Good Guys with Guns

I wrote my first song about gun violence in 2012.

On December 14, 2012 I was spending the day at the Flynn Theater watching my girls, who were then 7 and 4, rehearse for the annual Nutcracker Performance. It was dress rehearsal and it was loud, chaotic, and joyful, and every once in a while I had to step away and cry because the news of the day was too awful to comprehend. The contrast between so many young kids in sparkly outfits dancing on Burlington’s biggest stage, and so many young kids dead in Connecticut was so sickening and disorienting. It was one of those moments where I can’t believe anyone is able to do anything, myself included. How is it possible to be rehearsing for a ballet when it feels like the world has changed so indelibly?

I thought that surely now was the time for a meaningful discussion about our unfettered access to guns in America, but I was deeply disappointed. The suggestions that we add more armed guards to schools or give all the teachers firearms were put forth instead. We didn’t reduce access to guns. We didn’t increase the amount of money spent on mental health services. We just make our kids practice active shooter drills.

I wrote a song called “Babies to War.”

We don’t sent our babies to war, by letting them walk out the door,
And some things make no sense no more…

…So tell me now if it’s true that you still believe
That the cure for sickness you see is more of this disease…

Babies to War, Milton Busker 2016

As is my modus operandi, I think I softened the language a bit too much; so much so that when it was reviewed in Seven Days back in 2016, the writer described it as “…a cautionary tale of growing up too fast and facing the cruel world before you’re ready…”. It’s not about that. It’s about kids being slaughtered in their classrooms, and I failed to make it explicit.

I tried not to make the same mistake after the Stoneman Douglas High School Shooting. As sad and hopeless as Sandy Hook made me feel, Stoneman Douglas made me angry. So many kids’ lives lost because the people who could do something about it are beholden to companies that make ridiculous amounts of money convincing people that their freedom to own as many guns as they can is more important than the social contract to keep citizens safe – the social contract to keep OUR KIDS safe!

“Good Guys with Guns” is my response to the massive numbers of people who don’t see the disconnect between saying they follow the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, and using deadly force to protect their personal belongings. Who think that any barrier, minor or not, to owning a gun is tantamount to tyranny. Who believe that if they were in an active shooter situation, they would have the presence of mind to go full John McClane and kill all the bad guys without any collateral damage.

The words came pretty quickly. The music was originally much angrier – I imagined a lot of distorted guitars and a bit more shouting than what we ended up with. Thankfully The Grim Work heard the early versions and decided that it needed to be more from the Bill Withers school of social commentary than the Rage Against the Machine school of social commentary (which honestly I could never pull off). The anger is still there, but it goes down a little easier. We were even able to add some bongos to the recording (from the always game Dave Simpson, who doesn’t play bongos, but we made him do it anyway). It also includes the funkiest mandolin solo ever courtesy of Jom Hammack. Yes, you heard that right. The FUNKIEST MANDOLIN SOLO EVER! I will accept no argument otherwise.

As I said, this isn’t the first song I’ve written that talks about gun violence. But I do keep hoping it will be the last. I woke up this morning to news of a mass shooting in Colorado Springs, at a nightclub for LGBTQ+ patrons. Reports this afternoon indicate over 20 people injured and 5 dead. I’m so heartsick for these people. And I’m so sick of it still happening. Was this the worst shooting this year? Fuck no, that would probably be the Uvalde massacre. Was it the worst shooting this month? Maybe, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t. How messed up is that?

Good guys with guns indeed…

If we’re made of stars…

In 2017 I was spending a good deal of time at the McLure Miller Respite House in Colchester, VT, trying to fit in as many moments as I could with my Dad before the cancer took him. He slept a lot and I scrolled a lot. I’m not seeing them as much nowadays, but at the time Facebook and Instagram were lousy with motivational memes that encouraged you to live for today, seize the moment, get off your ass, and make your life better.

From a logical perspective, I don’t have anything against those types of memes or the folks who share them, but when you’re going through some shit, those messages can quickly shift from an aspirational goal to an attack. The positivity can be downright oppressive. What if I don’t want to hope for the best right now? What if I don’t feel like gettin’ up and gettin’ at ’em?

Or worse, what if I’m not feeling much of anything at all? That’s where I was living at that time. I’ve always been a little bit sad (see Blue, Bucket of) but I’ve thankfully never had that deep kind of sadness that keeps you in bed all day. I’ve always been able to get up and do what I have to do. And I was doing just that, but I was also finding that I wasn’t really feeling anything about it. Everything was just kind of happening at me.

