Ornamental Monsters

“For although each man among them was discrete unto himself, conjoined they made a thing that had not been before and in that communal soul were wastes hardly reckonable more than those whited regions on old maps where monsters do live and where there is nothing other of the known world save conjectural winds.”

~Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian

Debates over the source of consciousness are old and legion. I don’t intend to wade into those deliberations or even proffer anything close to a unified theory of the brain and mind; instead, I’d like to propose a simple enough hypothesis. Whatever the physiology of consciousness, its origins were most certainly accompanied by a novel intuition: Why?

The dawn of consciousness marked our species’ transition from darkness to light, from instinct to contemplation, from ignorance to awareness, from paradise to fear. This cognitive leap must have been accompanied by endless questions (even if we didn’t have the language yet to ask them): Why did the sun rise? Why is it setting? What will happen when it sets? How can we make it rise again? What is the sun, anyway? Every moment had to feel like a possible end. Consciousness begot concerns over the frightening natural world and our fragile, vulnerable place within it. To survive, we required answers to these elemental and existential questions.

We remain pilgrims stumbling through the fretful void, and the only thing we have to guide us are stories. No other creature seeks (or needs) to fill the mechanistic universe with tales of being, narratives of origins and destiny. We are the lone myth-making creature.

Please do not confuse my use of the word “myth” with its pejorative: myth = not true. Myths are essential to our being. They were to ancient peoples and are still so. Allow me to offer a rather lengthy exposition on what I mean when I say “myth.”

1. Myths singularly found civilizations and cultures.

2. Myths — whether they are based in the imagination, on historical events, or on observable facts — are metaphorical narratives constructed and organized around symbolic images and signs.

3. Myths create a sacred, social order in a violent and chaotic world and imbue that world with meaning, allowing us to participate in an existence full of significance and import.

4. Myths point to a transcendence or power beyond ourselves and place us in a realm of shared, collective meaning which surpasses all relative space and time.

5. Myths provide a moral compass for social groups, a guide to right and wrong according to the customs and mores of the time.

These symbolic stories allow us to weave varying aspects of understanding into a single, cohesive framework. They offer us guidance for why and how we should live. Their essence permeates all cultural expressions: literature, art, religion, history, science.

How about this analogy: Think of myths as a sort of map. In a chaotic and unpredictable world, they help locate us in a particular place and time and offer us guidance for which life path we should choose. They provide figurative routes for how to get from here to there. These narrative maps are all we have to help us navigate the incomprehensibly vast expanse of Reality.

Essential to myths are monsters, of course. Picture that half-human, half-beast from your childhood fairytale. Or, picture the dark, violent specter from your favorite horror film. Monsters inhabit torturous spaces in our mind. We can agree that monsters are scary. They symbolize what we don’t understand. They symbolize our fear of the unknown. They symbolize danger, in all its manifestations and forms. They represent a threat to our sense of self, to our sense of being, to our very existence. Scary beings inhabit a scary world.

Consider early depictions of monsters. Bridging our development from the Dark Ages to the Enlightenment, early cartographers adorned their maps with mythological sea monsters. Perhaps the most famous of these is Olaus Magnus’s 16th century Carta marina. 

In his book Sea Monsters on Medieval and Renaissance Maps, scholar Chet Van Duzer offers a common explanation for this phenomenon. Monsters on maps “serve as graphic records of literature about sea monsters, indications of possible dangers to sailors — and data points in the geography of the marvelous.” They can be interpreted, he continues, as “guardians of the furthest limits of the world.” In other words, the ocean is vast and scary, and there are things in those depths beyond our reckoning. When we don’t know what lies beyond the horizon, we imagine; we conjure monsters. It’s a plain warning: Beware to those who venture into uncharted territory!

But, Van Duzer offers a second interpretation, one that considers the artistic value of such fiends. Monsters on maps “may function as decorative elements which enliven the image of the world… emphatically indicating and drawing attention to the vitality of the oceans and the variety of creatures in the world, and to the cartographer’s artistic talent.” Van Duzer adds that Medieval and Renaissance maps containing sea monsters were “richer, more sumptuous, more extravagant.” In summary, these creatures supplant dread with an aesthetic. It might not surprise you to know that maps adorned with such fanciful beasts were sold at a higher price to the royalty and nobles who commissioned them. Thus, these mythical creatures served a dual purpose. They gave imaginative shape and color to the dangers and mysteries of the vast unknown. And, perhaps more importantly, they reflected innate artistic expression — these ornamental monsters that transfigure fear into surreal wonder.

What is art if not the ur-language of myth? Our guide to parts unknown. Through storytelling, song, and image-making we create beauty and meaning where before there was nothing absolute.

Songwriting has offered me a chance to chart a course, as Cormac McCarthy so brilliantly put it in his masterpiece Blood Meridian, to “those whited regions on old maps where monsters do live.” I am moving from darkness into light. I am venturing into parts unknown. I am deconstructing those dragons in the mist. I am decorating the void. I am trying to answer: Why?

And know, this discourse on consciousness, myths, and maps is no abstraction, no history lesson. Our day-to-day lives are filled with psychic monsters that take all shapes and sizes. Every day is a heroic quest. There is so much we do not know, so much that we fear. The only guide we have through this perilous journey are the myths we weave, together and for ourselves. And we must do more than tell ourselves these stories. We must enact them, live them, be them. We must continually examine and revise them. We must turn our very lives into works of art. If we do, then the whole journey becomes sublime — even the mythical beasts.

When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be

Thought Experiment: Consider, for a moment, the absolute lack of record of almost everyone’s existence prior to the invention of writing. These were people like you and me who lived rich, complex, social lives. Nothing is left of them but the faintest genetic trace. 

How long will it be until you are forgotten? The moment when it’s like you never existed? If you have kids, you’ll certainly be remembered throughout their lifetime. If your kids have kids, you’ll be half remembered by your grandchildren. So that’s, what, another eighty years of memorial existence after your death (if you’re lucky). After that, you’ll be reduced to a record in someone’s file, a leaf on some family tree, a photo in a book no one opens, a series of unviewed images in some internet cloud. Given long enough, even those records will cease to be. By the end of the next century it will be almost as if you never existed. History is overflowing with the billions upon billions of people just like us: those who lived, loved, suffered, died, and were forgotten. 

To exist consciously is to become aware of one’s impermanence. For some, this truth is unthinkably depressing. After all, we matter. How can it all wither away into the annals of insignificance so quickly, our existence devoured by time’s implacable black hole? 

It’s worth noting that ancient and modern cultures resolve this existential dilemma with varying stories about an afterlife. Problem solved. I’m not convinced by such tales. In contrast, I think a lot about non-existence, and I find that meditating on my finite nature, on the impermanence of all things and all people, has been my very salvation. Join me, if you will, on a few (hopefully) related tangents.   

Tangent 1: When my wife was pregnant with our first child, she made me aware of something called a “push present” — this being a gift you give your partner for, well, pushing out a child. (It’s kinda all explained in the name). I never know what to get my wife for holidays or birthdays or anniversaries, so imagine my dread and horror when faced with giving her a gift for bringing life into the world! My wife owns 173 pairs of shoes, 42 purses, and two jewelry boxes filled with all manner of shiny objects. (And on the off chance she reads this, I COUNTED). I just couldn’t think of another thing to get her. 

Tangent 2: In one of his later works, Twilight of the Idols, Friedrich Nietzsche condenses all of his theories on reason and philosophy and religion and art into a figure he calls the “tragic artist.” The tragic artist has rejected the existence of absolute truths, has confronted the nihilistic reality of an objectively meaningless existence, and has overcome that nihilism by passionately embracing his existence and fate in spite of the absurd insignificance of everything. Ironically, it is in his fervent embrace of every moment of his pointless existence that he overcomes the sickness of insignificance and redefines the meaning of his life on his own terms. In Nietzsche’s words: “The tragic artist is no pessimist: he is precisely the one who says YES to everything questionable, even to the terrible.” He triumphs over all futility through the act of self-creation. In this sense, the tragic artist fashions subjective meaning within an ultimately meaningless existence.  

On the one hand, art, as Nietzsche observes, “makes apparent much that is ugly, hard, and questionable in life.” It exposes and confronts our bleak reality. With the same brushstroke, however, the tragic artist creates art full of “courage and freedom of feeling before a powerful enemy, before a sublime calamity, before a problem that arouses dread.” Instead of nihilism, the tragic artist evokes a “triumphant state” through the act of creation, one that glorifies our existence in defiance of the existential truth: that we will live and die and be forgotten in the blink of an eye. Art has no higher purpose than to reflect the inherent tragedy of our existence while simultaneously overcoming that tragedy by conjuring beauty and meaning out of nothing! 

(Back to) Tangent 1: Which brings me to “Write Me a Love Song.” (For those expecting some simple, romantic gesture here, I do apologize). I didn’t want to get my wife just any thing to celebrate the birth of our child. We chose to bring life — a life that was not here before — into existence, and that act of creation felt worthy of a more sacred gift. Diamonds aren’t forever (despite what they tell you), she has more than enough shoes, and another purse would just get tossed in with the others.

