(The) Harvey Danger Database

Loyalty Bldg.

Recorded

Release history

Credits

Lyrics

Slow to marry, swift to die
We leave disasters where they lie
I know these lines look crooked on paper
But I swear I got it straight in my head
And if you’re looking for somebody to blame
I recommend the dead
(I recommend the dead
’cause they never answer back)

Skinny dipping in the lake
I got the itch, I drank the wake
Would somebody please hand me a towel?

And now we’re up on molehill mountain
Scraping coins out of the fountain
with a retinue of dirty old young, young men
(again)

But when I get back from Nashville:
I’m renting a room in the Loyalty Building
I’m sure that the prospects are sound
in the event of calamitous circumstance1
or great good fortune
There must be a reason
there must be a plan

A palace in receivership
a jester with a busted lip
a catalog of crooked answers
We’ve all heard about the rapist nun
she pulled a switch on everyone.
the altar boys are not having fun
and the papacy is drawing up the papers
behind closed doors

But in the meanwhile…
I’m renting a room in the Loyalty Building
I’m sure that the prospects are sound
in the event of calamitous circumstance
or great good fortune
there must be a reason
there must be a plan

  1. Footnote #27 in the KJV CD liner notes: Guns don’t kill babies, babies kill babies. ↩

Quotes

JJL: In a way, it’s a certain kind of jam-band rock song. What makes it interesting, to me, is that we’re playing that kind of music. I played it for people and they’re like, “You guys did this?” We threw a bunch of stuff [at the song]—every kind we could figure out—in a really haphazard way.

— The Rocket,

SCN: “Loyalty Bldg.” is our only stoner jam and is very long, but charming—we had a LOT of fun that night; it’s a real building in downtown Portland; lyrics reference several headlines from Irish newspapers, and other random tangents (Esther Forbes, meet Howard Fast); best tambourine performance of my life, which is saying something.10A

ECS: “Loyalty Bldg” does the same [as “Carjack Fever”], but gets there via the organ, the silly little drum fills that still make me happy, and the secret sound of Sean knocking an empty water bottle against a music stand. Everything is structured, and all the big sounds are in place, and it sounds more like a “real” record than Merrymakers, but happily the corners are still filled with with the junk of our lives.10A

SCN: The Loyalty Building is at SW Third and Adler in downtown Portland. I saw the painted sign while smoking on the roof of an adjacent hotel in the middle of the night and thought it had been put there just so someone could put it in a song. Great good fortune, indeed.P&F

SCN: Both songs [“Show Me the Hero” and “Loyalty Bldg.”] are redolent of a very different energy than the rest of the album, probably because in all the furor over the label bullshit, we’d all managed to drop our guards a little, and taken a step back towards one another and remembered that playing music together was the most fun any of us had ever had. That sense of fun can’t be faked, nor can its importance be overstated. It transformed the album from an incomplete, wishful self-portrait to a document of who we really were as a band, for good and ill. It was the final revision. The King James Version.K25

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