Dudley Saunders: Blogging MONSTERS

Song Eruption at Murder Music

2012-02-04T13:37:00.000-08:00

Murder Music was a hit: packed house, ecstatic crowd, etc. Sweet. Here's a link to the article on Patch. But a few nights before the show, my partner Barry woke up from a nightmare, yelling "Who are you?" A kind of abject terror flooded his voice. What is that particular horror you'd feel being murdered in the dark, never knowing who was killing you? Haunted me for days. And the night before the show, some chords I'd been playing with for the last half-dozen years or so abruptly connected with it and became a song. It's short, it has no title, but I opened Murder Music with it. It's a mix of bluegrass and pop-experimentalism -- typical of me, but a little more weighted on the Appalachian side of things. If it fits, we'll stick it on the new record. If I locate decent video of the performance, I'll post.

MURDER MUSIC is coming ...

2012-01-10T01:01:00.000-08:00

SATURDAY, JANUARY 28TH @ 8PM. I have these crazy ideas all the time but the Center for the Arts in Eagle Rock finally let me do one: An evening of modern and post-modern murder ballads by singer-songwriters who have their own peculiar takes on the modern heart-of-darkness.
There'll be projections of old LA Crime Scene Photos (why have I capitalized that?) and homicidal video art playing behind the artists. I'll be doing two songs, one from the forthcoming record. If you're in Los Angeles, come. And if not ... then let me know if there are enough murderous singer-songwriters in your town for me to do a local edition near you.

Dudley Saunders' acappella adaptation of Billy Edd Wheeler's COAL TATTOO

2011-11-28T09:20:00.000-08:00

I Won't Learn

2011-11-09T01:18:00.000-08:00

It's happened again: with each record, there's a song I am convinced is boring, or not good enough, or I don't know what. But I grudgingly move forward with recording, thinking I'll delete it later, only to find out it's everyone's favorite. For the past few years, I've been struggling and nipping and tucking and recomposing my maybe-post-modern murder ballad THE ROSEWOOD CASKET. In some ways, it's a traditional folk song, but in a lot of ways it's very much not, so making it feel right, move right, has been a real challenge. Anyway, fast-forward to recording sessions from the past week and - boom - once again, it looks like we're looking at the song everybody loves the most. Is it all that struggle, or was it always that good? Who knows. I'd say "When will I learn" except it looks I won't, so why bother? Meanwhile, cross your fingers that I get the genius fiddle player I've set my heart on. And look for it at MURDER MUSIC at the Center for the Arts, Eagle Rock, Saturday January 28th!

The Epilogue of UNITED IN ANGER

2011-11-02T14:04:00.000-07:00

The latest is that I'll have maybe two pieces of music in the film United In Anger: A History of Act Up, but I'm no longer doing the score.

After last minute discussions yesterday, I figured out that the filmmaker wanted something more musically transparent, backgroundy, where I was scoring the emotional ebbs and flows of the sequences.

At this point in my career, it's pretty clear that the artist I am is the artist I am, and it's way too late to become something I'm not. So I switched into Music Consultant mode, and together we were able to locate an example of the music he wants. Then I freed him to go get it from someone else. I loved what my score did in the film ... but it's his film and I'd rather help him to his vision than feel like I'm saddling him unwillingly with mine.

Then I ate a chicken salad sandwich and re-purposed last night's film-music recording session for work on my new album. We worked on "The Rosewood Casket" (beautifully) and made plans for recording "The Man in the Game" Saturday (a song I premiered at the Molly Malone's band show October 25th).

And that means I'm back on schedule to finish the album in December. I am feeling good all around.

Back from New York

2011-10-25T12:44:00.000-07:00

The weather changed my last days in New York, so I sniffled a bit through songs at the CMJ showcase - along with the other Mountain Stage NewSong Contest winners (including the wonderful Arthur Alligood who won the record contract with NewSong). But now I'm back in LA, rehearsing with my great band Ed Tree, Mick Mahan (of Pat Benetar/Sophie B. Hawkins (who'd a thunk it?)) and Debra Dobkin. My sniffles have desnuffled so I should sound pretty good tonight at Molly Malone's(somebody knock on some wood for me).

After the show, I've got two weeks to deliver the final score for UNITED IN ANGER: A HISTORY OF ACT UP so forgive me if I'm under the radar til then. And wish me luck!

On the Way to New York

2011-10-16T00:44:00.000-07:00

Leaving for performances in New York for the Mountain Stage NewSong Contest people, as well as a screening of the latest cut of UNITED IN ANGER: A HISTORY OF ACT UP. And then the day I return to LA, we have one last band rehearsal and then the full-band show October 25.