In song I tried to capture just how rich our life together is, just how necessary we are to each other in this existence that races toward non-existence. We are here, we’ve brought life into the world, and soon we will return to oblivion. Still, our life together matters — to me, to her, to our children. Each day as a family, we resurrect and renew our fragile and finite love. Our very existence together is a work of art. What else could I do but sing?    

Tangent 3: In light of Nietzsche’s views — which have informed much of my intellectual stumbling for decades — I view songwriting as the primary instrument through which I can define my life as a tragic artist. It’s about far more than streams and follows. (Though, please, stream “Write Me a Love Song,” and share it with a friend!) It’s about accepting those noble truths spoken by the Buddah all those years ago: that I am impermanent, that life is suffering, and that there is no self. And still I sing. And soon my songs (and whatever beauty swims in their musical wake) will have never been. 

Even so, there is no greater sense of purpose I know than creating art, and, by turns, creating myself.

The Greater Scheme

“I was thinking 'bout you, crossing Southern Alberta / Canola fields on a July day / About the same chartreuse as that sixty-nine Bug / You used to drive around San Jose.” The first time I heard the opening lines to James McMurtry’s “Canola Fields,” I was at turns dazzled and dejected. On the one hand, a living person had sat down with pen, paper, and guitar and written these poetic lines. (Nowadays, of course, it’s more likely he sat down with a computer or iPhone and a guitar). On the other hand, I couldn't wrap my head around the intimidating finesse and virtuosity of the lines. 

When you’ve peered behind the curtain of musical craft long enough, when you’ve lived your life with full attention to how songs are made, you don’t frequently come across lyrics that seem otherworldly. Most songs don’t bear the markings of the mystery. The lyrics of most songs seem doable, and it’s comforting to think that I could probably write something similar. But “Canola Fields” gave me the fear immediately — that this kind of writing was something I couldn’t do. The lyrics strike the perfect balance between specificity and universality. The imagery and word choice are exact and particular; the characters are so distinct, yet the song invites you to imagine this experience as your own. It feels as close to perfection as a songwriter can get.  

Take the use of proper nouns. This drive isn't just happening anywhere; it’s happening in “Southern Alberta.” These aren’t just any fields; they’re “Canola fields.” It’s not just summer; it’s “July.” And this moment reminds the speaker of a car, but it’s not just any car; it’s a “sixty-nine Bug” which is being driven around not just any city but “San Jose.” What’s so uncanny about the exactness of the location and symbolic imagery here is that it’s both unfamiliar and familiar at the same time. I’ve never been to Southern Alberta or San Jose, and I’ve never driven by Canola fields; still, I was able to immediately imagine myself on some lonesome, desolate drive at the height of summer with the windows down thinking about the past. What kind of magic trick is this — where a songwriter can weave exotic detail seamlessly with intimate experience?  

And while it’s not a proper noun, “chartreuse” is a peculiar color to choose. It’s not a color — like blue or red or yellow — that can be easily placed. And once I took the time to look it up, I realized that chartreuse is a greenish/yellow color named after a French botanical liqueur produced by Carthusian Monks during the 18th century. (It tastes awful, by the way, in all its varieties). So take a look at the lyrics again, and this time move beyond the majesty of the visual impressionism. Wafting from the opening lyrics are also distinct smells. In bloom, Canola smells like cabbage. Chartreuse smells like rosemary, sage, and pine. If you immerse yourself even deeper in the lyrical dream, you can also smell the Polypropylene and plastic of the car’s dashboard baking in the July sun. The evocation of these earthy and industrial smells is not unimportant, in the song or to the listener. Smell is deeply ingrained in our emotional memory. Both smells and songs conjure memory, and that is exactly what’s happening in this opening verse. The Canola fields remind the speaker of the car his former lover used to drive while at the same time the song itself is asking the listener to remember, to connect this song with his or her own lived experience.  

During each and every listen, I find the opening four lines of “Canola Fields” (not to mention the rest of the song) to be sensorially, emotionally, and intellectually all-consuming. The song takes me on a journey filled with memory, regret, and (by the end) a real shot at redemption. It’s the work of a songwriter at the height of his craft. There’s much grace to be found in art, and the more time I spend with “Canola Fields,” the more approachable, the less mysterious it seems to me. On occasion, I think I even catch a glimpse of McMurtry: the lonely songwriter, the mason toiling away at the stone.      

I told my good friend and fellow songwriter J Seger that I felt like I really turned a corner in my own songwriting when I wrote “Hermès Scarf.” I’ve been stretching myself to locate that lyrical balance that McMurtry found between specificity and universality. I wanted to move beyond all those clichéd and reliable turns of phrase that seem to be the first to surface when you’re working on a song. They’re always available and could work, but these easy lines are often not worthy of the kind of song I’m striving to write. The key, I’m finding, is in word choice, in the timely invocation of proper nouns and the intentional arrangement of vivid and unique adjectives. It’s about the synchronized dance between wording, meter, phrasing, and phonology. This approach seems more attainable to me now, and I think I’m stumbling in the right direction with “Hermès Scarf.”   

The first thing people do when they focus their attention on the lyrics of a song is try to imagine themselves in the song. As authors Susan Rogers and Ogi Ogas point out in their insightful book on the intersection of music and neuroscience This Is What It Sounds Like, “Talented songwriters recognize that listeners' imaginations work alongside their literal perception when they are enjoying a record. Even as we process the words, our minds are spinning out imagery and memories and emotions.” Therefore, exacting imagery has to be used in order to evoke the most vivid imaginary world. At the same time, the scenic landscape and emotional narrative have to be vague enough so that the listener can put himself or herself into the song’s situation, so that the listener can fill in the blanks left by the songwriter with his or her own life experience. 

In the third verse of “Canola Fields,” McMurtry sings: “We all drifted away with the days getting shorter / Seeking our place in the greater scheme / Kids and careers and a vague sense of order / Busting apart at the seams.” How could this line not be about me? 

There’s a reason your favorite songs are sacred. At times they speak for you; they perfectly express your experience and emotions. Other times, they offer you a chance to imagine a different life. Even more, they expand your understanding of other people. Expressed more concisely in This Is What It Sounds Like, “Lyrics can make us feel seen, heard, and understood.” And they do all this even though the words aren’t yours, even though the story isn’t exactly yours. Still, you step through some magical portal and become part of this deeply personal mise en scène. Within this whirlwind of language, sensory detail, and imagination you find meaning and understanding.

More and more, I am convinced that, amidst the messiness of life, songs help us in our quest to find “our place in the greater scheme.”

Just My Imagination

Seafoam green slim jeans. Black skull t-shirt. Skull ring. Turquoise ring. Onyx bracelet. Handcuff bracelet. Chain wallet. Rattlesnake charm necklace. Sunglasses. Chukka boots (though I really want snakeskin cowboy boots).

My wife is embarrassed by how I dress for gigs. My look has all the markings of someone in his (early) forties trying to reclaim his youth. And I won’t deny that some of that developmental psychology has to be at play. But, what I tell myself I am really doing is trying to find my persona: some Grecian mask I can put on to liberate myself from myself. To become something wholly different and other on stage — a vessel of sorts where the latent desires of performer and audience dissolve together in some phantasmic wish fulfillment. There’s something beautiful and true that happens in this collective myth-making. That’s what I’m doing.   

Or maybe it is just some midlife crisis. 

I would argue that every artist dawns a persona on stage. It’s essential to the performance, to the collective suspension of disbelief. Let’s start with pseudonyms. Some of my favorite artists are: Robert Zimmerman, Roberta Anderson, Stevland Judkins, David Hayward-Jones, Reginald Kenneth Dwight, James Osterburg, Jr., Jeffrey Ross Hyman, Shawn Carter, Edward Severson, Calvin Broadus, Jr., Alicia Cook, Josh Tillman, Elizabeth Grant, Christopher Breaux, and Kendrick Duckworth. Never heard of ‘em, right? We all know them as: Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Stevie Wonder, David Bowie, Elton John, Iggy Pop, Joey Ramone, Jay-Z, Eddie Vedder, Snoop Dogg, Alicia Keys, Father John Misty, Lana Del Ray, Frank Ocean, and Kendrick Lamar. All these spellbinding, creative spirits — masked and notorious.   

Giving yourself a new name is a rebirth. It’s a chance to grow and evolve into something you are not. You become a fictional character. You can say and do things as this figment that you would never do as yourself. A portal is opened to a place of expanded freedom and expression. In this theatrical space, everything is magnified — reality is distended. In cloak and veil we can better examine all those gaudy axioms of our rather usual but complex existence. The truth is hiding in plain sight when we all just make believe. 

