song

Robbing an Orchard

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Halloween is a multi-valent holiday. There’s the cluster of religious and spiritual holidays of prayer and remembrance for the dead, the holiday of horror and monsters, the children’s festival of costumes and small candy-bars, and so on. I went looking for some supernatural poems that might be fun to present this week, and I came upon this short poem by British Romantic-era figure Leigh Hunt that was begging to be sung – after all, the full title of his poem was written down as “Song of the Fairies Robbing an Orchard.”  It’s light fantasy, but then the news has stolen all the horrors.

Was I thinking of a particular orchard as I worked on this piece? There were two apple trees just to the side of the house I grew up in, but they were past their prime by my time. I remember they bore small and not very appetizing fruit, and sometime around when I left home they were cut down. I recall my sisters and I climbing in the low and scraggly branches when barely more than toddlers – but it wasn’t exactly that pair of trees. I was probably thinking more of an orchard I have never seen: the apple trees that are part of the homestead “kitchen garden” that blogger Paul Deaton often writes about.  I also probably visualized Deaton’s apple trees and his stories of work with them when I performed Robert Frost’s great harvest-time poem “After Apple Picking”  a few years back. Deaton’s a regular reader of this Project’s blog – so Paul, if you read this, and when you next check you are missing some of your apples, you’ll know who tipped off the fay. Well, the more they take, the fewer you need to harvest and put up.

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An engraved drawing of Leigh Hunt by J. Hayter

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Leigh Hunt is one of those Zelig or Forrest Gump like characters of the 19th century British Romantic-era. He knew and worked with all the big three Romantics: Byron, Shelley, and Keats. Hunt was key in launching Keats poetic career, was there for Shelley’s death by drowning, and had a tempestuous relationship (I suspect the most common kind) with Byron. As a poet himself, he’s decidedly minor, but this opus’ mischievous whimsy charmed me. I love the characterization tidbits in it: the fairies peeping in at pious humans worshiping in chapels, and their admission that they don’t even care that much for apples, but are in it more for the challenge of stealing them.

The 12 string guitar as played by Leadbelly 800

Come to think of it, Julius Lester probably has as least as high a Zelig/Forest Gump score as Leigh Hunt

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For music to sing Hunt’s poem, I used a 12-string acoustic guitar. Last week while commenting on a poem I’d read online, its author asked if I’d read Julius Lester. An old man, my steel-trap memory has corrosion problems, but the name rang a rusty bell. I remember seeing Lester’s byline in the Village Voice back in the Seventies, and I had some vague recall of him working on radio. But poetry? No, I had no idea he wrote any poetry. I hit a quick web search, and Julius Lester as it turns out was a multi-hyphenate: author of many books in several fields, social activist, college professor, photographer, critic, broadcasting host, and folk-scare-era folk singer. Reading about him I realized that I had owned one of his books: the early Sixties instruction manual “The 12-String Guitar as played by Leadbelly.”   I’ve long been interested in this 12-string variation of the great folk instrument of my country: the steel-string, flattop acoustic guitar. Leadbelly was a pioneering performer on that instrument.*  I can’t say that today’s piece is fully in his style, but it’s the work of someone who’s heard Leadbelly and some of his more apt descendants. You can hear the short song I call “Robbing an Orchard”  with the audio player gadget below. What, have the fairies run off with the audio player too? Naughty fairies! I give you this alternative enchantment then: a highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*I heard a counselor at a kids summer camp play a 12-string in the early part of The Sixties around the time that the 12-string-featuring song “Walk Right In”  made it to #1 on the Billboard Hot 100.  I note in the linked wiki article on that song, that in 1962 12-string guitars were so scarce that when they decided to use two 12-strings playing together for an even more powerful sound, they had to wait for a second one to be made by the Gibson guitar company. Lester’s book, co-authored with no-less-than Pete Seeger, was a rare publication on how to play this instrument.

Minnesota’s Twin Cities was something of a hotbed of 12-string players in the 20th century, and shortly after I moved there, I bought my first 12-string, a cheap one sold as a sideline in a Musicland record store.

Beautiful Justice

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

This poem by the French Surrealist poet Paul Éluard wandered into my view earlier this month, and it seems like it, and my work translating it into English, slots right in between my late wife’s poem I performed last time and this Saturday’s planned #NoKings protests planned around America.

I’ve mentioned earlier this year that in my youth I became interested in the French Modernists because I had gotten the impression that they were a key force in English-language Modernism. Later, from my work for the Parlando Project, I came to learn that this is only partially so. I wasn’t far into the Project when I realized that there was in London before WWI (at that time still the center of English-language literature) a “reverse British Invasion” going on as crucial as the 1960’s British Invasion that helped revitalized rock’n’roll music. Americans: Pound, Eliot, H.D., Frost, and even the important British Imagist theorist T. E. Hulme who had spent some expanded-sky time in Canada, were all there shaping up a make-it-new freshness. Now it’s also true that Eliot and Pound were fond of some French poets,* but as I later traced those French poets with the greater resources I could obtain this century, I found that some of those French writers were taken with Whitman and Poe.

Still, the French Symbolists, and the more internationally-sourced but eventually Paris-centered Dada and Surrealist poets were  important. Having only High School French it was hard for me to absorb a great deal of French Modernist poetry, but what I was able to find in translation, or painstakingly translate myself in the 1970s was an important influence on me.

It was soon enough that I came upon Paul Éluard then, who as far as the French were concerned, was a big deal, often rated as the greatest Surrealist poet. Well, ratings are silly – ought to remain so – but his poetry had striking imagery and was often concerned with some combination of erotic love and anti-fascist politics. In the 1970s, the first attracted me primarily, while the latter seemed a noble history lesson.

Ha ha! History, it seems, has jumped out of the past, and the anti-fascist Éluard is due for a revival – and so I welcomed seeing his poem “Bonne Justice”  appear on BlueSky in its original French. I could make out enough of it (my French is even more scant than it was in my 20s) to want to do a translation and possible performance.

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I don’t know why his handwritten manuscript uses a circular format. Éluard may be trying to convey the eternal in natural law. Cynics might read “circling the drain.”  Young moderns seeing this would need to start with the translation task of reading cursive.