I'm a little overwhelmed, but I'm also a little shocked to realize how much more I like my music when I'm engaged with other people, both in the playing and in the performing. Rehearsing alone in a room, it's easy to stop listening to what I've written and lose contact with how it impacts other people. It's why I'm often thrown when people have strong reactions to the content; I'll forget that a couplet like "They'll never forgive us/for what they did to us" gives some people an emotional jolt.

And it's made me remember that for most of my career I've been primarily a writer; I've never toured longer than two weeks. In other words, the thing that most compels me about art is the thing I've done the least.

So for everyone even remotely curious about my music, help me change that in 2012: after the new album comes out in March, I want to get as close as I can get to wall-to-wall houses concerts, church basement concerts, art gallery concerts, community center concerts -- hell, even music club shows. Whoever has a living room and at least a handful of interested friends should take the dare -- I know I will. If you aren't sure how to go about it, just write me and I'll send you some pointers on how to do it. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, right?

A Name-Change, An Award and A Future

2011-10-05T21:09:00.000-07:00

Two names have changed actually: the new album and this blog. The big experiment of an album of songs all inspired by novels ultimately moved me past the novels and into other work. Once I faced and accepted that fact, I had to face the body of work I'd created and see exactly what it was.

Hence, the new blog and album title, MONSTERS. Yes, there is a song with a similar title on the album -- MONSTER -- but every song is about a monster. Maybe every song IS a monster.

As some of you may have heard, MONSTER and COUNT ZERO both won me the Mountain Stage NewSong Contest for the Western Region, and I'll be in New York for a special show October 20th.

Now I'm in no danger of that making me a pop-star -- I can't write an uncreepy love song to save my life -- but it has made me think about the nature of attention: media attention, fan attention, cultural ratification. Penny Arcade says that there are two types of artists, those who want to be admired, and those who just want to be friends with everyone. I feel like I'm some weird third variety: I just want to be friends with the cool people with interesting passionate minds and lives.

The idea of being admired OR being friends with people I wouldn't want to talk to sort of gives me the creeps.

I'm fascinated when somebody responds to my work: I want to find out why, what's going on in their heads, what feelings it engenders. My song are like weird litmus tests that give out a thousand different answers, all of which compel me. They're my way into the world.

When I was 20 I wanted to meet people like Tom Waits or William Burroughs or David Wojnarowicz or Robert Wilson, etc etc. But now when someone finds me on Facebook and writes or posts how much they love what I'm doing, I go to their Wall and almost invariably find the writings of a person I would actually like to hang out with.
This is way better than just having "fans."

Three Songs (so far) for the film UNITED IN ANGER

2011-09-10T00:57:00.000-07:00

I haven't made this public before, but two months ago I was asked to do music for Jim Hubbard's non-fiction feature, UNITED IN ANGER, about the original ACT UP New York..

It's the first film to incorporate material from the ACT UP Oral History Project, and the sections I've seen are incredible. They're working the film over like dogs now, but so far they're using an entirely new song I've written for the film called WHAT I WON'T DO, along with THE WILD MEN from "The Emergency Lane" and LEBANON from "Restore".

Currently, I'm on standby to write anything else the film needs. I'm very very happy to be working on this film at the same time I'm recording the new album (which is on schedule for a December finish and a March release).

Stay tuned!

Abruptly, A New Song

2011-07-15T11:47:00.000-07:00

I got almost two weeks to myself, and stayed home writing the whole time. I wasn't thinking of writing a Novelsong - I'd drifted away from that impulse some months ago. But then, suddenly, everything crystallized around the images from a novel.

The hilarious thing? It's my novel. One I wrote. And even funnier? As with the other novels in this series, I twisted the content of even my own novel to make the song into what it wanted to be. I don't even do a true adaptation of my OWN writing. I am my own raw material.

It's called THE MAN IN THE GAME, and I played it last Saturday at Grassroots Acoustica in Venice, CA. Maybe I'll post a YouTube performance of it shortly. It's a little oddly shaped, but if you're reading this, that probably what you get into.

Four New Recordings & Their Future

2011-06-02T15:00:00.000-07:00

This isn't writing related, but what the hell: The first four tracks for the new album should be done by late June, with about three more close behind. Ed Tree is producing, and everything is better than I imagined or hoped.

But lately a question keeps coming up: do I have to wait for a full album anymore? Should I? Is the album a dead form? Is it better to release three four-song EPs over the course of a year or so, or wait around for a year to release a 12-song record?

I know the press prefers a nice old-fashioned record. But all of you are rightfully impatient, and you're what's important. Write me if you have any strong opinions.

