Ten Albums That Have Influenced Me

Ten albums that have influenced me (I'm cheating a bit as some artists have more than one album listed, and in some cases their entire body of work has influenced me):

1. Wendy (née Walter) Carlos: Switched-On Bach. Either the first or second LP I ever bought. Wore out at least two copies over the years, maybe three. First, here are modern electronic instruments playing some favorite classical music, proving that it works. Second, this was my introduction to the possibilities of the Moog synth. (I own two at this point.)

2. Bill Laswell: Hear No Evil. Laswell has always done really interesting kinds of music, often ten years ahead of everyone else. HNE is a fusion of hard urban grooves with Americana, West African and Indian rhythms, and Beat sensibility. This is one of my main influences when I pay improvised rock, prog, and jazz. Laswell proved that you can put a dub bassline on almost any kind of improvised music and make it solid. There are several other Laswell albums I could have listed here, yet this is one I keep coming back to again.

3. King Crimson: Discipline. Like so many others, Tony Levin was who influenced me to play Stick. This is just a great and enduring album, light and dark by turns, proving to me that "math rock" at its best is gutsy and emotional, not just cerebral. "The Sheltering Sky" contains a flavor of emotional intensity I had only ever heard before in composers like Bartok, Ligeti, Gorecki, or Grieg.

4. Javanese Court Gamelan, Vol. II: Istana Mangkunegaran (Nonesuch Explorer Series). The whole Nonesuch Explorer Series was very influential on my life, opening the door to world music (long before worldbeat was a pop music genre), and eventually to studying ethnomusicology. This album, from the Mangkunegaran influenced me not only musically but personally: eventually I traveled to Indonesia on a Fulbright and studied gamelan at the Mangkunegaran itself, playing some of the music on this album on those same instruments. For me that was a numinous, thrilling, amazing, near-religious experience. I devoted many years of my life to playing and studying Javanese gamelan, and it affected the way I play improvised music, too.

My immersion in gamelan and world music completely changed how I think about music and music-making. Gamelan was part of my immersion in pattern music: music based on ostinatos, on repeating patterns, on additive rhythm, on gradual process. The next three albums are also part of that experimentation with that kind of music, each from a different direction: jazz, rock, classical.

5. John Klemmer: Touch. Before late high school I had had no interest in jazz, rock, pop, or anything but classical and avant-garde music. This LP got me into jazz because the music was ostinato-based themes treated as jazz heads. I still find it really appealing, as well as still being outside the jazz mainstream. From here, all of jazz opened its doors to me, although I remain most strongly drawn to the jazz avant-garde, the more "outside" music like "free jazz" or the composed complexity of Ellington. And I could also list Brubeck's "Time Out" as a key influence here, too.

6. Mike Oldfield: Tubular Bells, Hergist Ridge, and Ommadawn. I remember having an argument in the van on a free afternoon when I was studying geology in Wyoming, when a bunch of us college students were stuffed in the van listening to the Jackson radio station. "Theme from The Exorcist" came on, and everybody was into the music, but nobody but me knew it was excerpts from Tubular Bells. Oldfield built layers of melody and harmony over gradually built-up musical patterns. All three of his early album-length recordings were influential on me, but Ommadawn is in my opinion one of the greatest works of the 20th Century. People don't realize how much folk music influenced Oldfield, and as an ethnomusicologist I can hear that influence all through here.

7. Steve Reich: Drumming (DGG 3 LP set) and Music for 18 Musicians. Gradual process music, which is actually the opposite of "minimalism," a term Reich has never liked. Small repeating musical patterns change gradually, and expand and contract, creating layers of interacting sound. This music influenced me as a composer, certainly, as well as a listener. Music for 18 Musicians is one of the greatest works of classical 20th Century music; and this is proved in part because it is now being played by talented high school groups, too.

8. John Cage. I've always listened to lots of classical avant-garde music, or "experimental" music. I can't pick a particular Cage recording that was a major influence, because his entire body of work has been a major influence on me. Maybe I could single out on the LPs of the Variations. I've performed a lot of Cage over the years, as well. Probably the 2 LP set of Indeterminacy (Folkways) is what I would have to single out as an important influence, as it combined music, "noise," and words together. This led me towards text-sound poetry, which of course had a lot to do with, which is the use of the spoken word as a musical element.

9. David Munrow and The Early Music Consort of London: Music of the Middle Ages and The Six Wives of Henry the VIIIth. Munrow was one of the leading lights of the Early Music revival scene in the 1970s, which was a both scholarly and popular revival of Medieval and Renaissance music performance on original instruments, that continues to this day. Munrow's 3 LP set of Medieval music was my first introduction to the very modern-sounding music of the 13th and 14th Centuries, which still sound avant-garde. This was my first intro to Perotin, the great composer of organum. And Munrow also did the soundtrack, period music on period instruments, for the hit BBC TV series about Henry the VIIIth, which my family avidly watched together as it was first broadcast on PBS. Medieval studies has had almost as big an impact in my life as has ethnomusicology, and in similar ways. Munrow was who opened that door for me.

10. Joni Mitchell: Hejira. There have been a lot of singer-songwriters of the "folk revival" who have had a big impact on me as a songwriter, but Joni Mitchell towers over all of them. This is not only an album full of great songs, it's also musically adventurous and was ahead of its time. Mitchell took a lot of flak for always evolving her sound, rather than staying the little waif with singing autobiographical songs about love, and jazz was a huge influence on her, culminating at one point with Mingus. It's all there in Hejira, though, combined with the appeal of being a musical road trip full of vivid characters and scenes. Some of the songs on "Hejira" have not only influenced me as a songwriter, they have at times seemed to be the narrative of my own life.

Songwriting: Wisdom from Willie Nelson

I've had a rough few weeks since getting home from the last roadtrip out West. First of all, I was sick for the entire second half of the trip, which is never any fun, and it really wore me down. Secondly, after over a year and a half of writing music and words and music for Heartlands, including the time in the middle of all that for surgery and recovery, I've been experiencing some post-partum depression: the "what next?" depression that follows the completion of any great project. That's something I'm prone to, and I know that I always have been. Sometimes the bigger the gig, too, the harder the fall afterwards. I know that Heartlands was a big success for me as a composer/lyricist in part because of how depressed since I got home from Denver and the Southwest. And since I got home I've been laying mostly fallow. I haven't made much art, I haven't really written anything, or worked on many lyrics or poems or sketched much music. I don't mind lying fallow, because I know that crop rotation is essential in both healthy farming and in my creative work. I just worry if it goes on too long, or gets tangled up with that post-partum depression. I finally hit bottom a few days ago, and lost an entire day to despair, depression, and weeping. Again, that's just something that seems to happen, part of my pattern.

And this past month, with the long drought here in southern Wisconsin farm country, punctuated by occasional torrential rains although we're still in a rain deficit, has been awful for anyone like me who's allergic to ragweed, hay, grass pollens, dust and molds. It's been a memorable allergy season for many here, along with the memorably dry and hot summer. Of course according to the political idiots who like to ignore scientific data when it doesn't serve their ideology, climate change isn't really happening. But I digress.

I'm writing in a conversational stream-of-consciousness mode because I've just been reading a book written that way.

I spent a couple of hours this morning reading Willie Nelson's 2002 book The Facts of Life, and Other Dirty Jokes. It's a breezy oral history, full of conversational asides, comments about touring on the road, growing up, and full of anecdotes about the music business, friends, and songwriting. It's much more than a book of collected lyrics, which are woven into the book in between rambles. I read the book in about two hours (I'm a very fast reader) in part because reading song lyrics on the page is faster than listening to the recorded songs.

The first album of Willie Nelson's that I can remember really getting into was Stardust, which is still a classic (and has been reissued as such on CD, in an expanded version). That was my discovery and entry point. I was still mostly listening to classical and jazz at that point in my life, but I was impressed by Willie's way of performing old standards and jazz songs. In fact, and I'm probably letting out a secret here, the way Willie sings is from jazz singing: always behind the beat, giving it that trademark laid-back feel, but arriving on time at the critical moments and the end of a phrase. That laid-back feel in the music is similar to way he writes this book, and lives his life. The important things in life are worth getting passionate about; almost everything else isn't. He does mention his Farm Aid activism in the book, quite passionately, and is passionate about the things and people he loves, and what has influenced him in life. And then there are all the dirty jokes laced throughout. A contradiction? Not really, just pieces of the whole cloth.