Fashioning a persona doesn't always require a new name, however. Take Keith Richards as the ideal example. He is the embodiment of THE MYTH: sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll. This guy has been on every “Celebrities Most Likely to Die” list since the 70s. He’s been perpetually on the nod for the past six decades, right? We’ve all seen the photos. I won’t deny that Richards spent most of the 60s and 70s in a narcotic haze (still somehow alert enough, I’ll add, to write most of Beggars Banquet, Let It Bleed, and Exile on Mainstreet). What’s also true, however, is that the guy is worth north of $500 million and that he kicked heroin in ‘78 and hasn’t snorted a line for more than 15 years. (Warning: bumping lines in your sixties is not recommended for most senior citizens). He’s a father, a grandfather, and has a businessman's understanding of international tax codes (which comes with the territory of being rich, I guess). So why do we imagine that the 79 year old man on stage is something more than what he really is? From our vantage, why does he appear to be a rock god?   

Keith Richards’s persona has persisted because it’s necessary. First, it’s necessary for him. As Tom Waits put it in the Netflix documentary on Richards’s career, Under the Influence: “You have to have some type of armor so that you can continue to also develop as a human being, you know.… Inside that [persona] you’re still able to grow and change…. It’s kind of a ventriloquist act a lot of the time, you know, but it’s much safer than putting your own ass out there.” Personas allow artists to divorce their artistic selves from their practical selves. Personas also provide songwriters courage to charge through the emotional phalanx, through the immense fear that comes with putting your art out in the world to be consumed and judged. 

Second, Keith Richards’s persona is necessary for us. Carl Jung, the philosopher and psychologist whose exposition on the persona is seminal to our intellectual history, observed the following: “The persona is a complicated system of relations between individual consciousness and society.” As we’ve seen, the persona allows the artist to conceal her true nature, but it also allows us (the audience) to conceal our true natures. It permits us to believe that such unbelievable people really do exist. If Keith Richards can will himself into something transcendent, some spirit that expresses the totality of our emotional selves in a few strums of the guitar, then so can we. All our dreams and desires are projected onto that masked man stumbling on the stage.

But such masks also trap you in some version of you that’s you but not you at all. In his epic autobiography Life, Richards admits: “I can’t untie the threads of how much I played up to the part that was written for me. I mean the skull ring and the broken tooth and the kohl…. I think in a way your persona, your image, as it used to be known, is like a ball and chain. People think I’m still a goddamn junkie. It’s thirty years since I gave up the dope! Image is like a long shadow. Even when the sun goes down, you can see it. I think some of it is that there is so much pressure to be that person that you become it, maybe, to a certain point that you can bear. It’s impossible not to end up being a parody of what you thought you were.” All myths are really cautionary tales, in the end.  

So why the colorful jeans, the accouterments of death, the chain wallet? Because really what we all want sometimes is to be someone we are not. I want to be a rockstar. I want to be Keith Richards (even though I know Keith Richards isn’t really Keith Richards). Even Keith Richards doesn't want to be Keith Richards. “I just want to be Muddy Waters,” he confesses in Life, “Even though I’ll never be that good.”

In the end, we all need personas because they help us manifest and channel our hopes, dreams, and desires. So, I’ll keep trying on different masks — looking for the one that fits best. If you come across any deals on snakeskin boots in the meantime, send them my way.

Slouching Towards Tin Pan Alley

I’ve begun teaching a songwriting course to high school seniors. What I’ve discovered building and refining the curriculum is that so much of the “teaching” of songwriting is wrapped up in what I am trying to “unteach” myself as a songwriter. 

First, expertise in academia is all about semantics. It’s not so much about what you know or your intuitions; it’s all about wielding the language of expertise — words and definitions that musicians have developed over the years only so that they can communicate with other musicians and other songwriters in a common tongue. This language in-and-of-itself, however, is not essential to the songwriting process. Music, afterall, preceded  language.  

Still, in teaching my students about songwriting, I’ve found myself hammering home vocabulary more than talking about the orphic process of songwriting. I’ve had to define musical concepts like melody and meter and syncopation. I’ve had to explain and clarify the elements of song structures: verse, chorus, bridge, pre-chorus (whatever a pre-chorus is). Sadly, I’ve been reducing the feel, the instinct, the mystery of songwriting to formulas. All the while I know that great drummers don’t need a textbook to tell them what “swing” is and that great lyricists don’t need a dictionary to define the musicality of alliteration. They just do it because it feels and sounds right. 

I’ve been plagued by a sort of double consciousness as I stand before my students. Ultimately, I don’t even think you can teach songwriting. I agree with Mary Gauthier who wrote in her brilliant memoir Saved by a Song: “I don’t know of a single songwriting rule that can be universally applied. There are no absolutes in songwriting, and no one holds a monopoly on how it should be done.” She’s even more right when she admits, “I learned how to write songs by writing them.” I’d humbly add that I learned how to write songs by listening over and over and over again to the best songwriters in every era and every genre. I study music as if my life depends on it. Great art is mimicry fused with particularity. Only you can write the songs you write, but it’s best to be in musical dialogue with those who came before you.    

Allow me to wander a bit: I picked up Dostoevsky’s instructive novella Notes from Underground the other day. It’s a book I taught for a few years and a book I fell in love with as a cynical undergraduate. I won’t drone on about the storyline (you should read the book), but, in summary, it’s about someone who refuses to accept the many, many formulas we’ve devised to help ground ourselves in reality, constructs we’ve invented  to save us from the chaos and randomness and meaninglessness that underpins our existence. The underground man has read all the science that attempts to put everything in order, that attempts to categorize and name all things. He’s read all the philosophy about reason and beauty and truth. And what he discovers is that the truth of 2x2=4 has not unburdened him from the “sickness” — no formula will ever resolve his existential crisis of being. 

Now, I’m not arguing that math and science aren’t true. I believe in the scientific method and that mathematical proofs are our only way of discovering objective facts. What I am saying is that facts alone are often not enough in response to the paradox of being. (Has the groundbreaking discovery of genetic sequencing ever helped you get through a bad day at work?) We know more and more about so much more, and yet we find the more we know the less we know about all there is to know. You see, art offers a complementary and contemplative narrative in juxtaposition to reason alone. 

And this is where great songs are born, in the space where established knowledge implodes under the weight of its own limits, where great artists shatter pre-existing molds through creative inquiry. Art, if it serves any function at all, offers emotional and intellectual guidance in an existence devoid of absolute answers — in an existence where, most likely, there are no answers but only more questions. 

So how should I teach my students to write songs? I’ve decided to teach them the rules and language of songwriting and insist that they break those rules and invent a new language. I am going to invite them to listen to the greatest songwriters I’ve communed with these many years and encourage them to discover the inspired and diverse ways songs can be assembled. 

The craft of songwriting is about so much more than strophic or ternary song forms. It’s about more than rhyme or pitch or downbeats. I’ll admit: I can’t teach my students how to write a song, but I can certainly advise them on how not to write a song. Or, just maybe, I can offer them a calling that will help them reflect on the mystery of being. 

High Fidelity

“Guglielmo Marconi, the inventor of the radio, believed that sound waves never completely die away, that they persist, fainter and fainter, masked by the day-to-day noise of the world. Marconi thought that if he could only invent a microphone powerful enough, he would be able to listen to the sound of ancient times. The Sermon on the Mount, the footfalls of Roman soldiers marching down the Appian Way.” 

 ~ Hari Kunzru’s White Tears

Space and sound: the 700 square foot storefront at Sun Studios, the Ryman Auditorium, the low-ceilinged basement at Motown's Hitsville USA, the Royal Albert Hall, the movie theater where Willie Nelson recorded Teatro, the Echo Chambers at Capital Tower, Abbey Road, the humid cellar of Villa Nelcotte in the south of France where The Stones recorded Exile on Mainstreet, Carnegie Hall, the concrete eyesore that is Muscle Shoals Sound Studio, RCA Studio B, WMGM’s Fine Sound Studios where Miles Davis birthed cool, Sound City Studios, the old church that was turned into Columbia Records 30th Street Studios, Stax Records, Trident Studios in London where Ziggy Stardust landed, 210 South Michigan Avenue, the Sydney Opera House, the stairwell at Headley Grange where John Bonham record the drums for “When the Levee Breaks,” Electric Lady Studios. You get the point. I’m obsessed with sounds produced in specific spaces at specific times.  

When you play a song live, there’s no intermediary between you and the sound being produced. I am spellbound by acoustic sounds. Vibrations that emanate from instrument or mouth, produce waves that jangle air particles, pierce our ears, and are perceived, without filter, by our brains. Principally, sound is the process of setting air to motion. The physics of sound is waves and pressure and velocity; it’s reflection and refraction and attenuation. But sound is also a sensation: a way of perceiving a motion we cannot see. Sound is an experience — a beautiful marriage of the physical and mental — that can be appreciated purely in only the space and at the time where and when it is being created. 

