Commissioner's name: David Daley

Publication: Hartford Courant

Date: 2/5/01

DICTIONARY HANDY?

I'm beginning to think that there might be some sort of novelists' insider joke: How many readers can they alienate in the first few pages, and how then shall they reward those who show faith and plough through it? In introducing th…

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Bob Dylan just made me cry. Twice. I don’t know if I can listen to Long and Wasted Years again today. Nina Simone singing Jimmy Webb’s Do What You Gotta Do used to do it. Leonard Cohen did it with Chelsea Hotel at the Beacon Theatre. OK I’m a bit of a crier… but this is different. I’m sitting alone, smiling, with Kleenex, thanks to this old codger’s swagger, his audacity, his warmth. You read that right - warmth.

Last night I heard you talking in your sleep,

Saying things you shouldn’t say,

Oh baby, you just might have to go to jail someday.

That he even dares to write this at 71 makes my day. That he pulls it off, well, it seems that it makes me so happy that I cry.

What exactly do we hope for from a new Dylan album these days? Well, I think if we’re honest we wish there were less of them and we hope that they can be OK, with a couple of songs we might add to our playlist. It only takes a him making something vaguely reminiscent of Blood On The Tracks for Rolling Stone to give it 5 stars. We desperately want to hang on to our Dylan persona and we don’t want it replaced by a wiry old troubadour in a matador hat. Frankly, it is always more convenient if our heroes die relatively young. Well, old Bob is an inconvenient truth, and the truth is he doesn’t have what he had in 1965, or 1974. He knows it. We all saw that interview. And much as we may have wanted him to, he doesn’t want to stop. So he finds ways to move forward. And his idea of a Bob Dylan for 2012 is pretty great if you ask me.

He can still put words together as well as he’s ever done post 1966. He’s still as brilliant and as careless with his rhyme as he ever was. He can still deliver these lines like no-one else. His voice has less strength but he knows it and he has adapted. His band is fantastic. No wonder he also seems comfortable in his own skin, maybe for the first time?

My heart is cheerful, it’s never fearful,

I’ve been down on the killing floors,

I’m in no great hurry, I’m not afraid of your fury,

I’ve faced stronger walls than yours.

(From Soon After Midnight)

Dylan has been playing around with his take on Western Swing since his first self produced (that’s right - Jack Frost is Bob) album made with his touring band - Love and Theft - and the format suits his late found taste for whimsy, not to mention his current dress sense. I’ve enjoyed this development but it did not prepare me for Duquesne Whistle which opens Tempest - he and his band take that swing and they rock it and roll it and make a big old joyous racket. It’s a simple pop song with great hooks and Bob has never, in recent memory, sung better. Never has he sounded more like he’s having fun (OK maybe The Basement Tapes). It’s infectious and I can’t stop playing it.

Next should be Early Roman Kings, and by chance that’s the way I heard it. Yes, for once iTunes enhanced my listening experience. Accidentally. This is a giant amongst songs and like its forefather Highway 61 it’s set to a simple blues, in this case the relentless riff of Muddy Waters I’m A Man, and like Highway 61 it’s a relentless lyrical riff on a phrase Bob liked the sound of. Who wouldn’t?

All the early Roman kings,

In their shark skin suits,

Bow ties and buttons,

High top boots,

Driving the spikes in ,

Blazing the rails,

Nailed in their coffins,

In top hats and tails,

Fly away over,

Fly away flap your wings,

Fly by night,

Like the early Roman kings…

…They're peddlers and they're meddlers,

They buy and they sell,

They destroyed your city,

They'll destroy you as well,

They're lecherous and treacherous,

A-Hell bent for leather,

Each of 'em bigger,

Than all men put together,

Sluggers and muggers,

Wearing fancy gold rings,

All the women going crazy,

For the early Roman kings.

What does all of that mean? To ask is to miss the point entirely. Listen and enjoy a grand master of the English language at work.

I’d heard just these two songs before iTunes hits me with Long And Wasted Years and you know what happens next. This song is gorgeous. The band are the perfect mix of energy and restraint. Everyone over 40 who has ever loved anyone should hear it. I just listened again. I’m a wreck.

