When I posted the previous version of this song in early December, I was careful to paint a picture of the troubled time in which it was written. I was concerned that the stridently polemical, confrontational lyrics might be taken out of the context of a time of US taxpayer funded death squads in Central America and the US funded war by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq against Iran, with its chemical gas attacks and overt and covert US aid to Saddam.
But then I thought — well, damn.
So, without further excuses or equivocation here’s a little slice of unapologetically self-righteous, blind fury.
Have you embraced the beast?
I see the mark is on your face
Have you embraced the beast?
Are you a slave of greed and hate?
Have you embraced the beast?
Do you serve the war machine?
Have you embraced the beast?
Did you trade in your soul on (for) the finer thinsg?
Have you embraced the beast?
Do your taxes buy bullets for fascist death squads?
Have you embraced the beast?
They’ll be coming to your hometown before too long . . .
Have you embraced the beast?
I see the mark is on your face
Have you embraced the beast?
Are you a slave of greed and hate?
A clumsy, rushed, homemade card and a bouquet of flowers plucked between my car and the current GF’s door and presented with the aw shucks charm of a little boy cozying up to someone he thought might give him a toy later if maybe he was charming enough.
That’s why I live alone with my cat. Yep.
And, you know, I’m so far down that road that I’m okay with that. Mostly.
But every now and then I feel something stir — and it scares me.
It’s not loneliness. I’m absurdly content. Self-contained. Hermetic.
But sometimes, when someone catches me a little off guard, sometimes, I feel myself on that slippery slope that leads to the abyss…
Happy Valentine’s Day, suckers!
[For additional insight into my Valentine’s Day sensibilities, flip back a few days to Forget About the Moon.]
dont know what to do about you
I did’nt know that I could still be scared
empty dreams night after night
afraid that you’ll never be there
I could give myself to love but love would only break my heart i could give my world to you but you would tear that little world apart
one day I looked at myself
and then I began again
I built it up and I tore it down
and I won’t do that again
I could give myself to love…
everytime I hear I’m doing all right
I know that I’m living a lie
everytime that I feel myself start to slip
I hold my hand to the fire
I could give myself to love but love would only break my heart i could give my world to you but you would tear that little world apart
(C)1994, TK Major
Blog within a blog: It strikes us as surprisingly odd (we’re so stunned we’re back using the editorial “we”) but we just realized that three of the four songs featured on the [then-current] front page of www.Ourmedia.org (which is was our portal for posting our audio material to www.archive.org) are, well, we’re almost too modest to say… but, OK, you dragged it out of us: they’re TK Major songs. From A Year of Songs. We’re amazed and pleased and we hope it doesn’t get the Editor of the Week (who we don’t know, we swear) fired before his week is up.
A few months after your nineteenth birthday, you’ll pass a different milestone. You will have seen — and survived — a thousand Mondays.
And, if you’re lucky, by most measures, the Mondays will just keep coming at you. Like clockwork. Um… Anyway.
Some folks love Mondays.
They can’t wait to get back to work and see what their friends did over the weekend, catch up on gossip, talk about TV, maybe even get in a couple of licks of work.
For me, Mondays have always been rugged. I could work up a sort of grim, stoic enthusiasm for biz world battle on the way in, behind the wheel in traffic, but that was about the best of it. From there it was all the clash of sword on shield, the cries of the wounded, and the roar of the crowd.
Not even on vacations. Not even when Monday was my day off. I just moped around thinking what a waste it was to have Monday as your day off instead of a cool day like like Friday. Even Thursday. Tuesday. You could walk around singing Tuesday Afternoon and go on long walks or to museums. You can’t even go to museums on Mondays.
Anyhow.
It’s a gorgeous, summery Monday as I write this and I’m in a really good mood because I just wrote today’s song a few hours ago. (Consider the music/melody, especially, as a rough draft.) While I used to write a lot (I have versions of about 125 different songs posted in A Year of Songs so far), in recent years my songwriting had fallen to just a few songs a year.
So writing two songs, no matter how modest, in one week is pretty much grounds for frenzied celebration around here (Lemonade and soda anyone, Wild Cherry Pepsi?).
That said, as my own boss, I’m actually stealing time from myself writing this when I should be working. It is Monday, after all.
So, dude, I gotta go before I get busted. Later.
a thousand mondays
that’s just 19 years
put your head down
put yourself in gear
before you know it
the day is done
fall asleep
and there’s another one
chain of mondays wrapped round my life chain of mondays until the day I die
I’m good at what I do
but what I do is dumb
pushing things around
all day long
what’s it all for
don’t ask me
i’m just a well-worn gear
in the big machine
chain of mondays…
don’t take off my shackles
i don’t want to be free
cause theres nowhere to go
and no one to be
been at the grindstone
for so damn long
there’s nothing much left
except this song:
In 1988 a friend gave me her old upright piano, at the time about 95 years old. I had her tuner do some repairs and then the piano and I settled in together for the next 15 years.
I’m not a competent conventional keyboardist by the kindest stretch, but over the years I’ve spent some time with keyboards (sadly far too much of it with only my right hand on the keyboard and my left on some wheel or control or fader).
But that old piano is as different from the synthesizers and electronic keyboards that I’d been playing as a thing could be.
With a creaky, cranky action, mysterious thunks and deep rolling resonances that would stack higher and higher (I have the little kid habit of leaving my right foot on the sustain pedal for very long times at times… I think I become hypnotized) the piano seemed at times to be so awash in sounds that I often thought I heard voices, old fashioned telephones, sirens.
Again and again I would stop playing, the sound taking a while to die — even with my foot finally off the sustain pedal — trying to hear whatever it was I thought I heard… someone just outside the window or perhaps a radio that had somehow come on, a television. Anything. But the sounds seemed to come out of the piano, almost as though it was channeling them to me.
And sometimes, on that century old piano, I just liked to turn my antenna to the stars: put my hands down on whatever note or notes found me… and then just play whatever came next…
Today’s track was recorded a couple days ago — not on my old piano (safely in storage in my garage), but on my new, sometimes very-piano-like MIDI controller keyboard. That keyboard is the first I’ve owned that has anything close to the feel of a real piano and sometimes I can lose myself for a while as I used to on my old piano.
This improvisation I’m calling Idle Hands is very much like the sorts of rambling musings I used to indulge myself on on my piano. If it tries your patience — imagine how my neighbors felt. 110 year old pianos don’t have volume controls.