Sure, you can record sound. You can amplify it. You can digitize it and translate it into binary. But, all recordings, analog or digital, never fully capture the space in which it was made. The recording and transmission of sound is ultimately a fool’s errand. A shadow on the wall of Plato’s cave. An approximation. Further, compressed digital files like mp3s are altogether an alien language; they’re sonic pulp, a computerized bastardization of human-made sound. Digital sound is not, by design, human sound. Direct-to-disc (what was once the green dragon of high fidelity vinyl recording) is as close as you can get to capturing live sound. The wave movement of space is captured directly onto the grooves of the record. (Grooves are not 0s and 1s). But still. You put that ultra high fidelity record on, and you’re in a different space. You’re in your living room (a spot where you’ve planted, like a flag in the ground, your obnoxiously big turntable, amp, and speaker setup despite your wife’s protestation). It’s still not the same as being there when that note was played or lyric was sung. 

There are some songs I play over and over again in my little basement music room. When I’m flipping through my Big Binder of Songs, I always seem to stop at Ryan Adams’s “Hard Way to Fall.” I keep playing it, first, because it’s a brilliant song, and, second, because I am trying to fully capture the essence and performance of the song this time. I am trying to achieve a certain sound — in this space at this time. Sometimes I get pretty close. Most of the time I just “cover” it and move on. I guess what I am trying to confess here is that I am aware of and in awe of the potential in that magical space I’ve procured for myself in the underground part of my house. There’s a way, I know it, to move that air with that song in such a particular way that transfiguration is possible. That space, as somewhere to reach for the sonic and emotional absoluteness of a song, is holy to me. 

You know that central image on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel? Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam? That narrow but infinite space between the finger of god and the finger of man? That’s what I am going on about here, folks. There is something about live, acoustic performance that is holy and something about recorded performance and digitized music that is forever and ever a simulation. It’s the outline of the thing and not the thing itself. As someone who takes the recording of song very seriously, this truth is devastating. 

So what do we do in the face of this reality, that music in its purest form — as a live performance — cannot be accurately recorded or preserved? Most people say, “Close enough. Stop all this ranting, Baker. This isn’t good for your health.” To those I offer: “You’re right. And don’t worry; I’m fine.” Practically, however, what I am trying to do now is reframe my approach to recording. 

I am heading back into the studio, and this time I am going to try to prioritize the space. I am going to try to capture as close as possible the way instruments and voices sound in space. I am mulling over hard engineering questions. (A thing I am in no way qualified to do which is why producers and engineers are so important in the process). How can I make this highly orchestrated, technical, and digitized process more visceral, more live, more reflective of the space and time in which the air was shaped to wave? Acoustic performance is one way, and by acoustic performance I don’t mean just acoustic guitar. I mean capturing the actual sound waves produced by a real piano, a real amplifier, a real voice. The ideal: no direct to console recording. No synthesized sounds. No MIDIs or plugins. No recording that’s not done in real space in real time. 

Of course! I am going to break this promise as soon as I get into a studio chock full of amazing technological innovations. But the aim remains fixed. Or, at least this intention will become the touchstone for the conceptual sound of the record. 

This is getting technical and silly and all too theoretical. For those still reading, bless you. But, I hope what is coming across here is the pursuit of an ideal. For what is art if not the attempt to depict and capture ideal Forms? There is no higher Beauty or Spirit than the art of Song. This futile quest to preserve Song in its purest is no less absurd than other quests. It, at the very least, offers me a direction to journey. 

And I Know It

I love The Beatles. I do. But, I don’t spend much time listening to songs written before Rubber Soul. And for good reason, I’ll argue. 

Last month, I was lucky enough to see Paul McCartney in concert. The show was a dream come true, and Sir Paul played with all the energy and enthusiasm of a man half his age. But, during his nearly three hour set, one song caught my attention (and triggered my cynicism, too). 

“Love Me Do” was The Beatles’s debut single. Released in England in 1962, it reached #17 on the UK Singles Chart. When it was released in the States in April of 1964, it hit #1 on the Billboard Hot 100. Teenyboppers and Beatlemaniacs swooned to “Love Me Do.” What’s not to like about it? It’s catchy, up-tempo, and fun. It even has a great harmonica solo! It’s easy to sing along to, largely, I think, because of the simplicity of the lyrics and rhyme scheme. I realized though — even as I sang along with thousands and thousands of other concertgoers — that the song is completely illogical; it’s little more than a teenage nursery rhyme. I understand formulaically why “Love Me Do” was a hit for The Beatles, but artistically I think it’s one of their worst songs. It’s certainly not something songwriters should try to emulate or recreate.    

I mean, what does it even mean to “love me do?” Surely, it’s meant as a command: as in do love me. But, such word reversal is most at home in the midst of some Shakespearean sonnet. Shakespeare gets a pass because of the complexity of his poetry and the masterful way he uses linguistic inversion as a highly stylized and intentional metrical device. “Love Me Do” isn’t deserving of such Shakespearean-license. “Love me do” is a nonsensical phrase, and it strikes me the more I think about it as spontaneous yet lazy writing; it’s just a silly rhyming trick.

Allow me to speculate further: Paul and John wanted to write a love song, right. So, they started with “I love you” as the foundational end-line phrase. They must have worked backward from there. There is no way Paul or John bothered with a rhyming dictionary as they impulsively scribbled down this saccharine (if not woefully immature) masterpiece. “You” is one of the easiest words to rhyme in the English language. Hundreds of words rhyme with you: blue, knew, flew, tattoo, undo, breakthrough, avenue. The list goes on and on. But, I don’t think Paul and John struggled very hard to find a more sensical rhyme. (Anyone who has seen all eight hours of the Get Back documentary can attest to the dynamic duo’s Dada approach to songwriting, even later in their careers). Somewhere in the hasty process of writing down lines that rhymed with “I love you,” “love me do” came out. Voila! A framing hook. 

Hold on. I’m almost done… I’ll just add that rhyming “you” with “love me do” feels like a swing and a miss, or, dare I say, a miscue! 

I smiled quizzically later that night, humming along to “Love Me Do” back at my hotel after the show. Were John and Paul being cheeky or naive? Or, more likely, were they just trying to write a hit and weren’t worried too much about the grammatical illogic of a phrase like “love me do?” They probably thought the line was funny! It certainly makes me laugh. 

I spent much of my artistic energy as a young songwriter trying desperately not to rhyme. I wasn’t trying to write “Love Me Do.” An admirer of modern, postmodern, and avant-garde poetry, rhyme was an anathema, a tool of the past bearing the insignia of conformity. Most of the songs I write now, though, revel in rhyme. More and more I’ve grown to understand and appreciate the utility of rhyme in songwriting and the radically paradoxical freedom it endows in its constraint. Sure, rhyme can be embarrassingly sophomoric as in “Love Me Do,” but more often, it becomes a vehicle to style and originality.  

The best analysis of rhyme I’ve ever read is Adam Gopnik’s recent New Yorker essay “The Rules of Rhyme.” Reviewing Levin Becker’s book What’s Good: Notes on Rap and Language, Gopnik identifies two approaches to rhyme in poetry and music: True Rhymers and Tumble Rhymers. 

True Rhymers revel in the highbrow, strict, conservative world of straight rhyme. “Do, you, true,” a la The Beatles’s “Love Me Do” being one example. Songs coming out of the Brill Building in the fifties, most of early Motown, standards written by Sammy Cahn, or most traditional show tunes from the likes of Stephen Sondheim would be other examples from the True Rhyme catalog. 

Tumble Rhymers, conversely, are faithful to slant rhyme; they are far more invested in the sonic nuances of dialect and in the playful ways words can be paired together to represent the beautiful imperfections of speech. Emily Dickinson was a master of tumble or slant rhyme. But so are Kanye, Lou Reed, Kendrick Lamar, and Randy Newman. Personally, I find songwriting committed absolutely to true or straight rhyme mostly boring. It’s predictable. I am more excited and surprised by the witty innovation of rhymes that work only because of the way they’re delivered — the power of intonation mixed with timbre layered in mood. Tumble Rhymers are cool because they sculpt language, because they rhyme with moxie and pluck. 

When I am writing a song with rhyme, sometimes the straight, true rhyme serves the song. But most of the time I am looking for a slant rhyme that moves the song into an interesting place; I’m always looking for a word that no one sees coming (not even me). As Gopnik pointedly notes in his essay, “rhyme is a self-imposed constraint, and you get to choose your handcuffs.” Sure, writing a song with rhyme can be restraining, but writing within established boundaries can lead to incredible breakthroughs. Especially when you’re willing to bend the rules.

Gopnik’s right when he proclaims that rhyming makes language matter. So, as you wade through the ocean of words trying to write a song, seek words that shock, surprise, illuminate, beguile, and charm. Rhyme words that no one has ever rhymed before (even though they probably have; you’ve just never heard the song). Trust: what matters more than the perfection of rhyme is the impression and emotional truthiness of the sound. So please, don’t let rhyme get in the way of the song itself, and never let rhyme commandeer the process either. And remember, it’s okay to tumble your way to the truth.

