Songwriter's Navel: Week 18, In Which I Write a Throw-Away Song That Is Too Long

Recording

I seriously just yelled: "WHAT THE HELL? THIS IS NEARLY 4 MINUTES LONG?!" Just as the mail person came up the steps.

This assignment comes to you courtesy of Richard Hugo, a poet who urges writers to not let the "triggering subject" for a creative work be the boss of what the work ends up being about, to avoid journalistic language and instead embrace imagery and the sound of words, resulting in being "foolish like a trout." I am not even making that last bit up. The other hoops for the assignment were writing in 6/8 and in a minor key.

The Hugo (I'm just going to call him Hugo, because he has mistakenly been called "Victor Hugo" [who, given that he has a tragically journalistic chapter title "Love Under a Rock," seems not to be following the other Hugo's advice] and "Hugo Boss" in class. This amuses me to no end.) part of the assignment was relatively easy for me, as it's how I tend to write anyway. Or at least how I tend to write now. I will never forget back when I was in Songwriting I and really struggling with telling a story in a song and the Kernel said, "You have no obligation to the truth." Bloody obvious, in retrospect, but it was a huge "Ah ha" moment for me, and now, for good or for ill, I tend to work much more with sounds, sentiments, and images that link together at least in my head.

The time signature requirement was a bit of a challenge for me, because I almost never write in 3/4 or 6/8. It's how you know I'm not a real singer-songwriter! Also, being fairly rhythmically challenged, I can't reliably distinguish between 3/4 and 6/8. But the hoop I ended up missing entirely? Minor key. Ended up writing in D Dorian mode (at least I think that's what we decided?).

In some ways, this song was tremendously difficult to write. In others, I feel like it just fell out of me. And I do mean fell. And landed in some pretty unattractive ways.

I decided pretty early that the song would be about Christmas Day, 1978, which is the day that my grandmother died. I was 6 at the time, and I figured that Christmas, death, and the imperfect understanding of same by a 6-year-old wouldn't lack for images. I had lots of memories of that day and of visiting my grandmother (she had Parkinson's Disease and was in a nursing home attached to Oak Forest hospital for as long as I can remember) that I thought would make it in, as well as what I thought were three great material objects to include: Dancerella and my Playdoh Fuzzy Pumper Barber Shop (wow that sounds dirty written out), my two big gifts from that Christmas, and this music box that my dad had uncharacteristically let me by for my grandmother from the gift shop in the nursing home (). It was a small, red hemisphere with a mirror on top and little magnetic ice skaters. I thought it was the coolest thing.

Then, of course, I ended up writing from the perspective of my Great Aunt Elsa (my grandmother's sister, and after my grandmother's death, the only surviving sibling). This is the second time Elsa has showed up in a song. This perhaps is my destiny manifesting: I am doomed to look like Elsa

So, feeling pretty smug that the avoidance of journalistic language would be no problem for me, Queen not only of Zombies, but of Rococo Lack of Clarity, I ran immediately and at full force into obstacles. For example, what does one say when one canNOT say, "And the phone rang just as we were sitting down to Christmas dinner"? At any rate, although the song is not very good (certainly not good enough to drone on for nearly 4 minutes), the exercise made me very aware of how directive I am in my writing. Given that I REALLY dislike this as a consumer of songs, I am chagrined to say the least.

It was also an interesting exercise from a memory-mining perspective. For example, I'm pretty sure that my Aunt Elsa was actually at our house on Christmas Day that year (the picture linked above supports that), but I'm not positive that she didn't arrive some time after Christmas for the funeral. Many of the narrative details that are implied (e.g., my Aunt signing for my grandmother's effects and going through them) are certainly not true. It would have been my dad who did this, and although he never really talks about her death, my mother remarked recently that the staff at Oak Forest were very cold and unsympathetic during the process. Anyway, what came out is all very dissatisfying, but hopefully at least the process yielded some results that are mineable for future songs.

Verse 1 is relatively generic images of the living room on Christmas morning, the combination of crumpled wrapping paper, scattered packaging, and the big, black plastic bags awaiting the clean-up. The phone in our kitchen was an enormous, bright yellow, rotary-dial phone. As you can see my solution to the "no journalistic language" problem is pretty gag worthy:

[D] Bright paper morning, [Em] light chasing shadows on
|[Bm] Faces, un- [D]| noticed and [Em] wise
[D] Black plastic corners, [Em] sagging and hollow the
|[Bm] Last of her [D]| patience un- [G] winds
The |[Em] bright yellow [G]| mouth in the |[C] wall sings [D]| out
|[Em] Brass angels [C]| chime and [D] sway
[C] Blue [D] December, [Bm] January gray

In the penultimate line, I'd initially written "Brass angels chime on the table" (we had one of those candle centerpieces on which the angles would spin and strike little chimes once the candles were lit; cheesy and tacky, yes, but the physics of it was fascinating to me). The Kernel pointed out that I had much stronger rhymes for "gray" in every other verse, so I rewrote it. I absolutely agree with his point, but I really hate the rewritten rhyme.

