The Dance of Electricity

“The Dance of Electricity,” from Tangerine (1997).

The hounds stopped their howling
Replaced by the wailing of machinery
The calls of the crows and the mockingbirds
Gone silent, subsiding away
The sailors now sailed to foreign places
Leave no traces, no memories behind
The urchins of alleyways
Forever now fleeting, they’re drifting away
The water of wishing wells
The dust of the dreaming that’s disappeared
The shining of sundown
Superseding’s the dance of electricity

The trace of the outline of industry
Has permanent placed itself on the old skyline
The smoke of the twilight horizon
Has, shrouding, descended and seized the day
The feeling of four-letter fingerprints
Impressed itself onto the outside.  It’s crying out,
“Wait!”  Now the whole price has pushed itself
Inside of each and of all of the hollows.
The shelter of solitude
The noise of the numbers of metal days
The brightness of moonlight
In the dark of the dance of electricity

The leaves and the laughing of lily-roses
Who now can suppose who can speak in their way?
The tempo has taken its trampling
To the tears of the hallowed of higher places
The shadows of new-orphaned faces
See the spaces of lifetimes now leaved behind
In the shaking and stealing simplicity
In the trance of the dance of electricity

I went through a period in the summer before I entered grad school where I moved from Claremont back home to San Diego and wrote a number of tunes very quickly, with little editing but with a series of what I think are pretty good melodies.  There are three or four tunes from that period that actually haven’t seen release in any form and, having heard them a few years ago as I was going through my old 4-tracks and remixing them through Pro Tools, aren’t likely to be made available any time soon.  I was working quickly and playing around, and wrote some pretty embarrassing lyrics in the process.

I got better as the summer wore on, and that August (or so) I wrote “For Good Measure,” “I Know and You Know,” and “Have You Seen My Baby?” in that order, all of which still stand up and which are here heard in the 4-track demos I cut that summer, later to be re-cut for the House Carpenters’ In the Choir of Primates in 1995 and Bill & Pete’s Hey Rhumbahead! in 1993.  It was a real streak, that August, and “For Good Measure” at the time and in hindsight really represented a jump forward for me in the way I would feel that something like “I’ve Maintained My Advantage” would later on.

“The Dance of Electricity,” on the other hand, is like all the stuff I wrote in, let’s say, June or July: cut from a different and lesser cloth than those later three.  The lyrics are a mess, if evocatively so.  I’d just read Ulysses and, while I never labored under the conceit that was a writer that sings rather than a musician, or a poet rather than a songwriter (why on earth, I think, would someone who could write songs want to be anything else?), I did like how Joyce was so willing to do unconventional or anti-conventional things with language and form.  It seemed then and in its way still seems to me a good general policy, though for years now I’ve played with form and language in a less outwardly obvious way than I do in this tune.

I became very attached to E.P. Thompson and John Ruskin‘s writing in grad school, and I thought a lot at the time about change in history, and things that are lost.  I don’t think I’m a nostalgist, but I am very skeptical about the idea of progress.  I have always lived in thoroughly modern places, be they suburbs or, as I do now, in a genuine city–and Dakar is, without question, a thoroughly modern city, if of a different side of modernity than one sees in San Francisco.  Dakar would be impossible to imagine before the creation of a global division of labor.  I say this to contextualize the fact that I spend a lot of time daydreaming about living in a quiet, rural environment and walking everywhere.  I don’t know what to make of it, but suffice to say that the imagery, drawn from 19th century reactions to industrialization, are only partially a pose on my part.

What makes the tune worthwhile is the mandolin riff.  I can’t remember precisely, but I’m fairly sure this was the first tune I wrote on the first mandolin I purchased, an Irish-style Flatiron I bought used and which later split in two when a bass drum rolled on top of its soft case on the way home from a gig once.  There’s not much to say about this, except that it proves you can get a lot of mileage from a good riff, even when the other parts of the song, while not totally indefensible, aren’t up to the riff’s quality.

