photo by Christina Hensley

Approach Influenza as a series which serves to help give insight as to where music is born; these are the thoughts, influences and the inspirations directly from the mind of the artists. For this edition Mike Reisenauer breaks down the titled track from the Pale Young Gentlemen’s latest release, Black Forest (tra la la).

On “The Crook of Good My Arm”:

I’d been working with the verses for sometime before I finally wrote the title to this song. Once I had that, the song basically wrote itself. It’s really a standard A-A-B-A song in the tradition of “What a Wonderful World” and the like, but I wanted to make it longer so I added another chorus to it (The “Run, Run” section).

I set up the rhyme scheme and built the strings so that it moved up and into the “Crook” line- a musical and lyrical exclamation point. The clanking percussion on that song is comes from a Pottery Barn fruit bowl that was handy when I was demo-ing the song. It sounded just right, so we used it for the actual recording as well. – Mike Reisenauer

Pale Young Gentlemen “The Crook of Good My Arm” (mp3)

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