Tune Tag #38 with Britta Pejic, Pt. 2: Small Faces, Stereophonics, Darlene Love, The Crystals, and Britta's Original Songs!

A Tune Tag first! Singer/songwriter, Britta, will only be sending me songs she wrote and performed! I have all of recorded history from which to cull songs I send her! Enjoy Britta's new EP here, too!

Hi, Britta! Wag, You’re It!

Tune Tag proudly welcomes back singer/songwriter,

Britta Pejic

of BrittaRiffindots!

Last week,

Jeremy Shatan

of AnEarful Tune Tagged with us! Find that here.

Next week,

Penny Kiley

of Penny Kiley’s music writing takes her Tune Tag turn!

👉Tune into Britta’s first Tune Tag foray from back in September:

Tune Tag #6 with Britta Pejic, Pt. 1: Bowie, Small Faces, U2, Chris de Burgh & More!

FRONT ROW & BACKSTAGE is also proud to celebrate the release of Britta’s brand new EP, She Ate My Red Glasses (linked elsewhere in this Tune Tag)!

🎉TODAY’S TUNE TAG BONUS: We shuffled the deck of Tune Tag cards, had each participant pick one, and Brad drew the Tune Tag Wild Card!

Britta will only be responding with songs she wrote, performed, and sang, exclusively!

Britta: Before getting started, let me tell you a little about how these tracks came to be. Gather ‘round, one and all! Some tracks came out upon the release of my album Latitude Bera (2020), which is Basque for “same latitude.”

When I moved to France in 2016, I happened to settle in the town of Hendaye in the Basque Region, which had the same latitude as Portland, Maine, the town where I was living and the town where I grew up. I slid East at 43°! [Brad: Wow, that sounds chilly! Hope you took a good coat!]

All of the songs from this album were written at my home in Hendaye using GarageBand. Feeling woeful that I’d never find someone to help clean up these piles of files, I met Lole! We crossed paths at a local Hendaye hangout and he told me he was a sound engineer! I cornered the poor fella and told him ALLLL about my project. He must’ve thought “who is this crazy American?!??”

He gave me his business card. His address on the card was almost the same address as mine! Lole lived right across the street! We were neighbors? Not only that, we were born the same week!!! Thus, a musical partnership was forged! We’ve been working together since 2019, even from thousands of miles away!

Britta, on her new She Ate My Red Glasses EP:

Another batch of songs have been stockpiled since Latitude Bera was released. They were made in the same “kitchen,” as it were, with Lole in his studio. Other musicians from both sides of the Atlantic have joined as well including Jon Eviti from the East, and Jason Phelps, Joe Beninati from the west, plus lots of other friends on backing vocals and clappage!

These newer songs are slowly being released throughout this year under the project name Urte Naturala, which in Basque means “calendar year,” and, just so you know, the newer songs are all being released under the name Riffindots-my nom de plum.

I’m moving away from my first and last name to protect the innocent, or rather so that my kids can go about their business. What does Riffindots mean? It’s a song. And I chose that name because it’s the first thing that came to mind when I had to “save as.”

Sure it rhymes with Dippin’ Dots (those space-aged ball bearing-sized ice cream pellets that give your tongue freezer burn. Delicious!), but it also rhymes with the Basque name of my kid’s middle school in Hendaye which was called “Irandatz,” which I nicknamed Dippin’ Dots, so I guess, inadvertently, I came up with Riffindots because of Dippin’ Dots. It also rhymes with Gryffindor, but that’s a whole other unrelated can of ballgames!!

Britta’s song #1 sent to Brad: “Everytime/Forced Perspective”

Britta’s rationale: I cast a wide net here: This song covers lots of ground. Plenty to work with. Lots of supplies. Reams of fabric. Skeins of yarn. Plenty of lumber. Fresh pots of paint. There are classic rock motifs all throughout. If you’re a Who fan, you know (IYAWFYK).

If you’re a fan of Arthur Lee, you know even better (IYAFOALYKEB). Anyway, moving along-screeching backing vocals. The crazy woman on the roller coaster in the background-Edith Bunker I call that voice-that’s me. I think I remember scaring my kid and friends when I recorded that. Lots of lava soaked guitars and thrumming bass. It’s gotta conjure something for you, Brad. But just what could it be? 

Plus it’s a double helix of a song. It’s a Two-fer. Also a hackneyed classic rock radio motif as in Two-fer Tuesday! It goes from volcanic and Psychedelic and settles into an Americana-ish song. Just what will catch Brad’s ear?