Out of the blue, more love from the blogosphere

2010-12-03T23:16:00.000-08:00

If it wasn't for bloggers, I sometimes think I'd have no career at all. They have balls the mainstream media can't imagine. Check this guy out - he even includes video:

http://soundtracktomyday.blogspot.com/2010/11/great-music-dudley-saunders.html

Just back from a fun New York gig. Head into the studio next week - stay tuned.

Dudley

Tour Diary Wrap-Up: The Dregs

2010-06-06T16:52:00.000-07:00

Somewhere toward the end of this tour, a newspaper wrote that I was “like Leonard Cohen with vocal chops.” A nice quote, yes, but also something to think about as I went into the last two shows, and thought back about the tour as a whole.

Friday, I rolled into Poughkeepsie and finally met my booking agent Markus Payne, who made it all possible. Nice to finally put a face to that phone voice and email address. He’d scored a gig for me at an afternoon Pride Preview Party/Picnic for the Hudson Valley at some historic estate. Beautiful grounds, like something out of an Edith Warton novel. I was immediately met with a hearty handshake and a can of bug repellent: easy to forget in Los Angeles that you don’t come by all this deciduous beauty without suffering. The Hudson Valley is quasi-rural and most of the attendees, I gathered, don’t see each other that regularly so it had the feel of a reunion, with a lot of catching-up conversations and a whole lot more liquor. Lots of tiny tiny dogs ran rampant around their feet, and before the stage.

Into this, stepped Leonard Cohen-with-a-voice. Which means, essentially, I was a poetic, emotive human jukebox (thank you, Leslie, for that phrase). For most of them, I could have been singing the phone book. Fortunately, human jukeboxes still have listeners and I ended up selling a few CDs and meeting a few admirers. And the human jukebox got paid. But, man, I had to push.

But the situation flipped the next, final night of the tour. Café Bocca is tiny, which fit the crowd, and I realized that many of them were really there just for dinner. The light was going down over the Hudson River, a nice sunny amber, and I thought, I want these people to digest. So I decided to see how gently I could perform my twisted little songs. I went from human jukebox to poetic dinner muzak.

And the weird thing is, all the diners began to pay attention to me. The less attention I demanded, the more I got.

This would not have worked at the picnic, so this was not a simple lesson. There are no simple lessons here. Except for the fact that maybe I should not be fooled by my ability to “pull it off” musically in difficult circumstances. If you step back a little, really, if I am consistently having to “pull it off”, maybe I’m in the wrong places. I know I don’t go see my favorite artists to see them battle heroically against the odds. I want to see them comfortable, with great sound, in a welcoming setting.

Sure, I take a little stupid pride in not being a hothouse flower, but the fact that I can put on a good show does not mean I’m a real showman. They’re a different breed. Me, I’m “Leonard Cohen with vocal chops”. Where would you want to go hear HIM play?

I’m writing this in the Phoenix airport, waiting for my connection back to Los Angeles, my guitars at my feet. I’m coming home playing better. I’m coming home with a problematic new song finally all worked out. And I’m coming home with two show booked for June.

Good.

On Tour, Part 3: The "San Francisco of Appalachia"

2010-05-27T21:13:00.000-07:00

More late night driving lands me still amped up enough to continue the tour diary a little bitty bit mo'.

The title is what someone described Harrisburg, PA to me after my gig there at the Harrisburg Midtown Arts Center's Stage on Herr. For those out of geography class too long, Harrisburg is the state capitol of Pennsylvania, and as such has a lot more going on than you'd expect fora semi-rural area known affectionately as "Pennsyltucky". The two owners, John and Gary, walked out on a dizzying array of careers in film and television and I couldn't keep track of what else, to sink their savings into an incredible old building they're fast making the epicenter of the region's previously scattered arts scene. The sound is probably the best I've had all tour, and the crowd was so primed to get what I was doing that I ended up, late that night, forced back on stage to do a second, unrehearsed set. I had a flicker of how people go crazy when they suddenly become famous. It was dislocating, a bit, but ... well, if it's like Harrisburg, then I could "muscle through" the troubles of the overly-beloved.

But enough about me: I have a theory that Harrisburg could become the next Austin or Portland. Call me crazy, but I even liked the visual art I was seeing there, and the joyously off-center people I got to hang with. What else does a town need?

OK back to me:

New York saw the reunion of - well, me and my ex-band mate, ex-producer Chris Cochrane. I first met Chris years before when my friend (and later Rolling Stone editor) Mark Kemp asked me to write a story about gay musicians - like, where the hell were they? (This was waaaay back when, when the general assumption was that there WERE no gay musicians.) Chris was one of the few I could find other than myself, and he was doing it in the world of art-rock/avant-jazz/art-funk/Knitting Factory noise-rock/what the hell else can you call it. At the time, he'd just self-released an extraordinary cassette only solo album then called "What Stops Us", but was more widely known for the band he co-founded with harpist Zeena Parkins, NO SAFETY and for his work with the legendary John Zorn.

