Tag Archives: composing

Is Bigger Actually Better? (art + adamance)

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When did the value of a piece of art get determined by the hours logged?  Is it me, or does that idea seem counterintuitive to the very spirit of art? That spirit is, among other conceptions, that which reflects something more than the surface thing it is made of, and that “something” has the power to entertain, enlighten, challenge, tickle, anger, transform, and the oh, so many other splendid eruptions of the human heart that art can accomplish. And to clarify “more than the surface thing it is made of” I mean that a canvas, some paint, and a brush don’t make the thing art. What makes it art is how it speaks. If it speaks. Of course, that idea is so very subjective and abstract that anything can be called art.  And, personally, I think that’s the very beauty of it.  

I had a conversation maybe 6 or 8 months ago with a woman who’d come to an art show that a couple of my alcohol ink pieces were in. She didn’t have a thing to say about my pieces (I knew right away that my small abstracts were not her thing; and that was a-okay with me), but she did go on and on about a piece she had flipped out over. She had been interested in buying it but was stopped by the price tag. In a nutshell, it was a painted cello; I mean an actual cello that was painted, and the imagery painted on there was abstract, but not like the large, sensuous brushstrokes of O’Keeffe, or the random splatters of Pollock. They were squiggles and lines and shapes, geometric, detailed, and meticulous. It sort of resembled code, and even a bit of hypergraphia. It was colorful, every color under the sun, it seemed. I really liked it. It hearkened to me aspects of Basquiat, Haring, Kandinsky, and even Schnabel, as there were also bits and pieces of found objects glued on, and which gave the whole thing a very New Orleans vibe, or a voodoo vibe, or a creole vibe, and I may or may not be saying redundant things. It was a compelling piece. Since the canvas was the wooden instrument itself, I figured it must have a meaning related to music, but it was such an abstract concept that I didn’t linger too long on what that might be, because when it comes to abstract art, I give up everything to the piece, my need to make sense of it, or to create some kind of order. 

In any case, while I liked the piece, this woman loved it. But she was indeed bugged by the price tag. It was selling for $8000. I didn’t blink an eye, except in the knowledge that I can’t buy a piece of art for $8000 and may never be in a position to do so. So, it was a non-issue for me. If the artist believes the value of his work is $8000, and can get that, then it’s worth $8000. (For the record, I never pursued finding out if the piece ever sold, or if the artist took his piece back home with him and re-thought his price tag). The value of a thing is self-evident, as it really is determined by two things: The decision of the artist to put the piece’s value at X. And if the market bears that.

The woman begged to differ with me, and proceeded to break down what she felt the worth of the piece should be based on the number of hours at the task of creating it. She took a guess on how long it might’ve taken. And then broke down that number into dollars. I can’t even remember what the number was, because in all frankness even THAT is an abstract, since neither of us had a clue how long it took this artist to create the piece. But let’s say she came up with $1000 per hour. Is the artist worth that wage? was the bottom line for her. And the fact that she looked at it in terms of a wage was fascinating to me. I happen to believe that what goes into any artistic endeavor, from painting, to composing music, to playing an instrument, to writing a poem or a novel, to directing a play, to acting, to dancing, to choreographing, to photographing, to sculpting…..is more than the rudimentary, physical manifestations: Telling an actor to move here, take a beat there; affixing the paint onto its canvas with the stroke of a brush; mastering the physical constraints of a pirouette, typing words onto a manuscript. And it’s more than the amassing of hundreds of hours on a timesheet. First, there is the quite crucial element of the thing birthed, forming, growing inside one’s brain, then on the canvas, staff paper, dance floor, typewriter, etc., conceptualizing, determining what message or non-message this creation is. Artists are often in search of healing, which is customarily why they’ve been led to an art form to begin with. A way to offload trauma. Which means, there is the inner resonance. What is it speaking to?

The measurement of a piece: it’s size, girth, length of time it took to create, tells us little of its emotional, spiritual, cosmic impact. Really, it all comes down to one question: What does it do for your soul? The rest doesn’t matter. 

That’s MY bias, of course. This woman, an art lover herself, had a different set of criteria for what something was worth, and was definitely coming from that left-brain, linear hemisphere in her assertion. Which I realized does have its place, because the deeper into the debate we got, the more I could begin to see a bit of both assertions. As there is also the Emperor’s New Clothes Syndrome. Modern legend has it that Picasso scribbled on a napkin for a waiter, as his tip for the service. And the first thought on anyone’s mind who knows this bit of modern lore is, “Get thee to an appraiser!” It’s Picasso, for God’s sake. His name alone, at a certain point in his meteoric ascent, became the thing that defined his worth. The legitimacy of that phenomenon is a whole other conversation, a more cynical, less pure one. Or maybe it’s not. Maybe this was exactly the woman’s point about the value of a thing. If Pablo had merely spat on the napkin, it probably would still have been canonized as “a Picasso.” And so, the game is played. She was challenging this artist of the cello piece to qualify his ownership of his worth. I don’t mean to say that she actually approached him at the art opening, armed with gall and too many glasses of free champagne. It was merely a whispered aside to me, posing the question: what gives him the nerve? with, of course, the inference of it’s not like his name is Picasso.