Verse 2, mostly just physical description of Elsa, whose personal style froze somewhere around 1958:

[D] Silver-white memory, [Em] twisted and pinned
|[Bm] Shoulders set [D]| sharp as a [Em] knife
[D] Neat fingers fumbling, [Em] stitches and buttons
|[Bm] Pictures un- [D]| troubled by [G] time
In the |[Em] checkerboard [G]| hallway they |[C] turn and [D]| wait
|[Em] She traces the [C]| shape of her [D] name
[C] Blue [D] December, [Bm] January gray

Throughout the writing of this song, I had to juggle words that I needed descriptively with words that I needed for rhymes to avoid reusing the same words. (Although guess what? Hadn't noticed until now that I used "bright" twice in verse 1. Kill me.) I can't remember what I had originally written for the "Shoulders" line, but the rewrite employing "knife" was certainly better—more evocative, less directive. Also really hard to sing with the Ss and Shs running into one another.

I wrote the final verse with the idea that Elsa was alone with a box and a bag or two containing everything left of my grandmother's life. I also was picturing her having to get them home on public transit. (Elsa lived most of her adult life in San Francisco, and as far as I know, never learned to drive.) I wasn't able to get that additional note of loneliness into the verse. Probably would have been able to if I were less lazy and had started on the song earlier.

[D] Dark wooden boxes and [Em] brown paper bags
|[Bm] Rattle and [D]| rasp on her [Em] knee
[D] Images knotted [Em], bitter regrets
|[Bm] Dropping like [D]| late autumn [G] leaves
The |[Em] bleak edge of [G]| winter in- |[C] scribed in her [D]| palms
These |[Em] last minutes [C]| bleeding [D] away
[C] Blue [D] December, [Bm] January gray
[C] Blue [D] December, January gray [Bm]

After looking at the solid wall of emo text with an extremely clunky refrain, it became obvious that the damned thing needed at least a bridge to relieve the tedium.

Oh, I guess the Fuzzy Pumper Barber Shop did sort of make it into the bridge in suggesting "clay" anyway:

[Am] Breath solid in her [C] ears
[G] Grief turns like clay in her [D] hands
[Am] Scolding and straight-backed, she [C] travels their years
[G] Heartsore, defiant she [Bm] stands

Still two weeks behind now, and a set on Monday to prepare for. The grim realization that I might not have two songs I want to play at the showcase is settling in . . .

Songwriter's Navel: Week 04, Which May or May Not Have Fewer Casualties Than Week 03

Don't think of this as late. No, seriously, don't think of it as late. I actually did work on recording this yesterday, but I had limited time, as I had to dig the ZK's car out of the snow, and then had opera (Girl of the Golden West at Lyric; absolutely wonderful and a bona fide Spaghetti Western!). In any case, I scrapped yesterday's attempt and started again today. Please do not infer that the second attempt is in any way kwality.

I did contemplate giving myself a pass this week. We did not actually have class, because of the Michael Bay–Level Blizzard, nor did I have my private lesson. However, I went ahead and worked on this anyway, both because I have a new assignment due next week, and because someone as lazy as I am cannot afford to fuck with inertia.

Working on a song without benefit of my compatriots' feedback was instructive in and of itself. Certainly trying to get the vocals recorded revealed that my voice/guitar teacher is a saint who is worth my weight in gold (my weight, rather than hers, because she is very tiny).

The assignment on which this song is based had a few different components. First, we had to draw 5 words out of a bowl (as a white elephant-type gift, the Kernel had gotten a jewelry-making kit, so the words were on beads). Mine were: Please, Kiss, Sky, Us Yours. Curse you, Jimi Hendrix! No, I will NOT excuse you while you kiss this guy.

The second requirement was related to tempo. In the verses, chord changes would only come once per measure until the last line of the verse when each measure would be split (2 chords per measure). In the chorus, we were allowed to change between split and un-split measures.

And then there were the two requirements that struck fear into my doggedly mediocre heart: We had to have a musical hook to lead off each verse, and there had to be a musical bridge that either shifted keys or changed up chords within the existing key. I suck at hooks. I suck at bridges. I epic suck at musical bridges, because they leave my shitty, shitty guitar playing out there, naked, sad, and exposed.

Moving on from my self loathing, fascinating though it is. I first sat down with the guitar and played around with hooks a bit. In my guitar lessons, we've been working on creating leads and melodies just using the major and pentatonic scales, with special emphasis on getting my hands to be less inept at doing this with hammer-ons and pull-offs, so I had a basic idea of what KIND of hook I was going to use.

Lyrically, the words I'd drawn from the bowl obviously suggested some kind of relationship song. (Well, all songs are relationship songs, but you know what I mean.) I had a left-over concept from my song last week that had not ultimately made it into that song: During the most recent full moon, we were experiencing that optical illusion where the moon appears larger than usual.

Because I'm a nerd who does NOT hate Neil Degrasse Tyson, I love both the illusion and the fact that it can be dispelled by looking at the moon upside down. The latter appeals to me on the evolutionary level (What is UP with the way our vision works?) and a couple of good personal memories (Having lunch with Madeleine at the Jackson Harbor restaurant and talking about what is UP with the way our vision works and a favorite book—although now that I think about it, the book that comes immediately to mind [Margaret Mahy's Catalogue of the Universe] is not the book in which a character demonstrates dispelling the effect [It might be in Kate Atkinson's Human Croquet. Or one of A.S. Byatt's? Gonna bug me now.]).

