Local composers Patrick Meagher and Johnny Marie combine their unfinished work into an unforgettable project
Photo Courtesy of The Real Flower Pots
Although they’ve been working together musically since 2000 in projects like Girl for Samson and Lonesome Petunia, Kansas City composers Patrick Meagher and Johnny Marie formed The Real Flower Pots just last year, when the pair were talking about an abundance of partially completed songs they each had. They each shared a dozen incomplete tunes with the other and began a process they describe as “finishing each other’s sentences without any genre limitations, rules, guidelines or interference from the other composer,” resulting in the album, Here Come The Real Flower Pots.
The idea came about after the fifth Girl for Samson album, Blend All the Seasons, saw Meagher and Marie trying something different.
“We jammed every week to drum loops and then culled the jams for inspiring bits for songs,” explains Marie. “I mention this to show that we were starting to think outside of what was normal for us.”
The discussion which led to sharing these unfinished songs was the result of two things, says Marie.
“I had loads of demos/notions and I knew that he did, too,” the composer recalls. “In late 2023, I thought of the band name The Real Flower Pots and felt it was worthy of building something around. I mentioned this in an offhand way to Patrick and he was in!”
Photo Courtesy of The Real Flower Pots
From there, they each began by trading a roughly even pile of songs and then getting to work. The bulk of the album is Marie fleshing out Meagher’s ideas with the exception of two tracks, “Saturnine” and “Pigeon Falls.” There weren’t any occurrences where one of Marie’s songs completed one of Meagher’s or vice versa. Here Come The Real Flower Pots is entirely new material being added to extant works, although there wasn’t a manifesto or mission statement, they say.
“Once I sent him something back that I had built up, we would often trade it back and forth a few more times,” continues Marie. “Generally speaking, we never smashed two existing bits together. There was the original notion and then new ideas. ‘Pigeon Falls’ was the only song that we built from the ground up in real-time.”
“God’s Horn” was the first completed song and when it was finished, the duo knew that they had something special with this idea and were both enamored with it.
“It was Patrick’s demo and was originally synthy with that great chord pattern,” Marie explains. “I replaced most of the parts with real instruments. We had an unspoken rule from that point on that we would use natural instruments as much as possible.”
While that held up for about the first six songs and includes cello, viola, recorders, lap steel, mandolin, banjo, lyre, xylophone, and natural hand percussion, Marie and Meagher now just do whatever best serves the composition. Sadly, while Here Come The Real Flower Pots is a wildly wonderful album that is baroque and folky, just like Girl for Samson, this is strictly a recording project because it would be unwieldy to do live.
Photo Courtesy of The Real Flower Pots
“The Girls did a single live performance a long time ago and decided afterward that rehearsing took too much time away from recording,” Marie says. When they first started the album, the pair began trading vocal duty on verses and choruses. “As the album progressed, we actually began to sing portions of lines. A line may start with Patrick’s voice and finish with mine. This would also make performance awkward!”
You can find The Real Flower Pots album, Here Come The Real Flower Pots, online.
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