This might be my last one of these for a while. While it's a good exercise, it's ultimately just an exercise.
(Although I'm learning that exercising is necessary at my age. Even though it's usually boring as shit.)
This song is one of the longer G.A. Studdert Kennedy poems I've taken on. It has more of a narrative than most of the other poems, which seem mostly to capture a snapshot of wartime in the trenches. And it's got some piano. And the baritone pipes are in full effect.
(Subsequently, the baritone pipes brought to mind one of the better rock and/or roll bands of the past 5 years: The National. Click the pic "Up and to the Right," and there's some National tracks awaiting. Including an amazing drunken acoustic version of "Start a War" from La Blogotheque, which, if you've never perused, is a fantastic site featuring live performances from a ton of great bands, placed in natural settings where the found sounds of the environment almost become another instrument. My friend Rob played me The National outing for Blogotheque. Just a great performance.)
But like I said, this is probably the last one of these for a while. I need to do something beyond exercise. So I might start posting some original stuff here soon. In the meantime, let me know what you think.
Download file here:
The FMTana-"His Mate"
Back to it.
After too many flights and turnpikes tolls and exit ramps and just in general a month of constant displacement, I made it home. And I'm home for a while. And so I should be posting more consistently.
(Should be.)
Hadn't done a Woodbine Willie in a while, so I'm going back to that well. Twice. I'm also tapping another old well. But first things first...
I had one poem of G.A. Studdert Kennendy's that I had come up with a vocal melody for, his "Prayer Before an Attack." However, it morphed as I messed with the guitar melody. I did a different tuning with my gee-tar. (One I stole from Alan Sparhawk, which he uses for Low's song "Starfire.") I tend to try different tunings or my capo or my e-bow whenever I'm experiencing some sort of songwriting block. Subsequently, the tuning was so inspiring that this song has a lot of guitar. In fact it's just guitar, vox and the above pictured GarageBand "Hip Hop Kit." That's right. This song is chalk-full of hip hop.
(No. Not really.)
However, it does tap the part of the brain that must be chalk-full with remnants of "emo past." The second section of the song, which uses a different yet similarly themed Kennedy poem called "A Scrap of Paper", sort of came out of nowhere. Even though the two halves of the song have a stark contrast, they also seem to blend pretty well via the build section. But still I haven't come up with something this thrashy since my college days. It was a surprise. Haven't decided yet if it's of the pleasant variety of not. But the deeply buried angry white kid part of me sort of digs it. You can take the distorted guitar out of a boy's hands, but you can't take the distorted guitar out of his heart.
(Side note: As a nod to this emo-related breakthrough, my "Up and to the Right" section is an emo salute to Cursive, whose Domestica record will find its way on my favorite albums of the decade.)
As always, let me know what you think...
Download file here:
The FMTana-"Prayer Before an Attack/A Scrap of Paper"
Or "How I Went To a Foreign Land And Then Got Sick, So That's Why It's Taken Me So Long To Update."
I am not one apt to travel. I am instead one apt to settle in. So going time zone upon time zone upon time zone from home is not natural to me. And despite having a very lovely time, it was obviously not natural to my physical body as well. My body let me know that. And then after my body stopped kicking me in the body, the jet lag rolled up its sleeves and got in its shots.
But I think I'm through it. So onto Willie.
As I did with "The Secret" (see below), I took one of G.A. Studdert Kennedy's World War I poems, "Today Thou Shalt Be With Me", and crafted a song around it. I like this one, but it wasn't easy to pull together. As easy as the melody and arrangement came, the recording process was as difficult. Largely due to the culprit pictured above: the Beast. Because of it's aged electronics and makeshift construction, it's temperamental. I'll leave it at that. I did cheat in this exercise by using the title of Kennedy's poem "Today Thou Shalt Be With Me" as a sort of chorus and also in the coda. Although, since I came up with this exercise, I consider the rules to be fairly malleable to my creative whims. I might start working in Bill Callahan lyrics in the future. Whatever sounds good.
(And whatever works as a segue to "The Up and To the Right" section as I'm tipping my cap to Smog, whose influence is very evident in the sound of The FMTana. At least to me it is. Click on the pic for some tunes.)
And here's the Woodbine Willie tune I've been blah-blahing on about:
Download file here:The FMTana-"Today Thou Shalt Be With Me"
Years ago, I found an old book at my parents’ house called “Rough Rhymes of a Padre” which was a collection of poems written by G.A. Studdert Kennedy, a British military chaplain during World War I. Originally written in 1918, it was handed down through my mom’s side of the family. I ended up packing it up with me and taking it home. (Not sure why at the time. Maybe because the US had just invaded Iraq. Maybe because the lyrical form of the poetry was simple and appealing. Maybe a combination of the two. Don’t know.)
Kennedy was widely known as “Woodbine Willie” for his penchant of giving Woodbine cigarettes to British soldiers along the Western Front. His poetry largely focuses on those soldiers and the daily horrors they faced on the front lines of WWI.
For me, aside from the subject matter in Kennedy’s work, this project is a fairly simple one conceptually. Generally speaking, the way I’ve always written songs is music first, lyrics second. The “Woodbine Willie Project” is an attempt to do the opposite: lyrics first, music second, which, for me, feels almost as awkward as putting on shoes before socks. Hence, I would probably refer to this project mostly as an exercise, since I’m working some very underdeveloped muscles. Writing with my left hand instead of my right, and so forth.
Kennedy’s poetry works well for this exercise because it does have a naturally lyrical feel and is conducive to melody and structure. I picked Willie’s poem “The Secret” for my first piece for no particular reason. Aside from liking the poem and liking the vocal melody that came to mind. I kept it to 3 chords, which is very punk rock for the World War I era, but apparently Woodbine was somewhat punk rock as a pastor. He once told a congregation that “he would like to take a great sledgehammer and smash every stained glass window in the church, and then go out and celebrate the Eucharist in a field with a tea-cup and plate.”
As always, let me know what you think.
download file here:
The FMTana-“The Secret”
This might be my last one of these for a while. While it's a good exercise, it's ultimately just an exercise.
