Songwriters... Paul Simon

If I ever meet Paul Simon I have one question for him. I want to know if, after writing the line "The Mississippi Delta was shining like a National guitar," he took the rest of the day off.

Over the past half century, Simon has emerged as one of the two or three finest songwriters of his generation. His skills are singularly unique, a perfect storm of musical and lyrical inventiveness that rarely sounds strained or hurried. In 1968 Simon wrote the song "America" which appeared on the Simon & Garfunkel album Bookends. It is one of a very few pop songs written in free verse; the only rhyme in the song is an internal one, "Michigan seems like a dream to me now."

Five years later, Simon returned to a similar rumination on the nature of identity and the character of the country of his birth. This performance from a 1974 Dick Cavett Show is just about perfect.

Jump ahead another twelve years and the release of Simon's finest album, Graceland. There is a DVD series on the making of classic albums, the one on the making of Graceland is really worth a look. Take a look:

Simon discusses changes in his process that took place around the time of Graceland. Now he would first develop the music, build the track until he was satisfied with the results. Then write a lyric and, if he wasn't happy with the results, remove the lyric and try again, but still have the track that he liked. This was the approach that produced the song "Boy in the Bubble."

Song....

Playing chess with Domino in England
A pawn I took for granted won the game
My kingdom toppled in an instant
The queen and her bishops looked surprised

And the knights atop their horses
They had no where to go
The pawns were cheered like heroes
In the courtyard of the palace
And they danced around the castle
Arm in arm

Walking off the street and through an unmarked door in Oxford
We walked into a wholly different land
The green was the greenest green that I had ever seen
There were secret gardens, secret gardens, secret gardens everywhere

And we were riding in that tiny car and driving through the Cotswolds
Through Stanton, into Stanway and to Winchcombe and beyond
Through green fields lined with dry stone walls
And honey-colored limestone so warm in the setting English sun
A thousand years of history, kings and queens and peasants in the morning
Mist upon the water out by Castle Combe

And we followed the Romans and the Normans
Moving through the hills above the market
It was as if our souls were trying to remember
Something about that castle, something about the markings on the wall
I held you against the chill and we drank whisky in the pub that night by the fire
There was something eternal
There was something everlasting
There was some kind of mid-winter magic
On the water
In the fields
By that castle
As we rode along the country roads in England

Songwriters....

For no reason I can fathom - I love how the brain works - this morning I was struck by how two great songs suddenly seemed related in some odd way. It had never occurred to me before, even though I have loved, and played, both songs countless times in the past forty years.


Six short verses, four lines each and, like every song on Dylan's John Wesley Harding album, no chorus. This is Dylan at his enigmatic best; the signifiers dance, whirl around as if in a strong wind, never stopping long enough for any meaning to become fixed. The greater context is, as it always is, important. There is the context of the album, stark, minimalist folk, loaded with odd religious imagery that has led some to interpret the Joker and thief as Christ on the cross speaking to Dismas, the penitent thief.

Dave Van Ronk was not a fan of the song, commenting that you cannot travel "along" a watchtower. I think Van Ronk found Dylan's dance with meaning irritating. I love Dave, always have, but where he is irritated I am more prone to exhilaration. I don't feel this way about all of Dylan, there are definitely songs in which he's just faking it, getting by. This is not one of those.

Beyond the context of the album is the context of the times, particularly important for JWH. Released at the very end, a scant few days before the end of 1967. 1967 was dominated by psychedelia, the "Summer of Love," Haight-Ashbury, Carnaby Street, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Neon flowers and paisley, elaborate album cover constructions (the Rolling Stones 3D cover, the Bee Gees red velvet) with lyric gate folds and booklets and cut out sheets and printed inner sleeves. When Dylan sings "There must be someway out of here" it is as if he is fixing an exit sign to all of that.


Released by Leonard Cohen in 1967 (though released first by Judy Collins a year earlier), "Suzanne" strikes me as a kind of bookend to "All Along the Watchtower" in its similar dance with ambiguity and meaning.

Suzanne takes you down to her place near the river
You can hear the boats go by
You can spend the night beside her
And you know that she's half crazy
But that's why you want to be there
And she feeds you tea and oranges
That come all the way from China
And just when you mean to tell her
That you have no love to give her
Then she gets you on her wavelength
And she lets the river answer
That you've always been her lover
And you want to travel with her
And you want to travel blind
And you know that she will trust you
For you've touched her perfect body with your mind.

And Jesus was a sailor
When he walked upon the water
And he spent a long time watching
From his lonely wooden tower
And when he knew for certain
Only drowning men could see him
He said "All men will be sailors then
Until the sea shall free them"
But he himself was broken
Long before the sky would open
Forsaken, almost human
He sank beneath your wisdom like a stone
And you want to travel with him
And you want to travel blind
And you think maybe you'll trust him
For he's touched your perfect body with his mind.

Now Suzanne takes your hand
And she leads you to the river
She is wearing rags and feathers
From Salvation Army counters
And the sun pours down like honey
On our lady of the harbor
And she shows you where to look
Among the garbage and the flowers
There are heroes in the seaweed
There are children in the morning
They are leaning out for love
And they will lean that way forever
While Suzanne holds the mirror
And you want to travel with her
And you want to travel blind
And you know that you can trust her
For she's touched your perfect body with her mind.