That’s when I saw Carl Sagan’s famous declaration that we are star stuff. I’m sure you’ve all seen it/heard it at one point in your life, but to paraphrase, all of the atoms/matter/particles/etc that are in the Universe right now, were once part of the singularity from whence The Big Bang came from, which means that the same ‘stuff’ that created stars and galaxies and planets is also the same ‘stuff’ that created you. At various points in my life I’ve found that both profound and moving, but right then I was just angry. If life is so fucking great, why is my Dad dying? Why did my father-in-law die years before then? Why was Donald-mother-fucking-Trump president? If everything is so goddamn magical, why can’t we harness any of that magic and make things better?

If we’re made of stars, why aren’t we surrounded
by a fiery glow, burning out our eyes?

That was the start of this album, although I didn’t know it at the time. All I knew was that I was desperately sad, and that writing songs is it’s own magic that I lean on when there’s nothing else I want to do.

My father died. We mourned. Time passed. Some things got better. Some things didn’t.

In 2018 Milton Busker & The Grim Work released our first album. I think it holds up. You should go listen to it.

In late 2019 we started thinking about recording our next album and talked with Ryan Cohen of Robot Dog Studio about recording there again. I think we may have even scheduled a time and put down a deposit. The pandemic halted those plans, and then Robot Dog Studio lost their space so Ryan graciously suggested we record elsewhere while he worked through what he needed to work through (can’t wait to visit his new studio space in Upstate NY). He put forth a couple of studios he trusted, but I already sort of knew who I wanted to work with. My cousin, Jeremy Mendicino.

Jeremy is a well-known fixture of the Burlington music scene and a singular musical talent whom I have had the joy and jealousy of knowing his whole life (he’s a few years younger than me and is my late aunt’s grandson). He works at Lane Gibson Studios in Charlotte and I’d always kind of wondered what his kind of genius could add to my songs, and now I don’t need to wonder. The end result is both miles away from, and exactly what I wanted it to be. His unfailing ear understood what we were trying to capture and helped us get there. He challenged and cheered and cajoled some amazing performances from everyone in the band.

Oh, the band.

This band.

Imagine having access to a machine that will unfailingly make whatever you put into it better, and that is what it’s like being supported by The Grim Work. Throw some flour into the machine and they’ll give you back some perfectly baked ciabatta. Try to fuck them up by dumping in a bunch of sand, and get presented with a stained-glass window worthy of Europe’s greatest churches. Toss in an apple and get a chocolate cake, and then you say, “What the hell is this, I was expecting an apple pie.” and they’ll say, “Maybe, but what you needed is a chocolate cake,” and you get a bit sulky but you eventually try the chocolate cake and you’re like, “Holy shit! This is exactly what I wanted to make with that apple!” … you get the picture.

John Treybal is one of my favorite bass players to listen to, straddling the line between purely melodic and purely rhythmic to create something that is uniquely his, even when I write a bass line for him to play. I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard him say, “I don’t know what to play here,” and then hear him play the perfect line for that part.

Someone once said about Dave Ball, “He never plays what I think he should, but it’s always right.” That someone was not me, but I can’t disagree. I am so often downright giddy at the shit he comes up with, and the joy he exudes when he’s playing is contagious. A joy to listen to. A joy to watch. A joy to play music with.

Jom Hammack is our secret sauce, of course. Without him we would probably sound like every other sad-singer-songwriter-folk-rock-band, and not just because he doesn’t play a guitar. I have often found myself thinking a song is done, hearing him add a few lines, and then coming to the realization that it wasn’t done at all, but this guy just finished it.

And what can I say about Dave Simpson? He has been in almost every band I’ve played with or put together in the past (nearly) 30 years, either as a guitarist, bassist, or drummer, and in each role he has been the rock that I can stand on and shout into the night. If we get another 30 years on this earth, I hope we’re still shouting into the night together.

So five years after seeing an Instagram meme in a hospital room in Colchester, VT here it is, “Made of Stars”. Thank you for listening.

Made of Starshttp://itunes.apple.com/album/id1648233954?ls=1&app=itunes

The Story of “Bucket of Blue”

This is the story of how a cover song, a pandemic, and an NBC sitcom combined to form the first single off our new album.

The cover song is “Stranger” by Devil Makes Three. It’s a great song. Simple and kind of spooky, with great lyrics and a phenomenal hook. We often cover it and whenever we do it generally brings the house down. We up the tempo and play with abandon; it always feels like we’re moments away from crashing and burning, but it’s written in such a way that a break is never too far away, and if everyone hits it at the right time, it’s magical. MA-GI-CAL!

It pisses me off.

No song that I’ve ever written has ever come close to generating the response that “Stranger” does and it’s a massive blow to my fragile, fragile ego. So I’ve always thought that I needed to write something in the same vein, but nothing ever came.

Then there was a global pandemic. You’ve probably heard of it.

