Captain Mainwaring

A lot has already been posted regarding this track, including a live version (which can be watched here), a director's commentary version with Aaron narrating (which can be downloaded here), and a Japanese version (which will be heard on our player soon). I think one of the reasons there's been so much thought on this track is that it's one of the furthest stylistic reaches for Brazil to date.

The entire song is three notes, and the lyrics are essentially a quaint character study told in basic rhyming couplets. Quite different for a band somewhat known for Yes-like keyboard noodling and lyrical abstraction. I guess you could say this was a reaction to all that.


My lyric sheet for Captain Mainwaring.

Mainwaring was also perhaps an indicator that we'd grown tired of exhuming progressive-rock clichés. We struck upon the idea that a song could be complex, even with a ridiculously simple melody and structure, depending on how you filled the space between the couplets. It's sort of like the difference between filling a canvas with a defined reproduction of a still-life image, or filling it with dribbles and splatters of paint to form an abstract yet cohesive whole. Not trying to say we think we wrote some Pollockian objet d'art, but we did go into the whole thing embracing randomness and happy accidents of sound.

This was another overnighter. Like I mentioned before, parts of the album were recorded late at night after Dave left with one of us (usually Aaron) sitting behind the board. Mainwaring, in its entirety, was recorded this way. We're pretty proud of the fact that we did the whole thing ourselves. In fact, this song is supposedly the one that sealed the deal and locked Dave into producing our record. And for that, we are thankful.

Amen.

Always Always Always,
Jonathon Christopher Newby of Brazil