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Translation moved quickly. Vocabulary issues are easily handled by computer these days, and online sources help to drill down on a word’s flavors.**   Éluard’s language here is not fancy, there are no obscure or archaic words, and he seems to me to be speaking to a general audience, not artistic theorists or avant-garde cadres. I proceeded as I normally do when translating from a literal gloss: first finding the images and what word choices will most clearly illuminate them, while giving care in preserving the “music of thought” in how the poem introduces the images and sets them off in the context of each other – though then I will take a hand at using a modern English word order and sentence structure that has some new music of sound in its new language. I rarely try to make rhyming translations. This poem’s word-music retains Éluard’s original repetitions, which I think are sufficient.

Beautiful Justice

A chord sheet presented so that others can sing this fresh song created in English from Éluard’s poem.

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So, my “Beautiful Justice”  keeps all of Éluard’s parallels, though I made one set of considered changes, both for the benefit of myself as the performer of the result, and from my reading of Éluard’s intent. This poem seems to be speaking of qualities and situations of mankind as a whole, but he uses “hommes” (men) for this, and in another case a masculine noun for brothers (“frères”) which I rendered as “family.” I decided these gendered words were outdated conventions that would benefit from translation. Yes, I was thinking too of my late wife’s poem, “In Another Language,”  performed here last time, who in those same 1970’s was dreaming a genderless language.

It’s just a single acoustic guitar and my rough-hewn voice for this performance. If one wanted to remember this poem, now song, when marching on October 18th, it could be portable that way, though I don’t think my own performance is a stirring march – it’s more a reminiscent prayer. Prayer is focused speech. Song adds intensity of breath and music to speech. Marching and standing together, as simple as that is, adds action from our bodies (even this old man’s body). There may be more going forward that we will be called to do – who can tell with accuracy – but I think it’s not a bad start to be praying in song for those laws old/yet new, those always perfecting laws that protect us, the laws that aren’t capricious decrees to persecute and sever us.

You can hear my song in English made from Paul Éluard’s French poem with the graphical audio player below. No player? This law says you’re permitted to click on the highlighted link and it will open a new tab that will have its own audio player.

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*Core Imagist F. S. Flint, working-class-born, but a native Londoner, worked hard to promote modern French poetry in this pre-WWI era for one.

**Though an online French dictionary I use for that had a service outage while I was working, and I began to dismay that I’d given away to charity my large old French-English dictionary volume.

Dorothy Parker’s “Portrait of the Artist”

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

Is Dorothy Parker a humorist or a poet? If choosing one, do we diminish the other? Wikipedia leads with the latter – which surprises me a little, because if you’d asked me in the midst of my literary engagements decades ago, I’d have replied the former. The poetic literary cannon doesn’t mind wit, but it downrates those suspected of making humor the main point of their work. And there’s the matter of how it was presented: Parker published in general periodicals (though at a time when they were still engaged more than now with literary poetry). Her collections are filled with short verses sharply focused on catching the busy glossy page-turner a century ago. Are they the poetry equivalent of a New Yorker cartoon – some insidery cultural memeability, yes – but not meant to be judged alongside fine art with substantial complexity?

What if we were to read her in translation, and she was a writer from a culture and times we were substantially distanced from? Imagine a poem like the one I’ll perform today not as a 1920’s American work by a writer whose lifetime overlapped my own, but as a fragment of Sappho or a poem taken from the pen-work of Li Po? Might we see something else?*

Here are some things I see looking at today’s poem this way as I worked to set it to music and perform it. The first is some awkward syntax, some of which could be “poetese,” that mangling of normal word order that is reaching for a sense that this is “special” speech cast in some archaic or fancified manner. In humorous verse this is often used as part of the joke: you were expecting some grand edifice of beauty and truth – dressed in this artificial, inflated manner – and instead you get a pratfall? Ha ha! This still works as a humor tactic, though its sharpness is dulled by the relative absence of literary poetry in our culture. Needing to reach the rhyme is part of the humorous charm of light verse – forced or outlandish rhymes are laugh points. Parker doesn’t go Ogden-Nash-hard on this here, but I smiled when the “rankles” and “ankles” chime goes off in the first verse.

An allied tactic is the use of some unusual words, another high-falutin stance that aims to make the pratfall funnier. I actually had to fix my recording of this. Having recently worked on Yeats famous apocalypse “The Second Coming,”  I actually sang “And gyre my wrists and ankles.” “Gyve” is to bind or tie, “gyre” is to move in a circle or spiral. I don’t know, maybe I was visualizing RFK Jr’s falcons besetting the poem’s speaker with fetters in their beaks and claws.**

Portrait of the Artist

Here’s a chord sheet for the song I made of Parker’s poem

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Also noted when dealing with this poem: the situation set out in the poem is extreme, and taken literally it’s a portrait of bondage, exile, or imprisonment. If parts of this survived as a Sappho fragment, I can see this being decoded erotically. Scholarship and kink cross-over more often these days – and the poem’s imagery is specifically sensual – but don’t put that in your scholarly paper until you do further research.

And here’s the last, most important thing I noticed: I’ve been living this poem recently. First off, a sidelight on the manner in which I found Parker’s poem: I have been going through books and disposing of most of them. My wife is distressed by the number of books and recordings I’ve accumulated over my life. Little difference most sit shelved at the edges of rooms, they are clutter,  and she believes that the space could be used otherwise. At this point in my life, I can see this issue another way: I’m of an age that there’s no world enough and time to imagine going back and rereading or reading the majority of them. Books that I once treasured as reference materials are likely obsoleted by the Internet. For example, I’m torn about keeping my thick hardbound French to English dictionary which was a companion when I started translating French poetry years ago. I’m keeping most of my books of poetry, and some on music, as I intend to keep doing this Project. Novels and general non-fiction? To be carried away.***  Is it clutter? Among my small segment of humanity, I’m not alone in being comforted by books and music surrounding me, and the irrationality of there being more than I can consume in whatever time I have left as an aged person doesn’t change this, but having accumulated an overwhelming amount submerges some books. Going through my books I was surprised to find a 1930’s printing of Parker’s collected poems. I don’t remember buying it, though I did spend time and a dollar or two in any used bookstore that had a hardbound poetry section during my youth.

Last week I read through the first segment of Parker’s book, work that is now in the public domain, and it’s there I found “Portrait of the Artist.”  I’ve mentioned recently that my opportunities to create new work here has become constrained. I’ll spare you the logistical details, but in the early years of this Project I had the five workdays of the workweek to research, compose, and record. The hundreds of pieces I produced in the first half of the Parlando Project’s run say I used that time productively – but if I was to be honest, I’d report that there were days I just blew off, knowing that the next day would be just as good to start or complete some Parlando work.

