William Blake once wrote that “If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.” I hope he’s right about that, though I can’t tell for sure, since I’m still in the persisting part of things.

Blake was a teenage hero of mine. I think I ran across him from two directions, and I’m not entirely sure which was first. My parents had a bookcase of books, some perhaps from their youth, some old enough to have been from my grandparent’s time. There were some odd lots in there. I remember at least one book that was devoted to William McKinley, and another was titled “The Beautiful Life of Frances Willard.”  One of them was some kind English poetry textbook, with a section in the back about minor English poets. Its paragraph or two about Blake included a summary: “Wrote some charming short lyrics as good as any in English, but his later, longer works seem evidence of madness.” That intrigued me. Around the same time I read that, I was able to use some gift money to buy three LPs, one of which was “The Doors,” a record with a track called “End of the Night” where the singer crooned a pair of lines: “Some are born to sweet delight. Some are born to endless night.”  I read that the singer had kyped that from Blake.

There are nearly no poets today who will say a good word for Jim Morrison or the Doors, because there is so much foolishness associated with them. I’m wise enough not to go up against that. Please do not note the number of pieces here with shaky guitar, boogie piano, or weird organ—some of these pieces even without electric bass.

Unlike my attraction to the poetry of Sandburg, it’s easy to see what I liked about Blake. Stubborn iconoclasm. A belief that one’s own internal vision of things was more valid than the common view. A DIY ethic which had Blake creating his own books that he engraved on plates himself.  What’s more punk rock than that? If Blake had been an indi-rock band, he wouldn’t have just made his own record; he would have cut the damn master on his own vinyl lathe.

What’s a teenager not to like in all that?

If I live a few more years, that teenager is a warning to me that there are things I believe now that will seem foolish to me then. Of course that teenager was foolish, but he also knew some things I don’t know now, so that teenager and I talk all the time.

William Blake wrote down what the Angels told him, but what did Blake tell the Angels?

You should see the player below to play the piece “I Have Believed in Foolish Things.”

Dave Moore takes us on a short Sci-Fi dystopia trip

Water isn’t just earth’s life-blood, it’s blood’s life-blood. Humans are, after all (as the Star Trek quote puts it) “Bags of mostly water.” So we had better pay attention to what happens to water.

In this piece we again have The LYL Band providing the music. Dave Moore wrote this and he is the speaker and the keyboard player in this performance. I’m playing guitar. Most of the pieces in this project will have me reading the words, but Dave will make regular appearances here as another reader.

As usual, you should see a player gadget below to let you listen to “We Are the Instant People”

Just as the words say, my friend and collaborator in this project Dave Moore was riding on a European train after visiting a Dutch art museum, and his moment of vision was that the clouds he was looking at out the train window were, in some way, the same clouds that the museum painters had portrayed. He wrote a somewhat longer set of words about that thought. I edited them down and added the music.

That was an audacious thing to do.  Dave allowed it, something I’m grateful for. Not just because I’m rather fond of the resulting piece, but because this was an early part of my journey to transform other people’s words and to set them among music.

Close listeners, you may hear in the catalog of museum painters the name “VanVliet”. Yes, there was a fine 17^th century Dutch painter by that name. A few hundred years later a Californian added “Van” in front of his family name of Vliet, possibly seeking a connection to that painter. Audacity! Run paint run!

What a writer writes may come to mean something else to a reader, and what that reader thinks can change over time.

Many years ago when I was a young student, I had a mixed reaction to the American poets of the first part of the 20^th century.  I liked some of things found in the typical school anthologies: T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound. But Robert Frost was a sticking point for me: a fuddy duddy, I thought, using an epithet that was created around the time of Frost’s youth to characterize that now old man.

What? You think I’m being unfair to Frost? Well, my opinions changed over time. We’ll return to Frost later in this project.

There were lots of excuses for why I thought that then, but never mind. Our prejudices, our subjective likes and dislikes, will always contain unfairness. One of the joys of art is that there is so much of it, and for everything we dismiss, ignore, or are exposed to only from compulsory education, there are so many other things that we can fall in love with instead. One such example for me was Carl Sandburg, who was Frost’s contemporary. Just as with my young person’s dismissal of Frost, my like for Sandburg was a little hard to explain. One thing I liked was his expression of the commonalities of human experience.

So even as I write here about reading Sandburg, from where I was at that time, and as a particular individual, one of the things I liked about him was that his poems weren’t obsessed with such internal monolog. His poems are almost never about “here is this strange and plausibly interesting thing that happened to me” but instead about those strange and notable things that happen to us.” He helped me form one of principles I’ll try to follow here: “Other People’s Stories.” Even when I write in these blog postings about myself, that’s only a frame for the real art: the music and words in the audio recordings.

As I got older, in my middle ages, I forgot about Sandburg. By and large the world did too, even though during his life Sandburg had reached just about the highest level of celebrity that a writer can reach.

I started to re-discover Sandburg in the past few years. For one thing, I picked up a book of his poems in a little bookstore along Lake Superior and began to remember what had attracted me to him in my youth. And as I started to think about ways that music and words could combine for this project, I began to wonder what Sandburg, that poet who always seemed to have a guitar within reach, could add.