Brad’s song #1 sent to Britta: Stereophonics, “Local Boy in the Photograph,” 1997

Stereophonics, late-’90s (l-r): bassist, Richard Jones, singer/guitarist, Kelly Jones, drummer, Stuart Cable. Never a rag to lean charitable when snark was nearby, Rolling Stone once asked the rhetorical question: “Does America need a dumbed-down Radiohead with Oasis bravado? Stereophonics are as useful as a fake-plastic wonderwall.” In a January 2022 interview with Loudersound.com, Kelly Jones spoke of his writing ‘Local Boy’: “I didn’t want to make the song a morbid thing. It became more of an homage to him; a celebration of his life. I remembered all the kids going to the place where he died, putting down flowers and spending all their nights there drinking and talking. It was a very descriptive, almost poetic song, describing the seasons, how the air smells, clocks going back, all that kind of stuff.”📸Tim Roney/Getty Images

Britta’s response: Shit, that’s a sad song!! This track was never on my radar until today. I missed the train on this one. And sadly, the song recounts the tragic death of a local boy hit by a train. He would be the boy in the photograph, right? Very descriptive. Friends gather after the death of the boy. Seasons change and come back around, and so do their wafts and familiar smells-the ones that remind of someone’s passing. Beautiful lyrical touch.

Brad chose the photo-TRoPE as the departure point. “Everytime/Forced” perspectives IS about photography. Kind of about someone in a photo being dead (see below). But I long to exist in that liminal haze of old film stock. This song has “anemoia”.

For a while, I was fascinated by 19th and 20th century photography. Perhaps because I once had a mad crush on an art history professor, and I hung on his every word of every lecture, many of which included references to early photography. So, there is reference to British photographer Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879) and her ethereal images of children portrayed as angels.

Julia Margaret Cameron (l), and front cover of a recently published collection.

There is also a nod to Walter Benjamin and his essay, “The work of art in the age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Oh, and of course Man Ray, and the myth that the solarization effect in photography was discovered when a mouse entered a darkroom while a photo was being developed. The lights were turned on abruptly and voila! That over-saturated silvery effect was born. Also, I am fascinated by how, in most old pictures, particularly Daguerreotypes, the people in the photos are long dead:

A Memento mori that one day, everyone pictured in our iPhone photo libraries will have vanished and a new media will have taken over. 

Brad’s rationale: A fascinating first song from Britta! A medley of sorts, two songs with different feels, and I caught a mention of “There’s no one alive who sends pictures like that” and “with old photographs you can only surmise.”

I purposely did not ask Britta for printed lyrics. I wanted to go with what I heard (or thought I heard), along with how she presented the lyrics in her music. With these notions of photographs, I found a band and song I’d never heard or heard of before, the Welsh band, Stereophonics, and their “Local Boy in the Photograph,” whose video seems to lean on the photo elements of not only various stills, but screen shots, with some seeming to be distorted a bit almost to the point of forced perspective.

Turns out Britta’s not the only single artist with new music being released! Stereophonics lead singer/guitarist, Kelly Jones, has his spankin’ new album, Inevitable Incredible (shown above) dropping May 3, ‘24!

Britta’s song #2: “Sebago Lumbago,” 2020

Brad’s response: I looked it up, and Sebago is both (and corporately separate) a shoe company and a brewery! The vast internet claims that “lumbago is an outdated medical term that describes pain in the lower back region. This region centers around the lumbar area of the spine,” the internet proceeds to assert, “which reaches from the lowest rib down to the buttocks. Today, most medical professionals (including mine) will use the term, ‘lower back pain,’” at which point I’m inclined to whine, “Hey, Doc, slow down with those technical terms, will ya?!”

So, if I can zero in on Britta’s vibe on this one, the song’s protagonist is suffering from lumbago lower back pain, and cares a lot less because he’s blitzed on beer, and he’s wearing comfortable, high-end footwear. Am I close, Britta?

The music is stunning: both sophisticated and catchy, but doesn’t sidestep what younger audiences are craving. And, to begin the song with such a strong, mid-tempo drum passage, and fill her final 12 seconds with the delicacy of what sounds like chimes, acoustic guitar, and electric piano (with vibrato) is really creative (and effective)!

Britta’s rationale: This song is about ghosts! I’m thinking about the boy in the photograph. His presence along the same place where he died on the train tracks. There is also a presence in “Sebago Lumbago”: A family member passed away in a summer cabin up at Sebago Lake in Maine. It has been in my family since the 1950’s.

I’ve always been a little scared of staying overnight there, even though the incident happened before I was born. But there is also something else creepy-adjacent for me about this lake. I had a bizarre dream about trying to avoid a certain corner of the lake, as I knew at the bottom of it was the glowing head of Abraham Lincoln!!

Here is a very rudimentary video I made of “Sebago Lumbago” which is chock full of images of the Basque coast:

You may catch a glimpse of me picking my teeth with a Makila, a Basque walking stick with a dangerous spike concealed in its handle. This object is  not recommended for air travel! 

Brad’s song #2: Small Faces, “Lazy Sunday,” 1968