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Between The Blades

by Libby Rodenbough

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  • Record/Vinyl + Digital Album

    Cut and pressed by Blue Sprocket Pressing in Harrisonburg, VA

    -Standard weight 12” black vinyl
    -Single pocket jacket on 24pt board with matte finish
    -Polybag
    -Poly-lined inner sleeve
    -Insert
    -Download code
    -Sleepy Cat sticker

    Shipping note: We place the inner sleeve + vinyl outside of the jacket and inside the polybag, next to the jacket. This helps prevent jacket damage during shipping. Let us know if you have preferred shipping practices.

    Includes unlimited streaming of Between The Blades via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
    ships out within 5 days
    Purchasable with gift card

      $25 USD or more 

     

  • Compact Disc (CD) + Digital Album

    -Duplicated CD
    -Wallet cases - 16 pt recycled board stock printed using green friendly ink
    -Insert
    -Sleepy Cat sticker

    Includes unlimited streaming of Between The Blades via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
    ships out within 5 days
    Purchasable with gift card

      $15 USD or more 

     

  • Streaming + Download

    Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
    Purchasable with gift card

      $8 USD  or more

     

1.
You can call me names, you can say that I am stuck in my ways. You can see what you want, that’s your prerogative. We are only here to take it in and make our bets. Maybe you will be the one who does it best. But if it all goes south, there will be dancing down there, cause I know that I am not the only one who needs another world. Everybody knows it’s too bad what we’ve come to, but we get our itches scratched—except the one, you know the one, the one between the blades. You can feel what you want, that’s your prerogative. It’s just that every time I pick up my camera it says, what are you gonna do? Take a new kind of picture? Say a new prayer for the world, get blood from a stone, tell a new kind of joke? Everybody knows it’s too bad what we’ve come to, but we get our itches scratched—except the one, you know the one, the one between the blades. Maybe you will be the one who reaches that. But if it all goes south, there will be dancing down there, cause I know that I am not the only one who needs another world.
2.
Make Light 04:08
Up over the Atlantic, my mind is blowing bubbles, and the wind is licking, out for trouble, and whitecaps—only caps to ever be—have turned the water marble hardened too early. But what the light has really caught on is a smooth-sided rider, and I can see the captain with his napkin there beside him. He is tired of the satellites and of the tin-can dinners, but the stories make him glimmer like a little shoe for me. We’re all shaking just to catch the light, but we really wish that we could make it with our eyes. We’re all shaking just to catch the light, but we really wish that we could make it inside. You’re waiting on the doorstep of my well-fed imagination, or was it that you’re at the station? Let me take my time and get the colors right, after all my eyes are ringing with the fanciness of flight, and what I’m really needing is a sure-footed rider who will meet my traitors who go clanging in the night and wag their fingers at my undeveloped blisters and at the way I ball my fist up for all the world to see. Gracie, tell your mother she was right about freedom (that it’s the only kingdom anybody seeks). But I saw a buck with branches tangled in his antlers and I could not help from looking on that desperate dancer and his soul was nearly taken in the struggle to be free but he saw my eyes on him and he spared a shot for me.
3.
Up in the buildings where the windows shine, they’re making money out of wasted time, but in the long run they come up empty. That’s what I’m saying to my tired head, safe from the buzzards in our perfect bed, but it can hold us only so long. So I’m sleeping hard tonight, and I’m hoping that the sun won’t be too bright in my eyes. It used to be that people made their way from act to act like in a high school play, and in the last scene everybody sang. But so few of us get to be the star—think of all the Romeos down at the bar, and when they go home, they close the curtains. And they are sleeping hard tonight, and they’re hoping that the sun won’t be too bright in their eyes. So you’re limping on, across the plains, manifesting yards in future football games, and you can feel it already thinning. But there’s a bounty on the western shore. You’re a little hazy on just who it’s for, but you’ve come so far and the clock is running. And aren’t we sleeping hard tonight, aren’t we hoping that the sun won’t be too bright? I know I’m sleeping hard tonight, and I’m hoping that the sun won’t be too bright in my eyes.
4.
Coming or going? The water’s fine, and I can see your sweat rolling down. Swimming or drowning? I know it’s a draw from the shore and now I feel the cool of the clouds. So I open my mouth and I choke on my tongue and… Another season’s gone, and you’re circling the bottom of the hole in my drum and the clock just gets easier to run down. I’m a sensible engine, I’m a well-tuned machine. You’re a beautiful broken-down dam. And I can hear the answers, but they only talk to me, and I fear the way they pull on my hand. So I open my eyes and I’m stuck on the sun and… I’d go to Louisiana if I could stand the sticky sheets, I would go to the city if I was young. I’d sail across the ocean if I could bear to rock and roll, but I’m earth-bound the way that I’m strung.
5.
Astrology 03:05
I’m gonna be a star out among the others, and you will draw a line that takes us in your twine and makes of us a bundle that you carry through the night. Love is a picture in the sky, turned over in your eye. Love is a picture in the sky—there is nothing to deny.
6.
Topography 04:17
I don’t know why I’m falling back. I can’t deny I owe a debt to the fireflies and the sticky air on the back of my neck, singing, who did you used to be? I can only tell you what I knew before: that there was a grove inside every half-eaten core, and there was a world behind every crack in the floor, saying, new ways are coming. Down in the canyon, they’re panning for gold, and the sun hits the water and it makes their faces glow, and they say, whatever happened to that one-foot come-and-go—doesn’t she know it’s just below us now, waiting? I don’t know why I’m falling back. Could it be this is the end of my slack? I see the cartoons dancing around as they fade to black. Isn’t it cruel to leave them? Up on the mountain, they’re cresting the clouds, and they plant their flags for all the ones who get out, and they say, thank your stars for the joy you have found beyond the bounds of where your little heart stays.
7.
Down along the outer islands, we were making friends with a bunch of pirate ghosts and a cat who dines on handouts from the tourists in their tactical khakis, and he is living better than most. And if you look across, you cannot see it, but it’s England, and the other side is the way we came on a boat where there was no one but the two of us and the captain and someone bringing over avocados from the mainland. And it’s hard, hard, hard to know which way to turn. Sally selling tacos came from Vegas, leaving behind her stand-up and all her friends and she is thinking of Bermuda as she folds up our burritos, waiting for a second hand sailboat to come in. You and me, we write it all down in our notebooks, saying, there’s a song in here, never mind the market’s glutted and the road will make you crazy and the good guys all turn into racketeers. There’s a lighthouse at the end of a dirt road, and there’s green grass growing all around, and as our boat pulls away from the harbor, the lighthouse watches but it doesn’t make a sound.
8.
Waking World 04:24
I see you in the waking world. You’ve shaken off my dream of you. Remember how it was before? Yes, that was another place. I never put my dreams to rest. Now they walk around the corridors. I see them in the waking world, but they don’t say where they have been. Covered in the light of day, all I see is what I see. I peel the waking world away—there, you’re reaching out your hand.

