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Can You Write a True, Non-Sappy, Non-Ironic Love Song?

I started writing Supernova in June, 2009 (that's exactly two years ago this month).  I'd been listening to Dylan (no???) and was again impressed with his gift for melody, how he can put four tired chords together and come up with something fresh, and then change them around in the same song and a whole new melody emerges.  Musically, I wanted to play with the idea of using a chord progression in various ways within a song, letting the length of the line and how long each chord stayed around dictate the melody changes.

Supernova is a song in G, with the verses following the G-D-C-G pattern, then a bridge that shifts to Em-C-D, then C-Em-D, and then a mini chorus of G-C.  the chorus proper then repeats the Em-C-D, C-Em-D pattern, but comes in for a "sweet" finish on G-C-G-D-G.  So it's a 4 chord song that keeps cycling the I-V-IV structure with a 6th minor (vi-IV-V, then IV-vi-V) thrown in and finishing on a I-IV-I-V-I "hook" (so yeah, it's a I-IV-V blues song ... sort of).

When i started to write the words, I played a verse or two for Melinda (my partner and wife of, at that time, 16 years; 18 now) and she hated it.  "It's about a dead person," she said.  "Can't you write something that's not dark for a change?" I decided to take up the challenge and write a love song for her, hoping to make it sincere and un-sappy.

The first verse and bridge stayed unchanged:

Close your eyes
and watch the sunrise
stardust in the air
you are back
where you started from
and you are everywhere

Wrap your arms
around yourself
and hold on tight
you are sitting still
at the speed
of light
a diamond in the night
a fire in the sky
supernova

But then instead of going on about the dead person (an old lover, something that no longer existed, some sort of loss) I moved on to talk about someone who had been through it and survived.  The idea of surviving a supernova is ridiculous, of course, but "supernova" became a metaphor for all the things Melinda and I had been through, had put each other through, and had survived:

And so
you have brought about
what you feared the most
when you're naked
remember those who watch
are naked in their clothes

Businessmen
do their thing
up in their stage
holy men
go tumbling
in their cage
the spirit of the age
the fire and the rage
supernova

Of course I couldn't resist throwing some "global" references in there, some sort of acknowledgement that the wider world (circumstances, history) play a part in any relationship.  And then, I went for broke.  What would I say to Melinda if I had the chance?  Here was my chance, and here's what I said:

And I am here for you
my love
and I am here with you
my love
I'll live as I have said
and I am not afraid
of your
supernova

Whatever you throw at me, whatever life brings, I am here with you and for you.  To quote Dylan (alas)  "together through life."

Of course, there are never any guarantees.  Just because you are there for someone doesn't mean they will be there for you.  And what is love but a rose that fades? (that's Edward Lee Masters, not Dylan).

Nevertheless, this speaker is not hedging his bets.  He's not holding back.  He's not putting conditions on the table.  He's basically saying, "Here is all there is, and there ain't no more, and I ain't afraid."  I was hoping that the terrible destruction a supernova entails would carry the weight of the devastation that could ensue from taking such a position.  Maybe the speaker feels it's better to be consumed in a supernova than live the half-life of businessmen (hey, there's Dylan again) and holy men carrying on, safe in their routines.  I'm not sure.  I just write the damn things.

So to answer the question posed in this entry, my answer is maybe.  At least you can try.

You can listen to the song here:  Supernova.

 Posted in Songs
  Tags eclepto funk americana supernova song writing songwriting

how long did it take to write that song? 44 years

and wouldn't that answer be accurate?  i mean, we pour the experience of our entire lives, consciously or not, into every song we write.  we can't write a song until we can imagine it, and we can't imagine songs before we can imagine them, if that makes sense. so, how long does it take to write a song?  however long you've been on this Earth before writing it, I guess.

narrowing things down, I see two schools of songwriting: the go-after-the-song approach or the let-the-song-come-to-you approach.  i think writing, writing, writing, on a schedule, with discipline,  results in lots of product, and for some people, the more they write, the more chances they'll have of writing something good. in my case, for better or worse, i am a "let the song come to me" kind of writer.  the more i write, the more crap i put out.  but if i let the elements of the song approach me, i find i write much better material. to put it another way: to experience nature, do you go on a walk and try to see as much as you can, or do you sit quietly and let a chunk of wilderness slowly expose itself to you? i am definitely the later.

my song Atlas of Far Away Streams is a case in point.  first of all, it is yet another confluence of themes that have preoccupied me my whole life: mutual love, finding a life partner, loyalty, daring to be vulnerable even if the outcome is not certain, the fragile balancing act that is a relationship.  these things have been with me since i was 18 or 19. and also: American history, the environment, our responsibility to future generations to manage the resources available to us, the fragile balancing act that is our need to consume and our responsibility to do so ... well, responsibly. and these preoccupations have also been with me since college.

at any rate, Atlas illustrates the "let the song come to you" approach that i find most successful.

