The Reign of Lori's Wrath
The Vision of Hope Remains Illusion
Lori and I just Dwelling on the Pain
A Seagull for Lori
Lori Loves Jim
Lori Loves Jim
Lori Loves Jim

Joe Quinn - Vocals + Words
Jesse Krakow - Bass
Chuck Stern - Guitars
Lori - Piano
All Songs by W.A.T.M.B.
Produced + Assembled by Jesse Krakow
Adjusted by Colin Marston
Art by Dylan Sparrow
Title Font by Liz Walsh

Dedicated To Dianne Baldridge

“Lori’s onslaught on boredom and mild depression is a smothering force to be reckoned with” - Joe Quinn

"This is really cool." - a drunk guy on the internet

"I should hate you for even exposing me to that. Yet I love it. Tha'ts messing with my head." - a drunk guy on the internet, again


Her name was/is/might not be Lori

In the summer of 2004 I was the touring the south of America with Ron Anderson and Keith Abrams in my band PAK, doing one-nighters in beer halls and community centers for scores of apathetic college students and earnest young bass players, and having a fantastic time of it.
As anyone who has ever been on tour can tell you, there gets to be a point when your own psyche slows down, your ability to think clearly and make rational decisions is blurred, and you wind up laughing at really, really fucking stupid shit. Maybe it has something to do with travelling the endless flat road that is all of Nebraska for a solid day or two, the fact that you have been eating Subway sandwiches for a week straight, or the fact that you have haven’t taken a good healthy dump in ages, but the end result is the same. As Frank Zappa expertly observed: Touring Can Make You Crazy.

In my opinion the turning point came when we stopped to buy peaches and boiled peanuts on the side of the road somewhere near Athens, GA. The man selling the merchandise was not in the best of moods - one couldn’t blame him, as it gets insanely hot and muggy in the summer in Athens - and didn’t look too Southern-hospitably as he put the peaches and peanuts in a plastic bag.
And then Ron did the unthinkable. He asked the man for some napkins. Georgia peaches, while inexplicably delicious, are quite messy once you bite into them, and in my mind’s eye Ron’s request was far from unreasonable. Here’s how the conversation went:

Ron - “Hey, can we get some napkins?”
(long pause)
Salesman - “Y’all Yankees?”
(short pause)
Ron - “Yeah. You fuck your mother?”

And then we quickly moved on out of there......

I believe it was that same day when, with a lot of time to kill before the gig and only so much Waffle House to consume and digest, we decided to kill some time with some good old-fashioned thrift store shopping. I personally am quite the fan of thrift stores and am always on the lookout for a good one that offers an assortment of cheap dresses, goofy hair clips, and un-intentionally humorous cassettes. Luckily we were able to pick out a thrift store that while a little skimpy in the clothing dept., was blooming wildly in the way of possible ironic musical purchases. and cheap too.
The store, whose name I unfortunately cannot recall, had a display of cassettes whose average price was 50 cents. Even though I was averaging about $20 a night playing prog-rock in the Bible-Belt and needed the money to eat, buying cheap cassettes is one of my many un-doings, and I simply went on an extended shopping spree.
For a grand total of $1.35 I picked up three cassettes that have gone on to have a lasting impression on my fragile Polish mind. The first - “Two-Way Traffic” by Life Forever, was an early 90’s recording by a Christian funk-band who had apparently been listening to a lot of Rush, Foreigner, and Baptist preachers. The best thing about it was the that the tape had been played so many times that the sound would come and go at random, making the music sound like this:

“You can’t hide the feeling inside you
Don’t hold it back! EEEEGHHHACCKKKMBJYUYBKKHB (tape slows down)
(silence)
(tape speeds up)
.......message of Jesus
He’s coming back!”

The second cassette purchased was “The Dream Lives On!”, which we soon discovered was a song cycle dedicated to the works of Party-Lite! As the years have passed I have come to realize that Party-Lite! is itself a manufacturer of candles + trickets that sponsores “parties” ala Tupperware, where people can get together and marvel at shitty worthless overpriced goods before buying them. But we didn’t know this at first. The only thing we knew was that Party-Lite! was part of some fascist right-wing neo-nazi Christian spiritual collective that sang cryptic lyrics of facinating inneundo to the melodies of 1980’s pop tunes. Case in point, sung to the tune of “Holding On To A Hero”:

“We need a hero We’re holding out for the heroes of Party-Lite! They’ve gotta book shows, be on their toes Sponsor everybody in sight”

Needless to say, we listened to this tape in the van overandoverandoverandoverandoverandoverandoverandover......

But it is the third cassette that I bought that bears relevance to Now. Indeed, this is how Lori came into our lives. Yes yes y’all, the third cassette I was to purchase that fateful day in Georgia was a seemingly innocous cassette mysteriously labeled “Lori’s Songs - Instrumental Only” that ultimately became “Lori’s Songs” by We Are The Musk Brigade.