I have made the point elsewhere, but, again, this is a good example of how a great record doesn’t need to be made up of nothing but great tunes.  Rule #1 about choosing tunes for a record is that the tunes must be good to listen to, and therefore they need to be decent tunes.  What makes a decent tune, though, is the big question.  I’d put forward that any tune needs to have something extraordinary about it.  In this case, it’s the mandolin riff.  Actually, in hindsight I would say that everything else about the tune, from the lyrics to the vocal performance, which is likely the oddest one I’ve released, are fair at best.  I have a few tunes that I have no intention of releasing that have both better lyrics and a better performance, with a melody on par with their better lyrics and performance.  “The Dance of Electricity,” however, beats out the objectively better tune, because it has one element that really is special.  It’s got a great riff, and while that doesn’t make for a great tune, it does make it work on what was a great, if unintended, record, Tangerine.

Tangerine, again as I’ve written before, consisted of a bunch of tunes I had on 4-track that either I’d never tried with a band or which had never worked with one.  I had a fairly large back catalogue by the time the House Carpenters ceased to be, and 1997, which should have been the worst year of my musical life given the band’s implosion, ended up seeing two good records come out and a new-found confidence and independence on my part.  The Bathroom Mirror, recorded to walkman in a day and released on cassette with photocopied packaging, served to prove myself that I possessed all the tools I needed to make something beautiful.  Tangerine served to show, above all to myself, that I had been doing so for years if only I had been aware of it.  Interestingly, though I would strongly disagree, there are people who think it my best record.

Cheap Liquor

“Cheap Liquor,” from Adieu, False Heart (2009)

“Cheap Liquor (demo),” from Adieu, False Heart Demos.

You got a lot of nerve to keep serving cheap liquor to me
I got a bad song coming and I’ll sing it from the witness tree
And they’re saying this time I took it too far
I got a set of bloody knuckes and a dented car
You got a lotta nerve to keep serving cheap liquor to me

You got a mean mind to keep running my good name down
When you were robbing me blind and you took off out of town
And when I hear any telephone calling
I’m bawling and shouting your name at the walls
You got a mean mind to keep running my good name down

You got a lot of gall to be bringing up charges on me
When you call up the constable, threatening lock and key
But you can serve up your subpoena papers
I’ll still be be escaping to the street below
You got a lot of gall to be bringing up charges on me

You give a lot of grief when you’re leaving your letters behind
I can hear the clock ticking and I’m gone out of a healthy mind
I could torch this one-room apartment then watch
The whole block steal away in smoke
You give a lot of grief when you’re leaving your locket behind

You got a lot of nerve to keep serving cheap liquor to me
Tell me who does it serve when we’re dishing up misery
Yes if you’re thinking of drinking two-fisted
You’re sinking down in the same hole I’m in
You got a lot of nerve to keep serving cheap liquor to me

Yes, this tune was available on the last post.  That was, however, a note that “Adieu, False Heart” was available.  This is the commentary.

The demo above, which is available for listening but not to download, was recorded about two hours after I’d started writing the tune, the quickest thing I’ve written, conception to execution, probably since I was in college, and this of a much better quality (the other one was a tune called “Potato Truck Headlights,” which I wrote to prove to Colin Epstein I could write a tune in one hour, and the carelessness showed in the piece).

At that point–this is sort of how I felt about myself, and I’m curious if anyone else felt this about where I was at that time–I was a bit stuck in my musical production.  Not as bad as I’d been in 2004 or 2005, when I’d just finished Chevy w/Balding Tires, a record of which I was enormously proud and which seemed to me impossible to follow–and of course anything like that is impossible to follow if one attempts to replicate it.  Chevy was a dense piece of work, and up until that point, possibly in an attempt to compensate for a lack of record sales, my work had become increasingly literary, for lack of a better word, and probably for that reason increasingly exclusive, in a literal sense, as in keeping out.  My music I felt then and feel now was completely successful, but successful on terms which, very simply, kept people out.

