Month: June 2025

The Sound of Sense

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

Today’s piece is kicking off a Summer where I’m going to be doing some different things here than what the Parlando Project usually does. Though the Project’s “usual” varies, the capsule description typically applies: “Combines various words (mostly other people’s literary poetry) with original music in differing styles.” What’s coming this Summer?

I’m not entirely sure yet. There may be more behind-the-scenes stuff, even some “inside baseball” topics about recording, composition, and musical instruments. I think, some personal memoir, a few more peculiar “cover versions” of other folk’s music — we’ll see. I’ve never emphasized those things, so I don’t know how this will work yet. Come September, I intend to return to our regular stuff: writing about my experience of other poets and their poems as the Project moves toward its 10th anniversary. I hope there will still be some things of interest to those who come here for that. For regular readers, particularly those that have followed this Project for a while, I’m hoping you’ll enjoy this Summer’s personal digressions.

I recorded music with Dave Moore last week. Dave and I have known each other since we were teenagers, and we’ve made music as the LYL Band for 45 years. For much of that time Dave was a driving two-handed keyboard player, pounding first an upright piano, then a Farfisa combo organ and electric piano. The Farfisa had grey keys for the bass register, and Dave was often effectively the bass player in the various LYL lineups. Two-handed keyboard players are a tough thing to integrate into the typical Rock band. That kind of playing can fill a lot of the harmonic space — but in some of Rock’s history, guitar voicings are expected to outline the chords. As it turns out, this was OK for me, as I was never a competent conventional rhythm guitar player. Though LYL had an additional guitar player sometimes, I worked out an unconventional role, most often playing single notes and double stops that decorated the chords that Dave laid down, or adding timbral color with guitar effects.

By the turn of the century, we fell into a regular pattern: around once a month we’d set a date. Just before the appointed time, I’d be ready in my studio space and would start to play a little melodic line or spare pattern. Dave would come by a few minutes later, let himself in, and he’d walk up to the keyboard position in the studio space as I continued to play. I’d lean over and reveal the key I was playing in, and off we’d go. I’d have some words ready, a literary poem for Parlando perhaps. Our familiarity bred musical content: I was accustomed to Dave’s keyboard moves, he likely knew mine after all this time too. We’d extemporize a weaved top line. In 2-6 minutes I’d wind it up. We’d say hi to each other. Dave would next hand me a sheet of lyrics. Sometimes with chords, sometimes just some jottings as to predominant ones or key, sometimes just the words. He’d start to play and sing and I’d find my way to play something that I hoped would fit in. That piece would end, and then I’d hand Dave a chord sheet with lyrics to something I had put together. Though sparse, my sheets would be more organized, allotting info for Dave to drive the basic harmonic content for what I would sing and play along with him.

The alteration proceeded as such from there.* After about an hour we’d take a break, talk a bit, and then we’d pick up the rotation for another hour. There would sometimes be partial takes, even (rarely) a “let’s play through it again” request. There’d be short delays as we shuffled through papers, or switched instruments or keyboard sounds, but there wasn’t much deliberation.

What did the recordings reveal afterward? Some trainwrecks certainly. Some searches for inspiration that snoozed off. Particularly in my case, a lot of poor attempts at singing. None-the-less, there’d also be some stuff I’d think worth working with. You’ve heard some of those spontaneous live-in-the-studio takes here.

As it happens, other than their being two alternating songwriters, this is close to how Bob Dylan worked in the studio throughout much of his career — though he worked with trained studio musicians for the most part — skilled folks who could bring a lot more facility that Dave or I can supply.**

Why’d Dylan do that? Well, I’ll have to ask him, though somehow, I haven’t had the chance. My guess is that when it did work, a real sense of something happening in the room among a group of people was transmitted. An exploration. An edge of the seat, this hasn’t yet been formed, a how will it turn out feeling the listener can share.***

Let me repeat myself for necessary clarity: my skillset as a musical instrument operator is such that I think that it doesn’t fulfill the job description of a musician. I won’t impose a summary on Dave, but I think he’d be unlikely to claim high-level musical skills. I do call myself a composer, and Dave has started to call me a producer. I wish I had more skills, but I work artistically with the ideas and actualities I have.

New Studio Space MIDI keyboard

One thing was different last week. For nearly 20 years Dave usually played an older non-MIDI keyboard at my studio space. I may write more about the context later, but I’m thinking it’s time to move to MIDI. Dave has no experience with MIDI and computer instruments, so this will be a journey. I was able to find a good open-box example of this affordable, semi-weighted MIDI keyboards with aftertouch.

