Noizy Library are Melissa Goldsmith (vocals, keyboards, and percussion), Tony Fonseca (vocals, bass, and percussion), and Robert Butterfield (guitars and drums). The band’s members hail from Northampton, Massachusetts and Pensacola, Florida, and put together this entire album via file exchanges and many, many e-mails.“Devil Town” is not just about living someplace you wish you weren’t. It is an appropriate metaphor for any dysfunctional work environment. It’s a song about how some people can make you mean and edgy, downright angry and defiant. Finding oneself in a Devil Town, after all, should result in more than frustration and anger; it should make a person want to fight, even if the best way to fight is to simply walk away and break its power over you—Not My Monkeys, Not My Zoo as they say. This is one song where Tony was able to quickly scribble down the lyrics, thinking all the while WWTWW (What Would Tom Waits Write), and as soon as he heard the techno-grunge beat created by Melissa and Bobby, he knew the song was on the right track. Once Melissa added the final touches (those interesting industrial noises and the digeridoo), the song was so good none of us could believe we wrote it; in fact, it is both Melissa and Bobby’s personal favorite on the CD.Tony has a bad habit of dreaming songs—hence “Cobwebs.” It is a song about songs—or writing them anyway. The sound was first created by Tony’s singing against a synthesized beat, which Bobby then reinterpreted for guitar and drums. After getting over an original WTF moment, Melissa helped Tony to re-envision what he had originally intended to sound like a distorted Beatles song: She told him, “think angry Bossa Nova.” After that he figured vocals and bass were easy. Melissa went nuts on creating points of interest after that, and the absolutely brilliant horn and cello arrangements were the result. The only thing left was deciding what to do with Bobby’s guitar outro, dueling harmonized leads that should be the guitar soundtrack to any spider spinning its web. Finally, it was an easy call: let those guitars have at it, with just a little cello and horn for color. The final result is a song that spins a musical web through the air, just waiting to snag the listener. “Space for Rent” was actually conceived and written by Tony while driving. He made himself a challenge (it was a long, boring drive) that the next sign he saw would be turned into a song, and he was quite glad that the sign did not read “Speed Hump” (these weird versions of “Speed Bump” signs do exist in Western Massachusetts). By the time he got home he had the lyrics from start to finish. After that it was just about passing the song back and forth and letting it take shape, after Bobby gave it its signature catchy guitar sound. Backing vocals were a bit tricky and required some multi-tracking for Tony and Melissa’s voices, but when all was said and done we were able to turn three people into a full arena band sound, thanks again to Melissa’s engineering. What can you say about “Gallows Pole”? It’s simply a song everyone should cover. We went back to the original Scottish ballad, and Tony added lyrics to complete a story about a condemned woman whose family is too poor to pay off the authorities and have her saved. Finally, she accepts her fate; thus the song ends with the instruments flat-lining. The fun part of song construction was bridging the gap between Melissa’s folk preference and Tony and Bobby’s preference for something rocked up and gothic—we ended up with a nice combination. During vocal recording, Melissa was thinking Odetta; Tony was thinking Jesus Christ, Superstar! This is another that Tony did the mixing on. At Bobby’s insistence, he reverbed the hell out of the guitars and vocals, not really knowing what he would get. The final product was so good it was scary. Seldom do you get to record one of THE songs you always wanted to hear, but Tony felt that for him, this was it. “1%ers” is a rocked-up version of Those Fabulous Hippies’ “Let’s All Feast (On the One Percenters),” a gimmick song written by Tony and Melissa for The Hippies in a Broadway Musical style. Tony, who had supplied the lyrics in response to a challenge to write a comic Christmas song, decided he wanted a second go at the song, which he had originally envisioned as a Rockabilly song. Once Bobby rocked it up a few notches, it ended up becoming something between Z Z Top, Slade, and Elvis (the older, less svelte Elvis of course, who would have slathered peanut butter on the 1%ers and deep fried them). You can call it Punkabilly, for want of a better term. This of course required a re-versioning of the original lyrics, so much so that most of the comical banter from “Let’s All Feast” had to be jettisoned. To make up for it, Tony and Melissa introduced the recurring third line comical backing vocals (Tony singing into a gender-bending vocal processor), and Melissa really hammed up female backing vocals and the spoken word one-liners that we could fit into the new version. Arguably, even though it is a gimmick song, Tony thought “1%ers” was one of the best songs on the CD. He’s 99% sure of it. Bobby’s guitar grabs you right away and never lets