But the truth was, there was a kind of emotional terrain that I felt was our commonality more than our sexuality - although truly you couldn't/can't separate them. The only other artists I felt any of that particular kinship with were David Clement and Rose Polenzani, who I've never met and who seems to have moved on to different kinds of work now anyway.

And that's what went on display at our show at Dixon Place. The place was packed, and packed with a crowd who felt our emotional landscape, recognized it in their own lives, and seemed hungry to hear what they weren't hearing sung anywhere else. It was an emotional evening, and strange for me, who has spent years with crowds that only half-got what I was doing. Homecoming time. The show was strangely hard to do, and I found myself dropping into performance-art-mode, where you just dump the way you rehearsed things and instead just go with what happens in your hand from moment to moment. But I reckon that just made it all the more honest.

I lit out the next morning from Cambridge, Mass. and Portland, Maine, neither of which were noteworthy -- except maybe for the not-jaw-dropping discovery that it's probably better not to book me after a stand-up-comedy open-mike.

I could write more, but this is already way too much. Long drive tomorrow for a late afternoon Friday event and then an early Saturday evening show in Poughkeepsie. Then it's a mad race to the airport and Los Angeles. Talk to you from there ...

On Tour, Part 2: The Night Before Maine

2010-05-27T10:28:00.000-07:00

I vaguely imagined I'd blog every night after every show. So, 2-1/2 shows to the end, I have learned better.

Here's what you've missed:

I rolled through the Virginia backroads (well, at least, the non-highway roads) to Charlottesville after my last post. I was excited about this show in particular because I was sharing the bill with the brilliant songwriter, Brady Earnhart. I'd become a fan of his after he toured with Scott Free, and Scott couldn't shut up about him -- and if you're smart, you listen when Scott talks like that. Brady is a long-time member of the Charlottesville folk scene that spawned folks like Devon Sproule and Paul Curreri (both of whom, it turns out, can be heard on his forthcoming new album - more about that in a minute). He's a great player, his music is surprisingly adventurous, both melodically and rhythmically, and his lyrics ... man, you can tell he spent time at the Iowa Writers Workshop: incredible, unforced poetry, the kind that can make you catch your breath.

Something in particular we have in common, though, is a well of tenderness for men in our music, whether or not sexual orientation plays a part in the song. Brady lives in Fredericksburg, VA where he teaches, and the lives of soldiers come up in his best songs - Civil War soldiers in WHITMAN IN 1863 and the new AS YOU WERE, or Iraq War soldiers in DANIEL.

OK, I'm talking too much about Brady, so let me cut to the chase: we had a great, intimate show at CVille Coffee - which has beautiful sound and wonderful owners - and then Brady handed me the rough mixes for his new album. Keep your eye out for it because I've been driving and crying to it for several hundred miles now. The aforementioned AS YOU WERE is killing me, so ... I keep playing it and crying. I'm a little nuts, yes, but I've been on tour and that's what happens ...

The next night put me in Washington DC at a benefit for Potters House - a great activist, social services organization that's celebrating its 50th anniversary - diverse staff, great food. Of particular note, though, were the two guys who showed up to see me because, they said, "Facebook told us to." They had no idea I existed before Big Brother Facebook gave them the instruction, but they felt it steered them right, so maybe Facebook really does know what its talking about? After the show, Potter's House's Mary Shapiro convinced me to stay up too late and grab a mint tea, where I got to hear about her travels to Palestine and beyond. The DC night was alive with activity, the breeze was gentle and cool and DC felt like a cool place to live.

Then I tried to drive, and discovered DC can have traffic jams until 1AM. I never thought LA could seem uncluttered ...

... And I'm going to have to cut this short now and get on the road. Next post I'll tell you about Harrisburg, New York, Cambridge and Portland, Maine (tonight!)

On Tour, Part 1: 4 Dates In

2010-05-19T22:59:00.000-07:00

My friend Leslie asked me to do a tour blog and I decided she’s right. And since I’m playing with three unrecorded songs on this tour it still fits.

Let me try not to overthink this:

I just finished the 4th show about an hour ago. I’m in Atlanta, heading to Charlottesville, VA at the crack of dawn. What’s it been like?

Well, for one thing, the tour is making me more conscious than ever that coming to see me perform is more like coming to a book of short stories - or maybe short plays - than a conventional concert. I mean, they ARE songs, and I am careful to keep variety in the set so as not to overwhelm the crowd, but when I finish up a real psychodrama like GUTTER BROKE just a little more than halfway through, I find myself wondering if this is what the audience thought they were signing up for – especially since so many of them have come to see the other performers.

