There’s a line from Errol Morris’s essay “The Pianist and the Lobster” that’s been rattling around in my brain: “It’s hard to forgive yourself, really, if you’ve done nothing wrong.” (Also: it took me two reads through to realize that the two images above speak to each other.)
Finding something new to say
Our dear friends are letting us stay in their house and this is my office for the week. I plan to practice on that Wurlitzer every morning and read and write in that cozy chair.
I feel ready to start on The Next Book. Or at least, I feel ready to think about it.
I have been listening to Bill Callahan’s Shepherd in a Sheepskin Vest on repeat. Here’s “Writing”:
It feels good to be writing again
Clear water flows from my pen
And it sure feels good to be writing again
I’m stuck in the high rapids as night closes in
It feels good to be singing again
Yeah, it sure feels good to be singing again
From the mountain and the mountain within
It’s been five years since the last album and it’s obvious that Callahan found something new to say. He got married. He had a kid. His folks died. And then he wrote these new songs about it all. “It feels good to be writing again…”
A reporter asked Erykah Badu why she wasn’t recording and this is what she said:
I just don’t have anything to say. As a songwriter, you have to kind of have something to say, something to record, something to ignite a conversation. I don’t have anything right now. I guess I’m uploading information. After that, we’ll see.
Finally! I thought to myself. Somebody just comes out and says it.
Input and output. Import and export.
I was reading another interview with Rob Delaney, recovering from the death of his son and wrapping up Catastrophe: “What he wants now is some time to sit and think about what to say next.”
Same here.
The fate of an archive
My mom brought me boxes of my old cassette tapes. The tapes range from 1996-2003, recorded from the ages 13-20. An archive from another lifetime, when I wanted to be a famous musician. My six-year-old has been sticking random tapes into the four-track, listening for drums and other stuff he could sample for his own songs.
I doubt he finds anything worthy.
I used to look at all those tapes and see a waste of time — what good was all that to a writer! — but now I see years spent dedicated to a creative task, learning what it’s like to practice and study and steal and share and try to express yourself and bring something new into the world. That time is never lost.
Plus, it was something to do.
Meanwhile, my stack of diaries fell over yesterday, like a cheap metaphor:
3 stories about the fates of musical archives posted in the past 2 days:
1) The 2008 Universal fire turned out to be “the biggest disaster of the music business,” destroying masters by Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Aretha Franklin, Etta James, John Coltrane, and on and on and on.
2) Bob Dylan’s team can’t track down historic footage of his Rolling Thunder shows, not because they’ve been destroyed, but because of a filing error:
“The negative was lost,” says a source close to the Dylan Camp. “Which [was] really horrifying. Part of the problem with corporations the days is all the consolidation. And in the consolidation of our storage system, somehow the numbering system fell off. There was just no way to find the negative — and we looked. Man, did we look. Now everything is in Iron Mountain. We went there and just couldn’t find it. It’s really sad. My worst fear is it’ll turn up tomorrow. For all we know, its sitting in some collector’s basement.”
3) Thom Yorke’s minidisc archive from the OK Computer era (1995-1998) was hacked, so instead of paying the hacker’s ransom, Radiohead released 18 hours of the recordings on Bandcamp.
It pleases me to look at Yorke’s minidiscs, and then look at my cassettes, and think how one archive contains treasure and the other trash. (“it’s not v interesting / there’s a lot of it,” wrote Yorke. “Yeah, right,” thought I.)
But, despite their wildly different results, both archives were made with essentially the same effort: We hit RECORD and tried to make a noise that pleased us.
Now my six-year-old presses RECORD and tries the same.
Another archive begins.
Fear of getting sued
Darryl Hall, of Hall and Oates, once told a story of Michael Jackson confessing to him during the recording session for “We Are The World”:
He sort of clung to Diana Ross pretty much, but at one point I was off to the side and he came over to me and said, “I hope you don’t mind, but I stole ‘Billie Jean’ from you,” and I said, “It’s all right, man, I just ripped the base line off, so can you!”
Here’s “I Can’t Go For That”:
And here’s “Beat It”:
That was 1985. In 2019, copyright lawyers and estates are in a feeding frenzy, with songwriter Ryan Tedder telling the BBC, “The odds of getting sued in this day and age are so high, we’re going to get to a point where nobody can write anything.”
Meanwhile, Carly Rae Jepsen is over here getting Mickie Mouse to sign contracts:
Here is an incredibly Carly Rae Jepsen story about one of the songs on her new album, Dedicated: During a writing session, Jepsen and some of her collaborators (“all musical-theater nerds”) were talking about their love of “He Needs Me,” the breathless little Harry Nilsson–penned reverie that Shelley Duvall sings in Robert Altman’s 1980 musical Popeye. They started riffing on a modern, more full-bodied rendition of Olive Oyl’s love theme, “funked it out,” in Jepsen’s words. She loved what they came up with, but people on her team told her that Disney owned the rights to the Popeye soundtrack—and just try to get Disney to license something. Undeterred, Jepsen “drove to Disneyland with a fake contract for Mickey Mouse, got the mouse to sign it, then sent a photo to her record label who got onto Disney and pushed it through.” And that is Carly Rae Jepsen in a nutshell: So wholesome and nerdy in a very specific way that she is actually kind of a renegade.
Late capitalism, man. Strange times.
Saint-Saëns’ Swan
This weekend we took the boys to Severance Hall to see Saint-Saëns’ “The Carnival of the Animals.” Even with the crying babies and restless children, Charles Bernard’s cello solo during “The Swan” was so beautiful one of the Labèque sisters even re-gifted her bouquet of flowers to him after the performance.
I love the story behind the music:
In 1886, the French composer Camille Saint-Saëns, licking his wounds after an unhappy concert tour and balking at completing his majestic Third Symphony, retreated to an Austrian village to write “Carnival of the Animals.” The suite of instrumental miniatures playfully evokes a menagerie of creatures, while also poking wry fun at the music of its day. The piece delighted the small circle of friends who heard it, but Saint-Saëns, fearing for his serious reputation, forbade its publication until after his death.
The one piece from the suite he did okay for publication during his life, in 1887, was “The Swan,” in an arrangement for piano and cello. Here’s a performance by Yo-Yo Ma & Kathryn Scott:
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