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In 1991, we created a short chapbook of lyrics from nine SWOON songs as a precursor to a compilation of music we never put together. Eight pages, nine songs, two folded pieces of paper. Thanks to SWOON super-fan, Brad Swenson, one paper copy survives. He photographed it and submitted his photos to our Facebook Page.

Here’s a link to download a PDF of the booklet titled Sleep Little Stash.

Sleep Little Stash

No, it’s not a book about getting high off your own stash. “Stash” was the name of one of the characters inhabiting the imaginary world of SWOON stories. The name is short for Anastasia, a Greek/Russian name that means “Resurrection.” The song Old Woman Willow (Sleep Little Stash) croons about the death of a fictional British girl named Anastasia who gets buried under a willow tree. (Think of Tolkein’s sinister man-eating Old Man Willow in The Fellowship of the Ring.) The tree absorbs her body through its roots to more-or-less resurrect her into leaves and branches via the cycle of physical death and rebirth while her soul takes flight passing out to sea over the chalky Dover cliffs before becoming one with the One who is I WILL BE AND I AM. Something like that. Perhaps we were getting little high.

We gave the chapbook away to fans and probably gave out copies along with other SWOON merchandise at our shows. The songs selected for inclusion shared some common connective tissue as half-told narratives featuring named characters. Most of them had been written on the heels of our exodus from the Christian music scene, and the bawdy lyrics are too eager to prove themselves scandalous. In those days, we were living together in a rented house just outside of the University of Minnesota’s Dinkytown area in Minneapolis. An enormous cast of compelling characters intersected our lives, coming and going at all hours, playing musical chairs with love and relationships. Their personalities and personal dramas inspired the fictional characters in the songs. The lyrics documented some of the swooning going on at the time, and they hint at some of the emotional wreckage left behind in the wake.

The broader theme followed the same path we first blazed in BEN SON BEATRICE/NEVERLAND by continuing to explore the world of innocence-lost, unrequited spiritual longings, frustrated eroticism, and angsty puzzlement over the question of how the soul fits so snuggly into the physical body. The chapbook contained lyrics from two songs recorded in the NEVERLAND sessions: Sweet Ally and Speak Soft. Three of the songs eventually went down on tape in the posthumous SPECTACULAR ILLUSIONS session: Old Woman Willow (Sleep, Little Stash), Seriously Sonny, and Dixon Berkman’s Tale. Four songs never made it to studio at all: The Tenth of May, Wishing Ring, When Things Go Well, and Happy Indeed (Sparrow). Recently, a cassette recording of a rehearsal showed up in the hands of a Cottonwood native named Tony Schwartz. It included a recording of Happy Indeed. (We played a live version in the 1989 Winona show. See the bootleg GLORY LIGHTS.)

One notable omission that should have been included with the collection is the ethereal Epiphany. It’s another of those half-told narratives about a named character undergoing some vague spiritual experience of unfulfilled longings consisting of deep sighs for intangible worlds. It’s the same type of romantic SWOON-worthy dish we we liked to serve. The lyrics to Epiphany don’t appear with the collection in Sleep Little Stash because, by 1991, our keyboard player was no longer part of the lineup. Songs that depended on her had to be cut.

What about the remaining three songs in the chapbook? It’s possible they might yet show up in Mr. Schwartz’s collection of vintage cassette tapes or elsewhere. In the meantime, it seems appropriate, on Easter Day 2023, to celebrate the Resurrection by resurrecting Stash. Here’s a Soundcloud link to the audio of Old Woman Willow (Sleep Little Stash) from the unreleased album SPECTACULAR ILLUSIONS.

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In January 1989 THE SWOON recorded a live demo for Charlie Peacock to review prior to the Neverland sessions. The song titled “Epiphany” was at the beginning of the tape because we assumed that one was going to make it to the final cut. We were considering including it on the Neverland recording all the way up until we did our first rehearsal in studio. At that point, for whatever reason, we decided to ditch it, and I’m not sure we ever played the song again.

