The Plan
“You say ‘I love you’ like a goodbye to an old friend”
A classic song about unrequited love and false confidence, and as usual with my songs, references to themes from a religious upbringing that I’ve shed so many years ago but cannot shake from the deep parts of my brain, especially when it comes to anything creative. Catholicism is a masterful piece of fiction, and it’s hard to stop scooping from that well.
“If the savior comes back and forgets the plan
I’ll whisper gently, while I still can
And sing of temptation,
Spark your fascination,
And give you every chance”
This is a chest-puffing moment: I am the one who can save you, Jesus is not coming back, and I will bring the deliverance of love and forgiveness.
“I keep your old notes closed
In boxes deep inside a closet.
So, when I need them, I know
They’re always right there where I hid ‘em”
This line is just true. The person knows who they are. My cat knocked down said box one night, the one-year anniversary of my mother’s death at about the same time she died, and I woke up and my visitation pass to the hospital had fallen out, amongst notes from the previously-alluded-to person. Strange. I wrote this in the following days.
“If the savior comes back and forgets the plan
I’ll be there to help you, for as long as I can
And sing of starvation,
Spark humiliation,
And give you my last chance”
This is the point in the song where the ridiculousness of the first chorus comes into play and an admission of mortality.
Junkie Love
“We bleed a happiness too unfamiliar to see”
Ahh, another unrequited love song, this time encompassed in being too late, and biting off more than one can chew. I look back on relationships that I’ve had that were always viewed as a temporary engagement, only to feel that I was happy then without knowing. The feeling is too estranged from my memory to know it when it sits next to me, smiling and assuring of better things to come.
“It’s a Junkie Love,
Couldn’t get enough to keep it all for one
It’s a cover-up
And now you’re stuck
You cut ‘em up, said you don’t touch the stuff
Now we’re back to where we started
You had enough
Went and called my bluff”
This is about…. Infidelity. Or at least, the inability to commit - although I say I want to get married and have children. The line “You cut ‘em up, said you don’t touch the stuff, now we’re back to where we started” sounds negative, but it's actually romanticizing my dreams of having a kid and thinking of feeding my niblings and laughing with them as they just play with the food. It’s a fond moment for me, always.
“Stop the river and bury me
In a gold and silver effigy
Release the river over me
Never find my body underneath”
I was listening to a Stuff You Should Know episode about an ancient leader that was worshiped and his people stopped the flow of the river to bury him in a beautiful, heavy coffin made of gold and silver, then let the river flow over him so that he would be part of the river forever and never found. I don’t recall who this was, and looking it up I see many legends of leaders being buried in this fashion. Either way, I thought it was absolutely fascinating.
Ancient History
This was an attempt to not write about myself, or anything truthful for that matter. I wanted to invoke some sort of story that feels larger than a relationship between me and someone else now. This song also came to light out of an unrequited love.
“You went beggin’ for fools gold
And came back in a lasso,
Spent the summer all alone,
All kept up in a foxhole
You were living long ago
Then came the big snow,
Spent the ice age all froze,
Emerged as a fossil
But that’s ancient history
And you will find it hard even just to believe
In something you can’t see
Is it god or make-believe?”
Another stab at the Catholic part of my Irish-Catholic childhood. I loved the imagery of feeling like you’ve lost someone and drifted so far apart that the years have changed memories into dream-like sequences.
“Tanner, I’ll stop singing about sleep
When you stop singing about teeth
And everybody will get clean
When they are good and ready.”
Someone had told me I sing about sleep too much, which is true, and I believe Tanner agreed when I told them. So I wrote this in spite. The first two lines are dogging him, the next are dogging my old song “Get Clean.” Pretty funny, I think.
Find Your Own Way Home
“You’re not alone,
You’ll find your way home,
The things you can’t say,
They get in the way…
But you’ll be home real soon”
For the purposes of this song, and often in life, home is finding a place where you feel at home. This was written when I had a solid sense of community around me. I was always with some combination of Zito and the Detroit gang or Pat Ray, Gabe Clemens, and Tanner Ellis. It is sort of me speaking to myself, remembering that I can be part of something larger than me.
