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I try to keep my chat with Morphine's aptly-named leader Mark Sandman light and airy. It didn't work. To say the least. "I was kind of a dreamy child - a Curious George baby," says Sandman, the singer/lyricist/two-string bassist of the band. "As a child, people told me they thought I'd grow up to be a poet. You have to wonder what kind of kid someone would say that to." Morphine's sound is as dreamy and uneasy as Sandman's childhood recollection - heavy, thick and resonant. With taut rhythms and barreling blues, Morphine is aggressively pensive, "Spy Vs. Spy" Muzak best played late at night. Sandman himself is most comfortable at that time. "You know in kindergarten when they make everybody lay down and close their eyes even if they're not tired," says Sandman from his Boston apartment, sitting in a squeaky chair. "That's the most ideal context to listen to us." You can't help but be mesmerized. Over the course of three albums - Good, Cure For Pain and Yes - and several contributions to like-minded cinema (Get Shorty, Things To Do In Denver and the TV show Homicide), this noir jazz-rock trio of Bostonians make danger fun, make restlessness desirable and make love sort've worthless in the face of desire. As musical unit, Mark Sandman's heavy blunt vocals and self-made bass guide Morphine's Dana Colley on baritone saxophone and Billy Conway on drums. Their weirdly shaped blues stems from Sandman's big start with Treat Her Right on RCA records. "We weren't conventional blues. We didn't do the da-dum da-dum fossilized cliches. But some of the dynamics of Treat Her Right carried over into Morphine, like not worrying about fancy arrangements, doing things intuitively." But no sooner than they "got away" with Morphine's sound, Sandman's lyrical punches took hold. Inspired by the hard-boiled density of writers like Jim Thompson and James Ellroy, Sandman's writing (and singing for that matter) is full of bitter laconic types not happy unless they're not happy. "I was always a big reader. Books are like a silent soundtrack to your life. People like Thompson and Ellroy put social history into their work. They give you a sense of what it might have been like to be operating in a different period of time. Makes things real." Real bad. His characters - be it lascivious lovers caught in the act in the song "Thursdays" or thoughtful marauders in "Murder For The Money" - are desperate, but full of the vigor best associated with people running away from something. "My people. They roam from town to town. Recurring. Not recurring." On their newest effort, Like Swimming (Dreamworks/Rykodisc), Morphine creates a glistening, dizzyingly loud work that reverberates with moist anticipation. This fever pitched, broken-down sound is also accomplished by Sandman's trash-picked, self-made instruments like the two-string slide bass or the half guitar/half bass of the Tritar. "It's all about trial and error. I start with really cheap instruments. Almost all my stuff's under $100. My microphone cost me $5. I like things broken that look interesting." This creaking, clackety ideology only feeds into Morphine's darkness. "I think people are tired of the larger than life - in movies, in books. It's escapism. Everyone knows what defines realistic behavior. When people are trying to be good and they wind up being bad the sin becomes greater." Before we go, I ask Sandman if he thought any of his previous pre-musical incarnations prepped him for life as an artist. Sandman told me he worked in a fish cannery. "I sorted halibuts. It taught me that halibuts are really big." |