SONG: “Two Wolves Inside Us” . (OGG version here.)
ARTIST: grant.
SOURCE: Based on Ecology, 14 Nov 2024, “Canids as pollinators? Nectar foraging by Ethiopian wolves may contribute to the pollination of Kniphofia foliosa,” as used in the post “The birds, the bees, the… wolves?” and on Sentient Science, 6 Dec 2024, “Colorado Reintroduced Wolves. They Might Have the Wrong Personalities to Succeed,” as used in the post “Personalities count… for wolves.”
ABSTRACT: Having two stories about very different wolves in one week was kind of two good to pass up. One eats honey, the other eats… other stuff, but not livestock. One lives in Ethiopia (which I always associate with eremites and desert patriarchs) and one hangs out near ranchers… but not TOO near.
I knew I was going to write about them. And I knew it was going to be largely one chord with little variations around the choruses (I thought). And… I thought I was going to follow the same skeleton as “Content Feeds,” which is a song that came together really well as a version of the genre I made up and called “urban wyrd.” Repeated unadorned guitar figure, drum hits on the 2 and the 3-and, bass that emphasizes half-step intervals. Right, OK, good creative machine there.
Then, I went back to that open-G-minor tuning and somehow because of that wound up with, I dunno, this late-1950s Tom Waits cha-cha thing. Which is fine, but I don’t think I’d ever drawn a line between “Harmonise” by Ipso Facto and “Something Beautiful” by Clem Snide before. But there it is!
The words – well, I wrote them on (virtual) paper before I had a melody, just a knowledge that it was going to be in G minor with … all that creative machinery going on.
When I read them as words, the meter scanned for me. I couldn’t figure a melody out, though – the phrasing fell apart when faced with the rhythm guitar going chunk-chunk-chunk in simple straight eighth notes. If I was not working on a deadline, I would have used that chunk-chunk-chunk and rewritten the words practically from scratch – there are couplets and triplets in there, and lines of different lengths. But nah, why not go whole-hog “The Ocean Doesn’t Want Me Today” and make ’em fit like an internal monologue?
It actually worked a lot better than most of the things I set out to make as spoken word. I kinda thought I’d sing the “Two wolves inside us” part, but nah.
There’s a nylon-string acoustic playing chords, a Squier Strat doing the main lead riff, a bass with a pitched-up bass track doing the second-“guitar” solo, a VSTi organ (the S30 emulator made by uhhh…. Ian Webster, a virtual Hammond that leans kinda spacey in its built-in effects), and, the first two tracks I put down, a conga and a Pearl Masters drum kit. Oh, and hi-hats sampled and slowed down from “Love Shock” by Slant 6. The voice track has the Tube Baby tube-amp emulator on it, as does the bass solo. I am not sure I could learn to do this live, but maybe.
LYRICS:
There are two wolves inside us (x2)
One sniffs out honey from the land
The smell of flowers in the sand
The taste of pollen on the snout
The yellow muzzle spreads about
The seeds that bloom between the stones
Under the sun above the bones
.
Of generations gone before
Of desert monks who praised the Lord
And spelled a contract out in wax.
It howls in faith and howls the facts
The moon is rising on the stacks
And canyon monasteries that rose out of the dust
Two wolves inside us. (x3)There are two wolves inside us
One has a certain kind of profile:
INTP, maintains a lifestyle
Where hungry might yet hunt for dinner
But not for steaks, for something thinner
Something wilder than farmer’s fields
Thank the wolf-god for our daily meal
–
That never prays for recompenses
Never snags on barbed-wire fences
Never crosses private ditches
Nor begs to be with backyard situ-
ations, prefers another niche
With far-off wolfen wanderlust
Two wolves inside us. (x4)After you, sir. No, I insist.
(SOLO)Two wolves inside us. (x3)