I sometimes think I’m working against gathering a larger audience for this.

Twice in the past month or so I’ve had an opportunity to speak in passing with poets about what I do with the Parlando Project. I’ve got my elevator pitch carved out: “I combine poetry, usually literary poetry not intended to be performed, with original music in different styles.” Both poets came back with this replying question: “What kind of music?”

Maybe I should start hitting that word “different” with hard emphasis — but Midwesterners know that kind of spoken underline could be parsed in our regional argot as cloaked disparagement. If I was to say:

“I’ve written a piece for a string quartet in which the instruments are placed on the floor and filled with nuts and seed. A herd of squirrels is then unboxed and will proceed to chew through strings and tonewood for the course of the musical evening.“

The Midwesterner is bound to reply “Oh, that sounds different.”

For Friday the 13th: presenting the unexpected, not gnawful, just “different,”  the Squirrel String Quartet.

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Now, I believe both of those poets this past month are perceptive, I read it in their admirable poetry. If they miss the word “different” it’s because many people have strong feelings about the music they care about.* Long before reaching the age of those poets most listeners have strong affinities for some music and equally strong dislikes for the sounds that they don’t wish to put in their ears. The idea of combining poetry with music is attractive, but what kind of music is an unavoidable point in describing the Parlando Project, and I can’t encapsulate that. Elevator pitch? If I tried, I’d be out of breath and walking up flights of stairs. To both poets I was reduced to trying to start my response with “That’s my problem: it varies.”

Readership of the blog posts here continues to increase through the years, while listenership to the audio pieces has been for the last half of this Project’s life flat to somewhat lower. This bothers me, and I have theories, but one that seems particularly plausible is that the variety itself turns off listeners. One day acoustic guitar folk-scare strumming, the next day some kind of synthesizer sound, a garage-rock quality electric combo, something like Jazz, small orchestral ensembles, Blues slide-guitar, or alt tunings in a matrix somewhere between John Fahey, Joni Mitchell, and Sonic Youth. And then on the third day, a combination of one or more of the above.**

How well do I (who much of the time needs to play or score all the parts) present that variety? I think my own judgement approximate, but it goes like this: on good days I think I do it well enough, on bad days I feel embarrassed by the faults in execution and conception I hear. So, my limitations are a factor here, but even if I was a master of all these forms, I think the problem would remain. In this theory it takes only one or two “bad fit” musical pieces for a new listener’s taste to judge the work has no value, and no further listening occurs.

What will I do about this? I don’t know. I can’t help the eclecticism — it’s been in me since my youth*** and I don’t think I want to try to scrub it out.

Today’s musical piece comes from that “We’re a garage band, We come from Garageland” mode — looser still in that like most of the LYL Band pieces presented here over the years it’s spontaneous, not the execution of parts each instrument is supposed to play. As keyboardist Dave Moore says at the end, the words are “a personal experience story,” an exception in the Other People’s Stories texts the Parlando Project finds, experiences, and presents. Just over a year ago a storm with 60 mph winds and golf-ball sized hail struck Minneapolis. Overall, it caused 1.1 billion dollars in damages. On my roof, my shingles were totaled (the classic hail-storm result), windows were shattered, and there were plenty of cracks in the siding from the wind-driven hail. As “Heaven and Hail”  tells it, it took months, well into the winter, for overwhelmed builder crews to get all the home damage repairs completed in my neighborhood.

Last year at this time work started on fixing the damage at my place. One experience amid the hammers, ladders, and supply pallets: hearing one of the crew’s boomboxes playing a record of garage rock classics all sung in Spanish. Another Rosetta Stone moment, like reading those cereal boxes in French.

To hear this short account of the storm and aftermath you can use the audio player gadget below. No player? This highlighted link is an alternative that will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*Neither asked me —and few people ask me — “What kind of poetry?” With non-poets, I ascribe that to the lesser interest in poetry as an art and therefore a lack of strong likes and dislikes.

**This leaves out the subjective qualities of my voice, something which I recognize is of overwhelming importance to most listeners.

***”Top Forty” rock’n’roll radio was extraordinarily broad in “The Sixties™” and I was listening to the classical music station and a country-western station along with that format. Hootenanny was on TV, folkie music was part of church camp. Other than the occasional cross-over hit I’d hear on the radio, the Jazz waited a bit to creep in late in my youth. Eventually the smart programmers figured out that a pop music station that played a “button pusher” record would cause the listener to switch to a competitor. I’m the odd-duck that when I hear a record I don’t like, right after one I do like, I want to hear the third and maybe fourth or fifth record played, particularly if any of the small sample (liked or not-liked) is something I don’t think I’ve heard before.