When I sat down to work on lyrics, I had my 5 words at the top of the page and a vague intention to write about pleasant illusions or dispelling same. Almost immediately, the first two lines of the chorus suggested themselves along with the basic contours of their melody:

Please can't you see me upside down
Can't you kiss how it is goodbye

My immediate reaction was to argue with myself: No, that's not right! If the narrator is asking the listener to buy into a pleasant illusion, then s/he is asking him/her NOT to look at the situation upside down! For good or for ill, I was able to assure myself that Neil DeGrasse Tyson was probably not grading me on the accuracy of my lyrics, and those two lines remained intact.

I went back to try to write a verse and was fixated on describing the moon, a treacherous task for a songwriter, to be sure. I kept thinking. The moon is big. The moon is round. The moon looks kind of orange. The moon is only big when it's close to the horizon. Not exactly poetic or inspiring. When frustration set in, I decided to just try to set down the basic rhythm of the lyrics some chords and I was working with something along the lines of there being a large brass grin on the horizon.

Vomit worthy, to be sure, but setting it on the page and playing chords suddenly made it clear that the narrator was using the illusion as a metaphor and I didn't need to describe the moon at all, really. I wound up with I'm capo 2 on this, so it's really in B, not A):

I see a [A] brass ring climbing high
[D] Larger than life
I see a [A] gift to me and you
From the [E] man in the moon
Might be a [A] trick of the light
[D] Might not last the night
But I see [F#m] you and me and [E] us and I'm [D] reaching for the [Bm] sky

Now, I have never in my life actually seen a brass ring on a merry-go-round. Has anyone? And yet . . .

I kind of ended up feeling like this verse was good enough. It certainly was an improvement over failed attempts to describe the moon, the imagery turned out sort of playful. Part of me sneered at the simplicity of the lyrics and the overused phrases, but on the other hand, with the chords and the rhythm, it was shaping up to be a poppy love song, so they were at least not a disservice to something musically complex. (Not that I've ever written anything musically complex.)

Speaking of music, I'm pretty sure that the chords over the last line of the verse are wrong, wrongitty, wrong, wrong, wrong and I will cop to the fact that I said to myself, "The class/Kernel will help me figure out what they should be." Oops.

As is traditional, I struggled with the rest of the chorus, even though the first 2 lines pretty much dropped in my lap. With verse 1 and the first 2 lines of the chorus, I had knocked off all of my words except for "yours." That wound up in line 3 of the chorus:

[D] Please can't you [E] see me [F#m] upside down
Can't you [C#m] kiss how it is [E] goodbye
[D] All this could be [A] yours if you'd [E] just look [F#m] now
You could [D] see me like I [E] see you, [A] upside down

I go back and forth on how I feel about that third line. On the one hand, if feels like it should be "could be ours," and I was hammering "yours" in there out of Catholic Schoolism. On the other, I like that it evokes cheesy commercials that—like optical illusions—promise things that they can't deliver. The second half of that line is purely a place holder for the rhyme. Initially, I had it as "but don't look now"; however, though my inner critic was willing (to some extent) to let me off the hook on the nonsense in the first two lines, it was tapping its foot impatiently over that. I ended up with "if you'd just look now." Meh. Again, I would have benefitted from feedback.

The text that is struck out indicates that I had originally intended to resolve the chorus by repeating "upside down." When playing around with the music, though, the hook ended up resolving to an A chord, so I decided to just end on "see you" and then the hook. Not sure how I feel about that.

In a song chock full of my ambivalence, I am ambivalentiest about the second verse. In my copy of the lead sheet, it says "[Hateful. So, very hateful.]" next to "Verse 2." I really do hate the contents for many of the same reason that I have issues with verse 1. On the other hand, I rather like how the lines play out rhythmically, even if the words are sucky and predictable:

It's an illusion, so you say
Try to explain it all away
Bend over backwards, break the spell
But we both already fell
It might well be a fantasy
But you might like what you see
Like I see you and me and us and I swear it's meant to be

Something I'm not ambivalent about? The bridge. The hate for the bridge flows through me. On an earlier recording, you can here me snort derisively on the vocals track when the bridge comes around. Anyway, here are the chords:

B E G#m C#m
B E A B

I just remembered that the instructions required us to repeat the chorus twice after the bridge, then end on the hook. Um . . . I ended on the hook?

Overall, I am not in love with this song, to be sure, but it's always a good exercise to write something more up tempo so that not everything is a fingerpicked, modal dirge. Likewise, lightening up on the lyrics gets me out of my usual rut.

I'm forcing myself to link to the recording, which is worse than usual. I did go over and over and over the parts of the melody that you'll hear me miss badly. I'm unsure that I should be playing a D on the penultimate line of the verse where I go up high, but the real problem is likely that I'm just shying away from that as the highest part, even though it's technically in my "range." I also am flailing trying to get to the melody over the last line because I'm unsure of those chords and I'm floundering in the wake of the previous line's pitch panic.

The guitar sucks, too, as always, but I did pull out my lovely, neglected semi–hollow body, which badly needs new strings and possibly some adjustment to the action. I think I applied the pop vocals filter to my vocals? Can't remember now, but it does not do enough to make up for my lousy pitch.

Here you go.

Authors! In My Navel!

This has been percolating for months and changing all the while, unsurprisingly. Feel free to skip this, as it could not possibly be of interest to anyone, even me (perhaps especially me).

I was supposed to go to Santa Fe at the end of February/beginning of March to present a poster at a conference. I did not go to the conference, but the poster—eventually—did, in the capable hands of my colleague, J. For reasons related to why I did not go to the conference, the research underlying the poster limped along and ended in an all-nighter. (Ok, I'll come clean. The all-nighter was probably inevitable, but life was not helping at the time.)

