KEEP THE PLACE CLEAN
Bill Lloyd suggested this song idea.  We wrote it at Shoney's in Nashville.  It's Beatle-ish, but it's about a stalker.  The fact that he's only looking for someone to clean his apartment changes the mood from menacing to simply bizarre.

GOOD MORNING GROOVY
We conceived this as a copy of a Japanese band doing a copy of American pop.  A copy twice removed.  The Japanese bands are all about exuberance and enthusiasm.  If you want to see rock'n' roll with all the fun still intact, go see a band like ex-Girl in a small club--you'll realize what the Ramones, Beatles, etc. were really all about in their early days.

NEVER LEARN
A folk/hip-hop ballad, recorded during a Mardi Gras party at Peter Holsapple and Susan Cowsill's house in New Orleans, with Susan and Vicki Petersen providing the "beach girl" harmonies -- headphones may reveal Peter and the members of alt-country band Jolene getting rowdy in the back yard by the light of the tiki torches.
 

THE GIRL WITH THE BLONDE EYE
"Goldfinger" is one of our favorite movies, so we were doing imaginary spy soundtracks long before we saw "Austin Powers".  But we love Austin Powers!  Our favorite track on this cut is Rico's flute part.  He stood like Ian Anderson from Tull when he recorded it.  We were thinking Sergio Mendes and Brasil '66.  Maura plays the popping solo at the end.

FREE
Maura wrote and cut most of this while I was working at a different studio one day.  In "White Album" fashion, I came back and dubbed a few tracks over her parts.  Then we took the tape down to Nashville and added drums in Vince Santoro's living room.  We got a great sound in there with just two overhead mics.  Lots of Hollies influence on this one.

MR. LUCKY MAN
We were walking out of a deli on Bleecker Street in New York about 3 am one morning, when a guy came up to me and said, "Yo, Mr. lucky man!" It resurfaced in Vegas a few months later, when we were surrounded be would-be lucky men, and we felt lucky ourselves.  We renewed our wedding vows at the Elvis Chapel on the strip, and as I donned my polyester leisure suit for the ceremony, I slipped effortlessly into the role of Mr. Lucky Man.

PUT YOUR MIND
We've got a bunch of fans who are in the 12 to 15 year old range.  A lot of them are girls who share Maura's interests in vintage clothes, music, Pokemon, and so forth.  This one is for them.

CANíT KILL HOPE
Written for a British compilation called "Ripples of Hope", that features English, Irish and American artists doing songs about nonviolence.

HERE WITHOUT YOU
The only cover on the album.  We recorded this for a Gene Clark tribute CD, and we did it pretty faithfully, with the addition of the travel alarm clock.  It just fit the tempo perfectly, and suggested the late-nite-lonely feel of the song.

WORLD AWAY
We have an interesting and somewhat spooky snapshot in our collection.  It's a picture that I shot of Maura, sitting in a booth at the Magnolia Cafe in Austin.  The time is about 2 am, and she's smiling like a typical 2 am Magnolia booth dweller.  When we saw the print, we noticed a shadowy figure sitting outside, barely visible through the window.  It's Beth Orton, smoking a cigarette and, I suppose, waiting for someone, or just relaxing in the Austin night air.  She looks almost like a ghost.  Anyway, we treated this song the way William Orbit did her material on "Trailer Park".  Julian Dawson helped out with the lyrics in a hotel room in New Mexico.

IF I WEEP
Maura was collecting isolated "one shot" ideas for song images, and she had a few written on a piece of looseleaf paper that I ran across.  I said, "You should do something with this poem".  She answered, "It's not a poem, it's a bunch of separate images that just happen to be on the same sheet of paper!" We started thinking of it as a poem, and late one night, about halfway across the Mojave Desert, she got the idea to recite it in the middle of this song.

DOWN, DOWN, DOWN
We were thinking about recording an old, eerie folk song called "Nottamun Town".  It's in 9/8, and I had already recorded an instrumental track, using a hollow log, brought back from the Phillippines by Maura's brother, as the main instrument.  I played it for her just as she was finishing "The Shipping News", and she wrote the lyric right on the spot.  A rare example of the Kennedys being pretty dark.

STRANGERS
We wrote the melody for this at a little coffeeshop in Brattleboro, Vermont, and carried it on the road with us.  When we traveled out to Roswell, New Mexico, to do a little recreational UFO spotting, it became the perfect setting for the lyric, which we recorded in the closet of our hotel room.