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Rabbits in the Moonlight

by Marc Nerenberg

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about

A new album of songs recorded over the past 6 months, inching my way toward material that's not quite as dark as it's been lately, with a bit of humour here and there. This album has 6 completely original new songs and 4 reworked traditional songs, all of which are reimagined to some extent, one almost completely rewritten.These songs are accompanied on 5 string banjo throughout, with the last one also using harmonica.

When looking at the song list for “Rabbits in the Moonlight”, I notice that, despite the fact that I have no intention of releasing this record on any type of physical media, much less on pressed vinyl, my conception, formed early in my life, of what an album actually is, nevertheless persists: in essence, two complimentary sets of songs on opposite sides of a sheet of vinyl. Without even being aware of it, I have thus, arranged the order of the ten songs on this album in precisely this format - two sets of five songs each. And these sets have remarkably similar structural trajectories. They each start with three songs featuring animal characters, the first two of each set being thematically related to each other, and the third of each set being somewhat surrealistic songs with dream sequence logic to them. Each set ends with two songs having some relation to social consciousness.

Here’s a brief description of each song:

1. “Possum’s Just Layin’ in the ‘tater Patch” is a somewhat re-written (by me) old folk song about three animals’ struggles to keep themselves fed. The melody of this song appears to have begun as a Québec fiddle tune in the 1800s, that has spawned numerous musical and lyrical off-shoots upon arriving in diverse locations on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, with this off-shoot being found in Virginia and Mississippi.

2. “Rabbits in the Moonlight” is an original song of my own, both words and music, which deals with both the triumphs and the perils of life as a lagomorph (rabbits and hares). It’s a lively banjo tune, with lyrics that have a touch of terror.

3. “Sheep on the Clothesline” is an original “talking blues” that began its gestation with a misheard phrase. My wife referred to “sheets on a clothesline”, but I somehow heard “sheep”. With that image in mind, the song seemed to, pretty much, write itself. I just wrote it all down (Marc Nerenberg, stenographer) and made up a banjo part to play along with it.

4. “Another Man Done Gone” is an old prison song, that emerges from the prison farm system of the Southern United States, where (mostly Black) prisoners in striped suits, were leased out to build highways and lay railroad tracks, while chained together in chain gangs. The prisoners also worked the extensive farms and plantations on the prison grounds. To the best of my knowledge, this song was first collected from the singing of Vera Hall in the 1920s.

5. “Banging My Head with a Hammer” is a song I wrote recently when I was trying to write something a little more cheerful and optimistic than most of what I have been finding myself writing these last few years. To that end, I set it to a lively rock and roll chord progression. While not so dark, there’s still a healthy dose of realism that managed to creep into the song as I wrote it.

6. “Leatherwing Bat” is another old folk song that I’ve somewhat rewritten, adding parts to flesh out the story, including a somewhat somber ending to the tale. This song is apparently very old indeed. Folklorist John Lomax has suggested that it may have its origins in Chaucer’s “Parliament of the Fowls”, an epic poem largely focussed on a long discussion between various birds on the subject of romantic love. Apart from this generalized thematic similarity, I don’t personally find any clear concordance between the song and the poem.

7. “Poor Little Turtle Dove” is an old folk song that I’ve almost entirely rewritten, retaining only the original opening stanza (repeated at the end). The rest of the song now contains bits and fragments of the original verses reworked into an entirely different song. It seemed to me that the original song was a pastiche of “floating” song verses (that “float” between many folk songs). The opening stanza was great - but the rest of them seemed to have nothing in common with it. I’ve turned it into a song with a fairly clear narrative theme, fleshing out that wonderful opening.

8. “When the Tiger Eats the Crane” is a song I wrote plumbing the depths of my subconscious mind. The result is a dreamscape, as is the song “Sheep on the Clothesline”. But while that one is bright and sprightly, this one is dark and somber - more of a nightmare, I suppose, than a breezy afternoon nap.

9. “The Last Surviving Angel in the Land of the Gods” is also somewhat of a surrealistic dream scape. It’s also my answer to those that think “thought and prayers” are an answer to the tragedies that seem to plague society with greater and greater frequency and intensity, year after year after year.

10. “When the Blues Have Got You” is a blues about having “the blues”. It’s a “condition” we seem to be seeing a great deal these days, no matter where you look. After describing “the blues” in various terms, from various perspectives, the song concludes with a hint of optimistic advice.

credits

released September 24, 2022

Marc Nerenberg: vocals, banjo, harmonica

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Marc Nerenberg Montreal, Québec

Marc Nerenberg is a veteran Montreal folksinger who plays old time banjo styles and blues harmonica. He has a narrative- centric repertoire, recounting stories in song and wrapping stories around songs. You may “be drawn in by a combination of Marc’s mastery of traditional banjo styles, his idiosyncratic singing, and [his] richly detailed ballads.” (Mike Regenstreif – Folk Roots/Folk Branches 2019) ... more

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