As many who know me know, I have strong opinions about lyrics printed on the page: they rarely stand up as purely poetry. Many poets, and fans of various songwriters, make the claim for their favorite songwriters as being pure poets, and often cite lyrics as poetry when discussing them. The problem is, if you really know the song, you're not really paying attention to just the words, as if you know the song the music will be playing in your head as you read. My point is that songwriting is words-and-music, not just words. Lots of poets, and fans, get hung up on the lyrics and forget that songwriting is synergy: words-and-music in perfect symbiosis, each synergizing the other to a higher level.

Several of Willie Nelson's song lyrics printed in this book are to songs that I didn't know (several early songs) or knew on;y slightly. So I was able to read several lyrics on the page as poems. I learned a little bit more about the craft of songwriting from this: both in terms of metric form and when you can really make a phrase stand out by not rhyming. Most songwriting uses older poetic forms, notably ballads and blues, most of which are metric forms with end-rhymes. These patterns are inherited and evolved from folk music—country is the descendent of old-timey mountain folk music, as is bluegrass, and is in turn descended from the music brought to the Appalachians by immigrants from the British Isles for the most part. (Blues and its many related and branched descendent forms were brought to Turtle Island by African-Americans.)

What Willie often does in these songs is stick to a simple rhymed metric form, then break it for effect. Outlaw that he is, he also invents forms, often in songs with very short and simple lines, using fewer words for song than many other songwriters. They're striking to read as lyrics on the page. You constantly trip over your own running feet. There's real gold in breaking away from couplets and quatrains, and other classic song-forms that on the page often look like rectangles of text; these songs rarely look like rectangles on the page.

What makes Willie a great songwriter shines out in this written ramble of a book of collected lyrics and anecdotes and memories: he's an excellent storyteller, period. Of course, I also love his attitude. Actually, I've always loved his attitude. He knows how to laugh at himself, and make you laugh along. There's also a very serious man under all this, and always has been: it's the serious artist, always observing, recording, and telling us stories. That's pretty much the old Viking definition of a skald, or bard. Willie is certainly one of our own bards. Plus the man can really sing.

What leads me to book reviewing The Facts of Life, and Other Dirty Jokes more formally is a long passage Willie writes about the power of song itself, for the writer and the performer as well as the audience. I found this passage very wise and telling. Willie includes the lyrics to two early songs that I didn't know about, "No Tomorrow in Sight" and "Sad Songs and Waltzes." He comments in an aside between giving the lyrics of these two songs: I wrote that way back in the early '60s. Very few people have even heard it because sad songs and waltzes weren't really selling that year.

Then Willie follows this up with a very telling commentary:

Both of these songs put together probably sold about four copies. That's not the important thing. To me, just getting the words out of my head and onto paper was an exercise worth performing. Those kinds of thoughts left bottled up inside can do more damage than good, and can probably cause everything from cancer to heart break. Sometimes just saying the words can cause some kind of healing to begin. But if you sing those songs every night year after year, I believe you can also prevent a total healing because you're always opening old wounds.

So what's the answer? Who knows. If you have a hit with a sad song, just remember when you wrote it, it was for you. When you sing it over and over, it's for the benefit of the listener. Don't let it spoil an otherwise good night. Attempt to sing the song for the audience, and try not to get involved in it yourself. It's a very thin line, and a lot easier said than done.

Sometimes I believe the reason a lot of country singers and writers have gone off the deep end was because they could not find that thin line, and could never fully recover from the evening that caused them to write the song in the beginning. Hank Williams, Floyd Tillman, George jones, Lefty Frizzell, and myself included, could in some ways be victims of our own words.
—The Facts of Life, and Other Dirty Jokes, p. 186

I find this to be incredibly timely and useful advice. Coming out of a post-concert/concert/roadtrip/concert depression, more aware than ever that you just have to keep going, even if you don't want to, this kicks me to keep on going.

Willie also gets at something that's perhaps at the heart of his endurance as an artist, and at why some artists crash and burn. This gets into the toxic myths and stereotypes (usually promoted by non-artists, although some artists buy into them as well) of the Starving Artist, the Drunken Writer, the Suffering Artist, the Lonely Poet, the Underapppreciated Songwriter.

That entire awful cluster of stereotypes that circle around the idea that "I'll be rich when I'm dead," plus the core devaluing of all the arts that goes on in our culture. People want to be able to download all the music they love for free, even though it means the singer they love goes broke. People will pay hundreds of dollars to go see their favorite athletes throw little balls around various kinds of grassy fields, but they balk at paying 99 cents to download a song? Get real. I lost all remaining shreds of sympathy for professional sports players the year the baseball players went on strike: essentially that was millionaires going on strike against not being able to be double-millionaires. Any one of those undereducated professional athletes could have taken their already-inflated salaries and funded the entire educations of ten artists or dancers, or more. (Although dancers are in fact better athletes overall than any sports stars. They have to be: it's a whole-body art.) But I digress.

The truth is, life is full of so much suffering as it is. You don't need to go looking for it.

What a lot of people who recycle those toxic stereotypes miss is that the art isn't the result of the suffering, isn't caused by the suffering, and you don't necessarily make better art because you have suffered. The artist's first response to all of life's experiences, both positive and negative, is to make art about it. That's what artists do. Just that. Full stop. An artist makes art. All of life is fuel for the artist, good and bad alike. In fact, making art is often the best way to cope with whatever life is throwing at you, good and bad. Artists do make art as a form of self-therapy: just getting the words out of your head and onto the paper is worth doing.

But it doesn't stop there. Afterwards, you go on with life. You're not supposed to dwell on it, you're supposed to let it go, and continue on. Don't stop, don't wallow, just get back on the road and keep moving on. One of the best quotes I ever heard coming from an artist was that the secret of life is to do the next thing.

"On the road again. . . ." I don't know where Willie Nelson learned his enlightened Zen detachment, but it's the real thing. And it's a good role model for all other bards to heed.

•

Here are some other brief quotes from the book that caught my eye as I was reading, and made me stop and think.

‎Success and failure—same number of letters.

Puts worry and despair in perspective.

I believe that you can't lose if you don't give up. Even if you die, you'll die fighting.

Another good reminder to never give up. I needed to hear that today.

Ninety-nine percent of the world's lovers are not with their first choice. That's what makes the jukebox play.

Which means you will never ever run out of material.

We authors deal in words. You can't tell a songwriter he ain't any good because he knows better.

A comment on artistic stubbornness that I can agree with. It's certainly true that almost every poet knows that he's right and you're wrong.

If you ain't crazy, there's something wrong with you.

Words to live by. If you're a sane person living in an insane world, others might judge you as insane, but really, you're not, they are.

Songwriting: Is Listening

Yesterday someone gave me the 1949 edition of The Lyrics of Oscar Hammerstein, a nicely-printed hardbound book which will go on the shelf by the piano in the living room, next to the two volumes of collected lyrics by Oscar's most famous student, Stephen Sondheim. Oscar's presence is found woven throughout Sondheim's commentaries on his own lyrics. Skimming through the book I found many familiar song lyrics, but also many I didn't know so well, which I was able to read on the page as though they were poems, and appreciate them as such.

This was a pleasant, rare experience, for me, since songwriting is words-and-music, and the two are usually so inextricably twined that you can't separate them. Even though many poets are biased towards words alone, and even though many fans claim to enjoy reading songs by their favorite singers as poems (the Cults of Dylan and Cohen are particularly prone to this), in truth it's almost impossible to read song lyrics on a page without hearing the melody in your mind, especially with songs you know well. Songwriting is a synergistic artform, not a purely literary one: words-and-music together are a greater whole, most of the time, than they are separately; in truth, most song lyrics, if presented on the page purely as poetry, are often limp and banal.

So it was pleasant to encounter Oscar's more unfamiliar, to me, lyrics, and be able to in fact read them as poetry. And I have to say, everything good that people have said about Oscar's skill and craft in writing lyrics, held true in my casual reading through this book of collected lyrics.

As I look more deeply into songwriting as a means of artistic expression, as I embrace it more as a mode of music composition, as I accept the fact that I've always been writing songs even if I didn't label the activity as such, I find myself doing more and more listening, as a songwriter, to songs written by a wide range of others, in a diverse range of modes and styles. In my occasional browsing through local thrift stores, I allow myself to pick up CDs by singer-songwriters that I might have ignored before, to see what I can learn from them. I listen to a lot of these CDs in the truck, and I do make remix CDs and playlists in iTunes of newly-discovered favorite tracks, so I can listen more closely, again mostly while driving. I find myself giving a lot more attention to Nashville than I ever imagined I ever would, if only because Nashville as a recording haven is more diverse than most people think it is.