But that’s not the real revelation of the tour . The real revelation is that so far these audiences are actually pretty enthusiastic. Just tonight, for instance, a short bespectacled woman waiting for the next band actually followed me back stage to find out where she could get my lyrics. And the applause each night has been strong, though tonight only a handful of the crowd knew my music. I find this hard to get my head around. All too often, I feel like I'm Patti Smith accidentally booked for a Red State Ladies Auxiliary Luncheon. Clearly, I need this tour as much for figuring out my place in the music world as for what the shows can do simply as shows.

San Francisco was a good start last week, on 4-person song-circle performance with Tom Goss, Jeremiah Clark and Daniel Owens. A benefit performance for the Metropolitan Community Church, organized by the amazing Mr. Goss himself. (I really like performing with other people, and this was like a warm bath.) It was an intimate, high-ceilinged church with an actual balcony, and some fans I only knew virtually stepped out from behind their Facebook pages to come out. I’m starting to think I don’t really have fans so much as friends made through music. I mean, if you like what I do, we probably have some things in common. OK, just let me have that Pollyanna moment.

The next night we brought the show to Molly Malone’s in LA, with Matt Alber replacing Daniel Owens. My first time playing that room, though it’s now my home city, and friends really packed the place for me. A new song WE WERE RIGHT finally fell into place for me.

Sunday saw me flying to the east coast, and my first show ever in Charlotte. The Patchwerk Playhaus is a performance space like no other: it’s exactly as described, a good sized room patched together with mis-matched bits of fabric and furniture and murals and I don’t know what all, and you’re as likely to hear a Captain Beefheart-ish band like CASE FEDERAL or free jazz or an actual play or a full-on traditional-style folkie like the great-playing, Maria Muldaur-ish looking Lea McLaughlin. People crowded in booths and bar stools or stretched out on sofas with blankets over their legs. Allyson runs the joint with a light touch, like she really really wants creative things to grow there. It made the town feel like a burgeoning creative center that only needs a paper interested in covering local arts to make it pop, Portland- or Louisville-style. I’ve also never had so many artists shove money at me to help me on my tour. I was moved, once I got over being guilt-ridden.

Then tonight there I was at Smith’s Olde Bar, which is an enormous complex, somehow, with various rooms devoted to entirely different things, like parties or pool players or sports-bar screens or just boisterous after-work drinkers. Then there was the music room with doors they fought to keep closed for me. You could hear the bass from the bar music thumping through the walls, and the murmur of the drinkers, but the sound system was good, and Mr. Macpherson kept it that way. It did occur to me – again – that this might be an odd place to come to hear dark and surreal short-story songs, but I found out later that a goodly portion of the crowd was a book club who had their meeting just before I arrived. Who woulda thunk it? Some of them got the most annoyed when people would arrive late and let in the bar noise. The most moving thing, though, was the fan/friend who drove six hours – yes, SIX (6) HOURS – to come see me perform. It really makes you feel a responsibility to the people who truly love the work you do.

And that’s the other thing that’s been on my mind on this, my first tour in eight or ten years. No matter what, you can’t really compare yourself to any other musician. Or I can’t, at least. I do the weird thing I do, and it means something very deep to the ones who have the ears for it. It’s silly to beat yourself up for not being John Mayer when you’re … well, not. And right now I’d feel guilty for abandoning the people who value what I do so deeply. I don’t care how few of them who feel that way. I care about them.

And, hell, I keep finding more of them on every date so far.

I should re-write this, clean it up, but screw it, here I am in all my sloppy, soppy glory.

OK, to bed.

Work vs. "The Work" and Kathy Acker

2010-02-05T00:10:00.000-08:00

Good things have shaken loose, and I've got three novelsongs in a state of excited half-completion. That's also the bad news. There's no writers block, though. There's just a time-block. Pretty simply, I'm lucky enough to be working full time at a great job (as jobs go), and it's making it impossible to put the time I need in to these songs. And it's making me feel alienated from myself.

But I can find time to read, which makes this project some kind of blessing, right? I finally located a used copy of Kathy Acker's BLOOD AND GUTS IN HIGH SCHOOL, and it makes me weirdly emotional to read it every night, and for reasons I can't adequately explain. I miss Kathy Acker, although I never knew her. I thought the things her work revealed to us would become part of our common language, our common understanding. But instead she seems to have been erased, and we've reverted to a culture without her revelation. As a teenager in the 1970s, I felt that way about the raised consciousness of the 1960s - or rather, the quickly re-lowered consciousness of the 1970s. How could we pretend it never happened?

