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For the 2nd annual #LehrerPhest, once again held at PianoFight, we have both new and returning faces to play tribute to Tom Lehrer by doing their own takes on his songs. Here's a run down of of the roster of performers that will be joining me. Ben Einstein (aka Neeto) of Van Goat Noted electric fishing rod and pineapple enthusiast Neeto (aka Ben Einstein) will be returning for this year's #LehrerPhest this Sunday at PianoFight. If you want, for some reason, to feel bodily transported back to the 1990s, check out Ben's retro-chique website, complete with obligatory dancing hamster. http://neeto.net/ Joel Schick Joel Schick is a singer/songwriter, who describes his work as Original Americana, encompassing blues, country, R&B, rock 'n' roll, doo wop, folk, Celtic and jazz. Brand new old songs of the '30s, '40s, '50s and '60s, he calls it. He accompanies himself on guitar and harmonica. Joel grew up in Chicago in the 1950s and '60s, when the airwaves were full of an amazingly eclectic gumbo of musical styles. So, of course, he fell in love with all of them, and writes in all of them as well. Joel came late to making music, after a long career as an illustrator and co-author of scores of children's books, and designer and illustrator of hundreds of Muppet and Sesame Street products. Songs and art samples are available at http://familygorilla.com/js_joelschick.html Dawn Oberg Dawn Oberg is a San Francisco-based songwriter. Her influences are all over the place, but include jazz, R&B, pop, punk, country. She plays all over the bay area and has done two national tours. Dawn has released three full-length solo records, two singles, and most recently an EP called 'Nothing Rhymes with Orange,’ the title track of which mic.com included as one of the 16 best anti-Trump songs of the year in 2017. The Village Voice listed her song “It’s 12:01” as one of the 50 best protest songs of 2016 and SPIN listed it as one of their favorite songs of the week. Dawn's website is: http://www.dawnoberg.com Ben Visini Aside from being an accomplished drummer, composer, tap dancer, and rapper Ben writes his own comedy music — he recently featured the at Neck of the Woods, singing about a topic I'm sure Mr. Lehrer would approve of. Check out a video from that outing at Ben Visini Comedy Music as well as other Ben Visini compositions. Cincinnatus Hibbard Nina Jo Smith Award-winning songwriter, Nina (rhymes with China) Jo Smith, is the original indie grrrl (born on the 4th of July.) Nina Jo accompanies her sweet voice and wise lyrics on guitar and ukulele. She got her start when stole her mom's guitar when she was about nine and taught herself to play by listening to Joan Baez records. Also, she believes Belly Laughs make the world go ‘round. http://www.ninajosmith.com Eve Fleishman Jazz chanteuse Eve Fleishman Music will take on anotherTom Lehreŗ piece for this year's #LehrerPhest, returning from last year's inaugural bash. Eve's sultry sweet sounds of original jazz-folk-pop are near and dear to my heart, especially given our mutual affinity for Blossom Dearie. An artist and a yoga instructor as well as delightful vocalist, she's Nashville meets San Francisco, east meets west. Check out her website at: http://www.evefleishman.com Brendan Getzell Brendan Getzell, from a vantage point with which I am quite familiar.
Recently minted as the musical director for the San Francisco Shakespeare Festival, Brendan has his fingers in multiple musical pies, including Kat Robichaud's Misfit Cabaret, numerous David Bowie tribute bands, his own project "The Getz" as well as, of course, the infamous Hotel Utah Saloon open mic — to name but a few. He'll be swinging by PianoFight to be part of #LehrerPhest this Sunday. Check out some of Brendan's original power-pop, rock, folk, indie amalgam solo work on bandcamp: https://brendangetzell.bandcamp.com/ And be at LehrerPhest 2019 to catch him and all the players this Sunday. Support this event and local music by preordering tickets.
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 A while back Rozanne Gewaar (one of the new proprietors of Bazaar Cafe) turned me onto a FilmFreeway, a website for submitting to various film festivals. So I went through and picked out a few likely (and relatively cheap as far as entry fees go) options for the music video for "The L.A. Song"— digging through the multitude of possible festivals with an eye on those focused on music videos.
Yesterday that effort paid some dividends as I got a notification that I'm the finalist in two categories for the California Music Video & Film Awards — "Made Me Laugh (Humor)" and "True California" I will keep you posted as to the results of this endeavor. I fall in love too easily I've decided to anthologize the little essays I've been writing about each of the songs on the new album into a couple of blog posts. Read Part I here. Only in it for the T-shirt
The light blue t-shirt is from the last big jazz festival I attended — back when that was something I did, traveling to different destinations that had a festival that was part of the IJFO — the International Jazz Festival Organization — a little box ticking exercise of mine of yore that is now on indefinite hiatus. Maybe I’ll get back to it some day. But it’s simply not tenable these days and it was always a bit lonely anyway, however exotic the destination was, without someone to travel with. So that’s how I ended up in Western Finland — driving back and forth between this little town called Pori and the location I ended up staying at some 40 minutes away (usually I prefer the train in Europe, but not possible that time round). Plenty of time to observe the Finnish countryside, and plenty enough light at that latitude even at midnight, after the festival had wrapped up. So I wrote “A Finnish Midsummer Midnight” — I won’t claim the botanical litany in the verses is entirely accurate — but the bridge — “now I’m so far away from the crowds, all those people that make me feel so lost and alone — the only time I don’t feel lonely is when I’m truly on my own” — that was real. Travel on your own has its advantages (you can set your own pace, for instance). But it can get dispiriting to be around so many people yet feel isolated — perhaps counter intuitively desiring to flee deeper into that isolation as a way to somehow salve the wound. And in the end, if you have no one to share the experience with, what are you left with? Sometimes I think I was only in it for the t-shirt. Speaking of t-shirts, I did get one of the t-shirts from my new album done up (the dark blue one) — just to have something physical to show folks and reassure myself that my design would work. I have a few modifications to make (tweak the colors, make the duck’s head stand out a bit more) but I’m happy with the result and my supplier, @customink has been very helpful. My shirt is a reduced color version of album art — a house on the water with a wave rising up ahead of it and on the roof of the house, a duck, wearing pants, playing guitar? Who wouldn’t want that? Get one of your own at: http://igg.me/at/homeatsea Of Detours and Alternate Routes Bill Evans at the Village Vanguard with bassist Scott LaFaro flanking him on the left and drummer Paul Motion to the right. While my first album had the track “Sunday is Made for Loving” in the mix, with its upright bass accompaniment, the second one definitely brings the jazzier side of my repertoire to the fore. And production-wise, for the track “An Alternate Route” even the guitar is eschewed in favor of a jazz piano trio backing my vocals, with producer Ben Osheroff at the keys. Although as I recall, I was cribbing more from “My Foolish Heart” when I wrote my song it was Evans’ version of “Detour Ahead” from these classic sessions at the Village Vanguard that I referenced when explaining the sound I was going for. “Alternate Route” is one of those rare cases where the song, at least for me, is really all about the bridge. This one is a long winding beast that backtracks and goes off in new directions — never settling on a harmonic progression that repeats, only going further afield, as do the lyrics. The ending itself was serendipitous— it’s dissonance owing more to misplaced fingers on my part than any sort of theory. It ends up being quite the detour, but the journey has it’s own merits in my opinion, which is also the feeling of the song’s protagonist as he holds out hope that some connection can ultimately be made with this other person who he obviously feels is worth the trip. You can pre-order my new album at: http://igg.me/at/homeatsea Personal Fads Bassist and fellow San Francisco songwriter Elliot Racine recently was describing to myself and Shawn Byron at an open mic what he termed as his latest “personal fad” — an obsession and fascination with different types of cinnamon — and how he was spending his time reading about different varieties and places of origin of the spice. I can relate — having through various such fads myself. There was a point where I was all about claypot cooking — and trying to procure the various vessels described in Paula Wolfert's book on the subject to try the recipes therein. And is apparent from the photo, there was a period of time when I was heavy into the essential oils (note — turns out you don’t really need them, that’s just good branding). I wasn’t in it for all the pseudoscientific claims regarding supposed capabilities of said oils, but certainly I think there’s a therapeutic aspect in terms of effecting mood and I love the sensual variety. And the hunt. Finding a new location that was a purveyor of such things and going on an expedition to sample their wares was always a bit exciting. So that’s where to reference to blue tansy and essential oils in general comes from in “‘Til I Wash You Away” — another song on the new album. It’s a piece that touches on the interaction between sense and memory and unrequited love. Please pre-order the album at: http://igg.me/at/homeatsea All That I Can Share “Visit Laguna Chaxa, don’t disturb the flamingos“ “All I Can Share Is Photos” is a sort of travelogue of my time in Chile a few years ago, but the history of the song goes back to the days when my primary output musically was MIDI based compositions created with score writing software and programs like “Band In a Box” that would automatically generate arrangements. It had a different title back then and no lyrics in particular beyond a refrain. This was stuff I never dared to share. I could get a bit adventurous in my chord choices back then, being unconstrained by notions of theory. I hadn’t thought of this piece in years but for some reason while I was on this trip, it came back to me and I couldn’t get it out of my head. So I started trying to pen some lyrics that would fit it. We start with a fairly detailed portrait of a scene from a jazz festival in Santiago where one group played “It’s Only a Paper Moon” (referred to as “a Harold Arlen tune” mostly to avoid repeating the word moon) as I watched from a park on the other side of the river. This was where all the locals were hanging out, as that was free. From there it’s up to San Pedro de Atacama before heading to Valparaiso (Valpo for those in the know) and finally back home, where it all becomes just a memory. Somewhat bizarre both harmonically and structurally, in some ways it’s the dark horse of the album. The guitarist on this track is Mario M. Noche, who first did his bossa nova take on the tune at EGPhest II, the second edition of my annual birthday show — it also happens to coincide with Mario’s birthday. Since my producer Ben Osheroff also saw this as a bossa number, I invited Mario to come in and reprise his take on the song as he was going to be able to effect that far better than I had any hope of doing. Between his rhythm track, the guitar fills he added for the solo section and the piano part Ben put down, the track really came together beautifully. You can now preorder the album at: http://igg.me/at/homeatsea Ex Post Facto Externalities Having been to sea and ranged as far as Finland and Chile, it’s now off to the depths of outer space — to the Oort Cloud which surrounds our solar system. An electric bass supplants the upright on this track, which is a the lone straight up rock song of the album — I would even call it a rock epic. “The Comet and The Wandering Moon” is the first new song I attempted after the first EGPhest — after having so many other artists cover my songs, the prospect of writing new ones was a bit intimidating... well a bit more so than usual anyway. The idea started with the fanciful notion of grabbing a comet by its tail, which I think of as owing a bit to something like "The Little Prince" and maybe a bit inspired by the Alison Kraus / Robert Plant cover of “Killing the Blues.” Then there’s the game einy-meanie-miny-moe, though I guess given that little rhyme’s history, it might be considered “problematic.” More problematic was the fact that not long after I’d finished the song, a certain presidential candidate’s tendency to grab women by their nether regions became known and I felt that cast an unfortunate pall over this new composition. I was hoping the episode would pass into obscurity along with everything else related to this character after the following November... no one was so fortunate, alas. So those are the vagaries of writing — or creating anything. The meaning it takes on after you create it is not something you can control. A similar thing happened with a crucial line The Albatross Song. The choice to not change these works and even include them as is on the album might just be stubbornness on my part, but I hope they will end up having longevity beyond this moment. You can order the album at: http://igg.me/at/homeatsea Soundscape “Sunrise” by Claude Monet. “You Will Sail With Me” — our penultimate track — is the oldest song on the new album, an artifact from a previous millennium, if memory serves (it rarely does these days). It started as an exercise in minimalism — using just an arpeggio of a single chord as the backdrop to hang words and melody over (as opposed to the more complex changes I’m want to use). And the words themselves are sparse as well, with verses that fold back onto themselves and a chorus that ebbs off into ever shorter phrases. The track is a soundscape built on top of a loop of that arpeggio. Louise Nalbandian’s haunting ooohs, recorded inside a cave, sweep over the pattern. An echoing electric guitar played by producer Ben Osheroff clangs and lingers with a sound that reminds me of the soundtrack to the Doctor Who episode the “Seeds of Doom” — otherworldly and ethereal. The upright bass is looped in as well. But the real stand out here is Ben Visini on drums. Visini is a tour de force throughout the album, ably adapting to all the genres thrown at him. As a sort of reward, he gets to cut loose here and just compose on the fly — to go wherever his imagination would take him him