-- i remember tweeting the words "cool water. wash my neck, wash my face."  these words represented an actual experience.  i was hot, got to a bathroom, and splashed water on my face and neck. for some reason, the sheer pleasure of it gave me an idea: write a song about this. just water. cool water. the feel of it.

-- weeks went by.  i re-read Mark Twain's "Roughing It."  at a point in his journey west through the American frontier, he reaches the crest of the Rocky Mountains, and witnesses a stream split neatly into two: one running west to the Pacific, the other running east to the Missouri and eventually the Mississippi. both times i had read the book, this passage had struck me as somehow full of significance, even if i couldn't explain what that significance was.

-- the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico

-- one night a few weeks after the spill was contained,  i was playing around with my guitar and found an interesting mini-riff that seemed hypnotic (A7-A11-Em6-A7).  i played around with it for a while, and the "wash my neck, wash my face" line just seemed line a natural fit, so i went with it.

-- "water" lead me to remembering the Mark Twain passage -- the beginning of a journey. what was the end?

-- i had read a short review of a self-published book called "Atlas of Far Away Islands." (being born in an island, the title caught my eye). i resolved to steal it.  thinking of the stream in Mark Twain's narrative, the title Atlas of Far Away Streams suggested itself.  I then had to insert that line into the song. it didn't take long.

-- i am a cave diver.  at some point, i came across the words "gin clear water" to describe the submerged caves of Florida. it was a great description, and the "gin" part had a darker meaning: we can not live without water.  and what if you become addicted to something, say, alcohol, and come to need it as much as you need water?  and we humans can't live without water. and how are we taking care of the very water we need to survive? and what if that need turns ugly on us, like the overwhelming need of an alcoholic for just another drink? which they can not have?

-- this, of course, leads to my own worries about my drinking. i think i drink a little too much. i do love it. i think it's under control, but a lot of the time, i wonder, is it really? do i really need to drink every night to the point of getting buzzed?  but it's so relaxing, it just takes the edge off. it makes things just ... slide on by.

-- and if that is the dark side, what is the light?  my love for Melinda; her love for me. for better or worse, for richer or poor. you can make that promise to another person; but can you make that promise to alcohol?  to the natural world? to the changes in climate and the rigors of natural selection?

-- at this point, i wanted to write a hopeful song, so the lyrics as they are emerged:

wash my neck, wash my face
gin clear water
wash my chest, try to wash my hands
gin clear water

through miles of sage brush
and desert rock
to the Missouri
and a man-made lock
down the Mississippi
and the delta mud
to the Gulf
and another act of God
gin clear water

and you are my atlas
of far away streams
you are my waking
and you are my dream
no need for silence
no need to lie
i'm going to love you
til the day that i die
gin clear water

and you are my atlas
of far away streams
you are my center
and my extreme
you are my ocean
and you are my sky
and i'm going to love you
til the day that i die
gin clear water

-- of course, the "I'm going to love you til the day that i die" is not exactly a St. Valentine's day postcard.  there's darkness there. and there's truth: if you need water to survive (as we all do), we will die when we can no longer get it.  and "the day that i die" may not be far off if a lifestyle or a relationship isn't healthy.

-- and that'll be the day that i day.  those good old boys drinking whiskey and rye, singing ....

in my journal, i wrote this song in November, 2010.  but it really took me my entire lifetime to write it. up to that point.

here's the song if you want to take a listen: Atlas of Far Away Streams

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 Posted in Songwriting
  Tags eclepto funk americana songwriting atlas far away streams

The Line Between Emotion and Melodrama

Speaking of what fellow poet Anne Sexton had taught him, David Trinidad said, "Everyone feels pain. Ultimately, people relate to the feelings, not the particulars."

In my songwriting, I try to put together particulars that, while maybe never experienced by a listener,  will hopefully give rise to feelings that listener has experienced, and, in an ideal scenario, touch something about that listener relating to our common experience in terms of feelings, even if the events that give rise to those feelings are not the same.

And so, one has to set up a story, even if not in narrative form, a set of images and phrases that will evoke not the feelings themselves, but a bonfire of sorts in which the fire of common feeling may ignite.  The danger, of course, is not getting how much is too much and how little is too little right.

A song about losing a pencil is probably not going to evoke terribly strong feelings of loss.  Unless that pencil was given to you by your mother on her death bed. And therein lies the danger, right?  How far can you push a point before the building blocks of emotion mutate into the slushy mud of melodrama? Realistically speaking, how many mothers hand out pencils in their death beds? It'd better be one hell of a story ... at the risk of having people laugh at it as utterly ridiculous.

On the other hand, a song about losing a son or daughter is almost immediately guaranteed to evoke strong emotions (we have all lost loved ones; we can all imagine what it is like to lose what is perhaps the closest bond we form as humans).  The danger is to overdo it and be too sentimental, so we pull back and keep a stiff upper lip ... at the risk of writing a bland song that reaches no one.

