song writing

A poet, Joseph Fasano, has a music recording, and he barely let’s you know about it.

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

My Project says it’s about where music and words meet, yet I’m still surprised and gratified when I encounter literary poets whose connection to music is significant. Most poets enjoy music — hell, most people  do. And the arts of poetry and music have long been siblings. Who can count how many poems have the word “song” in their titles, or how many poems speak of birds or unfeathered human musicians making music? Yet the number of poets who have publicly taken to composing and performing music is limited.

One might think that songs with words, the music most listeners prefer, would be already halfway accomplished by any good poet. In practice, that’s not always the case. A great deal of literary poetry doesn’t work like a song that captures listeners in real-time once in and through their ears.

What you say: “You do this all the time, you take literary poetry and you combine it with music!”  Yes, but I’m choosing what poetry to use, rejecting much more than I even attempt to compose music for. And while I appreciate the audience this project has developed for your open-mindedness and tolerant ears, by Internet standards my Parlando musical pieces have a small audience. Part of that is my voice, which has its limits, and my reach-exceeds-my-grasp musicianship — part of it too may be that I’m no one’s young, good-looking, begging-to-be-discovered talent.

Last time I said I’d leave a fourth example of someone combining poetry with music that I’ve discovered recently for a future post. That one is poet, novelist, teacher and promoter of poetry* Joseph Fasano. In the midst of his very active social media presence this summer, Fasano let it (rather casually) drop that he had publicly released an album of songs, The Wind That Knows the Way.

Fasano is an effective promoter of his own work on Twitter, and he’s amassed (by PoetryTwitter** standards) a sizeable number, thousands, of followers. “Followers” in the social media world is something of a hollow stat. Many in the count are proforma or “polite” followers mutually responding to follows from others, and then there are bots and insubstantial accounts seeking merely to draw attention to their causes & businesses. But when Fasano posts a poem of his or a series of notices about his latest novel, he gets (by literary standards, or mine, whatever I am) lots of eyeballs, re-tweets, and at least a bit of replies and response. By PoetryTwitter standards, people are paying attention to him.

To my knowledge, he’s not followed up to that single notice about his album of songs. For someone showing such effective and continuous effort to promote the other things he’s doing, that’s odd. Even though getting ear-time from me for musical work is tough — composing, recording, mixing the Parlando Project pieces take away from those opportunities — I listened to the album (available on Apple Music, Spotify, and likely some other current music streaming services) within a few days of the announcement.

It’s good, and a particular surprising adds to that goodness. I guess I expected a typical modern musical production — either pop in pretense or a rougher indie one. When someone tells me they have a recording these days, that’s what I’ll most often hear. Instead, the album’s sonic approach is a remarkable duplication of an early 1960s Folkways, Sing Out, folk-venue-appearing guitarist-singer with original songs record. In arrangements and general vibe, it’s like the early records of Gordon Lightfoot, Tim Buckley, Jackson C. Frank, or Eric Anderson.  For musical particularists, let me add I’m not talking about post 1965 records.  At times Fasano’s voice and musical approach reminds me of a less gruff Tim Hardin, but Hardin’s most popular later ‘60s records used highly skilled bandmates to fill out his sound. The Wind Knows the Way is just Fasano and his acoustic guitar, but like the early ‘60s records I’m referring to, his voice is pleasant and his music appealing, while his lyrics express more emotional complexity and range than the average pop song.

Here’s the title song from Fasano’s album for those that don’t use Apple Music, Spotify, et al.

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I don’t know who engineered this recording, but the recording is technically well done too. My favorite cuts on the album are “In My Time,” “The Trouble,”  and “The Wind and the Rain.”  I’m an outsider to Fasano’s creative process, but it appears to me that he already has a “song lyric” mode that both borrows from and differs from his page poetry. These songs don’t come at you with a strange torrent of unusual metaphors with hermetic connections between them. Song lyrics forgive, even arguably benefit, from less originality in tropes, from commonly returned to, simple, elemental words. Many literary poets have trained themselves to avoid those things — and so the Parlando Project sometimes asks the listener to allow more weird words and similes that one hears with most songs. Fasano seems to know that as a songwriter he can write differently for song.

I assume he wrote the music, though the modern streaming services and his sparce posting about the record make this only an assumption. His melodies are fine, not showy, catchy and very singable. Harmonically he shows some variety in this set of songs, but he’s not from the Joni Mitchell or Nick Drake school of advanced guitar composition. This isn’t a pioneering, challenging, or world-changing record, but then too our contemporary world doesn’t have many records like this anymore: a voice, a guitar, and tuneful well-written songs that don’t require anything more than that.

In summary if you are a fan of those early ‘60s records (as I am) or if you would like to hear an intelligent record that usefully uses simplicity and a direct unadorned presentation, there’s a good chance you might like Joseph Fasano’s “The Wind That Knows the Way.”

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*Fasano’s “promoter of poetry” element appeals to me. I’m forming a number of things I’d like to say about his efforts in that area, and if time and fate allow me, there’s maybe yet one more Joseph Fasano post to come this summer.

**Twitter, its faults and its problematic owner, is a current topic that’s launched a thousand takes, which I won’t add to today. I will say that PoetryTwitter is not overly large, but there are interesting people there. Part of what draws me to poetry is that I’m a naturally long-winded, run-on-story kind of person, and poetry’s compression lets me pare that back. The off-the-cuff, short-answer nature of Twitter lets me exercise the same muscle, and it fits my current fate of having few assured blocks of time to compose more complicated music or thoughts.

