I wrote up a piece on a song over on the End Times blog.
I like clever songs. Silly songs. Novelty songs. I’ve attempted to write many such songs. I believe making someone laugh is one of the most important things you can do in life. But at some point in the last few years, sitting at the piano to pull together a new song began to feel weighty. If we were going to perform it night after night, it felt essential that each song mean something.
The title is a reference to Baudelaire (to whom Lyndsy’s dedicated a new song), but the lyrics riff on Wallace Stevens more than anyone (e.g., Of the Surface of Things). In reaction to the love songs and breakup songs that made up the bulk of High Wire Lover, lately I’ve tried to write lyrics that say something. This one is probably the most direct product of that desire, but it’s also about how no song ever says anything of value, even this song itself. The outro was the last thing written, meant to humanize the speaker.
As always, forgive me for trying to sing in an alto’s key. These demos are meant for Lyndsy to practice with.
In song the world is three or four stars,
The moon, a rose, and you.
You, a ghost light of the mind,
Illuminates from here to here the line
Past neighborly dangers of moon and rose
All blue and more blue
Than the deepest sapphire.
So attend these glad liars,
The moon, a rose, and you.
We sing into being words that eat their stems,
Mere will o’ wisps to ring our self-full ends.
The whole of language is for us.
The moon, my love, the moon is for us.
We applaud a magician for the craft
We politely ne’er undo,
And a song for the sleight what makes personal
The moon, a rose, and you.
When you close your eyes as we’re kissing,
Is it me that fulfills your wishing
Or so many heartsick fools who sing
Of a precious, tender, wounded thing.
Love is natural and real,
But a song is a darkened mirror.
So don’t believe a word.
No, don’t believe a word.
Don’t believe a word that I would say to you.
Here’s a song I wrote and quickly recorded for End Times. In the last year I keep finding myself writing songs about language or that use language to address some other topic. Go figure. This one about not having a language at all.
All dizzy the afternoon,
A little bird wove symbols
Above the remains of the field.
Now lines, now plummeting rings,
Each to me indecipherable
Save their liberty from the frozen spring.
Who are you? And
Do you know the name of anything?
How can you spin so free
With the weight of such awful ancestry?
For those once living now dust
Through the afternoons that shaped your bones –
Is the beauty of lines enough?
Realized recently that I should use this blog more. And if I’m not writing my usual essay-like blog posts, I should share what I am writing.
Here’s an untitled song fragment I’ve been picking at since November. The third and fourth stanzas have changed the most, though I’m still attempting to work more emotion into the first two. The whole thing needs a melody as yet, which is when it will all settle down – I hope.
When we go apple-picking
I watch your old red coat climb the ladder
Whose sharp edges test last year’s stitching.
The chill of the feeble frost
Washes over my leaden feet, asleep
Where I wait aside, cold, arms crossed.
Your whistling stops
And after a breath you marvel
“The sky is so thin
You can see snow gather months
From here.” – And I see
All summer we have been flowers,
Easily loved,
Without bite
And without nourishment,
But the blossom that bends the bough
With time grows sweetest.
The deep and beautiful trick of the brain is more interesting: it possesses multiple, overlapping ways of dealing with the world. It is a machine built of conflicting parts. It is a representative democracy that functions by competition among parties who all believe they know the right way to solve the problem.
This ties into something AI-related I’d been working on that I may discuss in the future.
A new YouTube series is taking a humorous (and partly-animated) look at world history. I do recommend it.
There are a few more episodes available on the channel page. So far it’s doing a fair job of presenting an undergraduate level of investigation in a manner which a high school student could follow. Every episode has taken a good topic (agriculture, the definition of civilization, writing) and then demonstrated its importance and the degree to which culture changed as a result. Far better than a parade of characters and dates or falsely-mystifying open questions (“Who were the celts? We may never know”). The approach means history is presented as a contemporary and ongoing activity.
As of yet, I do not recommend the sister series on chemistry and biology. The first episode’s slut-shaming metaphor for carbon was so thick I had to turn it off a few minutes in.
The matter is quite simple, Wong’s petition for declaratory relief explains to the federal court in San Francisco. Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the US Constitution defines the purpose of copyright: “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.”
Notice the words “science” and “useful arts” in the aforementioned sentence? Since when did movies with acronyms like “P.O.V.” or “M.I.L.F.” qualify as either? Therefore, “copyright is authorized only for works which promote the progress of science and the useful arts,” says Wong’s lawyer from the firm of Murphy, Pearson, Bradley & Feeney.
“Early Circuit law in California held that obscene works did not promote the progress of science and the useful arts, and thus cannot be protected by copyright,” the brief also notes
It’s an interesting question. I’m curious what the legal precedents are. One argument against this I can presently imagine is that giving Congress the power to determine “usefulness” is tantamount to limiting speech. This would essentially make copyright a free speech issue – which I think could as dangerous as Congress having the ability to decide “useful arts”.
Based on US law, I’d also love to see a legal argument made against the validity of a copyright which has changed owners.
Over at The End Times Spasm Band’s site, I’ve written a bit about touring and being productive and all that.
Not long ago now we finished our longest tour to date. Nine days, eight shows. We swung through Michigan, drove out to Kansas and Nebraska, and returned via Indianapolis. If the others are like me, then we caught a giddy second wind towards the end and the last few days felt like we’d only just left. It was a success by our own standards, but we also know it hasn’t made us pros overnight. In fact one of the reasons I can’t wait to do it again is so we can apply the lessons we learned.
This has been one of the bigger differences between End Times and the other bands I’ve been in. If we’re doing the same things we did last month, we feel unsatisfied. We make as many mistakes as anyone, but within a day we’re saying to each other “next time, lets try it this way.” We’re always asking “what’s next?” even in the face of failure.
A few days after returning I listened to Merlin Mann’s 2009 presentation “With All Due Respect to the Seduction Community” for what must have been the fifth time. The presentation is about creative projects and the barriers that stand in the way of starting a new one. I highly recommended it for anyone who’s been meaning to get to work on a project, whether it’s an album, a novel, software, or some fantastic experiment in knitting. The last few times I listened to it, I heard it in relation to songwriting and it was helpful. But this time – because of where my mind already was – I heard it in relation to touring and tour-planning. Read that way, it sends a very clear message to every band out there.
There’s a new blog post by me over on The End Times Spasm Band’s blog. It’s about finishing and songwriting.
While the SpasmVan cruised north along I-69 for the hundredth time and Zach and Eric bobbed heads to Miles Davis up font, Lyndsy and I sat in the back and talked songwriting. She described her pile of partial songs needlessly gathering dust, and I admitted to having such scraps of my own. I think most songwriters have a folder or notebook filled with the same. Each song consists of a good line here, a satisfactory verse there, or maybe just an idea expressed hastily. Each midway between the idea pile and the first demo. Whenever we revisit them, we find our last attempt to bring the song to a close too weak or – attempting again – we find ourselves unable to summon the right words.
I was in a good state of mind to talk about these things with Lyndsy because last week I forced myself to stamp “Finished” onto four songs for End Times. This always feels like a major accomplishment because there’s often a big gap between the beginning and end for me. Months even. Up to a year in some cases. Since forming End Times, I’ve tried to become more aware of my own songwriting process, and have come to realize that there are two major reasons for the delay in my case.