My song Marie, Part Two is a song that walks that line.  How well it does that is not up to me to decide.  I use it to illustrate the point.  [Spoiler Alert: If you want to experience the song for yourself before I divulge details about it, here it is on Bandcamp]

The song's story line is that of a married man who has a relationship with a younger, troubled woman, who then goes on to kill herself when he breaks up the relationship after finding she is too "dark" for him.  The sense of guilt for being responsible for someone's death is something very few of us experience, but the sense of guilt and regret at having let others down, at not having done the best we could for others (be it for a wife, a son or daughter, or a young lover) is something we can all hopefully relate to.  In Marie, Part Two, I wanted to get at that sense of guilt and regret.

I started writing the song in June, 2010, a very productive month for me (I also wrote Handcuffs and Chains, Empire Express, and Flag Day right around there).  Marie was meant to be a song for my then-project Ghost, which was about people haunted by others or people who haunted others.

I had been listening to Springsteen's Nebraska (the whole album, but particularly the title track) as a primer on how to write point-of-view songs where a speaker tells his or her story, not necessarily a happy story from a happy narrator,  and not necessarily a song that makes the speaker look all that good. Using that song as a starting point, I wanted to create something similar, something that moved people at a significant level.  (A separate point:  we should all learn from the masters -- we should copy what works. Ain't nothing original under the sun -- we should use songs we love as our models).

The title of the song is a separate story, but the narration basically started as a husband (the narrator) telling the story of how he had cheated on his wife and how guilty he felt about it.  Essentially, he had gotten away with it.  His wife didn't know,  the young woman with whom he'd had the affair had left town, and he had only his conscience to live with. He felt bad for his wife, bad for his young lover for whom he felt a sense of fatherly duty, and bad for his young daughters, who reflected the care he should have taken for a woman "half his age."

But I asked myself, is this enough?  Is this story sufficient to convey the sense of guilt and regret about being responsible for others and failing to take that responsibility?  After a certain point, I felt it was not. I felt I had to take it one step further, and that's where the suicide of the young woman came in.  I really had doubts about this.  Boy did I have doubts. I mean, what can be more cliched and sentimental than a young, troubled person killing herself over a relationship gone bad?

To take a step back, this song really started over my relationship with two specific women when I was in my early to mid twenties.  In retrospect, I realized that I had not done right by them.  I had treated their feelings too lightly (in Fiona Apple's words, I'd been careless with two delicate people); I had not treated them with the respect they deserved. But nobody committed suicide, and both of them went on to happy lives with more mature men than me at the time. Nevertheless, I've since felt the regret and guilt of treating them less than respectfully. 

But Marie, Part Two required  extra heartbreak.  Something more than a heart had to break.  Someone had to break.  The break had to be irreversible, something the narrator would have to live with for the rest of his life with no hope of fixing.  In a sense, the song is really about how the narrator goes on living.  When he states  "If I were a man of honor, I'd pay with my life," there is no chance to elaborate.  Those words end the song, which leaves the question of what he will do up in the air.   The song doesn't answer that.  It just asks the question: how can people live with themselves after doing terrible things?

In order to mitigate the potentially melodramatic suicide, I tried a few things.  For one, I made the tone of the song very matter-of-fact: it's a recounting of events, particularly when dealing with the young woman and her suicide.  The narrator never actually uses the word suicide.  He doesn't even say she killed herself.  The report is oblique:

they found her in the morning
cold in the frozen lake
her clothes piled by the shore
the dark her soul to take

My hope was that maybe the listener wouldn't even realize what had happened on first listen, that they would have to go back and DISCOVER the suicide rather than being told about it.  Of course, I had to be clear enough so that the four lines would make sense (the last line, an echo of a child's prayer twisted unto itself, I felt, was pretty unequivocal).

But the song is not about this young woman's suicide, ultimately.  It is really about the narrator carrying on. I felt that by not ending the song at the suicide, its melodramatic effect would fade during the next verse, which focuses on the narrator as he tells us how his life is now. 

To that effect, the song had to end on a strong note.  The last two lines ("if I were a man of honor / I'd pay with my life") are potentially melodramatic too.  I feel they are offset by the fact that they reflect poorly on the narrator. He's basically accusing himself.  I think that adds poignancy to the pronouncement.

My hope is that while most of us don't know what it's like to cause somebody's suicide, we all have enough regret and guilt over how we've treated others that this song strikes a chord.  And hopefully, it's not so fake or melodramatic as to turn the listener off. 

Here's the song again if you want to take a listen: Marie, Part Two.