I sent the finished product off to a Kinko's in Santa Fe, then collapsed into bed. Moments later, I leapt from bed back to laptop in a single motion (no small feat, as this involved two sets of stairs and four 90-degree turns; plus, you know, my innate grace). Was this inspiration gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door? No. Indeed it was the Spirit of Paralyzing Fear of Inadvertent Plagiarism.

I realized, just as I was drifting off to sleep, that I'd forgotten to put a caption underneath one of my figures acknowledging that it was a modification of one from someone else's work. I fired off an e-mail to my intrepid colleague asking him if he could scrawl in the acknowledgment when he picked up the poster. (He pointed out to me that the text on the slide appropriately cited the work in question, so I was probably safe anyway, but still . . .)

At the time these gripping events were occurring in my life, plagiarism seemed to be everywhere in the news. It was around the time that Madonna Constantine published a statement condemning the investigation of accusations of plagiarism on her part by Columbia's Teachers College, and I finally realized why her name was ringing such a bell for me. (It's a magnificent name in its own right, of course, but the swinging and the ringing/ Of the bells, bells, bells for me personally resulted from my having edited some articles by her.)

And then everyone and his famous, one-quarter Cherokee grandparent seemed to be outed as having written a fake memoir. Incidentally, I don't mean to link Constantine to two substantiated cases of faking in any way other than temporal coincidence that connects them in my mind. I know very little about her case, and obviously I have no basis even to begin to judge. But other than the mild, "How 'bout that?" personal connection to that unfolding drama, it's the other two cases I linked up there that have really been snagging on my grey matter.

Margaret Seltzer cobbled together her faked memoir of a Native American/White girl growing up gang banger in LA from the stories of people she met doing anti-gang outreach (although even this much appears to be in question). As to why she did this, Seltzer has famously said, "For whatever reason, I was really torn, and I thought it was my opportunity to put a voice to people who people don't listen to." It's an appropriational nightmare and a crisis of ethnographic theory in a breathtakingly compressed package. Eisa Ulen covers a lot of this ground better than I can in this NPR interview.

As for Monique De Wael/Misha Defonseca's decade-old not!memoir of going feral during World War II . . . well, at least she has come out and said that it represents an internal reality and admitted that she can't reliably distinguish between that created reality and the one in which the rest of us live. But even with that nod to mental illness, there is her statement that actual truths of her childhood led her to "feel Jewish," which no doubt fueled (but certainly do not excuse, as Bruno Waterfield and Blake Eskin ably address) her deconstructionist issues.

And then I think of Lucy Grealy's Autobiography of a Face. Of course, it's a different kettle of fish, as Grealy is telling no one's story but her own. (However, it's worth considering that sensu stricto Grealy could only be claimed to speak for the 1 in 1 million who get Ewings Sarcoma, but sensu lato, her memoir is about normative beauty, which changes the stakes considerably.) But I also recall a memory of Lucy that Ann Patchett shares in Truth & Beauty: A Friendship.

Lucy's memoir had just come out to great success and acclaim. Ann's novel, Taft, had come out to deafening silence (which is terrible, it's a wonderful, wonderful novel and probably my second favorite of hers). Lucy suggested they turn Ann's book signing into a double bill, so Ann got to see first-hand what a typical crowd gathered for Autobiography of a Face was like. I'm going to skip around a bit in quoting from Truth & Beauty here.

There was a lot of cancer in the room that night, cancer in the process of being defeated and cancer in the process of defeating people. There were the ravages that cancer, long gone, had left in its wake, including the damage it had done to Lucy.

Of course, in thinking about voice and Voice, I hadn't remembered to think of Grealy as the Voice of Survivor. It seems that she didn't care too much for being that Voice, though.

After the crowd was able to control their weeping after hearing the passage she read . . . she opened the floor for questions.
"You were so incredibly brave," a woman began "If it were me, I wouldn't have been able to survive it."
"Meaning what, you would have died?" Lucy said. "It doesn't work that way, unless you kill yourself."
People said it to Lucy all the time. . . . My brave and heroic Lucy made it clear to the audience that she had no interest in being anybody's inspiration. She was not there as a role model for overcoming obstacles. She was a serious writer, and she wanted her book to be judged for its literary merit and not its heartbreaking content. (Emphasis added.)

But the point that stuck out enough in my mind that I went and found the book, then found the quote (then found all the other morsels that are on point here) is this:

"It's amazing how you remember everything so clearly," a woman said, her head wrapped up in a bright scarf. "All those conversations, details. Were you ever worried that you might get something wrong?"
"I didn't remember it," Lucy said pointedly. "I wrote it. I'm a writer."
This shocked the audience more than her dismissal of illness, but she made her point: she was making art, not documenting an event. (Emphasis added.)

In college, I had the good fortune to take a class called "American Lives." It was taught by Amy Kass, one of the five best teachers I have ever had, and certainly someone who strongly shaped my thinking and approach to teaching. In it, we read The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin and The Education of Henry Adams. As it turned out, we were all—except for one guy, and he was, you know, that guy—in it for Ben. (In my defense, I was in it because I wanted to take a class with Amy Kass.)