I have subscribed to American Songwriter magazine and so far have found it to be a wealth of useful information, reviewing, and especially thoughtful interviews. Within the past year they've done a special Country issue, an overview of contemporary country trends and artists that had a sense of history behind it; they've done a Bob Dylan 50th year career assessment and overview; and there's been a profound interview with Paul Simon. I like the magazine's iPad app, which adds multimedia layers to reading the articles, including lots of videos and audio tracks, extra sidebars to interviews, and so forth. So far, my experience of this magazine has been that it's an essential resource for any songwriter. It also makes me want to go back to reading classic folk/roots music periodicals like Sing Out!

I now listen to a lot of music that these days is labeled as Americana, which encompasses styles that are home-grown rural and regional in origin, often from here in the Heartlands that bicoastal urban types fly over and ignore. Music that actually has a pretty broad range to it, and can encompass styles ranging from folk, blues, classic country, introspective balladry, and bluegrass, to swamp rock, zydeco, Missouri jazz, Appalachian fiddling, and more. What these musics all have in common is sincerity of origin and history, depth and longevity of tradition, and an appreciation for honesty and authenticity. Many have stories to tell of ordinary people living life as best they can even when life is hardscrabble and unexalted. There is no "bling" here, no lapidary exaltation of the surface of life, no emphasis on the ephemeral at the expense of what has endured.

A lot of contemporary country music artists talk about "traditional values" and "family values," but the best of these artists, people like Willy Nelson, include a lot of diversity and acceptance under the banner of "tradition" and "family." Tradition means you are not ignorant of your own history, nor trying to rewrite it to your personal gain. Family means you love the people in your life, even if sometimes you think they're full of crap.

Some of this is music that I've always listened to and been involved in, although I haven't overtly tried to craft my own songs within its styles. Folk music, old-style country, roots music, singer-songwriter material, and some interesting hybridized music that years ago I had to come up with a name for, which I called new traditions music: music that is brand new yet rooted in tradition, syncretizing existing folk traditions with the exploratory spirit of the avant-garde.

There are certain record labels that I've long known were trustworthy for finding and presenting quality songwriting. I now find myself listening to many artists new to me, just because they're on these labels. Several of these labels, by no coincidence, have long been prominent in the folk music and songwriter recording worlds, and are well-known to anyone interested in that music: record labels that are too big to be dismissed as mere "niche" labels, but small enough to remain independent and not subject to the vagaries of pop music fashion. Rounder, Philo, Folk-Legacy, Flying Fish, Nonesuch.

The latter, Nonesuch, has been since the 1970s a label that has brought to the eager listener many folk and world music recordings not otherwise commercially available; the Nonesuch Explorer series was produced, recorded, and written by actual ethnographic scholars and ethnomusicologists; as I go through my old vinyl LPs in the basement I discover that I still have most of these releases. I've listened to some of those recordings so often that for me they are as indelible in my youthful memory as rock 'n roll is for others. I am as familiar with Paul Berliner's album of Shona mbira recordings, and Robert Brown's several recordings of Central Javanese gamelan, as some of my friends are with Led Zeppelin. The formative influences on the young musician were about the same, although the sources diverged radically. I can hear many subtle influences in my own composed music that others might not be aware of, that are rooted in the world music I listened to in my formative years; one example is that I felt I was given permission to not write linear-narrative tonal programmatic music, but in modes and cycles instead. A very different approach to using music theory in practice. I know a lot of musicians who began in garage bands, imitating the music they were listening to on the radio and on their LPs; in truth I did the same, only the LPs I listened to were quite different.

So I find myself picking up and listening to a lot of singer-songwriters in the thrift stores that I overlooked before. This is part of my education as a songwriter. I'm not learning by directly imitating what I hear—I have too much experience as a composer and poet now to absorb influence so blatantly anymore—but rather by immersion in subject matter, mood, performance style, tone of voice, and the subtleties of arranging. I am discovering songs and songwriters that are incredibly good, and learning from all of them. Again, the range is diverse.

New to me is Tab Benoit's swamp blues style, but it's fantastic and gutsy. New to me is songwriter's songwriter Ellis Paul. My sister introduced me last year to Shania Twain's great feminist anti-love songs, and more. I am rediscovering folk humorist Christine Lavin, having found a few of her live albums. Nickel Creek. Alison Krauss and her various groups and collaborators. Carrie Newcomer.

And of course I go back and listen to those songwriters and folk musicians who I have listened to for many years: Joni Mitchell, Bruce Cockburn, Pete Seeger, Johnny Cash, Gordon Bok, Michael Smith, Lynn Miles, Carol Noonan, and more. There are many contemporary women songwriters who owe such a huge debt to Mitchell that, despite their various and divergent styles and means, I think can seriously be called The Daughters of Joni Mitchell. One of the best of these is Sarah Mclachlan, and she passes on the torch with the regular Lilith Fair women's music festivals that she organizes and headlines, including the live recording CDs that follow.

Michael Smith, from Chicago, is another songwriter's songwriter, who I've listened to for years: everybody knows or has done his songs, but he himself isn't that well known; Claudia Schmidt's recordings of "The Dutchman" and "Vampire" are still better known that his own versions. Yet his albums on Flying Fish are essential, as no one else writes or plays or sings quite the way he does. His song "Panther in Michigan," based on a true story of a live black panther than roamed free for an entire year in southeastern Michigan, which I remember because I was living in Ann Arbor at the time, is a particularly fine example of topical balladry that transcends the form and becomes timeless.

I also go back and listen to singers and songwriters who I knew about, but now look at more carefully and attentively, with deeper appreciation, and deepening respect. Kris Kristofferson, Patsy Cline, Greg Brown, k.d. lang, Jane Siberry, John Mellencamp. Essential blues artists like Bessie Smith. And I have a lot of vinyl LPs in my basement that I am going through and rediscovering, including many that I'm digitizing to be able to listen to again since as far as I know those albums never were re-released on CD.

There are also a number of roots and blues and soul/R&B and rock 'n roll artists that I've been going back and listening to as part of this cycle of absorbing and learning, appreciating them more as singers and songwriters, many of whom I overlooked back when they were very often in the Top 40, but when I still mostly listening to anything but the Top 40. Or who I knew one or two songs by, but now have been listening to their whole catalog, to learn from them regarding the craft of songwriting. My respect for Tom Petty has gone way up in the past few years, for example, although I thought all along that he was an innovator and explorer in several ways. Rediscovering Robert Palmer has been fun, because of his sheer joy in life and music. Bruce Springsteen I've written about at length, elsewhere, in regards to the folk-sourced aspects of his music.

The list, and the listening, goes on.

My appreciation for the craft of playing guitar while singing is also on the ascendant. I'm learning from listening to singer-songwriters who play and sing guitar at the same time. What I'm learning is tricks of performance and presentation, as well as the formal craft of how to write an effective song as simply and minimally as possible.

Not that I have any interest in learning to play guitar as well as many songwriters do. (Bruce Cockburn and Bonnie Raitt continue to be underrated as guitarists, which surprises me, although it must be admitted that their often elegant guitar work is always in the service of the song, and not shown off for its own sake.) I do have an adequate guitar now, and have been teaching myself to play it, but in truth I've avoided guitar for most of my life precisely because it's the instrument everyone and their grandmother plays. I started at age 6 on piano, and also play many other instruments, but guitar I avoided out of an almost perverse desire to be different. No, that's not quite accurate. To be completely honest, and more accurate in retrospect, deep down inside I always knew that I was different, anyway, and no amount of trying to conform to the norm was going to change that; I tired and failed throughout my youth to "fit in" and I never did. So I gave up trying to fit in musically and socially while still relatively young (although in terms of career and finance I gave up trying to fit in much later in life). For one thing, the stereotypical teenage male notion of joining a band to "get some girls" that I saw many young kids take up guitar to get into did not appeal to me at all—since I was more into getting boys than girls. Yes, we're talking about knowing about that difference about yourself, and it did indeed affect some musical decisions as well as other life-choices.

Anyway, now I have an adequate guitar, and I am learning how to make musical sounds on it, but mostly for studio recording rather than performance. I also don't tune my guitar in any standard way, but use open tunings that ring out sonorously. Something I learned from musicians as diverse as John Renbourne, Robert Fripp, and (again) Joni Mitchell, all of whom have championed non-standard tunings. (And again another way in which I was attracted to music-making that was different, in part because of my other differences.)

Meanwhile, I've crossed off the checklist the songwriter's inevitable first time playing and singing live in front of a coffeehouse crowd: I sang a new song I wrote at a cabaret event a few months ago, while also playing Stick. So, we're making progress.

