Me and Hank – Ray Toler

After finishing The Gathering, I was directionless. No idea what to do. Also, the week has been getting long and while the dog has been pretty well-behaved and accommodating of my musical endeavors¹, I’ve been getting tired early. I came up with the basic hook of the song and then decided that that was good enough. It’s time for bed. I was asleep before 11pm, which is a rarity. Even better, Olive let me sleep through the night.

Olive is a Berger Picard,² a French farm/herding breed that dates back to at least 900 AD. They were bred to be largely independent and just do jobs that needed to be done without specific instruction. Mary and I hadn’t heard of the breed prior to Thanksgiving 2023, when Mary learned about them while watching a televised dog show. While I don’t know that we were fully ready to welcome a new dog into our lives after Laska, the rarity of the breed often means that you get on a waiting list and if you’re not ready when the litter arrives, you’d better get ready.

Me and Hank Ray Toler 3:37

The breed is rare because they predominantly lived right where some of the worst fighting in World War II happened. The war nearly wiped out the entire breed and though they are making a comeback, there are only around 5,000 of them in the entire world, right now. They’re becoming more known, though, so I expect to see them become more popular again.

New and Improved!

Mary and I believed all of the positive marketing about the breed (highly intelligent, low-maintenance coat / no grooming, big personalities) and not much of the negative marketing (difficult to train, very opinionated, super-high energy). Surprisingly, all of the marketing was largely true. Someone recently asked in an online forum for real-world experiences with the breed as they were considering getting a puppy. My response can be summarized as follows:

Take all of the intelligence of a German Shepherd, throw away the Germanic belief in rules and procedures, and replace that with the belligerence of a beret-wearing, chain-smoking, espresso-sipping, early-twenty-something French poet. This is less of a pet or companion animal, and more like having an unmannered roommate who is constantly getting in your business and asking if you want to go out for drinks at two in the afternoon.

She is easily the most challenging dog we’ve ever had, and that sentiment is echoed by most people who have them. There are no commands, only suggestions and convincing arguments. Harsh verbal correction not only doesn’t work, but will have the opposite effect as the dog basically responds to that with “Fuck you. Don’t tell me what to do.” I have had to learn an entirely new set of handling skills, not to mention patience, which is not always one of my strengths.

Don’t get too worried about all the negativity here, I’ll write nice things about her in another couple of days.

Hank

Olive’s friend, Hank, lives across the street. Hank is a one-and-a-half year old, 150+ pound blue Great Dane. He’s a good boy, but he’s incredibly strong and when he gets excited, you’d better have your feet planted with a good hold on the leash. He also drools at approximately Alien Xenomorph Queen levels. When Hank and Olive first started playing with each other, I envisioned needing to keep multiple towels with me to keep wiping her off, but that marketing (low-maintenance coat) actually turned out to be right… water (and drool) just seem to fall off of her.

Hank and Olive had gone to a dog park together for the first time a few days ago. While it wasn’t a perfect time (Hank is protective of her), I had the first flash of an idea. So today, waking up with a decent night’s sleep, I fired up the studio and loaded the previous night’s beat. I still wasn’t thinking about Olive or Hank, though… I thought this was going to be an instrumental of some sort. The more I worked with it, though, the more it felt like a rap.

Laziness Pays Off Now

I don’t pretend to be a rapper. I’ve done a few “rap” type things over the years, but they’re not what most people think of when they think of rap. Ignoring that I’m not really a rapper, I don’t like writing rap because… well… there are just too many words. Change Your Behavior has about 230 words., Falling only 120 or so. This track, without including repetitions, has over 400.

For perspective, the entire verbatim transcription I did for Don’t Fight the Funk, including all of the ad libs, etc., is around 670 words, with the actual song having far, far, fewer. Now, I’m not so lazy that I won’t type out a bunch of words (at this precise moment in this blog entry, I’m at 857 words…), but because I always hand-write my lyrics out into a notebook, the thought of the inevitable hand cramps does sometimes prove to be a deterrent.

But the song is the song, and it demands what it demands. I was in a decently good mood, Olive was (mostly) behaving, and I had a track perfectly suited to be a rap song. But what to rap about? It’s amusing to think of me writing anything aggressive or gangsta-ish, but I bet Olive would sure as hell do it. And as soon as that thought crossed my mind, we’re off to the races.