with soft mallet rolls, delicate cymbal scrapes or cacophonous crashes. While recording Ben O. would just close him eyes and get a bit lost in a meditative trance, absorbing all the percussive textures washing over us. After a few takes he remarked that this was the reason he does this. Had Ben O. had his druthers, the album would have ended with this track. While I was tempted go along with this approach, I had one last song that I felt had to cap off this set... The album is available for pre-order at: http://igg.me/at/homeatsea An Acoustic Apertif Pablo Picasso’s “The Old Guitarist” And now we come to the conclusion — to the last track of the new album, “Your Inexorable Pull.” As the otherworldly layers of “You Will Sail” lap up against some distant shore and subside, there is a brief clearing of the throat, as if I as a songwriter and performer am reasserting my own presence on the album before launching into a live solo acoustic performance — just my voice and my guitar — going back to basics after our journey together through so many different genres and soundscapes. With my first album, I was a bit against the somewhat cliche acoustic close out, having wanted to end (perhaps melodramatically) on the thrashing on the Dm chord that is the culmination of the grungy distortion-laden “Lover for a Day” — itself part of a mini-suite that begins with its philosophical counterpart “The Fish Song.” But in the end there seemed to be no other logical home for “The Light In Sylvia’s Window” so eventually I acquiesced. Now I felt like such an aperitif was necessary. In part because that seemed like the natural realm of this song. In part because it is the logical counter point to “Lighthouse at the Edge of the World” — which, while not the opener, is close (perhaps Albatross is a “prelude”). Where in Lighthouse we were lamenting what seemed like an inevitable pushing away of intimates, here we acquiesce and even delight a bit in the strange and inexplicable pull of someone who is still largely unfamiliar. It is short and sweet with some vocal escapades I perhaps can’t quite pull off but are none the less heartfelt. I will return with one last concluding essay, but in the meantime, please consider pre-ordering the album. http://igg.me/at/homeatsea Postscript: The Pushes and Pulls of Attachment Display window of the "Pirate Supply Store" at 826 Valencia St in San Francisco
And so we conclude our series of essays about each of the songs on the album. Hopefully this has been useful to you, dear reader, in helping you understand what you’d be getting yourself into if you were to commit to at least giving it a spin when it comes out, if not going so far as to pre-order this beast to help towards the cause of spreading the word. If nothing else it’s been helpful for me. At the very least, it’s gotten me doing some writing on a regular basis in a sort of short essay form. More importantly it’s put the songs in perspective for me and helped with some lingering questions in my mind. I've heard some artists muse on NPR that it took them years to figure out what their songs or albums were all about. So in that, this is a gift. It has been noted by others that I have a lot of songs about the ocean. Yet not all of them made it onto the record while some perhaps less likely candidates did. Part of this is just time constraints and keeping a project like this from spinning out of control in terms of time and money. But there are definitely pieces I’ve written — “Boil the Ocean” comes to mind — that would have been perfectly logical constituent parts thematically if one was trying to be terribly literal about an album entitled “At Home At Sea.” However, sometimes one’s choices are made more out of passion than logic when it comes to assembling things like this. Perhaps, like when I name something the “_____ Song” that’s because this title is a bit of a head fake — if not, in this case, just good marketing, given how often the phrase is repeated in The Albatross Song’s chorus. If I were to sum up the album in a single word, that word would be “attachment.” While it’s not an uncommon theme for me to write about, I think it’s fair to say, in one way or another, each of the songs that are part of this collection touches on that issue in one way or another, It’s called out rather explicitly in the 2nd verse of the Albatross Song — “Does your restless spirit wander yet get hopelessly attached?” — a reference to the titular bird and its mating habits, of course, but also the same issues that a jazz standard like “I Fall in Love Too Easily” has a performer like Chet Baker crooning about. So these are meditations on attachments gone wrong, attempts to let go, if not completely, then to at least accept the reality. However, while in “An Alternate Route” the protagonist still embraces his continuing fondness for the object of his affections as a motivating force to continue on and in “Lifetimes Without You” what seems like centuries of longing weighs on us, this is no celebration of unrequited love. Nor is it an attempt to romanticize it. Even in “An Alternate Route,” our protagonist is acutely aware that what place he eventually may find in his would be love’s heart may not be the place he was looking for initially. Like with “You Will Sail With Me” the fantasy (which might be where the attachment lies as much as with the person in question) is acknowledged to be “just a dream.” There is at least an acquiescence to reality and need to let it go… by like Saint Augustine, perhaps not just yet. And that’s not to say it’s easy. There is at time a recklessness that can come from this kind of pain (“Finnish”), if not just a lot of internal monologuing (“Ephemera”) but ultimately we can acknowledge that some relationships are indeed bound to be unhealthy and should be avoided (“Comet”) or are simply inherently limited (“Photos”) even if the best we can hope for in the moment is the solace of removing ourselves from the reminders of whoever we are pining for (“Wash You Away”). This is altogether healthier than assuming that the gates of that particular paradise will ever be opened to us. But this is not to say that the draw of others must be left behind completely, we can accept it, even revel a bit in its mystery (“Your Inexorable Pull”). Friend and fellow songwriter Amy Obenski just the other day encouraging people on the Facebook to give a full album a handful of listens through and not just focus on an artist’s top Spotify songs. Some artists will tell you that the album is dead. Only release singles. For certain songs, this can certainly work. But I’d be hesitant to put Finnish out there on its own considering what a dark place it goes — it needs its natural complement — an Alternate Route. Not just because of the cleaver(-ish) juxtaposition of two songs that involve travel and roads — but because it is truly an alternate route, a different frame of mind — instead of giving into our desire to speed up and get away from anyone else within visual range, we can also embrace the strange journey we are on, wherever it takes us. For the travelogue that seeks out solace in complete annihilation of connection, there’s the travelogue where our weary traveler is still trying to reach out, albeit however feebly it communicates the experiences he’s having. For the the pieces where I’m largely stuck in my head like Ephemera, there’s also being awash in a sensual ocean of outside stimulus (Wash You Away). Pushes and pulls. It’s a bit more evident when it’s all part of some whole, the sum that adds up to more than its constituent parts, as the cliche goes. Yes, as an album it’s an eclectic mishmash genre-wise — but aren’t we all when it comes down to it? No one is just one thing and no one listens to just one type of music, at least if they’re not completely lost within their own myopic self-importance and need to engage in condescension to inflate their ego. Yeah, there are things I'm not into, but it's rare to meet a musician who doesn't at least appreciate other forms of music outside their performance comfort zone or what they brand themselves as. Maybe being bound to a single genre makes the publicist’s job easier and that's a constraint an artist should try and work within to be commercially successful. For better or worse, I chose otherwise. So does the title “At Home At Sea” (or “@ Home @ Sea” if I feel like wrecking havoc with cataloging systems) still fit? After all, it’s not a collection of sea shanties as some might think it implies and maybe the original underlying ideas of “trying to find a place in trying to find a place” are not as prevalent as I might have imagined initially. Certainly the title is “tongue in cheek” and “ironic” — but that’s really always been the case — that much could be ascertained from my choice of cover art. That the house is floating incongruously on the ocean about be swamped by a huge wave does bely that the notion at we are truly feeling “at home” when at any moment our precarious existence could be wiped out. And yet there sits our little avatar, a duck wearing pants, sitting on the roof, playing his guitar. It seems apropos to me, so I never questioned that choice. You can pre-order the album and support bringing a little bit of magic into the wider world: http://igg.me/at/homeatsea - E.G. Is it such a big task Although I didn't entirely plan it this way, I find myself beginning each day writing a little essay about a song or some aspect of the album such as the artwork (for some reason it only works in the morning, I tried one last night and gave up). It occurs to me that these also deserve to be in the blog — even if my intention is to expand upon them later — so here are the ones I've written so far with some minor revisions and extensions. The Artwork The Great Wave off Kanagawa and Virginia Lee Burton’s “The Little House” are both images I was referencing in the cover art for “At Home At Sea” which is much more apparent in the earlier draft on the bottom left. The version I settled on had some specific changes — the duck was always meant to be there (I just had not bothered adding him because I already knew I wanted to change up the composition) but switching the position of the wave and the house color felt like it worked better, as well as less explicitly copying either image. Part of this is because the original "Great Wave" is really meant to be read in the opposite direction than westerner's tend to — the Japanese as a language being read right to left also impacts how the image is viewed. But also it aligns with the album's title. As to whether the reference to Burton's work even lands is a bit doubtful, as it is just kinda "generic house," but as far as authorial intent goes, yeah, it's there, so make of it what you will. Please support my @indiegogo preorder campaign for this album: igg.me/at/homeatsea The Birds of "The Albatross Song" Although the titular Albatross is clearly the star of “The Albatross Song” a whole menagerie of avian friends are referenced in the first verse, including the bowerbird, starlings, saltmarsh sparrows, and chickadees — the visualization for this in the video for the song is being handled by way of face painting. Aside from the salt marsh sparrow (I'll explain later), like the Albatross, all of these birds have chapters in Noah Stryker's "The Thing With Feathers" which, along with the obvious (and not so obvious) nods to the "Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner," is one of the primary inspirations for this song. Support the video and its release through my pre-order campaign --http://igg.me/at/homeatsea The Secret Origins of |
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The inspiration for my song "Lighthouse at the Edge of the World" comes from this Doctor Who comic that was impactful enough on me that decades later I remembered it while I was working on a songwriting assignment to create a chord progression with a non-diatonic chord (in layman's speak: a chord you're not "supposed" to use).
So, when I say my songs are influenced by Doctor Who, I'm not entirely joking. This is a deeper cut than most. There is also an oblique reference to the episode "The Horror of Fang Rock" (which also features a lighthouse) for those astute enough to hear it.
The song has the distinction of being the first song of mine to be recorded by another artist (it will be featured on Shawn Byron's debut album), but I'll be releasing my own version on my album "At Home At Sea"
Pre-order the album at http://igg.me/at/homeatsea to support the release campaign.
So, when I say my songs are influenced by Doctor Who, I'm not entirely joking. This is a deeper cut than most. There is also an oblique reference to the episode "The Horror of Fang Rock" (which also features a lighthouse) for those astute enough to hear it.
The song has the distinction of being the first song of mine to be recorded by another artist (it will be featured on Shawn Byron's debut album), but I'll be releasing my own version on my album "At Home At Sea"
Pre-order the album at http://igg.me/at/homeatsea to support the release campaign.
Blossom Dearie and "Lifetimes Without You"
My song “Lifetimes Without You” started its life with me messing around with the chords to the jazz standard “Tea for Two” — I had in mind Blossom Dearie’s version where she slows it down and makes it a sensual affair.
The end result ended mixing in my usual Doctor Who (another deep cut this time — Lungbarrow for the true devotee) references and love for history and geography as well as a bit of Patsy Cline by way of Bob Dylan.
The song has been covered live by the acoustic duo The Complements at EGPhest twice as well as at the Hotel Utah's open mic for their legendary "Cover Your Friends Night" feature set. Alicia and Greg put a soulful spin on on their rendition — and, of course, they incorporated it into a medley for one outing, as they are want to do.
The version of it that will be on my new album features ukulele accompaniment and backing vocals by jazz chanteuse Eve Fleishman who, by some twist of fate, is herself a Blossom Dearie aficionado, in fact I would go so far as to say scholar.
You can pre-order my new album "At Home At Sea" at:
http://igg.me/at/homeatsea
The end result ended mixing in my usual Doctor Who (another deep cut this time — Lungbarrow for the true devotee) references and love for history and geography as well as a bit of Patsy Cline by way of Bob Dylan.
The song has been covered live by the acoustic duo The Complements at EGPhest twice as well as at the Hotel Utah's open mic for their legendary "Cover Your Friends Night" feature set. Alicia and Greg put a soulful spin on on their rendition — and, of course, they incorporated it into a medley for one outing, as they are want to do.
The version of it that will be on my new album features ukulele accompaniment and backing vocals by jazz chanteuse Eve Fleishman who, by some twist of fate, is herself a Blossom Dearie aficionado, in fact I would go so far as to say scholar.