My point in this discursive ramble has been simple, however: To be a songwriter, you need to listen to a lot of songwriting, and that's what I've been doing. It's the same reason that writers need to read, read, read, and read some more; poets especially, perhaps, although novelists are not excused from the task of reading. You learn much more by example and observation, and then trying things out for yourself, than you ever do in the classroom. There's a reason most authentic singer-songwriters are still mostly self-taught—which is not to say that they are ignorant of music theory or craft or technique—and that's because learning by doing is a richer way to learn than sitting and listening to a lecturer expound. And that's why I'm listening to so much music that is relatively new to me—new folk, Americana, roots, and the all the rest: I am educating myself to become a better songwriter. This is journeyman work, and I relish it.

Songwriting: Storytelling

Having bit the bullet and admitted that I might as well accept the label of songwriter for myself, even at my advanced career age, I have been exploring the terrain, finding out what's out there and what people expect. I've looked into the available networking resources. I've subscribed to American Songwriter magazine, which, unlike many other music mags, is really still more about the music than about celebrity artists and musical gear. In the January/February 2012 issue, which is a Bob Dylan 50th anniversary tribute issue, there are great interviews with Joan Baez and T Bone Burnett. It was a segment of the latter interview that got me thinking this morning, as I sat in my usual morning reading chair, still huddled in night's blankets, starting my day. Here's the exchange that caught my eye:

Do you have an overarching philosophy when it comes to producing?

I've been through so many different stages in my own life. The thing that's been consistent all the way through it is that at the base it's storytelling. All record making, all songwriting, all singing is storytelling. I've always tried to keep that in mind. First you look for the voice.

So you focus mainly on the vocals rather than the music of the sound of an album?

The sound of the music is completely dependent on the sound of the voice. That's reality. The instruments are more or less the same. The human being is completely different. Of course, I don't mean all instruments are exactly the same. There are great and bad sounding instruments, but even bad ones can make a beautiful tone. The person and the voice are so distinct that it changes the way you make sound out of either good or bad instruments. It's about blending the instruments with the tone of the voice.
—T Bone Burnett, interviewed by Hal Bienstock, "T Bone Burnett: The Taste Maker," American Songwriter, January/February 2012, p. 41

The voice is the original instrument. It's integral to the human body. The voice rises out of the center of the body, rises up through the torso, and out through the throat and mouth. The sound is shaped by all these factors, as well as general health. I've noticed that my own singing voice, which was never a robust instrument as an adult, has changed in the past few years when I was at my sickest, and as I've recovered. I have more strength now, more tone, although I'm still not a loud singer. Voices are very individual: you cannot actually standardize the human voice the way you can standardize the manufacture of a guitar or piano, because we're all different. There are some various types that one can identify, certain styles and approaches, but within those parameters there is still a lot of individuality.

One of the things that I've noticed lately in the current wave of over-produced pop stars is that has seemed to be an effort to standardize an interchangeable pop star voice; you may have noticed how pop voices sound more alike now than they ever have, with almost no variation in singer's tone or range. Some of that is because the production is being standardized, and there is a currently a fashion for highly-processed vocals, and a ridiculous fashion on top of that for semi-vocoded voices, so that tone and pitch all sound slightly robotic rather than human. I hope that's a fashion that dies soon, but I'm not holding my breath.

Elsewhere in the interview, Burnett is asked about the current American roots music revival—roots music being the old folk songs and styles, which not only are being researched and performed as they were, but are being used as the basis for new songs by young bands.

It seems like the public has become a lot more interested in roots music over the past decade than it was in the '80s and '90s. What do you attribute that to?

There are a couple of big trends going on in the world. One is towards globalization, the other is localization or tribalism. This is the music of our tribe. The Scots-Irish, Black people, Italians, the people that came here and started cooking up this music. I think things have gotten very depersonalized in the modern world. It started in the 20th century, the century of the self. This is a way to touch base. There songs are hundreds of years old, but they've been rewritten and grown into all kinds of things.

Does roots music speak to a longing for something more authentic?

I think there's always that. My view is that we live in a very de-authenticated world, especially in music. All music has been deauthenticated because it has been compromised so heavily by current technology.
—T Bone Burnett, ibid.

I find the current Top 40 pop music using perfected artificial voices and vocoders to be mannerist, decadent, the result of the end of an artistic era's process. It's representative of the cyberization of late-Modernist culture, in which people aren't sure where they end and their machines begin. Cyberneticists thought about all this in the 60s, and what we're seeing now with people (like me) using their smartphones and tablet computing devices for almost everything has been written about for decades in futurist circles as well as in science fiction. Amazingly thoughtful artistic projects such as the SF anime TV series Ghost In The Shell: Stand Alone Complex (based on the manga by Shirow Masamune) ask the question: what happens to culture, and to ourselves, when we stop being able to tell what parts of us are human and what parts are cyberized? Some of the mannerist music being made nowadays reflects an enormous if unconscious anxiety about these questions, reflected especially in the cyberized voices of the singers and the metric perfection of rhythm tracks created using digital beatboxes and instrumental parts that are never out-of-tune because they're produced and filtered using software synthesizers.

The end result is rather lifeless. It often seems like in pop music the machine has already won. After all, humans are an adaptable species; we often take on the shape of our surroundings, affected by geography, climate, nutrition, noosphere. We can certainly adapt to the cyberized future—as both represented in and thought about in pop cultural literature such as cyberpunk, and pop cultural music such as vocoded Top 40 radio. So we adapt, and change, and are changed. And we respond to digital perfection by looking for the unpredictable artistic glitch, the places the machines fail, the noise that often hides the signal—and so we get musical genres such as aleatoric music, noise music, and dubstep. We also get the soundtrack to the cyber movie Tron: Legacy, or the soundtracks to the Matrix movies, all of which brilliantly combine techno/punk hard beats and the more expected blockbuster orchestral movie soundtracks.

And that takes me back to the original comment that Burnett said that got me thinking: All record making, all songwriting, all singing is storytelling.

All of this is storytelling. Even the decadence of mannerist, deauthenticated, depersonalized "artistic product"—reflecting the contemporary attitude that all things are to be commodified and categorized or they are not real—is a particular story that is being told.

All songwriting is storytelling. All myths around art-making are storytelling. I am reminded of what poet Muriel Rukeyser once opined: The universe is not made up of hydrogen, but of stories. Joseph Campbell once defined myths, both religious and cultural, as the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. We are a storytelling species. Story is how we communicate with each other. Stories are how we express our communal and individual values, and also how we talk about what went wrong. Movies are storytelling taken to a synergistic level of words-music-image all combined; even journalistic documentary movies are storytelling. Reporting is storytelling. Even cable TV news is storytelling, although you often have to read between the pixels to uncover the narratives being sold us via assumption and innuendo, which lurk beneath the apparent surface of straight-ahead reporting.

So as someone who has been an artist in multiple media for decades, who now finds himself practicing the synergistic art of songwriting, of words-and-music, I find myself becoming a more conscious storyteller than ever before. That is, more consciously aware of the stories I am telling, and more willing to examine those stories as such. I find myself going back to listen to the folk music I explored deeply in an earlier period of life: the roots music, centuries old, that is being remade and reborn now. For Heartlands I wrote a few new folk songs, inspired by the old roots, but brand new. That sensibility, central as it is to living life in the Midwestern Heartlands, is a thread that winds throughout the music, sometimes more overtly, sometimes more deeply buried. And the work overall is storytelling: telling the stories of what it's like to grow up and live as a gay man in the Midwestern Heartlands, which was the origin and purpose of the music being commissioned.

I am now writing new songs. I find myself connecting to the roots Americana musical revival, not because I play an instrument like mandolin (I don't), or because I'm listening to a lot of Americana albums right now (ranging from Alison Krauss to Edgar Meyers' "Appalachia" series to the many artists influenced by Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, and so on), but rather because I find myself writing story-songs. Probably half of the songs lyrics I've written in the early months of 2012 have been impressionistic, based on things and seen while traveling out West, but the other half have been human stories, based on stories I've witnessed, or read about, or which emerged from my own life. What you observe and what you experience, and what you think about all that, that's all fodder for your art.

This is how we re-authenticate our lives, and re-personalize the world. Storytelling is still myth-making, which is how we make a home in the world, and how we make sense of the world and what it offers us, both soft and hard. Myth is the quest for meaning. Storytelling is the very fabric of the weaving of myth.

First Flutes

Since I began playing flutes, some 30 years ago, I have focused on ethnic flutes, especially bamboo flutes. I own a concert flute, a glass flute, a jade flute, flutes made of various hardwoods, and several dozen bamboo flutes. I specialize in suling, from Indonesia, and shakuhachi, from Japan. I don't claim to be a virtuoso flute player, as I am primarily self-taught, with the occasional guidance from more professional players. I play well enough for my own purposes: music for meditation, for ambient music, for my own compositions for flute and other instruments.

