Category Archives: acoustic

Kingdom of Fools

T his is my latest finished song. Recently, I saw a bumper sticker with big, bold letters on a patriotic red, white, and blue background that read “THE POWER OF PRIDE“…

… and I thought to myself: What about the power of humility?

There are those who wrap themselves in flag and holy verse to justify what looks to all the world like pride, greed and foolishness. You can’t help but wonder if many of those folks have actually read the scriptures they so enthusiastically and frequently bang.

The Kingdom of Fools

Ain’t no such thing
as too high to fall
aint no place so low
you can’t get there
if you crawl

Ain’t no bro’
so close you can’t play him down
’cause in the kingdom of Fools
only one can wear the crown

Ain’t no truth so pure
you can’t turn it to a lie
ain’t no love so deep
you can’t drain it ’til it’s dry

ain’t no flower so pretty
you can’t crush it to the ground
in the Kingdom of Fools
only one can wear the crown
Ain’t no lie
that can ever make you see the truth
and your whole life ’til now
is just so much living proof

Ain’t no one but you
can keep you from where you’re bound
‘Cause in the Kingdom of Fools
Only one can wear the crown

______________________

blog within a blog…

B ack in the 80’s a friend of mine gave me the old upright grand piano she’d bought for $100 some years before. It was beat to heck, had some broken keys, and was pretty out of tune, but a sensitive piano tuner who loved old pianos was able to bring it more or less into fighting trim and for 15 years it had a central place in my living room.

When I traded the sprawling space of my former mid-urban home for a small, beachside flat, I wrestled with a way to fit the big ol’ thing into my living room — but it ended up in the garage, as I had always suspected it would. If I move things around, I can play it down there — and I promise that at least one AYoS recording will feature it — but it’s not something I can do everyday. And, in this tightly packed neighborhood, it’s not something I could probably get away, anyway.

So that left me with what keyboardists call plastic ‘boards: my two synthesizers that are also “controllers” that can control virtual synthesizers on my computer, or other hardware synthesizers via the MIDI music communication protocol.

Plastic ‘boards have that somewhat derisive name because, while they may offer many of the control parameters needed to communicate with various synthesizers, digital pianos, and so on — they mimic the light plastic keyboard of the eletric organs of the 60’s and 70’s. They have a feel to match: light and fast, to be sure, but completely unlike the mechanical hammer action of a real piano. And, while hammer action MIDI keyboards have been around for many years — ‘real’ pianists seldom feel comfortable with anything else — they’ve been quite expensive in the past, usually running into the thousands of dollars.

For that reason, I’ve soldiered on with my platic boards, ignoring the surreal disconnect between the rich, big piano sounds coming out of the speakers and the tinky, downright squirrelly feel of the keyboards.

Now, however, our future benevolent overlords, the (formerly “Red”) Chinese, have applied their justly famous production skills to knocking the bottom out of the hammer-weighted keyboard market. