Jennifer Cat enjoys warm sunbeams, following laser pointers, things with bells on, and falling asleep literally wherever. She is definitely a human. She also likes playing bass, guitar, and singing, and editing idol board! Jennifer is so proud to be a part of this beautiful, international, wonderful, constantly evolving band, and hopes you enjoy hearing about it (enough to join us maybe?…) You can find her on Twitter @CattiferJen.

This episode of idol board was hosted and edited by BONES, produced by Tangereen Velveteen, transcribed by Merry, and written by Aoife and Tangereen Velveteen. Find all episodes and transcripts of idol board at fourth-strike.com/podcast and follow @idolboard on Twitter for updates. Get all episodes plus bonuses by supporting Fourth Strike on Patreon.

Listen to “solar eclipse” by the garages on Blandcamp:

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Episode Transcript

BONES:

Hey everybody! BONES here. Quick content warning for this episode. During the interview there are discussions involving mentions of ableism, the concept of death, and reaction and handling of COVID-19, especially in regard to the United Kingdom. Um, so for those who need a heads up or would like to skip those sections, we have the timestamps for that conversation in the episode description, as well as in our transcript, uh, so that you have a heads up on it. Uh, with that said, enjoy! [The conversation mentioned begins at 19:47 and ends at 26:15]

[musical intro plays]

ANNOUNCER:

You’re listening to a Fourth Strike production.

[The end of the musical intro plays, followed by the beginning of ‘solar eclipse’. The vocals fade out while the instrumentals continue playing under the conversation.]

BONES:

Hello and welcome to idol board! I’m BONES and I use they/them pronouns. In this podcast, I’ll be interviewing members of the garages about their songs, the creation process, and possible inspirations. My guest for this episode is garages band member jennifer cat. Thanks for coming on jennifer cat! Can you tell us your pronouns, your pre-song ritual, and what song you’ll be talking about with us today?

JENNIFER CAT:

Yeah, hi! Um, my pronouns are she/her, uh, my pre-song ritual is… a nice cup of tea, because I’m a stereotype, and uh, today I’ll be talking about the song ‘solar eclipse’ from the album ‘#14’.

BONES:

Awesome! Alright, uh, so first off, when and why did you join the garages?

JENNIFER CAT:

So I joined the garages… Oh wow, no, you’ve got me saying “guh-RAH-ges”--

BONES:

[laughing] Oh, yeah.

JENNIFER CAT:

[laughing] Terrible, okay.

BONES:

I guess you usually call it the “GAIR-uh-ges”, huh.

JENNIFER CAT:

“GAIR-uh-ges”, yeah. So, yeah, so I joined the garages… it was around Season 11? Um, I’d watched the People Make Games video about Blaseball, and just thought, gotta get in on that, that looks great. So I was sort of aware from the beginning that the garages the band existed because they were briefly mentioned in that video and I thought that that was just so cool. So yeah, I, I kind of got in on Blaseball, joined the Discord, kind of vaguely mentioned in the Garages chat “I love the fact that you make music that’s so cool”, um, and mentioned that I like played a couple instruments and someone was like “oh you gotta, y’know, check out the sidecord and mention it” and like literally the day after I’d joined I said “oh you know if anyone ever wants bass or guitar on a track, um, let me know” and immediately two people asked me to be on their songs [BONES laughing] it was kind of, there was a, a lot fewer people at the time and I think they were, um, short on bassists especially, so, yeah, yana and em grace both messaged me and I ended up, I think like, a couple days later on their tracks on, on ‘DEICIDE’ which is the, the first album that I was on, maybe... four days after I’d joined Blaseball. Which is a bit of a wild ride, um, and then yeah, the end of that week, there was obviously the ‘DEICIDE’ premiere and also the heckdang show on the same day and so that was a real, like, that was a big day, that was a big week for the garages and I’d literally just joined and it was just this wild ride. Um, and yeah, it’s been great ever since.

BONES:

That’s awesome. So, what are your musical and compositional backgrounds?

JENNIFER CAT:

Yeah! Most of my experience was when I was quite a bit younger, when I was growing up, my dad played guitar and I thought that was so cool so I, I wanted to learn as well. The sort of main band that I was in when I was a teenager from about, I was maybe 15 to 17ish, uh, we kept changing genres, so we started off as a bit of a like indie band and we kind of decided that we wanted to be a bit more like Muse and then by the end I think we were like a funk band, so it was, it was good to get the experience in those different genres. I was in, I was like in the worship band at church and I was like in choirs and things like that and like ultimately I kind of decided that I was gonna distance myself from the church but that experience was still really great, because it taught me a lot about things like harmony and improvisation, and y’know, it taught me a lot about my voice, and, and kind of how, how to use it. But that was kind of when I was a bit younger and I’d say for about a decade I haven’t really done very much at all, just kind of y’know, played for myself, uh, noodled around occasionally, but really, the catalyst for that has been joining the garages. Having this sort of incredible community of really talented people just around all the time, um, is so inspiring, so that’s, that’s been the main kind of driver for my more recent compositional musical adventures.

BONES:

So, speaking more specifically on ‘solar eclipse’, like, what was the process like for making the song, like how did it start?

JENNIFER CAT:

So yeah, with all of my songs, I think, uh, they usually start by me having just a melody, or a lyric, or something in my head and I go and record it into my voice notes app, or write it down in my notes, and then, you know, when I’m sitting down to think about what I might want to write, I look through them and I’d say nine times out of ten, it’s rubbish, [they both laugh] and sometimes you know I’ll come across something and be like “oh, actually, yeah, maybe that could be something” and for this song specifically it was kind of a patchwork of a few different ideas that I’d had at different times. I’d written this song that was, I think it was just a melody, but it, it was this kind of hymn thing, like a church hymn almost? [A voice note of jennifer cat humming a melody plays]

JENNIFER CAT:

And it was very like, somber, and I, I liked it, I liked the way that the melody sort of flowed, but, it, it didn’t really feel like it was going anywhere, and then, completely separately, I’d written this quite like jangly, like happy tune that had lyrics that were like “You just gotta keep on going” like, it was completely different. [they both laugh]

[A voice note of jennifer cat singing and strumming plays]

JENNIFER CAT:

And I found some like chords for it, um, that I really liked, uh, that ended up being the chords in, in ‘solar eclipse’, and then I wrote a sort of little bridge bit for it, and I was like “well actually, this is starting to sound maybe a little bit sadder, um, maybe I don’t wanna do this jangly thing.” And so I ended up putting those two ideas together. The first thing that I came up with, like, that actually made it into the song, was the, was the “ooh”s, the, the first set of “ooh”s, and then the chords that descend, so you’ve got this descending melody, and then the chords are descending... [A voice note of the melody and the “ooh”s plays, followed by the melody and “ooh”s from ‘solar eclipse’]

JENNIFER CAT:

From that, I think I just kind of played around with it until I found something that I liked, um, and, uh, you know, at the same time I had a vague idea about writing a song about the fact that solar eclipses were back, in Season 12 ‘cause it had just been after the, the long siesta, and so yeah those sort of ideas all kind of came together from this frankenstein of different parts of songs that I actually didn’t like very much, um. and put, put the best bits together to make something that I really liked.

BONES:

So this song, along with a lot of your other work is really heavily structured, um, around vocal harmonies. Can you talk about the process of like, working on those arrangements?

JENNIFER CAT:

Mhm! Um, I love harmonies. Like I’m an absolute sucker for a good close harmony, it just, y’know, speaks to my soul in some way. In some ways it’s quite instinctive because of the kind of music that I have always listened to, like, I dunno, like Simon & Garfunkel, and, I dunno, Destiny’s Child, when I was a kid, I was always like singing along with all the different parts. In some ways I kind of don’t have a particular process. What I do is to create a full scratch track, so just like a full singthrough, even if that’s not gonna be the final, uh, vocal take. But I’ll just sing through the whole song.

BONES:

Yeah.

JENNIFER CAT:

So I compose the entire song first, with the melody, and the chords. And then, um, you know, I knew that there was bits where I kind of wanted to play around with some harmonies. So yeah, once I’ve created that full, uh, scratch track, um, that, that kind of demo for myself, I’ve got the full melody there and so I'll listen to the parts where I’m like “I really feel like a harmony would work really well here.” I’ll sing it through, like maybe sing a harmony over the top of it and then listen back to it and think, you know, does this work, and if it doesn’t quite work or if there’s like one or two notes that are a little bit shaky, or I’m not entirely sure where they’re supposed to be, I might get the keyboard out and like actually figure out “okay what is that note” and then like what chord is underneath it, and then, you know, find the note that goes with it, but, but for the most part it’s just I’ll, I hear it, and then I sing along to it with something that I think sounds nice. Um, and then kind new for this song, something I haven't really done before was sort of improvise, like, entirely improvise sections of singing, um, where I just had the chords running, underneath, just in a section, and then sang whatever came to my mind.

BONES:

Oh my god.

[A section from ‘solar eclipse’ plays]

JENNIFER CAT:

That was a really cool thing that I knew that I wanted to do, but actually the process was very much like, record a whole bunch of stuff, and then listen back to it and take out the bits that do not work, so it’s a kind of “throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks” approach to vocal harmony, [BONES laughs] but I think it works really well in the final thing and what I then did was with the, the melodies that I decided I really liked, I listened back to those, and then did harmonies over those melodies so you’ve got these sort of like really interesting sort of melodies that kind of interplay with each other in different ways and... yeah I really liked how it came out.

BONES:

I know I put it in the, in the sheet that I sent you prior to the interview, do you know how many vocal parts there are in this?

JENNIFER CAT:

Yeah, um, oh gosh, I should have counted this beforehand. [BONES laughs] There are... sixteen vocal tracks, um, but they’re not all playing at the same time so they have like slightly different effects on them and things, and I think, the, I think the most tracks, vocal tracks that are playing at one time, I think there’s maybe 13. That’s in the kind of very climax of the, the song, I’ve got, I think, a melody, and then a double for the melody, and then a harmony, I think I’ve got two harmonies at that point, and then like a whole bunch of “ooh”s behind it. [BONES laughs] Um, so, yeah, that, that’s, it’s kind of a very, like, rich part of the song. But yeah I didn’t really think about it like while I was doing it, I was just like “ooh okay and then I could do this on top of that and then I could do this on top of that” I wasn’t like “I’m gonna make a 13 part harmony” like… [Jennifer Cat laughs] The guitars actually, in the final track, um, some of them are me, but actually, quite a lot of them are Rolo, who, who is my partner, um, and is just a guitar wizard, I don’t know how he does it. He just does amazing things with like layering different guitar parts, and then panning them so that it sort of like, it fills up the space so--

BONES:

Yeah!

JENNIFER CAT:

--so I just really love the, the way that it sounds like when I listen back to the demo it just sounds really thin, um, you know hearing the final product with like these like, really expansive guitars is just amazing, so, I’m glad that I kept the guitar in, there was a brief moment where I was just mixing the vocals and I was hearing it a cappella and I was like “oh maybe this could be an acapella song” and I think it probably does work quite well as an a cappella song but actually in the end the guitars do add this sort of like, richness and, and fill out the space much more than... how would you put it, like the... cause my voice is quite high so like, you wouldn’t, without the guitars you wouldn’t get those like bass tones, um, that that end up, yeah, kind of filling out the space.

BONES:

Uh, shifting gears a little bit, did you have any particular like, inspirations on this track musically or otherwise?

JENNIFER CAT:

Um, I didn’t write the song kind of thinking “oh I really want it to sound like this” or like with any particular inspirations in mind at the time, but I think once I’d written it, and listened back to it, it sort of became clear that like “oh right I see where I've got this from”, um, in fact, there is a part of it that I absolutely did not realize I was doing at the time but the, the sort of the bit that I was talking about earlier with the ascending melody, and the “ooh”s, and the descending chord progression is pretty much exactly the same, there’s a guitar part in a Ray LaMontagne song called ‘Hold You In My Arms’, I think [BONES laughs] and the beginning of that track is, like, it’s the same melody [both laughing] but I mean it’s just like an ascending melody up the scale, but it was just really interesting how I like, listened back to it and I was like “oh that’s what it sounds like”, [BONES laughs] and then yeah apart from that, I think the influences here are kind of just bands I really like listening to, like, The Staves are incredible they’re uh, sisters and they just like harmonize with each other and it’s so natural and so beautiful, um, and other bands like Julien Baker, and Phoebe Bridgers, and their band boygenius, and kind of as I said before like, Simon & Garfunkel, like their incredibly close vocal harmonies in thirds and then also dodie, I think, as well? She has like a really beautiful way of like singing in this very soft voice that I'd never really thought, I’d, I'd always associated if you’re a good singer, then you’re a powerful singer but like, I think kind of listening to her music I've realized that like, actually there’s different emotions that you can get out of your voice and it doesn’t always have to be like a big belt--

BONES:

Yeah.

JENNIFER CAT:

--you know you can use it in different ways. And then I think the final influence that I kind of realized after the fact was, um, I use -- this is really specific -- but I use a minor IV chord where your ear would expect a major IV chord--

BONES:

Huh.

JENNIFER CAT:

--which is not something that I like conceptualized in those terms when I was writing it because I'm not really a music theory person--

BONES:

Yeah.

JENNIFER CAT:

--but there’s this thing where like your ear kind of hears the chord and goes “ooh that’s different”, um, and I was talking about it with someone, after the fact, and they were like “oh yeah that’s like the british chord”, like, “that’s a british thing, [BONES laughs] you know”, I was like “is it? I didn’t realize.” You know what, that actually got me to google it, you don’t have to include this bit, but I thought it was really interesting and I found this reddit thread in music theory, and someone was like “Why does the minor IV chord sound so nice?” or something like that and this comment says “Using the minor IV chord (e.g. F minor when in C major) has that deep sentimental feeling because F minor doesn’t belong in C major; it belongs in C minor, so you get this moment of reflection, as if you’ve been chilling in the sunlight, and then you consider the darkness.” [both laughing periodically] And I was like I wrote about a solar eclipse and used this chord, and apparently it’s the chord that means that you feel like you’ve been chilling in the sunlight and suddenly you reflect on the darkness?

BONES:

Oh my god…

JENNIFER CAT:

I thought that was so interesting.

BONES:

Speaking of, too, there is a joke within the garages that our songs are totally about Blaseball and absolutely nothing else, [Jennifer Cat laughs] even though very often it is to the contrary, um, as far as ‘solar eclipse’ goes, uh, thematically, and like lyrically, what, what does the song mean to you, like both within, and like outside of the scope of Blaseball?

JENNIFER CAT:

Yeah, yeah, there, there is, there is that kinda, that joke because I think with a lot of garages songs in general you know we, we use this as kind of, we use Blaseball as a, a writing prompt and then it kind of expands from there but, having said that I think the other songs that I've written very much haven’t been anything but Blaseball songs? [BONES laughs] Like, ‘rooting for you’ is just a bunch of vegetable puns and, uh, even ‘parker macmillan iiii’ was like, quite a sad song but it really just came out of me being like “wouldn’t it be really funny if I wrote this incredibly sincere song about the commissioner who only ever tweets “hi best friends” and, and “what”” like, so, you know, this is kind of the first song where I kind of, in earnest, wanted to create a song that was very personal to me.

BONES:

Yeah.

JENNIFER CAT:

Within the lens of Blaseball, I had joined in Season 11, and the only weather in Season 11 had been Sun 2 and Black Hole, which did make for an interesting season. I knew about incinerations, but I'd never personally seen one, um, as much as you can personally see anything in Blaseball. Then, yeah, we had the long siesta, and then, when we came back from that, um, and I was, you know, checking out the website and watching a couple of games, I noticed that, you know, “oh, solar eclipse weather is back” and then thinking about that from the viewpoint of a blaseball player, like any blaseball player, I didn’t like have a specific one in mind and thinking like, what would it be like to, you know, turn up after this, y’know, in-canon decade-long break and then realize, like, we might die.

BONES:

Yeah. [Content warning: Discussion of ableism, the concept of death, and reaction and handling of COVID-19, especially in regard to the United Kingdom begins now.]

JENNIFER CAT:

And like that, that was really the kind of spark of the song and I think that prompted thoughts about like, well how do you, how do you just keep on doing your job like, how do you keep on going just doing normal everyday things when there’s this like looming threat of death. The minute, obviously, the minute I had this thought about how do you keep going and how do you keep going with normal life when there’s the threat of death hanging over you I was like “Oh! Well... that’s the pandemic”, um, I'm personally like a high risk person, I'm a person at high risk of complications, and potentially death, if I were to contract COVID or any respiratory infection, and so it really is this song about just the kind of working through those feelings of just trying to keep on going, and keep on living your life, and doing the things you enjoy doing, when there’s this constant looming threat. And the song’s kind of in three parts, I think, I didn’t really think about this while I was writing it but the, the first part is really kind of like setting the scene, you know, we’re in this blaseball field and suddenly we realize that the sky is going dark and oh gosh we know what this means, it means that we could die, um, and then the second part is like... kind of telling yourself like you just gotta keep on going you know, I, I know everything feels so wrong but, and everything is different, and the world’s turned upside down, but you just, you just have to keep on going, um, and then the third part which is really the like, meat of the song lyrically is the bit where it starts like “I know that the gods don't respond to petitions, but we do our jobs in the worst of conditions” um, you know, “we pitch and we bat and we stare into death” from that part onwards it’s really just the like, raw emotion of like... this sucks.

[The mentioned part of ‘solar eclipse’ plays]

JENNIFER CAT:

Yeah very like, existential scream into the void of like, I'm not really like a particularly angry person or a sad person but like, you know, these, these emotions of like, I think what really sparked them, especially at the beginning of the pandemic when we didn’t really know what was going on... We were getting kind of like rates of death, and things like that, um, in the news and then on like social media, and like the government updates, and things like that and, and the, the rhetoric that was around it at the time was like, “Oh don't worry it’s only elderly, and disabled, and people with underlying conditions that are dying, it’s okay!” And so me being one of those people, was like, “is, is it okay? Like I, I don’t, I would like to live please, I, I'd really like that!” Um, and so yeah, it just kind of, dealing with feelings of like, oh gosh, my, my life is worthless, like I'm considered worthless and you know this is something that, like I could probably rant about for ages but, you know with, with the UK having like, the, a Tory government that like, has constantly displayed that it just does not care about disabled people’s lives--

BONES:

Yeah.

JENNIFER CAT:

--and then that being like amplified during the pandemic. A lot of my anger with that went into this song and specifically in the, the last four lines that I wrote, I kinda got to that part of the song and I'd written the rest of it, and it felt like it was missing something and I almost had to kind of say to myself, like, “you’re still hiding behind this Blaseball metaphor, just write how you feel” and that’s when the kind of like, last four lines came out which, um, start like, um, uh, “I'm tired of wondering how I can manage, if my life’s just acceptable collateral damage, don’t want to be forgotten, don’t want to forgive, is it so bad that I just want to live?” Was like, that’s what I, that’s the core of this song, that’s what I mean when I'm singing this.

BONES:

Yeah.

JENNIFER CAT:

Um, and, yeah, that, it, I think, you know, that feeling of being like, is it acceptable to people if I die [laughing] is so heavy to be talking about on this podcast--

BONES:

Yeah, well yeah, but like…

JENNIFER CAT (simultaneously):

But like, but yeah, that’s, I mean that’s what the song’s about, is like, yeah just feeling like, completely undervalued, um, and, and just kind of saying like, “I'm a person, I exist, is it okay that I wanna live?”

BONES:

Yeah.

JENNIFER CAT:

Like, um, so yeah, that’s, I mean that’s what the song is about. It is the heaviest thing I've ever written, um, yeah.

BONES:

I feel like a lot of us in songwriting processes especially, but just in general like as a, as a fan watching Blaseball unfold, there are a lot of things that feel relatable even if the sort of framework of it is absurd, you know?

