Barry & Michelle Patterson

…for a rocking t-shirt company called USE SMALL WORDS (they only wanted crazy people for models). They just launched their site last week and we really love their stuff. The design is clever and ironic and the shirts feel amazing. Our personal favorite is the Edgar Allen Poe hoodie.

If you want to see Michelle’s stylish and impressive shots, please visit www.usesmallwords.com and buy something while you’re there. This week get a 25% discount by putting “ourfriends” in the discount code box when you check out.

Lo and behold..we inspired someone! Wesley D. Stein’s book has just been released and he cites our song “Scavengers” as a source of inspiration for the story! To celebrate the book launch we are going to use this opportunity to dive back into our song-stories series.

We wrote it a long, long time ago indeed. I was using my stellar secretarial skills at a part-time job at Amber Rose Music back in the day. The phones weren’t ringing very much on this particular day and I started singing the first two lines to myself over and over. I had no idea what the heck they meant but I kept singing them all the way home and until Barry got home from work so I wouldn’t forget them. He liked it, even if we didn’t know what it meant and wanted to work on it some more. We experimented with it in 4/4 (since 3/4 was like a known default of sorts for me) but we never liked it as much, so we chose the waltz time. I wrote some more verses and Barry wrote some too. As we were writing it, we were discovering that what the song was saying was out of Lamentations and Isaiah 30. The song is about when we get pushed and shoved out of the place that belongs to us. It’s about when we get robbed of things that are rightfully ours. It’s about when Grima Wormtongue is given a comfy spot on the couch and permission to say anything he wants to us. It’s about a taking back and a repossession. At the time of the writing of this song, I was pretty beaten down about some things I was being robbed of. Peace, health and babies for starters. During that season, this new aggression started to rise up inside of me to take back what had been stolen from me. I am certain that as we started performing this song publicly and I stomped my feet and flailed my hands, I was warring on my own behalf. Enough is enough. Anybody need to do some ousting? Buy Wesley D. Stein’s book “Son of the Sword” at Target, Amazon or Barnes & Noble.

“Scavengers”

by Rebecca Thornberry

SEE REBECCA THORNBERRY’S ART

HEAR THE SONG