You can pre-order my new album "At Home At Sea" at:
http://igg.me/at/homeatsea
Asking and "Ephemera"
“They say it doesn’t hurt to ask...” our protagonist muses in my song “Ephemera” that will be on the new album “At Home At Sea”
He then follows that up with this observation: “But what the hell do they know?”
Framed within an entirely fictional story about a litterbug, this is largely inner monologue. You’re not given much insight into “the ask” in this case but there are indications it’s romantic in nature. In part the song is just me continuing my war on inane advice and platitudes (see: The Fish Song) but the relevance of “the ask” here is this pre-order campaign and its attempt to at least offset the enormous costs of recording and releasing music, some which are purely psychological. But “the ask” itself is a burden — because it does hurt, no matter what “they” say.
The antecedent of this song in my mind is “The Last” — the last track off the last album by The Replacements (or the first Paul Westerberg solo album as some would have it) — or at least that’s the song that was rattling around in and gnawing at my brain when I wrote this one. I may be the only one to see it because how exactly it relates is a bit difficult to convey (though the blockquote quote at the top might provide a hint). So is what exactly it’s saying. But I wouldn’t have written it any other way. For reasons that are hard to articulate, it’s an enormously important song to me, which is why it’s on this album, because you never know which one will be the last.
The link to the preorder campaign is http://igg.me/at/homeatsea
He then follows that up with this observation: “But what the hell do they know?”
Framed within an entirely fictional story about a litterbug, this is largely inner monologue. You’re not given much insight into “the ask” in this case but there are indications it’s romantic in nature. In part the song is just me continuing my war on inane advice and platitudes (see: The Fish Song) but the relevance of “the ask” here is this pre-order campaign and its attempt to at least offset the enormous costs of recording and releasing music, some which are purely psychological. But “the ask” itself is a burden — because it does hurt, no matter what “they” say.
The antecedent of this song in my mind is “The Last” — the last track off the last album by The Replacements (or the first Paul Westerberg solo album as some would have it) — or at least that’s the song that was rattling around in and gnawing at my brain when I wrote this one. I may be the only one to see it because how exactly it relates is a bit difficult to convey (though the blockquote quote at the top might provide a hint). So is what exactly it’s saying. But I wouldn’t have written it any other way. For reasons that are hard to articulate, it’s an enormously important song to me, which is why it’s on this album, because you never know which one will be the last.
The link to the preorder campaign is http://igg.me/at/homeatsea
More to Come...
It's people like that who make you realize how little you've accomplished. It is a sobering thought, for example, that when Mozart was my age, he had been dead for two years
- Tom Lehrer
I’m not big for writing up lists of accomplishments. I’ve always dreaded doing so for workplace annual reviews. I’m really not big on tooting my own horn and my inner critic always wants to minimize whatever it is I’ve done. I hadn’t even considered doing so for my music related endeavors this year, but I was thinking about what I would do for my newsletter this month and about the whole IndieGoGo pre-order campaign I’ve been working on to roll out for the new album. I’m still trying to justify the whole thing in my head — asking for help is not one of my strong suits — and as a result I started mentally tallying up what I’d done over the past year. I was kind of actually impressed with myself... an unusual feeling to be sure.
The year started with finishing up the recording of The L.A. Song. Although most of the tracks had been laid down in the previous few months of 2017, I was struggling to get it wrapped up so I could bring it to its conclusion. My goal was to have it all ready to go and mastered by the time I went to L.A. in May so I could make a music video, and between getting the track done and finding a videographer it wasn’t entirely clear that this would happen. Fortunately for myself, Michelle Renee was available to help with backing vocals, a key missing component, as we prepared for a show together at Neck of the Woods.
The year started with finishing up the recording of The L.A. Song. Although most of the tracks had been laid down in the previous few months of 2017, I was struggling to get it wrapped up so I could bring it to its conclusion. My goal was to have it all ready to go and mastered by the time I went to L.A. in May so I could make a music video, and between getting the track done and finding a videographer it wasn’t entirely clear that this would happen. Fortunately for myself, Michelle Renee was available to help with backing vocals, a key missing component, as we prepared for a show together at Neck of the Woods.
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In early February I started recording “Lady of the Shadows” with Ben Osheroff. He and now fiancé Louise Nalbandian performed for the first time together at one of my Bazaar Cafe residency shows back in April of 2017. My own song “Lighthouse at the Edge of the World” made enough of an impression on him that he suggested we record together when we met again at a pop-up event at Amado's where Louise was playing’ in January.
Once "Lady" was in the can, Ben and I would go on to record a full album over the summer that includes “The Albatross Song,” "Lifetimes Without You", and "Your Inexorable Pull" in addition to "Lighthouse" — I’ll be releasing this album in the early part of 2019 (and the rationale for the IndieGoGo campaign I alluded to earlier and will link to indiscriminately if not interminably during this post).
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I did a lot of shows over the past year. Maybe too many. I put together shows at Neck of the Woods (my first full band show), the Monkey House in Berkeley, and the Oakland Octopus as well two editions of “Rotating Rounds” at the Lost Church. I also joined in at two shows at Bazaar Cafe, one with Rob Jamner and one with The Complements for their residency in April as well as two appearances with Delphi Freeman at Ghirardelli Square.
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I also hosted (or co-hosted) 3 ensemble shows events with LehrerPhest in April, DylanPhest in May and EGPhest III in August. All three events involved rounding up a large and diverse array of performers and keeping things at least nominally organized, with assigning songs, arranging practice sessions, doing promotion and just keeping things rolling during the event. Don’t get me wrong, it was blast and I hope to continue doing more events along these lines in the coming year.
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In May I went on my first tour as a musician — doing a brief stint down to Southern California and back with shows in L.A., San Luis Obispo and Santa Cruz. While in Los Angeles, I shot my first music video with Button Up Productions. This was like the real deal — it included actors and multiple locations (one in Hollywood no less) — even if it was done guerrilla style with the aide of a rather conspicuously pink towel.
Just ahead of EGPhest III in August, I released a recording by Samantha Margret doing her rendition of “Sunday is Made for Loving” from the previous year's birthday extravaganza. Samantha's recording is accompanied by an arrangement written by Nahuel Bronzini which includes parts for cello and trumpet. This the first cover of one of my songs to be released commercially, with two more in the pipeline from other artists.
The third edition of the big birthday bash — EGPhest III — was held at the Hotel Utah and we had all sorts of lovely performances from both returning performers and first timers, including some Argentinian imports by way of Madrid. And entirely too much cake (I could have been more conservative but it was my first time ordering sheet cake and I planned for catastrophic success). So yeah, I managed to somehow pull that whole affair off once again — with a total of 15 different acts covering my songs simply because I asked them nicely — check out the full blog post I wrote up about it.
Later in August I went to Nashville and I played two songwriter's nights (including one at the infamous Bobby’s Idle Hour on Music Row), performed a show at the Bowery Vault, went to the CD Baby music conference and recorded some tracks with Kenny Schick at his studio in East Nashville (I’ll keep you updated when that’s going to be released) — he and his wife Sabine put me up for a good chunk of time and for that I am eternally grateful (I tried the hostel downtown... one night was enough). Oh, and I ate a fancy donut because...
In September was part of the first ever Balanced BreakFEST showcase, playing at a set at Revolution Cafe. I also released the The L.A. Song as single along with its music video:
During the month of October, with the help of Tohm Lev, I shot a second music video — this one for “Lady of the Shadows.” For this outing I handled directing and editing duties myself and recorded on iPhone (with a smattering of stock footage thrown in). Tohm and I had a lot of fun tromping around the Presidio with a scarecrow prop I had grabbed last minute from the Ace Hardware in Laurel Village. I released the track and the video in early November.
In December I shot my third music video with the help of Anthony Jimenez and Jene’e Patitucci at Summer Rae’s “Secret Garden,” with Ken Newman on hand to host the open mic we used as a lure to get folks to come out to what turned out to be a rather rainy Sunday evening. Although nerve wracking in the lead up, given this is the most complex endeavor I've tried video-wise and the rain seemed like a bad portent, the event was enormous fun and I look forward to sharing the results once we get the editing done and I roll out the full campaign for the new album.
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Over the course of the year I continued to be a regular at Balanced Breakfast, played the Hotel Carlton almost every Monday (and the Marker on Tuesdays up until August), frequented to open mics at Bazaar and the Utah (among others), participated in a monthly songwriter’s circle, and had appearances on Bird Flu Kitchen on BFF.fm with Alvie of Alvie and the Breakfast Pigs as well as Mike Glendinning’s Underground Mayhem on FCC Free. I went to three different music conferences — the ASCAP Expo in L.A., the CD Baby DIY in Nashville and Balanced Breakfast’s first music conference in SF (hosted at good old PianoFight). I started blogging (now and again), at some point along the way I hit 300 followers on my Facebook musician page, and although I didn't win the SF Deli poll for emerging artist for the month of February, I did get over 300 votes — and most of those were real ones too. I also wrote a bunch of new songs, some of which I actually think are pretty good.
There are a lot of people to thank — too many for me to list exhaustively and give all the credit they are due. But certainly props should be given to Daniel Button, Jen Cody, Sean Cody (dba Shawn Byron), Eve Fleishman, Delphi Freeman, Brendan Getzell, Robb Hagle, Sabine Heulser-Schick, Anthony Jimenez, Allie Jones, Tohm Lev, Samantha Margret, Theo McKinney, Louise Nalbandian, Ken Newman, Mario M. Noche, Amy Obenski, Ben Osheroff, Jene’e Patitucci, Summer Rae, Michelle Renee, Kenny Schick, Sean Silverman, Samantha Sipin, and Ben Visini — you all helped make all my accomplishments this year possible and I thank you all for your support. If I missed you, please don’t hold it against me.
To end with a call to action, as one does with one’s blog posts, I have launched his whole IndieGoGo campaign thing to try and keep things afloat as I roll out the new album.
In terms of the job review which I brought up earlier, the usual course of events is to get “promoted” to the job one is already doing, having taken on more responsibilities in one’s current position and basically unofficially already having the new title in everything but name. As reluctant as I am to ask for help, creating this summation of the year’s activities at least helps me feel like I’m not asking for anything I haven’t already shown I can do. Only this time its not an employer that I'm making the case to, but rather to anyone who wants to support me as I continue these endeavors.
Here’s that link to the IndieGoGo campaign one more time:
https://igg.me/at/homeatsea
Thank You,
- E.G.
“We'd all become unpeople undoing unthings untogether”
— The Doctor, The Mutants
“Wouldn't know the difference between a real blonde and a fake”
— Bob Dylan, Highlands
A picture I used for one of my Instagram bot honeypot posts
For probably the majority of its user base, Instagram is a quick and fun way to share photos of what you’re doing with your friends. Furthermore you can follow celebrities and artists you admire to see what they’re up to.
For musicians, as well as other artists and businesses, it’s a way to engage with your audience and help new people discover what you do. This can be done by simply putting out information about upcoming releases and shows. You can also share the day to day aspects of your life or other facets and interests you have to build up a rapport with your fanbase.
But whatever this platform is in its ideal state, it’s no secret that it’s being co-opted, gamed, and abused.
The plain semantics of a “like” on Instagram should mean that someone saw your photo or video and enjoyed it enough to take the level of effort it requires to press a little heart icon and thereby let you know they think what you’ve shared with the world is something worth at least that level of appreciation. It’s a nice little dopamine hit for you; a nice little reward for your effort; and it acts as a reinforcement for your use of the platform.
But that’s not necessarily what a “like” actually means in practice. If it’s not a user that you're familiar with, it’s less likely that they’re someone who happened to stumble across your photo and wanted to let a stranger know they enjoyed a post than it is someone or something that is seeking your attention. So now it’s not “good job” it’s “hey, look at me!” — a total inversion of the intention. And since this is a digital platform it’s not even necessarily a human — in fact it’s more likely than not to be a bot acting on a human’s behalf. In all likelihood no human actually ever laid eyes on your photo to produce that supposed interaction.
