“love is the only game in town” features a total of 12 tracks, with imaginative lyrics and a nice variety of musical styles. Musical influences include Tom Waits, Syd Barrett, Brian Eno, The Grateful Dead, Bjork, David Bowie, The Rolling Stones, The Beatles and The Velvet Underground and Nico. Instruments used include voice, electric and acoustic guitars, bass, mountain dulcimer, keyboards, synthesizer and musical saw.
All letters for all tracks as well as the title of “love is the only game in town” are lower case as are all lyrics in the CD booklet. We just wanted it that way.
Work on this CD began back in August 2014 after I returned from a trip to the U.S. to see family and friends. I jumped right into recording a track about a place where a friend and I had stayed in the mountains, a track that would not make the final cuts. Sometimes you just need to get through a track you won’t use in order to get to one you will. In my case, getting through that first track was a warm-up for the next ten or eleven I recorded between September 2014 and January 2015. That was quite a creative flurry for me, I don’t think I had ever written and recorded so many tracks for that many songs over a 6-month period, not to mention recording a very nice song by Isa called “show me what you’ve got”, track number 3 on “love is the only game in town” . In case that doesn’t seem like a lot, just remember that I am also a full-time teacher. So is Isabelle.
“love is the only game in town”, the title track, was recorded next. I really got into the drums and the whole thing, actually. Steve Train, a good musician and a friend of mine, suggested taking the bass out of the vocals and I liked the way it sounded. Steve also suggested looping the cat calls throughout the entire song, and not just at the end as I had originally intended. 2 for 2.
And then we added Isa’s backing vocals, which were just what the doctor ordered.
Kevin Lipnicki, a good friend and former bandmate, kept telling me to get the beat on the chord change right. I’m glad he did because he knows what he’s talking about when it comes to percussion.
Speaking of Kevin, track number 4 “when I saw jesus” was inspired by an Alan Watts lecture and I think Kevin had brought me a cassette of the lecture he had recorded on WFMU in New Jersey, where Kevin is from.
I remember listening to more of those lectures alone and with friends. Once I missed an exit on my way to New York while listening to an Alan Watts lecture.
Anyway, Watts said something in one of those lectures about Jesus not wanting to be put on a pedestal but that’s exactly what we did, and that was the seed of inspiration for that song.
My mother called me in early February 2015 and told me she had pancreatic cancer and that she wanted to remain her positive self as long as possible. My mother was a big music fan so I sent her some of the initial “love is the only game in town” mixes and she called me back to tell me how much she liked the CD. I was in the middle of giving a presentation about Syd Barrett during a class I teach at HEC and though the ringer and buzzer were off, my phone lit up and I could see it was her calling. She left a very joyful, supportive message and from then on we talked about how the CD was coming along during every conversation we had before she was no longer able to talk on the phone.
Isabelle and I flew in from France at the beginning of June and were honored that my mother, who had an extremely low tolerance for sound at that point, was very keen on the idea of Isabelle and I playing acoustic sets at her bedside. She was still in her own bed at that point. At the end of the booklet for « love is the only game in town », on the page featuring Isabelle, Benny and myself, as well as Jean-Yves Allanic and Gilles Poirier, two good friends who decided to sit in on the photo shoot, there is a dedication albeit hard to see, to my mother.
Constance Louise Phillips Moogalian died on June 20th, 2015.
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