Production

The production’s really pretty simple. There are two beats, the hook sound, the tick-tock rhythmic sound, and those classic 80s orchestra hits. This song probably came about largely because of those hits, especially the sustained one that sounds so dramatic. I had it as a simple 8-bar loop for most of the writing process, then just copied, pasted, deleted, and otherwise arranged everything. I could have gotten a lot more involved, but it doesn’t need it, and it certainly doesn’t deserve that level of work. I did most of the vocals as single-takes (though it took me a few tries on a couple of them) with the group vocals making use of Digital Performer’s wonderful POLAR loop recorder.

The last thing I added was the sound I use as my personal alarm on my phone for both timers and waking up. I do hate it when people put real-world sounds in a track that make me think that thing is happening (especially distant sirens), so I added a fast pan to it. It was funny to me that it’s in the right key and almost the right tempo.

Rhymes with Orange

I’m actually decent at writing couplets, so actually writing rap lyrics isn’t daunting, but the chorus/hook has to be solid for any of it to work. The one thing that kept insisting its way into my brain was “Me and Hank are gonna fuck you up!” I don’t know why, it was just amusing and made me laugh.

Unfortunately, “up” is only slightly better than “orange” when it comes to rhyming words. The vast majority of them are just compound words ending in up. Breakup, cleanup, holdup… Here is an exhaustive list of the rhyming words that don’t end with an “up” form:

Crup, cup, Gallup, grace cup, gup, ketchup, larrup, loving cup, makeup, pup, scup, stirrup cup, sup, tup, wassail cup, whup.³ With the exception of Cup, Ketchup, makeup, and pup, I either don’t know what the others mean, know that they’re antiquated, or would find them overly awkward to say or use. I suppose I could have used “As soon as I take off my makeup…” in place of “As soon as I get a drink from my cup” – that would have been funny, but it also puts a bit too much of a picture in the listener’s head.

So that’s why the chorus is maybe a tiny bit too repetitive. It’s fun to yell, though!

This has been an overly-long writeup⁴ for what is essentially a silly trifle of a throwaway song, but I had a good time writing it, my neighbors liked it, and it makes me smile. It’s exactly the kind of thing that I would never have released to the world (or maybe even friends) prior to 2016. Whether that’s a good or bad thing is something you can decide for yourself.

Lyrics

Wake up early, it’s time to go
Gotta go out and get the news, you know
Cause this is my hood and I gotta protect it
Not gonna let the damn strangers wreck it

I can smell trouble a mile away
So you know I’m on patrol every day
Step in my yard, you must be thick
And I’ll take care of it soon as I can find a stick

Yeah I might be small right now
Size don’t matter when you got kablow!
But did you just hear that chain go clank?
Means it’s time to introduce you to my man, Hank.

Hank’s got my back and I got his
Hank is the muscle and I’m the biz-nitch
Who knows when it’s time to play
And when it’s time to tell you get out of the way!


As soon as I get a drink from my cup,
Me and Hank are gonna fuck you up
Nobody’s callin’ me a little pup
Cause me and Hank are gonna fuck you up

As soon as we see you it’s time to go
Release the mind and let the instincts flow
Nobody’s calling me a little pup
Cause me and Hank are gonna fuck you up

If you ain’t running it’s time to start
Make a u-turn or play your part
Cause nobody calls me a little pup
And me and Hank are gonna fuck you up

Find your kin who’s next in line
You shoulda never stepped foot in the 49
Cause as soon as a get a drink from my cup
Me and Hank are gonna fuck you up


Run, rabbit, run, scurry back to your hole
Like I said at the beginning I’m on patrol
If you’re up to no good, I’m gonna know
Then I’m calling Hank, and it’s time to go

Hank Mardukas, that’s his name
Don’t hate the player, hate the game
And he’s watching too, so don’t you relax
Though he might let you slide if you pay the tax

But I see everything, every detail
Don’t call the cops, cause I’ll make bail
And I’ll be back out in a day
I don’t sit still and I don’t stay

In one place for long, I got things to do
I’m looking out for Hank and we’re looking for you
Cross our paths and you cross the pack
Then we attack and we put you on your back


Copyright © Ray E. Toler, Jr. All rights reserved.
www.raytoler.com

Colophon

Instruments & Samples

Plasmonic, Rhythmus, Emulator II V, iPhone

Effects, Mixing, & Mastering

Fabfilter, Gullfoss, Valhalla VintageVerb and Delay, H3000 Factory, PanMan

Notes

1
Or at least as much as one can expect out of a 9-month old puppy with an attitude
2
behr-ZHAY pih-CAR – named for the region in France they are found. Also the same region a certain sexy, bald, captain calls home and is named for.
3
This is from my constant writing companion since the mid-90s, The Complete Rhyming Dictionary (ed. Clement Wood, Revised by Ronald Bogus)
4
Ha! writeUP