The primary way the bots discover content to “like” is through the hashtags you add to your post. If you ever want to see this in action, simply create a bunch of related tags (30 is the max — beyond that Instagram will make your post blank) and use them with a picture of literally anything (it could be television static and you’ll still get likes — I literally did this). There are even tools that will help you create such a collections of tags. Once posted, you’ll be pretty much instantaneously swarmed by bots giving you likes. In fact, you can get more “likes” than people your post supposedly reached — “reach” being measure of how many people have seen your post in their feed one way or another. Short of discrepancies in how Instagram’s backend updates these counts, logically this sort of mismatch doesn’t seem like it should ever happen (you couldn’t like something that hadn’t reached you).
I did a spate of such posts recently (in the name of science!) and they became the frontrunners for “engagement” compared to all my other posts for the past 2 years — engagement being a catch all for likes and comments. After playing around a bit by creating posts with tags of different subjects (fashion, food, photography) and I’ve concluded musicians — particularly singer-songwriters — are the some of worst perpetrators of this sort of nonsense. It’s frustrating because some people could be legitimately discovering your content, but to know who is doing that as opposed to who’s actually only interested advertising to you requires more time and effort than its worth.
I mean, I’m pretty sure the random chiropractor’s office that’s liking my post is not on the up and up. But a random songwriter? — well, honestly, chances are, they’re not either — and how exactly you’d determine otherwise I’m not exactly sure. I assume the idea is to target non-musicians who are posting about music they enjoy in hopes of attracting them to the ostensible “liker’s” own brand, but as a musician who’s just starting to build audience, this means the majority of accounts “liking" my posts are probably more focused on building their own followers than they are in any content I’m creating. Maybe this just becomes all so much noise as you grow your number of followers, but I think it's much more insidious than simply being a nuisance.
And the bots don’t necessarily simply ”like” the post. Some will add some supportive but generic and inane comment that at first glance might seem relevant but is really meant to be applicable in an all purpose way. Some bots even have the gall to directly call for you to look at their own work. Others will actually start liking a handful of your other posts as if they had just discovered you and started looking at your feed. Still others will follow you — only of course to quickly stop following you even if you naively start following them in return. In my experiments, even after the bots swarm a heavily tagged post, my overall number of followers pretty much remains constant over time. This is an insidious way to build up a follower base without having to do any actual engagement oneself.
All of this activity will no doubt sound familiar to anyone who’s spent much time on Instagram. I find it to be disingenuous and manipulative. Furthermore, I would also contend that all of these machinations hurt the value proposition of the platform and I’m surprised that Instagram even allows it to happen. The fact is though, the functionality that allows this is part of their web API which means that far from making it difficult to do, Instagram has actually enabled it.
Now, according to Instagram’s terms of service, automated activity along these lines would appear to be a violation. According the "General Terms" of the API usage, client applications are not to “confuse, deceive, defraud, mislead or harass anyone.” As I said, it’s inherently deceptive to say you “liked” something when you never laid eyes on it according to what I think would be the generally accepted idea of what “liking” should mean. To post a comment on it that suggests a person looked at a photo when no person did is obviously misleading. So I would say the powers that be at Instagram are a bit lax about enforcing this rule.
The good news is apparently the API functionality to post “likes” automatically is being removed on December 11th of this year (though this doesn’t quite jive with the list of features that were supposedly deprecated on April 11th). Why this was ever made API in the first place astounds me to be quite honest. This is an open invitation to automate “likes” by a client application. It feels like the developers came up with general purpose API that exposed all the platform’s capabilities but who ever was minding the store as far as the overall system's functionality didn’t think through the implications as to how it could be used in practice and what that would mean to the end user experience. And given the level of activity one sees from bots, whatever measures they might have in place to govern bot activity are clearly insufficient. Aside from making the numbers of likes and followers suspect, it also casts a pall on a business that wants money to promote posts and sows doubt in the authenticity of activity generated by such promotions.
It remains to be seen whether or not this change in the API leads to a serious decline in the activity. People may wake up on December 12th and see their apparent engagement plummet. Other platforms, (i.e. Twitter), have had issues with fake accounts, and some users have seen follower counts dwindle when such accounts are culled.
We do live in a day and age where we have be wary of whether news is “fake” or not — is it legitimate content or is it being shown to us because an entity that is hostile to our interests wants to sow dissent — or is someone is simply "trolling" us? In the larger political arena, making it more difficult for voters who are likely to oppose your positions is common place, not to mention diminishing their representation through gerrymandering. And the consequences of being deceptive or telling falsehoods seem to have fallen by the way side in general. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that we see this “bending the rules” elsewhere.
I’m cynical in general about people’s motivations and willingness to adhere to rules in the online world. It doesn’t even surprise me that some segment of the creative community online would behave in an unethical way for their advantage. Not so long ago I was in an internet poll that to my mind was clearly being manipulated (if you look at my Instagram history, it’ll be apparent what I’m referring to) and given its nature it was quite an easy thing to do. I discouraged anyone voting for me from doing so, but some folks didn’t seem to regard there to be anything wrong with not playing along with what should be the general understanding of what a vote would mean in that context. IP Addresses don’t listen to music, so they shouldn’t be the ones voting and having more than on IP Address shouldn’t entitle you to vote multiple times.
In the context of promoting one’s self as independent artist, one might see these tactics used on Instagram and elsewhere as simply being scrappy and resourceful — doing what it takes to get ahead in a dog-eat-dog world is a tried and true tradition and a little violation of the spirit of a platform’s intentions is minor. But I’ll stick to my guns and say that using bots is a perversion of the system and makes Instagram less useful to its users — both artists and casual users alike. And in the realm of the singer-songwriter where authenticity is good currency, using these tactics or others undermines any claim you might have to that authenticity.
I hope other artists and creatives would consider this and how ethical anything they are doing to build their fanbase actually is.
Kill the bots.
— E.G.
For musicians, as well as other artists and businesses, it’s a way to engage with your audience and help new people discover what you do. This can be done by simply putting out information about upcoming releases and shows. You can also share the day to day aspects of your life or other facets and interests you have to build up a rapport with your fanbase.
But whatever this platform is in its ideal state, it’s no secret that it’s being co-opted, gamed, and abused.
The plain semantics of a “like” on Instagram should mean that someone saw your photo or video and enjoyed it enough to take the level of effort it requires to press a little heart icon and thereby let you know they think what you’ve shared with the world is something worth at least that level of appreciation. It’s a nice little dopamine hit for you; a nice little reward for your effort; and it acts as a reinforcement for your use of the platform.
But that’s not necessarily what a “like” actually means in practice. If it’s not a user that you're familiar with, it’s less likely that they’re someone who happened to stumble across your photo and wanted to let a stranger know they enjoyed a post than it is someone or something that is seeking your attention. So now it’s not “good job” it’s “hey, look at me!” — a total inversion of the intention. And since this is a digital platform it’s not even necessarily a human — in fact it’s more likely than not to be a bot acting on a human’s behalf. In all likelihood no human actually ever laid eyes on your photo to produce that supposed interaction.
The primary way the bots discover content to “like” is through the hashtags you add to your post. If you ever want to see this in action, simply create a bunch of related tags (30 is the max — beyond that Instagram will make your post blank) and use them with a picture of literally anything (it could be television static and you’ll still get likes — I literally did this). There are even tools that will help you create such a collections of tags. Once posted, you’ll be pretty much instantaneously swarmed by bots giving you likes. In fact, you can get more “likes” than people your post supposedly reached — “reach” being measure of how many people have seen your post in their feed one way or another. Short of discrepancies in how Instagram’s backend updates these counts, logically this sort of mismatch doesn’t seem like it should ever happen (you couldn’t like something that hadn’t reached you).
I did a spate of such posts recently (in the name of science!) and they became the frontrunners for “engagement” compared to all my other posts for the past 2 years — engagement being a catch all for likes and comments. After playing around a bit by creating posts with tags of different subjects (fashion, food, photography) and I’ve concluded musicians — particularly singer-songwriters — are the some of worst perpetrators of this sort of nonsense. It’s frustrating because some people could be legitimately discovering your content, but to know who is doing that as opposed to who’s actually only interested advertising to you requires more time and effort than its worth.
I mean, I’m pretty sure the random chiropractor’s office that’s liking my post is not on the up and up. But a random songwriter? — well, honestly, chances are, they’re not either — and how exactly you’d determine otherwise I’m not exactly sure. I assume the idea is to target non-musicians who are posting about music they enjoy in hopes of attracting them to the ostensible “liker’s” own brand, but as a musician who’s just starting to build audience, this means the majority of accounts “liking" my posts are probably more focused on building their own followers than they are in any content I’m creating. Maybe this just becomes all so much noise as you grow your number of followers, but I think it's much more insidious than simply being a nuisance.
And the bots don’t necessarily simply ”like” the post. Some will add some supportive but generic and inane comment that at first glance might seem relevant but is really meant to be applicable in an all purpose way. Some bots even have the gall to directly call for you to look at their own work. Others will actually start liking a handful of your other posts as if they had just discovered you and started looking at your feed. Still others will follow you — only of course to quickly stop following you even if you naively start following them in return. In my experiments, even after the bots swarm a heavily tagged post, my overall number of followers pretty much remains constant over time. This is an insidious way to build up a follower base without having to do any actual engagement oneself.
All of this activity will no doubt sound familiar to anyone who’s spent much time on Instagram. I find it to be disingenuous and manipulative. Furthermore, I would also contend that all of these machinations hurt the value proposition of the platform and I’m surprised that Instagram even allows it to happen. The fact is though, the functionality that allows this is part of their web API which means that far from making it difficult to do, Instagram has actually enabled it.
Now, according to Instagram’s terms of service, automated activity along these lines would appear to be a violation. According the "General Terms" of the API usage, client applications are not to “confuse, deceive, defraud, mislead or harass anyone.” As I said, it’s inherently deceptive to say you “liked” something when you never laid eyes on it according to what I think would be the generally accepted idea of what “liking” should mean. To post a comment on it that suggests a person looked at a photo when no person did is obviously misleading. So I would say the powers that be at Instagram are a bit lax about enforcing this rule.
The good news is apparently the API functionality to post “likes” automatically is being removed on December 11th of this year (though this doesn’t quite jive with the list of features that were supposedly deprecated on April 11th). Why this was ever made API in the first place astounds me to be quite honest. This is an open invitation to automate “likes” by a client application. It feels like the developers came up with general purpose API that exposed all the platform’s capabilities but who ever was minding the store as far as the overall system's functionality didn’t think through the implications as to how it could be used in practice and what that would mean to the end user experience. And given the level of activity one sees from bots, whatever measures they might have in place to govern bot activity are clearly insufficient. Aside from making the numbers of likes and followers suspect, it also casts a pall on a business that wants money to promote posts and sows doubt in the authenticity of activity generated by such promotions.
It remains to be seen whether or not this change in the API leads to a serious decline in the activity. People may wake up on December 12th and see their apparent engagement plummet. Other platforms, (i.e. Twitter), have had issues with fake accounts, and some users have seen follower counts dwindle when such accounts are culled.
We do live in a day and age where we have be wary of whether news is “fake” or not — is it legitimate content or is it being shown to us because an entity that is hostile to our interests wants to sow dissent — or is someone is simply "trolling" us? In the larger political arena, making it more difficult for voters who are likely to oppose your positions is common place, not to mention diminishing their representation through gerrymandering. And the consequences of being deceptive or telling falsehoods seem to have fallen by the way side in general. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that we see this “bending the rules” elsewhere.
I’m cynical in general about people’s motivations and willingness to adhere to rules in the online world. It doesn’t even surprise me that some segment of the creative community online would behave in an unethical way for their advantage. Not so long ago I was in an internet poll that to my mind was clearly being manipulated (if you look at my Instagram history, it’ll be apparent what I’m referring to) and given its nature it was quite an easy thing to do. I discouraged anyone voting for me from doing so, but some folks didn’t seem to regard there to be anything wrong with not playing along with what should be the general understanding of what a vote would mean in that context. IP Addresses don’t listen to music, so they shouldn’t be the ones voting and having more than on IP Address shouldn’t entitle you to vote multiple times.
In the context of promoting one’s self as independent artist, one might see these tactics used on Instagram and elsewhere as simply being scrappy and resourceful — doing what it takes to get ahead in a dog-eat-dog world is a tried and true tradition and a little violation of the spirit of a platform’s intentions is minor. But I’ll stick to my guns and say that using bots is a perversion of the system and makes Instagram less useful to its users — both artists and casual users alike. And in the realm of the singer-songwriter where authenticity is good currency, using these tactics or others undermines any claim you might have to that authenticity.
I hope other artists and creatives would consider this and how ethical anything they are doing to build their fanbase actually is.
Kill the bots.
— E.G.
E.G. Phillips is a singer-songwriter based out of San Francisco. You can follow him on instagram as @duckswithpants — this also works on the Facebook and the Twitter machine.
“I been to Sugar Town, I shook the sugar down”
— Bob Dylan, Tryin' to Get to Heaven
In addition to blogging about my own songwriting, I thought it would be an interesting exercise to write about other songwriter's songs. This is not done from the perspective of researching the song's background in depth, but rather from my own experience and analysis of it. In fact, beyond consulting the lyrics, I've actually avoided other perspectives (including the author's) because that seems to be how we all most naturally experience a song. For the first of these posts, I've chosen Dylan's "Tryin' to Get to Heaven" given that is one that I've covered and therefore have some intimate familiarity with.
“Time Out of Mind” was the first release of new Dylan music I had at my disposal after I had become an aficionado of his music in college. Prior to that there had been releases of old blues and folk covers on “World Gone Wrong” — but this was the first set of new originals released from the man who’d I’d come to admire for albums such as “Highway 61 Revisited” and “Blood on the Tracks” just a few years prior.
Was I immediately in love with this new work? No… but with opening tracks like “Love Sick” (it took me forever to even understand what he was saying with some lines) and “Dirt Road Blues” (not exactly top tier, not exactly leading with your strongest song) as well as just the overall newness of it, I think I can be forgiven. I did immediately dig the title of the album — though this owes largely to a soft spot I have for Mercutio (having played the part, albeit only for high school class rendition). The album subsequently became a very important album to me, one that gave me solace in those lonely moments of heartbreak. I recall taking many a warm bath with this album playing in the background.
Admittedly “Tryin' to Get to Heaven” was not as interesting to me as “Standing in the Doorway,” “Million Miles,” and “‘Til I Fell in Love with You.” In part I just wasn’t that taken with the vocal performance. Moreover, there was the fact, for me as someone who is more or less an atheist (in the moments when I’m worrying about such things), even a light touch on a vaguely theological subject matter was a bit off putting (this has led to Dylan’s evangelical period still being somewhat terra incognita to me — even “Ring Them Bells” on “Oh, Mercy” is one I’m not all that inspired to revisit).
It wasn’t until I came across the early 2000’s live recording that was released as part of single with its jazzy re-harmonization that I really began digging this particular song. Having spent most of that decade immersing myself in old Blue Note recordings and the like from the Virgin Mega Store bargain bin (a bygone era, alas) instead of listening to anything current, this was my jam.
“Time Out of Mind” was the first release of new Dylan music I had at my disposal after I had become an aficionado of his music in college. Prior to that there had been releases of old blues and folk covers on “World Gone Wrong” — but this was the first set of new originals released from the man who’d I’d come to admire for albums such as “Highway 61 Revisited” and “Blood on the Tracks” just a few years prior.
Was I immediately in love with this new work? No… but with opening tracks like “Love Sick” (it took me forever to even understand what he was saying with some lines) and “Dirt Road Blues” (not exactly top tier, not exactly leading with your strongest song) as well as just the overall newness of it, I think I can be forgiven. I did immediately dig the title of the album — though this owes largely to a soft spot I have for Mercutio (having played the part, albeit only for high school class rendition). The album subsequently became a very important album to me, one that gave me solace in those lonely moments of heartbreak. I recall taking many a warm bath with this album playing in the background.
Admittedly “Tryin' to Get to Heaven” was not as interesting to me as “Standing in the Doorway,” “Million Miles,” and “‘Til I Fell in Love with You.” In part I just wasn’t that taken with the vocal performance. Moreover, there was the fact, for me as someone who is more or less an atheist (in the moments when I’m worrying about such things), even a light touch on a vaguely theological subject matter was a bit off putting (this has led to Dylan’s evangelical period still being somewhat terra incognita to me — even “Ring Them Bells” on “Oh, Mercy” is one I’m not all that inspired to revisit).
It wasn’t until I came across the early 2000’s live recording that was released as part of single with its jazzy re-harmonization that I really began digging this particular song. Having spent most of that decade immersing myself in old Blue Note recordings and the like from the Virgin Mega Store bargain bin (a bygone era, alas) instead of listening to anything current, this was my jam.
So when this past May I put together a Bob Dylan tribute show with Swamp Child's Robb Hagle, this became one of my go to options for a song cover. Part of it was simply that with this particular arrangement it seemed “on brand” for me given my own blending of folk, jazz and popular music. But it’s also a song that’s come to mean more to me as I’ve taken my own songwriting more seriously. No longer just a hobby that I keep to myself, my efforts to get my music out there in the world at a somewhat later stage of life than is typical has given the refrain and the themes of this piece greater resonance.
And as a songwriter, I find it interesting just from the standpoint of the lyrics.
There’s almost a certain sloppiness to the composition. The first two verses start their penultimate line with “I’ve been walking” and then the song drops it for the subsequent three. That this is an echo of the album's opening line is probably coincidental, given how these things ultimately come together, but one does wonder how much the writer is paying attention as to whether he's repeating himself (though hardly as conspicuous as the use of the word "brain" throughout Modern Times). The line length changes so much for this line in each verse, it defies your expectations as a singer and some oddities just make remembering the order a bit difficult. There are some helpful mnemonics, even if they are counterintuitive — the verse that’s talking about railways ends with our protagonist “going down the road feeling bad” — for instance.
There are some bits that I do just adore — this character, Miss Mary Jane, a player who appears on stage and is quickly shuffled off, is a typical Dylan walk on. Like Mary Lou and Prince Phillip in “Dignity” she’s only there so briefly and all we see is a snapshot. All we learn about her is she has some connection to his train of thought that begins with New Orleans and that she has a House in Baltimore. Sure, her name is a euphemism for marijuana, but I can’t see how this makes any literal sense. Dylan was smoking some pot in a buggy in New Orleans? How does the house in Baltimore jive with such a reading. To me, this is an actual person who’s memory our protagonist has tripped over in his thinking? Perhaps she is drug-like in some way, but I prefer to interpret her as being an actual character and not just a symbol.
What's her significance then? Her juxtaposition with the admission that he doesn’t “know what ‘all right’ even means” and within the overall song suggests that this is not a relationship that is in a good state of repair. What happened in that house in Baltimore? We’re not given a clue, beyond perhaps that this is a door that now is closed. Maybe she is the lost love to whom references are interspersed throughout the lyrics — a woman he’s slowly starting to forget, a woman who’s sealed up the book.
We’re given some interesting settings for this song — thrown in “in media res” with Dylan wading through the high water just before a storm on a muggy summer day. And then in subsequent verses we traipse through Missouri, a train platform, New Orleans and then finally his parlor, where he imagines he'll dream about ramblers of old, hitching rides on trains (the latter harkening back to the heavily self-embellished mythology of Dylan’s youth).
With the advent of “Tell Tale Signs” we know that Dylan’s approach to songwriting is more like that of a collage. Verses from the unreleased “Marching to the City” and the like wound up in completely different songs that actually ended up on this or subsequent albums. As a writer, he’s a packrat — keeping whole verses tucked away in his outtakes in case he can reuse them later. More recent songs are practically written like ransom notes with virtually every line clipped from different tunes from another age. So whether any of “Try’n to Get to Heaven” is meant to make any narrative sense is questionable. It’s imagery, it’s impressions, thematically connected…maybe. Or maybe he just thought it sounded “right.”
What really binds the verses together is the constant return to a loss that is haunting our protagonist — maybe not like it used to, but still there in the back, if not the forefront, of his mind. So in what sense is he trying to get to heaven? Who is closing the door?
One of the questions we as songwriters are often asked within the context of writing our songs (say in a song circle or writing group) is “who is being addressed here?” Well, clearly there’s a second person — the “you” that the narrator keeps engaging with. It sounds like it would be a woman, as I alluded to earlier. But then there’s this strange tell in the fourth verse — “I’ve been all-around the world, boys” — that is interesting. Who are these “boys?”
English is a bit frustrating in its refusal to distinguish between singular and plural second person and can lead to international or unintentional authorial subterfuge, so maybe our narrator isn’t simply changing up who he’s addressing midway through the song. Maybe he’s been addressing a group from the beginning. Could it be this is a traveling musician, on the road, who got run out of Missouri after his gig there? Is he speaking to his audience, perhaps in absentia, as he reflects on this tour gone wrong. Maybe this is how we ended up wading through the water in the beginning — in his hurry to get away, there was no time to make his way to a bridge, and he ended up fording a river.
Still, whoever our boys are (fellow travelers?), this anonymous “they” hangs out there. But they often do. “They” are often responsible for saying things, being the ones who “ought” to do things and a myriad of sins. Notably it’s a door, not (pearly) gates. But still, maybe it’s the angels and archangels and saints who are about to make their domain forevermore inaccessible. Why? Well, maybe heaven itself is not immune from overpopulation. For the Talking Heads, it’s a bar. So perhaps management is concerned about violating fire codes and it’s not salvation that our protagonist is seeking, but just being part of the hip and happening scene.
Not likely.
This is a man who feels like his opportunities are fading as he drifts and reminisces as the walking wounded.
In that I can relate, as I’m sure we all can from time to time.
Below is my own cover of the song as well as the full lyrics.
And as a songwriter, I find it interesting just from the standpoint of the lyrics.
There’s almost a certain sloppiness to the composition. The first two verses start their penultimate line with “I’ve been walking” and then the song drops it for the subsequent three. That this is an echo of the album's opening line is probably coincidental, given how these things ultimately come together, but one does wonder how much the writer is paying attention as to whether he's repeating himself (though hardly as conspicuous as the use of the word "brain" throughout Modern Times). The line length changes so much for this line in each verse, it defies your expectations as a singer and some oddities just make remembering the order a bit difficult. There are some helpful mnemonics, even if they are counterintuitive — the verse that’s talking about railways ends with our protagonist “going down the road feeling bad” — for instance.
There are some bits that I do just adore — this character, Miss Mary Jane, a player who appears on stage and is quickly shuffled off, is a typical Dylan walk on. Like Mary Lou and Prince Phillip in “Dignity” she’s only there so briefly and all we see is a snapshot. All we learn about her is she has some connection to his train of thought that begins with New Orleans and that she has a House in Baltimore. Sure, her name is a euphemism for marijuana, but I can’t see how this makes any literal sense. Dylan was smoking some pot in a buggy in New Orleans? How does the house in Baltimore jive with such a reading. To me, this is an actual person who’s memory our protagonist has tripped over in his thinking? Perhaps she is drug-like in some way, but I prefer to interpret her as being an actual character and not just a symbol.
What's her significance then? Her juxtaposition with the admission that he doesn’t “know what ‘all right’ even means” and within the overall song suggests that this is not a relationship that is in a good state of repair. What happened in that house in Baltimore? We’re not given a clue, beyond perhaps that this is a door that now is closed. Maybe she is the lost love to whom references are interspersed throughout the lyrics — a woman he’s slowly starting to forget, a woman who’s sealed up the book.
We’re given some interesting settings for this song — thrown in “in media res” with Dylan wading through the high water just before a storm on a muggy summer day. And then in subsequent verses we traipse through Missouri, a train platform, New Orleans and then finally his parlor, where he imagines he'll dream about ramblers of old, hitching rides on trains (the latter harkening back to the heavily self-embellished mythology of Dylan’s youth).
With the advent of “Tell Tale Signs” we know that Dylan’s approach to songwriting is more like that of a collage. Verses from the unreleased “Marching to the City” and the like wound up in completely different songs that actually ended up on this or subsequent albums. As a writer, he’s a packrat — keeping whole verses tucked away in his outtakes in case he can reuse them later. More recent songs are practically written like ransom notes with virtually every line clipped from different tunes from another age. So whether any of “Try’n to Get to Heaven” is meant to make any narrative sense is questionable. It’s imagery, it’s impressions, thematically connected…maybe. Or maybe he just thought it sounded “right.”
What really binds the verses together is the constant return to a loss that is haunting our protagonist — maybe not like it used to, but still there in the back, if not the forefront, of his mind. So in what sense is he trying to get to heaven? Who is closing the door?