I think about my own artwork. The medium I’m presently working in is small (9″x12″). Alcohol ink on Yupo. I keep being told, “go bigger!” And honestly, at present I’m not inclined to. The reason I even qualify the size of my pieces is because this woman asked me, during this debate about worth and value, how long it takes me to finish one of my “little trifles.” I’m pretty sure she meant that as “like a sweet confection.” Nonetheless, it came off as belittling (pun intended), and I got the feeling she’s probably someone damned artful at passive-aggression, for she never lost the warmth. I responded, “anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours.” She never said a thing beyond that, but her reaction clearly betrayed, if it only takes you a few minutes to create, how are you rationalizing $100 for your pieces? I didn’t answer that question, because she didn’t actually ask it. But I did sell both my inks that evening for the price asked, and I have to admit the tiniest tinge of schadenfreude at letting her know my good news.

My alcohol inks are all abstracts, at least so far on this journey. I’m partial to abstracts. So, when a friend bought one of my pieces a few years ago, she took it to a workshop she was conducting, where she asked her attendees what they saw in the painting. She was kind enough to share with me the varied responses. Something I will treasure forever:

“Beauty in the un-manifest, infinite possibilities.”
“Core of darkness reaching out to be brought to light.”
“Nature and the outdoors.”
“Underwater world.”
“Mermaid fairy with a flower.”
“Hummingbird with the spirit of a dragon.”
and quite possibly my favorite…
“A gathering of monks.”

These answers not only moved me beyond words, but also affirmed for me what I believe is most powerful about the abstract realm—art of any realm, for that matter—that we each glean from a piece what shows up for us; what we need in the moment. And that makes something worth whatever the art lover is willing and able to pay to take it home and be moved by it every day.

The experience of art is far more than just a surface observation of: Nice colors! Nice notes! They’re in tune! Stellar spin! She must have really strong muscles! He uses pretty words! That’s gonna just about cover my giant wall and match my sofa! So how can it be quantified? The very experience of art is an intangible abstract. It can open us wide open. Give us what we need in that moment.

Or it doesn’t, and we move on. 

There’s also absolutely nothing wrong with admiring a pitch-perfect note, a gorgeously rich hue, someone’s logic-defying technique or prowess. It’s just, there’s so much more experience that can be had if we don’t allow ourselves to be contained by mere surface. Surface has nice things to offer. But beneath it? Can you imagine what you might be missing if you stopped just short? Perhaps a magnificent rebirth. And therefore, again, what is that worth?

If something isn’t grueling or doesn’t take a chunk of flesh from us to create, or doesn’t take months and years to finish, or doesn’t require a vast studio space in which to contain its girth, does that mean its value is less? Or can’t have impact? Because impact is the endgame. If a work of art collides with someone, and the explosion from that collision is life-altering, or even a tiny shimmy, art has done its job.

Some of the most compelling art I’ve ever experienced is from Japanese minimalist artists known for line drawing. Matisse and Picasso did incredibly compelling line drawings. These are not the intricate layer after layer of exploding color and texture and brush skill in replicating a figurative image, which is what Picasso was known for in one of his many eras. This is the use of pen or pencil, and drawing single lines. And these “trifles” can be quite startling. Or how about: a brilliant haiku packs no less a punch than a brilliant novel. Does Blind Willie Johnson’s simple guitar and warbled voice on Dark was the Night, Cold was the Ground connect less to struggle and pain than Penderecki’s Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima? For some, there is no difference in the connection to pain. And for someone else, hell yes, there’s a difference. Which is perfectly valid. Except the difference won’t be because the Penderecki has about 10 billion notes and a riot of tone clusters and 52 stringed instruments and is a discordant behemoth, and Blind Willie’s is merely a precious, tiny, single voice and 6 strings on an old bottleneck slide guitar. Deep, exquisite pain is felt every time I have listened to either of these heart-wrenching, power-packed pieces of music.

Size really does kind of lose its meaning when we dare to probe deeper. So, then, if it isn’t size, what is it that makes a work of art worth something? Is it, after all, the amount of labor invested and hours logged? Is it education and an MFA vs. being self-taught? Is it something completely intangible that only the person colliding with the piece can experience, because their experience will be funneled through and informed by their own history, and what speaks to them will not be replicated by any other person’s collision with the same work of art?

