Now Then, the songs

Workin’ No More Blues

A Gilded Age history I read says that before the Industrial Revolution, work was something one did in a workshop or other small space with a few people. Here on the other side of mass manufacturing, machine work, and wage labor, it’s as natural to compare an aging human to a broken machine as it is strange to attach the modern presuppositions around “labor” — safety rules, managers and bosses, a clock-governed period, weekends and holidays off, retirement — to the stuff in your garage. For a musician or other so-called creative-class person who doesn’t report daily to an office building, these habits of mind (work = stress, leisure = off-the-clock) may be a little easier to dodge. I do feel myself to be in a place of literal and sometimes deep productivity when making up a song, playing with the grandkids, learning from a book, or similar activities most people wedge into “off-hours." And I remember the days of suiting up for eight hours of sitting at a desk under fluorescent lighting, helping shore up a corporation’s bottom line, as the very least productive days of my life. For me what they produced was boredom, tension, and wastage, and for the corporation mostly the latter. 

Ocean City

Donna has long held that I should keep my dreams to myself. Not only because they reveal my mind as sick and substandard, which they do, but mostly because they’re dull to hear about. Fair enough. But when I woke up one morning from a particularly vivid hallucination in which my parents, uncle and aunt showed up as vibrant, laughing 30-somethings and I was tasked with persuading them that they were in fact aged or dead, an idea they smiled at and waved off, I was dazed and disturbed, and had to tell her straight away. Then came this song. Later, Donna had a dream of her own, in which she was struggling to make sense of her uncle’s aliveness and youth. “We all thought you were dead,” she said. “I got myself together,” the uncle explained. “Then whose are the ashes in my urn?” she demanded. And thus began an investigation into a mystery….The last entry in the triptych of dead-love delusion must come from Milton, whose poem about his late wife you really have to read. Imagine being blind and having a night vision in which you experience the beauty of your unrecoverable love for the first time; imagine too the awful disappointment of waking up. So, sure keep them to yourself, but not everyone (Milton, myself) or always.

Now Now Now Now Now

Since I wrote “Fare Thee Well, Carolina Gals” I’ve been playing with the theme of unreliable memory, in songs that relate actual memories of mine and somehow introduce signals of mistrust, self-doubt, shakiness. A common and understandable question that readers and listeners have is, What parts of this story are real? To which a fair response from the author or singer could be, How would I know, why ask me? My memories of being a young man in New York (falling asleep on people’s couches, slinking around in dark scary joints, the jittery rat-a-tat of the Attractions and the Police mirroring my narcotic-impaired metabolism), or of fainting dead away during my son’s delivery many years after, are about as real to me as my conviction that the musical lodestars of those vanished times are worthier, more incandescent, than those of the tyrannical Now. But that conviction falls away under clearheaded inspection, as does my sure grip on the real events in my past. The NYC I visit now doesn’t look at all like the one in which the earlier RWF scampered; buildings and persons have been changed out, old acquaintances, and places like the Peppermint Lounge, have attained the status of Dulcinea. Photographs of that place and time don’t match my recollection, either. My clothes and hair looked that bizarre? My mental picture of longago events is personal, entirely unsubstantiated, and will die with my body. Eventually, when all that occurred on April 9, 1997 in a Chicago hospital room are gone from all heads and records, the seemingly monumental and unchangeable events of that day, those that are fundamental to my Now portrait, will have disintegrated, and the events will have lost even the status of myth, will be as the unheard tree that fell. “These are the days of our lives”: a flicker followed by a story, sandwiched between two infinities of non-existence. Meanwhile the reign of Now carries on uninterrupted, keeping us healthy and helping us rise each morning. We’re the only living beings burdened by this problem of “mattering” and meaning, who understand that all that sustains us is constructed, fleeting, soon forgotten, and who still must carry on tacitly accepting delusion as our best reality, or go mad.