Playing flute for myself, I find it to be an instrument that calms and centers me, based as it is on the breath, the prana, qi, ki.

This is my first flute:



Not the first flute I ever owned, which was a flute of lesser quality that was a gift from a relative. This is the first flute I ever bought for myself, and which I taught myself to play. It has shown up on more than one recording over the years.



It's a large instrument, sounding in the alto flute range, with limited pitch range, a unique tuning, and very sensitive to breath pressure. It's called a Zen Flute, and was made by John Niemi in Hawai'i, in the early 1980s. I have three or four bamboo flutes made by John Niemi, all of superb quality, and all possessing a soul, an earth spirit. That's not just my opinion; other players and listeners have made similar comments to me, unsolicited.

In December 2011, when I was commissioned to record a new CD to be used for meditation, yoga, Reiki, and/or massage, which I titled Darshan, this flute was one I wanted to use on the recording. But I couldn't find it anywhere. I tore the house apart looking for it. I looked all through the studio, all over the basement, I looked in travel bags from my last camping trip last year. I thought with horror that it had somehow been lost, that I would never see it again. I had given up hope. I went ahead with the recording project, and was well satisfied with the music I was making, but there was a hole where this old friend had been.

Just this past week, it was returned to me. I had last used it on a recording project at the studio in Chicago, when I was living out in California, and in the turbulence of recent years I had lost track of it. Without remembering, I had left it in Chicago intending to record more with it later. My friend found it when he was cleaning out his place in Chicago, a few months ago, and had been waiting for the right time to return it to me, along with a half dozen other flutes all bundled together.

Having this flute given back to me is the best thing that's happened to me all month. It's like being reborn. Now that I have my Zen Flute again, I can hardly wait to make new music with it. I have plans to record more music for meditation, yoga, etc., and this flute will be featured prominently, you may be sure.

Here are the first two flutes I ever bought for myself:



Alongside the Zen Flute is my first shakuhachi. (Japanese end-blown flute, with a long and important musical tradition to its name.) It's a rough-hewn example of the breed, also made by John Niemi. This shakuhachi is featured prominently on Darshan, appearing on several tracks. It's my first shakuhachi, and even though I have acquired other shakuhachi of officially better quality, this instrument has a special place in my heart.



Here are several of my best-quality bamboo flutes, including three shakuhachi:



Three of these flutes were just returned me on the aforementioned occasion. The evening after I was reunited with these flutes, I spent a fair amount of time playing, caressing, just getting reacquainted. To have them all back again is inspirational. I am finding new music in them, each voice being as fresh as if never heard before. It's been long enough that I am rediscovering each old friend with great pleasure.



I spent some time tonight just getting to know all these flutes again, looking for new melodies. Each of them will appear on the next recording project, and I'll be sure that they are not parted from me again.



The three shakuhachi above grouped for a family portrait:



Making these photographic portraits of some of my favorite flutes from among my collection of musical instruments was an exercise in more than one photographic technique. All of these were made using a tripod and long exposures, with directional lighting from more than one source. It was a late-night photo session made in celebration of their return. These are all relatively long exposures. I used narrow depth of field to create the close-ups, desiring to emphasize the parts of the flutes where the mouth is placed, where the breath gives life to the music. One or two of the resulting images are iconic enough to be enlarged to poster size, and printed as decoration for the recording studio walls.

Process of Writing 23: Feeling of Accomplishment

That's what I'm feeling tonight: accomplishment. I just finished watching the televised presentation of Richard Strauss' opera about opera, about words and music, and the love of them both, titled Capriccio. This production featured Renée Fleming, and was superb. I'm a big fan of the waltzes from Strauss' Der Rosenkavalier, which are the waltzes I return to when I want to listen to an uplifting waltz. For me, Strauss was the culmination of the Austrian genre of the form. Capriccio is delightful, a modern meditation on art that is presented as a salon, itself a meditation. It doesn't have a Big Ending. Like real life, it just ends. It even ends on the questionL how can you choose between words and music? which is the greater art? The unstated implication is that it's the fusion of words-and-music which is the greater art: something I have argued for a long time. I found the "message" of this opera to be not only congenial, but close to home, near to my own thinking.

Since, after all, I now find myself writing songs. Music for the new commission that is words-and-music. I am writing both, and they do combine together. Am I poet? Am I composer? I am both, and like the character in the opera in the end I do not have to choose between them, but can love both.

That's the other sense of accomplishment I feel at the moment: I completed three more songs for the commission this week. I had only planned to write two this past week, but then I was surprised. As sometimes happens to me, a piece was gifted to me—I have no better way to state it—and was written down, more or less fully formed, in a few hours. It happened this way: I had finished one song, and was in the middle of forming and writing the second one. I went down to the farmer's market Saturday morning, to buy the vegetables that I like to get there, fresh each week. The apples are starting to come in, too, and I bought a couple of fresh crisp apples, that I have also been enjoying. On the drive back home from the market, some words starting coming into my head, followed by some musical phrases; next thing I knew, I had a complete piece in mind, and all I had to do when I got home was write it all down. Which took about three hours. And when I had accomplished that work, I took a break for awhile, then went to back to writing the other piece I'd been working on. I finished that the next day, and turned them in that night.

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One of two pieces I had been working on is "Alone," which is part of the commission's primary set of pieces, that are a universal story about living in the Heartlands, about leaving home, about life alone, and about the return to home. This is one of two interwoven narratives for the commission. The other narrative thread consists of several individual pieces, which are individual Stories, many of which were directly inspired by the stories told me by the men of the Chorus. This has been what the commission has been about, of course: telling their stories of what it is like to live and grow up gay in the Midwest, in the Heartlands, the heart of the prairie and Great Lakes states. The commission has all along been designed to be modular, so that for any given performance any set of pieces can be used: all of them, or just a few of them, or perhaps just the pieces from one of the two interwoven narratives.

"Alone" is a song of loneliness and isolation. Of feeling like you're the only "different" one in your town, or your school. Of being different, and knowing you are, and knowing no one like yourself. I wrote it as a solo for baritone and piano. The style is mostly tonal, mostly intended to be simple, pretty, and song-like.

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The second piece is one of the Stories pieces. I had the idea for this particular piece some time ago, when I was reviving once again my interest in folk music. I wanted to write a very simple folk song, reminiscent of but not directly quoting the great tradition of the Child Ballads. Back in my music school days, I had done extensive research on the Child Ballads, including going back and reading the original multi-volume publication of lyric variants; these ballads are at the root of a lot of traditional folk song in the US, especially in Appalachia. They are ancient English and Scots ballads, with many variations and a long history.

I set out some weeks ago to write something new in that ancient style. A variant, if you will, on the traditional ballad about finding one's lover, about being in love, about life and death. There are whole genres in the tradition of ballads about lost lovers, about those who have died, and whose ghosts the surviving lover encounters in dream, or in the night. For example, "She Moved Through the Fair," or "The Unquiet Grave." I wrote a basic sketch of the lyrics a few weeks ago, but I struggled through several rewrites to get the tone and rhythm and rhymes just so. You want to evoke the formal constraints of the ballad tradition, and still write something new.

What's unique about this new ballad, which for the commission I titled "Folk Song," is that the two lovers are both young men. I also invoked the ballad form of the calendar-poem, with the verses counting through the four seasons. If you know the Child Ballads, there are a lot of music-historical details I worked into this new "Folk Song" that evoke the tradition, that are homages or reflections of the ancient ballads. Having spent some scholarly time on the Child Ballads, I put in a couple melodic quotes and lyrical evocations that only genuine folkies are likely to catch; it will be fun to see who catches them and lets me know, if any.

Here are the first two verses, and the refrain (chorus) for "Folk Song," just to give a sense of it:

When trees burn gold in autumn
and the river runs cold and blue,
I first met my own true love
under orchard trees rough-hewn.

I gave my love an apple
and he gave one to me,
we kissed beneath the golden maple
and made our vows to be.

    To be true to each other,
    to live forever, clinging,
    like the vine that loves the tree,
    like the river flows to the sea.

I want to point out that the refrain breaks the strict ballad form, both in meter and in rhyme-scheme. I deliberately made the refrain more "modern" in sound, in a folk-music style, but a different one than the Child Ballads. Playing this kind of musical games is great fun for the composer. If no one else catches on, that's okay. It's one way you keep yourself interested, and amused, when writing lyrics and music for this kind of piece.