All kinds of people harbor grandiose ambitions, and this kind of thing is normal and healthy.  Mine at the time was to write the best songs of anyone working remotely in my medium in my generation.  Very particularly I wanted to outclass everyone else my age lyrically while at the same time having better melodies, bearing in mind a more-or-less folk-derived base of source material, than all comers.

These kinds of ambitions are juvenile, but useful.  For starters, I made a lot of good music.  A person needs a measure of ambition, even small ambition, to do anything, and looking back between 1988, when I wrote “Full Tank of Gas,” my first decent song (commentary coming relatively soon) and 2003, when I’d completed Chevy, I wrote 60 or 70 keeper tunes, with probably that many that I put aside but which were nonetheless finished products.  More importantly to me, I put out a number of albums, all homemade affairs but very real nonetheless, and these gave and give me a sense of some accomplishment.

I don’t think I started writing tunes trying to write “literate,” let alone “literary” lyrics: I wanted at all times to write excellent lyrics to tunes, largely because I was and continue to be very easily embarrassed by bad lyrics.  I always wanted my words to actually make some sort of a point, which meant that it was never acceptable to me to be obtuse or incomprehensible.  At the same time, the ideas I tried to express became over time more complex and specific.  Details became more numerous, and the relationships between them more complex.

I have no idea how I compare to other writers my age, but I am sure that if one takes my best tunes and puts them next to others striving for a similar type and level of quality, mine at the very least hold their own with anyone else’s best.  I really felt I nailed this level of quality on Chevy‘s best tunes, above all, to me, “When My Wife Takes Me By My Hand,” which was my favorite among them–commentary on that one forthcoming as well.  You could argue with me about which tune was or is the best on that record, but that one really stuck with me.

I had two problems once I’d finished Chevy.   One, of course, was that once I’d finished the work and was proud of it, it had really tapped, at least temporarily, my imagination of what I was capable of doing.  I wrote some good tunes in 2003, but very literally only a couple, and I did not write a single song in 2004.  You can imagine how demoralizing that was for me.  I have never been particularly prolific, but I’ve usually knocked out at least two tunes a year, and often more.  It’s almost a cliche to suggest that artists often spook themselves after they finish a great work, but I suppose I really did.

A second problem was that I had absolutely no sense of what to do with my music once I’d finished it.  A lot of people heard Chevy, but it never grew legs, commercially.  I have always been from somewhat naive to exceptionally so when it comes to music appreciation.  I’ve never been able to fathom that most people do not have the same relationship to music that I do, though I have come to understand that there’s no reason that people, in this big world, ought to.  I wanted Chevy to be the best hometaper/lo-fi album of all time, and to some extent I feel like I succeeded.  However, I finished it about 5 of 6 years after lo-fi had ceased to be cool, and it had never, with a couple of exceptions, been lucrative.

I suppose I started to ask myself, in 2004, when I didn’t write a single tune, what the point was, and given the assumptions I made about how my trajectory ought to work, I couldn’t give myself an answer.  I sort of assumed that if I kept making good music, things would snowball, and increasing numbers of people would come to appreciate it. It doesn’t actually work that way for anybody, even Paul McCartney.

A few things saved, me, however.  In 2004, I changed an intellectual interest in Buddhist thought into an active meditation practice when my girlfriend (now wife) and I found a fantastic meditation group in Riverside, CA, with a top-notch Dharma teacher, Gilbert Gutierrez.  The Buddhist emphasis on practice had implications for my music, and if initial results were slow to come–I wrote only two tunes in 2005, “Open Door” and “El Chorrillo,” both collected on Begging Bowl–what I did do was decide that music was something that one does.  My wife was a huge help, too.  Above all, she likes my music, to her relief.  I had told her when we started dating I made music and when I burned a CD for her of the works-in-progress from Chevy she was apprehensive lest it not be any good.  Thank God she liked it.  Having someone believe in me, but believe in me not-uncritically is hugely important.

My wife also got me out of the United States for the first time in almost 20 years.  Staying in Dakar for eight months in our first year of marriage was great for us as a couple and for me as a human being, but as a musician it really put me in a position where I felt that, contrary to my negative feelings the year before (this was 2005 when we moved there, in October), I had new and fantastic experiences awaiting me, which inevitably would lead to new musical experiences.  I finished more songs that year in Dakar than I had for some time.  A feeling of forward momentum is essential to me as a musician.

