baby cup
Written by Ron Moses
Guitar, bass, vocal and programming by Ron Moses
Guitar solo by Steve Hart
Single, produced by Steve Hart and Ron Moses
Strap in, there’s a lot to talk about. You’re gonna have to forgive me, as things are going to get... how shall I put it... a bit auto-fellatious? Frankly, I think I deserve to be proud of this track and everything I put into it, and a dollop of back-pattery is not uncalled for. And since none of you are writing extensive liner notes about my music, I’ll have to serve it up myself.
First, what is a baby cup? My wife Michelle, our daughter Liz, and I were at the kitchen table playing with clay, as families do. Purely at random I molded this little black teacup depicted to your right. Liz dubbed it the Baby Cup. So that’s it. End of story.
As for the song, I was driving home, listening to NPR like I'm supposed to, when a bit of bumper music caught my ear. It sounded like two or three kalimbas playing this syncopated pattern. It lasted only a few seconds, but as soon as it ended I had this song's intro in my head, followed quickly by most of the first verse. Determined not to forget it, I sang it over and over until I pulled into the driveway, ran down to my studio, wrote it down in detail, and breathed a sigh of relief. Now what?
As I got to tinkering with it, I realized I had ended the fourth line with a falsetto jump that was going to give me trouble. (It’s the “you” in “where do you come from.”) You may have noticed I'm not a particularly versatile vocalist. So I played around with the key until I found something I could feel reasonably confident about attempting. Sort of.
And then my brain handed me something I would never feel reasonably comfortable about. Not even sort of.
See that jump between the second and third notes? Between “have” and “ne”? That interval is called a major sixth. (We're about to go full music nerd, so brace yourselves or skip these three paragraphs.) For a skilled vocalist, a major sixth is no big deal. For me, it’s daunting. Not only do I have to perform a sudden and significant pitch jump, I need to transition smoothly from a chest voice to a head voice in mid-melody. And do you see that gap between the fourth and fifth notes? That’s only a fourth; not so bad, right? Except now I need to switch from a head voice into a falsetto, and then back to my head voice for the last note of the measure.
You know what it's like? Imagine playing hopscotch on three parallel courts (that's what they're called, thanks Google). You take the first two hops on the first court, then leap sideways to the next court while spinning 180 degrees in mid-air, then take two backward hops followed by another lateral 180 to the third court, then one more hop and a final 180 back to the middle court and you're done. Go outside, try that right now. Bring chalk.
My breathtakingly accurate hopscotch analogy notwithstading, any semi-skilled vocalist should be scoffing at my amateurish timidity right now. This is high school math at best. But this feat of vocal gymnastics is simply unrealistic for the guy who couldn’t even master “I Need A Bag.” And I had to do it four times over the course of the song. I had failed miserably at far tamer vocal challenges. And if I didn't nail this, it was gonna sound really bad. Some of you remember “My Time To Fly”? Yeah, like that.
I had trained myself not to write beyond my abilities, but dang it, I liked this too much to scrap it. So I did something I’d always resisted in the past: I dedicated myself to practicing over an extended period of time. I know, right? I made a recording of that measure and the next on a loop, and I kept it in my car, working on it every day. Just those twelve notes, over and over and over. Gradually I worked up to singing the entire verse, over and over and over. And eventually I got there. The vocal take on this song is not perfect, but I’m not the least bit embarrassed by it. There are sketchy bits here and there, but those intervals are pretty much nailed. Ironic that it should take me until the last song I ever recorded to figure out that practice pays off.
And then thankfully I never had to sing it again. I just tried it now, as I’m typing this, and I can’t even come close anymore. That’s fine, nobody’s asking me to sing it, so I’m good.
Wow, I wrote way too much about a few measly notes. Gotta move on.
The harmony vocals in the “tea from China” section were fun. I think they came out pretty great, and it was all down to an idea I came up with on my own, though surely it had been done before. I wrote out the four harmony parts, then I recorded myself singing each part. That sounded okay. Then I made a copy of each of those voices, and pitch-corrected them. So now I have four voices perfectly in tune, which sounded a bit unnatural, and four typically wobbly voices, which sounded typically wobbly. Put them all together and it was like each voice was filling in the cracks between the other voices. Very cool. I also threw in that falsetto line in the middle; I’m not sure what made me think of doing that, but it's very silly. I actually did multiple takes to get it right, can you believe it? Maximum effort!
I remember the line “tea from China and beer from Germany” popped into my head immediately. And somehow I knew I wanted “I’ll be your [something] if you’ll be my [something].” I started with the second name because it had to rhyme, flipping through a few options before realizing that Persephone fit the melody perfectly. Wait, isn’t she from Greek mythology? I did some reading and discovered her uncle Hades had abducted her, tricking her into eating pomegranate seeds which bound her to the Underworld. Yikes! Things get all “Luke and Laura” after that, it’s pretty fucked up.
