ALL SYSTEMS GO!

"All Systems Go!" is The Grimm Generation's latest and scariest song to date. It will be available for your trick or treat bag on October 31st by ringing the doorbell at www.thegrimmgeneration.com

In speaking about "All Systems Go!"...

Jason says:

I love October. Its not simply watching the last lush green of September whither to ground (I don’t care for Summer)…nor even the fact that concluding this perfect state of Zen calendaring gets us our only true pagan holiday (I don’t care for Christmas….hmmm…I do sound like a ball of laughs, don’t I?) ….. Nor (I do care for the word 'nor' apparently) is it simply the costuming and the erotic act of masqurade. Its all dat stuff….plus…

October is Love. October in New England is the place to do your spiritual accounting and take stock of what it takes to make you happy. Or if not happy, bearable to others. It’s the season I try on optimism, test drive hope and buy a pumpkin. It’s a season flush with inspiration (the breezes come and blow the bad summer into a thousand back yards to rot away) and full of promise for the first day you don that flannel shirt.

I produce during this season. I create and revise and plan and plot. And now we both do.

If your not one of the three…no four…people to witness it, Carmen and I make up one pretty fine being. Separately, I could give or take us, but together...almost human. And this grows through manic creative hours, long email chains, a suicidal amount of cigarettes and the vision of forming our heaviest thoughts and heartaches into Pop music formats. It reminds me of the Pilgrims and how they had that one cannon to take on the world. They couldn't imagine what was in The New World …so they only hoped a cannon could handle. Our cannon comes with 6 strings, 2 notebooks and two voices. Hope its enough.

Carmen sent me 'All Systems Go' in our usual fashion: it was waiting in my email. The way this works is she sends it, I print it and stick it in my pocket. Every once in a while I will wonder 'what's in my pocket all folded up?'. I open it and say 'Ohhhhh'…and refold it and put it back in my pocket. I do this several times daily. I consider this part of the process but really think maybe I'm just bad at recalling everything I will put in my pocket. Ill show up with a capo at work instead of a phone, stamps instead of picks at a gig. No pocket recall. Its my worst trait (though some could argue).

And I get the song home at long last and grab the guitar and look at it. Certain lines will jump out…others fall off the page completely. Carmen is a fine writer and images and direct thoughts are her game. She will write something that sounds almost emotionally forward. Words that should come with a warning label. I love when she does that. 'All Systems Go' came from a fine bit of writing. But the only one thing hit me and hit me hard 'Rockets! Ignition! All Systems Go! LiftOff! GOGOGOGO!'. How those lines got into a weighty piece about allowing yerself to open to others is a mystery to me, and perhaps to her. But those words came though my head and stopped for a layover.

And what else would you hear? Rockabilly. So with that in my head, and her words in my hand, I started. There was gonna be a gun, I knew that. According to 'The Lost Gospel Of Jason'. That Gospel states 'if your in a bar, and have a girl sing about shooting a gun, someone is gonna 'YeeHaw"…so far proven correct. And the story as it was was about bank robbing (which will be our second career if this whole show biz thing don’t work out). And as I started to pull things apart on the sheet (scratched out words, revised lines, rough approximations of chords), the story came together. So I called down Champagne and we got to work. I come up with a line, she comes up with a line. We work out a melody eventually, this stage is just telling a tale. And as we got deeper into this, the story started walk and talk on its own.

It wasn’t enough to have a bank robber. She had to be…well, a 'she'. And sexy to boot. And it wasn’t enough to be a sexy bank robber, she needed to be dangerous in a way beyond bad intentions and worse addictions. She needed to be Lovecraft-ian in her horror. And 'she' became 'it'.

It gave me opportunity to reflect on what I like about the planet. Which is coffee. And girls. And rockabilly.

In Carmen's words:

Jason and Autumn, yes. He made it clear from the day we met (and probably even before that as we met online and got into this immediate and never flailing, back and forth letter writing tryst about everything and anything under the sun) that the Fall was the time of year that he loved the most. And how August, to him, was a sand-filled swimsuit he couldn’t wait to discard. I, on the other hand, LOVED the summertime. For me it was trips to the beach, backyard barbeques and being barefoot whenever possible.

I couldn’t be persuaded from my favorite season until…the summer of 2010. Serious? I don’t recall a hotter summer…ever. Ass Hot will be the only way I refer to it from this day forth. And perhaps it is because I’m not in an air-conditioned office all day anymore. But man oh, man…this past summer has finally changed my tune. Ah…tunes, yes. That’s what this blog is about, isn’t it? I’ll get to that in a moment. I just want to let all you leaf peeping, sweater wearing, cider drinking Fall-crazed nuts know that, yup…move over. I’m joining y’all.

And maybe Jason is on to something. October is Love. It sure has been the theme in what I’m writing about these days. I feel it in the air, love, love, love!! No red lights…only green. Why, I can hardly contain my excitement! Giddy. That’s me. Go, go, go! And that’s where the original concept of All Systems Go sprang from. After an evening of putting my curlicue thoughts down on paper, I hit the Jason Send button (no I don’t have a designated Send button for Jason, but I should) and went to bed.

And once I hit my imaginary Jason Send button…well, it’s Wonka-inspired, what happens after that. You can hear the machine start up, the wheels turning, steam hissing, whistles and bells of a new confection in progress. And the next day, I got an email: I have something, a chorus. It’s going to be a Rock A Billy song. We need to make some changes. And we got together later that evening. The Grimm Candy factory was open for business! With words and guitar and ideas dropped into our Taffy Pull, we got to work. The result was a song that was fun, dangerous and unexpected, bold and a bit uproarious. And too, a perfect ditty for a beloved pagan holiday.