What's not to love about Ben? Of course he's a liar and a cheat, but a brilliant mind, a character, and one hell of a writer, too. We all loved Ben. Henry Adams, not so much. As far as we were concerned, he was denser than a dining hall brownie, probably amoral, and he marked his wife's suicide with a chapter break, picking up the thread of the narrative 20 years later. Man, did that piss us off. How dare he deprive us of the creamy, eviscerated center of his life?

I was hard-pressed to get the intart00bz to admit it, but in 1995, Mrs. Kass published a book of paired autobiographies, American Lives: Cultural Differences, Individual Distinctions, An Anthology of American Autobiography. The book was in progress during the time I took the class, and you may notice that Mr. Adams does not make the list. So great was our hatred for him and his autobiography, so feeble was the defense of the lone Adamsophile in the crowd, that she took him out. I'll forever feel guilty about that.

It's not that my dislike for him or the Education has softened. It's matured, in fact, and I now dislike him for the dirty modernist and hopeless positivist that he is. But it's his autobiography that I pick up again and again, his autobiography that I leaf through while chuckling, and it's him that I find myself wanting to call and say, "You see, Henry, the problem is that you're full of crap, and here's why . . ." Benjamin Franklin is pretty unanswerable. What would a schlub like me have to say to Ben?

If you're asking where I'm going with all this, I'm pleased to meet you. This started, lo! those many months ago with me thinking about plagiarism. Then I realized that I was really thinking about voice and Voice for a number of reasons, not least among them that I was about to embark on my first songwriting class. (That particular realization led me to wonder when, exactly, I'd offshored my subconscious, but from January 1 to about March 1 of this year, I had exactly zero time to devote to subtext.)

And then the Spirit of Coincidence and Leprechauns visited me in the form of a comment by "Anonymous" on my long-ago entry about our very first foray into Robbie's Secret Country. I don't have any means of asking for Anonymous's permission to quote from him or her, but s/he did make a public comment, so I'm hoping s/he won't mind.

"I very much enjoyed your piece on Kevin Gordon. [Well, thank you kindly, A!—Ed.] In doing some searching on Jimmy Reed, I came across the KG song and was moved--well, as moved as a person my age can be about an artist (KG) with whom he was was not familiar. In trying to find out why on God's Green Earth a poet/singer-songwriter from Iowa (albeit via Louisiana) would have written a song about Jimmy Reed, I came across your blog and, as I mentioned above, enjoyed it very much. What prompts me to comment, however, is that your remarks led me to Webb Wilder's version (complete with the haunting guitar) of the KG song. In short, I doubt that I would have found that version, save for your pointing me in the right direction. So, thanks, and keep up the good work.
PS: If you gleaned any insights into why KG would write a Jimmy Reed song, pass them on in another blog."

I found the comment gratifying in a number of ways. Even I—neurotic old "please don't actually read anything I write, no matter how much time I've spent writing it" I—must admit that it's nice when someone says something nice about one's writing. And even neurotic old I—"is there something more 'I' than 'I' on the Myers-Briggs?" I—regret from time to time that I don't often have the chance to share things that I love with new people. But even through the warm, fuzzy glow of gratification, I wondered about a couple of things in A's comment.

First, this: "well, as moved as a person my age can be about an artist (KG) with whom he was was not familiar." Interesting! I've no idea how old A is, but isn't it fascinating that s/he either sees him/herself as beyond the age of being easily moved? Or maybe not yet having arrived at such an age? Or maybe the real core of that idea is that it takes intimacy, familiarity, and knowing the artist before their art can really dig in, undo,change, and move the audience? And A's was already an opt-in audience: S/he was interested in the Jimmy Reed first, and sucked in by Kevin Gordon and Webb Wilder second.

But another part of A's comment that got my gears grinding was this: "In trying to find out why on God's Green Earth a poet/singer-songwriter from Iowa (albeit via Louisiana) would have written a song about Jimmy Reed, I came across your blog." My anthropologist self leaps on the designation "from Iowa." Where is Kevin Gordon from? Well Kevin Gordon seems to think he's from Louisiana (which A, of course, allows parenthetically, and you know how much I love parentheticals, so I'm not knocking it), but A clearly sees Iowa—more specifically, I suspect, the Iowa Writers' Workshop (which, incidentally, also gave us Ann Patchett and Lucy Grealy, as well as Ann-and-Lucy)—as the place that gave us "poet/singer-songwriter" Kevin Gordon.

And, finally, A wants to know, why would this Iowan, this refugee evacuee (and that joke's no good, as Kevin himself pointed out in the very interview in question, that he's not from the Gulf Coast, and there's nothing swampy about him or his Louisiana-tude), this poet/singer-songwriter write a song about Jimmy Reed (I Did Not Know that he was buried in Blue Island! I feel a Macabre Pilgrimage coming on!) of all people? Obviously, I'm a tax-and-spend liberal with regard to the surplus of subtext that built up earlier this year, because I'm once again about to read things into A's question.
Again, I know nothing about A, which makes this all the more fun, but I don't think it's too much of a stretch (and I'd love it if A weighed in on any and all points) to say that A is wondering what led a white boy from a hoity-toity edumacated background to write about a man whose life drew so heavily on the Stereotypical Tragedy of the Bluesman (son of a sharecropper, killed by epilepsy misdiagnosed as the dts).

As much fun as it is to have a one-sided, perhaps completely unfair, conversation with poor, beleaguered Anonymous, I thought it might be even more fun to just ask Kevin Gordon about the Jimmy Reed song. So I did. And not only did he actually respond with flattering promptness, he also gave me permission to share some of the answer.