Emmett recalls that Derri Daugherty of THE CHOIR liked Epiphany a lot and really wanted us to put it down on tape but that Charlie Peacock was less confident about the song’s value. Peacock was right. Austin points out that, despite the clever lyrics, it doesn’t hold up musically. It’s a silly and pretentious composition. One can hear a lot of U2’s Joshua Tree era at play. Nevertheless, Emmett still speaks fondly of the drums for the song, and I still likes the story of the bride’s transcendent out-of-body experience that leaves the things of this world strangely dim.

As we considered the lineup for the Neverland recordings, Charlie Peacock asked me, “What do the lyrics to Epiphany mean?”

I replied, “Whatever you want them to mean.”

He said, “I really hope that’s not true.”

I wish we had a studio version, but this cassette-demo version from the AGRAPHA material is the only extant recording of the song.

Lyrics:

A million angels danced on the head of a pin that was held by Rose as she sewed her wedding dress. Her father was downstairs, in his chair, snoring softly, dreaming just how costly it would be to give her up. Her mother’s in the kitchen doing dishes and she wishes she was young again and soon a young man’s bride. With an anxious, simple sigh, Rose let go, learned to fly, left her body sitting listless and aloof. Rose came down the stairs unaware that her stare, devoid of cares, betrayed her empty state of being. Epiphany, speak to me. You’re a symphony. Set my soul free.

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“What’d I do to you?”

I don’t remember exactly what he did or what he said, but whatever it was, it irritated Jeana, our keyboard player, and she let him know about it. We had enlisted my college roommate Mark Derby (The Derb) to manage bookings for THE SWOON. His efforts met with varying degrees of success, landing lucrative college shows and terrible little American Legion Halls in small-town Minnesota. He brought to the mix a tactless forthrightness which sometimes transgressed the boundaries of our keyboardists’ sense of dignity. It happened once again during a SWOON rehearsal while we were still putting together a new song to be titled “Sister Mary Francis.” Picture the scene in the unheated, unfinished second-story addition to the Gillispie family home in Cottonwood. In the winter, it was so cold up there that we had to light up a kerosene heater at least an hour before rehearsal just to thaw our instruments out. Perhaps while waiting for the room to warm up, Mark made some seemingly innocuous comment which was probably not innocuous at all, thus inciting Jeana’s retort and inspiring his protest of innocence, “What’d I do to you?”

There was something a rhythm to the way he said it that made us laugh. To his amusement, Austin and I dropped the outburst into the new song we were writing on the spot.

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Here’s an old song from THE SWOON you might not have heard before. “Medicine” was in the set list for a long time, and it was one of the songs that we submitted for inclusion in the Neverland project, but it didn’t make the selection for the studio work. This version, recorded during a live rehearsal in January of 1989, in preparation for the Neverland recordings, captures the song’s energy and REM-inspired guitar riffs. Thirty-two years later, the message of the song seems no-less pertinent, nor the petition less urgent.

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daniel thomas

Here’s the audio from a Minnesota Public Radio interview with me and the Dacey brothers. The interview took place in the Mankato affiliate studio for the show “Minnesota Morning” on January 3, 1991. The audio file comes from a cassette recording of the broadcast with poor sound quality and without the first few minutes of the interview. But it’s worth a listen because it includes a live in-studio performance of an early version of “Tea of China,” a song we included on Spectacular Illusions later that year.

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daniel thomas

Since the very beginning of the band, we created a lot of print media, promotion, and vanity projects, but in the last months of the journey, we started sending out a newsletter to our mailing list under the title HYPERBOLE. It was primarily a way of letting people know when and where to catch a SWOON show.

The first issue is dated December, 1990. HYPERBOLE was just a handbill with a little bit of news, a list of shows, and occasional lyric. The idea was to hype the shows, hence the name. The newsletter had a short print run of just two issues.

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daniel thomas

Emmett and I walked the Via Dolorosa while visiting Jerusalem in 1985. I sort of remember him saying, “That would be a good name for a song.” It’s the name of a street in the Old City on which Jesus allegedly carried his cross as he went to Golgotha. Every Good Friday, Christian pilgrims commemorate the stations of the cross and walk the Via Dolorosa. The name literally means “Way of Sorrow.”