Three verses, with the middle verse about the figure of Jesus - a character we recognize - in the center of two verses about Suzanne, a character we are only now trying to understand. Here, the singer speaks to the listener about Suzanne (and Christ). In the song, it is we whose bodies are perfect, not Christ's. Christ - if he is referenced in both songs, is impotent in both. And this, for want of a better term, impotence of Christ, becomes then the perfect metaphor for the tired, world weariness of the post-psychedelic experience.

As interesting as psychedelic music is, it is almost always superficial; everything of interest skirts along the surface. But post-psychedelic music... that's another thing altogether.  More later.

Songwriting....

“I’d spent five hours that morning trying to write a song that was meaningful and good, and I finally gave up and lay down. Then, “Nowhere Man” came, words and music, the whole damn thing, as I lay down…Song writing is about getting the demon out of me. It’s like being possessed. You try to go to sleep, but the song won’t let you. So you have to get up and make it into something, and then you’re allowed sleep.” - John Lennon

 “Somebody said to me, But the Beatles were anti-materialistic. That’s a huge myth. John and I literally used to sit down and say, Now, let’s write a swimming pool.” - Paul McCartney

Songwriting is the biggest mystery to me. It is something so many people seem to be able to do, and yet I have tried for probably the better part of forty years now to write songs with virtually zero success. I have one song about how hard it is to score drugs when you get older. I have one other I've never sung for anyone ever. I have a wedding song I wrote in 1980 that I've always wanted Willie Nelson to record. I have a half-finished one about being in a plane looking down on the lights of Memphis that I kind of hear as a Vulgar Boatmen song. Years ago I wrote one called something like "The Patron Saint of Circumstance" that I recorded on a cassette that I lost. I can't remember much about the song other than that I liked it at the time.  I have a 22 second instrumental that I am very fond of.

And I have snippets, fragments, that I occasionally offer to people who never take me up on it. One, in particular, is the... I'm not sure what the word is. It's not the "chorus," I don't think it's a "bridge"... it's the line at the end of a verse that contains the key idea and probably the title. It's about how passions burn most fiercely when we are you and ebb as we age.

It is sung by an older man remembering his younger self. When I think about it I can hear George Jones singing it.  The line is: "But I was younger then, and my heart was full of roses." When I sing it, the word "roses" is stretched out at the end.  If you can do anything with it, it's yours.

 I want to look at songwriting by looking at some of what I consider to be some of the greatest songs we have. First up....

 

Written by Cole Porter in 1936. Sinatra first sang the song in 1946 and then, in 1956, he recorded this version, arranged by Nelson Riddle and known for Milt Bernhart's terrific trombone solo that shows up around 2:20 in. The collaboration of Porter, Sinatra and Riddle produces this moment of near-perfection. The pleasure here is right on the surface, in the grain of Sinatra's voice, the gorgeous lyric perfectly phrased and played with, and in Riddle's sense of swing. 

“I usually know what kind of song I’m after. I know what I’m trying to do when I start. I don’t always get there. But I try to visualize what it’s actually going to be." - Jimmy Webb

Jimmy Webb is one of the 5 or 10 best songwriters of all time. He's at his most interesting when he picks an artists to work with and writes an entire album for them. He did it with the Fifth Dimension, Richard Harris,  and with Johnny Rivers, and he did it for Art Garfunkel on his best album, "Watermarks." If I had to pick my favorite Webb collaboration of all time it would be Garfunkel's reading of Webb's "Crying in my Sleep." If you listen, you learn a volume of information about the people in the song, their history, their relationship, their friends, their jobs, etc. But if you just look at the lyrics you will not find ANY of that in there. This song is one of the greatest examples of the use of subtext I've ever found. With Webb, the pleasures are many, but a major one is in the way he suddenly moves n an odd angle away from the direction you were certain he was going. This has that characteristic that is common to all great songs - I never tire of it.

“My best songs were written very quickly. Just about as much time as it takes to write it down is about as long as it takes to write it…In writing songs I've learned as much from Cezanne as I have from Woody Guthrie…It’s not me, it’s the songs. I’m just the postman, I deliver the songs…I consider myself a poet first and a musician second. I live like a poet and I’ll die like a poet.” - Bob Dylan



It is probably silly to claim any one song as Dylan's best, but this is the least silly claim of all. What I find so telling is that this is the one song he never seems to stop writing. There are many on line sites that list the various lyric variations Dylan has played with over the years, this is just one example. The song comes from the period in which Dylan was trying to apply the principles of his painting teacher, Norman Raeben, to his movie project (Renaldo & Clara) and his songwriting around the time of his "Blood on the Tracks" album. The songs is an ocean of sub text and time travel. It is,for me, Dylan at his most singular,  powerful and sublime.

Artifacts from a distant past....

Promises, promises....

In July 2012 we organized the largest grass roots Woody Guthrie Centennial Celebration in the US, a 9 day festival with 13 events designed to educate and entertain, all in our neighborhood on the East side of Indianapolis, IN, Historic Irvington.

We now plan to make that celebration an annual event, and June 2-8, 2013 will see the Second Annual Irvington Folk Festival (Son of the Woody Guthrie Celebration) in various location in and around Irvington. For more information about the actual schedule of events check out the Facebook page (and go ahead and "like" us if you would).

In the meantime it is my plan to use this blog, which I had tired of somewhat during the political battles of the past few years, to look at the more-complicated-than-you-might-suspect notion of just what "folk music" actually is. So keep checking back to see just what's going on. In the mean time let me leave you with what I think was the brightest moment from last year's festival: Dale Lawrence & The Punkin Holler Boys doing a version of Woody's "This Land Is Your Land" is a quiet and introspective arrangement that drew everybody into the song.

Music is....