It is a random concept, the worth and value of a thing. So random as to be, actually, a kind of silly debate. I realize that. But thank you anyway, woman I argued with. There’s nothing more enjoyable than to exercise the critical thinking mechanism in the splash pool of wonderment. The value of a work of art is whatever the market will bear. Plain and simple. And yes, there is some wicked capitalism and sleight-of-hand opportunism often involved. I wrote a microfiction once called Supernova that I’ve offered below. It speaks to that very abstract idea of value, and just how unstable, unquantifiable, and exploitable it actually is. Enjoy my dark little trifle, and—if you even care about such things—ask yourself what you think makes a work of art worth anything. 

Or just relax with a glass of wine, and stay away from us pontificators. You’re surely better off.

Supernova

He sold the painted canvas on the street for $1, a striking abstract created by his own homeless hands. Years later it sold at a gallery for $800. The original purchaser, an artist himself, had put his own name on it. By the time many more years passed, and it sold at Sotheby’s for a million (as the artist/thief eventually enjoyed astronomical fame), the homeless man, who never thought of his painting again beyond that corner sell, had long ago died, impoverished. The art thief did not fear God. He did, however, feel the dread of ghosts now and again. 

— from the 100-word story collection Aleatory on the Radio

Wake Up Ophelia (The Song Series)

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I jokingly call this the greatest love story I’ve ever written.   I say it with tongue in cheek because it’s the only love story I’ve ever written.   But also because it’s a seedy, salty, nasty little story, with pain, hurt, desperation, heartbreak, rage, violence, and passion as its main ingredients.   But make no mistake, a love story it is.   The story of Arthur and Ophelia is one that originated in my novel The Assassination of Gabriel Champion.  The book is a modern fable and a meditation on violence and redemption.   And Arthur’s and Ophelia’s story is only a small part of the overall landscape of the book, yet it’s a pivotal one.   In writing the story, creating these characters, and then living with them over the years of refining and rewriting the book, I fell in love with them.  They are the most imperfect people you could possibly conceive of, they are rich in pathos and pain, they are complicated, infuriating, and they are forever sewn to my heart.

Somewhere along the line, during the years of nursing this book into its rightful being, I was inspired to write a song about Arthur and Ophelia (not even the main characters).  And of course, considering the source, the song HAD to be blues.

Wake Up Ophelia would end up debuting on my first album of original songs, Resting On the Rock, a few years later, although many years before the book itself would be published.

I thought the writing of the lyrics would be easy, because their story was already there.  But in taking it on, I discovered that there were actually quite a few challenges ahead.  First off, I needed to decide which angle would be the focus of the song, because Arthur and Ophelia are sort of epic within the scope of the novel, yet suddenly we’ve got 3 verses and a chorus in which to tell their story, not the luxury of an entire book.  And that proved tricky.  I eventually came to the conclusion that Ophelia’s death was the moment that merited a song written (yes, it’s a bit of a spoiler; but if you haven’t read the book yet, believe me nothing’s ruined . . . now, go read the book!).   And so, the song would become Arthur’s plea to Ophelia after snuffing out her life.  I needed to find a way to express the arc of their love, their substance addiction, their desperation for and violence upon each other, and finally the deed, all within the confines of five 4-line stanzas, two of which are a repeated chorus.

I knew that what would aid me would be to approach the whole thing as poetry.  There’s a different palate for poetry than for prose.  Prose begs linear detail and chronology (not always, but as a matter of standard), whereas poetry can, through the artful twist of a word or phrase, illuminate everything.   For example, I think “he made his arms erupt”  is all that’s really needed to capture the entire nature and scope of a man’s addiction.  And I had an entire story to re-work in this way.   To get it all in, within the space of few words.  Poetry.

Once I was able to figure out the basic prosody of the verse, the words began to fall into place, and so next came the music.   Now, like I said, it couldn’t possibly be anything other than blues.  And so inevitably the thought is:  What’s there to write?  The blues is the blues.  The form is universal.  Well, the lesson I would come to learn in the years that this song came into being, grew its legs, and was eventually recorded, is that the blues ain’t jes’ one thang.  And as hardheaded as I have been known to be, it took some years for that to really sink in, but we’ll get to that.

At the time I was first conceiving of Ophelia’s story as a song, I had been listening nonstop to Tito & Tarantula, the stoner rock band out of East L.A.   There’s a song of theirs called The Strange Face of Love that is this enigmatic, engine-revving shuffle that cannot be stopped!   And I instantly thought, “Well, that’s it!   That’s what I need for my song.”  But it wasn’t only the feel that struck me.  It was that their song was a minor blues.  That’s certainly not unheard of.  It’s just not the more common dominant seventh environment that’s so familiar to our ears.  Wake Up Ophelia in a minor key would lend an even further dankness to the proceedings.  Done.  Decision made.  Song written.