"I don't really know where to start. The title for the song came from a memory I had--I was riding back from a gig in Ottumwa IA, I think, when I was in Bo Ramsey's band(ca.1988-89). It was just me and him in the van for some reason. The sun was coming up; we'd stayed up all night. He had Jimmy Reed on the stereo. He said, in his characteristically understated way, "you know, Kevin, Jimmy Reed's the king of rock n' roll". (He may have actually said "father of rock n' roll"). It was just a moment, but it stuck with me--and the song itself came from thinking about several related things at once: the memory described above, the general experience of playing with Ramsey and scenes from those days, and, Jimmy Reed himself, and what I knew of his life, that he was quite the late-night man himself, to say the least. So the song is sort of about Bo Ramsey, sort of about Jimmy Reed, sort of about the experience of touring in less-than-prime situations, and the self-destructive element that's very much around . . . and ends up (hopefully) being about all those things."

Gold. Awesome. Can't you just hear Bo Ramsey? Can't you just taste that hyperalert, completely exhausted, barroom-grit-behind-your-eyes feeling? I also love the casual acknowledgment that the entire song might be built around a misquote of Bo Ramsey. He didn't remember it, he wrote it. He's a writer.

One of the most stunning, important, revelatory things that Steve Dawson (he's not just a great teacher, but an incredibly gifted singer-songwriter, one I really admire) said in the songwriting class: "When you write songs, you have no obligation to the truth." I'm deliberately leaving that untouched, unqualified, because it's been important to me over the last couple of months.

But really, my gentle reader wants to know, what the fuck am I on about? Well, it's like this: I would like to make my living by writing. On the one hand, that is up there with "And I want a pony and the power of teleportation." On the other, as J pointed out recently, I do make my living by writing, for extremely broad values of "make," "living," and "writing." BUT NOT THE RIGHT WAY as a drunken me once said. (Hey, L: Have I mentioned recently that I'm really sorry about that?) Whatever (not "Whatever" to L, I really AM sorry about that!). The truth is, I'm not proud enough of myself or my writing to be overly particular about what it means to "be a writer," but I've had some interesting brushes with surrendering my amateur status lately (interesting to me, not really to anyone else, and in any case, I can't bear to talk about some unresolved aspects of it at the moment).

At the moment, I'm having a struggle with voice and Voice in an increasingly bizarre context. I am being paid to do some technical writing, not really what I picture William Goldman picturing when he first read "Richard Cory" and set off on the road to Writerdom. But, like I said, it's bizarre. It's been bizarre from minute one (and minute one happened long before I was involved), and it just keeps on trucking down the bizarre highway.

There are a lot of things that need doing in the production of this piece of work, but the most challenging is getting an idea out of someone else's head and on to paper. That "someone else" happens to be Black, which I suppose could be an obstacle in the path, given my Whiteness. That "someone else" happens to be a man, and again, maybe my innie genitalia complicates or outright disqualifies me from doing the job. But the real problem, in the beginning, is this "someone else" is brilliant. I mean crazy, terrifying, inconceivably brilliant.

I am not stupid, but I have a lazy, plodding little mind. I've never been more aware of that than I have been on this project. I met with this guy several times over the last year and a half, and J and I have met several more times than that to work things related to the project. I've read his notes (in so far as my pointedly not brilliant mind can read anything he's written). I've read patent applications. And every time, I've been left struggling, gasping, panting, daunted, exhausted. But also invigorated, challenged, determined, and interested.

Do I have an obligation to the truth? If so, I've fallen down on the job, because I've been writing about this "someone else" in the present tense. He died last week after almost 5 months of struggling to speak after a car accident took no one knows how much of his brain from him. It certainly stopped up irrevocably the conduit carried his incredible mind out to the rest of us. J and I, in the midst of our sadness (because, make no mistake, we both liked tremendously, even when he was driving us completely mad with his crazy, string-theory nonlinearity and quantum communication style), have long been aware how screwed we are in being left with the task of bringing this into the world. But it's worse now.

But leaving that tragedy-wrapped-in-a-technicality aside and heading for Big W Writing (but for the record, most of the time I think that making some kind of absolute distinction between writers and Writers is as bogus as the one between Fine and Folk art), it all comes back to the issue of voice and identity. Say I did convince someone to pay me to be a Writer: What would I write about? Obviously I do a lot of reviewing, but I hope that it comes across clearly that I do that because I am interested in how people create their art, whatever medium it's in. Maybe it doesn't, and I fall into the dread dual trench filled with those who cannot do. I'm down with that.

But in Big W terms, I'm very much aware that Oprah is never going to ask me to draw my breath in pain to tell my story. I'm down with that, too. I am aware of the extent to which my story is the watery, boiled down, generalized, abstracted story of any given American. It's a dominant, hegemonic story and one that many rightly and justly point to and say, "That is not my story and it sucks more every time that it's told as a universal truth." But what are you going to do? 'Tis mine own, and in case I wasn't clear, these crazy, lying, appropriating fake memoirs leave me sputtering.

