Song Demo: Dear Reader
Posted April 5th, 2012
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.
Song Demo: Little Bird
Posted March 26th, 2012
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?