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 Posted in Songwriting
  Tags andres rojas eclepto funk americana marie part two emotion melodrama songwriting

to infinity and beyond: Twitter and DIY

strength lies in diversity.  more brains means more ideas. and social media has made a meeting of the minds easier than ever. cooperation, then, is the way for the DIY type. why do i speak this self-evident truth?

by the end of 2010, i had realized that i couldn't take my songs any further with my given skillset. in other words, i sucked too much to make my songs the best they could be. by myself.

i can write ok. i can play rhythm guitar ok.  i more or less can sing.  but that's it.  my attempts at drum tracks were just basic "bump bump bump" tracks.  my bass lines were ... well ... you don't really call root notes bass lines. and i really, really, really needed a brilliant female singer to step in and save the day (Leonard Cohen knows a thing or two about this ... not that I'm comparing myself  TO him ... more like i learned FROM  him sort of thing).

my first step was to try and put together a local band here in Jacksonville.  i should mention that one complicating factor is that i have ... what we will call a trust issue.  or in other words, i just can't work with anyone off the bat.  or ... at all ... unless i have some reasonable assurance of his/her innate goodness as a human being. this usually takes time to build, and i am anti-social. basically, i have a handful of friends and that's it. it's hard for me to meet people. i can socialize and party with almost anyone, anytime, which is deceptive because it seems like i'm a friendly sort, when in fact ... quite the opposite is true. anyway ... more on that later.

so, the people here in Jacksonville that i've worked with or would love to work with are particularly busy musicians with their own things going.  after a few probing sessions of beer drinking, it became clear that i couldn't really form a band given my preconditions.  i approached and was stoked to work with The Senses' Doc Kilgore (@the_Senses on Twitter), but one awesome guitar player and me a band don't make.

at this point, in one of those moments the universe can put together by chance (and Heisenberg WOULD agree with me here, i believe), one of my oldest and dearest friends, Tom Luongo (@TFL1728 on Twitter) offered to work with me on drums and bass.  he lives in Gainesville, about 60 miles away ... but in the age of the internet, distance is irrelevant.  i exuberantly took him up on his offer ...

... and that's when it hit me:  over the years, i'd had offers from people i had met over the net to work with me.  but really, there was no point to it: what i could put together on my end was, in the quaint terms of the trade, nothing but a turd.  and there is no point in polishing a turd.

but with Tom on board, this all changed.  he could put together a solid rhythm section, and i could use my rhythm guitar skills to their full advantage ... and on that basis,  we could lay down Doc's guitar work, and bring in other people as needed ... and create ... better songs than i could ever do on my own.

in retrospect, it was really a no-brainer. a musician i admire, Markus Rill (@markusrill on Twitter) has an uncanny knack for bringing musicians together on his songs.  likewise, my friend Darren Ronan here in Jacksonville (he was the drummer for the best band I ever played on) has put together amazing players for his songs. they do it in person, either locally or tavelling to record.  but why not do the same thing ... only on the net?  i knew other people worked this way, it just had never been a possibility for me, given my real reluctance to work with strangers.

and that's were Twitter was a life-saver.  over the last year and a half, i've gotten to meet quite a few people in music over there: singer/songwriters, guitar players, cello players, harp players, violin players. you name it.  over the months, one gets to read their tweets, look at the links they post, laugh at their jokes, hear about their families, listen to the songs they share, and you do get to know them a little bit (i won't claim more than that).  but that was enough.

and so, somehow, i managed to get Sarah Boyd (@RocktheCupcake  in Olympia, WA) to agree to sing with us (don't ask me how). I had heard her sing her own song on a video she posted, and by God, she has the voice of an angel. She can pack more emotion into two syllables than I can in a whole verse. i think she will be doing a lot more singing with EFA that she imagines =)

so far, Mike Lunapiena (@cellomike from New York City)  has come in to do a track with us, and his cello work  really made the song he worked on come alive.  and Shana Norton (@hipharpy from Austin, TX) is working on harp for another song (I can't wait to hear what that's going to sound like).

what we all have in common is Twitter and an ability to self-record.  and those two things can transform a less than mediocre project into a rather amazing one, as the songs we're working on show.

so far, the pluses have been flexibility (people can work in their home when they have time) and the simple fact that if we weren't doing it this way, we wouldn't be working together, so any product is better than nothing

the downside to me has been not being able to sit down with them and play a song, see how it strikes them, having them chime in and basically start building the song together.  that, and not having the sheer joy of playing music together with people you like, for which there is no substitute.

but you know, when i hear the songs we've put together while not being together, man, i get goosebumps. 

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 Posted in Songs
  Tags new eclepto funk americana social media diy

What I did right in 2010 -- What I'll do in 2011

in the first days of 2010, i wrote an entry called "What I Did Right in 2009."  mostly, 2009 was about keeping at it, not letting my limited results writing and recording keep me from continuing to write and record: Do what you can with what you have.  Keep getting better. Don't let the quest for perfection be the enemy of continuing to create.

