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

Leaving the Country

Posted on 27/12/2015 by admin

I think it’s time we left the towns of ten thousand people to decide whether the lack of verse-chorus disqualifies Who was that at the Drive-in? as country rock. It can’t be the melding of life in a sparse rural community with American Graffitti cool nor the simple narrative detailing this setting and all that happens or happened during a typical night at the drives. Country rock would line up pick up trucks in the US and Sandman panelvans here and not try to be clever with valiants (a relatively obscure term) and ‘Ford thinkers’ who are not analogous with forward thinkers.

We’re not pandering to a non- country rock crowd so trust that the Aussie contingent at least, knows that God Save the Queen was the national anthem played before the first film was screened.

The ‘rest pause inbetween’ conflates a strained social convergence in the men’s room, with long forgotten scraps of conversation, with what would now be the push of a button and conceivably shorter in duration.

The sexual reference is just the right amount of nudge nudge wink wink considered tolerable and worthy of the M or MA rating.

The most difficult ask is rendering a poem into country rock, without a catchy chorus and only a near rhyme to finish.

C#nt re: rock

Posted on 24/12/2015 by admin

I’ve listened to enough country rock to think I have to attempt its easy rollin’ style. It is more down the line than alt country or cowpunk but precedes them in suggesting ways to move from trad country.

One aspect of country life for me growing up was the way that the local drive-in was the place to go. This has vanished now but it doesn’t make the time any less real and plucking an event or object from the past to use for a song is legitimate.

So here’s my country rock contribution

Who was that at the Drive-in?

Valiants aod Ford thinkers
Lined up next to speakers
This was the place to have been
When God still saved the Queen

In blankets in the back seat
with no chance to repeat
deal with dialogue as it descends

Intermission meant a mission out to the canteen
with rest pause inbetween
placed behind parents with our pillows
for the following feature 

Oblivious to the blind gropings of starting couples
occuring in other cars
Not across in front behind
no reason to remind

Who was that at the drive-in
last night
Who viewed the founding of legend
under the stars and moonlight
Who was that arriving
 late
forgetting to replace on the stand

From the Sound of It

Tag Archives: lyrics