I suppose I have always had a taste for the unintentionally atrocious. Whether it’s documentaries of Corey Haim, instructional videos from Mr. T, incredibly low-budget music videos, Canadian soap-operas, whatever, I have this facination with knowing and finding out why someone in their right mind would ever do THAT. And if they are not in their right mind, what IS their mind and how did it get that way that made them do THAT? And are they even aware of what THAT is? And who the fuck are they anyway? This is what makes “Lori’s Songs” so important. I have no answers to any of those questions. Almost 3 years after the fact I can not fully understand what Lori’s problem was, and perhaps what it still is. Nor can I tell you anything else about her. Lori is an enigma wrapped in a mystery but much too boring to ever become a riddle. As Joe Quinn perfectly stated, her music is an onslaught of boredom, and this trancends her existence, and possibly existence itself. She is a facinating idea, and possibly nothing more. As remarkable of a concept she represents, that is how exhausting it is to listen to her.

But perhaps I am jumping ahead.

I vividly recall putting “Lori’s Songs” into our van’s cassette player and being instantly bored and repulsed by what I heard. A horribly recorded piano terribly playing the most fake-tugging-at-the-heartstrings ballads ever dreamnt, seemingly made up on the spot, with no arrangements, that dramatically slowed down at the end of EVERY section (this is what really made me foam at the mouth), that went on and on and on and fucking on. Fucking 8 minutes of shitty bullshit fucking poopydick songs, one after the other...

So I instantly decided that it would be the basis of the next We Are The Musk Brigade release.

That in itself was pretty revolutionary. You see, only a week earlier We Are The Musk Brigade was a “band” consisting of myself, my friend Beever, and Nate Hayden from Friends Forever, making music by sending each other tapes through the mail. But while on tour I started to get other ideas about how the project could grow, and soon I decided to do an album with Shane from Ahleuchatistas and Andrew from Pattern Is Movement - who PAK was sharing bills with - and also call that We Are The Musk Brigade. So the idea of doing an album based on Lori’s music fit right in to the “whatthefuck, why not?” spirit, and from there it was easy to see that We Are The Musk Brigade could have a life of it’s own if only I could manage to keep people interested in it. Which is a other story, but I digress...

As soon as I heard Lori vomit all over her piano I knew I wanted Chuck Stern from Time of Orchids to be involved. Chuck, an amazing composer/record-maker/keyboardist in his own right, is a highly stylized guitarist whose ability to comp and/or sweetly solo behind a gentle ballad is rivalled only by his complete and utter disinterest in ever doing so.
As for vocals, I knew that Joe Quinn would be the only person who could truly bring Lori’s episodic fits of apathy to life. Joe, who I had first seen with the truly confrontational Rated R (w/ Dan Deacon and Keith from PAK), was and still is one of the most bizarre and hilarious performers/conceptualists/film-makers out there.
And then there is me. I knew that my own fluid bass runs would speak of an urban nature, underpinning Lori’s gentle mystery with subtle-yet-urgent grooves, propelling them with a restrained intensity that could lift the music to it’s emo-nature, which I completely failed at doing. And thank She for that...

...for Lori’s Songs is simply an exericise in patience, humility, and torure, and it has been that way since Day One. Pre-Day One, actually, as I would assume that a tape consisting of Lori’s earlier works is none too easy to sit through either. I wanted myself, Chuck, and Joe to completely re-voice Lori’s bland horror and make the listener hear her music through a different end - the wrong end - and base their opinions of her off of THAT, like looking at a picture from the viewpoint of an elbow.
Lori is that elbow.
And she is always sore.

All of which goes to show how deeply I seem to care about Lori, a person I have never met, whom I will never meet, and whose name in fact might not even be Lori. She is a mundane virus that affects the most boring parts of my being, and for that I will always love her while learning to hate myself. Standing there at my four-track listening to her soloed piano while simultaneously learning her songs and trying to keep somewhat in time with her remains one of the worst musical memories of my life. There were countless moments where - missing yet another downbeat - I would click on my fuzz pedal, bang the body of my bass, and fucking scream “Why?”. This feeling of lasting ineptitude set the tone for the record, a record which saw Lori and I break up between 9 and 12 times during the making of, which is pretty amazing considering that they’re only 5 songs on it, but oh well.

I am going to wrap this up now because much like Lori and her music I am now totally exhausted, emotionally spent, existentially lost, and mentally malnourished. I know nothing, feel nothing, am nothing, and it is a wonder that I even have the strength to tell you as much. I look at my hands as they type these words and feel a void opening up within, underneath, and around me. Once again I have spent more time on Lori than she deserves, and once again I feel the tremendous wicked lust to put on her record, close my eyes, and laugh my fucking face off.

I hope you do the same.

jesse


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