2010 was about accepting my limitations with my gut and not just with my head.  i could accept, intellectually, that i am no Bob Dylan nor was meant to be.  but my gut went on hurting.  every time i wrote a song, i knew it was trash compared to Dylan in my gut. my head could accept my limitations.  my gut didn't, and it rebelled against my finished product with unmitigated hurt.

towards the middle of 2010, i think i finally won the battle of the gut: write what you write.  do the best you can. it's not about being as good as Dylan.  is about being the best you can be.

this lesson learned at last with my songs spread to my poetry.  sometime in the late 90's, i stopped writing poetry because what i was writing was not as good as Seamus Heaney, Carolyn Forche, Debora Greger. it hurt too much to write in that light, and i walked away from it.  finally, in 2010, i began to write poetry again for the craft, for the pleasure, for myself.

another imp0rtant realization i had in 2010 was that i didn't have to limit myself to one media.  some ideas i have work well as songs; others work well as poems but not songs.  yet others work only as short stories.  in 2010, i came to write all three, picking the form that would best suit my idea. i hope to continue doing that in 2011.

i want 2011 to be a year in which i take joy in writing songs and poems and stories.  i want to enjoy what i create and not let a misguided and unrealistic quest for perfection hurt me to the point of paralysis.

in 2011, i will work on my singing and playing skills and do the best i can when i record new songs.

i will enjoy the lifestyle and sensibility of someone who appreciates songs and poetry and whose life is enriched by spending time with and producing songs and poems.

i will send out poems understanding that the rejection rate will be over 95% because if i don't send them out, they have zero chance of being accepted.

i will continue to strive to make art even if the end result continues to fall short.  my percentage for making art may be almost zero, but if i don't try, it will certainly be zero.

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 Posted in Songwriting
  Tags eclepto funk americana 2010 2011 resolutions new year

how do songs get written?

somewhere, somehow, i have acquired this idealized vision of a song being written by letting the music and the lyrics develop simultaneously, or at least each suggesting a new path which the other takes up until it's time to let the other lead for a while.

how accurate is this ideal? i think it is just that, an ideal.  there are many ways for a song to come together.  here i am, thinking on the page:

Bananafish:

some songs take a long time to finish from the time the idea comes around to the time you actually have a finished product. 19 years is my record.

i read J.D. Salinger's "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" in1990 or 1991 as a college sophomore and LOVED IT.  for a story written in 1948, it sure grabbed me.  to this day, it is my favorite Salinger work, counting  Catcher in the Rye.  i should add that Jorge Luis Borges is my favorite author and i would trade a great short story for 10 novels any day.

anyway, at the time i wasn't writing songs anymore. i wrote from about 1984 to 1989 and then basically decided i was more into poetry, so i pursued a degree in English.  after reading "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," i started playing around with a song idea: the song would have me walking on the beach with J. D. Salinger and making up stuff he might say.  then i left it at that.

fast forward to late 2006. i started writing songs again. fast forward to January 2010:  i was working on a song with no lyrics yet, just some chords, when i heard the news that J.D. Salinger had died.  the words "innocence, i'd like to be eight million miles of electric filigree that is a mind" just jumped at me, i don't know where from.  at that point, i knew i was writing a song about J.D. Salinger after all.  i had to do some adjusting, but the lyrics i had fit into the melody i had found nicely. 

by February, 2010, i had a verse and the chorus.  the second verse came easily.  the third verse was difficult. it took me until early April to get it down. I wanted to do an homage to Salinger but to speak my mind as well.  the song ended up not being so much about Salinger as about me. of course. here is the song: Bananafish.

Empire Express:

i started this song in June, 2010, by writing a few lines about a hard guy living in cheap rooms, barely making a living with petty crime and stating that the best thing he ever did was to stay away from his son so as not to screw him up.  the lines seemed to gel, and then i went looking for some music for them. playing around with my guitar, what i found was a sort of derivative Paul Simon-Pixies chord progression (Cm#, G#, A, E). nevertheless, i liked it.

trouble was, the music had nothing to do with the lyrics. the music was wistful, almost pastoral, whereas the lyrics were broken glass and bone-white concrete.  it just wasn't working.  it was clear something had to go, so went the lyrics did.

i've always been into trains, especially steam trains, and i had found an old photograph browsing in the Library of Congress with a caption on it regarding an 1893 new speed record set by a New York Central locomotive.  that sort of looking-back-in-time wistfulness seemed to fit the melody perfectly, so i went with it. i kept the father-son theme in it, but almost tangentially to the "time is leaving you behind like an express train" theme.

here's the song: Empire Express

Strictly Speaking Drunk Blues:

I must say this was an unusual song, for me.  One night in November, 2010, I was playing the guitar and I found myself riffing on a very basic chord progression (D-Em-G-D).  Not sure why, but the Everglades and Miami came to mind. Perhaps I was thinking of one of my dive trips down to Key Largo.  I thought it might be fun to just start taping and see what would happen.