you go until you’ve had your fill. When Tony first finished the lyrics to “When in Rome,” a sort of love song about fighting the odds, he was thinking Blondie (and he still intends to someday go back to that version and record it), but Melissa got very playful with rhythm and sectioning, and it ended up being more Henley than Harry. Vocally, this was easily the most challenging song, but thanks to lots of happy accidents, we ended up with something that sounds pretty decent. Bobby keeps this one together with his drumming and guitar playing, which is no mean feat being it’s a song that just wants to unravel itself. We all breathed a huge sigh of relief once we left Rome. Little did we know the battle we would be fighting would be with the song! “Pacific 231” originally one of Melissa’s poems about riding a train, which she was going to throw out. The minute Tony saw it he said, “this is our next song.” After Melissa decided she wanted a song in 7/8, early recording was all about getting the vocals, which were tricky, tracked. Then Bobby added the scratchy rhythm guitar, soaring lead guitar, and drums to make the train come to life, speeding it up and then slowing it down again (an exercise in patience to say the least). We then re-recorded the vocals to match his pacing, and Melissa added effects and points of interest (and found out that train sounds are hard to create on a synth). This was one where Tony took the lead in mixing of vocals; after all, how to describe to someone else that you want vocals flying in from all over? You just have to do it yourself. After playing with effects for seven or eight vocal tracks, Tony got what he wanted—a song that sounds like the train number must have surely been 420 (which by the way does exist). It should come as no surprise that members of Those Fabulous Hippies (Tony and Melissa) ended up really liking this song. “River Blues” is a response to and elaboration of Dave Van Ronk’s “Bamboo,” a wonderful blues song that has been badly reinterpreted into a rather silly folksong by too many bands since. Where Van Ronk’s “Bamboo” leaves to the imagination what the bamboo floating in the river symbolizes, Tony decided to put into words the sense of longing in Van Ronk’s vocals creating lyrical images that turn into a song of true despair. He kept only the original idea—the floating bamboo—and then let his imagination do the rest. It was then Bobby’s turn to have at the song with guitar and bass, and his decision to recreate it as a standard blues melody turned out to be brilliant, and fortunately for us, Melissa has a smoky, bluesy singing voice (and knows blues conventions very well), so she was able to make it work vocally. The final touches again were hers, in this case a very playful organ and an added chord that brought all the lyrical and musical ideas together into one song.“Ocean Wasteland-Siren Song” is a happy accident. It started as an intro to “Space for Rent,” where Melissa put together a keyboard piece reminiscent of “Teenage Wasteland” and asked Bobby to add his guitar magic, which he did. But after “Space for Rent” was finished, we knew it didn’t quite fit. But the riff was so cool and infectious we knew we wanted to use it someplace, and it became “Ocean Wasteland,” once it was matched up with “Siren Song,” a keyboard-based art-school-esque piece Melissa created as a B Section. Tony then dug up an old Irish ballad and did some tweaking for lyrics, which became a jumping off point. After Tony heard Melissa’s “Siren Song,” he immediately recognized a bit of The Decemberists in the melody and thematic content, and this inspired him to scribble two quick verses for the “Ocean Wasteland” tune—because after all, what is a siren without a sailor to claim as victim? Hats off to Melissa’s mixing and engineering genius for making the song work as a whole, for Melissa meeting what she called “the artistic challenge of bridging rock and the avant garde.” Bobby best summed up our reaction to the final product when he called it a “freak show” but then said “I love it!”“Songs from the Glass Church” is another of Melissa’s poems set to music. In this case, we had the music first, a wonderful guitar melody that Bobby had put together. Tony ran with it first, playing with looping, doubling, and distorting to get a somewhat psychedelic effect; then Melissa added some sitar and tabla for effect and interest. After that, it was figuring out what to sing to the melodic line. Tony started thumbing through one of Melissa’s books of poetry and found “Song from the Glass Church,” which had staccato lines he knew he could work with, and absolutely gorgeous imagery. He and Melissa recorded various vocal tracks (many of which got thrown out eventually), but after they choose the best of them, Tony set to work mixing them to make them sound as if they were drifting in and out on the snow. Melissa added her final touches of mixing magic, and we ended up with something nice, one of Bobby’s favorites on the CD (which tells you even the hardest rocking guitarists have soft spots).All songs on Chimera, copyright 2015, 2016by Robert Butterfield, Anthony Fonseca, and Melissa GoldsmithDapper Kitty MusicNorthampton, MA