A Mien to Move a Queen

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

Ready to go on a roundabout trip with today’s blog post? Keep your hands inside the car, we’re going somewhere back to here on another wild-mouse ride.

A couple of things the foot-square vinyl LPs of my youth afforded us: liner notes to help guide us in appreciation of the grooves within, and more commonly as The Sixties progressed, lyric sheets.

Not every record had those lyric sheets. Some artists opposed them on principle—Bob Dylan was one—though to a large degree the reason we got them was due to that hold-out, Mr. Dylan. Dylan revolutionized song lyrics. Before Bob Dylan, no one wrote songs with lyrics like he did.*  After Dylan, a lot of everyones tried their hand at it. In the 21st century when we hear or see lyrics that use an accretion of rapidly changing metaphors and a kaleidoscope of dark-cylinder mental outlooks, we no longer notice that they are Dylanesque. It’s just a mode that songwriters can draw from the common.

Would that have happened if Dylan hadn’t happened? Possibly. And plausibly, only similarly, but distinctly different. Would Richard Farina (sans motorcycle accident) or Leonard Cohen have won a Nobel prize for reshaping a word form?

One argument that it would have still happened was the psychedelic phase of pop music that followed Dylan’s revolution. There, later in The Sixties, opaque and strange lyrics got another push, one that was largely ascribed to intoxicating chemicals which produced visual sequalae and baroque mental turns. Now of course the intoxicated or drug altered poet was already a thing in literary poetry, and the sober cold-water-army songwriter was likely a minority long before “The Sixties.” But Dylan had punctured the membrane that separated those two crowds, and so we got the Canyons of Your Mind school of songwriting too.

Cold Water Army

19th century straight-edge punks on dihydrogen monoxide, usually also anti-slavery and pro-women’s rights too. Comes with a lyric sheet!

Some of it was good, some of it bad—but then we might see lyric sheets to the wind like these:

Oh where are you now
Pussy willow that smiled on this leaf?
When I was alone
You promised the stone
From your heart….
Brandish her wand
With a feathery tongue

Or

A mien to move a queen
Half child—half heroine
An Orleans in the eye
That puts its manner by
For humbler company
When none are near
Even a tear
Its frequent visitor

Or

If you were a bird and lived very high
You leaned on the wind as the breeze came by
Say to the wind as it took you away
“That’s where I wanted to go today”

And

Bedouin tribes ascending
From the egg into the flower
Alpha information sending
States within the heaven shower
From disciples, the unending
Subtleties of river power

The chorus sings: “OK Boomer,” and you can ascribe all of these to chemical traces, wonder about their authors consequent mental damage, or coldly appreciate them as word music, but I’ll come at you from a minority report: the trip’s in your head, not in the drug. I gave up stuff you can smoke (mostly nicotine) around the time I passed the trustworthy border age of 30. I never spun the pill roulette wheel. Needles are for records or loose buttons.

Next stop for the psychedelic bus is some credit for those lyrics above. The first is from Syd Barrett’s post-Pink Floyd song “Dark Globe.”  The second is the beginning of an arresting if mysterious poem by Emily Dickinson. The third is by children’s writer, humorist, and WWI vet A. A. Milne quoted by songwriter Paul Kantner to begin the Jefferson Airplane’s “Ballad of You and Me and Pooneil.”  And the fourth is the start of “Slip Inside this House”  from the 13th Floor Elevators’ Tommy Hall and Roky Erickson.

A little day glo paint or patchouli and Emily Dickinson fits right in when she writes in this mode I think, even if she’s a century too soon, “The Eighteen-The-Sixties.” When I ran into that first stanza of her 1861 poem known by it’s first line “A Mien to Move a Queen”  earlier this month, I was immediately captured by its strange mystery, so much so that I worked out the music you hear today without even knowing that the poem was longer than that one stanza, and I was so entranced by it that the piece you hear today uses only the first and last parts of her poem because I think the middle parts break the mood that first stanza gave me. Want to see the entire poem? The link is here.

The omitted middle section seems playful to me—even as the British would say, twee, but I am of course editing a genius here. I still like my selection as I hope it adds some weight to the whimsey. What was Dickinson on about in this poem? Even living with it for a few days, I’m not entirely sure. The opening stanza is often read as connecting to Joan of Arc. Some read the poem as Emily reflecting on herself and constructing her own persona, and the middle section I omitted gives some evidence of that. Beside it’s general mysteriousness, there are to my mind two pieces of particular heightened sensitivity or even hallucinogenic imagery: the “Orleans in the Eye” line and the sensuous and heard quiet of the “Like Let of Snow” image.

So, we started with musty cardboard squares and moved through two steps of an era of wilder and wilder metaphors sung to music, and finished with Emily Dickinson, sewing 1861 fascicles by whale oil light while listening to Syd Barrett or A. A. Milne feedback on her record player long into the night. In between songs, the needle stops shimmying and she can hear the sound of snow moving across snow outside, filling, and not, summer’s empty room.

The player to hear my musical performance of a selection from Emily Dickinson’s “A Mien to Move a Queen”  is below. Thanks for reading and listening!

 

 

*Yes there are examples that made it into popular or semi-popular music pre-Dylan. Modernist poetry had already done all of these things earlier in the century, and  in addition, a big part of what Dylan used in creating his work were the un-acknowledged Modernists who created the Afro-American blues. None of that disproves the point that Bob Dylan showed that you could do that sort of thing in a proximate way that led to a revolution in the possibilities of song lyrics.