By its Very Nature Fleeting

“By its Very Nature Fleeting,” from Begging Bowl (2007).

In a cold, concrete cave
In the mists of the city
In the skeletal form of a dorm room
Lit by shooting, blue electricity
There’s a sharp, tearing wail
Like a wounded ass braying
Hello Nancy!—she’s sweet, but she’s antsy
And this is what she’s saying:

“Gone, gone away.
I’m a wild wind retreating
And the blueness of the firmament
Is by its very nature fleeting.
When my mind will finally fade
There won’t be a pause for grieving
Because the whole damn planet
Is hurtling through infinity
Through this vacuous vicinity
Through a mind of raving lunacy.”

Now a bursting voice chimes.
It’s the young convert, Felix.
“There’s a place out in space where the towers climb
Like the spiraling double-helix.
In the wide, distant sky,
See the flaming sign shining.
Without it, our lives would be bestial,
Our words, a hollow whining.

Gone, gone away.
Your whole life is time retreating.
And there’s no-one beneath the terrestrial sun
Who’ll hear your heart stop beating.
When this mundane shell decays,
You better know what you’re believing
Because the whole damn planet
Is hurtling through infinity
On a crash-course with the trinity.
It’s en route to Judgement City.”

A new voice softly breathes.
It’s the usually silent Valerie
With her words wafting down from the top bunk
Like a sweet breeze from the peanut gallery.
“You can hear what I say.
You can just as well ignore me.
But the thoughts jetting out from your synapses
Are as real as your body before me.

Gone, gone away.
You see the shining sky retreating
While some unnamed, unknown part of the globe
Feels the burning dawn light heating.
Though your shifting form will fade,
It’s no real cause for grieving
Because the entire, spinning planet
Is hurtling through infinity
Through our molecular vicinity
Through the streets of New York City
Through a tiny probability
Through the grossly disfigured and the pretty
Through a mind of bright simplicity
Through a mind of shining simplicity

I’ve always had a soft spot for this tune, since I first wrote it in 1997, right before I began the stretch of tunes that would become The Duck Hunter.  I had been toying with the riff, in which I play a D minor chord in a D major tune for two or three years by the time I really sat down to write the thing, and I felt at the time that I was writing the poppiest thing I’d written in a while.  Certainly, it was the pop-rockiest thing I’d done since the Little Band.  I wrote it moderately quickly, but well, and it shows.  It feels fresh, even after all these years, and the words do not seem labored in the least.

I imagined, for some reason, a friend’s suite at Pitzer, in Mead Dorm, as the setting.  I can’t for the life of me remember the guy’s name now, though I imagine it will come back to me at some point.  I remember, distinctly, getting together and playing some tunes informally one evening, including Bob Dylan‘s “The Man in the Long Black Coat,” which was at the time brand new and certainly the best tune on Oh Mercy, correctly considered a return to form.  My friend wasn’t the best player in the world but he was great company.  For some reason, when imagining where this tune takes place, I see the same room, with, of course, different people in it.  I would add that nearly everything I’ve ever written takes place in a very specific place I’ve been, most often with no connection whatsoever with the subject matter of the tune.

I won’t spend too much time on the lyrics, because I’ve commented on them before, but I will note that the basic form, in three parts, is more or less my most common organizational scheme and certainly one of my most effective.  It is very easy to write a compelling lyric if one takes whatever one is imagining and views it from three perspectives.  You can’t go wrong.  In this case, it’s death, but it could be absolutely anything.

This tune popped into my mind as something to write about–getting to the recording of it–because I was driving last week and it came on my radio, with my iPod on shuffle.  I was immediately struck with how much I missed my Rhodes.  I got the thing for a birthday present, cheap, right after college in the Summer of 1991 and I sold it, cheap, in 2005 before leaving for Senegal.  There was no real way I could keep it, and we don’t have space in our current digs–pretty spacious for San Francisco, to be sure–for a Rhodes.  I got a lot of mileage out of it and while I’m not much of a pianist I can’t recall a recording on which I used it to better effect than this one.

I used a trick I’ve used a couple times, which only works as a trick when it’s not planned.  I cut two tracks for the solo sections, one with electric guitar and one with Rhodes.  I played both on both solo sections, and figured I’d keep the one and keep the other, in whichever order had the better solos.  On playback, I played both initially, and found that having both simultaneously was far and away more compelling than either one by itself.  I’m a very limited soloist, most of the time, but I can arrange things pretty well.  At least, I can spot a good arrangement when it lands in my lap.

Newry Highwayman

“Newry Highwayman,” from Building St. Petersburg.

In Newry town, I was bread and born,
In Stephen’s Green now I die in scorn.
I served my time to the saddling trade,
But I turned out to be a roving blade.

