Folkie is psyched

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With all the freak folk and indie folk and anti-folk, surely we get the picture: there are breakaways that assert their independence by deviating at some key point.

You’ve got me there: I have a natural affinity with the wayout soundscapes that manifest when psychedelic is mentioned. So, whether this is psychedelic folk or not. Or whether a musician can turn it into psychedelic folk

Feigned Indifference

Unbuttoned my subtle intent  
having a lend and having lent
Try to stem the tide of tie-dyed anachronisms
catering to cataclysms

Beset by bored restraint
tempted to temper taint 
Pursuit of hirsute and his suit 
brittle but not such a brute

The stony expression of pride
it would take Derrida to deride
A session of social success
not even the cardinals bless

It's an inferior inference
a sign of chance glance significance
Feigned indifference, feigned indifference

The modal moves in measured step
Muscular crepuscular has stealthy crept
shield her with shoulders that shook
because it's always done by the book

Progressive folk successive yoke

Posted on 06/03/2016 by admin

Led to psychedelic folk and progressive rock so can’t be left out. You could say that all the folk songs in previous posts exhibit something of progressive folk but there’s always a good excuse for publishing a new song

A Plague of Low Cuts

Something to get off your chest 
Teased this was part of the test
Just look at the way she's dressed

I'm a beast who likes to keep abreast
selfish as self-confessed
Adjust to the agile jest

At the core of every caress
just when you reach a crest
is this the bust with which we're blessed

In the bosom of truly obsessed
right next to the pecs of the sex pest
and at the behemoth's behest

Single and in a singlet
Stripped and encrypt
No kid goes naked
Close Optional

Other folk

Posted on 27/02/2016 by admin

I don’t feel I can speak to industrial folk as I was the farmer’s grandson and farmer’s son, not a farm labourer. In the way of boys, I took everyone for who they were and had no formed perceptions on different roles. We were also a long way from the centres of class struggle. I felt no kinship with the gas meter readers and glass & aluminium warehouse workers I later rubbed shoulders with (in fact, even that exaggerates the closeness of the connection) and I know this is much down to my attitude and proclivities as their perception on things. It doesn’t qualify me to write about my time as an aluminium racker.

It is a big part of what folk music comprises of, concernes itself with.. It is impossible to think of folk without the stirring political anthems. Then, as now, this was about the action of civic authority in making life harder for the (as the term was) working man.

Now as for neofolk, I do have an insight into pagan practice and have read extensively on the subject(s). I haven’t lent this knowledge to my songwriting endeavours and, not being a practicing witch, don’t feel qualified extolling the virtues of astral travel or scrying.

Portent

A flood of foiled philanthropy blamed for 
falling through the cracks  
A parched earth position that rarely enacts
Shelter 'neath the helter skelter
This is important this is a portent

Quake in our boots don't try to take up roots
Not a pot to piss in or a well to wish in 
A lost at sea lucidity
Department deportment this is a portent

Hearkened as horizon darkened
Felt the folds of fields
an otherworldly undercurrent
Pinned intent with penitent this is a portent

Move along Folks, nothing to see/hear

Posted on 20/02/2016 by admin

Contemporary folk would, I expect, focus on the bat-weilding thugs that went on a recent rampage rather than ones who did so in 1916, but how do you make the distinction?Choose something too contemporary, like a drone delivery, and you risk veering from the course of folk altogether.
Folk punk, just mention the Pogues and Roaring Jack. Folk metal.

Indie folk is so full of quirky talent that there is an impulse both to explore it and be intimidated by it. I won’t lecture on the folly of feeling intimidated because there are artists you like and respect working within a genre as, if I scratched, there would be whole genres that I avoid as not my thing. That said, the essence of indie anything is that you attempt it without too much reference to what others are doing.

