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| "[A]s far I'm concerned, the songs are almost completely lyric driven." |
| -Dan Messe, Crud Magazine, 13 March 2002 |
| This meanings section is a collection of quotes from band members about the meanings behind their song lyrics, album titles, and band name. Songs can and do mean different things to different people, but I think it's interesting to know the inspiration behind songs. Meanings for the cover songs aren't about song content so much as what spurred the band to record them. |
| This is the page for No Word From Tom songs. Click Meanings on the left menu for the main page. |
| Click on a title to jump to its meaning. Click here for No Word From Tom lyrics. |
| No Word From Tom |
| Dan: "Tom is a friend of ours who sort of is a patron saint who's inspired us musically in a lot of ways, and he literally fell off the face of the Earth. We don't know where he is. He's just always been this sort of...constantly giving us music that he loves. He's sort of been one of the people we always play things to early. He's just been a great friend to the band. We were sort of trying to track him down, and we realized he was just gone." Sally: "But no, we're not worried." Dan: "He falls off the Earth a lot." |
| [Dan Messe and Sally Ellyson, WFPK, 15 February 2006] |
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| On the album cover, the black and white picture hanging on the wall is from A Rake's Progress, a series of etchings made by William Hogarth in 1735. Igor Stravinsky's mid-20th Century opera The Rake's Progress is loosely based on that art series. The wall image etching is Plate #4, the one that seems to be closest in the storyline to the opera's song "No Word From Tom." In that aria, Tom's abandoned paramour Anne (Sarah in the etching) sings how she hasn't heard from Tom after he took a trip to London so she's going after him. In the etching she's just found him. |
| All That I'm Good For |
| While this song can sound like it's about a person, it's actually about a dog. |
| [Mentioned (perhaps jokingly, though the lyrics do make a little more sense with the dog interpretation) when the band performed in Newcastle, England in October 2002] |
| All The Pretty Horses |
| "We're blessed in Hem to have taken on a particularly lovely childhood songbook in the form of Sally; the songs that were sung to her by her mom and that she’s brought to the band are truly some of the most strange and lovely lullabies I’ve ever heard: 'Lord, Blow the Moon out Please,' 'All the Pretty Horses,' 'The Golden Day is Dying,' 'Slumber Boat.' The titles alone are magical, but they’re most striking when you hear them coming from Sally's voice, because (I would claim) you can hear the grain of that childhood connection. The songs are totally a part of who Sally is as a singer..." |
| [Steve Curtis, MySpace Blog, 14 September 2005] |
| Betting On Trains |
| Dan used to be a lifeguard on beautiful Lake Lansing (in Lansing, Michigan). There were train tracks nearby and as his mind wandered he convinced himself that he could tell from the whistle blow in the distance whether an oncoming train was a freight train or passenger train. One day he bet himself 20 dollars they an approaching train was a freight train. He was right. Afterward, he came down from the lifeguard platform and found twenty dollars. |
| [Dan Messe on April 22, 2005 at The Church House in Haddam, CT, as summarized by Fuzzyman (via Hem's Forum)] |
| Cincinnati Traveler |
| "[F]or Eveningland, we know we wanted that huge, peaceful, cinematic world that the instrumental 'Eveningland' sort of defines. But we also want to show some of the corners of the world still exist as like the more Rabbit Songs 'Cincinnati Traveler,' which is really like a Civil War or Appalachian sort of song." |
| [Dan Messe, All About Hem Interview, May 6, 2005] |
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| Cincinnati was the name of Ulysses S. Grant's horse and Traveler was the name of Robert E. Lee's horse, and Dan thought to put those two words together for a song title. When he didn't write music or lyrics for the song, he offered the title to Steve who'd written this song that has a very Civil War era melody. (Later in 2005 this song did get lyrics and was recorded for the album No Word From Tom.) |
| [Steve Curtis, Gary Maurer, and Dan Messe, All About Hem Interview, May 6, 2005] |
| The City And The Traveler |
| "I think I got the lyric basically right today [for "Cincinnati Traveler"], but something else happened while I was singing it back to myself in the park: I heard another, entirely different song inside that song - this one called 'The City and the Traveler'. I've always been fascinated by the way in folk music, versions of songs change from place to place and over time. 'Lord Randall' becomes 'John Randall' as it's mis-heard and mis-remembered, and before long it's a new song altogether." |
| [Dan Messe, MySpace Blog, 9 August 2005] |
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| "We've always been interested in how folk songs evolve over time and across distances through mis-hearing lyrics and mis-remembering melodies. Here is a mis-hearing of our song Cincinnati Traveler." |
| [Description accompanying this song when it was available for download at Hem's official site starting in January 2006.] |
| Eveningland (The Song) |
| "Our songs are almost always built around an image or a scene, a set piece. When I'm writing a song I can picture it in my head, and I wanted that place, Eveningland, fleshed out. I could picture it, could absolutely see this land of shadows and water, and so I just wanted a moment on the album where Eveningland is fleshed out musically." |
| [Dan Messe, The Bob Edwards Show, 10 February 2005. Hear the great, hour-long, XM Radio interview here.] |
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| This instrumental song helps define one of the album's themes by being/creating a huge, cinematic world. |
| [Steve Curtis and Dan Messe, All About Hem Interview, May 6, 2005] |
| The Golden Day Is Dying |
| "One of the songs we recorded for our next covers etc. album was a song my parents used to sing me to sleep with; it's called 'The Golden Day is Dying.' Steve fell in love with this song and created a very dreamy and ethereal guitar part and harmony that ups the magic of the song substantially." |
| [Sally Ellyson, MySpace Blog, 15 September 2005] |
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| "We're blessed in Hem to have taken on a particularly lovely childhood songbook in the form of Sally; the songs that were sung to her by her mom and that she's brought to the band are truly some of the most strange and lovely lullabies I've ever heard: 'Lord, Blow the Moon out Please,' 'All the Pretty Horses,' 'The Golden Day is Dying,' 'Slumber Boat.' The titles alone are magical, but they’re most striking when you hear them coming from Sally's voice, because (I would claim) you can hear the grain of that childhood connection. The songs are totally a part of who Sally is as a singer..." |
| [Steve Curtis, MySpace Blog, 14 September 2005] |
| Idle |
| Sally says something along the lines of "I think of this song as being about being dirty, doing something naughty in a park," but it's unclear whether Sally laughing at Dan's very quiet response means that he confirmed or denied her intro to the song. |
| [An exchange between Sally Ellyson and Dan Messe at Hem's February 2, 2005 show in West Hollywood, CA] |
| Lazy Eye |
| "I think it is the same tendency in us that makes it difficult to let go of things in our own lives (whether it be a relationship or a dream or whatever) that keeps us always looking backwards in all things. We definitely have a 'lazy eye' when it comes to music." |
| [Gary Maurer, Crud Magazine, 13 March 2002] |
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| Gary Maurer wrote the song about/for his mother. |
| [Mentioned when the band performed and dedicated this song to her in Columbus, Ohio in July 2003.]
