Take Advantage Of Me

What do people think it's about?

"It reminds me of the Floating Market, if the Floating Market went completely wrong and raised its prices...TO YOUR SOUL." -- Mars.

"Samhain. The one night of the year when the rules are broken, when Faerieland visits us all. Barriers between life and death, real and fantasy, good and bad, sane and mad, they all fall down. Are you going to revel in that? Are you going to live it, or just let the chance pass you by?." -- Shawn.

"A wicked mix of fairy tales from many lands, meeting in a caberet to tempt one another with leaving their stories and having flings. Come and join us?" -- Jessica.

"It's about a cafe that isn't there. Or maybe it is." -- Vixy.

"It's a lure to escape your story. Because sometimes everyone wants to get out." -- Rebecca.

When presented with this question, what does Seanan say it's about?

"On a general level, this is a song about temptation -- a song about making choices. Do you want to be saved from your story, or do you want to try dealing with your life as it stands? This is a limnal place, and it won't exist tomorrow. Make your choices now, and be prepared to live with them, whatever they may happen to be.

"On a much more specific level, this is a Babylon Wood song, as well as being a song about the mockingbirds that harass me on the way to work. I never claimed to be entirely linear."

What is it actually about?

Never buy a drink in a bar where the waitress has three tails, the torch singer has feathers, and the band accessorizes with mockingbirds. It's just not a good idea. Also, if it wasn't there when the sun went down, common sense says that it probably won't be there in the morning.

Genesis of the song.

Every song starts somewhere. 'Take Advantage of Me' started with an Iron Poet request containing the words 'sakura', 'mockingbird', and 'starlight'. Good words, with nothing immediately obvious connecting them. I poked them with a stick for a little while, to see if they would poke back, and found nothing that really jumped out and said 'hello, play with me'. That happens sometimes, and is part of why there's no actual time limit on Iron Poet. (That, and I enjoy my vague pretenses of sanity.) The words were good, but there just didn't seem to be a poem there. So that was item one.

There are mockingbirds living in my neighborhood, where they practice the ancient mockingbird art of annoying the holy crap out of every human being in earshot. A lot of mockingbirds. They imitate a wide variety of noises, including alarm clocks, ring tones, and, thanks to my tendency to sing while I walk, the first eleven notes of Talis Kimberley's 'Uffington Hill'. Over and over and over and, oh, yes, over and over again. Without end. And, of course, never in anything resembling unison. There's a reason that my neighbors hate me, and that reason probably has something to do with my providing sheet music for the mockingbirds.

I started referring to the avian collective as 'the mockingbird choir', since the things I wanted to call them were both anti-social and profane. The more I complained about them, the more obvious it became that I would need to fit them into a song, if only to get them out of my head. I just didn't have a song to put them in. That was item two.

Sometimes I know someone 'lives' in the Babylon Wood without knowing exactly who -- or what -- they are when they're there. The Wood is like that. Someone made a comment about 'Earthquake Weather', saying that the Fox of the Flowers was clearly meant to represent Vixy. The Fox of the Flowers isn't Vixy; the Fox of the Flowers is Talis, and she's too busy with that to go around being Vixy at the same time. This did, however, make me stop and question whether or not Vixy was in the Wood. Of course she was. As soon as I wondered, I knew. The Wood is like that, too. Of course, I had absolutely no idea who or what she was, or how long she'd been there, or anything else about her. She couldn't be a fox. She had to be something vulpine. The brain goes whrrrrrrr. What's vulpine, but isn't actually a fox? Not a clue.

So now I had three words that didn't connect to anything; I had a bunch of really irritating birds that absolutely refused to shut up; and I had a friend of mine taking up residence in the Babylon Wood, with no real idea what she was doing there. Or why, or to who.

This was vexing. And because this was vexing, I stopped thinking about it.

My lunch hours at the time were generally spent a) walking to the Sony Metreon, b) playing Dance Dance Revolution in the Metreon arcade, and c) walking back to my office. (The Metreon arcade has sadly since closed, leaving me at lunch hour loose ends.) Wherever the word 'walking' is used, assume the phrase 'and singing' is also there. I walk, I sing. Sometimes I sing songs. Sometimes I sing random noises, words, or phrases. Whatever. And one day, as I was walking back to work after my lunchtime DDR session, I opened my mouth, and sang:

The kitsune girl with the sakura smile.

Huh. Well, that's one of my words -- sakura -- and since that's the Japanese word for 'cherry blossom', and kitsune are Japanese fox-spirits, the line fit together really well, at least from my perspective. And I liked the image. It implied this sort of blossoming smile that didn't really tell you everything right up-front. Something secret and coy and beguiling. Hmm. I considered the line for a bit, and then tried for a next line, with:

She winks as she pours out the tea.

Okay, now I had two of my words, a tune that made me happy, an interesting image, and a fox-type girl that wasn't actually a fox, but looked like she stood an excellent shot at being Vixy. I started to consider that maybe I couldn't find a poem in those words because they weren't supposed to be a poem at all: it was supposed to be a song. I decided to follow the tune, to see where it would wind up, and got:

And the mockingbird choir performs in vaudeville style,
'Won't you take advantage of me?'

Oooo. This pleased me so much that I repeated it about fifteen times (feeling a bit like a mockingbird myself), until I was sure things were fixed in my head. (Sometimes this works, and sometimes it doesn't. When it doesn't work, I usually don't remember that the song existed to be forgotten, so that works out pretty much okay.) And then I went back to the office, and hammered through the rest of the piece on Post-It notes and scraps of paper. I didn't know where it was going until it got there -- that's usually how it works with the Babylon Wood songs, which are sort of evil, in their own way -- but I still pretty much wrote it without breaks. And then?

Song.

