Bill Foreman, musician.

New Tune: A Bed of Roses

“A Bed of Roses,” demo (2009).

Lyrics with chords in .pdf, for all you hootenanny participants.  Print and play!

“A Bed of Roses”, Garageband file–444 mb.  Feel free to add as you see fit, but let me hear the results.

Call off your dogs and hold up your horses and slaughter your sheep
I had my final round and I’m heading into dreamless sleep
I can’t hide how my innards are feeling when I hit my head upon this low ceiling
I’m gonna wake up tomorrow morning on the floor

There’s nothing simple about the pleasures of this average working American
If you calculate the complex operations I undertake to make ends meet
Keep your observations on your person and it’ll be better for the both of us
So we can smile at each other when we’re passing upon the street

Call off your dogs and hold up your horses and slaughter your sheep
I had my final round and I’m heading into dreamless sleep
I can’t hide how my innards are feeling when I hit my head upon this low ceiling
I’m gonna wake up tomorrow morning on the floor

Late one evening as I was stumbling through a garden of well-dressed rose bushes
Traveling out of my mind as I was trying to find my homeward pathway come correct
It then occurred to me too plainly to put my finger right upon it
So I rolled up my scruples and lay me down in a bed of roses

Call off your dogs and hold up your horses and slaughter your sheep
I had my final round and I’m heading into dreamless sleep
I can’t hide how my innards are feeling when I hit my head upon this low ceiling
I’m gonna wake up tomorrow morning on the floor

Who would have thought that these daily trials would have made a man or something out of me
Sometimes I wonder if the good days are gone or just taking a long vacation
So when I ask for your black tooth smile, you’d do right to muster it up for me
And I’ll shake my eyes-closed head in crooked time to the fiddle player

Call off your dogs and hold up your horses and slaughter your sheep
I had my final round and I’m heading into dreamless sleep
I can’t hide how my innards are feeling when I hit my head upon this low ceiling
I’m gonna wake up tomorrow morning on the floor

At that time I lay down my mind and kick my shoes off
When I’ve spun my wheels one last time in that wild and great big go-round
I’ll take two portions of my daily bread in preparation for what lays ahead
And take two bottles of the finest vintage I can lay my fists upon

I like making tunes available quickly, which is not a way to monetize my art.  That said, I like it, and I’m fortunate enough to have a revenue stream that, while not a mighty Mississippi, is stable and pleasant enough so that I’d be a fool to try to make music my sole source of income.  So here we go: A Bed of Roses, cut to Garageband on Labor Day, 2009, finished less than an hour ago.

Please note–and this is worth its own paragraph–that there’s a .pdf of the lyrics to this tune, with chords.  I’d hope that any musicians who plan on making it to my house concert on October 3rd (email for directions) will be ready to play or sing along.  Music is meant to be a participatory affair.

I’d written most of this tune about a year ago but left off editing until this morning, quite literally.  I cut one couplet and replaced it, as well as tweaked a word here and there.  The addition fit in fine, actually adding to the tune, and I’ll not indicate which couplet is the new one, letting you instead enjoy it as a piece.

One of the tunes I’ve played for decades now–since I was 18, actually, 22 years and counting–is “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere,” a perfect, all-purpose hootenanny tune if ever there was one.  This is definitely its own tune, and the melody has been in my head incessantly in the past weeks, but it’s a singalong, which of all genres is the most beautifully Socialist.  I am not the world’s biggest Pete Seeger fan, but I also am aware that the point of Pete Seeger is socio-musical rather than strictly musical.  John Cage was similar: the point with both was the creation of social relationships in music.  Pete Seeger, by all accounts the best leader of singalongs there is (still), is all about diminishing the distance between musician and audience, which is, when one thinks of it, much too hierarchical as it stands.  Octavia Butler points out that humans have two contradictory impulses, that toward intelligence and that toward hierarchy.  The first is good, the second bad.

The recording is of decent quality but not better.  I recorded it using the built-in mic on my Mac laptop, on Garageband.  It sounds disturbingly like my old 4-tracks did.  Musicians should feel free to download the Garageband file above and add to it as you see fit.  Have fun.  None of the solos are particularly great, though the three are functional and this has the first bit of slide guitar I’ve recorded in 20 years.  All of this is made available with a Creative Commons 3.0 license, so you can modify things and add as you see fit.  As I note above, have fun, but let me know.

Enjoy it.

I Know & You Know

“I Know & You Know,” (1993) from ¡Hey Rhumbahead!

“I Know & You Know” (recorded live, with the House Carpenters, 1997) from The Long March through the Clubs, Colleges, and Cafes.

“I Know & You Know” (demo, 1992) from Bill Foreman’s Bill & Pete/House Carpenters 4-track Demos in the General Ludd Music Archive.