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So, last week, after decades of this, when Dave and I met, I was in progress, playing a guitar riff, and he, on arrival, began playing electric piano. I had set out a drum loop and had a bass track running that hung around the key center. The piece I read as I played my electric guitar was a sonnet, a recent one in my sonnet-series about Alzheimer’s disease and a care-home for those suffering from it — and how we, outside the disease, interact with those within it. “The Sound of Sense”  doesn’t lie: Robert Frost actually did think there was a basic undercurrent in how poetry works — that it’s like how we hear others speaking just out of earshot.

Dave’s not Bill Evans or McCoy Tyner. I’m not John Coltrane or Mike Bloomfield. Some people say I sing like Bob Dylan, but I think on a good day I might sound something like Bob on a bad day. Here’s something I’ve been thinking lately, as successful music gets more produced and marketed from the moment of conception on: it’s still good to have some notes made that don’t know what the note to follow will be. If that next note is unexpected, even “off,” — well that’s better than always knowing what the next note is. And that latest artistic worry: Artificial Intelligence and LLMs? They’re programmed to work-to-rule, creating statistically what you’d expect next.

Two old guys playing live in the studio together. I perform a sonnet I recently wrote that Dave hasn’t heard. He and I weave together in a loose, homespun warp and woof, and unlike a lot of poets reading to music, I spend a minute playing electric guitar at the end, trying to not play the next note that you’d expect. You can hear that performance with the audio player below. No player? You aren’t out of AI credits or something — this highlighted link will open a new tab with its own audio player.

I hope we’re going to have an interesting summer.

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*When other musicians played with Dave and I, I tried to continue that strict arbitrary rotation — everyone got to start a piece in turn.

**A few years back a huge box-set including alternate partial and unsuitable takes from Dylan’s classic Sixties period was issued. Fascinating, listening to and hearing the outright failures or “just not it” attempts. Given what I know those musicians involved could  do, knowing those failures keep me from utter despair when I listen to a busted LYL take uttered from my limited skill-set.

***Some classic Jazz recordings of the LP era were done this way, though often with a substantial shared mental “book” of structures and cadences for the skilled musicians to rely on. It may be one of those shared illusions, as there’s no strictly technical reason that Kind of Blue  or A Love Supreme  couldn’t have been recorded as most modern pop music is recorded: many instrumental tracks played separately and laid behind featured top-line tracks constructed of many passes collaged together. Those old Jazz records feel like the musicians are breathing together in the room to me, in my mind’s eye I can see them glance at each other — but we can be fooled.

Meru

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

Poet William Butler Yeats had interests and a life that spanned times and poetic styles. His earliest poems whole-heartedly exhibit 19th century romanticism and prosody, but like the English Pre-Raphaelites he sought to vividly revive elements of the deeper past while doing so. His interests beyond poetry ranged as well. Last time I performed Yeats, I mentioned he had deep interests in esoteric magic, and yet the same man had a firm grounding in civic poetry while supporting an Irish cultural revival and independence from England. A poet with an already established style, he crossed paths with the American and British Modernists early in their revolution, and his later poetry shows that rather than getting his back up about their changes, he adapted some of their make-it-new approaches. Yeats employed influential American Modernist critic Ezra Pound during Modernism’s rise, and while he dipped his toes into fascist movements,* unlike Pound he seems to have drawn back from that.

Today’s piece, “Meru,”  is a late poem in Yeats’ career. I find it balancing the worldly and spiritual, and on no more authority than my own necessary to come to grips to perform it, I see it as commenting on the rise of rapacious authoritarians contemporary with its composition in the 1930s.**   Here’s a link to the poem as Yeats published it.

“Meru”  is a sonnet, a rather regular one structurally. Though the word we use for this lyric poetry form literally means “little song,” many sonnets are hard for me to perform with music. Their length is good, and lyric poetry in this context means that they focus on a compressed scope of time and experience — but the form rarely uses refrains, a powerful, almost indispensable, tactic for song attractiveness. Seeking a good musical structure, I divided Yeats one-stanza poem into four verses, with refrains after verses two and four.

Meru

The song form I reformed Yeats’ sonnet into. Note the chords shown are what I fretted on guitar, but I used a capo on fret 3, so the piano, bass, and the song song sound in Eb.

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What do I think, as I chose to perform this, the poem conveys?

