Foreign Skies Demos: II

Let's hear the AMIENS POLKA!

A while back, I published this little post:

It tells the tale of Foreign Skies (2017) and of the germination/learning process for many of the songs. The amazing thing is that we thought to record so many of the acoustic sessions, capturing the moment when a tune was new and unfamiliar. For example, here’s an early version of the long “Foreign Skies” instrumental, which almost sounds like it could be part of a traditional klezmer album. This sort of thing is really cool to listen to, because we are now almost too familiar with these songs.

The Amiens Polka in particular, is about a wild night of partying that took place near the end of WWI near a sleepy French town. The Battle of Amiens (1918) saw the German forces finally exhausted and surrendering in large numbers. Stories were told of groups of German soldiers simply giving up and walking into villages, desperately hoping to find food and wine, and finding it. The resulting parties were, apparently, epic, because the Germans were clearly no longer a threat and just needed one last party before the humiliation set in. I thought that it would be interesting to try to capture that spirit in a polka. This, by the way, is why the song has German/French singing in it; a wine-sotted German soldier is singing to a local village woman about his amorous intentions.

Interestingly, the French were very aware of this development—German wine looting—and during the Battle of Amiens they hastily gathered and transported huge amounts of the stuff away from the city of Amiens, lest the city be captured again. A picture of this actually survives:

Fig 1: Not all heroes wear capes

But having played this polka like 100 times live I will say that it is getting a little stale. So it’s really nice to listen to these demos, because it reminds me of what it was like when the music for Foreign Skies was so fresh. Making that album was an absurd amount of work, and at the time it felt too experimental and too weird and not recorded properly and learned too quickly. But it would be nice to go back in time to the folks frantically learning all this new material, pat them on the head, and say—don’t worry, kids. It’s gonna come out pretty good.

So for you paid subscribers, here are the three recordings we made. The first is real slow and incomplete and the middle bit isn’t even written yet. But by the third version, we are up to tempo and nailing it, and the energy is really cool. Enjoy the content below…