Story of the Song.

The Shadowplay Saloon is a part of the Starlight Carnival, which travels around the Babylon Wood pretty much at random. It's only ever there at night, and only on the nights when the Princess of Storms has allowed the sky to clear enough for at least three stars to be visible. There are a lot of stories there, because the various parts of the Carnival all keep pretty strictly to themselves. The Saloon seems like a very nice place, from the outside. It's attractive and interesting, and there's always music and light and cute barmaids ready to serve you immensely alcholic drinks that you probably shouldn't be drinking. Really, it looks like a lot of fun. Of course, it's actually a pitcher-plant that acts as a recruitment point for the Carnival: you go in looking for a good time, and you wind up either joining the Carnival or drinking yourself to death in the burnt-out husk that serves as the Saloon's daylight side.

I never said the Babylon Wood was nice.

So here's the Winter King -- also known as 'Harald', when he bothers to have a name beyond 'the Winter King' or 'the King of Winter' -- and he's sort of having a rough patch with his girlfriend/wife/ex-wife/sworn enemy, the Summer Queen, aka 'Melanie'. Yes, sometimes these people have really surreal names, given their iconic positions in the Wood. Since he's in a bad mental place, he's perfectly primed to find the Starlight Carnival, which is much more likely to appear to people who are at emotional low points. That's because it's sneaky and kinda malicious, in its own way. Harald heads into the Carnival, looking for something relaxing. He finds the Saloon. Yay, alcohol!

There are two opposing forces in the Saloon: the kitsune barmaid, who will do her very best to make sure you get the hell out of there before you cease to have a choice, and the rose owl, who sings there largely because she likes the way the place entraps people. Yes, the rose owl is kinda evil sometimes. The kitsune girl will work to make sure people stay off the hard stuff (hence the serving of tea), and actually make decisions, rather than just being lulled into the quiet of the Saloon and allowing it to hold them forever. It's possible to visit and not get trapped -- the fairy tale girls are there fairly often, on weekends when they have nothing better to do with their time -- but not if you're emotionally vulnerable when you're there.

So the kitsune girl is saying 'dude, make a choice', and the rose owl is singing, and one of them always wins.

Sadly, it's often the wrong one.

Arranging the Song.

'Take Advantage of Me' is, at its absolute most basic, a torch song. It smokes, it slinks, it sits down at your table without invitation and it steals your drink. When trying to come up with an arrangement, I could envision nothing more appropriate than a jazzy piano with some supporting guitar, save, perhaps, for singing the song while wearing something sparkly and draping myself over the aforementioned piano. While the dress and draping remain a fond dream, the piano actually seemed to be something that I could accomplish. After all, we live in a world of wonders, and those wonders include the power to bounce sound files across oceans. I wrote to the fabulous Mich Sampson, a dear friend and wonderful pianist, and asked her if she would be willing to provide a piano line. To my delight, she agreed. Step one, accomplished.

Of course, before she could record a piano line, we had to provide her with something to work against -- the piano was going to be our primary instrument (as in, we were building the arrangement around it, rather than layering it onto the arrangement as things went along), but the piano was in a different country. The piano couldn't come to the studio to listen to me sing and work itself out. And the only way to be absolutely sure that my vocals were in the right tempo was to record them with a backing track. What to do, what to do...

Oh, Paaaaaaaaaaaa-aul...

Paul Kwinn has been a bedrock of support all through the process of putting Stars Fall Home together. When help was needed, if at all possible, he was there. And so, when I contacted him to go 'um, we need to work out a guitar part for 'Take Advantage of Me' so that we can send it to England', he was totally game for the experience. As is often the case with our initial arrangements, I packed myself off to his house, we -- and by 'we', I mean 'he', with commentary from the peanut gallery -- worked out the chords, and we were off to Kristoph's, with the expectation that we would record voice and guitar, send them to England, and see what happened.

We recorded voice and guitar. We sent them off to England. We waited a while, since recording takes time, and once Mich was able to get herself into the right position, well...we saw what happened.

I'd always envisioned 'Take Advantage of Me' as smoky, sort of free-form jazz, but what Mich delivered absolutely elevated it, using the guitar as a backboard from which almost anything could happen. The first time I listened to it, it brought tears to my eyes, because it was so perfectly everything I hadn't been able to articulate wanting. Now, I'd been waiting to discuss further arrangement with Kristoph until we had the piano line; with it firmly in hand, it was time to see what could be done. Vixy's contribution had always been a part of the plan, but the further build-up of the song -- Kristoph's bass, Scott's drums -- were almost entirely suggested by where 'Stoph saw the song as going.

The final piece, however, also came from England: that smoking-hot electric guitar track you hear all through the song, but most especially during the instrumental break? That would be the fabulous Mike Whitaker, who added his layer after most everything else had been put down, and magically pulled it all together.

Won't you take advantage of me?

Trivia About the Song.

'Take Advantage of Me' was the last song on the album to be formally named -- it kept switching between 'Take Advantage of Me' and just plain 'Take Advantage' right up until we had to do the final typesetting. I still fret about this on occasion.

Unlike most Iron Poet pieces which become songs, 'Take Advantage of Me' didn't change noticeably between incarnations.

'Take Advantage of Me' marks the first appearance of the rose-owl on Stars Fall Home. She's mentioned on Pretty Little Dead Girl, in the song 'I Am'. 'Take Advantage of Me' is the second Babylon Wood song on the album.

Factual Bits and Bobs.

Written on: June 28th, 2006.
Structure: Verse (in two parts)/Chorus/Repeat/Coda.
Arrangement: Lead vocal, backing vocal, keyboards, acoustic guitar, bass guitar, drums, electric guitar.
Tempo: Torch song standard.
Length: 4:20.