Now? I can’t tell for certain when I can record, I just know there will be fewer hours available. My energy level as I age is lower, and my old body no longer finds itself able to sit in an upright office chair for hours at a time. I do more of my research and reading on a tablet, which however marvelous, is a poorer environment for complex work with its constrained single smaller screen. I’m still able to play my instruments when I can use my studio space, though I need more time there practicing or simply blowing off the stress of life with a plugged-in electric guitar moving air around me. There are some mornings when my wife, being helpful, will tell me I’ll be able to work on recording for a few hours that day. I’ll think: I don’t have any new poem-texts selected, or the basis of a musical setting ready to be realized, and my energy is low. What can I do (anything?) with that time? And if I can’t do anything, when will the next chance come?

Whine. Whine. What else is the Internet for – complaint and its opposite, the carefully curated presentation of one’s perfectly actualized life to be envied. In Apollonian distance I can clearly see that to have the opportunity and the wonderous technology to do creative work, is a historical exception of the first order.

But then artists, many of whom are toward the introverted side, are often like the one in Parker’s poem: always swearing they wish they had the solitude and freedom from the distractions of life. And then the poet faces the blank page, the composer the silence in the room, their muse taunts them “What’ya got?” and the artist mumbles “That’s your job,” knowing that there’s really no one else in the room, just as they wanted.

There are lots of things in life that are temptations for self-pity or abuse. Sometimes the de profundis answer is “Ha ha.” That doesn’t mean it isn’t serious. The consequences for this troubled encounter with the chance to be creative, and perhaps to come up dry, have killed and crippled.

Simeon the Stylite 600

Simeon the Stylite has figured out how to get some work done without Robert Benchley, FPA, George S. Kaufman, Alexander Woollcott, et al.

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All this feeds into the choices I made in the musical performance of Parker’s poem. I treated it no differently than I would have a “serious” literary poem by Parker’s contemporaries Elinor Wylie or Sara Teasdale, though I believe there are a couple of times I’m subtly winking as the singer seeks the situation of a desert-steeple mendicant. The fool is funny – still is when the situation is serious. This is often the lonely place of business for creativity: weighted on commercial and logical scales, it’s absurd that we do it – even, or especially, alone in that room with silences and tabla rasa.

You can hear this performance of Dorothy Parker’s “Portrait of the Artist”  with the audio player gadget below. What, is any such gadget gyved up somewhere? Well then, I provide this highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*We can prosecute mootings on more recent American authors too. I’ve recently written here on the difficulties in deciding how often Emily Dickinson means to make a humorous/satiric point in her poems vs. how often she’s an earnest transported romantic. A mixture? Likely, but what are the proportions? What are we missing if we miss the joke?

**Ah, the powers of overdubbing. I fixed that word-mistake ex-post-facto.

***I’m fond of the term “Death Cleaning” for this process. Time’s winged chariot is heading for Goodwill. While I’m blessed to be healthy for my age, I can no longer fool myself into thinking that someday I’ll get around to this, and that…and that, and that.

Tis whiter than an Indian Pipe

~ Frank Hudson ~ 3 Comments

Emily Dickinson poems are easy to set to music, but they can be more difficult for the performer. Having absorbed Protestant hymn books and folk songs in my youth, the common meter/ballad meter stanza Dickinson easily falls into makes it especially easy for me to find music for them. But then the composer me turns things over to the necessary performer me – and in that role I’m left with the question: what is she on about in this poem? What’s the attitude to the material she’s presenting: is she playful, joking, earnestly existential, or some hard to assay mixture of those approaches?

Here’s an example of how this dichotomy works out. In August I completed a setting and performance of a Dickinson poem, “Tis whiter than an Indian Pipe,”  inspired, as I was with the recent D. H. Lawrence “Bavarian Gentians”  poem, by a flower that my wife had seen and photographed on one of her nature walks. Working rapidly on that song setting I went with a casual judgement that this is a playful poem, a little portrait or riddle around the entirely pale white Indian Pipe plant. It has no green chlorophyll at all – doesn’t need it, it doesn’t use photosynthesis to get its nutrition, instead feeding parasitically off deep soil fungi. Dickinson may have been especially drawn to the plant (she had an avid horticultural interest throughout her life) because it’s, well, so weird. As the poem proceeds, my quick understanding was Dickinson commenting on its oddities. That would be consistent with other short nature portraits-in-verse that she wrote.

Ghost Pipe flowers photo by Heidi Randen 1080

If they are symbol of the afterlife, they aren’t immortal. The Indian Pipe/Ghost Pipe flowers are short-lived, and this one, near the end of its life, has lost its pipe-bowl shape.

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Now in September, I looked again at the poem, and I can see the primary mistake I made leading me to understand this poem too soon. The poem begins “Tis whiter than an Indian Pipe.” Duh! While the things she writes in the rest of the poem could  be characteristics of an impressionistic plant description, she’s declaring right off that the poem isn’t about this unusual plant, though it will make use of the comparable flower as a symbol. Here’s a link to see the text of the poem and a scan of the handwritten manuscript including alternative words Dickenson considered.

What is the thing she’s sort of riddling us to guess is her subject? Some kind of immortal soul, some extension of being or consciousness past death. Oblivious to this at first, in this new understanding Dickinson’s poem is a good pairing with Lawrence’s “Bavarian Gentians” – each poem is examining the prospects of that “undiscovered country” past death, illuminated by a late-summer/autumn flower. This poem’s speaker (likely Dickinson herself) is unsure of such a thing: it’s colorless in the shade, makes no sound, is not something all can see. Belief in it might well be romantically exaggerated, “hyperbole.” This pale uncertainty continues, an ongoing “drama” about the possibility of an ongoing plot for our souls, instead of a tragedy’s concluding act.*

The original music and performance I created was lighthearted. In this new understanding, Dickinson is still playing, balancing thoughts about immortality, riddling with mysteries without solution. My new music would have a stronger “drone” center to depict on the necessarily faith or grounding in the unanswered question here. The core instrument in this recorded performance is my old Seagull Folk acoustic guitar, a smaller-bodied cedar-topped instrument, brown and worn as the leaf-beds the Indian Pipe might sprout from. For the drone grounds I played a tanpura, an Indian of a more correct than Columbian geography instrument. For drums, I stayed with the emerging South Asian sounds and played tablas with only the simplified technique I have for them.**

I liked how the new version came out. You can hear it with the audio player below. No player to be seen? Well, “not any voice denotes it here” – some ways of viewing the blog suppress the audio player gadget – but it be not tragedy, I supply this highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*Oddly, for all her oft-expressed gothic touches, she doesn’t use one of the symbolic plant’s other common names which include “Ghost Pipe,” and “Corpse Flower.” Perhaps the name she used was entirely predominate in her time and place? A supposition is that the plant’s long stem topped with a bowl-shaped flower is reminiscent of a ceremonial native American smoking pipe. By 1879, First Nations people were largely absent from Amherst (see also this extraordinarily brutal Robert Frost poem) – and to call this haunting plant “Indian” may have had a cultural or specific undercurrent for Dickinson.

