The
Puppet Master"The
Puppet Master" continues the journey into being lost begun in "Nowhere".
Sun wrote it on January 31st, 1999 as he continued his own personal Spin
Girl Spin. Only now there was no focus...no go-go job, no drag family,
only a few (very faithful) friends. Sun is pretty embarrassed about and
sources most of his phobias and anxieties to this period in his life.
It was actually kind of confrontational for him to put this song on the
album.
As easy as it was to write - both lyrics and melody came quickly - it
was as difficult to arrange. The drums didn’t want to be played. It cried
"No Guitars!" Sun wanted the verses to be eerie and the chorus
to be perky otherwise the song might come out sounding dreary and ominous.
Once a groove for the chorus was laboriously selected Dan thought up the
dramatic timpani and tom hits in the verses. It started to come a bit
together when the organ parts were added. These parts were as difficult
to birth as the drums. At this point Sun felt that the whole thing was
still too creepy. The eerie-ness and drama of the verses would only work
if the chorus was sufficiently sillyfied. The song materialized with so
much difficulty that there was actually a point when Sun looked at the
playlist for the album and said the package could survive without it but
this whole process was certainly not about abandoning difficult children.
It was more about the opposite, bringing out the best in them and resurrecting
some of the forgotten ones.
Dan had been thinking of whistles in unison with the chorus melody but
Sun didn’t like it and suggested answer whistles and whistled one that
Dan liked. Dan then created the other answer whistle part. O.K...it still
wasn’t silly enough but the lead vocal hadn’t even been sung yet. Sun
started thinking 'la-la's' but first the instrumental section had to be
addressed. While they had been working on all the other parts he kept
poking at Dan every so often when the instrumental section would pass
by with remarks like "So, do I get a string quartet here?" and
"This is where the people in period drag who are done up like puppets
do the minuet and they’ll need a string quartet to minuet to". He’d
then proceed to do a little mock minuet.
A day or two later Dan told Sun the bad news. It might cost double the budget. Then Sun asked if it had to be a quartet all playing at once...were they all going to be on one track or would it be multi-tracked? To which Dan responded, "Duh, and I know the two perfect people to play it and they can play two parts each!" and it wound up costing the original budget. As soon as these parts were recorded Dan said he was going to have just the strings and the whistles in the break section. The first time he played it that way, Sun was in heaven!
The lead and harmony vocals were sung and now to the task of getting the chorus as silly as possible. Sun started la-la-ing and Dan picked up the cue and helped invent just the right parts. The last things were the two little high aahh's in the out choruses which Sun insisted on singing even though he could barely squeak out a falsetto being throaty from the chest cold he had through at least half of the singing on the album. But he persevered. The Puppet Master was the last song that was mixed and as Dan was tweaking some things, Sun was sitting on the couch with Garry who said something like "I love those little Brian Wilson inspired aahhs at the end, what a nice touch." Brian Wilson? Sun was about as flattered as he could ever be.