I see you walking with Mister So-and-So
And baby, it just breaks my heart
I never thought you’d sink so low
That this would be the way we’d part
We used to talk on the telephone
And all the guys would envy the way you were mine
But these days you pretend you’re not at home
And you leave me dangling on that telephone line
There’s no way that I can take it
I can’t roll on over and try to fake it
I’ll make it plain so you can’t mistake it
That I know and you know
That you keep yourself looking so very fine
But there’s only one place you’ll go
And you won’t catch me walking that crooked line

It’s a flying fluke, a freak of fate
That we ended up opposing factions
But baby, it’s grown too late
To blame your life’s story on chemical reactions
I used to run around and say
About how it was that you really knew the score
But things are different today, baby
Your old tricks just can’t cut it any more
There’s no way that I can take it
I won’t make like one of your leaves and let you rake it
I’ll make it plain so you can’t mistake it
That I know and you know
That your kisses are tasting sweet like wine
But there’s only one place you’ll go
And you won’t catch me walking that crooked line

Understand, I got a right to share
All these points I keep pounding into the ground
But how can you compare me, baby,
To all those other boys with whom you run around?
You used to show me your fancy clothes
And the way that they clung to your physique
But these days you just turn up your nose
And you expect me to just sit here and turn my cheek
There’s no way that I can take it
I can’t roll on over and watch you break it
I’ll make it plain so you can’t mistake it
That I know and you know
I could invent a reason to keep on trying
But there’s only one place you’ll go
And you won’t catch me walking that crooked line

“I Know & You Know” has always been one of my favorite tunes to play, and one of those I’m most proudest for having written.  I’m well aware that it’s by no means one of my most ambitious or artsy tunes, and I’d not pretend it would be in my top five or even ten.  I have a fantasy, though, that I wrote this in 1962 rather than 1992, in a climate that actually liked music like this–though maybe I would have held on to it for two or three years.  1965 would be just about right.

I’ve always had a good ear to mimic styles, and this is as good an example of it as any.  At one point in my life I could mimic accents and voices, and would even do imitations of teachers and celebrities at little shows my old high school put on.  Musically, I mimic, but I always still sound like myself.  That’s probably my secret, though I don’t know that I could teach or communicate it.  This tune was stolen in almost every way from any number of sources–George Harrison’s guitar sound from “Taxman,” for example, the structure from any number of great Stax or Motown tunes, the background vocals an obvious and admittedly thin appropriation of the kind of vocal arrangements that were fairly standard in the ’60’s–but try as I might, which I didn’t, I sound like me.

Above all, and again, this could be taken as a somewhat general rule with me, one reason that I never can quite truly mimic a style is that my lyrics, which tend to be relatively verbose for the form, require a vocal cadence that is very different from all but a few musicians.  From my sound, one would think it would be folk musicians who inspired me to cram a bunch of syllables, like Tom Lehrer pointed out, into a line.  In reality, however, it was Chuck D more than anyone else who was then and is now my lyrical-structural source.  It’s worth noting that, if one excepts “Full Tank of Gas,” which I’d written in the summer of 1988 before I heard It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, all of the songs I’ve ever written that sound like me come from a post-Public Enemy Bill.

I can’t overstate how much I listened to that album in late 1988 and 1989.  I wasn’t so hip that I was aware of Rakim at that point, outside of having heard the name.  Though a common love for PE gave me a connection to the hip-hoppers at Pitzer College–they were definitely there, and we went to see PE a bit before they released Fear of a Black Planet, at a show in LA–I wasn’t that deeply into the music, much like I never really have gotten that deeply into any one genre.  While it’s true that folkies will cram a bunch of syllables into a line, they usually lengthen the line itself in time, meaning the actual form of the tune changes to accomodate the words.  I never do that, one will note, and neither does my model, Chuck D.

The lyrics of this tune follow the cadence of hip-hop, in 3, but follow the melody, if at times embellishing it to accomodate the words.  That’s my trick, and if one bears that in mind any number of my tunes make sense.  It works because I never set out to do it.  I just listened to a lot of Public Enemy while trying to write tunes that would have fit in the mid-to-late 1960’s.  Words just got piled in at a density that they wouldn’t have forty years ago.

The collection this came from, ¡Hey Rhumbahead!, was, I think, the recording Peter Giuliano felt we did best.  We cut it at Jack Devine’s house in the Valley–Los Angeles–with him at the controls, cut four songs, two each.  For both of us, they were a big leap forward artistically, and the sessions were remarkably fun and stress free.  We cut basic tracks live with me on drums–this incidentally, always makes for a great, live-feeling recording, no matter how many tracks you pile on top of the basics–and then added instrument after instrument.  I don’t think my drums have ever been recorded more beautifully than this set, to be sure, in terms of the actual quality of the sound.  As an additional treat, Alex Kimmel, with whom I’ve had a running correspondence in brief messages in the last few months, helped on the backing vocals.  I think we will record something at some point in the not-too-distant future.

Tomorrow is labor day and I hope to cut a demo to Garageband, which is much easier to deal with than Protools for a demo.  I’m at the point where my last project is basically out of my system and I’m looking forward to my next.  The tune I plan on cutting is one that I wrote a year ago, in Autichamp, the Drome, in France.  It’s the last tune I wrote.  The year passed quickly and my focus was on Adieu, False Heart, which basically took up the extra time I had that would have gone toward writing.  Fair enough.  I’ve been knocking around on my guitar recently and I’m cautiously optimistic that one of my things that I’ve been playing around with will come to fruition soon enough.

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.