So of course I used it. Even without the backstory it’s a perfect line, so I wasn’t passing that up just because the context is icky. I wrote a song about burying my girlfriend alive, do you think this phases me?
The rest of the recording was done in bits and pieces. I wrote a guitar part, I recorded it, I forgot it forever. No extended practice sessions here. I also recorded a guitar solo, and... I haven’t mentioned my soloing abilities, have I? I don’t have any soloing abilities. It was terrible. Enter Steve Hart.
It’s safe to say Steve was infatuated with this track (because he did say it, so it’s safe). He had a copy of the multi-track at his studio, and one night he was pissed off about something and got drunk over it. Then he went into his studio and recorded a guitar solo for “Baby Cup.” He handed me a CD the next day, and I listened to it. It was unusable. There were cool ideas in there, and I loved his tone. But it sounded like an angry shit-faced person played it. Steve acknowledged that fact, and assured me it was only a demo; he’d do better on the next try. But as I listened to it on repeat, I started to hear the possibilities. I flew the track into Audacity and started chopping. I cut it up into I don’t know how many little note clusters, and started sliding them around the timeline. A little cross-fade here, a little extension there, and after a few days I had produced the solo you hear on the track. There’s one note I don’t like but apart from that I think it’s a great solo. Steve still wanted to do it over but I wouldn't let him.
Steve also took a copy of my multi-track and remixed the first few minutes, up until just after his solo. It sounded so much better than my mix. I really wanted him to do the entire track, but life got in the way, we fell out of touch for a while, and then one day I got a call telling me Steve had succumbed to cancer. I didn’t even know he was sick; apparently I had fallen out of touch for longer than I thought. I wanted his mix to be heard, so I tried to master my mix to at least match him in volume and general EQ. Then I cross-faded from the end of his mix over to my mix and let it play out from there. You can hear the edit if you know what to listen for, but overall I’m pretty satisfied with the results.
Let's move on to more praise for me and my prodigious talents. Lewis Saul wrote on his review site:
I am posting my fourth RON MOSES track.
As I say, I think Ron is a magnificent songwriter (with a magnificent voice!) ...
Listen to the beautiful melodic leaps beginning at "I have never seen ... "
So, I happen to think this is a magnificent song.
However --
The producer in me cannot resist what I hear in my head.
Before the final verse, Ron spends a long time in purely instrumental mode. It is all very interesting -- well thought-out, beautifully recorded --
But I couldn't stop hearing my four-minute version.
So with Ron's permission, I give you Baby Cup in two versions. I made only a single edit (and it's a bit noticeable -- I did it quickly), cutting about four and a half minutes.
Let me start by expressing my gratitude for Lewis’s kind words. And for pointing out those vocal intervals, that’s very gratifying. And yes, I did grant Lewis permission to create his own edit, since he was nice enough to ask when he was under no obligation to. And also yes, even I trimmed maybe two minutes out of the piano section from the original edit to create the version you’re hearing now. (I've included the “extra piano” version as a bonus track, in case you're bored and want to be even more so.)
But to suggest there’s four-plus minutes of fluff here, worthy of being excised for all our sakes? I’m calling a hard no on that one. Would you edit the middle section out of “Bohemian Rhapsody” because Queen spends a lot of time in purely operatic mode? Or trim a couple minutes worth of “na na na nas” from the end of “Hey Jude” just to tighten things up a bit? Of course these are both lesser musical examples, but I think they make my point. You don’t cut down “Baby Cup” to radio-length. It’s exactly what it needs to be, no more, no less.
Oh, one last note before we wrap up. That little guitar figure at the very end is clearly an homage to Steve Howe on Yes’s “Awaken”. I didn’t copy it exactly, but the inspiration is glaring. Seems only right, I think. I started my musical career in pastiche, and I ended it there too.
Little bitty baby cup
Sitting on the coffee table
Such a tiny baby cup
Where do you come from?
I have never seen the like of the baby cup
I cannot believe my luck
How did I deserve you?
Little baby cup
Tiny shiny smiley face
Friendly little baby cup
What do they call you?
Would you like to be my personal baby cup?
We could see the world together
And I’ll fill you up with
Tea from China and beer from Germany
I’ll be your Hades if you’ll be my Persephone
We’ll buy a ticket on a big jet plane and fly
Sad little baby cup
Lying on the floor in pieces
Oh little baby cup
What has befallen you?
What a fickle fate to be suffered by the baby cup
Let me get the glue and I’ll make you good as new