Celt-Rock. My dad wrote that one for Thomas and Rona. He brought it down here around Christmas last year and played it, but I didn’t have the recording stuff all set up and figured-out then, so I didn’t get a recording of it and don’t remember the melody. But he left me the lyrics, and I did a new melody and this Celine-Dionesque, River-dancey, Celt-rock arrangement for them. To get the full effect you probably need to picture Buck in a kilt lashed to the bow of the Titanic as it speeds across Loch Lomond, Mount Kilimanjaro in the distance, the wind ruffling his beard as the frolicking dolphins leap over Nessie while everybody’s chased by Comanches.
I’d been meaning to do something with it for awhile, but the last verse kept defeating me. Though the last verse has the same structure as the first two verses, it seemed to me it ought to be treated like a bridge—i.e., musically different—even though it makes no sense to have a bridge at the end of a song. Because, you know, what’s it bridging? Merle Haggard did that in “Carolyn,” maybe his weirdest song, both structurally and lyrically. It’s about a guy telling his wife about some other guy he heard about at work today who abandoned his wife and went to a city where the women were dressed in “yellow and scarlet,” which is a color combo I can’t even really picture for some reason but makes me think of the Japanese flag, and wore strange perfume. Then the guy (the first guy, the singer) goes on to tell his wife (Carolyn) that, well, he might just do the same thing if she doesn’t shape up. Or at least he gives a very strong implication that that’s what he’s saying. Then he tells her that all over again.
That’s the whole song: one verse, more spoken than sung, and then a nearly shouted bridge, or what I’m calling a bridge anyway, then a quiet break where I guess he’s just stewing and getting mad all over again thinking about it, and then the crazy bridge again. You get the sense that the whole story is bullshit, that he just made the other guy up to make his wife feel bad. (“Yes, honey, I sure understand why he went off with those women in . . . what was it? Yellow and scarlet? And their lips like a honeycomb dripping with honey? I guess I better start treating you better, hadn’t I?”)
Tell-Tale Heart.I wonder if Merle was trying to write an opera based on “The Tell-Tale Heart,” which is most famous for being all denoument—i.e., everything has happened before the story starts—and was commenting on Poe’s achievement by writing a song that was all bridge. I doubt that’s what he was doing. But it’s what I’m doing, and it’s driving me nuts. I’m almost done with the first draft, though. If I’d spent a tenth of the time writing the libretto that I’ve spent worrying about writing it I’d have been done a long time ago.
I blew off most of work yesterday messing with this song—I couldn’t stop adding tracks; that’s the problem once you break out the midi keyboard. All of the tracks except the main guitar track are pretty rough. I need to learn to get each track in good shape before moving to the next, but I don’t do it that way. I add tracks to get a sense of how they’re going to sound, and if I think they’ll sound pretty good, I’ll leave them and move on to the next, with the plan that I’ll return to each track and do it right once I know what the whole song is supposed to sound like. That pretty much never happens. What happens is I spend a long time on the guitar and vocal and get it as good as I’m ever going to get it, and then everything after that winds up being a first take. I spend hours noodling around with various mixes and settings, convincing myself that I can tell the difference between this level of compression and that level of compression, this much reverb on the master and that much reverb on the master, get it to where I think it sounds just right, and then realize that it sounds entirely different played through external speakers than it did through the headphones. That’s what happened here, too.
Rock Flute. Yeah, there’s rock flute on here. There probably shouldn’t be but there is.
Video. Didn’t really have time to do one, but I don’t know what I’d have done anyway. The picture I used is some random shot of the kids from three years ago before we re-did the kitchen (note vintage wood paneling, circa 1968.) I was going to do one of all their various grandparents and great-grandparents, but I don’t know how you can make a video out of six or eight pictures without it being goofy.
Thanksgiving Song. I did write one, but it wound up being about smallpox. That’s the second song I’ve written that’s been hijacked by a disease or I guess technically a virus. The first song was a really pretty little lullaby kind of guitar part, and I wanted to write some lyrics to suit it, something kind of non-particular and pretty and universal and all that, and first rattle out of the box it winds up being about polio. Once that happens you’re kind of stuck with it. You can use your best efforts to make it be about something else, but no, it wants to be a song about polio. I may wind up using it anyway, since I need a song that starts with W and this one is called “Wishing Well.” I’m not going to use the Thanksgiving song because it’s just mean and nasty.
Sheena. Auntie Sheena’s in visiting this week and we’re all looking forward to a traditional Scottish Thanksgiving. We got the kids a turkey several months ago to raise, so they’d know where food comes from, etc., but I have a feeling they’ll be too attached to old Tom to kill him, so we’ll probably wind up eating the dog. (Old David Letterman joke.)