“Where do they go?
And how do they know
To keep the time,
To stay for a while,
And then find their own way home”
This line is about watching a crowd disperse in groups from a basement show and leaving alone. This does not mean that I am being left behind, rather that I don’t know how to join. The anxiety of being afraid of being alone is isolating enough in itself.
“I tried to drive between the lines,
But the engine’s on fire.
I could never learn how to cross the wires.”
I hate driving and don’t know how to fix cars or wire a car and steal it like a real cool cat. This is a metaphor for focusing on the wrong things in life. I’m trying to drive between the lines, that’s great. However, the bigger problem is that the engine itself is on fire.
True North
My father, James Edward Haggerty, wrote True North. I can only speak to what this song means to me. I remember hearing this song for the first time, and I thought it was so genius.
“A lover’s heart’s a shaky compass,
And True North is hard to find”
My whole family loves this song and it was the favorite for me to play in his band with him, or more accurately to this recording- us two singing in the music room at the condo. Never perfect, I could never figure out how to harmonize with him. He was a much better singer than I am.
This recording was made on an EP my father and I made under our traditional Irish surname, O’Hegarty. We recorded it together, with Sean of course, and I have always loved it. When he passed, I knew I wanted to bring this song into my next record. I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do. At first, I thought we will keep his voice and I will play a bunch of instruments and get the band in, etc. Which I would like to do eventually. But, the right thing felt like doing what would sound just like we did when we would play together and just adding my vocals to the song. It originally had my father on guitar and singing and me on banjo. We kept all of that and added me singing along. It’s hard for me to listen to, at times, because I remember that feeling. But, that’s also why I put it on this record - so we could have us singing together forever. I and our family will always be using True North as a phrase for thinking of our future, and we always will have him in our minds.
Never Suffer Fools
“Never suffer fools, it comes to haunt you,
Never come back home, I swear to god
I don't make the rules, but you should listen,
I will not repent when I’ve done wrong”
I heard the phrase “never suffer fools” on Dax Shepherd’s podcast when Charlie Day said that Rob McElhenney never suffers fools. Had no clue what it meant, though it was catchy. I had this little Slaughter Beach, Dog-inspired progression and I just rolled with whatever came out of my mouth as I played. The second line is just a brief reference to being kicked out of the house for various reasons as a teenager when staying with my mother. The final line of the first bit here is a reference to how hard it can be to admit guilt. It all has more religious themes to it in my brain that are portrayed here and reminds me of being in church in high school and just feeling strange.
“Pat knocks on my door to walk to school now,
Everyday from third to eighth grade
I wish I could turn back the dial,
I wish we were playing ball today”
This is mostly true, except it was more like I was ready first and sat in Pat’s living room for a few minutes before we left for school. That doesn’t sound as catchy, though. We would walk to and from school together everyday, often bringing along some of the other Redford boys on the way home for backyard soccer in the fall and snowball fights in the winter. Of course, anytime the weather allows you’d find at least one of us playing basketball in the street or in Pat’s backyard. These memories are some of my favorite in the world, and there are so many more I could share about the Redford crew. Love to Pat Maher, Collin Kelly, and Tommy Brady a.k.a Backpack Kid Quarterback TOOOOOMMMMMMM BRADY!
“In every nightmare, holding daddy dying
Everyday I’m waking up in tears.
From picking up Petoskey rocks with grandma,
To counting up the years since she’s been here
She forgets what we sound like
Always tries to get the names right
We always cry at the right times
No one knows that it’s just fright”
I wrote this all before my dad passed away. I would have these dreams that I was sitting with him in his bed, talking about music or history. He would have a heart attack in my arms and I would watch him die. These nightmares haunted me. Then, that’s what happened to him, although not in my arms. It feels so eerie to have written this then.
