Vinyl to Mp3: Bedhead’s Last Song

Posted on January 10, 2008 at 10:41 am | No Comments

In October of 1998, Trance Syndicate Records released what would become the last recorded song by my beloved Bedhead as the b-side of a 2-song, 10-inch record. While a posthumous, long-distance collaboration with Macha would arrive two years later, the song “Leper” would be the final full-band studio document of Bedhead’s 7-year life.

Here’s what they had to say about the 10″ in the liner notes…

“The only song anyone in our band has ever written in musical notation is “Lepidoptera“, the seventh song on [their final album] “Transaction de Novo”. A few months ago, in a rare serendipitous moment, I turned the pages of this music upside down – the bass clef became the treble clef, the treble became the bass – and played on a keyboard the new formation of notes that appeared on the page. It instantly made sense. It didn’t sound backwards, but it sounded reversed, turned inside out and over all at once. As the reverse of a song lyrically based on perspective, it also seemed musically to be telling the other side of the story: in “Lepidoptera,” the speaker is a person, the object is a moth; in the song that became “Leper,” especially because the music appeared by accident, the speaker seemed to be the moth and the object the former subject. We finished the song based on this idea of reversal, lyrically and musically carrying it to its logical conclusion, and then began to think about another logical conclusion: a song that forms a mirror image of another song is, literally, the perfect b-side, the record turned upside-down.”

Hard to believe it’s been nearly 10 years since Bedhead called it quits, but the decade since has been made much better by the existence of The New Year, the Kadane Brother’s follow-up project. 2008 will, at long last, see the release of their third album.

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