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Good Songs

by Busman's Holiday

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  • Record/Vinyl + Digital Album

    On limited edition Crystal Cherry vinyl, your ears will delight in the sounds and sensations of our album, GOOD SONGS. With gorgeous design by David J. Woodruff and Busman's Holiday, your eyes will have a feast of a time too. Illustrations from the band included on the dust cover. Pick it up now and often!

    Includes unlimited streaming of Good Songs via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
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  • Compact Disc (CD) + Digital Album

    For the first time ever, listen to our album GOOD SONGS in glorious plastic! Yes, all on the finest of compact disks is this album for your consumption. Encased in a digipak wallet, with liner notes to boot, with all artwork by Busman's Holiday and David J. Woodruff, this will be a cherished piece amongst your audio collection.

    Includes unlimited streaming of Good Songs via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
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1.
Only Ones 03:21
Feeling like the only one No more feelin’ like a lonely one Feeling like the only ones do Priest and soldier Money folder All will die the same Streaming faster Slave and master Turtles have short legs Feeling like the only one No more feelin’ like a lonely one Feeling like the only ones do All this time that I feel we are wasting Are you tired of the food you are tasting? Like the sound a preacher feeds the hallow Let’s get wild, let’s get lost, let’s get wallow Feeling like the only one No more feelin’ like a lonely one Feeling like the only ones do So much love that we all are concealing Like a river we have dammed to repeating There’s no time to be against another When we love, we are one, we are brothers Feeling like the only one No more feelin’ like a lonely one Feeling like the only ones do
2.
I was doing the laundry Just waiting on a call Hoping you had found it better on your own I remember all you taught me Sipping smoothies through a straw Pools of love would swell my head and make me weak Loving eyes are filled with sorrow See the old folks at the mall Love and time is ours to hold but not to keep For all true lovers know That love is perfect kindness Love is perfect kindness The heart matures the soul And love is perfect kindness Love is perfect kindness you know In the spring there’s winged begonias And there’s apples in the fall Sold the house but the family kept the pond There are times I feel so crazy Sometimes don’t feel at all But I try and catch the wind that helps me speak She was with me for the moment We were asked to sing a psalm Love and time is ours to hold but not to keep For all true lovers know That love is perfect kindness Love is perfect kindness The heart matures the soul And love is perfect kindness Love is perfect kindness Love is perfect kindness you know
3.
In a small town near New England Crash my Corolla thorough a paint shop on Main All the colors mixed my window Hallelujah, what a beautiful dream! Next I hear is, people screaming Won't be long; just wait for fireman's hands Margarita How I need ya Mix the colors, marbled lovers slow-dance Hey Margarita, I hold your hand Hey Margarita, I hold your hand Hey Margarita, I hold your hand We were lyin' at the drive-in Side-by-side after the movie would end Constellations Brief vacation Crossed my eyes and felt my fingers extend On reflection our connection Was beyond a place that I'd ever been Margarita, can't I see ya? Tell me lies like we was playin' pretend Hey Margarita, I hold your hand Hey Margarita, I hold your hand Hey Margarita, I hold your hand And when I call you up On the telephone I wish that you'd pick up I know you're not alone Hey Margarita, I hold your hand Hey Margarita, I hold your hand Hey Margarita, I hold your hand
4.
Future 03:56
Like someone, like no one, and everyone’s talking I’m poor and I’m losing, I’m sick and I’m coughing What does it cost? Nothing at all I wish that I had that, I’m forever floating I know that I hate that Why must I keep watching? What does it cost? Nothing at all I don’t want to be numb to life Don’t want to become the type who needs a crowd To say he had a good time And I see the future Oh, I see the future I hear you, I see you, I’m glad that we’re talking There’s much to believe in Just listen to nothing Love is for all Like it or not I love you I need you Remind me more often I can feel that sudden feeling I can feel that lovin’ lovin’ I believe I feel loving I believe I feel loving I believe I see kindness I believe I see kindness I can feel that sudden feeling I can feel that lovin’ lovin’ I believe I feel love I don’t want to be numb to life Don’t want to become the type who needs a crowd To say he had a good time And I see the future Oh, I see the future
5.
Feel You 04:34
