Cody Django Redmond

Paul Jantzi is pretty much the best songwriter in Montreal.  One day this will be known.

Apparently he’s also quite the wordsmith.

Check out his tunes, if you’re so inclined.

awwshucks:

TODAY’S INSTALLMENT: “MY LOVE”

It seems I’m going in reverse chronological order today. This is because I have just started this BLOG!? and can only upload one song a day, but I want to include at least a few songs from before the “BEGINNING”. I have some time to kill, and I haven’t written or recorded anything since the last one so i’ll tell you about ” MY LOVE”.

This song was written and recorded, as many of mine are, in one day. It was on a Sunday, April 7th, 2009, and I was waiting for my bandmates from Paddle To The Sea (fronted by my good friend Philip Shearing) to show up, and had a crappy winter day to fill until they showed up. I’d been contemplating how to write the perfect pop song, as usual, and after giving up once again on THAT endeavour, I decided to try getting into the head of my latest and weirdest alter ego/pseudonym.

I have taken, as of late, to imagining farcical characters to whom I might give substance by writing and recording songs from their perspective. Most are rough sketches at this point, but this particular character embodies several charming traits and I will describe him for you now in detail.

His name is Chad Yuskevic, known on the world wide web by the name of “Patrice Le Vice”, pronounced in french “Patriss Leviss”, and meaning Patrick the Vice. A disillusioned art school dropout born and raised in Cambridge, ON, “Patrice” relocated years ago to Montreal, QC in search of his dream girl, whom he expects to look and act a lot like Isabella Rosellini. He is a die hard romantic, only ampified by a magnitude of x2000. He speaks no french whatsoever, but aside from when he is singing speaks exclusively with an insultingly bad Quebecquois accent. He wears eye-liner, has dyed black hair, and looks a bit like Robert Smith, only with the added genetic benefit of an armadillo-like nose and sunken eyes. He is unnaturally pale and sensitive to the sun due in part to his scandinavian background, and due, to a greater degree, to his reluctance ever to leave the musky comforts of his 200$/month basement apartment.

Working mainly in the field of “posting ads online for big bucks”, Patrice has no great need to really enter the outside world except to purchase canned tuna, cigarettes, and cat food once every two weeks. And so it is on every second tuesday that Patrice ventures out in full-on shut-in trenchcoat-and-sunglasses regalia to the nearest grocery store. It is here that he waits in the same queue each time, anxiously anticipating the next encounter with his beloved gum-smacking, eye-rolling, smells-of-hairspray-and-cherries Provigo cashier, Marie-Christine.

Unable to admit that he does not speak any french, he says nothing when they meet, only nodding in mute agreement to what he assumes is an ordinary check-out line conversation, habitually handing over his “carte air-miles” and his “debit” at the familiar facial cues. He longs to convey his deepest longing in the purest, most romantic terms available to the french language, but instead only lowers his Vans sunglasses slightly  and nods “au-revoir”.

Upon arriving home, he continues to toil at his seminal work, entitled “My Love”.   In english, he surmises, eet ees sheet, but in french, en francais, it must sound like the most beautiful fountain ever constructed; cascading water from the purest source spilling out and through cunningly contrived channels of chiselled granite from the Himalayas. A bubbling  stream of conciousness, asplash with spawning salmon, full of life and sexiness, and yet.. and yet as calming as the stillest volcanic lake at dawn.

He writes:

You know I love ya, You know i’m gonna love you all the time
I’d tear my eyes out for you, I’d tear my eyes out for you I’d go blind
My love is strong enough, it could destroy the moon
You know my love could split an atom, we are nuclear fusion,
My love’s strong enough, it gives me telekinesis
I could smash the rocky mountains into millions of pieces,
So why won’t you call me?

Final Note:

It could have sounded funnier, but my “producer” insisted on trying a couple of new sounds, sounds that aren’t as “techy” or as “hardcore” as i originally intended. I will try to do a remix, but in the mean time, here is a way to serious sounding joke song.