I was very lucky – I worked from home for several years prior to the pandemic, so the shut downs didn’t impact me as much as it did others. I was able to continue working and supporting my family while friends of mine had to all but stop their livelihoods. I wanted to write something that highlighted how scary and uncertain things were and started putting together the chords and melody in between meetings and PowerPoint presentations. I was trying to capture the feeling of “Stranger” without copying it.

It was also during this time that “The Good Place” finished it’s fourth and final season and gave me the last piece of the puzzle I needed to write this song. I’m not going to recap the show or the context because if you haven’t seen this show, stop reading this and go watch it. I’ll wait.

It was good right? Are you ok? The last episode was a doozy.

Anyway, during one of the episodes, Michael says, “… every human is a little bit sad all the time…” and the line hit me: “Every soul’s just a little bit blue”

I ran to the office and more ideas and lines came spitting out as I interrogated my tendency to write about depressing or otherwise upsetting topics, and how maybe it’s ok because I feel like there’s a lot of joy in the music I produce – especially when I’m playing with the band. And at some point, those thoughts became, “If it’s joy you need, I’ve got some for you. But it comes in a bucket of blue…” and everything else kind of fell into place after that.

I played it for the band during one of our outdoor rehearsals that we started having during the summer of the pandemic, and it slowly coalesced over the course of many rehearsals, although Jom aping the verse melody with the mandolin came about in that first rehearsal, which was super cool.

The lyrics went through a couple more iterations as I refined what I wanted to say – in particular the last pre-chorus was originally written:

I’ll admit that I’m a little bit grim,
But it’s just because the world I’m in
I am basking in the warmth of the pain and sin

to

I’ll admit that I’m a little bit grim,
A consequence of this miasma I’m in
marinated in the soup of disease and sin

Which I think we can all agree is a much better line.

A lot of rehearsing, making sure that the arrangement was as good as we could make it, asking Dave to pretend he was Animal during the drum section in the middle, and we were finally ready to record. That’s a story for another time.

I hope you’re enjoying the song.

-Milton

That Person Aside You

We made a music video.

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Directed by Brandon St. Cyr, filmed by Michael Fisher. Featuring Agatha Daley and Isaac Schroeder. 

I hope you enjoy watching it as much as we enjoyed creating it.

-Milton

Radio Bean – 05.11.18

I have a band. I love my band. They make my songs much better than I think they are without them. We’ve recorded an album and at some point in time, it will be released (still working through all that). Anyway, the band is called “The Grim Work” and consists of Dave Ball on electric guitar, Jom Hammack on mandolin, Dave Simpson on drums, and John Treybal on bass guitar. I enjoy few things more than getting together and working out how to make the music I write sound good-er.
Here’s the thing, though: they all have lives, so as much as I wish I could play every single show with them backing me up, sometimes it just can’t happen. That’s what happened tonight, but rather than just go it alone, Dave Simpson joined me, playing the cajon and singing along. It was quite lovely. Here’s what we played:
1. Ordinary Day
2. Sixteen Ton Soul
3. Basement Song
4. All the Same to You
5. That Person Aside You
6. The Meanest Thing I’ll Ever Write
7. Jesus in Chains
8. Dogs at the Door
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10. Lost Cause
11. Made of Stars
12. The Whole
13. Driver 8
14. Glad to See You Go
The sound was great. The night was that perfect temperature between warm and crisp, and Radio Bean is the bomb.

Until next time…

Radio Bean 03.16.18

According to my records, the last time I played a show at Radio Bean was August 2015. It felt really good to be back on that stage. I was all by my lonesome, but a lovely time was had by all (me). Here’s what I played:

  1. The Basement Song
  2. That Person Aside You
  3. The Meanest Thing I’ll Ever Write
  4. Jesus in Chains
  5. Dogs at the Door
  6. All the Same to You
  7. Baby Let My Money Keep You Warm
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  9. Lost Cause
  10. Sixteen Ton Soul
  11. Ordinary Day
  12. Made of Stars
  13. Mind This Mind
  14. Gravity
  15. Glad to See You Go

Light Club Lamp Shop – 03.05.18

Tonight’s set list. A lot of covers because I was all by my lonesome and sometimes I just don’t want to sing my own songs.

1. Basement Song
2. A Jerk’s Lament
3. Jesus, Etc. – Wilco cover
4. That Person Aside You
5. Angel Dream (no. 2) – Tom Petty cover
6. The Meanest Thing I’ll Ever Write
7. Jesus in Chains
8. Bones – Michael Kiwanuka cover
9. Dogs at the Door
10. Baby Let My Money Keep You Warm
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12. Sixteen Ton Soul
13. Pitseleh – Elliott Smith cover
14. Ordinary Day
15. Made of Stars
16. Redemption on Pearl
17. For Milly ~ With Mostly Squalor
18. Gravity
19. No Surprises – Radiohead cover
20. My Fear of Losing You

Thanks to everyone that came out and to Charlie for running sound. Goodnight.