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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

The Minneapolis City Pages referred to the band from Cottonwood as art-dorks. Not wrong. We came by our love for poetry honestly. Emmett and Austin Dacey were raised by published poets with multiple Masters in English and Literature. And I pretty much grew up in the Dacey home where I fell in love with the titles on the family’s bookshelf. But let’s not forget that some of us were cowboys too. My father considered himself to be a cowboy-preacher, and the bookshelf in my house had titles by Zane Gray. My family had horses, cowboy boots, cowboy hats, and lariats.  

Chili Eating Contest

In the fall of 1989, several of the band members lived together in a single house in Minneapolis, and someone had a job at a VHS video rental store. Almost every night was movie night at THE SWOON house. Troy Baartman and I went through a significant number of Westerns, and we might have watched the 1988 Young Guns three or four times. Also a favorite was the 1970 They Call Me Trinity.

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This song just wanted to be a rock song, but it got all tangled up with angst about faith, spiritual frustration, and the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the boastful pride of life. Several versions of the song existed before the one that coalesced onto tape in the Neverland Studio sessions. This version is a live, raw performance scooped from a bootleg of a show in Winona, MN (Sep, 1989), mashed up with video footage from a show at the New Union in Minneapolis (Nov, 1989).

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Whose Hands are These? puzzles over the contradiction between substance and spirit, between a materialist reductionist worldview and the ineffable, transcendent spirituality leaking through consciousness and self-awareness … you know, the type of stuff kids are always crooning about. The audio of this live version, scooped from a 1989 bootleg recorded in Winona, MN, preserves the full-length song–unlike the truncated version that went down onto the Neverland recordings.

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It’s a war song. Sort of. Tim O’Brien’s book Going After Cacciato, the story of a soldier who walks away from the Vietnam war, inspired the vibe. Florence Dacey, the mother of the Dacey brothers and adopted mom of the band, campaigned tirelessly as an activist against the Cold War Era war machine and nuclear proliferation. Thompson’s Confusion vectors on the mystical unity of every human being. There are no strangers. This song never made it to the studio, but a cassette bootleg from a 1989 live show preserves its memory.

Thompson’s Confusion

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We recorded Let’s Talk About Love in 1988 for the ben son ben son Beatrice demo, but this version of the song is scooped from a bootleg cassette recorded at a live show in 1989. The song itself, while pretending to bounce along as just another silly love song, contrasts pop culture’s infatuations with the the expensive price of perseverance in a relationship gone wrong. Video clips from a 1948 version of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina tells it like it is.