THEA: Okay, this one will start with an admission:

[INHALES DEEPLY] For six months when I was about 21, I played keyboards and sang in an Elvis impersonator’s back up band.

I was young. I needed the money.

(Apologies to the Elvis fans out there…but playing in this particular band was truly one of the weirdest gigs of my entire life; I’m sure most of them are good.)

Many years ago, I was trying to describe this extremely colorful bandleader to a friend of mine, so I did a Google search. I discovered at that time that the bass player who’d been in the band before I was in it had written a book about his experiences playing with the same guy.

Well, obviously I had to talk to him, and I had to read his book.

The author’s name is Frank Siraguso, and the book (which I highly recommend if you are entertained by gig and road stories, which I definitely am) is called “He Don’t Look Like Elvis”. It’s available on Amazon.

I found Frank’s email address, wrote to him right away, and the two of us started to compare notes. This will surprise precisely no one, but our experiences were remarkably similar. We quickly became electronic friends.

Now for the details:

Yes, there was a diner called “EAT”.

Yes, people threw underwear at “Elvis”.

Yes, “Elvis” was cheap.

Yes, the show was actually pretty good if you’re into that sort of thing.

Yes, women were very disappointed when they saw him without makeup. (My close friend Dennis Varo was playing bass in the band when I was in it…we personally witnessed two girls who came looking for his room in the hallway of the Best Western in Butte, who were bewildered and completely let down by his appearance when he came to the door without makeup.)

So this song is only slightly fictionalized. I asked Frank if it was all right with him if we used the title of his book as the title of the song and the hook, and he said it was.

And on a happy personal note: It was at that Best Western in Butte that I met my future bandmates from Seattle, who were playing in another room…one being the great songwriter/musician/vocalist Rob Moitoza, formerly of the legendary Bay Area band The Sons of Champlin. Rob’s resume is far too broad and impressive to recite here (that’s Rob playing bass on the classic Sugarloaf tune “Don’t Call Us, We’ll Call You”) but if you get a chance, look him up too.

Those were the guys that rescued me out of the Elvis show. And now I get to write about it with Chad…who just…ran with all this.

What a life I’ve had. [LAUGHS]

THEA: WARNING: EXPLICIT LYRICS (well, just one word…Chad wanted it and I didn’t object, because this story is pretty horrific).

I’d watched a documentary about a “cold” case in Missouri (it’s not really “cold”, just…nobody’s saying what they know), about a man who terrorized a small town and eventually became the victim of vigilante justice when the legal system repeatedly failed to deal with him. Chad was already aware of the story (Chad is typically aware of everything before I am) and we agreed it would make a good story to tell with a rock backdrop.

Chad’s a bit of a metal head so he cooked up this Pantera reminiscent Suno recipe, which I love. We made one direction change—we just realized as we were working that it wasn’t quite graphic enough. So I came up with “a bloody windshield and an empty street”, and he came up with “a monster bleeding out in the driver’s seat”.

Very interesting documentary, by the way.

CHAD: This one is, I think, pretty self-explanatory. I - like many people - had a lot of adversity growing up, and at the time I saw a pretty dark future ahead of me.

Eventually, though, after years of being constantly on the move and never really settling down into a “normal” life, I was able to finally see a future that wasn’t dark.

This song was written in response to having that realization many years ago. I couldn’t have written a song like this when I was younger, but older me was able to do so in hindsight.

I know Thea definately made some improvements in this, as always.

Anything you’d like to add, Thea?

THEA: I don’t think so.

CHAD: This one started out as a simple idea - a song about cellar holes. You can imagine how hard Thea laughed when she heard that. “You can’t write a song called ‘Cellar Holes’.”

Challenge accepted.

In New Hampshire, cellar holes are basically stone-lined holes in the ground that used to be, well, cellars for homes. That’s what I knew them as, and that’s what they are called. But I suppose she was right - a song called ‘Cellar Holes’ would be weird.

As a kid, and a teenager, I would stumble across them every so often on the mountain. This song is pretty descriptive of a time I found one: stone walls that marked property boundaries, the cellar hole itself still there with trees growing in it, and an old charcoal kiln that was still somewhat recognizable.

But what really stayed with me was the small family cemetery. After 100 - maybe even 200 - or more years, the names were worn away, so there would never be a way to know who had made a a life there. I remember walking away having a lot of thoughts about this that were not the usual things a 15-year old boy would think about.

So, Stones On The Mountain. Everything was about the stones - the stone walls, the kiln, the cellar, and especially the headstones.

Thoughts, Thea?

THEA: You can’t write a song called “Cellar Holes”.

CHAD: Yes I can.

THEA: Well you didn’t, did you?

CHAD: A Man from Nantucket. That’s what this started as - me trying to be funny. It morphed though, thanks to Thea. I decided that if I couldn’t do a song about a man from Nantucket without it being a joke, maybe it needed to be different.

I tried a bunch of things, but nothing really clicked. Just the story of a man going to sea, having some success, and then something that may prevent him - and the other men - from getting home. Nothing was really working until Thea said something along the lines of “You mention the woman in the beginning, but you don’t ever mention her again.”

So, the story really ended up being like cut scenes in a movie - the verses focus on him and what he is dealing with, and the choruses deal with her and what she sees as she waits. This really was thanks to Thea’s intervention.

As an aside, I grew up in New England and those architectural additions on old homes called a “Widow’s Walk” were always fascinating to me. Whether they truly were ever used as described in this song is still a matter of debate. That people think they were, though, is good enough.

Anything you’d like to add to this, Thea?

THEA: Yeah, even after the new direction for this was decided, using the name “Nantucket” only sounded like a good idea when you added “Harbor” to it. When you were still talking about the man (from Nantucket) [LAUGHING] I just knew it had to go.

There’s just no serious way to do it.

I’m sure I ruined your fun, as I often do. [LAUGHS]

(This is why I’m a 50/50 partner here, even though I typically do about 25% of the work.)

Also: New England, where Chad grew up, seems to have no shortage of weird stuff. Which explains a lot. [LAUGHS]