I sang it around town for a few years.  It never even had a chart.  I would just say, “blues in A minor,”  tell the musicians it’s a shuffle, count it off, and go.  And while it worked perfectly alright, I can’t say I felt especially connected to the story in the song, nor did I feel that it had the emotional heft of an opus, when in truth that IS how I felt about Arthur and Ophelia’s story in book form.  And honestly I don’t even think I was aware of just how unsatisfying the song was for me.   I just chalked it up to being “not one of my best,” and didn’t really feel any need to do anything about it.   Or so I thought.

Fast forward to the year 2000, and it was, at last, time to start writing songs for Resting On the Rock, which I had conceptualized as a project that would take its inspiration from the folk vocabulary of other cultures, including America’s roots and blues movement.  Wake Up Ophelia  fit that bill, so I took it into the studio with some musicians to record, with the hope that it would jump start the rest of the canon for me.  And I did exactly as I had done every time I’d ever sung it on a gig.  I just called the key, said it was a shuffle blues, counted it off, and sang.   We did a few takes.  I got quick mixes.  And I took all the takes home to study, and to determine which I liked best.  It was sort of ZZ Top meets saloon music.  And as I listened back, there was something unsatisfying about all of it.  Every take.   It wasn’t the playing.   Let me be very clear about that.  These guys, Ken Rosser, Ross Wright, David Arana, and Chris Wabich, are some of the best I know.   They played their asses off.   And had the subject matter of the lyrics been anything else (my baby done left me, blah, blah, blah . . . ) perhaps I would’ve dug it as I dig everything these guys play.

But in this case, I heard my song’s meaning and power just get lost in what sounded like nothing more than a romping bar blues, the kind you get up and dance to, not the kind you shudder to hear and to witness, and are forever changed.

Forgive my hyperbole.  I do have visions of wanting to change the world in whatever tiny ways my talents can achieve.   So, yes, I wanted shuddering.

I lived with the recording, and listened to it a hundred times, a thousand times, realizing that I’d been singing this song, played just this way, or close enough, for years, but not until locking it into recorded history, and actually having the luxury to study it did I realize how unrepresentative it actually was of Arthur and Ophelia’s dark tale.   And then to try and figure out what exactly wasn’t working.   And whatever that was, this much I knew, was my fault.  Because I hadn’t bothered to take the time to actually compose.  That’s the tricky thing about blues.  You can dismiss it without even realizing you’ve done so.

The first thought that struck me, after so many listens that I’ve lost count, was that the driving shuffle was not right.  Not exactly.   It was precisely what was needed on the chorus, because the chorus is the plea.   The begging, imploring plea.   That energy is required.  But the verses are expository.  The verses describe their world.  And their world is a place of sadness and despair, and begs sobriety.   So, I decided that the verses should be played with a half time feel, and at a tempo of about 64.   Very sparse, not note-y, not chops-y, but vibe-y.  And that vibe needed to be messy, crunchy, grungy, but with texture, not with busy-ness.  When I thought back to the Tito & Tarantula tune, I realized that that’s exactly what they do.  I’d been so hypnotized by that burning shuffle of theirs that I hadn’t really noticed what they were doing on their verses.  This would give the song some actual shape and dynamics.  Places to go TO, places to come FROM.   A meditation, to a full-on assault, back to a meditation, back again to the assault, and so forth.

Next were the chord changes.   Something about what had been played didn’t sit right.  I realized that clashes were actually occurring between chords and melody, because the melody I’d written didn’t resolve to the tonic by the end of a phrase, the way blues traditionally does, but instead to the dominant, and only resolved to the tonic once we were into the next verse, as opposed to the dominant merely being used as a passing chord.   So, I dropped everything, and I just listened to a LOT of blues for awhile.   Now, you can never go wrong with the brilliance of a Son House, or a Big Mama Thornton, or a Howlin’ Wolf.   Those singers are special stars in the firmaments.  Or even contemporary folks like Chris Whitley and Jack White.  Yes, I was listening to everyone I could possibly consume from every walk of blues life.  But the changes, the changes, were still driving me crazy.  Of course, I was able to make sure a chart would resolve the verses to the dominant; I just wasn’t especially crazy about the traditional changes.  I plucked around on the piano for weeks, trying to discover something different, when I just happened to find my answer in the most unlikely yard.  I ran across a Daniel Lanois track called Blue Waltz, and my mind was blown by an absolutely simple set of chord changes on what was ostensibly the blues, and which were so left of the middle that I was stopped in my tracks, and knew that this chord progression was what my song was screaming for.   What’s so funny to me is that it’s only the last four bars of a 12-bar blues that he does anything even remotely twisted with.  So simple, and yet so profoundly odd.