You can hear the influence of U2’s The Joshua Tree in the chord progression of Via Dolorosa. It wasn’t intentional, but we liked it that way. A short version of the song went down on the ben son Beatrice demo. The live version could roll on for a long, long time. We almost always closed out our live shows with that hypnotic rambling extended version—right before the big-bang showstopper GO NO STOP.

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daniel thomas

In 1994, three years after THE SWOON had disbanded, I received a phone call from someone (I think it was Emmett) about a guy trying to contact me. There was a Christian music and arts mag called kamikaze that wanted to interview me about THE SWOON. They were doing a feature piece on the band under the title “What ever happened to THE SWOON?”

I declined the interview. Now I wish that I hadn’t. But at the time, I was busy with a wife, a job, two little boys, and a headfirst plunge into Jewish studies. I had no sympathy for rehashing the THE SWOON.

A few months ago the editor of kamikaze, Stephen Knight, graciously sent me a copy of the article (as did one other SWOON fan). Knight did a bang-up job of marshalling what sources he could to put a solid article together.

Unfortunately, Knight’s primary source was a mostly obsolete 1988 interview in a Christian music fanzine called Ragtime. The editor of that fanzine, a guy named Charles Clark who had tried to help us kids out back in the day, also tried to assist by filling in a few of the gaps. As a result, some of the speculation is less than accurate, but that’s the way these things go. On the whole, it’s a good article. It mentions stuff I had completely forgotten about, like the early demo tapes we recorded under the name Restricted Access and how I sold cassette copies of Spectacular Illusions, repackaged under the title Piss and Vinegar, to SWOON fans working the 1991 Minnesota Renaissance Festival. For the record, the anecdote about Charlie Peacock sleeping through the Neverland sessions is not true. We all took turns sleeping on the couch in the Neverland studios, and Peacock put in some late hours on that project. He was very much involved in the whole production, whether he cares to admit it or not, and he was good friend to the band.

At the conclusion of the article, Clark speculates, “Had they continued, it probably would have killed ’em. It’s the excesses of rock and roll.” I don’t remember anything that dramatic. But my mom must have agreed with Clark’s sentiment. While I was gigging with THE SWOON, she took out a life insurance policy out on me.

Download a PDF of the whole article here.

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daniel thomas

THE SWOON starts in small-town Cottonwood, MN ‘round about 1975 when my family moved into town and became next-door neighbors to the amazing Dacey family. Us kids lived in the perfect Norman Rockwell dream of small-town America—a world of bare feet and banana-seat bicycles, without rules or boundaries where you could see to the horizon in every direction. Every house on the block had children our age. I think there were fifteen or sixteen of us in those days. Every summer we ran wild. We did everything together all day long every day all summer long: building forts, exploring the drainage ditch, waging wars, watching Star Trek, playing matchbox cars, playing football, kickball, freeze tag, Ghost Ghost in the Graveyard, and eventually, playing Dungeons & Dragons. In the early eighties, the Dacey brothers and I spent most of our spare time adventuring in those fantastic imaginary landscapes, rolling dice and living large through paper heroes in the never-ending war against evil orcs and goblins. Austin and I even tried to open a hobby shop in his basement, but Emmett was our only customer.

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Here’s the new video for THE SWOON’s song “Ben son, ben son Beatrice,” only thirty-two years after the original recording. We recorded this song in 1988, along with four other tracks, in a studio owned by a Minneapolis band called Limited Warranty. They were a hot local pop band famous for winning Star Search in 1985. Our producer/manager, JAMES, had set up the arrangements for us. Not sure how he negotiated it. I think he had secured the studio on spec—an industry term which means “you will never make a dime.” Dale Goulett and Greg Sotebeer of Limited Warranty were in the control room with JAMES. The studio space was some sort of converted warehouse. Big and open, the way we wanted the music to sound.

At one point in the production, I was sitting in the loft-lounge above the control room and talking about Kate Bush with the guys from Limited Warranty. Dale pretended to be smoking a roach, implying that Kate Bush took her inspiration from the amount of pot she smoked. Maybe she did. Wherever she got that totally epic spooky-sounding supernatural vibe, I wanted to get some of that down on tape. That’s the type of feel we reached for with “Ben son, ben son Beatrice.”

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