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The unexpected piece, the one that came to me on the drive home from the market, is the most modern-sounding piece in the entire suite of pieces for the commission. The piece is for tenor solo with chorus and piano; all three elements interweave, one element leading at times, at other times following the others. The pianistic style is modern, polychordal, using overlaid whole tone scales at times—more or less reminiscent of the style of some of my more complex and evocative solo piano pieces. By contrast, the solo and choral vocal parts are very simple, almost chant-like, occasionally monochromatic, holding down one note while the piano goes off into its own musical galaxy.

The piece is called "Night," and falls into the category of the pieces I am calling Illuminations. It's a piece about living in the Heartland, evoking common experience. It's not specifically a piece about living as gay in the Heartland; but the purpose of the Illumination pieces are to give context, provide background. They speak most directly about living here in the Upper Midwest, about the sky, the lakes, the forests, the land itself.

The words for "Night" came to me very quickly. Once I had them down, I spent a few hours writing out the music, and then it was all done. Here are the lyrics for "Night":

Night
walking the dirt road
at the edge of the field
moonless night full of stars
millions of stars so bright
I can see the dirt
I can see my boots
road rising into the sky
celestrail road

Night
edge of the lake
mirror still waters
night full of stars
silver light filling the sky
and reflecting in the lake
stars above, stars at my feet
mist rising near the shore
celestial lake

i was, as I said, surprised to get this song, but I'm very pleased with it. It's going to challenge a few singers in the Chorus, mostly because of its musical style. But in fact, the choral part is very easy, and all the reference notes needed to find your pitch are in the piano part, mixed in clearly against the backdrop of the more modern gestures and chords.

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So now I'm a songwriter. I've been writing all these songs. This week I wrote the most music I've ever written in a week. I've been in the flow, on a roll. Even though I am now approaching the commission's deadline for completion, if I continue to have songwriting ideas, I'm going to keep writing them down. I've never thought of myself as a songwriter before, but the process of working on this commission has really cemented that label in place for myself. Who know? Maybe I'll keep writing songs. Certainly if any song lyrics come forward, I'll set them to music, sooner or later. (I won't be moving to Nashville, though.)

This is a whole new world that writing this commission has opened up for me. A whole new level of writing words-and-music. I will at some point sit down and talk about my touchstones: those other songwriters who have influenced my process, both for this commission and in general, that have inspired me and given me direction during this long process. I'm too busy writing the songs to get into that now, though; so, later for that.

During this writing process, I've gotten in the habit of keeping a pocket notebook in my shirt pocket, in case an idea comes to me while I'm out and about. I'd say that 90 percent of the final ideas for the commission came that way—many of them while driving, as did "Night" just now. I think I'll keep that habit going, in future, and have a notebook with me for those moments when a song comes forward to be written.

Process of Writing 22: Everything Ties Together

I finished and then redid the short folk/country song "Fearless Heart." It felt really good to write it, something completely unlike anything I've ever attempted before. It also felt like actually writing the kind of song that songwriters write in songwriting centers like Nashville. Not that I like Nashville, I don't. I do like Memphis, a little. But I'd never want to move there and join the hordes of career-seeking songwriters. Most of whom are writing songs that I don't like anyway, in genres of music that don't touch my heart very much. Modern country music has become little more than rock 'n roll with a twang and steel guitars; it's more honky-tonk than ever, and mostly not very interesting. Not like the roots music. Not like the oldest country music, or bluegrass, or folk music.

Tonight, restless, I sat down and went through everything I've completed for the commission so far. I needed to sit down and reassess. I needed to take an overview, and pull things together, and see what I still have yet to do. I sat on the porch for awhile and looked things over. I also copied a few lyric sets into the master lyric notebook, gathering them together in one place so I can pull various scraps together into finished poems.

I've now completed ten individual songs, or pieces, for this commission. Words and music both, since that's what I've been commissioned to do. I see that I have six of the "pillar" pieces done, including the beginning and ending movements. I also have four "Stories" songs done. There is a pile of lyrics already done, and still needing to be set. Most of these are "Stories" songs, rather than "pillar" pieces. I still have to write the lyrics for at least three remaining pillar pieces.

By "pillar" I mean those songs that carry and support the main overall structure of the commission. These are pieces that together make up an overarching narrative. They include the "Illuminations" pieces, which are context-evoking, place-setting pieces, that evoke the Midwest Heartlands through description and memory and tone. This sequence of pillar pieces is architectural. Not that the "Stories" are decorative; but they are individual, and can really be presented in any order, as individual modules within the larger narrative.

So I really have two narratives going on in the commission at this point, which overlap and complement each other. The architectural narrative is about living and growing up and dying in the Heartlands. It's a collective story of home, departure, and return. Almost a mythic pattern of being at home, leaving home, and returning home. Like the hero's journey. The other narrative is the individual stories, some of them directly by the individual stories told me by the members of the Chorus. These are individual, with no overarching narrative connecting them together. What connects them is the theme of the commission itself: the stories of the members of the Chorus, about living as gay men in the Heartlands.

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Odd sources pull things together. Sometimes you set out to do something, and something else happens. I've written about four poems in two other series, other than the commission itself, over the past few days: a surprise outpouring of other poems. Most of these were written because I'm having difficulty with the emotions and physical sensations of my post-surgery recovery. I'm still dealing with grief, and depression, and just finding it hard to cope some days. What's hardest is breaking away from expectations, and just being present with whatever I'm feeling. So it pours out in a poem.

I realize I've also written three or four poems, written as lyrics for the commission, that perhaps won't get used in the commission. For two reasons: first, some are not central to either of the interlocking narratives, and therefore simply may not get done because I have to finish other pieces first, and then I might run out of time. Some of these I might still write as songs, but as stand-alones, written after the major work is done, and not intended to be part of it. The other reason is that they actually be poems, not song lyrics; one or two seem to move in that direction. The test will be to see if they call to be set to music, eventually, or if they will remain as poems on the page.

I had some arts programs on the TV running the background tonight. Suddenly I wanted to make a drawing, anything, even just random scratches on paper. I pulled out one of my sketchbook pads, and a couple of colored markers, and a new brush calligraphy pen, that's a brush with silver ink in it. I found myself making a long silver multi-stranded S-curve on the page. Then I found myself writing words on the page in four different colors, repeated in each color. Two phrases. "River cross my heart." And "River carry me home." I realized that the silver curve was a calligraphed river, and the words were my soul talking.

Those two lines, I also realized, are part of one of the next pieces I need to write for the commission. Part of the pillar piece about home, and leaving home. River, cross my heart. River, carry me home. And sometimes that's how the words and music come at you: completely sideways, unexpectedly, and out of nowhere.



This is why I say that my main artistic discipline, as a writer, is not to do as many writers claim to do, write something every day. Even when I do that, it's not always a poem I write. My discipline as a writer, as I have said before, is not to practice writing every day, or write a poem a day (the results of that particular exercise are usually crap), but to always be ready to write, when the inspiration strikes. I don't write things down until they're ready to be written down. My discipline is simply to always be ready, tools at hand, notebook and pencil and pen at hand, always ready to drop everything and write it down, whenever it comes forward. It's about listening to the voices inside you, not about going hunting for them. Listening, not seeking out. And that's my creative discipline in a nutshell: Just always be ready for the moment to strike, and the writing to flow.

Now, back to work. I have more words to discover.

Process of Writing 21: Moving Along

The first poetry is always written by sailors and farmers with the wind in their teeth. The second poetry is written by scholars and students, wine drinkers who have learned to know a good thing. The third poetry is sometimes never written; but when it is, it is written by those who have brought nature and art into one thing.
—Walter Anderson

I take this to remind one of the primacy of folk song, folk music, porch music, words of the old ballads always renewed, old stories retold with variations, the stories and the songs of the people telling themselves around the fire in the dark, songs about the shadows out there, beyond the circle of the light. And so I keep coming back to the folk music sources for renewal, myself, and my music, my words, my art.

A few days ago, rather unexpectedly, I finished the Opening number for the new music commission.

Suddenly, after having set it aside for weeks, the key concept of the opening piece became clear. It came from doing some reading in an anthology of mystical writings, specifically in the section in the book of chants, songs, and stories from the world's First Peoples. I realized that the key to the Opening number, now tentatively titled "Great Lakes Prairie Dawn," was that instead of being a summation-and-introduction of the entire commission, a showy grabber like the razzmatazz of an opening Broadway show, it needed to be quieter, grounded in nature, in life, in people, and be a scene-setting piece. It would be grounded by the traces left in the land by the First Peoples of the eastern prairie and Great Lakes region.

It's remarkable how many tellings by First People from different places and times often seem so similar, so grounded in the same basic reality. That's the place to start, therefore.

