SAW 2009 #17: Naked by Chris Devine

I'll be honest ... I have NO idea what this song means.

After delving seriously into the experimental (and instrumental) with my previous Song-a-Week contender, I wanted to write something a little more ordinary. I came up with a chord progression that I liked even though it sounded suspiciously Erik Hendel-like, and then proceeded to more or less pull words out of the air without much forethought. I think of this as my 'Dada' technique, ignoring the conscious mind and its volition and plonking down the words that just seem like they belong there. As a result, we have lyrics that at times seem to mean something but, taken as a whole, really seem all over the place. Maybe with time it'll all make sense. That happens to me sometimes.

But if anyone can tell me who the hell the 'wizards of the interstice' are and what they're doing in my song, please do!

The arrangement was intentionally really simple -- acoustic guitar, bass guitar, and a little bit of drum loop-ness. Initially, I'd put drum loops under the whole thing, but since it wasn't recorded with the drums, things really didn't match up perfectly and my attempt to audio-snap things to match them up failed miserably. So I dumped most of the drums, except to work as punctuation.

And since I'd been meaning to include lyrics in my blog posts but had forgotten to till now, here are the words ... I'll soon amend my earlier posts, too, to include the words where the songs actually have them:

The taste of the fruit
Is a bitter pursuit
When with the force of a brute
In an Italian black suit
You shamed me.

Dust from the trail
And the horse's long tail
Make it easy to fail
To see through the veil,
Then you claimed me.

Wizards of the interstice, and pillars of the circumstance,
Given rise to we have, taking stock of what we gave,
Made of flesh and made of stone, made of water, made of bone,
Made for this and this alone, made to bring us safely home.

Too long ago to remember the words
Too long abed to rise up with the birds
So I can act like it never occurred,
Do what I want and not what's preferred.

The hand in the dark
Never leaves a mark
But the hint of a spark
Reveals all that's stark
And naked.

SAW 2009 #16: Miles More Pain by Erik Matthew Hendel

This song sets the threat of continuing corporate layoffs (a topic that is presently and unfortunately close to my heart) against a metaphor of train travel. And, how I came to be inspired to write in this style is a bit of a yarn.

First, I was reading up on the recorded history of Dylan's "You Ain't Goin' Nowhere" ('cause I can't seem to stop listening to The Swell Season's cover of it lately). If you are familiar with the song, you may remember the reference to Gunga Din (depending on the version you listen to). In Dylan's revised version written after the Byrds' cover of it was released, Bob (apparently) needed a word to rhyme with McGuinn, as he was going out of his way to make fun of him.

Anyway, like what usually happens to me when I am reading on this sort of thing, I can't help but look up other things along the way. I've never seen the movie Gunga Din, but now, thanks to Bartleby.com, I have read the original poem by Rudyard Kipling. And I enjoyed it. And I wonder now why it wasn't required reading in school.

So, I can't say I wasn't inspired by Rudyard Kipling when I set out to write this SAW. (Nor can I say that I wasn't inspired by Dylan, but that is pretty standard for my SAWs at this point.) I wrote the lyrics as a poem first ... I didn't even really have ideas for the music in my head.

Much of this song can be directly related back to what is currently going on where I work ... which I'm sure is similar to what many folks are dealing with right now. The only part that does not is where we introduce the villainous hitchiker (which seemed like a very Dylan-esque idea to include). This character comes from a story my cousin related to me a few weeks back.

Why a train? Why not? Actually, I'm not sure how that popped into my head, but thinking about it now, it seems likely that it is due to my watching Back to the Future Part III last week. You know ... the one where Marty and Doc have to hijack a locomotive in the old west.

Lastly, the phrase "miles more pain" was actually taken from a roster of attendees' last names from a meeting: ... Miles, Moore, Payne, ...

I pore over my destination
'Cause we just inch along this train
Once upon an overnight sensation
But now you're in for miles more pain

Hold tightly to that sage suitcase
You're lucky just to keep your seat
Or if you have the strength, then stand in place
If you still can plant your feet

And when you feel the brake cord rush
See the willing folks jump free
Meanwhile, your closest friend was pushed
Will it be that way for me?