There’s A Man

Sometimes you enter a song through a title, a story idea, a progression or piece of rhythmic business. This song began as a guitar-based mood. As I sat in a cheap motel room in New Hampshire, gloomily crosspicking and daydreaming, images and phrases began to float in. “Way up in that high-rise…there’s a man….” I liked the feel of it, it put me in mind of Red Shea delicately backing Gordon Lightfoot. In “Cold Hands From New York,” the narrator (perhaps Gordon himself) describes the feeling of helpless, teeth-chattering smallness into which he fell during his first visit to the grand city. Once again, hashing out the lyric, I recalled my own vulnerabilities as a young transplant to that intimidating, swirling, thrillingly toxic ecosystem. Subway fires, deranged poets, cocaine, falafel trucks, record producers, European exiles, live sex shows, off-track betting, the catacombs! It was much too much. When I played the finished thing to Donna, she said she was unsure what it all meant. I didn’t think that was a good enough reason not to release it, first, because I do know what every line means and stand by those meanings, and second, because I think the song offers enough to let listeners build private meanings for themselves. 

That Was Juarez, This Is Alpine

The subjects are terribly abstract on their face: personal destinies tied to points of origin, blue v. red social dis-ease in the US, privilege, immigration, historical trauma. I’m not certain how well it turned out, but since one line leads to the next, it’s hummable, and it reminds me of my grandson, with whom I traveled by train from L.A. to San Antonio in summer 2023, I’m all in favor of the song. Before first traveling to Mexico, a dozen years back, I was nervous about being there, based on some stereotypes and some true facts as well. Cartels, poverty, crime. Now, after several visits, I’m all gung-ho about the country, both as a wellspring of high-merit cultural products and values and as an exporter of those to America. I had the extended strophic outlay of “Juarez” in mind at the start, along with a general picture of how it would progress toward the endpoint — the closing moral is pretty much the opposite of the right lesson. I thought I’d finish it in a week or two, and was a little frustrated to hit some snags that slowed the weeks to months. But in an empty house in Berlin, Maryland, shortly after dropping Bill Kirchen off at one airport and Jack Lawrence at another, I sat down and finally sealed it.  

Savannah Is A Devilish Girl

I’ve encountered Savannah very little, just enough to fetishize it. My first air travel was there, at 8, bound to Guyton to visit my great-aunt for a spell. (Guyton:Savannah, Alpine:Juarez?) I put the mossy, humid landscape out of mind until I read Bernard Henri-Levy’s “In The Footsteps of Tocqueville” in the Atlantic magazine. He was dazzled by the place, so I stopped there one afternoon when traveling from somewhere to somewhere else, I forget. Entering the city center was like tumbling into a magic terrarium. Finally, in 2019, I had the chance to work there and to spend a couple days, when Jenny Scheinman brought me to back her at the fantastic festival they have every spring. I like to know a place a little before writing about it, though I’ve broken the rule a few times. I had been playing with a song about Knoxville (thanks again to Jenny I got to play at a great festival there, too, called Big Ears), mixing up true facts about the city with an old man’s warped pathologies. It wasn’t clicking and I started pouring the same ideas into “Savannah.” To my mind, the song isn’t “about” Georgia or California, but the ill-advised and frankly dumb yearning to go home again. Well, dumb is bad, but fantasizing isn’t necessarily a sin. The fiddle was always going to be central to the song, from the inception, I just wasn’t sure which fiddler. When the album started acquiring a decided West Coast flavor, and a couple of its songs seemed to want a string section (thought later abandoned), I asked Jenny to come down from Arcata and play, which she did very freely on this song, as well as advising me here and there on how to sing. After trying a couple ways of dressing it we ended with fiddle-banjo duet, which I am told is the rhythm section of old-time.

Your Tormentors

The core of this song came to me while I was folding laundry. I went to the other room and got my Collings, on which I’d been messing with Doc Watson’s take on “Summertime” a short time before. How true is the Kitty Genovese thesis put forward here — everyone sees what’s the matter, no one will help — I’m not sure. Those are two different propositions, actually, so the chance they’re both true is reduced. There’s some personally grounded detail in “Your Tormentors” but at least as much is conjectural. It’s strange to me to reflect how when I’ve lived in tiny, sparsely populated places, I’ve often felt invasively watched, whereas a zone of privacy feels in a big city to settle fast and easily. The lonely crowd, is maybe the negative framing, but I love cities, and privacy.