Tape I did, using my iPhone to record with (I sat in my living room, with the iPhone on a coffee table and my head turned to the side to avoid blasting the vocals).  I basically started singing what came to mind, and to my surprise, lines kept just coming and coming, suggesting changes in the chord progression (but keeping the same basic chords).  this is the only "song" i've ever written on the spot.  I will probably cut back on a bunch of lines and streamline the whole thing, but here is that first, raw product:  Strictly Speaking Drunk Blues.

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 Posted in Songwriting
  Tags eclepto funk americana song songwriting

Carlos Gardel Lives Under My Bed

today is Carlos Cardel's birthday.  His year of birth is disputed, but 1887 to 1890 is about right.  Where he was born is also disputed:  Argentina, Uruguay, and France claim him.  we do know in 1923 he acquired Argentine citizenship, an unnecessary step had he been born there.  for most of his life, he lived in the slums. he was poor. he could sing.

as a young man, he began performing first at local bars and restaurants and slowly for an upper-class audience audience beyond his means.  despite his up-step in venue, his rough early life seems to have followed him.  story has it that in 1915 he was shot by Che Guevara's father, Ernesto Guevara Lynch in a barroom argument. who actually shot Gardel is in dispute: some say the culprit was actually an upper class slummer named Roberto Guevara, no relation to Che. where Gardel was shot is also in dispute (chest or leg). or this may not have happened at all.  it's hard to tell with Gardel.

in  1917 (he would have been under 30), he defined (some say created) the tango-canción with his rendition of  Mi Noche Triste, the first tango ever recorded with a vocal part (tangos had up to that point been sold as instrumentals).  the record sold well and became a hit in Spanish-speaking America.  his baritone voice was beauty itself, and he was a master of phrasing.  for the next ten years, he sold quite a lot of records and toured the Americas and Europe. but his success really exploded with his films (9 of them, shot between 1931 and 1935). they made him the biggest star the Spanish-speaking world had ever known.  the films were tripe, but each contained several tangos sung by Gardel in his unmistakable style, and unmistakable he was. Gardel could also write a mean tango himself: El Dia Que Me Quieras and Por Una Cabeza, among others, are his own compositions and among the best tangos ever written, particularly the first.

his rags-to-riches story, his undeniable talent and vocal creativity, and his amazing charismatic appeal lacked only one thing to become legendary.  on 24 June, 1935, he died in a plane crash at the height of his career. Gardel remains for ever young, forever talented, for ever tragic. the elements of the myth fell into place.

without doubt, no other man, woman, or child has ever sang tango like Gardel did.  he practically was tango, in the same sense that Elvis was rock-and-roll: he was the right person at the beginning of an era and he became synonymous with the style of music he performed.  no one sang like him, and no one has sung like him since. and this is no accident: his image was so large, so overwhelming, so burned into the public's consciousness, that subsequent tango singers went out of their way NOT TO SOUND like Gardel.

here is Gardel singing perhaps his trademark song, Mis Buenos Aires Queridos:

 

and here he is singing my favorite tango of his, Arrabal Amargo

i don't recall a time in my life when i didn't know who Carlos Gardel was. my earliest memory of him is from when i was seven or eight (1971 or 1972): in my grandparents' living room, him singing from a movie on t.v. i remember little else of that moment, but it seems that i was already familiar with the song and stopped playing to listen. at any rate, i knew his music from very early on.

something of tango's dark sentimentality appealed to me from the start. i remember a few years later, while still a child, listening to Mis Buenos Aires Queridos on t.v. and then going out to play with friends and feeling the weight of the song in me, the sadness, wanting to cry, not really knowing why. but music always had a powerful influence on me. i remember going to see For A Few Dollars More and loving the score (at that time, I had no idea who Ennio Morriccone was). i went back to see the movie every night for two weeks, until it stopped showing,  just to listen to the music, particularly the last song leading up to the final duel.  i didn't know that there was such a thing as a movie score or that it was permissible to like a film for its music. i thought it was weird to see a movie for the music, so i  just didn't tell anybody about it. i didn't make the connection at the time, but in retrospect my behavior linked me to Gardel: many people must have paid to see each of his new films over and over and over again just to hear him sing.

later, tango's deep pessimism (perhaps fatalism) really meshed with my experience as a 13 year old leaving his country, his grandparents, his friends, his school, his church, and everything he owned for a brand new start. in my early teens, i discovered that i had feelings (often very dark sadness) which the circumstances couldn't explain or justify. i could be with friends at school or church, and everything would be fine, and we'd be having a good time, but inside i had this unrelated hurt that made no sense.  music stepped in to make sense of it.  with a song playing, what i felt inside matched what i was hearing, the words and music, and my feelings made sense.

even as i got into punk, new wave, and alternative music, and as i left the church and belief in the christian god behind,  i took tango with me, particularly Gardel.  sometimes i desperately needed to listen to him to allow myself to feel what i was already feeling but had not reason to feel. the tangos i like best by Gardel are the ones that speak of unmitigated sadness:  love lost, lost youth, the chance for greatness gone for ever.  they spoke truth to me. maybe Gardel was a trace of an old life, a current too deep in my life to abandon. or maybe he was singing of my life, and i recognized he could express it with his singing far better than i could with anything at my disposal.

