Track List Slim Cessna’s Auto Club, Buried Behind The Barn

Stories are the heart and soul of every song from Denver’s Southern Gothic granddaddies Slim Cessna’s Auto Club, even the rarities and outtakes. Buried Behind The Barn, a collection of eight tunes originally recorded in 2000 and 2001, is full of tales of doomsday gloom. Before the album's release on March 16 (on Jello Biafra's Alternative Tentacles) and the band's show this Saturday at the Oriental Theater, frontman Slim Cessna gave The A.V. Club the whole story behind the new/old material. 

Track one: “Cranston”

Slim Cessna: Me and my family used to live in Cranston, the town in Rhode Island. Rhode Island is an interesting place. It seems like there’s some kind of ancient, strange darkness about it, even in how it was founded—the place was filled with criminals and pirates and ghosts. Our house, where I lived with my wife and my kids, it was an old house. It was on top of the hill. The song for me is about what it seemed like things were doing outside. If you believe in those kinds of things, it just seems like it’s a little more obvious, at least the stories about how things came to be are darker than, say, Pittsburgh.

Track two: “Port Authority Band”

SC: That’s a story of Munly’s. I, for one, don’t want to speak for Munly. It’s an excellent song. I don’t know where he gets a song like that. It’s brilliant and amazing.

The A.V. Club: Is it historical or based in fiction?

SC: Probably both. I think that all of history is like that! [Laughs.] We’ll just leave it at that.

Track three: “Angel”

SC: Honestly, I had kind of forgotten about it. It’s nice to hear it again. It’s a song that I really like, so I’m glad that we’re releasing it officially. I had another band, kind of a local band in Rhode Island—the Auto Club was still playing—but when I was home, I played in a band called The Blackstone Valley Sinners. We played the “Angel” song. We had a different version of it.

Track four: “Thirteen Crimes”

SC: That song’s obvious. It’s more of a direct story of 13 crimes. There’s nothing to be read into it.

Track five: “Shady Lane”

SC: It was several years later re-recorded for The Bloudy Tenent Truth Peace, because everything was kind of moved to the East Coast, and at that time, it was just difficult to get to Denver to record. We tried it and it wasn’t working. This version was recorded soon after it was written with Bob [Ferbrache]. He’s definitely considered a member of the band. He’s the guy behind the scenes, controlling the knobs. When Bob is behind us on what we’re doing, the songs take on a different life.

Track six: “Jackson”

SC: I believe that this is one of the songs that were recorded when we were recording the songs for Always Say Please And Thank You. I think that everything we recorded was originally intended to be on an album. Whether it made it was not necessarily about the song or how it was recorded, but how it would work on the album that we were making at the time. Even Always Say Please And Thank You, there’s a definite flow and a back story, redemption and justification and things that are happening within that.

Track seven: “Sister’s Husband”

SC: It was another song that when I was in the Blackstone Valley Sinners band in Rhode Island, we did another version of this as well. That turned into a song called “Slater Mill.” This was the original version. It’s just a folk tale about some murder at a mill, at a mill in Rhode Island where they do textiles. It’s based on a real thing, but it’s based on something that happened, and I don’t have any idea what the story is behind it, so we made it up. We just like to tell stories. We make up stories and put them to music. Sometimes it’s about the places that we know about or we understand. Colorado is another good place to have songs about, because that’s where our people are from.

Track eight: “Earthquake”

SC: This song was only on the vinyl version of Always Say Please And Thank You. It wasn’t working on the album. It didn’t match what we were doing on that album. We had so many songs for that album that not everything made it. It was Jello Biafra’s favorite song of ours. He was disappointed that the first album he was releasing of ours didn’t have his favorite song, so we put this on the vinyl version as a gift to him.