My Heart, Your Hands

I don’t do many love songs, but my friend Al Anderson is extra-keen on them. And he’s no doubt correct, because why else would we be singing, but I feel myself tugged in trite and shallow directions as soon as “I love you all the way to infinity” is the driving thought. Working on several songs at Al’s house over Memorial Day weekend 2024, he would introduce these sensational grooves and chord inversions and progressions, and then we’d argue about what to say over them. “He loves her so much, he’d do anything, he’d die for her,” Al would say. “Yuck,” I’d say. “It’s got to be a love song,” he’d insist. “Yeah, I don’t think so,” I’d say. “Well, what do you know, anyway?” is how he closed off that line of discussion, which cracked us both up. I took this song back home with me in a wordless state, and started tinkering with it. I knew I should honor his pro-love stance, as well as his “always work from the heart” rule. So I thought about my gal and went from there. You can hear in the recording how an in-time group performance offers some benefits that a collaged recording process misses. In the instrumental section, no one was marked to solo, so Duke and Kevin and I passed the ball back and forth among us three. This aspect of music is probably as mysterious and chill-inducing to listeners as it is to performers, how structures can unfold almost telepathically and with no advance plan. With your body more than your brain, you sense little openings, where it might make sense to come forward assertively, or where you just feel impelled to. It gets me every time I hear it how we in the room are speaking softly to, never stepping on, one another.  

The Thirty-Year Marriage

“I’ll write a song called ‘The Thirty-Year Marriage,’” I thought, enjoying the rather bookish definite article, “and it shall begin, ‘It, or perhaps there, was a thirty-year marriage, as in a fairy tale.’” I’m sure I could have scavenged among particular emotions and memories from when my own marriage was only that age, but thirty-schmirty, it’s not journalism. I picture this singer a little older than my wife and me, and the marriage a little younger, but basically it’s about my life situation. One of my favorite tricks in lyric writing is simple honesty. First, because a lot of listeners don’t want that, or don’t think they do, or just aren’t used to hearing certain admissions sung in plain English, so there’s some element of surprise; second, because it’s a fun challenge in the writing, balancing some necessary artful ambiguity against blunt disclosure. We recorded this song second, on day one, after “Workin’ No More,” but it had an opening-day feel since “Workin’” involved three of us sitting alongside each other and “Marriage” brought four others in from flights and hotel rooms and houses (one of which would burn to the ground a couple weeks later). The seven of us were divided by walls and baffles and glass. I’d wanted a string section for this song, and three other songs too, but ultimately figured the resources that were right to hand were sufficient to evoke the lushness. That proved true. Jenny (violin) and Pepe (accordion) led the “couple’s twilight dance” section toward the end of the song, neither able to see the other, and it sounds perfectly orchestral if you ask me.

Poor And Sharp-Witted

Some songs turn out so different from how they started — can you hear any Steve Miller in this at all? I was amusing myself in early 2024 with the true thought that I was falling in love with this hitmaker from the 1970s, a gentleman scorned by me at the time. Favorite features: insanely long pre-lyric opening sections, e.g. “Swingtown”; Steve’s boyish, right-on-the-money singing; simple but thoughtful uses of scales in the vocal melodies. My intonation sense is sadly short of Steve’s, but I gave it my best. We recorded a long instrumental vamp at the top, but then I impulsively decided to preach over it. That leaves only the scale, which descends in an interesting, jerky, up-down sort of amble. What will really prevent anyone from discerning Steve Miller in any of this is the ten-times-more-obvious NRBQ thing going on, including the stolen riff.

Ol’ Folks

I’ve loved this oddity ever since Jim Herrington forced Dan and Spooner’s “Moments From This Theater” record on me. Love the sentiment + touch of hardness, and love that the audience on the record laughs at two possibly inappropriate places. To paraphrase Socrates, a life without laughing at inappropriate places is not worth living. My wife suggested Eleanor Whitmore for the duet and that worked out really fine — she brought some new lyrics into the song. When you tell Eleanor to feel free to add ideas she goes for broke! Wayne’s solo and Kevin’s are from different takes, otherwise the basic track is pretty honestly presented. Jay is hitting some weird shit up top of the kit.

Nobody Cares

Boo-hoo. I began identifying as a flatpicker in my teens, because it seemed I was better at it, but partly too I thought my awkwardness with fingerpicks, which I’ve never surmounted, disqualified me as a fingerstyle player. I still think the plectrum suits me over fingers, but the other opinion is bunk. Lose the interface — fingers on strings feel and sound great, and link us with our African forebears. (Muireann Bradley is my favorite young artist in years, just by the way.)