listening to him on tape, i began, of course, to try to sing like him. i did not have his quality of voice, but his phrasing i could imitate, and i did. you could say i learned phrasing from Gardel, and then recognized it in Billie Holiday and others as the great art that it is in and of itself. i remember the pleasure of finally being able to sing Mis Buenos Aires Querido or Cuesta Abajo, not in Gardel's voice (i was nowhere near that level) but with his phrasing, with his feeling. i remember singing in my room, in the car, as i left work for the night.  these are specific moments i remember, not generalizations. the feeling was one of utter delight.

i remember later, while in community college (this would have been 1985 or 1986), i wrote a poem, "Carlos Gardel Lives Under My Bed" and submitted it to the college's literary magazine, The Experience. it was published. i should say most things that were submitted were published. but i didn't know that at the time. i no longer have the poem.  it was, i recall, a poem about Carlos Gardel speaking to me from under my bed, basically saying things like "go for it," "enjoy life," live!"

for anyone who knew his songs, this message would have been incongruous.  yet that was the message that i did get from Gardel:  when i heard him singing, when i heard the pain in the lyrics and felt what it was to be lost and in darkness, i knew that you could still sing about it, and do something with your feelings which, if you were lucky, could touch others and become art.

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 Posted in Cool People
  Tags eclepto funk americana andres rojas tango carlos gardel

what's in a title? Night on the Galactic Railroad

one thing i've been conscious of lately is the importance of titles (both of songs and of song collections ). the title of a song can really grab a potential listener, act as a mantra or magical incantation that by itself can have a lot of power even before the first note of a song is heard. 

i've been traditionally lazy with titles. i usually went with the first line of the chorus or some other obvious snippet from a song, but i always tried to create some sort of resonance as far as the titles of collections went. for example, my first collection, King of All The Beasts, derived its title from a line from one of the songs in it, John Wesley Hardin ("i'd ride by day and camp by night / the king of all the beasts / and throw my body by the fire / with no one else but me").

i tried to make a conscious effort to create that sort of dramatic effect for each song title as i went along. i think the first song i literally went out of my way to find a striking title for was Six AM After the End of the War (from my collection Songs of Love and Bliss.)  the line itself doesn't appear in the song.  it was taken from a Russian movie made in 1945, just as WW II was coming to an end,  Six in the Afternoon after the End of the War. i had come across the title while reading Antony Beevor's Berlin: The Downfall 1945.  i thought the title was both evocative and sufficiently mysterious to grab a potential listener's interest (who can say whether i was right or not?)

thus, when i started working on this latest collection of songs, the matter of titles was an important one. after thinking about it for a while, i started out with the working title Ghost -- it was supposed to conjure up people who haunted other people's lives and people whose lives were haunted by other people.  i felt that the working title sort of captured the essence of the songs and heck, ghosts are just cool.  i made sure to work in the word into the first song for the collection ("the engineer waves at us / and he's blurry as a ghost"). 

after a while, it dawned on me that two of the songs had a train in it (Empire Express and Handcuffs and Chains), and tons of songs had moon, stars, suns, nights and all that galactic goodness in them. then one night i was playing around with my guitar and iPhone and decided to record a cover of The L&N Don't Stop Here Anymore, a song i've loved for years and years.  so, thinks I, hey, that's another railroad song, so maybe i could end the EP with it?  why not? and maybe i can structure the EP around that train theme?

at that point, i really needed a new title for the EP, something to do with trains.  for some reason Night on the Galactic Railroad popped into my mind.  i had run across the title years and years before, and doing some research, i had found out that it was both an anime film (1985) and a Japanese novel by Kenji Miyazawa (written around 1927 and published posthumously in 1934). i had run across the title when i was really into Yukio Mishima (i thought his  The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea was perfection itself). i used to teach a Mishima short story back when i was an English instructor, Patriotism, which concerns the ritual suicide of an army officer and his wife following a mutiny against the Japanese Imperial Army in 1936. after discovering the Miyazawa short novel (Night on the Galactic Railroad), i toyed with teaching it, but decided it was too long and potentially too difficult for the students to handle in the short time i would have available for it.

nevertheless, the title stuck to me, and i've kept it on the periphery of my consciousness all these years.  it attracted me in an atavistic way, a sort of primal utterance which, though its meaning has been lost, still resonates at some essential level, as did the stories of Mishima. in my mind, all these stories centered around the death of an ideal or death in the name of an ideal  or perhaps the cost of pursing an ideal to its conclusion even if the ideal is lost or can never really be reached in the first place. call that ideal love or redemption or salvation, the point is that though we may not believe in it anymore, or wish to believe we don't believe in it anymore, the very idea still has a great deal of power over us.

in terms of the title Night on the Galactic Railroad itself, i liked the image it conjured of a journey bound to rails (the inflexible laws of the universe which keep our planet spinning and our lives moving forward) against the backdrop of the unimaginably vast and unknowable universe that unfolds above our heads every night.  i thought the songs in my EP sort of echoed this theme of the contrast between the practically infinite nature of time/space and the very finite nature of our lives, love, loss, death, and the attempts of the living to come to terms with it all.