All this put me in a position where I was ready to have breakfast with Matt Nathanson in the Spring of 2007, who as I write this has finally after so many years “broken through” to a huge extent.  Matt and I played in a band together years ago, and he’s always been one of my very best supporters, on a personal as well as a musical level.  In any event, over breakfast, he said to me that he could not accept that someone as literate as me would have trouble writing.  He suggested that I just get the hell out of the way and write.  Very concretely, knowing how I wrote, he suggested that I refrain from editing a tune until I’d completed a draft.  I had evolved an effective but horribly labor intensive writing process by that time with which I would consider a complete line a good day’s work.  Deal with the editing, he said, at the end.  I said, “OK,” that I’d give it a shot because I didn’t really have anything else working for me that well.  Indeed, I said I’d have something by that evening, to which he replied that I didn’t need to feel that much of a rush, but he wished me luck nonetheless.

I drove home from Noe Valley to Crocker-Amazon, and on the way, I started whistling a bit and got the line, “You got a lot of nerve to keep serving cheap liquor to me.”  I understand that this might sound made up, but it really did happen like this.  I got home, got my guitar, and figured out the chords to the melody I’d been humming.  I got pen and paper, and started tossing out a number of lines.  I aimed for completion rather than perfection, and allowed myself to repeat lines, in this case to begin and end each verse with the same line.  This was incredibly liberating to me, as small as it sounds, and I felt–I remember this very clearly–a palpable sense of writing quickly when I got to the end of the fourth line of the first verse and then finished it off with the first line of the verse, already written.  Writing felt easy for the first time in years.

I ended up finishing the tune in a couple hours, as I noted above.  I focused less on an overarching coherence than on a series of lines that each were vivid and, I’d hoped, humorous in a sharp, absurd way.  This is to me a very natural way of working.  I like to say absurd things in normal conversation as people who know me will tell you.  Writing a tune this way suited my temperament.  I won’t say I didn’t edit as I wrote, but the editing was limited to cutting out or adding words to make it possible to sing, given the meter.  Some lines jam in more syllables than others, and I let this be.

I was immediately a bit dumbfounded with the results, because I hadn’t written anything so quickly in years and almost couldn’t believe that after a good three or four years of horribly labored writing I’d tossed off something in a couple hours that was objectively a better piece of work than things I’d put upwards of six months–or more–into in only the recent past.  Within a day I knew that, indeed, the tune was basically finished and good.  The only word I changed between demo and the final version on Adieu, False Heart was “locket” to “letters.”

“Cheap Liquor” had practical implications.  I was, I had thought, about half-way through my follow-up to Chevy, with a good four or five tunes plus a couple instrumentals finished, aiming for ten to call it an album.  I thought, however, that regardless of whether or not “Cheap Liquor” was better than the tunes I had, that it was different, and that I didn’t want to cram it into a group of which it wasn’t really a part, and that I didn’t want to try to force myself to write things to match the other tunes I had–that, of course, being the definition of filler, which I’ve never liked.  So rather than half-way through my next record, I had one song.  I ended up, after having written a few more tunes, taking the first three weeks of the 2007 Summer vacation to record those tunes I’d written between 2005 and late 2006 and release them as Begging Bowl, calling the group of seven tunes a “mini-album” for lack of a better word.  It felt bigger than an EP: I didn’t know what else to call it.

Comparing the demo to the final product is probably not without some interest to some people.  Both have the same instrumentation: solo acoustic guitar and vocal.  The process of production–and this was sort of my point on Adieu, False Heart–was not about making instrumentation more complex or developed, but about deepening the performance.  Both were played live, without overdubbing.  I think we tend to underestimate, given modern production capabilities, how critical it is for a singer to form a relationship with a song, and I can say for myself that in the nearly two years between writing this and cutting the final recording, I’d become very close to the tune.  The listening bears this out.