My songs definitely turn out to be a sort of journal, for me. I imagine they mean different things to anyone who hears them, like any song; The final product is in the mind of the listener, and no two people hear a thing quite the same way, I think.
1983, I wrote one morning with a laugh since as the song says, I live in 1983. To a certain extent it’s true. My musical tastes and songwriting vocabulary were pretty complete by the time I was 18, and I haven’t changed much, fundamentally, since then. I heard many years ago that most people spend the rest of their lives listening to the records they liked in their youth, and I thought, oh that’s awful, I don’t want to be that guy! Joke’s on me, I’m that guy. Somewhat. I mean, I hear a lot of new music in my creative and professional lives, but what comes out of me, the music I spontaneously create sometimes, seems largely rooted in my teenage brain.
“Juliet in black jeans” is an actual person, Juliet Harris, high school classmate, fellow rocker and one of the most original and stunning rock star individuals I ever had the pleasure to know. She died earlier this year, and I attended a memorial for her in Live Oak Park, organized in part by our mutual dear friend Peter Montgomery. I’m playing a short acoustic set at a birthday party for Peter this January 11, I’ll share the flier below, and I figure I’ll include 1983 in my caterwaulings.
“Never going one more year, Orwell said there might be trouble” cracked me up when I wrote it, and wow, what does it mean now? Too much, I think, I can’t quite fathom it. What have people done? They know not, methinks.
I have abandoned mainstream news sources (if mainstream even means anything anymore), I just don’t need to follow the play-by-play at this time. I know the big headlines and that’s enough. I had this sense, a few weeks ago, an idea, that the smallest pieces of local news are just as significant if not more so, than the hideous firehose of idiot shit we are asked to consume. A cat, napping blissfully in the sun of a bookstore window, matters more to me. Imagining the cat’s experience, or that of a dog gleefully playing as they do, gives me joy. I read Heather Cox Richardson every few days, and occasionally Dan Rather and a few others. The comedic satire of Jon Stewart and friends doesn’t connect with me at the moment, much as I love them, for reality has become satire again. People, a great many people, chose absurdity in its ugliest form, whereas I reject it. To some degree the world is as one sees it, and we do choose what we look at and listen to. I value my minutes in this life and will selfishly curate them. Somehow wrestling with these principles led me to write and record this:
And then somehow, without any wrestling at all, this song Donkeyfish emerged, and it turns out to be one of my own favorites of my work from this year, or maybe ever. It just burst forth, I had the idea and recorded each part once and bam, it was done before I knew it. I do labor hard on some songs, sometimes, and in some funny way I think my inner muse rewards me for those efforts by just handing me one, sometimes.
After this jaunt, I googled “Donkeyfish,” of course, and lo and behold, there is a Donkey Fish! Dermatolepis inermis. Also called the marbled grouper, mutton hamlet, rockhind, or sicklefish grouper. That’s a lot of names for a fish, or a donkey.
This many-splendored planet. I am glad to visit.