1879 – I note this is a late Dickinson poem. Dickinson was very prolific in the early 1860s, but by this time in her life the number of poems we have of hers tails off. She’d gone through the death of her father, and her mother’s crippling stroke, and all the national casualties of the American Civil War – all occasions for considering if death was really the end. She wouldn’t have known this, but the 49-year-old poet would be dead herself in 7 years, but with the ghostly flowers we have within her poetry I can make customs of the air by singing them.

**Just to be clear – my studio space is cluttered enough – I used virtual instruments (computer databases of all the sampled notes and articulations of the actual instruments) to allow my MIDI guitar and little plastic piano keyboard to play those sounds.

I Should Turn to Be – Jimi Hendrix Tribute 2025

~ Frank Hudson ~ 3 Comments

Thinking of the late Nineties, I think of the Sixties, 1970, and then the end of the 19th century. When you’re an old man, that’s the kind of swift mobility you retain.

It’s difficult to comprehend how short the careers of some musical figures from The Sixties™ were. This month I watched a documentary on Jeff Buckley, the charismatic late 20th century singer. One of the challenges of his foreshortened life was to deal with the artistic inheritance and distraction of being the son of another singer, one of those Sixties™ artists, Tim Buckley.*

Here’s something I think remarkable, comparing those two. Jeff Buckley was two years older than Tim when he died at age 30. Jeff left one full-length recording, his extraordinary, eclectic debut album Grace.** Tim, beginning in the onrushing Sixties, and continuing through its continuance in the early Seventies when rock performers were increasingly hobbled by drugs of dependence, released nine LPs! Nine,  moving between three  distinct personal stylistic eras in eight years.

Neither Buckley ever made it to the toppermost of the poppermost, but obscured by their creative and commercial hegemony, posthumous fame, and trailing post-group recordings, consider that even the Beatles band was a living presence for only seven years in America.

Back to the Buckleys – there’s a sharp line ending in their careers: Tim died of an overdose of drugs stronger than he expected, Jeff drowned in river currents during an unwise spontaneous swim. We may expect our artists to be audacious – risks come with that.

Which brings me to today’s annual duty, where I mourn the death on September 18th 1970 of my patron saint of The Sixties™ music martyrs, Jimi Hendrix.***  Time and again in these observances here I’ve tried to make the case that Hendrix – the rightfully proclaimed pioneer in expanding the electric guitar’s vocabulary – is underrated as a songwriter, and particularly as a lyricist. I say this, even if I believe such things shouldn’t be reduced to a rating, because his strengths there are just so under-considered. In the pursuance of this goal, I’ve done things like make the lyrics of “Third Stone from the Sun”  audible, and illustrated in a video the scenario of “Up from the Skies,”  but today I’m going to link the lyrics of one of Hendrix’s greatest compositions to a trope not of the 20th century, but more the 19th.

Are you ready for:

Mermaids.

In his song “1983 A Merman I Should Turn to Be”  Hendrix skillfully unravels a Science-Fantasy story without much wasted exposition: in a troubled world beset by wars and violence, a couple of lovers enter the ocean, find they can breathe underwater, and return to the salty brine from which we all have emerged through birth or evolution. Hendrix’s first-order inspiration for this tale is likely mid-century SF writing which he had been reading from childhood – but his imagination made this material his own and he should be remembered as an early Afro-Futurist – but let’s trace those SF stories he read back: the SF pulp writers were still following on from the Verne/Gernsback/H. G. Wells/William Morris late 19th century genesis of their genre.****

This week I went looking for literary mermaid/merman poems, thinking that a possible route into my Hendrix memorial this year. Surprise, there’s a lot of them!   I don’t have a theory as to why this would be, but a great many British Isles poets had a mermaid poem somewhere in their collected works from around the turn of their centuries. In some of the poems the sea maidens are depicted as sirens, luring men to danger or soggy death in their arms, and this kind of naughty sex/death double feature might be a good fit with Victorian decadence. Then there was the highly successful Little Mermaid  story of Hans Christian Anderson, but that’s an opposite plot from most of the poems: Anderson’s heroine wants to flee from the sea to the land, not from the land to the sea, and the mermaid is the story’s protagonist, not the landlubber male poets hearing sea maidens. Baring the example of Hendrix’s song, mermaids in my lifetime more likely follow Anderson fairy tale path onto dry land.

What turned the tide with this poetic trope? It might be T. S. Eliot’s famous use of sea-girl sirens in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,”  his first prominent poem. The satiric uncommitted romanticism of the poem’s Prufrock concludes with human voices awakening us from the sea girl romantic/decadent dream. We’ve largely followed suit ever since.

So, for a text for today’s piece I decided to weave together sections of five mermaid poems from that earlier era,***** but I am putting them in the context of a memorial to Hendrix, on the anniversary of Hendrix’s death, which came to him slept-under from unfamiliar pills, drunk on wine – when and where the man who dreamed a tender escape into the sea died on dry land in the middle of London. He was 27, yes too young, only four years in the general public’s eye, yet he had created his revolution for the guitar, and four albums of songs, songs I maintain that are good enough to be remembered alongside the guitar playing. What mighty things to have done in such a short time.

I Should Turn to Be

Selections from mermaid/siren poems by Tennyson, Beckett, De la Mare, Symonds, Eliot, and Yeats were woven together to make the lyrics to today’s musical piece.

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My song “I Should Turn to Be”  had to be created in a small amount of studio-space time, but I’m reasonably happy how it turned out. I was aiming for some dynamic range in this tale of doomed fantasies underwater, and I was able to get there. I haven’t been able to play electric guitar much for simple enjoyment this month, but even the focused playing to realize this composition felt good, so forgive the indulgence in two guitar solos – The Sixties™ would forgive me. You can hear the performance with the audio player below? Has any such player slipped beneath the waves? It’s just that some ways of reading this blog suppress showing the player gadget, so I provide this highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*I recommend that film, It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley.  For a music documentary about a male artist, it’s remarkable that it relies largely on testimony from women. Yes, like most music documentaries it avoids talking in detail about music – and the musical examples are short clips, which may not convey enough of the man’s art for the uninitiated – but the emotional narrative is richer for this uncommon choice by the makers.