At seventeen I took a wife,
I loved her dearer than I loved my life;
And for to keep in fine array,
I went robbing on the King’s highway.

I never robbed any poor man yet,
Nor any tradesman did I beset;
I robbed both lords and the ladies bright,
And brought their jewels to my heart’s delight.

I robbed Lord Golding I do declare,
And Lady Mansel, in Grosvenor Square;
I shut the shutters and bid them good night.
And home I went then to my heart’s delight.

To Covent Garden I made my way,
With my dear wife for to see the play;
Lord Fielding’s gang they did me pursue,
And I was taken by the cursed crew.

My father cried, “my darling son.”
My wife she wept and sighed. “I am undone.”
My mother tore her white locks and cried;
Saying, “In the cradle he should have died.

And when I’m dead and in my grave
A flashy funeral pray let me have;
With six bold highwaymen to carry me.
Give them good broadswords and sweet liberty.

Six pretty maidens to bear my pall,
Give them white garlands and ribbons all.
And when I’m dead they will speak the truth,
He was a wild and a wicked youth.

I think the real trick in making good music is in cover tunes.  Since the 1960′s and the advent of singer-songwriters–that is to say, in the period that formed basically all of my assumptions about what it means to be a musician–the focus has been all on writing “original songs,” however unoriginal the actual songs may be.  I began realizing in my early 20′s when I got really into Billie Holiday, which was a bit late for me given how long I’d been into jazz at that time, that here was a craft that had basically been forgotten by people my age and, I’d add, my background.  Of course Billie was, in her way, tops, though I probably go back to Ella Fitzgerald more often than Billie.  Billie put the craft of interpretation, often radical interpretation, at the center of her work.  This is by no means an original observation but it’s critical.  What does it mean to be a singer?  It means you sing songs, and what people my age and likely younger have all but forgotten how to do is to interpret, rather than imitate, others’ music.

Coupled with what was a growing understanding of the importance of interpretation of song, not just of writing them, was a growing appreciations I developed for traditional tunes, distinct from tunes written by someone with a known identity.  Covering someone else’s tune can be a good thing, for sure, and I enjoy and feel I can do it well–witness the Floyd Westerman tune, “Quiet Desperation,” I do on Adieu, False Heart–but doing so creates in the mind of the listener, or rather the listener who knows the original version, a relationship between the cover and original.  The artistic experience of the listener, the experience that counts, in art, is that of a relationship.  That’s definitely cool, and not just in a po-mo way.

With a traditional tune, however, one creates a different set of relationships.  A listener might know any number of different versions of the tune.  No one particular version is original, and so each new version relates to the others more or less as equivalent.  Authenticity is not a consideration, or really shouldn’t be–any sense that one recording of a traditional tune is more authentic than any other is a fantasy in the mind of the listener.  The earliest version of “Newry Highwayman” comes from an 1830 broadside, which is to say, in written form rather than recorded.  The first Earl of Mansfield lived in the 18th century, so we would be smart to assume that the tune had existed likely for decades before its first, written appearance.

No sense, then, worrying about authenticity with traditional tunes.  All that counts is quality and applicability to one’s present.  The latter is the real trick, I suppose.  Obviously, we can discard all museum-piece arrangements, all attempts to recreate things “as they were.”  The quickest way to irrelevance is to try to repeat the past.  Hence, the bankruptcy of Conservatism, unless one approaches Burke as a theoretician of change rather than stasis–which I wouldn’t necessarily do, myself.  A better bet is someone like Richard Thompson, possibly an obvious choice but nonetheless the musician more than any other I know of who consistently performs traditional music in a relevant way, even more so than the clearly more famous Bob Dylan.

I recently have been listening, over and over, to a recording he’s released of “Willy O’ Winsbury”, the Child Ballad, off RT: The Life and Music of Richard Thompson. Thompson plays it absolutely straight, performing the song on guitar, singing without any tricks.  This is the secret.  There is no need to make a traditional tune anything other than precisely what it feels like to a performer

“Newry Highwayman,” of all the traditional tunes I’ve recorded, is probably the least “traditional” sounding of the recordings.  This is primarily because of the electric guitar, recorded with fairly heavy vibrato.  I’d used this trick before, on “I’ve Maintained My Advantage,” above all.  I learned it, I swear–I’m not just trying to sound legit–from Bo Diddley, and particularly like how much it reminds me of some of My Bloody Valentine’s stuff.  The song itself I heard on a live recording posted to Bob Dylan’s website.  I’ve since become much more widely versed in sources for traditional song, though by no means as studied as a real afficionado.  At the time, though, I basically got traditional tunes from Dylan, the Pogues, and the Dubliners.  Dylan’s version is good, though not great.  That said, it really stuck in my head, so I cut a version of it.  I’m pretty convinced it’s one of the better things on the album.