I like Yeats opening here, with its circular word-choice of “hooped,” for describing civilization’s shared beliefs. I’m unaware that this is any kind of established British Isles idiom, and the choice of this scene-setting word seems to invoke something like a key-ring or perhaps a wooden barrel or cask — and in the last image, that’s a construction that can fall apart. The opening statement continues to say civilization’s order is only an illusion, but the first three lines end by reminding us that such creations of the human mind are none-the-less great movers of reality and life. I’ll come back to that at the end today.

The second, four-line, group is remarkable in its ferocity, and I think it’s a description of mankind’s often perverse desire to gather more power, more wealth, and perhaps something they vaingloriously ascribe as rough justice while doing so. The ending line of this section serves as my first refrain: “The desolation of reality” that results from this.

Third segment, as I read it, brings in a distinct element of Yeats’ occult beliefs, starting by reminding us that the “desolation of reality” is a repeating motif of history and the fall of empires. But what’s with the two mountains introduced? Everest is Earth’s highest mountain, but it’s remoteness and location in Tibet links it with a late 19th century form of occultism: Theosophy. Theosophy is too large a subject to go into here,*** but its founder posited that certain Ascended Masters located in Tibet held onto ancient secret wisdom becoming super-human in the process. Mount Meru is more obscure to most readers I suspect: it’s a symbolic mountain, and like other symbols such as Mount Ararat, the Garden of Eden, or the entrance to the underworld, it is not an actual fixed map point, but is often referred to as being in some part of the Himalayan region. Some read the poem’s plural hermits as two hermits, one-per-mountain, and Theosophy holds to two current Ascended Masters.

I suspect these Theosophical details were in Yeats’ mind as he wrote his poem, but I don’t know if he ever wrote about the genesis of this sonnet. And luckily for most readers (and listeners today) you don’t need to know any of that. After a description of desolation of nations, I think the image of two or more hermits, ascetics living naked in snow and ice shelters in famously remote places stands as an image of the other-worldly mystic surviving with nothing but belief and the knowledge that the world’s disasters are part of some reoccurring process driven by human greed for power and wealth. Is this removed survival our fall-back in today’s world of raging authoritarians, blinded in their ravening?

And once more, I suspect the aged Yeats was thinking of his own age, of the rising of fascist authoritarians then, not just specifics of Theosophy — as a poet, one uses the images in one’s cupboard. This aged singer certainly thinks of those men and the desolation they cause as I sing Yeats poem this month. The poem ends — and I refrain on this — with a twist on the old saw: “it’s always darkest before the dawn.” Chillingly, naked in the snow, Yeats has as his dawn consolations that all tyrants (and alas, all mankind’s) glory and monuments are gone.****

Is this fate? Is this prophecy? Is this inevitable? I’m no Ascended Master — if you are, you tell me. I’m just a composer drafted by words and asked to sing them. But I promised I’d come back to the “manifold illusion” of peace, of some sustainable rule without unleashed tyranny. “Man’s life is thought” the poem said. A diverted American poet turned President once spoke of a conception, a particular manifold illusion, imagined on: “Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” If enough believe, the mage’s trick works. I’d rather it be a kind trick.

You can hear my musical performance of Yeats’ “Meru”  with the audio player gadget below. Has the audio player become subject to the desolation of reality? No, just some ways of reading this blog suppress it. This highlighted link will conjure up a new tab with it’s own audio player so you can hear it.

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*I’m not a Yeats scholar, and there are surely many who know more about the man and these political matters. While disappointing, I was not surprised to see he found some connections in fascistic groups, as trappings of cultural nationalism and nostalgia for some mythic past were widespread then, just as they remain in the fascistic nationalists now crowding under the aged wings of my country’s self-fancied mad king.

**Because of the later date of publication, this poem may not be in the Public Domain in the US, and this entirely non-commercial project almost always uses work in that class out of respect for author’s rights. I’m making an exception here out of a renewed commitment to civic poetry in the current world.

***Here’s more info on Theosophy if you want to wade in deeper. Having had some interest in esoteric beliefs as a young person, I carried some knowledge of it as I encountered this poem. As the Wiki article points out, Theosophy continues to influence various “New Age” ideas, but I’m not a believer.

****Some readers of the poem hold the “His” in the last line to be a godhead. I’m not sure why that would be. Could it be the then traditional capitol letter at the beginning of the poetic line leads to that reading? Or is it some element of Theosophical mythology? There’s another, non-cap, “his” in the poem, and I read that pronoun, along with its partner, to refer to elements of mankind.