Surviving Line To Line

Larry Charles, the writer and director of Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm fame, tells great stories about working with Bob Dylan on a defunct slapstick comedy they pitched to HBO in the 90s. (Click here to listen; it will be well worth your time.) Charles spins some yarn about Dylan’s “coffee test” and the black duster Dylan wore to intimidate HBO executives, but one of the most interesting stories he tells offers insight into Dylan’s writing process.  

As the story goes, during one writing session, Dylan brings in an ornate box — “like a sorcerer would,” Charles adds — and dumps a heap of scraps from hotel stationary on a table, each with a “weird poetic line” scribbled on it. Coyly, Dylan tells Charles: “I don’t know what to do with all this.” 

BULLSHIT!

Dylan knows exactly what to do with this stash of poetic gems. I agree with Charles’s conclusion: 

“I realized, that’s how he writes songs. He takes these scraps, and he puts them together and makes his poetry out of that. He has all of these ideas and then just in a subconscious or unconscious way, he lets them synthesize into a coherent thing. And that’s how we wound up writing also. We wound up writing in a very ‘cut-up’ technique. We’d take scraps of paper, put them together, try to make them make sense, try to find the story points within it. And we finally wrote…a very elaborate treatment for this slapstick comedy, which is filled with surrealism and all kinds of things from his songs and stuff.”

What makes Dylan great is that his songs survive line to line. Each line or couplet can stand on its own. When Dylan’s at his best, every line could be a great opening line. And that is because he writes down every line that comes into his head and weaves these lines together like some mythic spider into songs that force you to keep up, force you to decode, force you to make the thematic connections that are there and not there at the same time. In a way, Dylan’s cryptic, line by line songwriting approach invites you into the process. In that magical invocation from writer to listener these lines become a song. It’s true sorcery. 

The best songs often start with a great line. And the line comes to you when you least expect it. I’ve taken to carrying around a small notebook with me and keeping one in my car. One must always be ready. (The voice memo app on my phone is likewise invaluable). When the melody, phrasing, and line come all at once, you feel more like a vessel than an agent. So, I get why Dylan just writes down everything that comes in his head. (Check out D.A. Pennebaker’s penetrating 1965 documentary Don’t Look Back. Dylan is always writing. Or, check out these pages of handwritten lyrics to “Like a Rolling Stone.” The proof is right there.) It’s a great way to approach songwriting. Write it down now, make it a song later. 

CAUTION: What shouldn’t be missed here, however, is that great lines come to artists because they are searching for them. I don’t want there to be any confusion — songwriting is not a passive endeavor. Great lines and songs don’t just come to anyone. Somnambulant demi-humans need not apply. They come to those who have focused their full energy on finding them. They come to those who strive to maintain a heightened and special state of awareness and receptiveness. They come to those who know where to look and what to look at. Good songwriters are observant, patient, and greedy. Think of songwriting more as a state of being, and you’ll better appreciate how these great lines manifest. 

When the first line of “Beyond Good and Evil” came to me, what followed was a manic series of questions: “She said, ‘God is dead,’ and took a long slow sip / I used to love the smell of Scotch and Nietzsche on her lips” Who says such a thing? What’s her backstory? Why is she saying this in conversation? Who is she saying this to? Who’s this “I?” Is this true; is God dead? An image of a dark, femme fatal formed in my head, and the more I inquired the more her story took shape. When lines pose questions, you become more of an inquisitor than a songwriter. Inquiring rather than knowing is a good place to be as a writer. 

Such a line by line approach offers no guarantees, and it is by no means the only way. No writer is singular in his or her process. Much of what you scribble down will be garbage. What you’re hoping for, though, is that one line that contains within it a world of possibilities. It’s as close to being a sorcerer as you’ll ever come.

Fear and Loathing in Nashvegas

On visiting Nashville for my 40th birthday — They close the streets off to cars on Broadway at night so that the pilgrims can stumble and vomit wantonly. They keep them doped on bright lights, flat beer, Fireball, and loud grooves. Nashville’s Lower End has all the cultish energy of Mecca or the Stations of the Cross. They’ve come from everywhere to kneel to porcelain gods. They screech, slur, sing, and curse at Uber drivers. They come for “fun” but leave cow-eyed and possessed. 

They travel on bikes that are bars, on the backs of buses that are dance floors, or are ferried by farm equipment; booze fueled tractor-taxis sow steady rows of crapulence. They move in packs and dress alike. They wear imitation cowboy hats or trucker hats, tank tops with bachelorette party slogans, and cheap leather boots.     

Some come to watch the beasts. They bring their cameras. They arrive early and leave early. But not before they witness the opening liturgy of the Bacchanal. These gray-haired voyeurs — they are the only ones awake early enough to eat breakfast the next day. With their intense gaze, they are trying to tap and drain the pool of youthful energy that wells below 5th Avenue.     

This daily festival is State sponsored. Tax incentives, police in neon vests directing the Hajj, ribbon cutting ceremonies. Everywhere you look they are building towers to hold more pilgrims. They’ve buried a lodestone somewhere, rumor is. They’ve built monuments and museums to memorialize the ritual. 

I feel the sickness set in. The fear and loathing rises from a sense that we are really just glutinous beasts, that civilization runs on a stupefying mix of greed and hedonism. This is what pure id looks like in Western ware. 

The honky tonks and bars, though, are penned in by churches. The Ryman stands apart, a red-bricked testament to pure spirit. Believers sit in pews and feel the pulse of life in every descending bass line and drum fill. The “mother church” is where the profane spectacle transforms into the sacred. If there’s any salvation or dignity off Broadway, it can be found in this ballast.  

There is plenty of great music being made in Nashville. You trip over premiere musical talent at every turn. Most even play on Broadway. Art is made here, it seems to me, despite it being commoditized and fetishized by soulless profiteers. There’s being and life in Nashville. You just have to fight through the wasted herd to find it.

A Heap of Broken Images

Not long after World War I, T.S. Eliot had what used to be called a nervous breakdown. He took leave from his job at Lloyd’s Bank and checked himself into a hospital in Margate, England. He wrote a few lines there that would eventually become his famous poem The Waste Land. Watching the waves lap onto the shore one evening, he concluded: “On Margate Sands / I can connect / Nothing with Nothing.” 

The Waste Land has always stood for me as a kind of fragmented testament to feelings and truths beyond the rational — art that tries to connect nothing with nothing. It’s spastic. It reads like our minds work. One moment you’re a child again, sledding down a hill in the snow, the next you’re lost in the desert, dying of thirst, contemplating “fear in a handful of dust.” I admire Eliot’s unmoored but intentional structure. At times we become third wheels, eavesdropping on conversations about lost love, desperation, the war-dead. Then we’re singing. Then we’re boozily gossiping at the bar, only to be told that the bar is getting ready to close: “HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME,” we’re reminded. 

TIME, indeed. The Waste Land is very much an extended meditation on the inevitable march of time and our relation to it:  

1. Remember when? How our memory transports us back in time. 

2. Maybe later we’ll…. Can you not see yourself in that distant future, more complete then than you ever were or are? 

3. Writing this now — How can this be anything other than a desperate attempt at immortality? 

The very act of creation is liminal. We stand always, in every moment, at a threshold that combines past, present, and future. Eliot proves this in The Waste Land. We watch empires fall and rise; we move between epochs, between generations, between seasons, between cultures, between people. We’re never fixed. It’s always TIME — always now and not now. Eliot rummages through this “heap of broken images” and experiences seeking some torn center: answers to existential questions. It’s how he spends his time as an artist. 

We know that physical time is relative to the speed at which one travels and can bend relative to the mass of an object (thanks Einstein), but I wonder sometimes if time isn’t also relative to our perception of time. Is our subconscious even aware of time or subject to it? How do you experience time in dreams (or if you don’t dream, in your sleep)? With trauma, can not one become stuck in time?  Psychedelics warp our perception of time. So does meditation.   

I’m fascinated by the idea of meditation but have tried it with intent on only a few occasions and have mostly failed. It’s hard to do well. Once, though, in a classroom full of students, I think I experienced the time-altering power of meditation. (We were studying American Transcendental writers like Emerson and Thoreau, so, of course, the hip thing to do would be to engage in guided transcendental meditation as a class). Sitting in a chair, counting my breaths, and then not counting my breaths, and then a slipping away of sensory reality. I don’t even know how to describe it with words (and I am not one who believes in extrasensory or metaphysical realities; I am more of a material agnostic). But, I had an experience that felt like pure mind. The experience was of a plane beyond the physical. Time seemed to evaporate altogether.            