Musically, there is no new ground covered here, but it is an exercise in beauty and refinement from a band with no weakness. They are alive and awake to Bob, they support the songs. The soloing is exactly as it should be, and as it should be there is almost none. Tin Angel is worthy if note here - a grizzly murder ballad over a single two bar riff repeating for nine minutes without a single noodle thrown in. Eat your heart out Bad Seeds. It does, actually sound like Bob has been listening to Nick on a couple of occasions - particularly the haunting Scarlett Town - another ballad. Bob is indeed on a ballad kick.

There are ten songs on Tempest and they add up to more than an hour of music. It is too much, in my mind, to call a single album (it’s almost as long as Blonde On Blonde) but remove the two (awfully) weak links and it’s 47 minutes. Near perfect. Which brings us to genius. You just can’t have the smooth without the rough from a proper genius left to his own devices. Genius always oversteps, reaches too high, fails to notice glaring errors, because it isn’t afraid of failure. 1964-66 excepted, there isn’t a Dylan album without a weak track or two. Here we have a thirteen minute Irish folk ballad on the sinking of the Titanic which lost me after 4 minutes and a truly awful sentimental eulogy to Lennon, the less said about the better. I’m sure Tom Wilson would have made this into a near perfect collection but he’s not around and who today could possibly tell Dylan what to do?

So there you have it. The old Bob Dylan is a flawed genius just like the young one was. What is odd, though, he sounds, today, if anything, more full of life, happier to take on allcomers, than he ever was. He sounds like a man who loves his day job. How great is that at Seventy-One?

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Nov 19th 2024

What’s this song about, then, Lloyd?

Well, actually, and without wanting to be an ass, I reject the question.

I’m in the ‘The Death of the Author’ camp. I think that’s we established at this juncture. I suppose I was lucky to be studying literature in Glasgow in my early 20’s, when the French Postmodernists were fashionable. I hated English at school. “What is the message? What is the poet telling you?” I don’t care. Honestly, if a writer has a message and the reader doesn’t get it, what kind of writer is that? Rotten, I’d say.

I loved Barthes. “To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing.”

If all that if all you care about is the intent of the author, then you restrict the work to a single understanding.

Great art engages the listener, the reader, the viewer. The full value of the work is not revealed at the first listen. As Wilde put it - “If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.”

<You may have noticed, that I’m not really using my paragraph breaks ‘properly’. That’s because this isn’t printed. Reading from a screen is different. Different rules. Maybe no rules. Also, I have almost zero grammatical training.>

Back to the business at hand.

To go into a little more detail let’s look at what Clement Greenberg wrote in Avant-Garde and Kitsch (1939). I paraphrase - “the ultimate values which the cultivated spectator derives from the work are derived at a second remove, as the result of reflection upon the immediate impression left by the plastic values. It is only then that the recognizable, the miraculous and the sympathetic enter. They are not immediately or externally present in the work, but must be projected into it by the spectator sensitive enough to react sufficiently to the plastic values. They belong to the reflected effect. In kitsch, on the other hand, the reflected effect has already been included in the work, ready for the spectator’s unreflective enjoyment. Where the great artist paints cause, the the kitsch artist paints effect, providing him with a short cut to the pleasure of art that detours what is necessarily difficult in genuine art. Kitsch is synthetic art.”

You can sense Greenberg’s Marxism in his certainty, can’t you?

Still, if all we accept from Greenberg’s argument is that the reflective effect exists, I think it does, then can’t we then say that as no two spectators, no two listeners are identical (not yet, anyway) therefore there is no single understanding to be had from a painting, or a song. In fact there are an infinite number.

I like this way of thinking of it -

Writers write similes but they don’t write metaphors.

The reader, the listener FINDS the metaphor.

Sure, the writer may have expected this, but the metaphor is not in the text - it’s in the interaction between the text and reader. Between the song and the listener.

How did this thinking impact me as a songwriter?

Well, it’s almost all good news.

Your understanding is necessarily correct.

I don’t need to know what my song’s meaning is. Or why I’m motivated to write it. I only need to know when it seems complete, and that it then meets my standards of beauty and elegance. Years later I may hear a song and think - Oh, that’s what I must have been on my mind…

I love this quote from David Byrne, he said recently (2010’s) - “I can't really hype my own record, or begin to tell what the songs "mean," or why I wrote them. Those things aren't known to me often until at least a year later, when the whole thing is behind me and I can listen to it as if it's someone else's record.”