One of the questions we as songwriters are often asked within the context of writing our songs (say in a song circle or writing group) is “who is being addressed here?” Well, clearly there’s a second person — the “you” that the narrator keeps engaging with. It sounds like it would be a woman, as I alluded to earlier. But then there’s this strange tell in the fourth verse — “I’ve been all-around the world, boys” — that is interesting. Who are these “boys?”
English is a bit frustrating in its refusal to distinguish between singular and plural second person and can lead to international or unintentional authorial subterfuge, so maybe our narrator isn’t simply changing up who he’s addressing midway through the song. Maybe he’s been addressing a group from the beginning. Could it be this is a traveling musician, on the road, who got run out of Missouri after his gig there? Is he speaking to his audience, perhaps in absentia, as he reflects on this tour gone wrong. Maybe this is how we ended up wading through the water in the beginning — in his hurry to get away, there was no time to make his way to a bridge, and he ended up fording a river.
Still, whoever our boys are (fellow travelers?), this anonymous “they” hangs out there. But they often do. “They” are often responsible for saying things, being the ones who “ought” to do things and a myriad of sins. Notably it’s a door, not (pearly) gates. But still, maybe it’s the angels and archangels and saints who are about to make their domain forevermore inaccessible. Why? Well, maybe heaven itself is not immune from overpopulation. For the Talking Heads, it’s a bar. So perhaps management is concerned about violating fire codes and it’s not salvation that our protagonist is seeking, but just being part of the hip and happening scene.
Not likely.
This is a man who feels like his opportunities are fading as he drifts and reminisces as the walking wounded.
In that I can relate, as I’m sure we all can from time to time.
Below is my own cover of the song as well as the full lyrics.
Try’n to Get to Heaven
Bob Dylan
The air is getting hotter
There’s a rumbling in the skies
I’ve been wading through the high muddy water
With the heat rising in my eyes
Every day your memory grows dimmer
It doesn’t haunt me like it did before
I’ve been walking through the middle of nowhere
Trying to get to heaven before they close the door
When I was in Missouri
They would not let me be
I had to leave there in a hurry
I only saw what they let me see
You broke a heart that loved you
Now you can seal up the book and not write anymore
I’ve been walking that lonesome valley
Trying to get to heaven before they close the door
People on the platforms
Waiting for the trains
I can hear their hearts a-beatin’
Like pendulums swinging on chains
When you think that you've lost everything,
You find out you can always lose a little more.
I’m just going down the road feeling bad
Trying to get to heaven before they close the door
I’m going down the river
Down to New Orleans
They tell me everything is gonna be all right
But I don’t know what “all right” even means
I was riding in a buggy with Miss Mary-Jane
Miss Mary-Jane got a house in Baltimore
I been all around the world, boys
Now I’m trying to get to heaven before they close the door
Gonna sleep down in the parlor
And relive my dreams
I’ll close my eyes and I wonder
If everything is as hollow as it seems
Some trains don't pull no gamblers
No midnight ramblers like they did before
I been to Sugar Town, I shook the sugar down
Now I’m trying to get to heaven before they close the door
Bob Dylan
The air is getting hotter
There’s a rumbling in the skies
I’ve been wading through the high muddy water
With the heat rising in my eyes
Every day your memory grows dimmer
It doesn’t haunt me like it did before
I’ve been walking through the middle of nowhere
Trying to get to heaven before they close the door
When I was in Missouri
They would not let me be
I had to leave there in a hurry
I only saw what they let me see
You broke a heart that loved you
Now you can seal up the book and not write anymore
I’ve been walking that lonesome valley
Trying to get to heaven before they close the door
People on the platforms
Waiting for the trains
I can hear their hearts a-beatin’
Like pendulums swinging on chains
When you think that you've lost everything,
You find out you can always lose a little more.
I’m just going down the road feeling bad
Trying to get to heaven before they close the door
I’m going down the river
Down to New Orleans
They tell me everything is gonna be all right
But I don’t know what “all right” even means
I was riding in a buggy with Miss Mary-Jane
Miss Mary-Jane got a house in Baltimore
I been all around the world, boys
Now I’m trying to get to heaven before they close the door
Gonna sleep down in the parlor
And relive my dreams
I’ll close my eyes and I wonder
If everything is as hollow as it seems
Some trains don't pull no gamblers
No midnight ramblers like they did before
I been to Sugar Town, I shook the sugar down
Now I’m trying to get to heaven before they close the door
“I Am Half-Sick of Shadows”
— Alfred, Lord Tennyson, The Lady of Shallot
— Alfred, Lord Tennyson, The Lady of Shallot
“Lady of the Shadows” is a song that began as one of those post EGPhest efforts to convince myself I can still actually write new songs.
EGPhest is this event I’ve done for three years running where I invite other songwriters to indulge me by singing my songs for my birthday. It’s all very nice to hear folks cover the tunes I’ve written — which I appreciate it to no end — and of course people say all sorts of wonderful things about me (mostly owing to the fact it is my birthday) — which is lovely, of course, but far from stroking my ego the whole affair actually is a bit intimidating. What if I can’t ever write anything again that people like? Which I guess is a typical for writers, but somehow I feel like this whole affair ups the ante.
Anyway, after the first EGPhest, I embarked on a rather intense effort to write a song called “The Comet and the Wandering Moon” (more about that one in the months to come) and after EGPhest 2 I wrote “Lady of the Shadows” — oddly enough although I’ve been writing a number of songs since EGPhest 3, there hasn’t necessarily been a single “one” that’s been the focus.
The idea for LotS (as the cool kids will call it, no doubt) originates from my friend Luna Taylor, another singer songwriter I know from the Bay Area music scene (though she’s subsequently moved down to San Diego). Luna, by the way, is also responsible for the cover art for this single. Luna has this lovely habit of photographing shadows — she has a whole Facebook photo album dedicated to this pursuit and actually uses the hashtag “shadowgirl.”
One night while hanging around Bazaar Cafe with future proprietors Josh and Rozanne as well as Shawn Byron and his wife Jen, Rozanne took to referring to Jen as the “golden lady” owing to the fact Jen was wearing yellow and has long blonde hair. For some reason this stuck in my head and got cross pollinated with Luna’s photo taking habits, so in my mind Luna became “the lady of the shadows.”
This seemed to me like the sort of phrase that I must have picked up from somewhere so I did what any self respecting wrier does, which is to do a Google search. This brought up Tennyson’s “Lady of Shallot” which I was heretofore unfamiliar. For those similarly unfamiliar, the basic story of this poem is that there is this woman who resides in a tower and is quite isolated there (reasons unspecified) who creates pictures of what she sees through mirror on a loom (once again, reasons unspecified). Then along comes Lancelot of the Arthurian legend through the fields in the glow of the sunlight (hence Lancelot’s armor aflame in LotS) at which point our protagonist decides to leave her tower, get on a boat, and then proceeds to die (reasons unspecified, yet again). She is later found by the local peasantry who are all like “who is this woman?” And that’s the poem. It’s filled with lots of gorgeous imagery, which tends to go on ad nauseam and some folks have even put the poem to song, which come off as a bit interminable. But still, you know, it’s great literature or something.
Anyway, at some point while this woman is stuck up in her tower she mutters that she is “half sick fo shadows” and it’s apparently one of the better known bits of the poem and probably the reason it came up in my Google search. Being sick of shadows is a situation I doubt Luna would ever find herself in.
With all that in mind, with a premise for a song like “Lady fo the Shadows” one must immediately set out to find rhymes for the word “shadow” — of which there are a paltry few. But the rhyming dictionary did provide some “near” rhymes like “vaquero” and “Kilimanjaro” — the latter of which I felt like I just had to use. It immediately brought to mind Ernest Hemingway’s “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” — so we’ve got another literary reference. Plato’s Republic with his whole notion about us only seeing the world as shadows on a cave wall seemed like an obvious choice to make it a trio.
The payoff is somewhat akin to Dylan sneering “you’ve read all of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s books” but with perhaps a bit more nuance. For instance, yes, our protagonist is familiar with the arguments Plato makes regarding our ability to know reality as only a mere shadow of itself, but she still nonetheless has an affection for those shadows (and therefore perhaps the ever so limited understanding we have of reality? At this point I let other people do the analysis — mostly I just thought it sounded pretty).
A half rhyme with “scarecrow” brought to mind this image of our protagonist dancing around a frosty field in November — something which I have no knowledge of Luna ever actually doing, but it was a fun idea so I decided to make it my opening scene. It also worked well for the overall “ad campaign” — such as it is.
Also around about the time I ended up hanging out a bit with Brandi Cheek of Swamp Child after a Balanced Breakfast meeting. As it happened Andy Strong was leading the group that morning and at the time he was doing the booking at PianoFight. I encouraged Brandi, being from New Orleans, to approach Andy (likewise being from the South) about doing a booking, knowing a certain cultural affinity would be to her benefit in that regards (didn’t help me get on the bill, but oh well). This led to a subsequent conversation about her Southern roots where she mentioned how sometimes she’ll say certain sayings from her native land that make her boyfriend laugh (this boyfriend being, BTW, Robb Hagle, who plays lead guitar on “The L.A. Song” and is a Midwesterner like myself) — one of said sayings being “ridden hard and put to bed wet.”
Well this seemed to me to be a little bit of poetry, and as incongruous as it seemed, I kind of wanted to use it in this song I was working on. The term actually refers to horses (get your mind out of the gutter) and the practice, or perhaps lack of it, of not cleaning them up (hence the wet) after a hard day of riding. In my research of this phrase I came across all sorts of additional terms in the realm of horsey-type phrases like “green broke” that I felt like I had to incorporate as well as “sunfishing” and “crow hopping” which sounded so much more evocative than spinning or twirling for our lady as she danced about the field.
It was actually a couple of drafts in before the refrain morphed simply from “Lovely Lady of the Shadows” being repeated to making sure we emphasized that she took photos of the shadows as well. For the harmony I cribbed largely from Bill Evans’ “Jade Vision” — one of those strange flashes of inspiration one can't quite account for but some reason happens to work (at least in my opinion). I did throw in a D Augmented chord, largely because I had thought I would try and ape Sonny Rollins’ “Shadow Waltz” at one point for the lols. The instrumental bridge with its chromatic ascension is largely my own invention — I knew the song needed a little bit of a break but felt a bit iffy about even attempting it as it felt like I was already vandalizing someone else’s work as it was, but in the end I think it turned out quite lovely and I’ve got some very appreciative reactions when I play it live.
EGPhest is this event I’ve done for three years running where I invite other songwriters to indulge me by singing my songs for my birthday. It’s all very nice to hear folks cover the tunes I’ve written — which I appreciate it to no end — and of course people say all sorts of wonderful things about me (mostly owing to the fact it is my birthday) — which is lovely, of course, but far from stroking my ego the whole affair actually is a bit intimidating. What if I can’t ever write anything again that people like? Which I guess is a typical for writers, but somehow I feel like this whole affair ups the ante.
Anyway, after the first EGPhest, I embarked on a rather intense effort to write a song called “The Comet and the Wandering Moon” (more about that one in the months to come) and after EGPhest 2 I wrote “Lady of the Shadows” — oddly enough although I’ve been writing a number of songs since EGPhest 3, there hasn’t necessarily been a single “one” that’s been the focus.
The idea for LotS (as the cool kids will call it, no doubt) originates from my friend Luna Taylor, another singer songwriter I know from the Bay Area music scene (though she’s subsequently moved down to San Diego). Luna, by the way, is also responsible for the cover art for this single. Luna has this lovely habit of photographing shadows — she has a whole Facebook photo album dedicated to this pursuit and actually uses the hashtag “shadowgirl.”
One night while hanging around Bazaar Cafe with future proprietors Josh and Rozanne as well as Shawn Byron and his wife Jen, Rozanne took to referring to Jen as the “golden lady” owing to the fact Jen was wearing yellow and has long blonde hair. For some reason this stuck in my head and got cross pollinated with Luna’s photo taking habits, so in my mind Luna became “the lady of the shadows.”