Victim Statement

Being about my business I didn't notice  
seldom so unwelcome said accomplice
to the gang who had harangued and nearly hanged
all those read of claw and fang

You hear how weary defeat up and down the street
hardly discreet in descriptive deceit 
Carrying on in a cluster there 
Keeping away the customer

Being of temperate bearing 
I've done my share of caring
For those who care for nothing themselves
they won't find it on my shelves

Freak folk facts

Posted on 18/02/2016 by admin

I don’t know any. As I gather, musicians use acoustic instruments but take their songs and performances into unusual directions. To this end, in repurposing recent samples here, we can see that We’ll Take Them In has the subject matter for a conventional folk song but the lyrical approach that is both dense ‘We’ll absorb the orb of their undoing’ and has multiple points of indeterminacy.

Rather than being a combined voice that a political event can get behind, the first verse is a clumsy reach to understanding and sympathy and the second is both self-condemnation and a lash out at other ways. It then leaps again, in the third verse, to the viewpoint of those captives who are just to glad to experience freedom but ends with a couplet that examines the debate itself and what fuels it.

Would this be freak folk if you played it on a guitar and a set of bongos, or would it constitute something different again? I think the subject matter gives it the license it needs to remain in the freakier fields of folk. We’ve been crying out for that old firebrand folk that picks up on issues and it wasn’t like you could escape it; other premiers got on board and there were protest groups spouting up on street corners across the region. Whether the folk groups are okay with the ambiguity is another matter.

There’s a couple of Berkoisms that threaten the plain speaking of folk rock in Barbed Wire Blues. I deliberately chose an object from my childhood in the broader landscape and wanted to use it literally rather than to, say, engage in a metaphor for the plight of those asylum seeker children or – stretching it further – a kind of mental imprisonment. And there is a rambling feel that is troubled at the same time.

It is the double meaning of the third verse that freaks the folk then the fourth eases out of it only to freak out completely in the fifth. I mean, what the heck does ‘I’m green to the mean‘ mean, man?

III

Careful of the Freak

Hail the hairlip let the truth slip  
grasp what you clasp close in your grip
Sneak up on the snaggletooth
wagers in stages the solemn sleuth 

Jumps at the bumps leaps at the lumps
packs in acts all wearing pumps
Jaws that jut and see sore strut
The reason you'll find you're anything but
Shiny dome in gnomic pose
tip of ear to bridge of nose
In tatters that matters
a taste for waste and seldom chaste
The guidance of the guards replaced

The nurses in nightsweat have noticed   
the way that they fit in the photos
Clubfoot closeness humpback humility
what harm to the charm of humanity

Revival tenterhooks

Posted on 08/02/2016 by admin

When I read about the American and British folk revival(s) it does get me thinking that I am a listener and not a composer. All of my information is second hand; either through the media saturation or visitors from those climes.

I did, however, write a song based on the Victorian premier stating he would take in the refugees. It takes its title from this and is called We’ll Take Them In

We’ll Take Them In

We'll absorb the orb of their undoing
a little bit of what they've been through-ing
We're in such a state
where we can relate
 so we'll take them in

We'll redirect the rude aspect
Negotiated as benign neglect
The faith you hold a bride's scold
which culture could you   leave in the cold
 so we'll take them in

No mistaking free for fear
in that sense where we can disappear
It's that incessant intersect
both sides saying they protect

Faux crock

Posted on 23/01/2016 by admin

I already feel as though Terse, which is a poem, and Lived Experience have a strong dose of anti-folk without knowing it, but that was always going to happen.

If I was meant to be more influenced by Michele Shocked than Pete or Peggy Seeger then I wasn’t aware of this. As for folk rock, well let’s see if the next piece manages to meet the mandate

Barbed Wire Blues

It's one way to get nimble
as you scramble for safety
through all of these obstacles
Out there barbed wire

in coils and strands
tightened neck height
and hidden 
barbed wire

It's mostly how we negotiate
where barbed wire is drawn straight
relay across hills so we relate

It's getting inbetween & not being caught up
not being stuck in a chorus of fuck
boots best placed planted astride
barbed wire

If someone can lift it off
though I'm green to the mean 
I wouldn't wager my wage on the gauge
or even settle over metal
barbed wire

Filk if

Posted on 22/01/2016 by admin

There are too many genres to canvas. Electronic alone would take over the entire blog. I hadn’t heard of this folk variant but apparently it’s played at sci fi and fantasy conventions and combines traditional folk instruments with an electronic keyboard. Sometimes it overlays themed lyrics using existing tunes but not always.