Every night I feel so lonesome It’s because I know it’s through with you and me And all the dreams that I’ve been dreaming of Come to call like fallen leaves And although I know it’d two divided I can see my soul residing And I want to hold onto what I can’t understand If I’m leaving here tomorrow I want to feel you with my hands I want to hold onto what I can’t understand If I’m leaving here tomorrow I want to feel you with my hands Is there a time you’ve taste a sweetness So divine it fills your mind with honeybees? When all the words you know have let you go We seem to fall from all them things And although I know it’s two divided I can see my soul residing And I want to hold onto what I can’t understand If I’m leaving here tomorrow I want to feel you with my hands I want to hold onto what I can’t understand If I’m leaving here tomorrow I want to feel you with my hands Why do you treat me this way? Pretending I’m the only one How do you think that I’m supposed to say I’m burning out like the setting sun Do you really believe that there’s someone for you? Holding your hand, make you feel you’re the one I can believe that there’s someone Holding to nothing Never to know when it’s done And I want to hold onto what I can’t understand If I’m leaving here tomorrow I want to feel you with my hands I want to hold onto what I can’t understand If I’m leaving here tomorrow I want to feel you with my hands
6.
Good Songs 03:33
Give me some of them good songs I want the type that don’t last long I wanna feel it in my backbone, So I can feel it in my feet I keep singing the same old song Do I have to linger on? If you keep singing the same old song Do you have to linger on? Oh we keep singing the same old song Do we have to linger on? If we’re all singing the same old song Do we have to linger on? Give me some of them good songs I want the type that don’t last long I wanna to feel it in my backbone, So I can feel it in my feet We’re all singing the same old songs Do we have to linger on?
7.
In my room there’s my TV I turn it off High frequencies Like some unknown Floats Above my bed Has placed their hands Upon my head 100 channels Out to sea All ride their waves to vacancy Where forgotten thoughts All go to die To be reborn in Someone’s mind Although I know What’s lost is gone There’s something to These simple songs That disappear Go back to where They belong
8.
What in the world’s come over you? Things seem different than they was It’s hard to know with just what to do Are you listening Cuz’? For all we know is all we have Hear the beaten sound of a lonely man If all this love could trickle down to you You could hear the sound, I know you’d feel it too When all this light can be confused Sight out of mind What you win to lose Honey I’m going to do almost all I can But I’m only a man I’m only a man Hey what happened? It blew like a napkin in the wind Seems like the world Start spinnin’ In a way I ain’t goin’ in When all is fractured It reflects and rejects the jagged edge And it cuts to the touch Every time that you try To put it back again For all we know is all we have Hear the beaten sound of a lonely man If all this love could trickle down to you You could hear the sound, I know you’d feel it too When all this light can be confused Sight out of mind What you win to lose Honey I’m going to do almost all I can But I’m only a man Yeah, I’m only a man Oh I’m only a man
9.
Casey I Casey I Sound of the Name Casey I Casey I Sound of the Name The morning of a summer song That helps the shadows move along The sun that burns from all blue ends Reflecting on the ground I hear a choir singing now Of pussywillow cockatoos That ride the disappearing night Like frogs with angel wings Casey I Casey I Sound of the Name Casey I Casey I Sound of the Name Gold and diamonds fill her mouth I want it all I dig it out With so much treasure in my hands I howl at the Moon Rainbows stroll from crystal beams The ceiling fan The twisting string The love that runs through everything So glad that she’s around Casey I Casey I Sound of the Name Casey I Casey I Sound of the Name
10.
Show me the way Look to the sunset That’s golden and gray Sleeps through the day Till it turns on headlights That splash on the sidewalk Like pennies and dimes Forgotten to time Bang a gong Like the tribe That sleeps through the night In a thicket of trees Patiently sings To the gods that bring light The hopeless semantics Of life set aside Knowing that Night is a gift Love brings You are a song Love sings We are the lonely only We are the lonely only We are the lonely only But you are the Only to the Sun
11.
Toco 02:23
Tocada para se mover Tocada para se mover Tocada para se mover Private eyes Watching someone’s Itemized tax deduction Freedom sighs Like a lonely dove But there’s light before tomorrow And there’s light before today It’s breaking up the sorrow Till it’s gone It’s gone away Family ties Promoting someone’s Diatribe Just beyond These dismal times I’m seeing only love But there’s light before tomorrow And there’s light before today It’s breaking up the sorrow Till it’s gone It’s gone away