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| When the band first got together, Dan had recently been dumped by a seamstress and thought that a song named "Hem" would be an appropriate ending for that relationship. The name of the song changed to "Lazy Eye" but the name Hem lived on for the band. | |
| [Dan Messe on June 12, 2006 at a show at the Paradise in Boston, MA]
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| Oh No |
| "The production/arrangement on this song was inspired by Bobbie Gentry's Ode to Billy Joe." |
| [No Word From Tom liner notes] |
| The Present |
| "One of the tracks that eventually got cut from Eveningland was also from this old song-cycle [called Burying Songs that Dan wrote while in college] called The Present. It's a quiet, story-song – three chords, no chorus to speak of, almost hypnotic in its repetitions. Gary, who has always had a soft spot for traditional folk ballads, fell in love with it when he heard me playing it one day on the piano. He was convinced that if we could find a way to sonically incorporate The Present into the world of Eveningland, it would make a fine album track. The basic tracks were recorded in just one inspired take using guitar, bass and drums; Mark Brotter's drum take, in particular, was just beautiful, somehow maintaining the hypnotic pace of the song while building in intensity with every verse. It all went to hell, though, when we got to Bratislava [to work with the Slovak Radio National Orchestra]. With all the technical problems we had over there (see every Hem interview/article for the past two years), we never really had time to work out the arrangement, and when we finally played through the song with the orchestra, it was clear that it needed a lot of work. So, much to Gary's (and Mark's) chagrin, The Present would remain unfinished." |
| [Dan Messe, MySpace Blog, 27 August 2005] |
| Radiation Vibe |
| Hem's guitar and mandolin player Gary Maurer worked in the studio on the original version of this song recorded by the band Fountains of Wayne. Also, Hem has worked for years at Stratosphere Sound, co-owned by one of the song's writers, Adam Schlesinger. |
| ["No Word From Tom" liner notes] |
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| "Fountains Of Wayne, they're friends of ours in New York, and Gary worked on the first two Fountains records. And so we just thought it'd be great to do a song that they do, and 'Radiation Vibe' seemed like a stretch, so we thought we'd give it a try." |
| [Dan Messe, The Drop Online, February 2006] |
| Rainy Night In Georgia |
| "I felt remiss in my discussion of Place Names vis-à-vis great arrangements [in the previous blog entry], seeing as I forgot to mention one of my favorite examples of this phenomenon: A Rainy Night in Georgia as recorded by Brook Benton. This remarkable track manages to be both lush and spare at the same time; instruments appear and pass away like the 'taxi-cabs and busses' referenced in the lyric. Each instrument seems to exist in a world of its own, taking little or no notice of the other sad sounds around it, and the overall effect is one of palpable loneliness, which suits the song's theme just fine. And yet there is also this uncanny sense of comfort here; the entire song is surrounded by this protective amniotic wash of reverb, and nourished by Brook Benton's low umbilical growl." |
| [Dan Messe, MySpace Blog, 14 August 2005] |
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| "Brook Benton's version of this song has been a consistent source of inspiration for us over the years." |
| ["No Word From Tom" liner notes] |
| [Dan Messe, MySpace Blog, 14 August 2005] |
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| "'Rainy Night In Georgia' is a song that has been a touchstone of our sound forever, since we were a band, and so it was just always a song we wanted to do." |
| [Dan Messe, The Drop Online, February 2006] |
| So. Central Rain |
| "[T]he first R.E.M. song I ever heard, and still my favorite one after all these years." |
| [Dan Messe, MySpace Blog, 14 August 2005] |
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| Gary: "We were mixing a bunch of these songs [on No Word From Tom] and Michael Stipe was actually in the same studio working on this song with James Iha, who is another friend of ours. We said, 'Hey, we've never done a R.E.M. song, so what should we do?'" Steve: "'South Central Rain' I think was even a fan suggestion at one point too. Somebody got on our forum and said, 'I would love to hear Hem do that song,' so the idea definitely landed with us there." [Nitpick correction by Christina: It was actually at Hem's blog where somebody mentioned this song.] |
| [Gary Maurer and Steve Curtis, The Drop Online, February 2006] |
| Tennessee Waltz |
| "We started playing [Tennessee Waltz], when we were touring with Beth Orton a couple years ago, just for the fun of it. We were just hanging out backstage and we thought, 'That song is so sad it ought to be a Hem song.' So we added it to our repertoire." |
| [Sally Ellyson, introducing this song in North Adams, MA on 6 August 2005. The band's said similar things at many live shows.] |
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