A hitchhiker-stowaway ducks the man
You know that he's from nowhere
He points to you with a bloody hand
He knows untimely fates you share

With fuel of large and useless words
The engine seems slower yet
A fire of paper barely burns
Combustion is an idle threat

Those that purchased my ticket sneer
They want to see the train derailed
They're forecasting that the end is near
But they share in what has failed

So the engineer's unhitched the caboose
And the tracks are steaming in the rain
The law and my word will cut me loose
But you're still in for miles more pain

SAW 2009 #15: Go Through Me by Richard E. Moore

From the podcast feed:

Says the composer: "Let's see: Melody and title came to me while driving and notated on my cell phone. Not safe, don't recommend it. Debut of my mandolin (if I remember correctly) in the SAW, hello to that - not safe, wouldn't recommend it. That's about all I gotta say about that. Be safe, y'all."

SAW 2009 #14: Cathedral Prayers by Chris Devine

OK, so this song fits in with something I do very occasionally with the SAW ... I veer off into experimental territory and try to stretch the boundaries of what fits into the concept of 'song' for the podcast. In 2007, I did it with the song I called 'Summer's Chill', which was composed entirely of samples and loops not of my own making. It was instrumental, it didn't have a traditional song structure and, while it did have a loosely defined chord progression it had no identifiable melody to speak of.

Over the last few weeks, I've been listening to a lot of strange stuff on the iPod. The stuff that's particularly germane to this composition is the work of Throbbing Gristle and John Foxx (lead singer in the late '70s-early '80s of the post-punk/New Wave band Ultravox, who in recent years has dived head-first into making ambient music). The title of the track is in fact a really obvious echo of John Foxx's two-album ambient masterwork, Cathedral Oceans.

But listening to Throbbing Gristle, in particular, I was moved to think about what really qualifies as 'music', much less what qualifies as a 'song'. If you've never heard them, they essentially invented the term and the concept of industrial music, except you wouldn't recognize much of what they've done in bands like Nine Inch Nails or Front 242. Throbbing Gristle's output consisted mostly of layers of noise, sometimes with a little bit of melody but mostly not, and sometimes with a little bit of rhythm but mostly not. Is it music, or is it noise, and what makes it so? Where's the dividing line?

With these things in mind, I basically went to town, recording a bunch of random bits of varying lengths. To make things sort of fit together I generally settled on a G minor scale, and particularly a G minor seventh chord, and tried to make anything I played that had an identifiable musical tone fit into that scale and that chord.

Then, in the time-honored fashion Brian Eno pioneered with Music for Airports, I cut and pasted, layered and generally played around with all these separate, independently-recorded bits, repeating some and cutting others into pieces.

And because ambient music is usually a little too amorphous for my tastes, I HAD to add a couple of rhythmic elements -- one a drum track of my own devising, with drum hits on almost random beats and nearly random drum sounds, then complimented it with a modern dance drum loop slowed down to slightly more than half its original speed.

Add a crapload of reverb, weird EQs and other effects and some surprising things emerged -- the swells and emotional tension were never really planned ... They were just the product of where the little snippets happened to land and overlap.

And no, that wasn't a real guitar in there, though it's mostly low enough in the mix that it almost sounds real. I just thought a chimey/echoey U2-reminiscent guitar line might serve as a little tribute to Brian Eno.

Does it work? I dunno. I feel like I could have put more work into it, and it feels FAR too short to me. But as an exercise in breaking out of my usual box, it was a resounding success.

This is pretty much the only song I've ever put together that was meant to be background noise ... I find, anyway, that my attention actually sort of slides off it, the harder I try to listen to it. And that's not a bad thing.

SAW 2009 #13: Disgrace by Erik Matthew Hendel

From the podcast feed:

Better late than never, EMH offers this take on greed in 2009 ... from the point of view of children (or maybe aliens). Chalk it all up to some weird nightmares - and current, real-world events.