What do you do if you’ve just written a resonant song about life under shutdown? If you’re Beth Patterson, you call in a member of the iconic prog-rock band Yes to help you record it.
Anyone who’s seen singer and bouzouki player Patterson perform will know that prog rock is part of her mix– along with Celtic music, original pop and folk songs, traditional adaptations, naughty parody songs and Lord knows what else. But her prog side comes out in the new single “Return to Our Caves”/”This Goes to Eleven”– which follows up her last release, a much-revamped cover of the Rush song “Red Lenses” with Johnny Sketch & the Dirty Notes. “The former will be available Friday on her Bandcamp page— and anyone tempted to buy either single is urged to do so today, while Bandcamp does its monthly day of giving all proceeds to the artists instead of taking a cut.
“Return to Our Caves” is the kind of song a lot of us can use right now: It’s hopeful and compassionate, with a little anger between the lines and a great chorus hook into the bargain. The song initially took shape at her last pre-shutdown gig. “I was playing a sparsely attended Celtic festival in West Texas. And I was hearing people say things like, ‘When my God wants me to come home, maybe that’s my time’. And I started thinking ‘Yeah, but maybe your God doesn’t want you to make other people sick in the process’. But I started writing the song from the perspective that you can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.”
The flipside, true to its Spinal Tap-derived title, is an instrumental in 11/16 time; she wrote it as theme music for a magician that she was scheduled to perform with this year in Guatemala. It too had an unusual origin– in this case she left a set of keys on top of a friend’s printer/scanner, and the resulting beeps had a rhythm she could use. (Roddy Ory and Owen Pascual play suitably tricky drums and bass on this track; also on the single are singer Gena Valentine and Patterson’s husband and sometime musical partner, Josh Paxton on keys).
Enter Billy Sherwood, a California native who’s been part of a few dozen prog-rock supergroups. Originally the bass-playing protege of Yes founder Chris Squire, he took Squire’s slot in the band when Squire became ill and passed away in 2015. He’s been giving bass lessons online during shutdown, and Patterson gifted her friend Gena Valentine– also a sometime backing vocalist, and a major Yes fan– with a lesson. Turned out Sherwood was also available for session work, and he liked Patterson’s single enough to play on both sides– giving a bassline to “Caves” and playing a guitar solo on “Eleven.” Sherwood told her he was aiming for a Beatles bass feel on the A-side, but to her ears (and ours) it still came off very Yes-like. On the flip, his shredding solo comes between a pair of lyrical ones that Patterson plays on bouzouki.
But the prog band closest to her heart will always be Rush, who she discovered when the song “Subdivisions” spoke to her as an eighth-grade misfit. “It was music that made me feel less alone, made me think and made me wonder.” She’s been known to throw one of their “Canadian folk songs” into numerous live sets, and Rush fanship has provided a secret bond between her and a few other local bands. One of those is funky worldbeat band Johnny Sketch & the Dirty Notes, whose bassist Dave Pomerlau is nearly as big a fan. She’s also connected to that band through Paxton, their keyboardist.
So they were a perfect choice when she was looking to throw a different spin on “Red Lenses,” the first Rush song she’s actually recorded. “If you’re doing a Rush song, I feel that you have to absolutely reinvent it or not do it at all. Having the horn section gave it a different life, and it hit me to have the band’s kind of groove supplanting the ’80s synth sounds. It got met with mixed reviews on the Rush forums, because they were still smarting from the loss of Neil [Rush drummer Neil Peart died suddenly in January]. And I knew I couldn’t make it sound like Neil, but I could make it sound like Johnny Sketch as a unit.” Once post-COVID life allows she still plans to release a compilation album called Singles, with the cover art paying homage/parody to Rush’s Signals.
If the virus hasn’t happened she’d be touring a few parts of the world right now– a “first world problem,” she says, but still a problem. Fans can also lend support by catching her webstream shows, the next one happens Saturday from 8-10 p.m CDT through her Facebook page.