But whatever better part of my nature might advise me to keep quiet, whatever shoulder angel might gently hint that it's time for People Like Me to shut up for a while, I still would like to write and to make my living by writing. Once again with the offshoring of the subconscious, I've just realized that I resorted to good old Henry Adams in pursuing that goal, I wrote a cover letter that at least got me an interview (and we'll see if it goes anywhere [oh please, oh cat fud]) drawing on this from dear Hank (and a hat tip to Manybooks.net, which saved me the trouble of hunting through my well-worn copy for the context):

"[E]ducation should try to lessen the obstacles, diminish the friction, invigorate the energy, and should train minds to react, not at haphazard, but by choice, on the lines of force that attract their world."

Also of note to me, if to no one else, in the songwriting class I struggled and I struggled and I struggled some more. (Still struggling. I'm right now trying to decide whether to take the first class over again or move on to the second level.) One of things filed under "Tentacles, wrestled," was snark. You may have noticed that it's my default. Yeah, I've noticed that, too. I've also noticed that the handful of things that I've written that (a) have raised any appreciable reaction (we disqualify, for obvious reasons, the story about the toddler grabbing my boob in a coffee shop) or (b) that I have been able to reread even once without wanting to throw myself under the nearest heavy vehicle are low on the snark.

One of our assignments was to write a "list" song (there are millions upon bajillions of examples, but the two examples that Steve gave me were "Can't Take That Away From Me," and "California Girls"). And I had a brilliant plan! I would devour my own navel and write a song called, "It Comes Out Funny," in which I could lay out my feeble, faltering steps towards conveying the real emotion underlying things that I feel deeply about, but then I could scurry back for cover, because it always comes out funny! GENIUS! You may have guessed that this never got written.

Instead, I got hung up on a handful of very, VERY strong images from my childhood home. Actually, it was a lot more than a handful of images, but one of the really fascinating things about songwriting, and poetry, too—please don't disown me for admitting that I've been dabbling in that dark art: instead, blame Stephen Fry—is the ruthlessness it forces on you. You might be in love with every image that pops and flashes and burns itself on to your authorial retina, but some of them have got to go. Last-minute slackerness also focuses the mind wonderfully, and I wound up choosing just three things. (And, sheepishly, I realized that these were the very images that made it into one of those very few things that I've written that I will grudgingly say isn't entirely terrible.)

The specter of snark still threatened, though. One of the things I need and want to work on in the songwriting class, whichever I end up taking this time around, is thinking of music and lyrics as a more intimately related whole. In the first go-around I tended to lean heavily on writing the lyrics, then scramble at the last minute to do something musical with them. In this case, I had a vague, bouncy, sarcastic melody in the back of my mind. I came up with a chord progression, tried playing an out-of-the-box 4/4 rhythm under the vague melody, and it wouldn't come.

Desperate to get at least something out of the time spent with guitar in hand, I finger picked through the chord progression, and suddenly there it was: a sad, sincere little song. Not earth shattering, certainly not a great song, probably not even a good one, but a song, and not a terrible one, either. And it's made up of nothing more exciting, tragic, or triumphant that me and my childhood.

One of my very favorite fictional Hoydens (created by one of my very favorite real-life Hoydens) has a way of delivering the most trite advice ever given to a writer (or a Writer): Write what you know.

"What do you think is my latest activity, Daddy? You will begin
to believe that I am incorrigible--I am writing a book. I started it
three weeks ago and am eating it up in chunks. I've caught the secret.
Master Jervie and that editor man were right; you are most convincing
when you write about the things you know. And this time it is about
something that I do know--exhaustively. Guess where it's laid?
In the John Grier Home! And it's good, Daddy, I actually believe
it is--just about the tiny little things that happened every day.
I'm a realist now. I've abandoned romanticism; I shall go back to it
later though, when my own adventurous future begins."—Daddy Long-Legs, by Jean Webster (available via Project Gutenberg)

How can I keep from spinging? Rodney Crowell with Chris Knight & Minton Sparks

So. Robbie was back in regular person clothes this month. His "freak the audience" maneuver for April's Secret Country show was to have, in actuality, three performers rather than two and to make me deal with issues of billing and URL cutoff. Oh, Robbie can try to blame Rodney Crowell if he likes (Rodney used his power for good and brought along spoken-word artist Minton Sparks), but those of us who have seen into the heart of Robbie's evil know better. This entry serves as your April reminder that Robbie is Wrong.

On my way up from bass class, Robbie was emerging from the auditorium and striding with great purpose (and when a man with 9-foot-long legs is striding purposefully, you get out of the way) toward someone as he said, "We should work up a little comedy bit about . . . " About 15 minutes later, M and I heard the outcome of that purpose-laden conversation as Robbie and a plant in the audience (his wife, Donna) opened the show with a schtick about mistaking Rodney for Roddy McDowell and Chris Knight for Ted Knight (ca. "Mary Tyler Moore"). It was no bastardized "Christmas Song," but pretty amusing for something constructed on the fly. We also learned that the interview segment is only done at the 4 o'clock show, which presents a difficulty for me in the coming months: My bass class will be from 3:30-4:50. Grrr. Arrgggh.

Rodney, Minton, and Minton's pocketbook (I adopt the Southern word in deference to this item, which so far exceeds the category of accessory that it is a featured character in one of Minton's pieces) took the stage first. Early on, Robbie asked Minton to talk about her art and being a somewhat genreless (or asymptotic to it) artist. She, of course, pointed out that rap and hip hop are largely spoken-word arts and made reference to beat poets: "It's just that no one else is doing rap or beat poetry to bluegrass." I'll say! (I also wondered if she knows Bitch & the Exciting Conclusion, or at least knows of her.)

