A GUH fan writes: Why "Chimney?" Is there a chimney in the woods, or were you just happy to see Tam? Is that "wire-rimmed can" as in "If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her...?" Or is that not one of the intended double entendres? I take it the edge was just danced upon, no "Mash down the trash in the wire-rimmed can?"
Memphis Evans responds:
I can definitely see how it could be interpreted that way, but believe it or not I intended no double entendres while writing the song with Karl. (He played me the first chorus section one evening during our habitual "new work review" and I really, really liked it and we finished it together instead of watching ST:TNG that night.) I never thought of "Chimney" as being, uh, "happy to see Tam". I remember seeing Tam sunbathing in a bikini on the lawn outside of Mellby once. But that just made me sad at that time, since I didn't have a girlfriend.
The reason it's called that is because we ended up including all this stuff about dancing, walking, hiding out, and getting lost in the woods. When I was a kid my family would go for nature hikes at this one nature center outside Rochester, NY and towards the end of the hike path there was a vast wild wheat field surrounded by the forest we'd just walked through. At one point there had obviously been a house in the field about ten feet from the path, but the house had burned down. All that was left was a giant, majestic, fully intact chimney with fireplace and hearth. The fireplace looked to your left as you walked along the path. I wish I had a photo of it, but I'm sure it's gone now for one reason or another. I can remember it clearly enough I guess.
As for the wire-rimmed can, I was thinking of it as a fully non-metaphorical actual aluminum can with sharp edges upon which one would have to be extrordinarily graceful to dance without injury. The shifting time signatures and sudden stops and starts of the song add to the difficulty. Tam has acheived this level of grace and is the high priestess of the ritual. Even just walking on the can requires exceptional bravery and would be only the first step to becoming a man. For to dance with Tam on the can, one must first walk on the can and become a man. This was partly inspired by the fact that our real-life St. Olaf classmate Tamara was an attractive and charismatic dancer. This is all very non-sexual. Velvets is our sex song.
Chimney is basically about a bizarre found-object-based ritual that has developed deep in the woods. It has Christian roots, but they are being lost, perhaps due to the prolonged isolation of its practitioners from the original texts. A rebellious prophet calls for a return to the first five books of the new testament in the song's bridge section, but as the song ends with a wild, uninhibited dance section it is unknown whether this call is heeded or whether the practitioners simply continue to "walk across the bridge" to try and "find the woods".
Minutae:
-Sitting By My Laughing Fire is a book by Billy Graham (a Christian text, in other words) that I had seen in the bathroom during a then-recent visit to my parents' house in MD.
-Once we came up with the spelling concept, we used a dictionary turned to "I". We did not know the word "Introrse" before we found it and judged it perfect in meter and in meaning for our new song.
-The sliding-two-notes-with-open-strings chords used for the verse were inspired by the final section of Lou Reed's then-recent song "Set The Twilight Reeling".
-The "man with the ball shaped hands" reminds me vaguely of Pink Floyd's "Comfortably Numb" anti-hero who had, when he was a child, a feeling like his hands were two balloons.
Kaptain Karl's Essay About Chimney
Scot Ninnemann's Essay About Chimney