Paper Moon
What do people think it's about?
""It's a kid singing about the mobile her dad made her when she was little!" -- Phil.
"One part sailor's lament, one part cowboy trail song, 'Paper Moon' tells the classic story of what it is to travel across great distances and face danger for a living. It's the cry of the battle and road weary to a loved one asking that they remember the story's narrator no matter how far from home their destiny takes them." -- Joy.
"Someone leaving home and refusing to be sad about it or let any of the people at home convince them to stay." -- Shawn.
When presented with this question, what does Seanan say it's about?
"There's a great big sky out there, filled with things a lot bigger and better than your own backyard. The only question is whether you're willing to make the trades it'll take to get out there, and whether you'll leave the things you have to leave behind. Not everything that goes is gone forever -- some people leave you to find themselves, and then come straight home again to tell you their adventures. Other people, the ones who go because they don't have a choice, they may never come back to you...but you'll always see their faces reflected in the paper moon, if you look for them.
"This is a song about choosing to go because you don't really have a choice, and telling people not to worry, because you'll be fine. You have everything that's out there, waiting for you."
What is it actually about?
'Paper Moon' is about exactly what I tell people it's about -- leaving because you haven't got a choice, but keeping the option to come home, if that's where the road takes you. It really is a cowboy trail song. It's an attempt to explain the unexplainable: why anyone would choose to leave their safe, comfortable, familiar life for something that's really just a great big gamble.
'Paper Moon' is also the opening theme song to a fictional television program, a Firefly spinoff called Paper Moon, and was written with certain constraints of the TV-theme genre in mind. Which just makes it more fun, from my perspective, but I'm strange sometimes.
Genesis of the song:
I am a great big geek, and I play a lot of roleplaying games. In June of 2006, my friend Joyelle announced her intention to run a Firefly game, using the existing RPG rules, and proceeded to assemble a crew of roustabouts, miscreants, and general n'er-do-wells, as was only right and proper. (I play Elsie Tanner, the ship's engineer -- that's her picture up in the box with the descriptions of the song. She's a little nuts, and likes to hit.) Now, I've written quite a few songs about another RPG setting, Martin's Passage. We were in the process of recording a few of those songs for this album when Paper Moon was getting started, and a friend asked me, half-jokingly, why I'd never written a theme song for MP. I attempted to explain that this was because MP is a fictional series in Joss Whedon's Buffy universe, where the TV shows have no words in their theme songs.
My friend smiled and said, "Firefly had lyrics."
I agreed that this was so, but staunchly insisted that I would not be writing a theme song for Paper Moon. Not for several months, anyway. Then I went back to packing, as my cousins Victor and Lara were flying me to the East Coast that afternoon, for hugs, companionship, and the East Coast Floating Filk Con. As I packed, I started humming.
It was really all downhill from there.
By the time we got to the airport, I had managed to pretty much assemble the first verse of the song as it appears on this album, complete with the soon/moon combination at the end, which I thought was a little twangy, but could be cleaned up as the song went on. If the song went on, since I was still staunchly insisting that I really had no intention of writing it. Ha ha ha. I jotted down the first verse and a half for safe-keeping, trusting that recording them on paper would get them out of my head. It didn't. The next day, standing on my cousins' porch while we packed the car to head for Worchester, I finished the second verse and composed the chorus, and realized to my dismay that soon/moon wasn't going anywhere, anytime soon.
Since I had the bulk of the song, I actually started paying attention to finishing it, which, of course, made things substantially harder, as now I had to pay attention to things like the rhyme scheme and where the stresses went. I managed to tighten up the existing verses and finish the third, declared it good, and, Sunday night, stood up at the Dead Dog to give it a public debut...in a room containing Mike Whitaker, Dave Clement, and Mary Crowell. And I tell you, I have never fallen in love with one of my own songs so fast, because Mike listened for two lines, went 'oh', and came crashing in. And Dave listened to Mike for two lines, went 'ah', and chimed in with this amazing country-style pick. And Mary listened to the guitars for two lines, and went 'ooooh', and suddenly, there was honky-tonk piano, and my heart was breaking.
The reason the song loops at the end? Back to the first verse? Is because I was having so much fun listening to them that I just went back to the beginning without thinking about it, in order to keep that amazing music going. This isn't the same set of instrumentalists -- alas -- but it's an amazing, and totally different, lineup, and I hope you'll feel the same way I did.