Tim abandoned Jeff’s mother to focus on making his first record and subsequent touring. Jeff broke up with his partner in the midst of trying to launch his own career, though without a child being involved in his case. Questions about his father bedeviled Jeff, understandably – more so in that both père and fils were taken with a strong ethos of living in the moment. Still, it’s hard not to note the similarities in the two singer’s unbounded singing, and the two even sounded a likeness when describing their dedicated artistic drives.

**In Jeff’s defense, his career as a recording artist was only 4 years, having not made his first recordings until his mid-20s. And the range of musical approaches he assayed over fewer recordings is comparable to his father’s.

***The tight cluster of the Jimi, Jim, Janis deaths in 1970 gave rise to that gothic “27 Club” thing. I’d be risking a lot of “who’s that?” shrugs if I’d say that I myself am probably more like Al Wilson, the singer/guitarist/folklorist who died on September 3, 1970, also at age 27. But Hendrix is my choice because he was as much a poet as Jim Morrison, and doubly an artist when he played his guitar.

****Reviving 19th century Victorian fashions and art was a significant part of the English psychedelic era. This undercurrent too might have led Hendrix to compose his merman/mermaid song.

*****One couplet introduces the piece that isn’t from a late 19th-early 20th century poem. Those two lines are from the most-covered Tim Buckley song, lyrics written by his high school friend and collaborator Larry Becket for “Song for a Siren” – another late contribution to the mermaid genre Tim Buckley released in 1970. It’s a haunted song, and it takes only a little dose of gothic romanticism to wonder if Jeff Buckley heard the sirens beckoning from out across that fatal river in Memphis. See, I wasn’t wasting your time with that Buckley stuff at the beginning, it’s a plan.

The Cherry Blossom Wand

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Here’s a poem by a poet you may not know of. I certainly didn’t until early this year when I saw a note about the later life of Anna Wickham on Bluesky, read the linked article (which I recommend), and made a note to look into her poetry.

Well, there’s life and my disorderly path – it wasn’t until this month that I did so. As a page poet Wickham may not capture you easily, depending on your expectations. I read a 1921 American collection that combined two books of hers published earlier in England: 1915’s The Contemplative Quarry  and 1916’s The Man with a Hammer.*   She wrote almost entirely in short formats, there are quite a few 8-or-fewer line poems that can remind one of Emily Dickinson poems of similar length. Short formats can be favored by those who dash off poems in an otherwise occupied life, and this may be the case here – but at least on first read through, there’s a different general attitude from the American genius. Dickinson to my reading is often playful in her poem’s argument, and even when writing of subjugation or from inside a gothic fantasia, she generally seems in control – and she was after all a member of a family that had achieved local prominence and financial stability. Wickham’s background seems less secure and more bohemian, and from 1906-1929 she was married to a man who is reported to have viewed her poetry as a sequalae of mental illness.** This horrid situation is reflected in the poetry – there’s ample counter-punching wit and protest deployed against the patriarchy in these two collections – but that also presents a certain closed-in feeling. Some of these poems take on the manner of quickly-whispered-where-he-can’t-overhear asides to friends from a woman in an abusive relationship. From extant drafts we know Dickinson had, and took, time to revise her verse, and she often strikes me as a talented structured improviser. Wickham (so far) seems to me to be more a jotter of quick poems from the first-thought-best-thought practice – biographical scraps I’ve read reinforce that conclusion*** – and some (most?) of her papers that might show more about work in progress do not survive.

older Anna Wickham in her kitchen

Anna Wickham in 1946. She made her living by turning her Hampstead home into a rooming house. Still asserting herself, she famously took umbrage with someone declaring: “You’d better retract, my good man. I may be a minor poet, but I’m a major woman.”

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There’s a good chance my appreciation of her work will increase, but I also didn’t get a sense of compelling word-music on first reading, and that’s a quality that can attract me to a poem even before I understand it – which makes the first poem of hers that I’ll present today a bit of an anomaly. “The Cherry Blossom Wand” is  musical, and she even put a notation beside its title on the published page “To be sung.” I have no knowledge if she wrote music for it, or sang it,**** but that sort of thing is taunting the Parlando Project!

I see the poem as being a multifaceted account of beauty or love of beauty (and if we extend that, to love itself). The poem starts with its refrain stanza, telling us a branch of cherry blossoms is a “wand” that can do some kind of merciless bewitching magic. I like the refrain’s final line “a beautiful thing that can never grow wise.” Ambiguously: either we never wise up to the thrall of beauty, or that experience, time and wising up removes the beauty.

Blossoms are of course famously temporary, as the first non-refrained verse reminds us. On the page, Wickham only puts the refrain first and last, but since songs favor repetition, I put an extra refrain between the two verses.

The final verse before the ending refrain contrasts the merciless enchantment of the blossom wand with the “kind” removal of the bewitching beauty, and the verse then ends with its own internal refrain saying that the transience of beauty and time is eternal. There’s no change that can change that change, and the mercy is that we are not taunted long with its brevity.

As a whole then: bittersweet.

Cherry Blossom Wand

Chord sheet for the song I took as commanded by Wickham’s note on the page

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Musically I got to play my nylon string guitar for the first time in a while. Every time I play that variety of guitar, I’m reminded of the cheap J C Penny nylon string guitar that I bought off the after-Christmas sale table in late 1974 to begin to learn how to play. Classical guitar players may be appalled, but I currently play my nylon string with a pick, which is wrong – but it’s how Willie Nelson does it.

You can hear my performance of Anna Wickham’s “The Cherry Blossom Wand”  with the audio player gadget below. Has some merciless hand removed any such player?  This highlighted link will bud a new tab with its own audio player then.

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*Some accounts say Anna Wickham is more read and studied in the U.S., which would be the reverse of some poets I present here, most notably Welsh poet Edward Thomas who has some best-loved poems in Britain, and is hardly known in America. Influential 20th century American anthologist Louis Untermeyer thought enough of Wickham’s work to praise and include it. The Feminist-Modernist angle probably occasioned some interest too, and you can read her as a predecessor to Sylvia Plath in some of Wickham’s themes. Before she had a career as a best-selling novelist, American poet Erica Jong wrote a couple of poems dedicated in part to Wickham: this one, and this one.