So it was, with all these inchoate ideas about memory and time, about collective and individual experience, about grief and rage at the wasted meaninglessness of it all,  about meditation, about how to even write about such things — connecting everything and nothing all at once — that I came back to The Waste Land when I was working on “Peace for All,” the last song on Buyer’s Remorse. Think of the song’s premise like this: one person survives the end of the world. There is one person left in the waste land. As our lone inquisitor, she gets to ask god why. Why all of this? Why any of this? Or maybe (and I would argue more likely) there is no god at all, and our survivor is left alone, talking to herself. Asking questions to no one about nothing. 

At the end of The Waste Land, we get a similar premise. A divine voice speaks to us amongst the ruins in the form of rolling thunder: “DA. DA. DA.” Followed by the feeble, desperate human response: “Shantih, shantih, shantih.” (Shantih is a Sanskrit word and mantra that can be translated as peace.) Eliot, suffering from personal crisis and witness to global catastrophe, ends The Waste Land with a meditation on and an invocation to peace: inner peace and peace for all. Isn’t that what we’re all searching for? HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME. 

The chorus of “Peace for All” echoes the end of Eliot’s poem. I sing: “DA: Shantih, shantih, shantih, Om.” I repeat the mantra over and over again. Sometimes, when I play the song alone, I just keep repeating the mantra. And, on occasion, I forget I’m singing a song, and that feeling of the absence of time slips in. Sometimes, singing the song can feel like a kind of healing.   

The Waste Land in title and substance is very much about a world without god but a world filled with our many inventions of god. I read Eliot’s poem as an attempt at a new invention, an attempt at restoration, an attempt at healing, an attempt to find meaning in the meaninglessness, an attempt to build a new cathedral, one brick, one word at a time. “These fragments I have shored against my ruins,” he writes. That’s an interesting and potentially lifegiving aim for an artist — to make something out of nothing. These are ideas worth meditating on, I think. It’s how I spend much of my time.

Hear That Lonesome Whippoorwill?

Most people don’t listen to lyrics. They hear them, for sure; but the lyrics aren’t the main allure of the song-listening experience. I teach a class on American Literature of the Sixties (which is really just an excuse for me to indoctrinate my students into the great music of the decade). We spend a lot of time listening to the pioneers of postmodern American songwriting, those songwriters who pushed popular music forward as a lyrical art. Almost universally and unabashedly, my students admit that they don’t really listen to the lyrics when they experience a song. For them, music is more visceral than poetic. As someone who considers lyrics to be primary in good songwriting, this majority sentiment drives me nuts! But I am certain that, at least in evolutionary terms, my students are right. The high intellectualism of lyrical craft is, for scientific reasons, insignificant to writing a pop song.  

Our species (that’s modern Homo sapiens) is roughly 160,000 years old. According to most anthropological hypotheses, this aligns with the birth of language. In other words, what helped us outcompete other hominids was (very likely) our evolving linguistic capacity. (If I were ever going to be brief, this fact alone would settle the argument; no such luck.) A lot of species communicate, however, and have been doing so way longer than us. Trees, ants, dolphins: coordinated messaging isn’t particular to us. Song most certainly isn’t unique to our species. Birds and whales have been singing far longer than we. What is clear, then, is that wordless song, as a tool of communication, is old and instrumental to the survival of many species. 

Unrelated to songwriting and on a different atheistic quest altogether, I read Nicholas Wade’s The Faith Instinct last summer. He dedicates a whole chapter to the evolutionary advantages of music, song, and trance. Highlighting the foundational importance of communication, he concludes: 

“it’s the sharing of information that binds a group of individuals together. This can be spoken information, but more important than words in the binding process is emotional information. This is conveyed by different, and probably much older, forms of communication than language. The vehicles of emotional information are gestures, such as dance, and evocative sounds, such as music, including wordless chanting and drumming.” 

In other words, beautiful melodies and hypnotizing beats speak to us on a much deeper and more emotional level than symbolic language. He adds that music and dance likely coevolved together. 

Do your favorite songs move you? Do they make you feel? Do they make you dance? It ain’t the words making your hips move like that!    

Words arrived in our species hundreds of thousands of years after dance and music. Darwin knew this. In his Descent of Man he suggests: “We can thus understand how it is that music, dancing, song, and poetry are such very ancient arts. We may go even further than this and…believe that musical sounds afforded one of the bases for the development of language.” We, thus, respond neurologically to rhythm and melody for adaptive reasons in the oldest parts of our brain. I’m not sure if that answers the riddle about the chicken or the egg; nevertheless, trust how you feel. Is it the groove of a song that moves you or the words? As someone who has (regrettably) found himself (in his late-30s) dancing on top of a table to house music (of all things) in a club in Miami at 2:00 AM (it was a bachelor party, okay), I can assure you; it is most certainly the groove.   

Think about music, then, as a rhythmic and melodic landscape that speaks to us, most deeply, beyond language. Our favorite songs inspire us to move and dance; it’s the beat or harmony that draws us in. Eventually you learn the lyrics (mostly you half learn the lyrics) and, when you’re alone in your car, you belt out the words in some kind of magical incantation. It’s the ancient ritual of singing (rather than deconstructing the lyrics or the meaning of the song) that transports you emotionally and spiritually. You feel connected to something: the singer, perhaps, or more likely to a moment or feeling in time that’s no longer a specific moment or feeling in time at all but, instead, a vibration or echo of that moment or feeling. Experiencing music in this way is connective and transcendent. 

When you hear your favorite song, don’t you feel healed in some way? With? Alive?  

The argument for the primacy of rhythm and melody in music seems evident — in the scientific record and in your personal musical experience. But, I want to at least make a bleeding-plea for the cultural value of lyrics. 

In his book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Yuval Noah Harari ambitiously attempts to outline the evolution of human culture from the pre-lingual past to the modern day. In his research, he noticed something stark: a pattern of concentrated human achievement and cultural evolution that was unprecedented. He called this specific span of our collective history, which occurred between 70,000 and 30,000 years ago, the Cognitive Revolution. 

At its simplest, the Cognitive Revolution was about how our use of language evolved. Though, as I’ve established, our language was not the first among sentient creatures, ours was the first language that allowed us to connect a limited number of sounds and signs to produce a seemingly infinite number of sentence patterns, each with a distinct meaning. We also developed the ability to not simply communicate about things we see, but we made the cognitive and linguistic leap to transmit information about things that do not exist at all. We figured out a way to adapt language to do more than simply communicate. We figured out how to wield the power of language to craft complex fictional stories. Harari concludes: 

“Legends, myths, gods, and religions appeared for the first time with the Cognitive Revolution. Many animals and human species could previously say, ‘Careful! A lion!’ Thanks to the Cognitive Revolution, Homo sapiens acquired the ability to say, ‘The lion is the guardian spirit of our tribe.’ This ability to speak about fictions is the most unique feature of Sapiens language…. Fiction has enabled us not merely to imagine things but to do so collectively.”

While some species can cooperate on mass scale and with thousands and thousands of individuals of their species group (think, again, of ants, for example) species closely related to Homo sapiens prior to the Cognitive Revolution likely had what Harari calls a “maximum natural size” or “critical threshold” of about 150 individuals. Because species groups competing for territory and resources and warring with other competitive groups require hierarchies and an intimate social order, something must have occurred during the Cognitive Revolution that allowed for our species to begin cooperating on a larger and larger scale, thus outcompeting many other species. What happened was the emergence and invention of fiction: fiction, most likely, communicated through ritual song. Telling mythological stories through songs, then, was the innovation that propelled our species to the top of the evolutionary food chain. Lyrical song, rich in fictional, poetic lore, helped us evolve en masse beyond survival and into civilization.  

I admit, it’s most certainly the rhythm and melody that move you deeply. But, I submit, it’s the lyrics that draw you into our collective symbolic order. Song lyrics (if they’re trying to do something more than just move the melody) bind emotional truth to rational understanding. They raise you above the physical and impassioned and offer a portal into the intellectual. A lot of people can bang a drum and hum a tune. How many try to fit the world in a song? 

Locality Data

Discussions about Tom Waits can get heated among my friends. People seem to either love him or hate him. Even among respected musical connoisseurs, his work can be divisive. I, for one, think Tom Waits is one of the most important songwriters and composers in the history of rock music. I love his lyrics, sound, style, and philosophy. I’m in awe of his ability to invite listeners to occupy his songs. 

You’ll hear some obvious Waits influence on my song “Beyond Good and Evil.” My producer J Seger and I tried some experimental recording techniques during the session. We looped the main rhythm track and used footsteps, chains, lead pipes, and breaths to create the rhythm. You’ll also hear a whisper track between verses which quotes from Nietzsche, whose writing inspired the title and themes of the song. I tried to make the song’s narrative detail very specific but vague at the same time. I’ll let you be the judge of how successful I was there, but I like that the song is about a very specific event in this couple’s life and that the imagery rather than the plot of the song is in the foreground. Our goal was to make every musical choice contribute to the haunting meaning of the song. This aim evolved directly from Waits.      