Now, I have improved somewhat over the years, but at the time my ear was pretty poor for hearing changes and being able to transcribe them; what’s called a “take down.”   So I asked Ross Wright, the bass player on this song, if he would listen to the Lanois track and help me jot down the changes, because, yes, he’d already been informed that we were going to redo this song.  Those four bars are a set of changes that actually yank the Lanois track right out of the blues palate altogether for just an instant, to something more squared, if that makes any sense.  No real blue notes.  And yet there was still the issue of how to take the establishment of those changes, whatever modal construct they came from, and resolve them to the dominant.  And this was where Ross was incredibly helpful.

So, finally I was starting to have a structure that was specific and fixed, and not just a case of calling blues, describing it as a shuffle, and having everyone play what they’ve played a thousand times on a thousand gigs.

I had called up Ken Rosser shortly after our session, in the midst of my song’s identity crisis.  I confessed I wasn’t happy with how we’d done the song, and that a lot of it was in the structure . . . that there was none!  Because I had not fine-tuned a specific set of mechanics.  But that a good deal of it, as well, maybe even more crucially, had to do with concept and interpretation, which I hadn’t bothered to relay.  I guess I thought the emotion could all come from me.  That I wouldn’t need to communicate it to the musicians playing it.   But that is so wrong.  We talked very intimately about color and mood and shade and dramatic arc.  He was SO on my wave length with this!  We each discovered in that conversation how much a fan we both were of ambient tone and atmospherics, texture more than notes, manipulation of sound, all in the service of emotional connection.  And as much as I like to talk  (and have done so several times already in this song series) about Ken and me being musical soul mates, let me say here that this moment of discussing Wake Up Ophelia was truly the breakthrough moment for us, and would firmly establish the musical relationship we’ve now had for nearly 15 years.

As far as my own part in this, I had originally, and for years, sung the song in A minor, which is a perfectly comfortable key for this old alto.  But as everything in the song was being revisited and re-envisioned, I decided to lower the key to where the first notes out of my mouth (which are the lowest notes in the melody) would be at my lowest possible register.  It’s not the most attractive part of my register, and with not a lot of physical power there, but it does lend a quality of something intimate and fragile, almost struggling.  Plenty of room to move up to the shouting chorus, but at least in the new key of F minor it would start off with a vulnerable simmer.

One of the final things I decided on, before we went back in to re-record, was to eliminate the keyboard.  David Arana is a wonderful player; I’ve done countless gigs with him, the most prevalent of those being with The Orchestre Surreal for the past 18 years.   But the presence of piano on this blues most definitely gave it its saloon vibe, which I realized only afterwards that I did not want.  I wanted something sonically dense, where a piano really pierces sharply through any kind of texture.  Plus I didn’t feel I needed two chordal instruments.  The guitar was plenty on that front.   And we’re talking Ken Rosser here!  Known for texture and aural layers of richness, even within one single pass.   He was all I needed.  In fact, it was that decision about instrumentation that would set the tone for the rest of the songs I would eventually compose for Resting On the Rock.

On the day we were scheduled to re-record, Chris Wabich wasn’t available (he, the working-est drummer in town), and so our recording engineer, who also just happens to be a drummer, offered to step in and do double-duty.   Michael Kramer has been my mixing engineer on every record I’ve ever helmed, but this song goes down as the only song of mine he’s ever played on.  And he was great!   Running back and forth from control booth to drum booth had to take a toll on his concentration, and yet both drumming and engineering that day were stellar.

We assembled at the same studio for round two.  We’re talking months later, after all the soul searching I’d had to do.  I had Ross bring in his F-Bass fretless instead of the Alembic fretted bass he’d used on the prior recording.  I thought the new approach, the new texture, the new mood, really called for that quality.  And my only instruction to him, a man known for very note-y, virtuosic playing, was to just simplify, leave space, yet without sacrificing pulse.  And I handed everyone the chart of my (finally!) structured composition.