**Wickham was eccentric. The linked article that sparked my interest has accounts that make that eccentricity seem charming, but depression seems to have figured in her life too. The complexities of our mental wiring and biochemicals mixed in with the stress of her life makes remote historical diagnosis chancy of course. The close publication of the two books of poetry that I read as a combined collection coincided with her husband going off to WWI, giving her some increased autonomy. Give a moment to imagine Edwin Starr singing a revised song: “War!! Uhh! What is it good for? Giving Anna Wickham a chance to see her poetry in print. Good God! Say it again!”

***The account of her reading one of her poems in public and presenting it with ““Rubbish, but there it is”” indicates this approach.

****After a childhood family sojourn to Australia, Wickham returned to England to take study in performing arts, particularly a singing career, though that doesn’t mean she composed music. The Cherry Blossom Wand”  has been set to music as Art Song before, at least this once 25 years ago.

She mentioned abandoning any search for musicality in her poetry in one of the poems I recall reading this month. This could be part of Modernist distain for frippery, or a practical act of triage for a poet without enough time. She’s a contrast to her American contemporaries Sara Teasdale, Elinor Wylie and Edna St. Vincent Millay who wrote very musical verse even as they wrote about Modernist concerns.

Sedition. A poem which isn’t, and that’s a point it’s making

~ Frank Hudson ~ 3 Comments

Edmund Vance Cooke was a Canadian poet. At least I think he was. There’s not much on his life I can find, and sometimes his last name is rendered as “Cook.” His sparce Wikipedia entry says he was born in what was then known as West Canada in 1866, and back around the beginning of the 20th century he wrote a type of popular published poetry in a style that has largely died out. Wikipedia calls his genre “inspirational verse,” and some of it I’ve found is that: paeans to earnest striving and social virtues that now-a-days would be reduced to short easily-sharable quotes or the captions on “hang in there” motivational/affirmation posters. But there are indications that social criticism was also part of his repertoire, and this poem I perform today has some bite to it. Though written in 1917, I felt I should work up some music and sing it as a freshly-made song in 2025.

One of the things that irks me most this year is the outrageous lying by my country’s mad despot and his fawning courtiers. I can’t say for sure what drives all these fabulations and alibies across his administration. For some personalities a lie is a demented reflex, a neurological tic. Others spout the lies as a cold tactical choice of propaganda, with a sense that it will gain them some rewards. A more generous assumed motivation: that by saying this or that is so, when it’s not, may help manifest the thing not yet in existence – and this is akin to what affirmations invoke for personal improvement. Alas, most of the things not yet in existence that our current regime members are manifesting by statement are ugly, cruel things. We shudder – while considering the exaggerations, we fear they might not stay lies for long.

Today’s Cooke poem “Sedition”  is a statement of the countervailing powers of truth. It reminds me of an anonymous poem about truth that was widely printed in the same era as Cooke was writing, “Truth Never Dies.”   Five years ago in this Project, I presented that poem and wrote about what I found about who had republished it. This link will be of interest if you wonder about that. Though it’s a statement without evidence, it’s not impossible that Cooke was the author of the much reprinted “Truth Never Dies”  poem – but “Truth Never Dies”  is a more religious and spiritual poem than “Sedition.”   I composed music for the former with acoustic guitar and strings presenting it as a firm, but gentle prayer. The latter, Cooke’s poem, is more sardonic, defiant, even militant – and so I decided to crank up some electric guitars for it.

Sedition

Here’s a chord sheet for my version of Cooke’s poem. I won’t take responsibility if you decide to play and sing it yourself, –  that might make you part of a conspiracy.

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I played three guitars in the recording via multitracking. For the electric guitar nerds, the center channel has a Gretsch hollow-body playing the chords, the right channel’s a Jazzmaster solid-body with a pitch-shimmering wiggle stick, and the left side a Telecaster whose wide vibrato here was created by having enough personal frustration to expiate that my fingers directly wrung the strings sideways to way above their fretted pitch.* I associate this kind of guitar solo with Canadian Neil Young’s credo that sometimes your intent is to not sound like a “professional guitarist,” some master of tasteful licks and precise intonation.

You can hear the performance with the graphical audio player gadget below. No gadget? I’m not lying – some ways of viewing this blog suppress the player, so I offer this highlighted link that’ll open its own tab with an audio player.

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*”Hey, posh-guy, you’ve got a lot of guitars there.” I accumulated cheap imported versions of these guitars over 30 years, using trades, hunting up second-hand examples, and waiting for sales. Coincidently, the current regime’s tariffs are threatening what has been a golden age of reasonable quality, good sounding instruments for musicians with limited funds.

On the Goodnight Trail, On the Loving Trail

~ Frank Hudson ~ 3 Comments

In 1970’s age of the Singer-Songwriter, Poet and folksinger U. Utah Phillips had an anachronistic career. In performance he might sing for only a portion of his time on stage, mixing in story-telling, verse, jokes, and his brand of political advocacy that reflected his even-then old-fashioned connections to Catholic Worker activism and the Industrial Workers of the World.* He would sing his own songs sometimes – and while he apparently didn’t write an awful lot of songs, a couple of them I know are extraordinary. Today’s musical piece, performed for American Labor Day, is one of those.

Here a video of my performance of U. Utah Phillips’ song

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On the dusty surface of it, “On the Goodnight Loving Trail”  is a cowboy song, one of the real ones that recognize that cowboy is a job title after all, not a romantic name for a gunfighter or wandering charismatic cinematic horseman. That type of cowboy song existed of course – Phillips didn’t have to invent it – but his take on the genre is sui generis. Consider the historical appropriation in the song title and the chorus’ refrain from a historical cattle drive route going from Texas to Wyoming. That trail was named for two cattle-driving ramrods: Charles Goodnight and Oliver Loving. A mere accident of family names, but Phillip’s choice to use them imbues the song from the start with elegiac affection.

Calling the aged cowboy whose cattle drive job fell to being the camp cook “The old woman” is also taken from fact. Is this gendered part of the song’s refrain an inevitable accident, or a choice by Phillips? That the song reinforces the old cook’s abrogation of manhood in a verse’s line about “wearing an apron instead of a name” says that the author wanted to underline that – it’s a choice. If this song isn’t Brokeback Mountain  or the sibling of Paul Westerberg’s and the Replacements’ “Androgynous,”  I’ll take the leap and say it’s maybe a second-cousin. Is it possible that Westerberg knew Phillips’ song? That’s impossible to say – the underground aquifer of the folk process is dark and damp.