I wrote the rest of these lyrics about my Grandma Jan, who I knew was going to pass anytime. She had been sick with Alzheimer’s for long enough, and she was ready. Sometimes it feels like the decade-plus that it has been since we were picking up Petoskey stones and polishing them between bowls of Moose Tracks, other times it feels like yesterday that I was lying to her that I was old enough to drive and smoke, and she believed me.
She used to collect McDonald’s toys and a bunch of other kid’s movie knick-knacks and things like that. I remember being very young and sword-fighting her on the hill behind her house. I remember playing with her little 7 Dwarves characters and pretending to be Sleepy. I remember the time my mom called her and the face she made when she realized my grandma did not remember who my mother was anymore. Now that the suffering is over, it is all something I can look at and find the beauty in.
I Know A Way Around Heaven’s Gates
This song came into my head when thinking about religion, again. Part of me always has these spite-filled thoughts going through my head. I thought of the devil, and how he was once an angel. And it popped in my head- “he says, ‘I know a way around heaven’s gates.’”
So I started writing that, and I knew that line would be repeated bigger and bigger, so I had to figure out a verse. In true Ship & Sail fashion, I thought about Redford again, my Irish-Catholic neighborhood that bore these ideals, and the schools that engraved the stories in our brains. Nostalgia.
“I know my way around these streets that I came about,
These streets that I came about”
Next is really a dream of love and I can see it in my mind as part of a drama movie. I don’t know why, but it’s always given me butterflies. It’s cute and innocently playful.
“I chase you ‘round like a child,
You run around goin’ wild
I spin around, you stay a while
I spin around, you stay a while”
Later is the line that I love the most in the song because it embodies me being in a world where there is a devil and heaven and he’s gotten into my head and is responsible for the bad decisions in my life. I suppose- acting catholic again. The book part is especially real, I want to be an avid reader so badly, but it takes work for me to get into it and not feel like it’s homework. I’ve gotten better since writing this song, but it is a line I am proud of.
“Now Lucifer sleeps in my head
And he’s read all the books I said I would back then
And says ‘don’t waste your time, they’re just what you’d expect.
No, don’t waste your time, they’re just what you’d expect.
He says ‘I know a way around heaven’s gates’”
This is how I can cheat my way into the promised land, and get around the gates.
Pushing Daisies
I wrote the chorus first in this song, like I generally do. It was a tough one for me to build the verses because I like the chorus so much, I wanted to stay with that catchy melody. The chorus came into my head after talking with someone about that old show that I think only lasted one season, called Pushing Daisies. My dad and I loved that show, and we always said that it was before its time and would work now.
“We’ll be pushing daisies, or disintegrating
In the backyard, slow
But I’ll be laying next to you
Like I always was”
The verses are stories made up of different feelings. Beginning with a lovely dream-like scenario of dancing and joking on the beach and going into the sea fully-clothed because who cares and we are in this moment together. Our clothes get covered in salt-water and sand- a little shell stuck to the elbow of my shirt, the sunset just far enough to where we can’t see very well anymore.
“I think the tide runs high tonight,
Let’s swim while we still can
You made a mess of your mother’s dress
When we crossed from sea to sand
One day you’ll find that between the lines,
The colors seem to shine less bright
And every time that you pray at night,
Your wishes don’t appear in sight”
So I revert back to lack of conformity and religion, so what?
Lovely
Originally the album title, our closer for our shows for the last year of playing shows, probably. A song I cry to while I’m singing, or walk out into the crowd and grab Dylan Grantham by his jacket and sing the hook, or drop to the ground while singing and knock half of the band’s power outlets out of place and lose the bass and lights.
I told Tanner when I began writing a new album that I was working on a new concept for me. I’ve always written about my trauma. On this record, I wanted to write something positive. I called it ‘writing for later.’ I may not feel this way, or even be able to yet, but I chose to believe that it can be better.
I begin, yet again, with unrequited love. However, the line stayed because months after I wrote it, I went down to Bowling Green for a show and saw that the Ohio sign was changed to “Ohio: Find It Here” - I couldn’t help but laugh at yet another coincidence on this record.
