lot during my twenties. It also happened that that summer, the summer of ‘01, was when Carson and I were trying to figure out our relationship. We were pretty new sweethearts, having been close friends for three years, and there were some bumps along the way. I think the strange July that this song references was that very July, when Carson and I were falling in and out with each other at a fairly regular pace. We eventually got it figured out.

8. The Oak Street Building is a former poultry slaughterhouse, and there were little holes in the wall here and there where the old slews used to carry the blood out of the building. I imagine many thousands of chickens were murdered in that warehouse, and I wondered about their ghosts. So many chicken ghosts, rattling the chains they forged in life.

9. This song is a portrait of a very particular time in my life, that summer of 2001. It’s about the warehouse where I lived and my own hangups and fascinations at that time. It’s about Carson and I in the first throes of our relationship. This verse is about her, even though she didn’t have a nappy blueish gray camisole. I think those lines were more about the passing of time and the frailty of memory. Here we are, now, growing old and ancient and there are many instances of one or the other of us remembering those spritely magenta things that were in fact much more grayish.

10. There’s that chicken blood again.

11. I copied these lyrics from the internet and then fixed the errors. For lyrics pulled from the internet, they were surprisingly in good shape (no giggle holes here), so thanks to whomever might be responsible for transcribing July, July! to wherever Google sourced the words. I did appreciate that the transcriber went to the effort of writing out all of the “ays” in this last, elongated “strange.” It’s gotten longer over the years; this original version seems so concise.