Tree School from DECEMBER (EP) by Seven Stars Panda

Part 2 / Track 2 of the "Patrick Goes Into Unnecessary levels of detail into the process for creating the songs on the latest Seven Stars Panda Release" series: *** TREE SCHOOL! ***

On the way through a heavily-wooded road on the way to Kat's sister Jean's birthday celebration at Crescent Lake on a Friday night, we saw a sign - maybe it was just a school bus pickup that seemed out of place so deep in the forest? I think maybe it was Kat who suggested, "maybe if you are going to Tree School?" and then it had to be a song. I was kind of tooling with the chorus for the rest of the weekend. Kat Tewson might remember this all better with accurate detail?

Songwriting is weird because deep in my id I immediately *knew* how the chorus went, but it took months for that to bubble into the conscious part of my brain and actually figured it out - the "Tree School" line jumps the phrase and while it's pretty common for that to hit the 8 count so it's like 1 - 2 -3 - 4 - 5 - 6 - 7 - (8)TREE - (1)SCHOOL - 2 -3 - 4 .... that kept seeming wrong, but it tripped me up to get to the recorded version which is 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 - (7)TREE(8)EEEE (1)SCHOOL - 2 - 3 -4 .... nothing too crazy but took me a while to figure it out.

This song definitely lands in a happy place for me as a writer of songs that I don't always get to indulge - a big happy sloppy barnstormer with some crunchy guitar and syrupy leads in the manner of the 90s bands like Superchunk and The Breeders that I don't know if I really pull off but I love trying. It's a little weird to sequence drums for a song that's maybe lives and dies on it's "vibe", but at the same time that precision that the computerized drum line brings to the mix keeps the whole thing from devolving into a sloppy mess. This song makes extensive use of combined four-count kick drum with syncopated tom rolls over the top so that it's like "bum BAH-da bum-pa BUM" or something like that. This is well beyond my ability to execute while playing actual drums and makes me appreciate the computer's talent and focus.

This song features a bass line recorded on a real-live bass guitar, which I haven't done for a long time! I kinda miss it, it was fun.

This song is a great example of the "I pretty much know what it's about but it's hard to put in words" phenomenon. James at one point saw a draft of the lyrical bit "Without a Ghost Between us we have entered God's pavilion" and was like "what the hell, dude". The song song describes sort of an Ender's Game-ish scenario but instead of a scared kid you have forest creatures, like I picture an animated, cocky skunk as the protagonist. Maybe he has a letter jacket? So like he's the golden-boy but there's kind of these fascist or nationalist overtones, and a darker landscape beyond the walls. There's definitely some influence from my time in private school and this feeling like your elders are telling you how great and special you are and building you up with all the potential you have, but that "potential" ends up being cannon fodder in a war that's ultimately someone else's fight. "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" definitely has some influence even though I *barely* remember that movie and watched it way too young to make sense of it (but a non-ironic thanks to my father who also was willing to expose his kids to that kind of shit when they were like 8yo, I think even though it went over my head it helped navigate some things later on. Still helping).

In my mind, the single greatest risk on this release is the spoken-part during the bridge. Early drafts of this song were chorus-verse-chorus-verse and it needed some mix up, but just pulling back after the bridge left kind of a void. The day before Rosie started to be born I actually was waiting to meet Kat to go to what would be our final childbirth class and wrote out this spiel, which goes fine with the song but was probably more motivated by just feeling like I never have any free time any more, which is a boring thing to feel that gets a little more interesting if you cast it into the backdrop of some dystopian woodland Harry Potter-esque fantasy high school war-in-heavens scenario you had lying around in a song. I was at the tail end of the horrific cold I got AFTER Rosie was born when I actually recorded this vocal (on my laptop's built-in microphone no less, which I don't think hurts it none) which has the welcome effect of making my voice sound unfamiliar to me, and thus reducing the amount I'm given to cringe every time I hear it substantially.

I would like to think that this universe could be the setting of some kind of dating simulator someday, kind of like the "Namco High" game that utilizes the Homestuck/MS Paint Adventures universe. This would also be a fun song to do an animated music video for if that kind of time and energy existed in the world.