Here’s where I’d like to mention that Ken Rosser walked into the session with a fever of 102, and was, understandably, not in the best of moods.  Oh boy!  But what a trooper to still show up instead of asking if we could reschedule.  He set up his gear in a corner, far away from everyone else, and had little tolerance for the chatting and laughing and all the things we do in the studio between takes.  I think it’s safe to say we were all kind of afraid of Ken that day :).  He used the house guitar amp, which was a beat-to-shit small vintage tweed Fender combo amp with a Deluxe Reverb, and he’d brought in a cheap Danelectro guitar, where one of the switches was intermittent and it wouldn’t stay in tune, which Ken confessed was a purposeful choice that, based on our talk, he felt would be perfect for the raw, urgent vibe.  That conceptual idea, for Ken, translated into cranking up the amp until it was rattling and shaking, or as he has said, “It’s Hendrix at the Fillmore West, or Neil Young in full meltdown mode . . . there’s no way to get that sound and not endanger something or someone,”  and with the plan to use reverse delay effects during the verses, and three fuzz boxes chained together at the same time during the choruses and solo.   I just needed one last whispered caucus with the fevered lion before we did a take, to reiterate the concept, and at this point I simply said that since it was about a woman dying I wanted the guitar to sound like a man on his last manic leg in this life, and that I wanted the solo to sound like a woman wailing, like the cries of the damned.

Well, folks, I don’t know what Ken Rosser was channeling that day, but I suspect all credit is owed to that 102° fever, and I, for one, thank God for it.  It was some of the dankest, darkest, most connected, plugged in, tapping something ancestral, killer music I’ve ever heard created.

Which brings us to the ending of the song.  The ending on this recording is such a far cry from that of our original.  That one resolved with the typical blues tag ― the classic 12/8, triplet-y, descending, Robert Johnson turnaround sequence, that almost begs an “ohhhh yeahhhhh” on the ending fermata, with jazz hands!  I know.  I’m being facetious.  And I truly do love Robert Johnson.  It just was not the call for my song.  Though in all fairness, because there are traditions, it’s what you’re likely to get when all you do is call some blues, and you haven’t bothered to architect it.   The new ending was designed to be a vamp on the tonic, still in the full shuffle, and for everyone to play out in their momentum, which we would gradually fade in the mix, the dramatic metaphor being that life goes on even in the midst of death, even after “The End.”   I liked the idea of a song about death having no ending.

And, on how we ended up doing it, a special note of credit needs to go out to Ross Wright.

We were recording live.  No isolation booths (except for the vocals).  No punching.  No cutting & pasting.  Yes, I did later overdub some harmonies on the chorus, and Ross did grab a Gretsch guitar off the wall after the session was officially wrapped (and Ken went home to sleep off his fever) and added a few wobbly chords at the beginning for mood.  But otherwise this was live, so if we screwed up we started over.   We were 98% through our first take, which was clearly a winner.  And as we landed on the tonic for the ending cadence, there we were, just sizzling on the F minor, and on bar 5 of this vamp Ross suddenly went from the tonic to the sub-dominant, as if we were going back through the form changes (those wonderful Lanois-inspired changes).  I had eye contact with everyone from my booth, and I shot a look at Ross, as in “No!  Oh shit!  You weren’t supposed to go there.”  And he shot a look back at me that said, “Sorry!  But now we’re here.  It’s a great take.  Let’s just keep going.”  We all shot a look at each other ― all except for Ken, who was in this world of his own, curing the freaking common cold and uncovering the secret to eternal youth ― and we all agreed to just keep going.  Well, progressing to that chord change, which Ken hadn’t expected, only propelled him into an even deeper, danker level of depth and depravity and marvel and wonder and amplifier overdrive.  Even Ross had this crazy instant during that cadence of slowly sliding his fingers across the neck of his bass for this pedal-to-the-metal grunge moment that just exploded everything.  And so, what had been instructed to be just this simple vamp-out became a whole second solo for Ken, with a second life, and which flung open the doors of Heaven and Hell both.  MY GOD was it stunning.  More hyperbole, yes.  But this is how I think of Ken.  He’s a transporter of souls, a deliverer.  We eventually did settle on that tonic, which would be faded later in the mix, but the world was on fire by that point.  And I smiled at Ross, shaking my head, who, instead of yelling “cut!” or “my bad!” had managed to remain calm and turn his little mistake into a stunning afterlife moment for all involved, and for the song.  I defy you to tell me that you don’t hear Ophelia’s cries in that outro solo.

When the take was done, the general consensus was that it was a great take, “now let’s do a few more.”  And my only response was “why?”

Quarter note = 64.   The tempo of big, bad, tragic, Shakespearean pathos.

 

 

Click here to listen on Bandcamp

 

 

Wake up Ophelia.  Don’t lay so still.

The sun’s goin’ down, and it’s time for a meal.

I’ve got the whiskey if you’ll bring the buzz,

and together, like in a story, we can fall in love.

 

With a tremble and a whisper he cried, I know you’re there.

I can see you hidin’ deep inside those dark eyes somewhere.

Where’s my feisty woman?  Where’s my sweet honey bee?

Please, please, Ophelia, don’t leave me!

 

Wake up Ophelia.  Don’t you dim your bright eyes.

