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Friday Full-Length: Circle of Sighs, “Roses Blue”

Posted in Bootleg Theater on February 5th, 2021 by JJ Koczan

This just occurred to me to post, like five minutes ago. I had another post all set up for an album I’ve been listening to all week and then decided last-second to write about the Circle of Sighs track. I’m not trying to get away with anything in terms of self-promotion or something like that — I’m on the song, doing vocals. I think it’s on the Circle of Sighs Bandcamp page, but it’s not like I’m making money off it and even if some came in from that, I’m pretty sure I’d still be well in the hole on recording costs. Doesn’t matter. It was worth it to me.

I hadn’t been in a recording session as someone actually recording in a really long time. Nine years, maybe? And in a real studio even longer. A while ago, on Thee Facebooks, I posted Circle of Sighs’ “Fleshself” single and said something along the lines of “god damn I want to be in this band.” I’d actually talked with the prefer-to-remain-anonymous parties behind Circle of Sighs about collaborating before, but the atmospheric industrial doom of “Fleshself” hit me right where my head’s been at in its combination of harsh, broad-reaching, and heavy sounds.

The band reached out after that and asked if I wanted to do a cover. Immediate impostor syndrome. I don’t belong in a studio. I don’t belong working with a band. I don’t even belong writing for a magazine. I belong on my laptop — and no, I don’t know how to record on my laptop. But I said yes anyway. In 2019, I got on stage with friends in Clamfight and did a guest vocal spot at Saint Vitus Bar. I won’t say it gave me the itch, but it definitely didn’t not give me the itch. I was in bands a long time ago, mostly a group called Maegashira who put out one album and a couple splits and demos that, on the whole, I’m still proud of. If we were making the record today, I’d hold a couple songs back for later release — it ran long — but it was a different era, and beyond that, I stand by that work.

Anyhow, I knew I wanted to cover a woman. Just tired of dudes. Dudes everywhere. Dudes with beards. Dudes who look like me, or dudes who don’t. Dudes dudes dudes, day in and day out. I picked Joni Mitchell, CIRCLE OF SIGHS roses bluewho seemed almost too obvious but I didn’t remember off the top of my head anyone doing in a heavy context recently, and she’s of course an amazing, legendary singer-songwriter, and someone whose folkish structure would translate to a heavy context. “Roses Blue” is about a friend getting into tarot and mysticism, so it fit a kind of cultish vibe as well, which I thought Circle of Sighs might go for. They did.

This was before the holidays, and then after the New Year, I booked time with Mike Moebius at Moonlight Mile in Hoboken, NJ. I’ve known Mike for a long time through the Kings Destroy guys, and he’s someone I trusted and felt comfortable with as much as I was going to feel comfortable. The ideas I was hearing in my head pushed the boundaries of what I’d done before, but on the other hand, it had been 10-plus years since I recorded anything in a studio, so I didn’t know what was going to come out when I opened my mouth. Largely it was off-key and pitchy, but Mike worked with me and made it come together such as it did. By the end of that session I was exhausted but excited, and that’s how it should be.

I’d rewritten the lyrics to “Roses Blue” — which felt a bit like sacrilege, right? That’s Joni Mitchell. It wasn’t just about making lines like “she lays her religion on her friends” from the original more modern. Coming from my mouth, I didn’t want the song to sound like I was criticizing the woman in the story, which would come across like misogyny. Instead, I thought about how in the last 50 years, and really the last 20, the idea of “friend” has changed. I have 5,000 “friends” on Facebook. Most of them I’ve never met. So I thought about friendship in that context, and tried to turn the lyrics around to indict not the lady getting witchy but the sort of pathetic male gaze coming from the other side. Her “friends.” “With trauma there’s no barter/Inside self-pity you swim,” and so on, if you can even understand those lines in how they’re screamed.

This was an experience for me. A good one, I think. When the first session files were sent to Circle of Sighs, they wanted more screams, so I went back in a couple days later and banged that out, easy peasy. That felt good. I think what I’m most proud of in the whole thing is the one falsetto line that made it in. A little bit I regret not doing a version of the entire early verses that way to give Circle of Sighs more to play with in mixing, but you do what you can when you can. I’ll take “of rain and roses blue” and call it a win.

Obviously I wouldn’t post this in any kind of review context — it’s hard enough feigning impartiality about bands I’m a nerd for let alone something I contributed to — so it seemed to me this was the space where I might be able to talk a about making it in a context that’s a little more personal than the average writeup tends to be. If I was wrong about that or you don’t give a crap, that’s fair. Thanks for reading this far if you have.

Circle of Sighs will reportedly have a new album out later this year. I don’t know if this song will be on it or not. And for me, I don’t know if it will lead to anything else or what, but it felt good to help create something like this after so long.

As always, I hope you enjoy.

Thanks for reading and have a great and safe weekend.

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