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 Posted in Songs
  Tags eclepto funk americana song songwriting night galactic railroad

on finishing: the journey is the destination

with the end of the year coming fast,  i decided it was time to end my on-going project, Ghost, now titled Night on the Galactic Railroad -- a title it got as the songs in it developed into a different direction

you can hear the 8-song EP in Bandcamp, free to listen and download

i've been working on this project for almost a year, longer if you count some of the older songs that made it in (i first wrote California in 2007, then re-wrote the melody in 2008 and have been working on it since)

during this year, i have (i think) finally slayed the beast of seeking perfection, of yearning for greatness, of feeling everything i did was worthless because it wasn't John Lennon or Bruce Springsteen.  my stuff is so far away from those standards that it was paralyzing.  i think few people understand the willpower that it took me to push on and do stuff -- it was so painful to listen to the end results in the light of the best of the best that has ever been written

and so my tendency (as with a lot of other people, i am sure) was to keep it open-ended: it can't suck if it isn't finished.  as long as i'm "working" on it, it can suddenly transform into a masterpiece

alas

what you end up with is a lot of unfinished crap. as opposed to a lot of finished crap, but at least then there's completion and you can move on

and so, here are these eight songs:  the best i can do right now.  here they are.  i gave them all i had and there ain't no more.  perfect they sure ain't.  good would be pushing it. kind of cool, maybe.  most of all, i hope these songs are stepping stones into something better, something slightly higher in the quality food chain

next year, next project

the journey is the destination

and that's kind of a contradiction, isn't it?  in order to move on, you have to finish.  and if you don't finish, you can't move on.  i guess the bottom line for me is that you can't be afraid to be less than perfect. you got to put them cards down on the table and call the last bet.  if you win, great. if not ... there's always the next hand.  and even if sometimes you have to fold, come the next hand you're still playing poker. because if you just play one hand, and you lose, and you walk away ... then you're not playing. and the point is to play

and to have fun, right? of course, you could just have a gambling addiction, in which case ...

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 Posted in Songwriting
  Tags eclepto funk americana song songwriting night galactic railroad

before you get to recording

a while back i discussed my home recording equipment and my new "studio" monitors.

here are a few tips for before you start recording:

1. get quiet

finding a quiet room is half the battle.  it helps to be away from obvious sources of noise such as washing machines, air conditioners, and pets.

pay attention to your chair.  if it makes noise, it will make it at the worst possible time, just as you have that perfect take nailed. a quiet chair is a must.  avoid wearing jewelery that jangles.  don't have paper or other items in the floor nearby which you can move (by tapping your foot, for example) during recording.

2. get the best instrument(s) you can

quality has merits all of its own.  having a great sounding guitar will pay off.  instruments that don't stay in tune (see below) or which sound like crap, will sound out of tune and like crap when you record them.  quiet amps are a must if you're going to record them.  i love my little Roland Cube.  it is super-quiet and sounds great for what i do.

3. get in tune

i used to be pretty careless about staying in tune.  i had a pretty awful guitar (a antique-store Yamaha) which did not stay in tune very long.  after a while, i just gave up and started recording after one or two days without tuning ... only to ruin what would have been good takes.

tune every time you start recording.  tune even in between sessions, at least until you are sure your instrument is staying in tune reliably.

4. get in time

learning the song ahead of time is key.  i tend to practice a song for at least several weeks before trying to make a good recording of it (as opposed to a quick demo).

staying in time will also probably require some sort of metronome, either built-into your recording software or external.  i use the metronome that comes with the Guitar Toolkit iPhone app (i also like its chord finder).  despite being a hold-out/purist for a long time, i finally decided that nothing beats nailing the exact bpm's of a song, and then playing it at that speed religiously.

in fact, the first step of my recording process is to record the metronome as a separate track, which i then use to guide me as a lay down the other instruments.

5. get ready to be alone

recording takes time, and there's nothing more distracting/annoying/disruptive/frustrating than having your significant other or roommate knock on the door or barge in at the wrong time.  figure out a way to arrange a clear do-not-disturb commitment from others when you are recording.

you may have to work around others' schedules for optimum results.  i try to record when i am alone in the house as much as possible because no matter how quiet people try to be, all sorts of noises happen as they go about their business, usually at the worst possible time.

 

next time, some tips on how to record guitar and vocals, which is basically all i do.

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 Posted in Home Recording
  Tags eclepto funk americana home recording tips

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