Wake up Ophelia.  Never listen to my lies.

Better get yourself away from danger, girl.

Please wake up and rise.

 

That man, oh how he begged.  Pleadin’ hands around her throat.

“Wake up Ophelia” were the desperate words he spoke.

And he leaned into his whiskey, and he made his arms erupt,

as he begged his sweet Ophelia to please wake up.

 

Wake up Ophelia.  Don’t you dim your bright eyes.

Wake up Ophelia.  Never listen to my lies.

Better get yourself away from danger, girl.

Please wake up and rise.

 

Angela Carole Brown is the author of three published books, The Assassination of Gabriel Champion, The Kidney Journals: Memoirs of a Desperate Lifesaver, and Trading Fours, is a recipient of the Heritage/Soulword Magazine Award in poetry, and has produced several albums of music and a yoga/mindfulness CD.   Bindi Girl Chronicles is her writing blog.

Blue Sea of August (The Song Series)

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Blue Sea of August

 

“ I’m a sucker for a burnished alto voice and an apocalyptic slide,
so this kinda works for me…”
– David Kelly

 

The first and last tracks on 2008’s Music For the Weeping Woman, which are Blue Sea of August and Bells (Of the Blue Sea), are actually the same song, but bookend the entire record with a vocal version and an instrumental rendering.  There is a bonus track, which is not available on the hard copy recording, but only as a single download, that is a marriage or mash-up of the two.  This is the recording featured here now.

Blue Sea of August  was the first song I wrote towards the album project Music For the Weeping Woman.   I had a very specific, narrow, and focused idea of what I wanted to accomplish with this album, and with the individual songs:  An ode to the vulnerability of women and their tears, and the myriad of emotional engines behind the phenomenon of tears, the seed of inspiration being Picasso’s “Weeping Women” series.  I’d just seen the movie Cold Mountain, and there is a song that plays throughout the film that was written by Sting, and sung by Alison Krauss, two of my favorite musicians, so that got my attention.   It was the most eerie and haunting ballad I think I’d ever heard, and really captured that sense of ancient folklore and American roots.   It was also such as ridiculously simple form whose simplicity was almost deceiving for how powerful it was.  I was instantly inspired to create something along similar lines.  Blue Sea of August  is about longing and loss in the most general sense of those words, but it wasn’t until I wrote the lyric “When my true love comes a-marching home” (an unexpected nod to the transpiration of the soldier) that I was really hit with the full scope of what longing and loss could encompass, and that it was potentially massive.   That’s the lyric portion of things.  When it came to the music part, it was my first time writing in a very small form, an almost (really stretching the boundaries on this) dactylic tetrameter quatrain, and allowing that to be the entire song (four stanzas of it), and resolving it without the standard pop music arrival chorus.  It’s completely rubato, and yet with that implied dactylic design.

As for the title, I took it from the 1975 Lena Wertmüller film Swept Away, whose complete title is actually Swept Away By An Unusual Destiny In the Blue Sea of August.  But the movie studio nixed the cumbersome title, and went with the shortened version for its official release. Personally, I think they kept the wrong half of the title.   And so, IN swoops Angela to happily take it off their hands.   I had no idea what kind of deep thirsting I was about to unleash as I began to compose.

Once the song was written, and in preparation for recording it, I had lots of conversations with guitarist Ken Rosser, my partner on this album, on the conceptual ideas for the song.   Of the many developments that came out of our confabs, and the incredible way in which (despite the fact that I am the sole composer) this was completely collaborative, was Ken’s idea to do, as well, an instrumental version of the song.   He had an entire layering concept in mind, and there isn’t often a bright idea of Ken’s that I say “no” to.    Once this absolute stunner was executed, and I added some Tibetan singing bowls to the proceeding, I knew it would require its own title.  Enter Bells (Of the Blue Sea).  

Fast forward to just a few months ago (roughly 6 years after the album’s release), and I decided to mash up both versions and make it available as an extended single.  I posted the track on Facebook, and got a really lovely thread going, beginning with the quotation at the top of this piece.   And while there were several participants on this thread, for the purpose of this piece I have culled only Ken’s and my contributions.  The rest were generally some pretty amazing and gracious accolades, but the process, as Ken and I excitedly recalled it, is really what I wanted to expound on here.

As transcribed from Facebook:
.
.

KEN ROSSER
This is one of my favorite tracks I’ve ever played on.

 

ACB
Apocalyptic slide?   Yeah, David Kelly!   That’s just about perfect.

 

KEN ROSSER
Just here to be of service.