The Kathy Acker song actually began a year before I realized it had roots in BLOOD AND GUTS IN HIGH SCHOOL. It's kind of beautiful, which may make it hard to square with the jerky rhythms and unsettled edges in her work. But the longer I go with this project, the more the books become mainly emotional jumping off points. THE ROSEWOOD CASKET comes closest to following the book's narrative -- except it turns out to be a completely different sort of counter-narrative. This means that this project is doing what I wanted it to do: to be a way of reaching out to novels -- outside works of art -- and having them turn me back on myself and find some new place in me I couldn't go on my own.

Winning the Outmusic Award and then having to prep for my big showcase at International Folk Alliance have also both turned into big time-sucks as well, I gotta admit, although I'm grateful for both, and they should get me on at least three extended tours this year. Maybe that will help: I always end up writing in my head when I drive long distances.

OK, I"m sleepy now. More later.

Rats, Wind-Up Birds and Ambivalence

2009-08-31T13:59:00.000-07:00

At the end of a weekend alone, I am realizing I was wrong about songs being more manageable than books: I only got a good work-groove going when I had nothing but free time and emptiness before me. My fingers hurt from playing and songwriting so much.

You know, I've always had an ambivalent relationship with music. Or - well, that's not quite it. Let me explain a little clearer.

In music, you are operating at the poetic level, meaning a work which is both compact and impactful, and the fact that it is performed is also poetic in the sense that it is more of a physical act than a ruminative one. Prose is ruminative: when you read (or write) you are engaging in a private act, an interaction with words on a page, and you can take all the time you want with it, repeating phrases or sentences at will, stopping at any time. It is like a toy you control.

But music is happening in time, and it is happening TO you. It strikes with melody and rhythm and whatever performance actually carries and transforms it. It is a steamroller, and while you can listen again, you can't stop it. It's a little like a rape you agree to, or a roller coaster ride. And while it may make sense, or tell a story that concludes, it doesn't have to, and might be a little disapointing for it. Are you interested in a message at the end of a boxing match? No. You just want the action, and the orgasm.

So that's music. Even at the creation end.

But prose is all sense, no matter how poetic it may be. Unless, maybe, you're Kathy Acker or William Burroughs or Virginia Woolf or fill-in-the-post-modern-blank. I love these writers, but their writing rarely appeals to the need to make the sense that The Talking Heads were so bent on stopping.

So there are times in music where I feel like I'm drowning in an experience I can't control. To stay feels like a decision to live at an animal level, which is very very exciting, but unnervingly subconscious. Actually, now that I've written that, I realize it's the opposite of that: it's life at a hyper-conscious level, unmediated and uncontrollable as a rapids.

I'm probably over-simplifying this. But it has to do with why I have always circled through different art-forms throughout my life. Each one opens up a world for me, but then I need to explore that from another angle and then another. Music and prose have been the two forms that recur the quickest. And music has been the one I return to without thinking about it, without deciding: absent-mindedly I just pick the guitar up and there it is again.

So - funny - I'm at the mid-point of the Novel Song project and realize I'm taking pieces from narrative-sense novels to make poetic-sense songs and hadn't noticed I was connecting the two competing poles in the creative life. Talk about subconscious living.

Today, I was going through my supposedly-finished song from Sarah Schulman's powerful RAT BOHEMIA and realized I was still changing it -- at an animal-level, something wasn't settled yet, and I kept shifting certain chords and certain words around, certain rhythms: something still had to settle enough for the animal in me to feel comfortable. Maybe I finished today, it's hard to tell, I won't know until I play it again later and find out if my guts are at home. It's based on the sections KILLER IN LOVE. It's a story about lesbian passion, which, I guess, may sound confusing on my male voice. Well, that's the folk tradition, right, not to respect gender in the singing?

If you follow me elsewhere, you know I've gone back to Haruki Murakami's THE WIND-UP BIRD CHRONICLE, which I was dead certain had no song in it. THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING hasn't wanted to be touched in a while, and I don't know when it might return. Nothing is the way I expected. In some ways, I feel like the lead character in WIND-UP BIRD, floating through a world that throws odd inscrutable information at him when it wants, then disappears until some unknown logic brings it back. Something wants to reveal itself, but it's not up to me just now.

Of course, maybe if I wasn't working a day-job for a living it would be different. But then maybe I'd be so enmeshed with my subconscious/hyperconscious world that I wouldn't be able to make any sense to you.

Don't care. Need it. And need help to do it.

COUNT ZERO SONG arrives

2009-08-29T13:59:00.000-07:00

I'm a little late embedding -- at least, I'm assuming it will embed. After much sturm und drang, William Gibson's COUNT ZERO has grown a song out of me. The title may change to THESE BOXES:

Does anyone recognize this?