This seemed to me like the sort of phrase that I must have picked up from somewhere so I did what any self respecting wrier does, which is to do a Google search. This brought up Tennyson’s “Lady of Shallot” which I was heretofore unfamiliar. For those similarly unfamiliar, the basic story of this poem is that there is this woman who resides in a tower and is quite isolated there (reasons unspecified) who creates pictures of what she sees through mirror on a loom (once again, reasons unspecified). Then along comes Lancelot of the Arthurian legend through the fields in the glow of the sunlight (hence Lancelot’s armor aflame in LotS) at which point our protagonist decides to leave her tower, get on a boat, and then proceeds to die (reasons unspecified, yet again). She is later found by the local peasantry who are all like “who is this woman?” And that’s the poem. It’s filled with lots of gorgeous imagery, which tends to go on ad nauseam and some folks have even put the poem to song, which come off as a bit interminable. But still, you know, it’s great literature or something.
Anyway, at some point while this woman is stuck up in her tower she mutters that she is “half sick fo shadows” and it’s apparently one of the better known bits of the poem and probably the reason it came up in my Google search. Being sick of shadows is a situation I doubt Luna would ever find herself in.
With all that in mind, with a premise for a song like “Lady fo the Shadows” one must immediately set out to find rhymes for the word “shadow” — of which there are a paltry few. But the rhyming dictionary did provide some “near” rhymes like “vaquero” and “Kilimanjaro” — the latter of which I felt like I just had to use. It immediately brought to mind Ernest Hemingway’s “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” — so we’ve got another literary reference. Plato’s Republic with his whole notion about us only seeing the world as shadows on a cave wall seemed like an obvious choice to make it a trio.
The payoff is somewhat akin to Dylan sneering “you’ve read all of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s books” but with perhaps a bit more nuance. For instance, yes, our protagonist is familiar with the arguments Plato makes regarding our ability to know reality as only a mere shadow of itself, but she still nonetheless has an affection for those shadows (and therefore perhaps the ever so limited understanding we have of reality? At this point I let other people do the analysis — mostly I just thought it sounded pretty).
A half rhyme with “scarecrow” brought to mind this image of our protagonist dancing around a frosty field in November — something which I have no knowledge of Luna ever actually doing, but it was a fun idea so I decided to make it my opening scene. It also worked well for the overall “ad campaign” — such as it is.
Also around about the time I ended up hanging out a bit with Brandi Cheek of Swamp Child after a Balanced Breakfast meeting. As it happened Andy Strong was leading the group that morning and at the time he was doing the booking at PianoFight. I encouraged Brandi, being from New Orleans, to approach Andy (likewise being from the South) about doing a booking, knowing a certain cultural affinity would be to her benefit in that regards (didn’t help me get on the bill, but oh well). This led to a subsequent conversation about her Southern roots where she mentioned how sometimes she’ll say certain sayings from her native land that make her boyfriend laugh (this boyfriend being, BTW, Robb Hagle, who plays lead guitar on “The L.A. Song” and is a Midwesterner like myself) — one of said sayings being “ridden hard and put to bed wet.”
Well this seemed to me to be a little bit of poetry, and as incongruous as it seemed, I kind of wanted to use it in this song I was working on. The term actually refers to horses (get your mind out of the gutter) and the practice, or perhaps lack of it, of not cleaning them up (hence the wet) after a hard day of riding. In my research of this phrase I came across all sorts of additional terms in the realm of horsey-type phrases like “green broke” that I felt like I had to incorporate as well as “sunfishing” and “crow hopping” which sounded so much more evocative than spinning or twirling for our lady as she danced about the field.
It was actually a couple of drafts in before the refrain morphed simply from “Lovely Lady of the Shadows” being repeated to making sure we emphasized that she took photos of the shadows as well. For the harmony I cribbed largely from Bill Evans’ “Jade Vision” — one of those strange flashes of inspiration one can't quite account for but some reason happens to work (at least in my opinion). I did throw in a D Augmented chord, largely because I had thought I would try and ape Sonny Rollins’ “Shadow Waltz” at one point for the lols. The instrumental bridge with its chromatic ascension is largely my own invention — I knew the song needed a little bit of a break but felt a bit iffy about even attempting it as it felt like I was already vandalizing someone else’s work as it was, but in the end I think it turned out quite lovely and I’ve got some very appreciative reactions when I play it live.
When it came to recording, I decided to use this song as the “pilot” project for working with Ben Osheroff as my producer. I met Ben through his now fiancee Louise Nalbandian (who contributes vocals to the song). Louise I know through the Bay Area music scene, Balanced Breakfast and open mics like the one KC Turner was hosting at the now defunct Doc’s Lab. I’d invited Louise to be part of my second residency at Bazaar Cafe and as part of her set she brought in Ben (on accordion) — whom she’d recently met — and his friend Chaz (on violin) to play some traditional Armenian songs. At the time I recall Ben saying some nice things about my song “Lighthouse at the Edge of the World” but it was the better part of year later when we met again at a pop-up event Louise was playing at Amado’s that he asked if there was a recording of that song. Although Shawn Byron had recorded his version, I did not yet have one of my own, at which point Ben expressed interest in creating one.
Since I had in mind a full album built around Lighthouse and am a bit protective about in general, I wanted to start with something less ambitious in scope to figure out if this would be a good fit as far a working relationship went (Ben gives me a hard time about this). Like “The L.A. Song,” LotS was new and I didn’t necessarily feel like she fell into an overall set, so doing her as a one off was appealing. It also felt like something that didn’t need to be huge in scope production-wise. So we brought in a bass player (playing and electric upright) so we could record the guitar and bass together in Louise’s living room. Ben added parts for Wurlitzer and accordion as well the tambourine. In addition to Louise’s backing vocals, I brought in Shawn Byron for some backing overdubs — Shawn had just a accompanied me on the song for a show at the Lost Church and I thought a second male vocal added an interesting texture.
With LotS finished, Ben I decided to embark on a full length album project, which had to be finished rather quickly given his ambition to head to South America and travel for an extended period of time. But more on that project later. For now, please indulge me and take a listen to our first collaboration together, “Lady of the Shadows.”
Thank you to Tohm Lev for stepping into the shoes of our eponymous lady for the purpose of the promotional video. Tohm has accompanied me on backing vocals on this song in the past and she is wonderfully creative songwriter in her own right.
Give the song a spin on Spotify, YouTube, Apple Music or bandcamp.
- E.G. Phillips
Since I had in mind a full album built around Lighthouse and am a bit protective about in general, I wanted to start with something less ambitious in scope to figure out if this would be a good fit as far a working relationship went (Ben gives me a hard time about this). Like “The L.A. Song,” LotS was new and I didn’t necessarily feel like she fell into an overall set, so doing her as a one off was appealing. It also felt like something that didn’t need to be huge in scope production-wise. So we brought in a bass player (playing and electric upright) so we could record the guitar and bass together in Louise’s living room. Ben added parts for Wurlitzer and accordion as well the tambourine. In addition to Louise’s backing vocals, I brought in Shawn Byron for some backing overdubs — Shawn had just a accompanied me on the song for a show at the Lost Church and I thought a second male vocal added an interesting texture.
With LotS finished, Ben I decided to embark on a full length album project, which had to be finished rather quickly given his ambition to head to South America and travel for an extended period of time. But more on that project later. For now, please indulge me and take a listen to our first collaboration together, “Lady of the Shadows.”
Thank you to Tohm Lev for stepping into the shoes of our eponymous lady for the purpose of the promotional video. Tohm has accompanied me on backing vocals on this song in the past and she is wonderfully creative songwriter in her own right.
Give the song a spin on Spotify, YouTube, Apple Music or bandcamp.
- E.G. Phillips
"Yeah, I'm not sure this song is about L.A."
— Robb Hagle (Swamp Child) introducing his version of this song at EGPhest III
— Robb Hagle (Swamp Child) introducing his version of this song at EGPhest III
Artwork fro the L.A. Song
The L.A. Song began with a pair of trips down to Los Angeles in the Spring of 2017.
During the first, I was meeting up with my sister and her family on their way to a pilgrimage to Disneyland from East Central Illinois. For me the highlight was not the amusement park but a chance to spend some time with my nieces on the beach and at the tide pools of Southern California. One day the younger of the girls was drawing a line in the sand as she walked and insisted that I follow the line as she drew it, at times with huge loops and flourishes that gave the path twists and bends not unlike all the freeways one has to navigate while in Los Angeles.
At another point I took up a stick of my own and claimed that if I finished writing her name in the sand she'd fall under my control — a bit of silliness owing to a notion from a Doctor Who episode about the power of naming things (The Shakespeare Code, if you must know) but she took it so seriously and desperately tried to stop me. So I’d write a letter and she’d use her stick to scratch it out and I’d spin around trying to write her whole name out, her spinning with me as I went, using her hands and feet to sabotage my efforts as I tried to write with one hand and tried to hold her off with another.
During the first, I was meeting up with my sister and her family on their way to a pilgrimage to Disneyland from East Central Illinois. For me the highlight was not the amusement park but a chance to spend some time with my nieces on the beach and at the tide pools of Southern California. One day the younger of the girls was drawing a line in the sand as she walked and insisted that I follow the line as she drew it, at times with huge loops and flourishes that gave the path twists and bends not unlike all the freeways one has to navigate while in Los Angeles.
At another point I took up a stick of my own and claimed that if I finished writing her name in the sand she'd fall under my control — a bit of silliness owing to a notion from a Doctor Who episode about the power of naming things (The Shakespeare Code, if you must know) but she took it so seriously and desperately tried to stop me. So I’d write a letter and she’d use her stick to scratch it out and I’d spin around trying to write her whole name out, her spinning with me as I went, using her hands and feet to sabotage my efforts as I tried to write with one hand and tried to hold her off with another.
It was these sorts of games we were playing that I was thinking I’d try and capture when I started writing, as well as just the experience of Southern California in general. I was back in L.A. a month later for the ASCAP Expo which is held in Hollywood. A few experiences there, notably with one of those hustlers you encounter on Hollywood Boulevard and just how tacky the walk of fame felt that provided some additional fodder for the lyrics.
It was an interesting piece to write, with the word “forever” cropping up organically, as did this sort of rhythmic structure that was pulling at the second half of the verse to want to vamp a bit on single chord for an uneven number of bars. It was an exercise in letting order gradually emerge from what seemed to be chaos and also letting the words develop into their own sort of form without necessarily pushing them too hard in one direction or another until an overall form began to take shape. Like a good dough, you could just sense the words becoming more pliable and starting to go from a sticky mess to something resilient and part of a whole.
At the time I was messing about a bit with chord chords from Duke Ellington’s “I Didn’t Know About You” (I was first familiar with Monk’s take on “Straight No Chaser”) and that became this section I thought of as an interlude, maybe a bridge. While messing about with that I flipped through my jazz fakebook and landed on “Blue In Green” and it’s opening BbMaj7#11 chord struck me as interesting. It became the basis for the opening broken chords of my composition. I don’t know where that F augmented chord came from, it just felt right.
The structure that developed is a bit unusual — although “forever” could loosely be considered a refrain, I didn’t have a proper chorus. The interlude section seemed to work nicely as an outro, but I had decided that I’d keep it lyrically simply as “oohs” and “L.A.” in contrast to the verse as opposed to piling more words and information into the thing. But this section was coming later than you’d expect a chorus to come. Part of the reason for that was I liked the idea of delaying “the reveal” about the location until we’d gotten into L.A.’s traffic. But it also felt a bit natural as already I felt like a verse that was fingerpicked building to increasing rhythmic intensity felt right for the overall arrangement I was teasing out.
It was an interesting piece to write, with the word “forever” cropping up organically, as did this sort of rhythmic structure that was pulling at the second half of the verse to want to vamp a bit on single chord for an uneven number of bars. It was an exercise in letting order gradually emerge from what seemed to be chaos and also letting the words develop into their own sort of form without necessarily pushing them too hard in one direction or another until an overall form began to take shape. Like a good dough, you could just sense the words becoming more pliable and starting to go from a sticky mess to something resilient and part of a whole.
At the time I was messing about a bit with chord chords from Duke Ellington’s “I Didn’t Know About You” (I was first familiar with Monk’s take on “Straight No Chaser”) and that became this section I thought of as an interlude, maybe a bridge. While messing about with that I flipped through my jazz fakebook and landed on “Blue In Green” and it’s opening BbMaj7#11 chord struck me as interesting. It became the basis for the opening broken chords of my composition. I don’t know where that F augmented chord came from, it just felt right.
