Blog
Background to Our Songs: 500 Letters to New York
Written by Jimmy
500 Letters from New York by AbubillaMusic
It all started with a box of letters.
My father was a child of the Great Depression. He was raised by his mother, Zella, in Gainesville Texas, aware that his father was alive, but Zella talked of him rarely and made it clear he was not a member of their lives. Dad only met his father late in live and it was clear that Zella did not want him to have a relationship. So he didn’t. my father was her greatest achievement and she was not going to share that credit. Throughout Zella’s life, Dad assumed his father had abandoned Zella and ‘Sonny’ when he was born and that was that. She died in the early 60’s.
On his mother’s death, Dad had to go thru Zella’s things. And there was a box of letters. All from his father to his mother. All of them from the thirties. All of the thirties. At least 15 years of letters; 500 letters from New York. And in all of them, his father was telling Zella of wonderful business deals he was pursuing, any one of which would make enough money to bring the family back together. He was always about to send for her – reaffirming his love and his place in their lives. He was always about to be the father and husband he needed to be. But it was the Great Depression and none of these deals happened. And the letters became more desperate as he moved from a nice hotel, to a bad hotel, to a shared room at the YMCA in a not very nice part of New York.
There was one letter where he said he had ‘made it’ and needed to reunite the family. He urged Zella to meet him in Denver. She took my Dad (aged 7) and waited for her husband at a train station. He came thru, but he wanted money from her to help with a deal he was pursuing in California. No success, no reunion. Just a loan as he travelled across the US. Dad recalled a very long train trip when he was growing up, a long wait in a train station and then an ice cream. He doesn’t remember seeing his Dad.
So that’s the song. A couple examples of the letters and the growing sense of weight that Zella feels. It is important to note that Zella would never have written this song and never have talked about ‘the weight’. Nor would my Dad. They did not feel a burden in all this. They were strong Texas folk and this was just the way it was.
Musically, this song was written on the first day of our Summer 2010 Spanish Jam. The whole band writing together – Andy started with a guide track and with each take we stretched out the ‘weight/wait’ and ‘postman’ lines trying to keep the song thumping with greater and greater tension. Rob’s great bass, Martyn’s stabs and Andy’s harmonica and Mike’s drums build a nice listen tension through the first verse. Lew and Martyn share guitar leads throughout. Love Rob’s bass riff leading to the Chorus. This is one of our favourite Lou vocals. Really suits her voice – her closing ‘so alone’ nails the whole vibe. She refined the melody with each take and deserves a lot of song-writing credit as well. It was pretty mcuh done that morning and we haven’t really touched it sense, other than to add a whole lot of brass for a while. Made it sound too much like a Commitments song and we wisely pulled those back out.
I think it sounds a bit like a Michele Shocked song, and it always important to market Michele Shocked. What I really want is God is a Real Estate Developer, but can’t find it. So here’s My Little Sister:
She’s better known for Anchorage, which is stunning:
Same era as Fast Car:
But I digress.
Jimmy