Then, as I was intensively testing my ideas of combining music and spoken words this past winter, David Bowie died. What could I do to respond to that loss? I could write some words myself of course, but instead I found this little piece by Sandburg, published in 1920, that just seemed to sum up something I was thinking as I reflected on all the work that David Bowie had put out over his life.

You should see an player gadget below which will allow you to hear the piece:

On January 11^th I recorded the basic track “live” with The LYL Band, and later that week added the synth strings and finished the mix that is now available here. I hope you enjoy it.

It’s become cold today, in a way that is not unusual in the upper Midwest in January. Throughout the daytime the temperature dropped a degree or so each hour until it’s now three below zero Fahrenheit.

I rode my bike out to breakfast this morning before it broke below zero, but it was still cold enough I had to wear a face mask, which reduces the pleasure of the ride for me. And now tonight, my hearty spouse just came back in from running a short errand, and told me “There’s no reason to go out the rest of this weekend. It’s just too cold.”

I think tonight is a good night for a poem by Carl Sandburg set to music. Carl was Midwesterner, and he knew winter. His Winter Milk is a lovely compressed recounting of his youngest daughter graduating to drinking from a cup. He calls her in the poem by her name, Helga, and as the poem ends with that seemly simple, but wonderful, phrase “dreams with your eyes” I became curious about what Helga in fact dreamed, and did with those dreams, once more that “only a little cup of winter” had touched her lips.

As best as I can figure out, she did plenty. Though she was born at the end of the First World War, she died this month in the winter of 2014 and she lived an active life well into this century. Here’s a link to a piece written a few years back that recounts her life briefly:

Helga Sandburg

So let’s think of Helga and life well spent, and think too of lives now only beginning. We have this human span of living, our redness against winter.

Musically, the setting I wrote for this poem is simple, and though it’s played by the LYL Band, there’s no drums or bass.  As usual, there should be a player gadget that will appear at the bottom of this post so that you can play and hear Winter Milk.

Here’s an audio gadget to play “Winter Milk”  hosted by the newer service that later hosted the Parlando pieces:

Well here’s the ego-bath piece. I wrote the words and the music, played all the instruments except for drums, and I am the reader. In my plan for the Parlando project, this is not my goal, to be the sole reader or musician, nor do I intend to feature my own work entirely; but as a practical matter, it simplifies things considerably to do so.

I can easily settle the rights to material if it’s mine. Shaping the arrangement and feel and getting the musical parts down is easier to schedule when I only need to book myself. Of course I need to put up with my limitations as a musician, which can frustrate me as a composer, but I can often forgive my mistakes as long as I’m the only one in the room, as long as I’m the only one wasting my time or a “take”.

 

Music

As I’ve mentioned in earlier posts here, I’m mostly a guitarist, but electronic synthesizers have always attracted me. I’m attracted to diversity in timbre (almost?) to a fault. When I first heard of electronic synthesizers I could hardly contain my wonder and envy at something that promised to make any sound that could be imagined. You could take a raw electronic wave and shape and filter it any which way. I recall trying to convince my father that this was a breakthrough.

“How is that different from a Hammond organ?” he replied.

That was a more trenchant response than I expected. I replied that it was more flexible, that the choices of what it could do with the waveform were endless.

“Any sound,” that was the tantalizing promise, but practically, I couldn’t afford an electronic syth. One of the reasons guitar grew to dominate American music in the 20^th century is that it’s radically affordable. Costs for electronic synths eventually came down and now they can be sold as software capable of running on low cost personal computers (personal computers, another technology that offers infinite choice).

What have we done with infinity? In one way: not much. EDM and hip-hop composers will sometimes dip into the outer reaches of sound manipulation, and some of that reaches a substantial and welcoming audience willing to shout “WTF was that?” at a particularly out-there break. But for a lot of music, and Bonds is an example, musicians end up using presets, waveforms that usually sound like a nice rolling sine wave with some historically pleasing harmonic intervals emphasized. In other words, not too far from what a Hammond organ does.

In Bonds the keyboard synth part basically doubles and arpeggiates the electric guitar part. It’s a simple trick, but it’s one that I liked.

 

Words

I started writing Bonds while my father was approaching dying. Mostly through accident of occupation I have been able to watch a lot of people die “a natural death.” One metaphor that fits the process in many cases is that dying is like birth in reverse. I don’t mean this, mainly, as some kind of new-agey “circle of life” superficial slogan, but rather that the physical travail, the way autonomic nature takes over the body, has striking similarities.

The words also play off the ambiguous relationship we have with the word “bonds”. We use “bonds” to mean family relationships, and the most close kind of connection between mother and infant (mother-child bonding). But we also use it when describing slavery and servitude (bondservant and the bonds of slavery) and more generally when describing moving beyond a limitation or obligation.

Preparing for a parent’s death is a way to prepare for your own death.

 

As always, you should see a player appear below this, though it may take a bit of time to appear.  Click on the play triangle in the player to hear “Bonds.”