The structure that developed is a bit unusual — although “forever” could loosely be considered a refrain, I didn’t have a proper chorus. The interlude section seemed to work nicely as an outro, but I had decided that I’d keep it lyrically simply as “oohs” and “L.A.” in contrast to the verse as opposed to piling more words and information into the thing. But this section was coming later than you’d expect a chorus to come. Part of the reason for that was I liked the idea of delaying “the reveal” about the location until we’d gotten into L.A.’s traffic. But it also felt a bit natural as already I felt like a verse that was fingerpicked building to increasing rhythmic intensity felt right for the overall arrangement I was teasing out.
The lyrics to the L.A. Song
Things happen along the way as you’re writing you don’t really plan, but amuse you, even if its more of a visual gag — “labyrinth and “landscape” both starting with “la” was totally unintentional. Some things came less easy — Olga getting name checked was simply because I couldn’t begin to get all the details about this photographer that came up to a group i was with in a Mexican restaurant during the ASCAP Expo. She was trying to hustle us into buy some cheap photo prints she'd taken of us for an outrageous amount of money (she eventually parted with them for the grand sum of a dollar — probably still a bit more than what they cost her). She could have been a whole verse, or a song, but I needed to have this vignette that was a few lines. Instead of trying to describe her in great detail, I just gave her name because that seemed to say enough and had a nice assonance with some of the other surrounding words.
Still, despite the fact it was a bit odd, it proved to be popular when I played it out at open mics. My little interlude/outro was sufficiently catchy that people would actually join in despite it only appearing twice in the song. This was part of the impetus for giving it a place as an instrumental intro. When I played it at the Utah open mic, I brought in a lead sheet and asked the host, Brendan Getzell to sit in on piano — Brendan’s good that way. I was particularly delighted with what he was adding in my “interlude” section.
Later on, they happened to have a drum kit on the stage for the featured act and I asked Ben Visini to sit in along with Brendan (Ben’s actually contributed to a full length album I’ve been working on). Probably one of the more rewarding things is when another musician comes up and tells you that your composition was fun to play, So I felt like I had something. It was this way that the L.A. Song was added to my short list of songs I wanted to get recorded having released my first album earlier in the year. I also didn't readily conceive of it as being part of an larger project, so it would work well a a "one off."
Around about the same time I was offered the feature slot at the Neck of the Woods open mic for an early December date. Knowing the dynamics of that venue, I knew I wanted a band to back me in order to keep the audience engaged. One of the people I tapped for that gig was Robb Hagle, who I knew from the Hotel Utah and I liked his lead guitar work when I heard him play in his band Swamp Child. Robb generously let me use his practice space at Light Rail and the song became a band favorite that actually had its debut at the Utah for an “unusual combo” theme night at the open mic. As the group gelled, I found myself enjoying Robb’s part so much I began imaging if there was a way I could marry what he was doing with what Brendan would add when he’d sat in.
Still, despite the fact it was a bit odd, it proved to be popular when I played it out at open mics. My little interlude/outro was sufficiently catchy that people would actually join in despite it only appearing twice in the song. This was part of the impetus for giving it a place as an instrumental intro. When I played it at the Utah open mic, I brought in a lead sheet and asked the host, Brendan Getzell to sit in on piano — Brendan’s good that way. I was particularly delighted with what he was adding in my “interlude” section.
Later on, they happened to have a drum kit on the stage for the featured act and I asked Ben Visini to sit in along with Brendan (Ben’s actually contributed to a full length album I’ve been working on). Probably one of the more rewarding things is when another musician comes up and tells you that your composition was fun to play, So I felt like I had something. It was this way that the L.A. Song was added to my short list of songs I wanted to get recorded having released my first album earlier in the year. I also didn't readily conceive of it as being part of an larger project, so it would work well a a "one off."
Around about the same time I was offered the feature slot at the Neck of the Woods open mic for an early December date. Knowing the dynamics of that venue, I knew I wanted a band to back me in order to keep the audience engaged. One of the people I tapped for that gig was Robb Hagle, who I knew from the Hotel Utah and I liked his lead guitar work when I heard him play in his band Swamp Child. Robb generously let me use his practice space at Light Rail and the song became a band favorite that actually had its debut at the Utah for an “unusual combo” theme night at the open mic. As the group gelled, I found myself enjoying Robb’s part so much I began imaging if there was a way I could marry what he was doing with what Brendan would add when he’d sat in.
At "Neck of the Woods" in San Francisco in February with Robb Hagle on lead guitar
For recording I’d gotten in touch with producer Ben Bernstein who’s based out of Oakland, which ultimately proved logistically problematic for myself given the divide that is bay so this collaboration may be a one shot deal. But Ben’s an excellent bass player in addition doing recording and mixing and we recorded him and Mike Stevens on drums together at Mike’s studio on Hayward where he has a kit all mic’d up and ready to go (which was a nice and efficient way to get real drums on a track). After getting myself and Robb tracked on top of the rhythm section, Brendan and I worked out a part at his place in San Francisco, at which point the track really took shape.
Michelle Renee’s part came a bit later — although I’d had a female backing vocalist for my initial outing at NOTW, she proved unavailable for a subsequent show in February and for recording purposes. I knew Michelle from the Utah as well and she joined in for the February gig on short notice. The part we worked out felt like the final missing piece, so I brought her into the studio to wrap up the single I’m now releasing. We got it all mixed and mastered in time for me to have it ready for the next time I’d be down in So Cal, which was when the ASCAP Expo would be happening again in May so I could use it as the basis for video that I intended shoot while I was in town for the conference…
Anyway, it's out now. It's one of those things, you start with the collection of things (memories and impressions) and something else entirely comes out of it that is a bit hard to describe but also just seems to work for reasons you can't entirely explain. The quote at the top of the post was something Robb said when he covered the song at EGPhest (my birthday show where other artists cover my songs). As with "The Fish Song" the piece's insistence that it is about something in particular is probably the best indiction that you are being misdirected. To me, it's a collage, you will likely see connections and ideas there that I am blissfully unaware of. And that's the thing, I can tell a lot about where it came from and how I made it. It's up to you figure out what it means to you and how it makes you feel.
Please check out the song or the video. I hope you enjoy it.
- E.G.
Michelle Renee’s part came a bit later — although I’d had a female backing vocalist for my initial outing at NOTW, she proved unavailable for a subsequent show in February and for recording purposes. I knew Michelle from the Utah as well and she joined in for the February gig on short notice. The part we worked out felt like the final missing piece, so I brought her into the studio to wrap up the single I’m now releasing. We got it all mixed and mastered in time for me to have it ready for the next time I’d be down in So Cal, which was when the ASCAP Expo would be happening again in May so I could use it as the basis for video that I intended shoot while I was in town for the conference…
Anyway, it's out now. It's one of those things, you start with the collection of things (memories and impressions) and something else entirely comes out of it that is a bit hard to describe but also just seems to work for reasons you can't entirely explain. The quote at the top of the post was something Robb said when he covered the song at EGPhest (my birthday show where other artists cover my songs). As with "The Fish Song" the piece's insistence that it is about something in particular is probably the best indiction that you are being misdirected. To me, it's a collage, you will likely see connections and ideas there that I am blissfully unaware of. And that's the thing, I can tell a lot about where it came from and how I made it. It's up to you figure out what it means to you and how it makes you feel.
Please check out the song or the video. I hope you enjoy it.
- E.G.
"I... I announce the acts, I count the tickets, I smile at people - you have no idea the strain it puts on a fellow."
- Henry Gordon Jago, Doctor Who, "The Talons of Weng-Chiang"
- Henry Gordon Jago, Doctor Who, "The Talons of Weng-Chiang"
On Saturday August 11th, 2018, once again, there was an EGPhest and a bevy of San Francisco friends and songwriters made their way to the Hotel Utah, a familiar stomping ground for myself, and performed songs from my catalog of music on the occasion of my birthday. This was the third such outing of this variety and I'm always kind of amazed it actually happens.
I kicked off the "phest"-ivities with some rather rambling reminiscing about my high school Geography and History teacher, Mr. Butler and his annual Christmas lectures about the geo-politics of the North Pole (what with the war of the elves and the subsequent annual reparations paid by Santa to this day) in a round about way of talking about, how like the North Pole is blessed with an abundance of "toy-ore" I have my supply of "song-ore" with which I looked forward to how the artists that would be on stage that afternoon would create something beyond what I could have imagined when I initially wrote my little acoustic curios.
I would say they all did so with grace and aplomb.
Clyde Always started us off with his own distinct "Bard of the Lower Haight" stylings and, appropriately enough, a rendition of "Sett'n My Own Pace" — complete with boat hat and cane as promised.
Ken Newman was back to reprise his rock'n version of the Fish Song (which I look forward to hearing on his forthcoming album) as were the Complements, who (of course) gave us a medley on top of their sweet take on "Lifetimes Without You."
Teresa Tuan gave us a rousing and soulful "Sunday is Made for Loving" in contrast to the sparse and elegant version Samantha Margret did on the same song last EGPhest and we released ahead of this year's show.
In honor of our collaboration on DylanPhest back in May, Robb Hagle gave a bluesy and Dylanesque take on "The L.A. Song" — a piece he is intimately familiar with having played lead guitar both as part of my full band show and the recording to be released later this month (Friday Sept 21st for those who want to know).
Michael McGovern took on "You Are Not Her" — a song I haven't played out much of late, but was inspired to include in a set of tunes I recorded in Nashville after I wrapped up with the show.
I got a 2 for 1 deal on Argentinians from Madrid as both Natali Castillo and Pepe Arribas performed "Til I Wash You Away" and "Mama Make the Red Bird Come Back" respectively.
Then there was cake. A vast amount of cake.
I kicked off the "phest"-ivities with some rather rambling reminiscing about my high school Geography and History teacher, Mr. Butler and his annual Christmas lectures about the geo-politics of the North Pole (what with the war of the elves and the subsequent annual reparations paid by Santa to this day) in a round about way of talking about, how like the North Pole is blessed with an abundance of "toy-ore" I have my supply of "song-ore" with which I looked forward to how the artists that would be on stage that afternoon would create something beyond what I could have imagined when I initially wrote my little acoustic curios.
I would say they all did so with grace and aplomb.
Clyde Always started us off with his own distinct "Bard of the Lower Haight" stylings and, appropriately enough, a rendition of "Sett'n My Own Pace" — complete with boat hat and cane as promised.
Ken Newman was back to reprise his rock'n version of the Fish Song (which I look forward to hearing on his forthcoming album) as were the Complements, who (of course) gave us a medley on top of their sweet take on "Lifetimes Without You."
Teresa Tuan gave us a rousing and soulful "Sunday is Made for Loving" in contrast to the sparse and elegant version Samantha Margret did on the same song last EGPhest and we released ahead of this year's show.
In honor of our collaboration on DylanPhest back in May, Robb Hagle gave a bluesy and Dylanesque take on "The L.A. Song" — a piece he is intimately familiar with having played lead guitar both as part of my full band show and the recording to be released later this month (Friday Sept 21st for those who want to know).
Michael McGovern took on "You Are Not Her" — a song I haven't played out much of late, but was inspired to include in a set of tunes I recorded in Nashville after I wrapped up with the show.
I got a 2 for 1 deal on Argentinians from Madrid as both Natali Castillo and Pepe Arribas performed "Til I Wash You Away" and "Mama Make the Red Bird Come Back" respectively.
Then there was cake. A vast amount of cake.
For our second half, Shawn Byron did a new take on "Lighthouse atthe Edge of the World" — this time on piano. Shawn has recorded the version he played of that song at the first EGPhest and it will be a track on his forthcoming debut album.
Tohm Lev gave us her spin on "Girls Who Don't Get the City" and Drew K adapted "Lover of a Day" to his stylings.
Christine Tence sang a passionate version of "The Mystery and Milieu of You" with Gerard taking a break from his sound and photo duties to accompany her on piano.
Our illustrator for EGPhest III (and second to have his artwork put into cake form), Mario M. Noche, took the stage, and gave us a take on "Tall Girls In Love" — apparently under the duress of reliving his own traumatic romantic encounters with tall girls.
I wrapped things up with "The Albatross Song" and "Your Inexorable Pull."
Thank you again to all who participated and all those who came to enjoy the party.
We had fun.
- E.G.
E.G. Phillips
Musings and activities of a songwriter in word form.
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