about

Like always, I find myself looking backward at the paths these songs traveled to find themselves shoulder-to-shoulder as “an album.” I wrote most of them in the period where my mom was very sick and immediately after she passed away, but I wouldn’t say they’re grief songs. Mostly they’re about trying to keep the faith—believing life can be new and even better. In this effort I find myself up against: Elon Musk, climate change, dying mothers, dying children, a question mark where I thought I’d have ambition by now, our civilization which has no regard for the bravery of imagination, the awkward sag of younger passions, and the perpetual ooze of bullshit. Lately my best source of hope is this truce I’ve made with memory; we get along because we don’t try to force each other to be anything we’re not. Holes start to appear here and there in the sweater that is your life—that’s inevitable—but I’m realizing you can really fix those in a great variety of ways. Sometimes it’s stitches and sometimes it’s patches and sometimes you come to like the empty place.

credits

released May 12, 2023

Production:
Produced by Alex Bingham, Saman Khoujinian, and Libby Rodenbough
Joe Westerlund - drums, percussion, OP-1
Saman Khoujinian - electric guitar, keys, synthesizers
Alex Bingham - bass, cello, keys, synthesizers
Jay Hammond - guitars
Kate Rhudy - backing vocals
Matt Douglas - clarinet, bass clarinet
Will Van Horn - pedal steel
Anna Jacobson - French horn
Libby Rodenbough - vox, acoustic guitar, violin, viola, keys
Recorded at Bedtown Lakehouse, additional recording at Small Pond Studios
Engineered by Saman Khoujinian
Mixed by Saman Khoujiinian
Mastered by Alli Rogers

Art:
Art direction by Gabe Anderson and Libby Ridenbough
Cover photo and type by Libby Rodenbough
Single cover art design by Gabe Anderson with photos by Chris Frisina
Package design by Gabe Anderson

Release notes: www.sleepycatrec.com/scr022-between-the-blades

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Libby Rodenbough Durham, North Carolina

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