about

Hey, it’s here, it’s finally here! Time to pop some of that champagne that’s hanging out and have a time! This album had a real life to it before we got here. Like it went through school, and college, and maybe even some grad school.

We’re really happy with it. The album started in Montreal and ended up in Bloomington, ricocheting to Brooklyn on the way. We had some of our best times making this one.

Mark Lawson is back. Matt Nowlin returns. The strings soared! The horns moaned. We got a lot of our life in this one. You can see that from the porch.

Thanks for being here. You enjoy it. You deserve it.


Here's more about the record from the sharp writer, Stephen Deusner:

A band of brothers hailing from Bloomington, Indiana, Busman’s Holiday are devoted to exploring the boundless possibilities of the human voice. On their inventive, giddily experimental third album, the aptly titled Good Songs, Lewis Rogers and Addison Rogers sculpt their lines rather than simply sing them, deploying an arsenal of techniques and tricks to deliver lyrics about loneliness and connection and joy and fulfillment. “In the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, there was this revolution of people like the Beach Boys and the Beatles using their voices in the strangest ways,” says Lewis (the taller of the pair, with a John Prine style-moustache that gives him the look of a gunslinger). “We’re trying to pick up on that. You can have a million synthesizers, but the human voice can do something wilder and weirder than all that equipment.”

His brother agrees. “When we were recording this album, we kept thinking, How can we sing this in a way that sounds zippy?” says Addison (voluminous beard, beautifully infectious laugh). “How can we sing this in a way that doesn’t sound boring?” While they’ve harmonized beautifully on their previous albums—2008’s Old Friends, 2014’s A Long Goodbye and 2016’s Popular Cycles—they pushed themselves to put their voices front and center on Good Songs, to foreground that most human and humane of instruments on every song. They also pushed themselves to capture the giddy freedom of listening to and creating good songs. Over a musical palette that collides gospel with country, rhumbas with r&b ballads, Nilsson with Bobby McFerrin (yes, that Bobby McFerrin, in particular his 1990 opus Medicine Music), their voices swoop up into their soulful upper register, bottom out in bass, abruptly clip syllables into staccato rhythms. They sing and yell, whoop and holler. Even as the songs chronicle great changes in their lives, that exuberant sound of two brothers blending their voices remains stable and persistent. “As long as our voices are there, as long as we’re singing together,” says Addison, “it’s always going to be Busman’s Holiday.”

The Rogers brothers have been singing together longer than either of them can remember, and they’ve been singing together as a band for nearly half their lives. With Lewis usually but not always playing guitar and Addison usually but always playing drums, Busman’s Holiday has amassed an avid fanbase in the Midwest and beyond, as listeners relate to their heart-on-sleeve lyrics and bright harmonies. “When you’re younger, you really want to dwell on your angst and sadness and put it all in your songs,” says Lewis. “That’s what we were doing on our earliest records. There’s still some of that on Good Songs, but it’s more of a celebration of those things. We made an effort to make the songs sound joyous and upbeat in a way that was authentic to us.”

Thinking they would record a quick follow-up to Popular Cycles, the brothers booked time at Sonovox Studios in Montreal, with their friend Mark Lawson (Peter Gabriel, Colin Stetson) engineering and with a small group of session players (including members of The Unicorns and Islands) bringing the Rogers’ songs to life. For once they showed up at the studio without completed songs, just fragments and ideas that they were prepared to follow in any direction. “We wanted this record to be very forward-thinking but also very positive about what we’re saying to people. When we recorded the vocals for ‘Future,’ we decided that we were going to smile throughout the entire track,” says Addison. “Just sing and smile. We were trying to get that joy across.”