2009-06-05T15:54:00.000-07:00

I wondered if anyone could recognize the book from the opening lines:

"They'll never forgive us

For what they did to us

Don't even try

Just put that Pork Pie hat on

You are Marlon Brando's

female guise"

Shock of the Neglected Blogger

2009-03-14T01:06:00.000-07:00

In my sleeplessness, I came across Penny Arcade's blog, where she freely admitted she had blown off her own blog for months, and ... well, I'm shocked how long it's been for me too. But I'm guiltless, or feel guiltless -- I mean, this isn't supposed to be some marketing tool (is it?), where I hypnotize into slavishly following my every I don't know what. And, you know, if I could make that happen, I'd have stalkers to go along with it, and I really can't afford body-guards on my meager music royalties. I can afford regular Starbucks lattes on them, I'm happy to say, but I refuse to do it - screw the economy, I need my royalties to stimulate ME.

What was I talking about? The blog, right. Well, I haven't blogged because my songwriting has been so scattershot, and I'm now in the middle of four different songs, all dangling at the end of other non-song projects. I had to rewrite a script (done) and I had to rewrite a book (also done, and currently being passed around publishers, cross your fingers) and I'm heading to New York April 1 to sing Chris Rael's song-cycle ARABY, based on James Joyce's THE DUBLINERS (opens April 8 at Dixon Place for two weeks). And other stuff I can't remember. Most interesting is my website redesign, spearheaded by my partner Barry, which is going to be a lot of fun - it almost feels like a video game as much as a website -- but that comes April 1 or so. Anyway. What was my point? Oh, that I've been doing a lot of work that isn't songwriting. Plus working full time - which I can't complain about because we're at the dawn of the New Depression. And I'm grateful, really I am - actually, I'm scared-grateful, certain my good fortune is going to crash down on my head.

It's late and this blog sounds like it. The only good, song-related news is that one of the new songs comes from William Gibson's COUNT ZERO. Nobody much talks about this book, but I've always loved a certain passage from it and it jumped into a song one day.

Here's the funny thing now: when I have to work on a piece of fiction or journalism or script-writing I generally shut everything out to do it - I go away from everyone and hole up. I can't juggle writing anymore with life, and I was never much good at it, which kept work nice and hellacious for a couple of decades there. Now it's clear to me that this is the case for songwriting as well. The good news is that songs are short, and the architecture is easier to keep together than the architecture of long-form prose. And now that a whole host of other projects are finally settling down for a period, I'm going to do little disappearing acts to finish these songs. I've got til, I think, August - don't know why, but I can see the focus staying there for four to five months. Barry's being pushy about this: he berates me with orders to just worry about writing the stuff, and nothing else for a while.

Sounds like a plan. So, I reckon I'll have something to share with you guys here, soon. Adventures in song-writing.

Sleep now.

Kundera Comes Back to Life

2008-07-28T23:25:00.000-07:00

I guess I've written a few narrative songs in my time - LOCUST, maybe GUTTER BROKE, MUSHY-HEADED KID even - but for the most part I'm compelled by crystallizing moments and images. They make songs to me.

I think THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING shut down on me because the full weight of the novel was weighing on my head. (My early writing was painfully efficient, it turned out, which is good for business but bad for music). This is particularly strange because, no matter how often I made a point of it, I couldn't for the life of me remember to go to the bookstore before closing time.

Maybe my forgetfulness was smarter than I was: A few days ago, I realized that there was one moment from the book - fairly early - that kept circling in my brain. I didn't pay much attention because the "serious" work would only begin, I figured, once I dived back into the novel.

But that's when it dawned on me that the lines popping into my head about that moment, and the odd, unwinding melody that was starting to trace its way over the words, might be worth paying attention to.

At this point, miraculously, I had no trouble remembering to go to the bookstore. The narrative had loosened its strangling grip on me. I've been re-reading ever since, and nearly cried into my eggs Saturday morning while leathermen and suburban couples with kids vied for brunch-time seating around me. This book kills me.

The funny thing? Most of the details I thought were in this scene weren't in the book at all. They were in my own head. Good.

This song is going to take a good while, I can tell. But it's worth it.

Success, Failure & A Holding Pattern

2008-07-14T00:25:00.000-07:00

The Kundera stopped dead in its tracks, I'm afraid. But then the long-languishing song from Sharyn McCrumb's THE ROSEWOOD CASKET kept nagging at me and, late one night about ten days ago, finally broke through and finished. You can't imagine the relief and you shouldn't want to. It took me two days to be sure I wasn't crazy. I've played it once in public now, where it was well-loved. A rare piece of bluegrass for me, albeit complicated with what one friend calls "Dudley chords" that will, no doubt, throw musicians who expect to settle into a full-on traditional groove. Typical for me, but who cares? The song finally carries the complexity of the emotion without losing the emotional propulsion.