 

ACB
I think of this song as almost a sea shanty, but without the yo-ho-ho-ness of your typical sea shanties. Instead there is a quality of looming doom in the music, much like that sense one might get from staring out at the sea, and acknowledging its ever-elusive horizon.  I wanted the feeling of a haunting, and I imparted that to Ken. So he began experimenting with loops and feedback, and this kind of grungy aural thing that almost evoked the sound of whales, or the creaking of a haunted barge (seriously!), and suddenly this unfolding of a dark abyss began to take shape.  I am a sucker for pathos, and Ken really captures that sense of loss and longing that is the prevalent intention.  And then there is the super-tremendous instrumental rendering of the song, whose textures are even thicker and darker and more perilous.  Ken gets me so well!   He is an absolute revelation on these tracks, and they remain my favorite on the album.

 

KEN ROSSER
Still never seen Swept Away . . . I need to fix that.

 

ACB
Dude!  . . . . . . . . . . .  That’s all I’ll say.

 

KEN ROSSER
Once you get into the emotional space of the piece it’s just a matter of framing and reinforcing.  So, because there was this tonic/dominant drone, I used an idea I’d gotten from the composer Angelo Badalamenti to add another layer of harmonic tension and release that would sort of work around that.  Then it was just coming up with those sounds, which are a pretty standard part of my vocabulary – using fuzz boxes and delays to generate layers of tones, and then sub tones and overtones.

Doing an instrumental recasting of the melody was an idea I’d heard in tons of film scores, where there’s a vocal theme song but little instrumental snippets of it reappear throughout – Breakfast At Tiffany’s (MoonRiver) and Alice In Wonderland  being two that immediately come to mind.  And I felt like since the record was basically a dialog between the guitar and voice, the guitar should get the last word.

Guitar-wise, this was me paying homage to some of my biggest influences, David Torn (whom I was becoming friends with at the time and was advising me a lot), Terje Rypdal, and Ry Cooder (especially his Trespass soundtrack).

I used a G&L Legacy for the whammy bar stuff and Larry Pogreba guitar for the slide, through Lovepedal Eternity and Wolfetone Chaos fuzz pedals and the Echoplex Digital Pro for the loops/delays, into a VHT Pittbull 45 amp.

 

ACB
Yeah, and I used a single index finger on the low end of the synthesizer, on the tonic for about 16 bars, and then on the dominant for about 16 bars.   Very complicated stuff on this end, Ken.   Don’t feel intimidated.

 

KEN ROSSER
Angela, I thought you might find this funny, as I don’t think I’d ever told you. When I did that melody instrumentally I was really trying to fixate on getting a vocal phrasing and for some reason the actual voice that popped in my head was Sinéad O’Connor’s, because I imagined that a song about the sea would work well in her Irish brogue, with this slightly angry sneer to it.  There’s even one of her little pet vocal tics that I snuck in there, that sorta cracks me up a little when I hear it now.

 

ACB
Sinéad O’Connor should record this song!!

 

KEN ROSSER
If that makes you a butt load of money, you owe me dinner.

 

ACB
From now on, when I listen to Bells (Of the Blue Sea) I’ll be listening for Essences of Sinéad.

So, the funny thing on MY end about your Sinéad inspirations is that I’ve always had a tug at me from the Irish when it comes to my songwriting.  (Where the hell does that even come from?  I’m a black chick from Compton!)  But if you think about Far Above Rubies, and a couple others of mine, there’s definitely an ancestral tug of some sort there.

 

KEN ROSSER
Yeah, it’s funny how that is.  And well, I figure – you go back far enough, we’re all from East Africa a few hundred millennia ago . . . the black American and Irish experience are just different shades of the human experience, taking the long view.

 

ACB
Anyway, what were we talking about?

 

(End of Facebook transcription).

 

I know that we could go on and on about this.  It was such a fun recording process for us.  But I’ll stop here, and I hope you enjoy Blue Sea of August / Bells (Of the Blue Sea).

 


Click here to listen on Bandcamp

 

There is a calm on the blue sea of August
There is a balm that anoints my head
It is the promise that my one true love
Will find me before I’m put to bed

There is a haze on the blue sea of August
There is a gaze that shines its eyes on me
It is the warning that I’d best be ready
When my true love beckons tenderly

There is a gleam on the blue sea of August
There is a dream that settles on the foam
It is that love will ne’er again falter
When my true love comes a-marching home

There is a gust on the blue sea of August
There is a lust all other seasons lack
‘Tis in the heat of a summer’s high noon
When the sea swears to bring my true love back

Angela Carole Brown is the author of three published books, The Assassination of Gabriel Champion, The Kidney Journals: Memoirs of a Desperate Lifesaver, and Trading Fours, and has produced several albums of music and a yoga/mindfulness CD.   Bindi Girl Chronicles is her writing blog.   Follow her on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram & YouTube.