As they returned home to finish the album at Primary Sound Studios just outside of Bloomington, the songs took them further and further afield. They mutated and metamorphosed, offering glimpses of unlimited possibilities. “These songs churned for a long time,” says Lewis. “We spent a lot of time thinking about the record and paring it down to the barest essentials. The songs all started one way and ended up sounding completely different.” Their first version of opener “Only Ones” sounded like a blues-rock jam but transformed when they became obsessed with a very particular strain of Thai music. Says Addison, “That first version was not the direction we wanted to go with that song, so we kept going with it. Lew had seen a video of a wedding in Thailand where they have this kind of psychedelic marching band with electric guitar, bass, and a mishmash of percussion.” The final version has an exquisitely rambunctious, unpredictable energy, in playful contrast with the band’s careful, exacting songcraft as they deploy pots-and-pans percussion, runaway strings, a disembodied female duet, and a scribbly guitar lick against Addison’s acrobatic falsetto.

Few songs mutated as completely or as organically as “Hey Margarita,” the album’s raucous first single. It opens with a verse about crashing your Toyota into a paint store and enjoying the swirls of thick color on your windshield, but the brothers struggled to devise a sound that evoked that colorful surrealism. “It started out as this weird Joe Meek rockabilly thing,” says Lewis. “It wasn’t bad, but it felt like something we’d done before. One day I was messing around with a drum machine and singing over this weird beat, and I realized, that’s where the song needed to go. The next demo ended up sounding like some kind of William Onyeabor African disco song.”

Every song led them down a different winding path, but all of those disparate sounds and styles coalesce into a powerful statement simply because it’s Lewis and Addison singing together. These are songs about moving through loneliness, reaching out into the world to find joy and power in other humans, in other voices. “This record revealed itself to be much more personal than our previous records were,” says Lewis, who between Popular Cycles and Good Songs fell in love, got married, and became a father. “I’ve written character songs in the past, but this time around, it was more literally personal than anything we’d ever done.” He put more of himself in the lyrics, singing “I” instead of “he” or “you.” Case in point: the ecstatic, eccentric “Sound Of The Name,” a hymn of devotion to his wife. “It even has her name in it! I never would have put somebody’s name in a song, but it felt right. When I sang it, it just felt like it was right.”

Good Songs examines a feeling akin to loneliness—what Busman’s Holiday call “only-ness,” the sense that you’re the only one suffering, the only one who’s confused and worried. Addison and Lewis understand that it’s hard to be truly only when you’re singing with someone else. Music is the ultimate cure for that kind of isolation and alienation, not only because it allows them to mix their voices together but because it makes them connect with so many others. “Everybody goes through some of these same changes—personal changes, social changes,” says Addison. “These songs were our way of saying you’re not alone in this jumble. Everybody, including Lew and me, is right there in that same jumble with you.”

That’s why they called it Good Songs. They’re confident in the quality of the album, but even more than that, they envision each song as a force of good in the world. “Six years ago we thought, Let’s just go and have a good time making music,” says Lewis. “That was novel to us. Why did we decide to go down this path of peril and poverty if not to enjoy it?”

credits

released October 13, 2022

All songs & music by Busman’s Holiday - Addison Rogers & Lewis Rogers

Mark Lawson - Producer, sound engineer, & mixing in Montreal, QB
Jake Belser - Additional engineering in Bloomington, IN
Evan Berg - Assistant engineering in Bloomington, IN

Matt Nowlin - String & horn arrangement along with Lewis Rogers

Alex DeTurk - Mastering at The Bunker in Brooklyn, NY
Big Man - Hondo Kirby

Recorded at Sonovox Studios in Montreal, Quebec, CA
and Primary Sound in Bloomington, IN.
Additional recordings made at The Bungalew in Bloomington, IN.

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