So I wrote down a couple of loose pages' worth of short texts inspired by songs, poems, tellings, and stories from the Ojibway, Lakota, Potawatamee, and Pawnee peoples—not quotes, not imitations, but my own words inspired by theirs. Words grounded in thousands of years of living on this land. Words inspired by that long experience of the land, the sky, the way of life here.

What better way to set a scene for the commission than with the original wisdom of the region, rooted in the land, the sky, the geology and geography, the changing seasons, the elements of nature that to this day dominate our worldviews, those of us who live here. Midwesterners always have the weather to talk about, because, as the saying goes, "If you don't like the weather, wait a day, and it will be different." Sometimes you hear "hour" instead of "day." We don't have climate here, the way some places do, we have weather. San Diego and Seattle have climate; the Midwest has active, dynamic weather.

After writing out a flurry of short poems, short texts, short lines, I cherry-picked through them as I was writing out the musical lines. For once the music came before the words; mostly I found words to fit with the phrases of music that were already starting to tumble out. I assembled texts more by intuition than by planned outline. Some things got left out. An entire longer poem got left out, for example, and if I have time, I'll make it into a separate piece later. So the end result is a series of interlinked word-paintings set to music. Some are rather fragmentary. Here's a partial sampling:

eye of the day sees everything
with the eye of the heart
    we help each other
the sacredness of life
bound to the land
we live our days
bound to each other
with love
   with love

Earth, our Mother
   bring rain to wash us
Lake, our Father
   wind to cleanse us
sun is risen
   sun to warm us
day begins
   soil to give us life

sun is risen
day begins

The piano accompaniment, rippling like water underneath throughout whatever the chorus is singing, has its own thread, and quotes at the beginning and end of the movement a well-known folk song, "The Water Is Wide." I made my own arrangement of this song, with altered rather than traditional harmonies. It seems proper to begin with words about the land, and a thread of song about the great water, woven together.

I didn't expect to work on finishing this opening piece till later on in the writing process. Weeks ago, I had felt stuck because working on the opening piece was triggering my tendencies towards perfectionism, which are the fast road to feeling oneself blocked. I got stuck because I wanted the opening number to be an attention-grabber, a Big Deal—since, after all, it's the first thing people will hear, and their first introduction to the overall piece. I realized that I was putting too much pressure on myself, and on the music, to be perfect. Once I realized that humbler, more earthy beginning was what was needed, I was able to proceed. Now it's done. I'm still not completely confident about it, though; I may revisit what I've written in a few days, to see if it has held up. If I have to rewrite it, I shall.

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I finished the Illuminations piece "Seven Haiku About the Great Lakes" just prior to working on the Opening piece. These short haiku linked movements came out quickly, a compact set of individual pieces that are thematically related both musically and poetically. This piece, I confess, was a real pleasure to write. The poems came months before the music, but when I began writing the music, it all came together very quickly and smoothly, one of the easiest writing experiences I've had so far.

I feel like I am still in that creative flow, that the writing is going quickly, smoothly, and relatively easily. I think about the commission every day. It's percolating away in my mind even if I've stepped away to do something else for awhile. For example, I needed to clear my mind, so I went out for a walk with the camera in hand. When I got back, some answers came directly out of the pencil and onto paper.

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Today I finished "Fearless Heart," adding a new verse as a bridge. In final form, it's basically a simple folk/country song, a shuffle, a simple little tune. Increasingly, I would like to have guitar, drums, and bass, as part of the musical accompaniment. I doubt that's logistically feasible. But some of these latest songs, some now finished, some with lyrics not yet set to music, seem to call for a versatile combo, able to play rock, jazz, country, whatever mood the music has at the moment. I don't know if this will actually happen. In my mind's ear, though, I can hear the arrangements for combo very clearly, even if I end up just doing it all with piano.

Initially I notated "Fearless Heart" as a jazz chart, or pop chart, at first. That is, just the melody line, with chords indicated, CM FM9 G7, that sort of notation. A few riffs written out, but when experienced musicians play to charts they know they have to come up with their riffs based on the chords: that's precisely when a shared musical tradition, such as jazz, is so useful in giving you guidelines about what to do. A folk song is the way I envisioned it, so that's the way I notated it. I can even hear it in my head, being sung in the voice of one of my favorite folksingers, with acoustic guitar, bass, and drums.

But that's not going to work for the commission. The commission is for male chorus, and piano. I doubt I'll have the option to add other instruments. So I'm going to have to re-notate the piece. I will copy out the solo melody again, then add a piano part. It will be a notated improvisation, as many of the piano parts for songs in this commission have been; this time, just more deliberately so. So I will re-notate the piece is a format more suitable for its intended use. But I'll keep my original version, too, and maybe teach it myself on guitar. Maybe it will get re-used in another context, as the folk/country song it was meant to be. Time will tell.

•

I've now finished two-thirds of the pieces necessary to complete this commission. Most of the main pillars of the construction are in place: beginning, ending, a couple of key central movements. I still have three or four pillar-pieces to build, and a few more smaller stories to tell. When this is all done, it will be an entire half of a concert, almost an hour of music. I am doing everything I want to do, with this, and not stopping myself from writing anything. If it doesn't get used, here and now, for this commission, it will still get used, somewhere.

Writing is what matters.

I feel like I've begun a songwriting career, now that I'm actually writing songs, real songs, like singer-songwriters do. It's an intoxicating feeling, and it makes me want to keep going: keep writing lyrics and songs, both simple and complex, both for chorus, and in the manner that singer-songwriters like Ellis Paul, Bruce Cockburn, Lynn Miles, Joni Mitchell, and others of that songwriting peer-group might do. Songs with guitars as often as piano. Not that I play guitar, but I have a good ear for writing music. We'll see what happens. As long as I'm in the flow, and things keep coming forward to be written, I'll keep going. It may take me well past this current commissioned project—and that's all to the good, as it might lead me where I want to go, now, artistically. Giving attention to what matters in life, and making art from it.

Art is always the replacement of indifference by attention.
—Guy Davenport

Folk Music: Against the Hit Parade

Pete Seeger wrote the following in 1956. It was true then, and it's still true today. Possibly even more true now than it was then, because the technology by which music is made, distributed, shared, and listened to has kept evolving, and changing at a rapid rate. The record companies have now lost their bootheel-n-the-throat control of music production and distribution, which is the good side of the current technological miracle; the bad side is of course that those same record companies, in their flailing about to try to maintain their dissolving monopoly, have become vicious about trying to keep that monopoly, while at the same time producing an endless stream of newly-hatched, overly-produced, hype-marketed, vapid, cheap and tawdry, hollow, talentless pop stars (is Lady Gaga, the latest incarnation of Madonna and/or Marilyn Manson, a postmodern commentary on this trend or herself part of it, or both?)—most of whom have been influenced by Pete Seeger without probably ever hearing his name. Seeger's influence on folk and pop music remains incredibly strong, and his opinions, even his older ones, are still worth listening to:

I am against the Hit Parade because I am against anything that would make a sheep out of a human being. The world is too big, and its people too varied, to try and make one hit parade suit us all. True, the gods of mass production may proclaim that it is much cheaper, much more efficient, to produce everyone's music at one place and at one time. But which would you rather hear—cheap music or good music? (And by good you might mean anything from Calypso to blues to Bach.)

Not only every country, but every region and town, every national group, every age group, every industry, even every school or summer camp should have its own hit parade, refusing to follow slavishly the dictates of Hollywood and New York.

Fortunately, at the same time that TV has concentrated the entertainment business as never before, LPs [and now CDs and MP3s] have enabled hundreds of minority idioms to receive hearings. The so-called Hit Parade is, today, simply the most popular songs of the fourteen-to-eighteen age group, and is supported by them and a few saloon goers who help feed the jukeboxes. There have been many songs which have attained Number One on the Hit Parade, yet 75 percent of the population have never heard of them.

Another way to think about this is a parallel slogan from artist/shaman/astrologer/writer Rob Brezsny, who says: Performance is life. Entertainment is death. Entertainment, which is what the music industry tries to reduce music to, both to sanitize it and make it harmless and control it, and also to try to own it financially, is passive; entertainment is you not making your own art, but only taking in the art made for you by others. Produced for you by artists and musicians and writers who the arts industry has laughingly begun to call "content providers." As if the purpose of making art was only to sell it, to provide content to be sold. Thus goes the final decadent stages of the commercialization of creativity under what another contemporary radical philosopher has called Too-Late Capitalism.