UUP Wobbly

U. Utah Phillips: an IWW member in the days of James Taylor and Carole King

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I chose to present “On the Goodnight Trail”  today because it’s Labor Day weekend here in the U.S. This song about work ends with the ground-truth that the lot of many of us is to use up most of our life in our labors. Years ago, thinking of two specifically American holidays, I wrote this short statement caught commuting itself towards a poem:

The temple of summer is guarded by two pillars:
Memorial Day for those who gave up their lives in war,
and Labor Day for those who gave up their lives in peace.

I’ll flatter myself and say U. Utah Phillips would have liked that one if he had heard it. I did my best to sing his song. Seven years ago I did a musical performance which included these three lines about The Temple of Summer,  and if you haven’t had enough Parlando Project music after the video above, here’s an audio player below to play that performance as we ride up to the gates of autumn this weekend.

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*corrected thanks to rmichaelroman

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The spider holds a Silver Ball

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Welcome back to our regular fare after a spate of summer diversions. And what is it that you’d expect to see here? We take various words, mostly literary poetry, and combine them with original music in differing styles. I’ve done this Project for over nine years, and within the archives here you can wander through nearly 850 of these combinations. Since poetry can be described as words that want to burst into song, such combinations might seem an obvious task – sometimes they are – but I enjoy looking for unusual connections, conversations between tendrils and mycelium deeper in the soil, not just the majestic and visible branches everyone sees.

One frequent supplier of words to be recast in sound here is the seminal American 19th century poet Emily Dickinson. Dickinson’s mind is Shakespearean in its scope, and while her modes of expression vary to meet those needs, much of her poetry sits in a rich intersection between short epigramic verse that superficially seems like it could be stitched as some crewel homily, and unconventional, rebellious, independence of thought.

For example, this lesser-known Dickinson poem: “The spider holds a Silver Ball.”   I’ll link the full text of it here. The opening four lines are praise to a spider’s industriousness, with the arachnid – unusually for this poet – standing in here for the highly common Dickinson totem, the bee. Dickinson, the avid gardener with a science-focused education, knows well the necessity of pollinating and honey-keeping bees. In this rarer appearance in her work, the spider is no such creature, for their work is occult or predatory. She praises its web-work none-the-less, that work’s imperial provisioning for prey goes unmentioned. This praise continues in the next stanza. The web is anchored or arises from “Nought” she says. The spider makes its spider silk from a secreted process, its attachment points may be a dimly lit corner unespied, its constructions do not exist until the spider’s efforts create them. But “Nought to Nought” is an omen too for all this effort as the final stanza will tell. Note too, Dickinson genders the spider: “His.” Spiders of either sex spin webs, but this action is male.

spider and mushroom by Heidi Randen 1080

A mélange of moss and mushroom. Can you spot the spider’s unperceived hands in the picture? (click to enlarge)

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I’ll make a leap here: Dickinson, the prolific weaver of 1,789 poems, identifies with this spider. One accounting has this as poem 513, so there are hundreds of poems behind her as she makes this one, and more than a thousand yet to go. The bees in Dickinson’s poems are usually cast as joyfully playing, the spider here is more obsessive. Even the dourest Puritan in her era would know the worth of the bee’s work: flowers, food, unspoiled sweetness. In the final stanza, the spider’s work is destroyed by what Dickinson genders as woman’s work, by housework – as endless as this spider’s spinning. Another leap: I wondered if Dickinson might have composed this poem while busy with housework, secretly engaged in the (gendered by her) masculine work of inessential gossamer creation – no matter if “Nought to Nought” is that work’s fate.

As I read this poem I thought of another poet working in this mode, the William Blake of Songs of Innocence and Experience,  who wrote of “The Fly”  and likened his own intellectual and creative drive to the bothersome insect.

I combined Dickinson’s words with music that partakes of the sound of the 1960s psychedelic genre.*  The joy of that kind of expression is the freedom granted to instruments to take novel roles and reconstituted timbres. To a loping 6/8 time, the bass is allowed to rise to sing, the electric piano has been having an episode, the guitars wander onto new paths, an organ breathes, the drums fibrillate. Over this I sing wildly, unconcerned to be overheard. You can hear this performance with the audio player gadget below. What, has that audio player seemingly come to nought? Some ways of viewing this post will suppress the gadget, so I offer this highlighted link which will spin a new tab that has its own audio player so you can listen.

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*I don’t find this a strained pairing at all. The 19th century American New Thought and Transcendentalist strain was still alive in the Beat and later counter-culture outlooks that arose a century later. Dickinson’s recasting of language and syntax in many of her poems is like to the sonic experiments of psychedelic music, which I’m attracted to for their adventuresomeness rather than their drugs. What is novel about my application of this to Dickinson is that this element of her poetry is under-observed, while it’s more common to view William Blake as “A ‘head’ before his time.”

I ask AI to write a protest song, and…

~ Frank Hudson ~ 6 Comments

A funny thing happened on my way to winding-up my Summer diversion series of thoughts on Artificial Intelligence. I’d concluded last time: since current AI was capable of producing musical pieces in popular styles that could pass for human works in casual listening – or plausibly even more exacting listening – those who’d prefer music expressed by humans might need to change the things they look for and value in music. What kind of things? Accept more imperfections in the music, cultivate an appreciation for the humanness inherent in live performance, and increase their consideration of the intent and motivations of the musical organizations they support.

That last point, about more significantly honoring intent, had hardly inscribed itself as a blog post here when a mischievous thought came over me: while AI is created by businesses with commercial intent, human-made music doesn’t have to be. As difficult as it is to refine authentic intent from music made by strangers distributed in a marketplace, could we be fooled about intent by entirely software-generated music? So, what if I asked AI music generating software to produce a protest song? What if I went further and presented it in a misleading context?

Disregarding my environmental footprint for the duration of the experiment, I created a free account on an AI music generating site, and I set about creating a new protest song. Out of the many outrages of 2025 so far, I picked the authoritarian assaults on academic independence which have sought fines/bribes/tribute from some of the U.S.’s most prestigious universities (known in America as “the Ivy League”) while demanding oversight into their operations and academic programs on flimsy pretexts.