I like Waits for a lot of the same reasons I love the poetry of Charles Bukowski. Both artists write about people who have been swept under the rug. Bukowski found his unwashed muse at the horse track and at dive bars during the daylight hours. Waits stalks the red light districts of LA and Singapore. Both are writing about a dark reality that many live but that few artists dignify. Bukowski’s poetry and Waits’s songs elevate these lives and reveal their artistic worth. In fact, Waits has acknowledged Bukowski’s influence on his writing; you can hear him talk about Bukowski’s “Notes from a Dirty Old Man” column in the LA Free Press here. 

In the Netflix documentary Keith Richards: Under the Influence, Waits expounds on his musical theory. He explains that what makes Keith Richards great is that he “is really big on detail.” He continues, “and you have to be if you’re an archeologist, and you insist on locality data. You know, not only where something came from, but what are the principles and the properties of it.” The same could be said of Waits; he’s a musical archeologist. Waits didn’t just write about the seedy streets of LA in the 70s; he lived there. Like a method actor, he embedded himself in the scene and became the characters he wrote about. The principles and properties of his songs are mined from the full breadth of lived experience and from the dusty archives of esoteric music.      

People who dismiss Waits almost always start with his voice. Waits garbles, wobbles, grunts, and slurs his way through the lyrics. But it wasn’t always that way. On early recordings like Closing Time and The Heart of Saturday Night, Waits sounds gravely, but his voice is rounded out by beautiful melodies and backing harmonies. He sounds like a capable lounge singer, washed up, sure, but singing his drunken heart out. “Drunk On the Moon” is a great example of this vocal period. Waits’s choice to sing differently was exactly that, a choice. He begins to make the move on Nighthawks at the Diner and perfects it on Small Changes.  

Listen to Waits sing “The Piano Has Been Drinking (Not Me).” That voice. It’s the voice of someone who, as Bukowski wrote, has been “clubbed into dank submission” by life. It’s the voice of someone who smokes two packs a day, who orders a beer and a shot at noon, who is always between jobs but somehow gets by. It’s the sound of someone whose voice has been ignored and marginalized, and it’s the growl of someone who sounds how he feels: beat up, angry, hopeless, insistent. Waits’s piano playing on this song is intoxicating. He slurs musical phrases, hits bad notes, and stumbles to the finish line. His playing is perfect because it realizes the meaning of the song — which brings me to my second point.

Waits is a genius musician and composer. His early records are a masterclass in pop-jazz piano stylings. On Blue Valentine and Heartattack and Vine, however, Waits channels the electric blues. The guitar takes the lead, musically. It’s the kind of blues played in a room with rolled up singles and white lines on a mirror. “$29.00,” “Blue Valentines,” “Heartattack and Vine:” here Waits excavates the rural blues tradition, reshapes it, and exhibits the form’s ability to articulate the desperate, urban dreams of bums, hookers, drunks, nobodies, and those with rap sheets a mile long. Waits accomplishes a visceral and authentic feeling; the instrumentation, playing, and singing match the setting and subject matter. Waits crafts seventies hyperrealism, the sound of rusting industry and the death rattle of the Age of Aquarius.      

In his next act, Waits goes full vaudeville on Swordfishtrombones, Rain Dogs, and Frank’s Wild Years. These records represent some of Waits’s most experimental work and reveal a songwriter at his artistic height. Waits is writing and performing short stories and plays; his ambitions stretch far beyond traditional songwriting. 

Take “Shore Leave,” for example: This song tells the story of a grizzled soldier on leave in Hong Kong writing home to his wife in Illinois. The lyrical detail is vivid. And, is that insincerity or pining we hear as the soldier’s pens his love letter home while roaming the carnival streets “Squeezing all the life/ Out of a lousy two day pass”? You see his “buck shot eyes,” taste the “cold chow mein,” and peep that “new deck of cards (with girls on the back).” This guy’s in need of more than a shave. His world is not the world of his wife back in Illinois. Where does he feel most at home? In the suburbs of Illinois or rowing down the gutter in Cuban heels on his way to The Dragon for a cold one? “Shore Leave” is an exotic musical stroll; the strange rhythm nudges you along; you trail each step the soldier takes. You hear banjo, accordion, bass-marimba, metal aunglongs, a calliope, a harmonium. Listen carefully and you can hear the motorcycles zip by, the waves hitting the shore, a bus slug past. The syncopated clatter of the market and the smokey rhythms of the “filipino floor show” appear as you listen. 

Tom Waits is a seminal artist because he approaches songwriting and music like an archeologist. He insists on “locality data.” He is trying to capture in exacting detail the scene, sound, and experience of the people and places he writes about. Every choice — from what he writes about to the way he sings to the instruments and arrangement — serves the theatrical purpose of bringing characters and circumstances to life. Think of Waits more like an operatic performer or voice actor than a singer, and all will be revealed. 

The Chameleon Poet

A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity — he is continually in for — and filling some other Body — The Sun, the Moon, the Sea and Men and Women who are creatures of impulse are poetical and have about them an unchangeable attribute — the poet has none; no identity...

~John Keats

Writing to his friend Richard Woodhouse, John Keats, the same poet who incorrectly presumed his name would be “writ in water,” proclaimed: “What shocks the virtuous philosopher, delights the camelion Poet.” With a stroke of the pen, Keats was doing more than coining a phrase (or misspelling a word), he was establishing his artistic aim; he desired to be a “chameleon poet,” an artist who is able to abnegate the self and pour his being into different molds. A chameleon poet seeks not self-expression but instead to become something wholly other than the self. 

My favorite songwriters have always been chameleons. The hue of their voices change from song to song. They cloak themselves boldly in the colors of any and all musical genres. Some songs glow in sepia tones of the past while others sound like some iridescent future. Their souls are bedazzled in prismatic camouflage. The person disappears, and only the artist remains. Just when you think you’ve nailed them down, they’re gone, off to some musical space both unfamiliar and perilous. 

If you know me, you know what’s coming next. Bob Dylan is the quintessential chameleon songwriter. I won’t belabor that point. I don’t want to bore you or become too predictable.  Instead, I want to write about Daniel Romano. 

Romano is unrestrained in his artistic exploration. He’s obliged to nothing and no one. It is this wandering and adventurous spirit that makes him great. Take his first record Workin’ for the Music Man. It takes you back in time to cowboy songs, to the whining of pedal steel, and to campfire guitar pickin’. But this record is more than an imitation of old America. The writing is strong. He doesn’t just say: “I saw this pretty girl at the bar.” No. He writes on “Missing Wind:” “I kept that little French girl tucked behind my eyelids/ Three times to the hour 'till her glass reached the bottom.” His poetic gifts are clear and original from the start.

Like all good chameleon songwriters, Romano sticks with a genre for a while — investigating every dark corner, trying to discover something someone left behind. His next two records — Sleep Beneath the Window and Come Cry With Me — remain country/folk inspired records. The singing is gentle and smooth and pretty. On a song like “Nothing,” he captures a relationship in decline with an exacting image. The absence of love is there as the speaker cleans up after another frigid dinner: “There's nothing in my arms/ But dirty paper plates/ And nothing in the look on your cold and distant face.” 

Psychedelic shades begin to emerge on If I’ve Only One Time Askin’. The arrangements get quite elaborate on this record as well. And maybe that’s one of my favorite things about Romano’s work. His ability to weave instruments in and out of songs is where much of his genius resides. Remember, writing a good song isn’t just about the lyrics. The musicality of the song is the initial draw.

The most noticeable shift in his catalogue comes on Mosey. And this was the record I first discovered. I saw the video for “(Gone is) All But a Quarry of Stone,” and I haven’t looked back. This is a rock n’ roll record, but there are elements of jazz, acid rock, blues, punk, country, folk — nothing is off limits. The changes get a little more ornate, and ideas, ultimately, are what ground these songs. There’s an intentionality and concept that underpins every track. Mosey is melodic philosophizing as much as it is good music. 

Side Note: I’m a sucker for rock n’ roll stars who dress cool. I have to at least mention that Romano is a great dresser. He quite literally takes on new personas with his evolving attire. Whether it’s the Nudie Suit he dons on Come Cry With Me or the hooligan tracksuit and Dylan-fro a la the Mosey period, Romano becomes the music. 

Romano’s most recent work has been some of his best. Modern Pressure is the epitome of the chameleon songwriter at work. The record as a whole is impatient and frenetic. It can’t stand still. The lyrical images move almost as fast as the guitar work or drum fills. The best part of the record is that you can’t get settled in. You survive from line to line. Describing a wasteland governed by Amazon Prime bourgeoisie, Romano moans: “The name of every landlord is displayed out on the awning/ And the farmers in the amber fields were harmonized in yawning/ As the memory of the ghost hung at the exit/ And the city doctor called in feeling head sick.” Boredom and depression are symptoms of our modern malaise. The music feels exhilaratingly like the first punch thrown at a riot. 

