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Everything That Happens Will Happen Today
I was very excited last year when the news came that David Byrne and Brian Eno would be releasing their first collaboration since 1981’s My Life In the Bush Of Ghosts. The album was a bit of a letdown — Ghosts was a groundbreaking record that still sounds ahead of its time a quarter-decade later, one that neither could have done on their own.
On the other hand, Everything That Happens Will Happen Today is a small album of pretty songs that aren’t genuine collaborations. Rather, Byrne wrote lyrics for melodies that Eno, who “hates writing words,” had already written.* Byrne sings all the vocals, and Eno plays most of the instruments and probably produced the album (it’s credited to both, but the production and the sounds are classic Eno).
So it was a bit of a letdown at first, but it has slowly grown on me. The songs are beautiful, much better than most of Byrne’s recent look-at-how-many-world-musicians-will-come-to-play-with-me excursions. Byrne says of the music Eno sent him,
The foundation of some of the tracks are much like those of traditional folk, country, or gospel songs before these styles became harmonically sophisticated. Brian’s chord structures were unlike anything I would have chosen myself, so I was pushed in a new direction, asked to face the unfamiliar … The challenge was more emotional than technical: to write simple, heartfelt tunes without drawing on cliché. The results, in many cases, were uplifting, hopeful, and positive, even though some lyrics describe cars exploding, war, and similarly dark scenarios.
In his “I Believe In Singing” essay, Eno describes his love of songs “based around the basic chords of blues and rock and country music.” The instrumentation and arrangements aren’t always straightforward. “Poor Boy” uses a disturbing rhythm track that might have come directly from Ghost‘s “Help Me Somebody,” while “Never Today,” one of the bonus tracks, uses the distinctive analog synthesizer sound from Another Green World‘s “In Dark Trees.” But the latter is a beautiful song with the kind of simple, sparkling hook that Eno is so good at, and uncharacteristically simple (for Byrne) lyrics:
I never thought I would fall asleep tonight
I never thought that my arms could reach so high
But now and then we find
We’re walking and we’re talking for the very first time
And what I am is what I want to be.
And the packaging of the deluxe version is a joy in and of itself. Enough so that I did a whole Facebook photo essay of it.
*It’s worth noting that Byrne and Eno each wrote essays for the CD booklet discussing the origins of the album, and each tells a different story about this encounter. Byrne places it at Eno’s studio in London while Eno recalls it as a lunch in New York. I’m sure they noticed this too.
Posted in Music, Uncategorized
4 Comments
Texas (Sun to Sun)
I spent Tuesday in Texas. We had crossed the state line from Louisiana the night before, stopped at San Antonio early in the morning, and by breakfast time we were in Del Rio, the “queen city of the Rio Grande.” We spent the rest of the day rolling across ranch country, cactus flats and through small faded towns like Langtry, Sanderson, and Alpine.
It seemed like a minor-key kinda day. The vastness of the state is overwhelming; it’s harsh and beautiful and unforgiving. Whatever you think of Texas politics and Texas culture, you cannot deny the power and the history of the state and the incredible fortitude of the people who created it. It has a bloody and brutal history, but so does this entire country; as always, Texas did it bigger and badder, but there’s a little Texas in all of us.
Today’s song is “Texas (Sun to Sun).” Before the advent of the eight-hour workday, agricultural workers who worked from sunrise to sunset were often said to work “sun to sun.” The sun rose and set on the train today without us ever leaving the state.
Sunset Limited
I’m freeloading on someone’s wireless connection during a stopover in El Paso, Texas. The train is running a bit ahead of schedule so we’re sitting at the platform for a little while. I took a walk alongside the train, and it’s pretty windy but much warmer than in New York right now. So I’m taking the opportunity to upload yesterday’s episode of song-blogging, a new song about New Orleans and Louisiana.
On Monday, I left New Orleans on the Sunset Limited, which goes due west across Louisiana, through New Iberia (home of Dave Robicheaux), Lafayette (hometown to some of my favorite Cajun bands), Lake Charles and then on to Beaumont, Texas (a trip immortalized on Lucinda Williams’ Car Wheels On a Gravel Road).
The extremes of history and music and beauty on the one hand, and poverty and toxic waste and corruption on the other, inspired today’s song, “Sunset Limited.” Playing faux-accordion on a D harmonica, and for the first time on this trip mixing in some Photo Booth performance footage with video and photographs shot from the train (and, in the second half of the third verse, Sunday night in the French Quarter), I put this video together on Monday evening.
I didn’t invent the word “song-blogging” but I can’t find any instances of it used as a verb meaning writing songs as real-time documentation. It’s very different from any songwriting I’ve done before — it resembles the speed-writing of February Album Writing Month but the pace is faster and the songs are more immediate, about the things I’ve been thinking about on that day’s travels. If I’d gone to Louisiana or New Orleans on a different day, or if the paper I was reading at Cafe du Monde had not had a huge story on the levee reconsctruction (or lack thereof) I might have written a different song.
Making the accompanying videos is a great way to illustrate the trip and, I think, more interesting than the usual photostream on Flickr. I mean, I’m doing that too, but lots of photos are in the videos that won’t be on Flickr either because they aren’t that good or because there’s just too damn many of them.