Flexibility in a lyric becomes a huge plus. Leaving a song without a definite conclusion allows listeners more freedom to deduce their own. Or not.

Scenarios become more attractive than linear plots.

And finally, for now, anyway - if I ever actually have a story to tell, I had better tell it beautifully, and with depth to the lyric if I want anyone to listen more than once.

Why then, I am I recycling this essay snippet from more than a decade ago, today?

Because I found a couple of examples of HAPPY ACCIDENTS is a song of mine, this week. And I thought it might be nice share these, and then to compile other examples of lyrics which were even more flexible than even I realised, when writing them.

The Over Under

There’s nothing to see
There’s no way of knowing
If we’re coming or going
There’s no way to know

We walk through the door
Are we in, are we out now?
Do we twist, do we shout, now?
There’s no way to know

Your guess, I guess
Is as good as mine
We could pool together
And be half right all of the time

My guess, I guess
It’s all, it’s all the same to me
I’ll just throw this out there
If you might care to tag along

Now that I’m no longer chasing certainty

What’s the over
What’s the over under?

We’ve nowhere to be
We need to get going
The old ways of knowing
There’s no way to know

We drive through the night
To be there in the morning
To be where in the morning?
There’s no need to know

And Mama Bear says
“Papa Bear,
Are you lying there
all afternoon?”

Your guess, I guess
Is as good as mine
We could pool together
And be half right all of the time

My guess, I guess
It’s all, it’s all the same to me
I’ll just throw this out there
If you might care to tag along

What’s the over
What’s the over under?

<From Guesswork, 2019>

Both of these are examples of the limitations imposed by lyric sheets.

I’ve always hated them. If there’s one thing that contributes the most to the closing of the writing of a song, it’s the lyric sheet.

Here’s what I wrote -

And Mama Bear says
“Papa Bear,
Are you lying there
all afternoon?”

Singing it this week I realised that if there really has to be a lyric sheet, then it should read -

And Mama Bear says
Papa Bear
Are you lying there
all afternoon?

Then it could be either Mama Bear, or Papa Bear speaking. Much better, right?

Also

We drive through the night
To be there in the morning
To be where in the morning?
There’s no need to know

Could be

We drive through the night
To be there in the morning
To beware in the morning?
There’s no need to know

That’s it. That’s all for today.

More soon.

Should there be footnotes?

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DIFFICULT PIECES

QUITS

After all of the angst of the previous couple of years I was, overall, pretty upbeat about 1996. Despite ‘Love Story’ not setting the world on fire, it had been well liked, sold a couple more than ‘Bad Vibes’, and maybe I’d…

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This page/site/whateveryoucallit is now a work in progress.

It needs a name. Yesterday I thought I liked Pamphleteer. It’s been in various notebooks over the years as a potential song title/idea. It seemed to be self depreciating in an arch enough manner. Self depreciation only works, as humour, when delivered by those whose self regard is, in fact, robust, at least.

But no. I found myself mulling the idea in bed, last night, when I was supposed to be listening to Audible. And it’s not good enough. It’s a song title. A good one, maybe. A place like this needs an album title.

Steven King already took On Writing, and this place will address more than just writing. So, for now, it’s Writing, etc. A nod to my lost 1996 album, I suppose. Which was not my first attempt to inject self-depreciation into a title.

Which doesn’t exactly bring me to the next point, but this is what I found myself stewing on - I don’t want to be my own curator. But that’s the corner, the niche, that so many working writers and artists find ourselves in, in this age of self propelled PR.

Before social media I would have been horrified at the idea of making so much of my process public domain. But that’s the deal, now. And the horror fades. I no longer worry about my ‘mystique’. It’s gone. I have to reassure myself that my voice, my aesthetic are still mine and not easily duplicated. For now.

So, what?

Well, I can present stuff, here, that can’t be accessed elsewhere. You can comment, and we can chat about it, from time to time. But you can’t DM me.

I can be critical of my work, to the point of saying “I’m rather pleased with this one” or “finding this phrase was quite exciting” or even “I do hope I never write anything this poor again”.

I can even state that I don’t believe writers make metaphors. Readers find them.

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