Like a lot of AI, the one I used for this works on a “freemium” structure, with limited features for non-paying users. To make a song I only needed to enter in a text prompt (length-limited for free users) describing it. I asked another AI engine to suggest a prompt and asked it to create lyrics for a song (though the song-creating AI site would be glad to generate its own lyrics). The more general AI answer-bot suggested including artists whose style the music generating AI site should seek to emulate. I picked Phil Ochs and the Fugs. I wanted something with real anger and satiric bite.*

I created around six songs. None of them gave me that, even when I tweaked my prompt. What came out was sweet-voiced singers with an attitude of pop-music yearning, or acceptably sorrowful disappointment in their delivery. The AI lyrics did come up with a few phrases that had some charge to them, but the lyrics generally suffered from what I personally call “Horse With No Name” defects.** My prompt specified “gruff,” “angry,” rough” or even “sloppy” to describe the vocal delivery I was looking for, and out came the singers with an air of polished regret, and lyrics that groaned under their attempt at machine-constructed sincerity. The best I could say for the lyrics on the songs? They might pass as modern recording-production-style versions of the parodies created for the Spinal Tap acting company’s folk-music parody It’s a Mighty Wind.***

These results fed into the context I chose to present them in. I wrote a script for a podcast, supposedly devoted to American folk and Americana music. I decided the podcast presenter would be earnest, but a bit removed from the less-commercial segments of American folk music, and so I made her British. She would be portrayed by the machine speech that I use on my writing computer as a proofreading aid.**** As the token human in this enterprise, I’d appear as a hype-man for the Parlando Project.***** Over the next day I wrote the podcast script and recorded it folding in sections of the machine-generated protest songs. I slightly degraded the audio quality for the British host’s dialog, though after I finished I now think I should have done that for my own dialog instead, as I’d be more likely the guest relying on a remote overseas link for the imaginary podcast.

I had fun doing this, trying to gauge how many tells that this wasn’t on the up-and-up I should drop before revealing the near total AI nature of the content in the last minute. For the names of the Americana acts that were purported to be performing the AI songs, I decided to burlesque the names of U.S. 19th century Fireside Poets. I think “Greenleaf-Whittier” is a great name for a band in that genre – failing that, Jeff Tweedy if you’re reading here, you’re welcome to it for the next Wilco album title.

Greenleaf Whittier

Featuring the exciting new song “University Surrender” you heard on the “Kit That Sounds So Real” podcast.

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The audio player below will let you hear the 18-minute program. The program opens with a snippet of an AI generated folk instrumental whose prompt I supplied was its title: “Obey in Advance.”   Though only a small selection, I think it demonstrates that AI generated music without vocals is particularly “real” sounding. The program continues with parts of three versions of a song called “University Surrender”  where the AI program supplied the words, music, and fully produced recording in three slightly different Americana styles it thought appropriate. The three versions resulted as I tried tweaking my text prompt – and while distinct, on repeated listening they seem somewhat “samey” to me. More smooth than I was asking for, “Ralph Waldo Bryant’s” version rising to falsetto delivery almost works for the material despite the pitch control artifacts I can detect in the computer-generated performance – but remember, as I said earlier in this series, the same artifacts are now common with recorded human vocalists in current pop. “Greenleaf-Whittier’s” cover did add one, nice, out-of-leftfield, touch: the flagrantly computer-voiced autotuned opening refrain of the title before continuing into its bouncy two-step country groove. And then there’s “Oliver and the Rolling Homes’” version of “University Surrender”  whose arrangement serves up a country-music playlist/station format sound. I was laughing hard as I heard the small-town-worshiping-my truck-my girl -I may get a little drunk sometimes-but I’m a hardworkin’ man-like my daddy sonic approach, but this time holding forth on tenure and syllabus issues. And then there’s “Ivy Towers Bow”  that is said to be written and performed by “J. R. Lowell.” The lyrics here were written by an AI chatbot and then those lyrics were given to the AI music generating program to make this song. Musically this one doesn’t give me anything – so generic. I almost didn’t include it, but I decided it was an example that a generate-songs-AI was on par with a text-focused AI when writing lyrics. The final song on the fake podcast might be the one of the group that does the best emulation. If I was listening casually and “E. E. Peterbuilt and the International Harvesters ““The Emperor’s New Chains”  came on, I’d think it better than many songs in its style. Oddly enough, the AI program produced it when I goofed and clicked generate when I’d only partly written the prompt “Folk or Americana protest song, gruff voice…” and by not having to lyrically add the academic details that made Oliver and the Rolling Homes version of “University Surrender”  so unintentionally hilarious, its Horse-with-No-Name lyric faults are not as exposed. If I wanted to pick one AI song from the ones I generated to fool a careful listener, I’d pick this one. You know you’re in the Uncanny Valley when the guitars have faded out and the robot vocalist gives us a little aside into the still open mic. Spooky.

If you don’t see the audio player gadget to play this imaginary podcast, this highlighted link was human supplied to let you hear it, and will open a new tab with its own audio player.

If my courage and energy hold out, I still want to write one more post about what I call “the guild issues” that concern some artists engendered by plausible AI results.

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*The AI program didn’t object to those two 20th century folk-rock artists of outrage and cutting satire being supplied for models – but it completely ignored trying to emulate them. When I tried “Bob Dylan” – suggested by the separate AI that’d given me a prompt I could use elsewhere – the song AI immediately refused to do so, presumably due to a specific concern about IP.

**”A Horse With No Name” was a 1971 song, recorded in England by a band led by expatriate Americans. The recording, done by humans, not AI, sounded like someone had anachronistically entered our future and asked AI to “Create a song that sounds exactly like a Neil Young record.” The lyrics went forth despite including some awkward lines like “There were plants and birds and rocks and things,” “the heat was hot,” “’Cause there ain’t no one for to give you pain,” and “Under the cities lies a heart made of ground, but the humans will give no love.” To spare us from more lyrical howlers, the song also featured a lot of repeated “la la la’s” in its chorus, well-performed in a CSN&Y style of harmony.

The song was a substantial hit in both the U.S. and Britain, indicating that it worked as a song for its audience none-the-less.

***Hey, I’m a fan of Spinal Tap. Everyone is! And rating art is a fool’s game – but “It’s a Mighty Wind” is every bit as good, maybe better.

****The “read aloud” feature in the current versions of Microsoft Word is a huge aid to my self-proofreading. With my neuro-wiring, it lets me catch a great many errors I’d otherwise miss, and using the female British voice enhances the “hearing this anew, as if I didn’t write it” factor that makes it so effective.

*****The stuff I say in the middle of the satiric podcast concerning the Parlando Project is how I actually feel about the nine-plus years of stuff I’ve put out here.