Nicholas Pentabona wrote “Aroused” thinking about his partner, Jenice Taylor — specifically about how she’s had several major life events through the years that made her feel trapped, and how she now feels, at 35, that she can “get out of bed” and make large changes. The song opens Side B of Bedtimemagic’s fourth LP, runs under two minutes, and is the first single from the record.
Pentabona and drummer Morgan Berns have been doing Bedtimemagic out of Boston since late 2013. The two-piece splits instrumentation across bass, guitars, banjo, piano, harmonica, slide whistle, drum machine, and melodica on Pentabona’s side, with Berns handling drums, percussion, glockenspiel, tambourine, synths, slide whistle, and vocals.
“Lie Down With Dogs” (TGIC185) is their longest record so far — thirteen songs across thirty minutes — and it’s their second on Bobby Johnson’s The Ghost Is Clear Records after 2023’s “Sleep Together.”
Alex Allinson tracked most of it at The Bridge Sound & Stage in Cambridge, MA. Alex Garcia-Rivera recorded tracks four, eight, and ten at Mystic Valley Studio in Medford. Carl Saff mastered. Artwork by Dr. Wolfenbergen, photography and video by Alex Ilyadis.
Pentabona has a rule about titles. Every Bedtimemagic song title has at least two meanings, ideally three. “One relating to the song, one joking, and one dirty,” he says. “But if we can’t make that work we do two out of three with the one always referring to the lyrics. Album titles are always a double entendre.” He admits the system gets harder after forty or fifty songs. The sleep motif that runs across “Narcoleptic,” “Morning Wood,” “Nap Quest,” “May Cause Drowsiness” and the rest isn’t a theme in the literal sense.
“Bedtime is about bucking order, normalcy, trend, and the limits of what is acceptable,” he says. “This particular record is more an oeuvre than a direct address.” He points to Black Flag’s “My War” as a reference for how Side A and Side B of “Lie Down With Dogs” behave as different objects — a record with a firm A/B disparity, a personality that shifts halfway through.
Pentabona walked us through Side B track by track. He prefaced it with a disclaimer: “I am truly reticent when it comes to discussing lyrics. I write most of them.” He went through them anyway.
“Aroused” — the Jenice song.
“Morning Wood” is about traffic. Specifically what Pentabona has dubbed TFNR, pronounced tiff-nerr, which stands for Traffic For No Reason. “You’ll be driving in east bumfuck then hit two hours of traffic. You know what’s at the end? Nothing. Nothing at all. Just some jackass hit the brakes while looking for their napkin, it trickled down for seven miles.” The lyrics, in their entirety, are “Full stop / T-F-N-R.” The slide whistles are “cause it’s a god damn clown show out there.” Seth Crowell contributed a sound collage to the track.
“Nap Quest” started with Pentabona writing a long poem for Andrew Wong (Miracle Blood) to read. Wong went out to his car, read it into his phone, and that’s what’s on the record. Berns played MIDI drums behind it. Pentabona frames the whole thing as a callback to old four-track recordings he used to do on a Tascam Portastudio MKII.
“100% Down Filling” is a play on words. The title is supposed to read as “100% Down FEELING,” about people in a relationship going through a crisis.
“Partially Fatigued” is a companion piece to an older Bedtimemagic song, “Overslept.” Pentabona says some songs on the band’s records are paired with earlier ones — “Long Kiss Goodnight” and “A Wake” are another pair — telling the same story from different chapters or angles, or picking up a thread from the first. “PF is a continuation of ‘Overslept,’ which is about how corporate America, this bullshit capitalist nightmare, this constant psyop, is wearing us down.” Kevin Whitley of Cherubs contributed the melodic vocal part. Pentabona doesn’t know how he recorded it — they told Whitley to come up with his own idea without hearing the vocal line first.
“Drift Off” — Pentabona took this one as an opportunity to clarify something. “Bedtimemagic has no shortage of songs with masturbation jokes. It’s like 1/3 of all song titles or lyrics. Masturbation is healthy. We laugh at it but that’s some religious-right thinking that it’s bad. EVERYONE MASTURBATES.” He goes on. “We are, incontrovertibly, a pro-sex and sexuality group of two. Not 80’s glam rock sex, but rather we are making fun of that because, as we all know, real sex is accidental farts, cramps, sweat, and spitting things out. Sex is GOOD. Sex workers ARE PEOPLE.” Then: “The song itself has nothing to do with that whatsoever by the way. Sorry.”
“May Cause Drowsiness” closes the record. Berns wrote it. “Morgan is a wonderful songwriter. He doesn’t do it enough, imho, out of some kind of personal fear that it won’t be good. I don’t understand that — nothing I, Nicholas, do is good, who cares.” Pentabona wrote the lyrics and says he has no clue what the song is about. He also notes the track is an outlier in how Bedtimemagic usually operates: “The songwriting process is 98% mutual. Most songs we write together. He wrote ‘May Cause Drowsiness’ on his own, I added my Nicholas spice to it later.”
Pentabona has thoughts about Boston. “It’s chaos out there. This age of the internet has really divided people, huh? We used to go to clubs to make friends. We would go to hangouts like Deli Haus or Great Scott to mingle.” He thinks the city used to do that better than New York — more socializing, more heart-to-hearts, more togetherness through the 80s, 90s, even the 00s. “It’s become much more unraveled.” The Bridge Sound & Stage is a counterweight, and he points out the name is itself a play on words — it’s in Cambridge, and it functions as a bridge between people and scenes. Alex Allinson, he says, is rebuilding the scene around it.
Alex Garcia-Rivera was a separate story. “He’s a man-about-town. He’s a guy you just know. He’s friendly, fun, vegan.” The Mystic Valley session was originally booked for “Sleep Together,” but the band finished that record before the date came around. They honored the booking anyway, tracked three songs that ended up on “Lie Down With Dogs” instead. “He loved doing the slide whistle.”
On the guests: “We couldn’t have done any of that shit ourselves. I don’t sing-sing, Kevin does. Wong is a crazy person. Seth has this art deep in his soul that you can’t emulate.” Cherubs have been in the band’s listening rotation for a while — “half a dozen records we adore” — and they asked Bedtimemagic to play their Boston show a few years back. Wong, Pentabona says, comes to all of the band’s shows and pays the door fee. Seth Crowell is “just a genius, I’ll leave it at that.” Ted Douglas contributed poetry to opener “Dozer.” Allinson himself plays backup vocals, hit an alarm clock on “Can’t Get Up,” and added phaser to “Narcoleptic.”
On the short song discipline — thirteen tracks, thirty minutes, single under two — Pentabona traces it back to the band’s original concept. “The original concept for the band was something like Man Is The Bastard. We’re too dumb to figure that out and too attractive to not do something pretentious af.” From there they pulled in grindcore mentality, added melodies and weird time signatures. “We have low, low attention spans. We hate sitting still. My favorite records have 45 second songs.” There was a practical constraint too. “Bass doesn’t do double picking death metal well, you gotta kind of hold notes, so we had to find a way around what we both did in our bands from back in the day. This is fast but you still get the bass to do its thing. Hurts my fingies.”
On being a two-piece eleven years in: “Being in a band can be difficult. We both were in tons of bands over the years. One thing I have learned is you have to be open to other ideas. You have to compromise. Morgan is a talented, kind, smart dude. If you just let him do his thing and find YOUR thing in the mix with that, you can make magic. Bedtimemagic.”
“Lie Down With Dogs” is out later this year on The Ghost Is Clear Records. “Aroused” is streaming now.
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