I don’t propose to write with any melody in mind as that is counter to how I work but I can certainly work with a large bank of comic book material stored away.

Let’s bypass The Flash and Wolverine and anyone else who has seeped into the mainstream as that no longer specifies the song as filk.

Heck with it, filk isn’t always science fiction or fantasy themed, let’s just roll

Terse

Creators were grateful  
when their creatures came good
Finely limned or lit up on screen
behaving the way they should

Artists have parted
the red, see, the green brown and blue
Colourists clarify 

Producers do so directors reflect
a stand-in's understanding
a pop culture prop assault

Vanity projects itself
with inspiration straight off the shelf
veterans can do nothing but watch

Folk: us

Posted on 16/01/2016 by admin

Folk music exists around the world and maintains its currency regardless of changes in musical fashion. That is, the whole globe continues to produce musical outfits that could reasonably be described as folk-oriented.

But there is no point in attempting to learn the entire cultural backdrop and different instruments when folk has at its base lived experience. We write about a place we traverse with people we recognise. Only historical reconstructions put the lie to that. And folk music is big on celebrating and documenting the past.

But, right, there is something that ‘clicks’ (in Australia’s case, shears 🙂 )

We’ve just looked at skiffle and that’s a kind of folk music. Then, for we colonials, there are Irish, Scots and Welsh folk songs aplenty. Let’s write one of those songs that is not going to satisfy any of these categories – even if accidentally

Lived Experience

I've felled forests fallowed fields 
I've worked like a jerk for minimum yield
Breaking my back and stretching my neck out
Design in my spine is there til I check out
this lived experience

The best that we can be
is the test as you can see
we make the most of mystery
it's a lived experience

A force that courses through
when they cancelled that taboo
choose who she chews
chews who she choose
set as lived experience

I've moved mountains measured mounds
I've sorted my surrounds
Bracing my shoulders facing my foes
Yes it's keeping me on my toes
such a lived experience

Scofflaw skiffle

Posted on 05/01/2016 by admin

Yet another piece that works as a song (though more as a poem) but not as an exemplar of the music genre that informs it.

Skiffle is another genre strong on narrative storytelling. Bands like Herman’s Hermits struck me as having remnants of the genre and, if Ray Davies wasn’t a genius, one could even point to influences on his songwriting.

It’s too knockabout to be so far above the chimney pots. It wouldn’t know what to do with dense allusion and words turning in on themselves, and neither should it have to. It doesn’t need changing; it’s already a curio.

I’m thankful this boom tish has been preserved but I’m not sure if we’d still see the appeal of songs about dustmen and window cleaners anymore than we’d watch On The Buses for more than nostalgia.

Current songwriters only have claim to Now since that is when they are active. The present is turning into the past as reliably as always, and this makes the poem or song age instantly; sometimes even before it’s complete.

The movement from past, present, future are all intrinsic parts of songwriting armoury. The fact that you can cover vast tracts of time in the space of a song is most useful.

The quality of music being produced in each era cannot be said to travel in one direction of time’s arrow.

III

Hoverboard Blues

Someone fetched the future 
and found this in the flames
bought a hoverboard for Christmas
and it set the house alight

All things bright and beautiful 
should not be left plugged in
recharging when not in use

Someone stretched the truth but not this time
It really was a hoverboard in the kids room
Who'd ever thought
How high does it hover?

The fireman warned us after the fact
our research said it was safe
we thought it  would be
harmless fun
Someone fetched the future 
 but we were trapped in frames                                     If we could have escaped by hoverboard oh wait

From the Sound of It

Category Archives: songwriting