Meanwhile, I just finished Norman Mailer's THE NAKED AND THE DEAD, and nothing is coming out of it for me. I liked it quite a bit, in a sort of trying-hard-to-be-an-American-Tolstoy way. But once it was over there was nothing going on between me and the book, no extra reverberations that needed to be filled. Still, it was good to read and finally understand why people liked Mailer. I'd only read his essays, and thought they were pompous and ridiculous the way an over-bright college sophomore's would be if he did too much coke for way too long. Sez me, anyway.

I have failed for weeks now to pick up the Kundera and the Chekhov again from the library or the book store. I am filled with shame. Still, I scribble odd phrases whenever I think about the Kundera. Is it better to base what I'm doing on 15 year old memories? That's certainly one kind of experiment.

Skipping Chekhov for Milan Kundera?

2008-06-14T22:42:00.000-07:00

An abrupt change: I've been rehearsing for tomorrow's show, feeling horrible about my work, just disconnected and crazy. Then I had to get out and eat, and tore up the house for my Chekhov. No dice. I took a pad with me anyway.

On the way I passed a poster advertising a California Gay Marriage seminar, which set me to thinking about what happens to you in long-term relationships. Lately, all those awful books and movies about married life have started to make sense to me, which I find sort of humiliating - you know, all that crap about "compromise" and "acceptance" and "working at it" - it sounds so settled I want to puke. Especially because I had the good fortune four and a half years ago to end up, abruptly and unexpectedly, in one.

But really I've been brooding on the more fundamental issues it brings up: the way intimacy pleasurably weighs you down and the way its absence can leave you adrift, and vertiginously weightless and disconnected. But the pleasurable weight smothers something in you too and the freedom -- well, it really is another word for nothing left to lose. But I'm old enough to know these are not issues with answers.

So, yeah, as you've probably guessed, THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING popped into my head. It's almost too obvious a choice, being so damned popular, but the sucker made me emotional enough to read it three times when I was single, so imagine how it makes me feel now.

Verses began popping out of me. I'm not sure they aren't bad. Maybe it'll all be way too on the nose, the way WHEELCHAIR IN THE SEVEN-ELEVEN PARKING LOT is so aggressively not -- although that song could be accused of opacity. Oh, like I care about a listener so anal they don't want to ruminate on a song's imagery - they can turn on any radio if they don't want to be challenged.

Surprises. I am definitely out of my comfort zone here. I know I'm supposed to say that's good. Right?

From Gaitskill to Chekhov, maybe

2008-06-14T01:16:00.000-07:00

So it came down, finally, to three lines. Three lines I couldn't stop writing and rewriting. I'm talking about the song drawn from/inspired by parts of Mary Gaitskill's VERONICA. It was the kind of difficult place I've found myself in before, and in years gone by I would have tortured myself and possibly killed the song in its crib. Instead, this time I found myself a little like the poet at the beginning of Carole Maso's first novel, GHOST DANCE, who stands disheveled in Grand Central Station, worrying over the final lines of a poem, but never trying to force it, simply knowing that it will come when it's ready. Then, in the book, it does come and she is a strange kind of joyful (even though we realize, moments later, that her mind has otherwise come entirely undone - but that's another story). I've had magical epiphanies like that, but usually it's either so fast that I don't have any idea how I wrote the words, or it's so painful slow that it takes me a while to recognize that what I've written is right and feels true.

That was the case this time. The good thing is that it was never drudgery, but a kind of professorial obsession. I kept humming and muttering everywhere I'd go, looking at it from so many different angles, playing at it and - worse - writing really good stuff that simply had no place at all. That's the worst danger, and it's easy to get sucked in by all that pointlessly impressive writing. And after all that labor, what I have is so simple. And such a sunny melody - is that becoming a habit with me? These sunny, open melodies with unnerving lyrics?

Yet now I have to face what may be cheating: I can't stop thinking about a Chekhov story I can barely remember - it was something about these men, stuck in the country, drunk outside at night, bored out of their minds. It seems weird to have two Russian-inspired songs, but I'm wondering more whether it's cheating to write from a short story when the project is supposed to be NOVELSONGS.

But maybe I better shut up and let my muse do the deciding. Meanwhile, I'm finally premiering the VERONICA song - called WE WERE RIGHT - this Sunday at Echo Curio in Los Angeles. (I did a test version in Santa Monica a week ago with a dummy lyric for those three lines - hey, maybe that's what got me so obsessed!) I do love the song, so wish me luck - not for the singing, but for me keeping my mind off Chekhov long enough to get through the set.

Peace.