Monthly Archives: July 2015

Bluesed and bettered

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As with the other significant genres, blues has many variations: jump blues, country blues, folk blues, Chicago blues. I have delved as far as I care to in the appropriated form (and I know that all the great genres and offshoots are appropriated)

I think some of the language in death cafe is a little dense for the blues, which comes right out and says it. Or, at least, provides a colourful metaphor that gives us the full nudge and wink.

The humour is earthy not esoteric. The drama is in real life depiction of what the songwriter experiences. Stories are about the protagonist in situations. There’s a lot of first person: I’m a back door man, I’m a hoochie coochie man, I’m the seventh son

You know and I know that that is the same man. One Willie Dixon. In my opinion the greatest blues songwriter.

The blues has such diversity that these observations can’t cover all of the genre all the time. But they’re a good field guide.

We’ve had a few Blues over the years

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The reason i folded blues into a discussion on the music forms that followed is because I have written my blues songs and don’t feel a need to go back to the genre and spoil things. Berko’s Blues was the habit of describing one’s own blues – and thereby the rules are particular to your own woes and circumstance – and Imaginary Blues could have started out as a piece using the novel idea of a blues that isn’t real but it became a solid story much in the tradition.

I did, however, write this piece when I had moved to muse over the blues so it counts. There are so many genres devoted to decay and putrefaction, to the yawning grave, that a song using death as a motif would be less likely to settle on the blues, which is more about the misery and tribulations of the living.

I wrote this when I read about the concept in our local gazette. The death café is a place where people can gather to mourn the dead as it is not usually a topic for social gatherings. Such good songwriting material could reap rewards even for the beginning wordsmith so I wasted no time; it was a quick recovery from some of the scribblings that preceded it. But I never lose any sleep over crummier or more difficult efforts. There’s plenty of good to be focused on but it’s not even that. The focus for me is always in writing the song that the concept or notion or idea or subject object suggest.  The rest flows from that.

death café 

Cut across to where they're 
  cutting up croissants
In memoriam in an ornante font
Carried the coffin, pause for a coffee
Read back the preacher's notes
The procession is passing
Time to make the toast
at the death café at the death café 

This really does take the cake
Clear the tables and chairs
and try to stay a wake
Disguised disgust
well they were quite old
Will the will be discussed
before the body's cold
at the death café at the death café 

You better believe  brave the bereaved
always lilies and lollies at hand
Proprietor a picture of piety
Weeping upon demand

Only started this business
so we'd be a witness
Condolence  sincere regret
A welcome repast to those who have passed
Others still with us yet
at the death café  at the death café

Bilious billy, yes

Aside

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Before considering whether it’s worth cycling through psychobilly, I don’t even see much need to analyse whether those last pieces are in the right vein.

What I do want to mention is the reason why I think the Windfarm Commissioner works: it’s in first person. There may not the hubris or identification of ‘I’m a tiger’ ‘I’m the goo goo mup’ or ‘I’m a rockabilly rebel [from head to toe]’

I doubt you could go to town on this and have ‘I’m a Sellout Liar with a Flag stuck up my Arse’. There has to be a sense in which the singer is proud of their prowess.

While there’s an underlying futility to the position and the concept behind it, it travels along. Just because the subject is unpalatable doesn’t mean that the song can’t be entertaining.

Putting this in context of other energy sources both moves it away from being a rant (which doesn’t belong to this music form unless there’s now an ‘arguabilly’) and introduces humour, which is an underlying feature of the genre; tongue in cheek though it may be at times.

 

Reinvention

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Reinvention

I'm ready to head into my own unknown
Where my asides collide my deeds overthrown
I'm prepared to be scared into moments anew
A penny for the many who are now the few
 seeking reinvention

I'll tinker with the blinkers til they finally come off
Fashion all forebodings and hold them aloft
I'll shatter the shutters shot through with chagrin
A wayward display shows I'm anxious to win

The creaks I've had for weeks
   are from cogs that are spinning
A stirring for the whirring
   like it was at the beginning

Further drafts

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If you did get wind of that last turbine driven rockabilly number you probably found the syllable count to be the most contentious part.

You could argue about whether a commissioner of any energy system needs to act as a metaphor for the kind of interests displayed by the billies, if I can call them that (just recently I noticed that a new rock festival coming to Katoomba will feature, among other acts, one doing horrorbilly), and I don’t think a po-faced folk rendition would have worked in the context of leather jackets and quiffs. Can anything political invade rockabilly turf? The apocalyptic end of shockabilly variations is usually cast in terms such as This is the Day the Sun Burned Down – where they are definitely not discussing solar funding.

II

I have been writing in the exercise book again and finding that ideas tend to come out in a more scattered order. This elaborates on some of the experiences I was recounting in earlier posts but there is a tangent at play when the handwritten lyrics move from nine, say, drafts of whole songs to lyrics delivered out of order and not immediately working despite an expectation that, by fitting and being in context, it should.

The first two pieces came about from the news that a work experience kid had discovered an exoplanet. Considering how recently we were ooh-ing and aah-ing about the first ones to be visible in the new telescopes, this trajectory reminds me of climbing Everest or breaking the four minute mile. It starts as this amazing thing and then is absorbed; at least enough for the bright and talented to pick up and pass on.

None of this ends up in the draft as I am in too much of a reverie about the space in general that the exoplanet planned for the chorus.

[Shockabilly draft]

EXOPLANET
Now that our vision extends beyond the reach
A yearning for learning but what will it teach
Worlds inconceivable light years away
A vaccuum to a void disperse and display
Exoplanet

The telescope tells of hope
Think outside the envelope
Stars adrift in a cosmic shift
The odds of gods being Man’s greatest gift
Exoplanet

One’s elusive now exclusive
The astronomical pay purview
A dearth on the earth we are but few
No offer up to this effusive
Exoplanet

In the past till the last we looked up to the sky
Wondered where what was there we asked why
As all our fronteirs are receding
Process the progress still proceeding
Exoplanet

I wrote this on 25th of June so my thoughts about it have changed but, at the time, I decided the following day to try again. This time not looking at the first version but using one particularly strong line ‘The odds of gods being Man’s greatest gift’

The vastness of the cosmos impresses me no end
As we all turn in circles in these eternal circles
Fade into the shade where life begins again

The burnt out stars that we still see
Their dead state serves as company
Switching on each witching hour
Wishing on a meteor shower

Light years away we like to stray
Where time determines night meets day
Space in place across divides
The odds that gods alone decide

Beyond every notion that we ever had
A guide to the good, a bid for the bad
Averaging out each moment of doubt

The vastness of the cosmos impresses me no end
As we turn in circles in these eternal circles
Ignite in the light life begins again

I wrote it but realised that it, too, had not stayed on exoplanets or, indeed, had much to say about them at all. It would require its own title. This doesn’t commonly happen as I tend to write from titles but, yes, I settled on IN THE SPACE PROVIDED

I let it rest there and went off and wrote a piece called REINVENTION as that was something foremost in my life, about to be offered a package.

Anyway, that was fine

I then returned to the space theme although I didn’t planet and really the two snatches there are more pissing around than anything.

And still I don’t have an exoplanet song.