Entertainment is ultimately deadening because it is passive. You are expected to be a passive consumer sucking at the teat of a centralized delivery system. (That's the paradigm that the five big worldwide music industry conglomerates are so desperately trying to hold onto.) Performance, by contrast, is enlivening because you do it yourself. You pull out the banjo, or the piano, or you go to choir rehearsal, and you make acoustic live music with other mostly-untrained people who are making music for their lives, their souls, and their health. (Which of course is one definition of "folk music" that Pete Seeger would agree with.) Performance is active, it's do-it-yourself, it's wild and anarchic and often very rough around the edges: folk music, in a word, which is music made by regular folk. Entertainment is very slick and over-produced, and slides down the gullet like teflon-coated candy. Performance, on the other hand, is often full of little rough edges and errors, those details that make it come alive. Put another way, performance exists where people who make music (or art) understand: Don't let the perfect get in the way of the good. Slick, perfectly-recorded, perfectly-packaged entertainment is deadening. Rough-edged folk music makes your heart beat as well as your feet.

Think about it. This is all tied into what Pete Seeger was talking about 50 years ago now.

(Hat tip to Swanee, who sent me a copy of Pete Seeger's The Incompleat Folksinger, ed. by Jo Metcalf Schwartz.)

Process of Writing 19: Folk Music

I own at present one Bruce Springsteen album: We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions, a CD of old, old folk songs recorded in honor of the great Pete Seeger. This is a great, great album, which I highly recommend. If you're a rocker or a pop music junkie who knows nothing about folk and its rich traditions, this is a good introduction.

I make no bones about it: I think Bruce has written some immortal songs, and I'm not among the ranks of slavish fans. Honestly, that's because I tend to not be among the ranks of slavish fans, period, for any artist. It is a general condition. I find myself relating to Bruce, with this album, as with others of his I've encountered, more as a fellow musician, more than as a fan. He interests me because he's a songwriter, his music interests me because it contains qualities of roots music that a lot of rock 'n roll does not. But I feel more like a fellow singer, with writers like Bruce, than I do a fan. Bruce himself is a lot more down-to-earth than many in the music business; and those are the types of rockers I relate to. more often than not.

When I approach a songwriter like Bruce Springsteen, I do sing along, but singing along is, like with folk music, how you learn the songs. There's no better way to learn a song than by getting inside it, and sing it from the inside. you sing along, you eventually memorize the song, then you make it your own, sing it your own way, in your own voice, in your own arrangement.

There are more great singers who sing from inside the song in folk music than there are in pop music, or even in rock music. Jazz singers tend to be coolly sophisticated; as much as I respect that, it can also be cerebral rather than gutsy. Although of course that can depend on the moment. Pop music is very polished, and these day it's pretty much over-polished and over-produced to death. Folk music, by contrast, is still music made casually by folks in the kitchen, the living room, the pub, the union hall, the church steps. It tends to be rough-edged. Bruce says it himself, in his commentary for The Seeger Sessions: "This isn't music being played, this is music being made." And he points out the rough edges that make making music a live thing, not a pre-digested and over-produced thing. There are occasional moments when you hear someone counting out the changes, or flubbing a riff.

We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions keeps all those rough live edges. Most of the musicians were standing in a circle in the same living room when they played, a living room in a farm-house. (The horns were in the hall, for a little bit of mix separation. The mixing board was on the kitchen table.) There wasn't a lot of rehearsal. What happened, happened live, for real. Spontaneous arrangements. In improvised music, whether we're playing jazz or folk or whatever, we call that making it up as you go along.

Of course, in folk music, you hang your improvisations on the skeleton of the well-known tune with its well-known chords. It's a way of rediscovering the music each time, of bringing it to life, rough edges and all. You hear a song like "The Water Is Wide" or "Shenandoah" and it comes alive for you all over again in the singing. Music to be made, not merely played. I know some high-power studio session musicians on both coasts; many of these have told me that it doesn't get much better than this sort of living-room session, when the perfectionistic rules of most studio recording sessions are suspended, and you're making music, not playing music for your rent. It can be a special thing.

I unabashedly admit that The Seeger Sessions, just found and purchased, though I'd been looking to buy it for at least a year, since I first heard about it, unblocked some very old musical channel in me, and gave me the ending to the song that I've been working on all week. Pete Seeger is once again to thank, along with Bruce. I was a heavy-duty folkie when I lived back in Ann Arbor, playing and going to concerts on the folk music scene for years and years. This music is deep inside my heart, somewhere. It's in the blood. Whenever I come back to folk music, to roots music, which I do periodically, I am refreshed and recharged. Some part of me which loves the sophisticated avant-garde music that I also grew up listening to, and that I also compose, loves to set aside the sophistication and just play.

I remember interviewing a musician involved in the Midwestern Industrial Music scene once saying to me in an interview: "Industrial is the urban-based banjo-and-fiddle music of the future." She was right, because Industrial in places like dirty downtown Chicago or rusting riverside Detroit (my birthplace) is the folk music of the post-industrial urban dweller, the music made by the folk who live in those environs. It's still folk music, even though its sounds and methods and means are all post-apocalyptic, inspired by the failure and disintegration of the post-industrial rust belt. Folk music of the rusting cities, even if it sounds like steam engines and sheet metal being pounded out on anvils, is still folk music. Folk music is the music that the local folk make.

So folk music is a welcome stream, revisited just now by being re-encountered yet again, that feeds into the new music commission I am writing. That stream of folk music, of rural music, of traditional songs sung by untrained and not-overly-sophisticated folk, is appropriate for my suite of songs about living and growing up gay in the Midwestern heartlands. More and more what I am realizing about this commission, as the work develops and I continue to write, is that this is roots music. It's about our rootedness in the land. It's about how the land, and the lakes, and the rivers, the prairies, the open skies, are as much as part of our character as anything other element, and more than some. The land is part of who we are, here. Even when we leave the Midwest, as many do, we take our memories of place with us, and also our memories of the values we learned in our small-town traditional homes.

Playing and singing folk music makes me feel social. And what's more social than singing in a chorus, or playing music with friends in the living room? It's good for me to be social, as I am alone too often. That's not a bad thing, I need a lot of solitude daily in order to keep my equilibrium; too much noise and fury and I get overstimulated. I need solitude and silence for writing my music. But music is also the thing I have in common with people I have nothing else in common with; music brings me together in harmony with people I might not otherwise have anything to say to. Even when there isn't a conversation, there can be music. For me, music is the sacred prayerful glue that holds it all together.

That's why I'm a musician, and not a writer: A writer is someone who responds to life by writing about it; a musician is someone who responds to life by making music. Of course a songwriter does both of these things; but most honest songwriters would tell you that music can stand without needing words, whereas words in songs need the music to be fulfilled and brought to life. So songwriters who are wordsmiths, even poets, still tend to refer to themselves as musicians rather than poets. Like myself. It's the folk way to keep a little humility to hand, even when it doesn't seem essential in the moment.

The song for the commission song cycle that I am currently writing is a sort of a folk song. I've deliberately left it a bit rough around the edges, a bit simple in terms of chords and melodies, so it's easy to sing, and keeps it life. It has a complex alternating rhythm of 6/8 divided duple alternating with 6/8 divided triple (3+3 + 2+2+2)—but that sounds more complex than the music sounds itself. When you get into the swing of the rhythm it becomes very natural, very self-sustaining. Once you get the feel of the rhythm, you don't need to count it anymore. Counting rhythms is sometimes required in more sophisticated music; in folk music, you just go with the feel.

i've got most of the lyrics for this song, now. I am coming to the end of this writing. Suddenly, after feeling like I was fighting an uphill struggle to write, after cleaning out my ears with some serious folk playing courtesy of Bruce Springsteen and friends, courtesy of the influence of Pete Seeger, I am feeling enlivened and charged. Words come easily when they had to be fought for, before. It all falls into place, with the acknowledgment that this is really a kind of folk song.

it's the angry lover kind of folk song. It's in the tradition of spurned, questioning, forlorn, angry love songs. Why can't you love me? Why won't you let love you? In old folk songs, which are often full of death and crime and the harsher realities of life, sometimes the lover is talking to a ghost, sometimes confessing to a murder. Love gone wrong. All the way from Olde England to Patsy Cline and johnny Cash.

So much for the philosophy of writing folk song lyrics. I'll put off posting the current song's lyrics here, except in small part, as, just as in the case of a good folk song, they sound better with the music than they do just by themselves. Here's a bit, though:

Can you love me enough to let me go?

Here we are in this sky full of lightning
Striking around us as we fight for our lives.
Can you still say we're nothing but comrades
When we made love all night? I know your heart.

Did you want to love me or did you just love yourself too much?
Can you ever love someone who loves you or are you too proud
To see who loves you who can always love you no matter what?
Can you make up your mind, just love me and let go, let go now?

. . .