“Sunset Limited” also illustrates a few of the problems with doing this. The performances are usually first or second takes of brand new songs and, as a consequence, are pretty rough. And, since I cannot write and take pictures at the same time, I sometimes end up writing about things I didn’t manage to photograph. There are no photographs to go with the verses about the dog on the chain and the kids playing outside, but they went by too fast for me to put down the guitar and get the camera.
Observant people will notice two things about the video of me playing the song on the train. Yes, the video is flipped, since Apple’s PhotoBooth application behaves like a mirror, and yes, the train is moving very slowly; we ran into some traffic and while I would have preferred to have the scenery flying by, I was running out of daylight. And no, the video is not lip-synched, but like every Apple application, iMovie has some brilliant features and some staggering deficiencies, one of which is that you cannot intersperse photos with video and keep the soundtrack of the video running. So I had to split them up, and then synch the video back to the sound by hand.
Sunset Limited
Laissez les triste temps roulette
I’ll be leaving New Orleans on the Sunset Limited in a few hours, after a one-night stopover here. I haven’t been here since 2005 and I have to say, it’s pretty sad. I have always had mixed feelings about this town: As a musician I feel compelled to like it, but the loutish tourism, horrifying poverty and racism, and terrible crime rates aren’t exactly attractive. Katrina seems to have destroyed a lot of small businesses that have been replaced by corporate chains and businesses desperate for tourist cash. Kinda like Ghouliani did to Times Square.
Unlike the other times I’ve been here — my first trip was in 1988 with some college friends — I couldn’t even find any decent music in the French Quarter. Walter “Wolfman” Washington was playing out at the Maple Leaf, but with no car and not a lot of time (and 35-degree weather) I wasn’t in the mood for that trip. I walked up and down Bourbon and Royal Streets and heard almost nothing but disco and club music, or dreadful rock-blues cover bands playing way too loud. There weren’t even any street musicians, but perhaps it was too cold for them.
I finally happened on a Bourbon Street bar called Huge Ass Beers (I give them credit for at least not trying to be falsely authentic) with a couple of guys playing blues in the back. Nothing to write home about, and I didn’t get their names, but they were having a good time and so were the other folks in the bar, mostly a hardcore band from San Diego and their girlfriends.
This morning I had coffee and beignets at Cafe du Monde, which is at least still there and intact, and walked around a little more. Even in the heart of the French Quarter there are a lot of boarded-up storefronts and for-rent signs. I’ll be glad to get back on the train.
Songblogging From the Train
I’m in New Orleans, stopping over for the night on my cross-country train trip to Arizona to see my brother. I left New York on Saturday afternoon on the Crescent, which runs down the Northeast Corridor to Atlanta and then goes across Alabama and Mississippi down to New Orleans — it is, I believe, a descendant of the train Chuck Berry wrote about in “Promised Land.”
I’ve been doing some reading and writing, taking lots of pictures, and playing some music. All of which put together means that I seem to be song-blogging my trip.
I wrote “The Northeast Corridor Blues” years ago, when I used to ride up and down that line on New Jersey Transit all the time, to my company’s location near Princeton. Here’s a brand-new version, actually recorded on the Northeast Corridor, with a slideshow of photos and video taken along the trip between New York and Washington.
Posted in Uncategorized
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Goodbye to South Ferry
The old South Ferry station on the IRT is about to be replaced with a new, larger station, so yesterday I roped mary_wroth into a brief photo expedition to the old station.
I grew up in the public-transit wastelands of Staten Island, which even though it’s part of New York City is the only county in a 50-mile radius without a direct rail link to Manhattan. So, South Ferry was the closest thing I had to a subway stop; after a bus ride of anywhere from 30 to 90 minutes, and a half-hour ferry ride, I could head down the stairs to the cramped, curved platform, only big enough to fit the front half of a subway train, and take the the Seventh Avenue Local (that’s what my dad and grandfather called it; when I first started riding the trains the standardized color scheme didn’t exist yet and the number/letter system was used inconsistently) to magical places worlds away from my semi-suburban neighborhood.
It took me to 14th Street, where Baird Searles’ Science Fiction Shop was located, and the main branch of Barnes and Noble (a bookstore heaven to a kid who only knew the Paperback Booksmith and Waldenbooks in the mall; this was several decades before the advent of the superstores) was just a short walk away. To 33rd Street, to go to the wargame/D&D heaven of the Compleat Strategist. To Christopher Street, for an afternoon rummaging through the bins at Second Coming and the Record Runner and other stores long gone and forgotten even by me. (And no, Bleecker Bob’s, while still open, was never on the list — it was an infamous clip joint where $3.99 albums sold for $25 and the staff was rude.)
The unusual aspects of the station — the moving grates that covered the gap between the curved platform and the car door, the horrendous screech of the wheels as the train came into the curve — were all things I associated firmly with The Subway. I learned to walk between cars very early so that I could walk up to the first five cars if I got on at the back of the train. None of this was strange to me, although most subway riders have probably never experienced them. The only other station with the moving grates and the curves is Union Square and I don’t think any other platform in the system is too short for a full train. And there’s really no reason to use the South Ferry station if you’re not going to take the ferry.
It will be gone soon, replaced with a new station that’s bigger and brighter and can fit a full train, and has a connection to the Whitehall Street BMT station. Anyone who uses the station regularly will be much happier with the new one, but I’ll always be nostalgic for the old one. And oh so very glad that I don’t have to use it anymore.