Finally Free finds Romano projecting yet more colors from his artistic spectrum. Its rawness and imperfections are its very highlights. The writing is surreal and abstract. The songs might be best understood as sonic paintings. Admittedly, Finally Free can be hard to grasp on first listen. But, like most works of art, understanding comes from the hard work required of understanding. I think I listened to the record some half dozen times before it revealed itself to me. As the title suggests, Romano is finally free of the ego and unbridled by trying to appeal to what people want or might expect.   

Romano, like Keats’s chameleon poet, has no identity, and that’s his greatest appeal. He can be or become anything. His work is hammered out in the forge of artistic anarchy; it’s the place true artists call home. 

The Master’s Hand

In September, Bob Dylan released another in his long line of bootleg albums: Springtime In New York. It covers a period of Dylan’s catalogue that, quite frankly, I’m not a huge fan of. It was the 80s, Dylan was, for better or worse, passé, and he was stuck in the middle of that 80s sound, white reggae (what a bad idea!), and New Wave. He was past those great “born again” records and stumbling toward some distant musical frontier. (It’s not his fault, by the way, that most music in the 80s sucked.) Don’t get me wrong, there are some real gems on albums like Shot of Love, Infidels, and Knocked Out Loaded. “Every Grain of Sand” is one of his best songs, and “License to Kill” is a masterclass in narrative songwriting. But, in general, the songs seem less cohesive, too distracted, disaffected even. Of course, Dylan ends the decade with the Daniel Lanois produced Oh Mercy which brings him back to form. But I digress.  

On the latest bootleg, “Too Late (Band Version)” proves that Dylan was still working at the height of his abilities. I say this with a full understanding of how blasphemous this will be to every Dylanologist out there — “Too Late (Band Version)” may be one of Dylan’s greatest songs ever. Let me explain. 

The musicians. Dylan gathered together a who’s who of virtuosos: Mark Knopfler (of Dire Straits) and Mick Taylor (formerly of The Rolling Stones) on guitar, Sly Dunbar on the drums, and Robbie Shakespeare on the bass — the best of the best. Dylan’s genius, though, has never really been about musicianship or arrangement. It’s the lyrics (shocker) that make ”Too Late (Band Version)” one of Dylan’s best songs. 

I’m in awe of the song’s structural and thematic conceit. We are interlopers thrust into the middle of a series of conversations. But, we only get one side of each conversation. In the first verse, it’s a conversation where one character is seemingly implicated in a crime. The first thing we hear is an alibi: “Well, whether there was a murder I don’t know I wasn’t there/ I was busy visiting a friend in jail.” Who are these people? Who denies being a witness or accomplice to a murder by claiming to have been visiting a friend in jail? Some serious people, man, that’s who! From there we’re tossed around from conversation to conversation encountering a wide range of loose-lipped, shady characters. 

Dylan’s songs have always curated a menagerie of strange personalities, and “Too Late (Band Version)” is no different. What we have here is scintillating voyeurism. It’s juicy gossip, and we just happen to be sitting next to these folks at the bar. I love that we never get the full story, that we have to fill in the blanks, that we get an astoundingly full sense of who someone is by hearing them utter just one sentence. We learn more about the people gabbing away than we do those being talked about. Sure, some nameless guy “reached too high/ and tumbled back to the ground.” But who cares? I’ve heard that story a million times: Oedipus, Hamlet, the Prodigal Son, Marilyn Monroe, Kanye (maybe/hopefully). It’s the bitterly jealous clamor of those on the outside that pulls you in. They’re the ones we saddle up next to as we sip our beer.   

One more thing. Dylan writes irritation better than anyone except, maybe, Larry David. Here’s a different way to look at the song’s dialogue: Imagine you’re stuck in the middle of one of these inane gossip sessions and would rather be anywhere else in the world. One of Dylan’s characters says what we all think in those moments: “In these times of compassion/ where conformity’s a fashion/ say one more stupid thing to me/ before the final nails driven in.” Larry David couldn’t say it better. We’ve all been there. 

It’s likewise essential not to miss the barbed irony that secures the song’s pre-chorus: “You know what they say/ about being nice to people on your way up/ you might meet ‘em again/ on the way back down.” (Listener Beware: This isn’t a straight line.) You can count on no hands the number of people who have reached the zenith of fame by being “nice to people on [their] way up.” Nice people are not good capitalists. They make for even worse idols because, well, they’re boring. Plus, you’re not famous, and neither am I. Again, this isn’t a song about the famous guy falling down; it’s a song about the bloodthirsty audience of hoi polloi salivating as they watch him fall. It’s about us! How much do we love seeing people knocked off their pedestal? It was Aristotle, after all, who established early on that tragic heroes must be "larger and better" versions of us. They have to be rich and famous. That’s why we take such enjoyment watching them taken down a peg or two. We quietly relish that it’s “too late, too late, too late, too late/ to bring him back.” Spite binds us together.   

I’ve saved the best for last. Dylan’s unpredictable meter and phrasing is what makes this song representative of his true genius. Each line feels improvisational. Anyone who has ever tried to write a song obsesses over getting the right number of words and syllables to fit the established meter of the song. Most songs set the lyrical rhythm with the first line or two and never deviate. (Picture me counting the number of syllables in a line on my fingers to make sure the song is perfectly square). Why? Because art — for a long time and in all of its iterations — is about the attempt to mirror perfect forms. (I know art and music history majors. This has not been the case for decades in sculpture, painting, or classical music; the avant-garde class rewrote the playbook). In pop music, however, this addiction to perfect meter (and don’t even get me started on perfect rhyme) has been harder to break. And let’s not forget that Dylan was one of the first to shatter this barrier successfully! What Dylan does with the lyrics of “Too Late (Band Version)” strikes against all norms of pop lyricism. Sure, there’s some metrical predictability in spots (like the pre-chorus and refrain), but the verses are Hobbesian. No rules. No comfort. There’s nothing fencing us in.  

Check this out. The first lines of one verse go as such: “You’ll arrange to see your man tonight/ who tells you some secret things/ you think might open some doors.” That’s 23 syllables for those of us counting. He follows that with: “How to enter the gates of Paradise/ no not really/ more like how to go crazy/ from carrying a burden/ that’s never meant to be yours.” 35 syllables! Same number of bars, same musical space to get the line out. Most songwriters would labor to make both lines exactly the same metrically (or at least get them close). Nope, not Dylan. His lines meander and abide by no metrical expectation.   

It’s hard to emphasize how much this laissez-faire approach goes against established songwriting principles. They don’t teach this in Pat Pattison’s Essential Guide to Lyric Form and Structure. But Dylan is more interested in the line than the rule. He’ll squeeze as many words as necessary into a line to get the image or sentiment right. It’s a different (if not better) artistic intention.  

And that’s what makes Dylan one of the greatest songwriters ever. He’s working by a different set of rules, by a different standard. He’s operating somewhere far removed from the listener’s expectations. From concept to writing to phrasing to tone and so much in between, the poetic architecture of “Too Late (Band Version)” is uncanny. For those who don’t “get it,” his writing here might seem incomprehensible or (worse) sloppy. But, for those of us who see the master's hand at work, it’s too late to bring us back.

The Year of Buyer’s Remorse

Some evenings I’m so bored I just scroll and click my way around the Amazon app. I usually make my way to the “Deals of the Day.” Here I can thumb through alien commodities, things I didn’t even know I could or should buy: “smart” digital scales, flea & tick collars, high thread bed sheets, LED strip lighting. As I sift through the deals, I’m trying to convince myself that I need something. I can buy a slim wallet now or add it to my cart for further consideration. My cart swells with things I forgot I wanted, stuff I “save for later” before making my next purchase. 

When Amazon was founded in 1994 it sold books, the idea being that you could buy any book from anywhere and get it delivered fast with the click of a button. The company didn’t turn a profit until 2001. Today it’s one of the most profitable companies in the world and is valued at almost a trillion dollars. Turns out a lot of people want a lot of things and want them delivered fast. 

Sometimes I order something and can’t wait the day or two it will take for it to arrive. Even though the app tells me exactly when it will arrive, I spend time between order and delivery checking the app, tracking the little green line that tells me where my package is en route. Other times, I order something and forget I bought it. A generic brown box arrives on my doorstep with its crooked smile. I’m excited to see what’s inside. Oh yeah, that multipurpose screwdriver. I don’t even take it out of the package. It just sits on our kitchen counter for two days before I toss it, unopened, in my tool bag in the basement. 

Allison Krueger of The New York Times called 2020 “The Year of Buyer’s Remorse.” She wrote: “​​While millions of Americans have lost their jobs during the pandemic, consumer spending on goods went up 7.2 percent.... And some of that spending includes items people now regret. Some were meeting basic needs, from canned corn to houses. Others took advantage of big sales to buy clothes they won’t wear this year. And still others bought goods from gadgets to boats they thought would keep them entertained, but are now sitting unused.” 

What am I filling my life up with? Why do I feel the need for more things? When will it be enough? Where is the space between desire and regret where contentment resides? These are some of the questions I am trying to answer with my music.