I Pity the Poor Immigrant

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

It occurred to me: should I try to sing a version of Bob Dylan’s “I Pity the Poor Immigrant?”  Afterall, I, without a plan, seem to be performing songs from Dylan’s 1967 LP John Wesley Harding  recently, and that song is one of the more noted ones from the album. And immigrants, and immigration, are currently a preoccupation of my country’s inept and callous administration.

Dylan might have been writing of his own family’s immigrant history in this song — being second-generation from his grandparents emigration from the Russian Empire and Turkey. Furthermore, he grew up in the iron-ore mining area of Minnesota, a place full of folks with wide-ranging immigrant backgrounds. Given Dylan’s, and folk-song’s in general concern for the underdog, one might expect this to be a song of empathy for these close-in immigrants.

Yet when Dylan sang his song in 1967, still a young man,* there’s a duality in its presentation. The immigrants within it are portrayed then as poor not only in wealth, but also in spirit. For all of Dylan’s genius, the voice that sings this song largely speaks about how the immigrants, who’d be the elders of his town and family, are stunted in their outlook. Dylan may be a genius, but this could be the disappointed vision of a young person who sees the faults and failures there. That’s what many young people, even those who aren’t geniuses, do, and it’s an important task.

His singing on this 1967 version is calm, not accusatory — at moments even sounding concerned as he decries the immigrants fallen state. If the harmonicas play the skeleton keys to the song’s interior, the passionate timbre of his playing on that instrument in the song may well be saying he feels sorrowful about the situation. The performance doesn’t lay any blame on poverty, exploitation, or the hard road of feeling the need to leave one’s homeland to find succor with strangers. Dylan, whatever he’s expressing here, likely knows these factors. Perhaps he assumes we do too.

I think Dylan’s aim was to confound the expected here — to write a great song instead of a good one, some mere piece of civic songcraft.

I’m not a young man, and I would have to go back to relatives I never knew, and who therefore can’t be blamed for imperfect mentorship or spiritual poverty. And I know from my life, and in my time, what immigrants contribute to my country. Some of course are noticeable success stories, but I think too of the many who do the hardest and least-rewarded work of the nation. I’m hesitant to pick a bone with the quality of their spiritual insight while they are trudging through unglamourous work — but even more so in 2025 when they also get slammed by disreputable politicians as criminals, scofflaws, swindlers, and parasites. I’m sure there are some immigrants who are those things, but I’m also quite sure that those slathering on those broad charges include in themselves a good measure of those failings — and are so eagerly pointing at immigrants to divert focus on that.

So, this is how I came to create this new performance of Dylan’s song, one for our time and situation. I changed only a few words, but by phrasing and refocusing my aim from Dylan’s original performance, I tried to illuminate those opposing scapegoating forces to the immigrant’s lot.** I may not even have made a (downgraded) good song of it, but I got some things off my chest I felt I had to say.

I can’t identify all the sources for the pictures used here. Alas, my stock photo library was bereft of any suitable pictures.

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*When he wrote this, Dylan had only young children, ones not yet able to judge him and his generation’s failings. Has an older Dylan, now a grandfather, revisited this song? AFAIK, no. Expert Dylanologists may have more info, but Wikipedia says it was last performed during the latter legs of the Rolling Thunder tour many decades ago, and then as a bizarre rollicking up-tempo jaunt.

As I said recently when a reader/listener pointed out that I may have completely misread Blake’s “Holy Thursday,” my theories about what was behind Dylan’s creation of this song are in no way meant to be definitive. They are just what I hear in it, and feel free to think my new recasting of the song is a sacrilege. I’ll plead that one part of Dylan’s genius is that he sees fit to approach his own work in highly different ways, and I’m just doing what I learned from the master. You should feel something to sing a song, and this is what I felt. Feel different? Sing the song yourself.

**Even fewer words in my plan than you’ll hear in the video, as some other different words slipped in by accident while singing. Here’s a link to the original lyric. Changing the song’s concluding couplet is the only indictable premeditated felony, and the video underlines my approach to make the sins that Dylan’s 1967 performance directed at only the immigrants as more of a dialectic. An accidental, unintended, change that I regret in this version: “Shatter like a  glass” is inferior to the original “Shatter like the  glass,” and looses the possible intra-album connection with the glass that has fingers pressed up against it in “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine.”