Her works are always accompanied by music and she tends to work one on one with a single musician (on this occasion, she'd brought guitarist John Jackson [no, not that one {but that would be a helluva trick!}, but good luck finding the other one] with her), reading the piece and working through it as the musician listens. As the musician finds his or her groove, Minton then modifies her performance and so on, so that the two are integrated into a single work.

Rodney was given one of her CDs by someone who told him that it would change his life. As it goes with such things, the CD then got dusty until he listened to it one day and didn't stop listening. He then arranged to meet with her. After lunch, he asked her how many CDs she had on her. She answered,"About 60," and he said he'd take all of them. He did and claims to have been cementing friendships and relationships ever since by giving them out. Her website has a similar story about how the director of her DVD became involved with the project. I wonder if "the friend" who gave him the CD was Rodney, but it seems equally probable that it was someone else entirely. I could sense M clenching when the words "spoken-word artist" were uttered (he has painful poetry flashbacks), but there's something about Minton herself. I don't think her art is for everyone, but if you're in the position to be moved by it, it will reach deep down.

Rodney also talked about his approach to both song writing and singing. Given the length and breadth of his career (from child drummer in his daddy's honkytonk band to pretty-boy front man), I suppose he's bound to feel reflective at this point. He was highly complimentary of Robbie (who may have actually blushed) and dismissive of a lot of his own work (He apparently hated his own voice well into his career and thinks that he didn't work long or hard enough at a lot of his early stuff to make them what they could be.), and is of the firm opinion that his most recent work is far and away the best he's done as a recording artist.

After chatting with these two for a while, Robbie siad it was time to bring Chris Knight (be sure to hit www.chrisknight.NET, not .COM, that's just disturbing) up on stage. He seemed as surprised as the rest of us when Chris emerged from the audience (house left). He was wearing a sleeveless vest, and Robbie complimented him on his arms (he'd told Rodney he looked "cut" earlier as well). For about the first 5 minutes or so it appeared that Chris would have rather been just about anywhere else in the whole wide world than on that stage. His discomfort, paired with his Kentucky drawl made it a bit difficult to understand him at first. But he warmed up and the audience came along for the ride. He talked about his tendency to write songs in short bursts without a lot of reflection and how that played out in the recording of his Trailer Tapes (basically him, a microphone, a guitar, and a producer in his trailer).

For the performances, Chris was up first, and seemed to slip back a bit into his shyness/stage fright. He got about a line into the first song ("Backwater Blues," I think) before he stopped cold, "Wait wait wait! This is not cool! I gotta get the first song right!" I defy anyone to resist the combined force of that self-effacing smile and The Drawl. I'd say he was warmed up but good by the time he told the story of not playing at an elementary school. He was, as they say, between labels when he was invited to do so and got to thinking of how he would pitch his music to 3rd graders, "Good morning, boys and girls! This song's about whatcha do when someone crosses you!"

The comparisons to Steve Earle in the press coverage for Trailer Tapes are good ones, at least as far as his voice and lyrics go (and consarnit he looks more like Steve Earle oughta look than Steve Earle does). In terms of his guitar-playing style, the fact that he taught himself to play by listening to John Prine records. And for those of you who might just might seek out certain country music for pretty boy purposes only to find that you actually kinda like the music, Chris Knight has a lot in common with Kane, which is a good thing. We bought two of his CDs (including Trailer Tapes and his self-titled CD) and have been enjoying them a lot.

Rodney and Minton took the stage with their respective guitarists (Brother Will Kimbrough and the aforementioned John Jackson [but not that one], respectively) after a brief intermission. As M commented, Rodney (unlike Steve Earle) looks exactly like you would expect someone who has toured with Emmylou Harris, been married to Roseanne Cash, and written for Guy Clark and Towns van Zandt to look. He is straight from bona fide Country Star central. He started with "Highway 17," a piece that makes a visceral argument for spoken-word art, off The Houston Kid. He followed it up, to my delight, with "I Walk the Line (Revisited)," with the very brave Brother Will standing in for The Man in Black. In addition to being on THK, that song is on Sugar Hill Records: A Retrospective, a CD set that should be issued to every human at birth. (In case you haven't guessed, I love the hell out of that song.)

MInton followed these two songs with two pieces of her own, starting with "Fill Her Up" from This Dress, and another about a family vacation to see a decaying bed-ridden Aunt. I can't remember the title of the second, but it's startling how different "Fill Her Up" sounds in that clip. It's more than just the switch from piano to guitar, it's also missing out on the visual and the immediacy. Which is not to label the CDs as a second-rate version. If anything, it speaks to the multiple experiences contained within her pieces. She also did "Vickie Pickle's Momma," "Cluck, Cackle, Peck," "Aunt Shine's Face Lift" "Her Purse," and "When You Coming Home, Girl." I'm undoubtedly missing a few, but those are the ones I recognize by title

Each piece is pretty short, and they were interspersed with Rodney and Will's songs. M overcame his poetry aversion enough to allow that he wasn't opposed to Minton's work, per se, but he found it jarring to whip back and forth between song and story. I didn't find that at all (Rodney's songs are so personal and story driven that I thought MInton was a good fit for him and he for her; furthermore M did admit that a piece they did in which Rodney would sing a verse, then Minton would do a spoken-word bit, then more song, etc., worked pretty well), but I did feel . . . not exactly cheated, but as if I could have happily listened to a lot more music.