New Tune, “High Finance”

“High Finance,” from “Garageband Demos 2009-2010.”

Sometimes I feel the need to fall down from high finance
I call sick and start driving until I hit Baton Rouge
Where the hotels are cheap and the liquor is cheaper
I’ve never been a sound sleeper so I might as well cut loose

I got a pint of rye through my arteries pulsing
Soon my stomach’s convulsing in the bushes outside
I hit it again and that seller keeps selling
There’s no telling how many that stream down my throat

I’m gonna burn through every one of my father’s connections
And I’ll burn through my subordinates on call
As no prep school could hold me
There’s no point should one scold me
I’ll have it my way or no way at all

The parking lot’s all but empty and the insects are singing
With the moonlight ringing as it lights up the clouds
But I’m too drunk to deal.  I put my head on the wheel.
I’m surrounded by steel and the radio‘s too loud

Someday I’ll get transferred back to New York City
And when that call comes I don’t know what I will do
I might accept it politely or I might lose it completely
And cash out my trust fund until my trust fund runs through

I’m gonna burn through every one of my father’s connections
And I’ll burn through my subordinates on call
As no prep school could hold me
There’s no point should one scold me
I’ll have it my way or no way at all

I put on my rubber gloves and I light me a cigarette
I flick the butt on the bedsheets and I whisper my name
I burn down the highway.  There’s the radio reporting:
Half a city block in Baton Rouge gone this morning in flames.

This is one of four tunes I wrote in Autichamp, France, in draft form, in Summer 2008.  I then let them all sit on the shelf for a year as I worked on Adieu, False, Heart in 2009.  Following that, I began revisions as the spirit moved me, which as it turned out was nearly two years later.

This is probably the least sympathetic protagonist I’ve had in a tune for some time, which all the more necessitates the need for a sweet melody in a tune, which this one has.  One of the advantages of song is that a writer works with two media rather than one, which for example a prose writer works with.  Instrumental music operates, because it is non-verbal, at a deep level with people.  I play instrumental music in my classroom when I am not directly teaching (exclusively good jazz from Ellington and Basie at the earliest through Dexter Gordon‘s Blue Note recordings from the 1960′s–basically, if Rudy Van Gelder engineered it, I want to play it) and despite the number of students who scream that they want a song with words, the music does the trick.

The fundamental experience a listerner has to a song comes from the instrumental music.  Indeed, as many people have observed, at some basic level what the lyrics themselves are saying doesn’t matter: people respond the the sound of the words rather than their literal meaning.  This leads to an obvious problem: because people can have a wonderful musical experience listening to a song with words that are of little literary value but which are unobtrusive, writers don’t invest much attention in writing their words well.

I would qualify the observation above that other people have made (I can’t remember where most recently I read someone who made the point) that the actual meaning of words doesn’t matter in song, but rather the musicality of the words.  What I would say is that the meaning doesn’t immediately matter.  This is the trick.  In an industry that wants to sell a lot of stuff and quickly, the goal of the product is immediate impact.  Immediately, the words don’t matter, as long as you have them so people don’t confuse your product for something like, God forbid, instrumental jazz.  What happens, though, is that at some point, if you have words, people are going to start to think about them.  At that point, if they mean something, it gives another layer of meaning to the song, people stick with the song, and the song in its turn sticks with people.  Writing good lyrics is an investment in a song’s future rather than its immediate present.

As usual, I don’t make any particular claims about this particular tune at this point.  It’s still fresh.  That said, I’m pretty pleased about it.  Any tune that deals with the fundamental anti-social criminality of financial capitalism is OK in my book, even for just trying.

A note on my musical progress as I close: I’m off today (in three hours’ time) to Riverside for over a month.  I’m bringing my guitar, mandola, and laptop on which I record demos.  I expect to have few distractions and am cautiously optimistic I’ll be able to devote some serious time to writing.  I haven’t made any decisions about a next record, but depending on circumstances it will be either recorded in a semi-live setting with other musicians (that is to say, we’ll record basic live tracks to ProTools and then overdub) or I’ll do the one-man-band thing.  The tunes I have so far seem pretty good so I’m optimistic.

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.