So here it is, our 800^th officially released audio piece from the Parlando Project. Perhaps it’s not representative: it’s not by a dead poet, and unlike almost everything else we do it may not have been written for the page without thought of it being sung. “The Fade”  was written and sung by the leading alternate voice of the Project and all-around inspiration Dave Moore. Dave and I go back to when we were leaving our teenage years. I met him then when he read two pieces in a church: one was his own poem, a cheeky number that mixed eros and agape, and the other was a reading (as if it was page poetry) of Bob Dylan’s “With God on Our Side.”   A decade later we started doing music together as the LYL Band, and some of what we were doing has become melded into what became the Parlando Project.

So, as I think again — is there any way to have a representative Parlando Project piece? Maybe not, and if so, by design. Variety and seeking something unexpected are founding goals.

Dave’s writing here, and our common efforts in making it the song you can hear below, strikes me as something too little done. Rock, whether it’s Rock’n’Roll, punk-rock, Alt-Rock, Indie-Rock, has tended to speak from a youthful perspective. Even the Classic-Rock acts that are still treading the boards at Dave’s or my age hew to topics that would interest those younger than they are. “The Fade”  is far from those common tropes: it’s about the diminishment of aging and particularly about the fogging and loss of memory.

Early this morning I watched an old documentary, a British South Bank Show done in the mid-1980s about the Velvet Underground, a band that was more than a decade defunct at that point, but all the principals (several dead now) were alive then, only entering into middle-age in the 80s, and of a mind to answer questions about the band’s influential work. The topic most covered as they spoke about their former joint project was what made the songs the original lineup put out of lasting importance when the idea of 20-year-old Rock songs having currency seemed novel.

Chief songwriter Lou Reed had it that he wrote about the things he saw around him rather than using the regular subjects of pop songs. True enough, but he chose subjects decidedly less ordinary in song in the times when he wrote them. He specifically wrote about things that frightened people enough that they left them out of the songs they wished to listen to: drug dependency, gay and gender issues, less-vanilla sexuality, and mental variations. And then several others, including the band’s PhD, Sterling Morrison, took pains to note that Reed presented those stories without editorial comment or stance, without sentimentality.

I’ll note now, that later in his career, past the times of that now 40-year-old documentary, Reed wrote one of the few Rock albums about aging and its disabilities: Magic and Loss.  It still stands pretty much alone. It’s also unlikely that even the adventurous readers and listeners that this Project has have heard it.

Dave and I recorded “The Fade”  this past spring. When I talked to Dave this morning we exchanged info on folks we know, folks our age or even a bit younger, who are moving into assisted living or who are suffering from dementia. I don’t know, there are probably a few songs about how sad Alzheimer’s and the like are, probably some songs that try to mitigate it with a chorus that mixes in the memories the sufferer no longer maintains. Dave’s song isn’t like those songs — if they exist — and I’m glad I helped make his song exist, and that I get to share it with you today.

This is the sheet Dave handed me with brief scribbled chord notes on the day we recorded this. As you listen to the performance you may see that he did a masterful job of revising his typed words. I think the song gained power from the verses he left out.

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You can hear that recording of “The Fade”  with the audio player below. I think Dave gets a bit of the VU-ara John Cale sound with the keyboards in it. I’m using feedback in it too, but not quite as the Velvet’s did. What? No player visible? No, you didn’t forget it along with where your keys are or what you came into the room for, it’s just not shown in some ways of reading this blog.  You can use this highlighted link as an alternative.

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