Final Day for Dark Songs

Carley Baer and James Hall

Tonight, The Holiday Music Motel will host the final night of its two-day Dark Songs 2014 costume party celebrating the culmination of a week’s worth of collaborative songwriting among its 40 guest musicians.

Among those musicians, whose genres range from country to metal, are second-time Dark Song participant Carley Baer and third-timer Ruby James.

Baer, a dual citizen of Milwaukee and Portland, Oregon, plays “jazzy-poppy folk music” on guitar, ukulele and accordion. She counts her favorite part of the week as the moments leading up to the week’s first Spin the Bottle – a game used to create the collaborative teams.

“At that point, you have the whole week ahead of you and anything is possible,” Baer says.

The most interesting songwriting group combination during her first year happened after getting sidetracked and then coming together with a group to create the Dark Songs Vol. 5 song, “Crow Black Crow.”

“Last year I spun Adam Mackintosh and Troy Therrien. On my way to go work with them, I got sidetracked adding backup vocals to one of James Hall’s songs, so they invited Craig McClelland to join the group in my place,” Baer recalls. “When I eventually rejoined them, I felt a little like a party-crasher and I wasn’t sure how the session was going to progress, but it ended up being a really fortuitous diversion.”

Ruby James

Ruby James, Los Angeles native and leader of Door County favorite WiFEE and the HUZz Band, counts Dark Songs as her favorite Holiday Music Motel event, though Love On Holiday was “the birth” of her band with fiancée Stephen Cooper.

Her favorite song from her first two years was “Throw the Hearse in Reverse,” a “pretty epic” song that she believes will be around for all time and labels it “a great example of what a bottle spin can do.”

“It’s easy to write a great song with someone you know you work well with,” she adds. “But when you write a great one from a spin, it has its own kind of triumphant and magical feeling and is really what the songwriting weeks are all about.”