JENNIFER CAT:

Yeah, yeah, and, and I think actually that kind of absurdity of it, it sorta helps that, you know, at the end of the day, these aren’t real people but they still deal with things that are real, um, like grief, and like death, and like these really heavy subjects, but actually, you know, being able to, in the middle of a global pandemic, like, process those things in what is a relatively kind of safe environment, um, has been, I think part of the success of Blaseball, is that, you know, it’s so absurd but actually, caring about it is a way of processing the absurdity that is happening in real life, um, and, and I think that was the case with this song for me, I like, it started off as a Blaseball song and ended up with me like really processing some deep emotions. [both laugh]

[Content warning: Discussion of the warned content ends here.]

BONES:

Yeah, god, I. That’s so incredible too, that like, not only for the medium to be able to give us these opportunities to sort of like, hide behind--

JENNIFER CAT:

Mmm, yeah.

BONES:

--something with a shared thematic intent and then be able to build up the confidence to then just like, knock that wall down and be like, “okay, this is what the song is about actually”--

JENNIFER CAT (laughing):

Yeah!

BONES:

--has been so, like, impactful I think on like, not, I mean not just mine too, but like so many people’s songs.

JENNIFER CAT:

Mmm, yeah, yeah definitely. Um, and I think it’s part of what makes the garages so special is, and Blaseball music in general, um, is just that, y’know, we’re, we’re all kind of like writing from the same prompt but it doesn’t mean that we’re not, you know, writing from the heart, and I think that’s maybe what separates it from... just fan music? Not that, you know, not that fan music is bad, fan music is great, but like, you know, I think that people who listen to the garages maybe don’t expect it to be so personal? But then as I've said some of the songs are just about, you know, cool vegetable women playing blaseball and thinking that they’re hot.

BONES:

Yeah!

JENNIFER CAT:

So, you know, it’s a bit of both!

BONES:

Yeah! So, lastly, outside of your own work, what would you consider the most underrated garages song?

JENNIFER CAT:

Whoof.

BONES (laughing):

I realize, this is like, part of the hardest questions in this whole set list.

JENNIFER CAT:

At this, like, at this point there’s just, there’s so many good garages songs... The one that comes to mind, I think, uh, ‘ROSTER’ as an album in general kind of ended up being a little bit lost ‘cause it was in the middle of the long siesta. One that I just keep going back to is ‘oliver mueller (is a hero)’ by Mango or A.M.F.S.H., I think, and the lyrics written by Tangereen Velveteen just, like, it’s so much fun and like, it’s a really good ska song and it just makes me happy when I hear it like, that’s, that’s yeah, one of, one of my absolute favorites and then if I'm allowed to sneak in a second little one like, ‘hold me--

BONES:

Oh, go for it.

JENNIFER CAT:

‘hold me in your arms’ from vlalentine by fizzabelle is, ah, just such a beautiful song like lyrically, and just like the melody, ah, it’s amazing and I do think that vlalentine as well kind of, maybe just because it was just before Blaseball coming back, really unfortunately got a little bit overshadowed by, “oh gosh Blaseball’s back and now we have to write about Blaseball” so, yeah, like those two albums but also like, yeah, specifically those two songs are just ones that I just keep going back to. They’re so good

BONES:

Thank you so much for joining us Jen, this has been so much fun, um, and thank you to everyone who’s listening for joining us on idol board, a podcast where we interview members of the garages, an anarcho-syndicalist band from the fictional location of Seattle. We make songs about being gay, the apocalypse, and fighting the gods and you can find our music at blandcamp.com with an L, on YouTube, or on your favorite music streaming service. Uh, we’ll see you next week! Now, here is ‘solar eclipse’ by jennifer cat of the garages.

[‘solar eclipse’ plays in its entirety]

ANNOUNCER:

idol board is edited by Ada Quinn, BONES, jennifer cat, and nuclear tourist, hosted by BONES, produced by Tangereen Velveteen, transcribed by Astrid D, SigilCrafter Aya, Merry, and VigilantBaker, and created by Aoife and Tangereen Velveteen.

[outro music plays]

ANNOUNCER:

That was a Fourth Strike production.