Not bad for a song I was actively trying not to write.
Story of the Song.
A lot of the story of the song 'Paper Moon' is wrapped up in writing it:
after all, if it hadn't been for the cracks about me doing theme songs for
the imaginary TV, it wouldn't have come about. That said, there's always
the game itself, which explains a few things.
Firefly is, of course, a fully owned and registered property of Joss Whedon and various production companies, and their trademark is in no way challenged or questioned by l'il ol' me. I am, however, a player of roleplaying games, and the folks who own the property allowed a licensed RPG to be developed, so that people could put together their own crews and tell their own stories. Bless them for common sense, since gamers would've done it anyway, and this way, the folks who own Firefly get to realize a profit on the deal.
When Joyelle started putting together her crew, she had a name for both the chronicle and the ship: the Paper Moon. (At the time, I didn't realize this was also the name of a relatively famous song, and a relatively famous movie. Ooops. Show me not to do my research, huh?) She basically made up a list of archetypes/stereotypes from the Spaghetti Western and Firefly itself, went around to her list of players, and offered us our pick. When she got to me, the options remaining were 'the engineer' and 'the crazy girl'. Being the predictable creature that I am, I said 'both', and combined them into Elsinore 'Trixie' Tanner, a machine empath who wound up at the Academy, in the same program as River Tam, but was sadly a failure, as her own psychic powers have absolutely no impact on humans. Oh, well. Elsie would've been terminated, but managed to escape by convincing the security system it should let her go. Sometimes it's good to be the crazy girl who can talk to the machines.
Now, in many ways, 'Paper Moon' is about every member of our crew: they're all on the run from something, all outlaws who elected to turn and run rather than get themselves locked into cages. They aren't bad people, for the most part; just people who, when forced with a choice between freedom and losing it, chose to be free. But that doesn't mean that they're gone for good. Some stars fall home.
These stars still could.
Arranging the Song.
The very first arrangement of 'Paper Moon' is one that exists now only in my dreams: two guitarists doing unrehearsed arpeggios and runs of chords, while one of the best keyboard players I know runs a one-woman honky-tonk from across the room. If I ever have the opportunity to record it, I will, because dammit, it was amazing.
That said, I knew going into the studio that I couldn't recreate that experience, and so I had to build something both wonderful and new. I started by asking my engineer, Kristoph Klover, if he could cook up a guitar line, tapping Amy McNally for some of her awesome fiddle, and Michelle Dockrey for her ever-reliable, ever amazing vocals. Lucky me, everyone I asked agreed, and I sent around vocal roughs for people to learn from.
I didn't hear Kristoph's guitar part until we walked into the studio to record the fiddle and lead vocal lines. And it blew me entirely out of the water. Here was this ornamented, instrumented series of rises and falls, tiny whorls of music, and we were going to layer it until it gleamed. I have never been so thrilled. My lead vocal was designed to be solid and low, leaving the high ground free for ornamentation.
Now, the thing about Amy is that she almost needs to be tricked into going from 'amazing' to 'made of pure awesome'. Kristoph recorded her twice doing excellent, dependable fiddle parts, then said, 'all right, this time, just get crazy, and maybe we'll use it for a patch or two'.
The fiddle line you'll hear on Stars Fall Home is almost entirely Amy, just getting crazy.
We sent the guitar/vocal/fiddle roughs to Vixy, who responded to the challenge by writing her own wistful, lilting backing vocal line, which rounded things out in a way that's just plain amazing, but left the backyard a little bit empty. Enter Kristoph again, this time on the bass guitar, and Scott Irwin on the drums, filling in the song's foundations until, after a lot of adjusting, effort, and balancing of all the lines -- this is a piece that has a lot going on! -- we wound up with the final version of 'Paper Moon'.
I honestly couldn't be happier.
Trivia About the Song.
A quote from 'Paper Moon' provides the title of the album on which it appears:
That doesn't mean that I'm gone for good;
Some stars fall home, and this one still could.
It was this couplet which actually caused me to commit to writing the song, because after I got that far, I couldn't imagine backing out without finding out the way it was going to end.
Factual Bits and Bobs.
Written on: June 19th, 2006.
Structure: Verse/Verse/Chorus/Verse/Chorus/Verse/Chorus.
Arrangement: Lead vocal, backing vocal, guitar, bass guitar, fiddle,
drums.
Tempo: Moderate/high.
Length: 3:59.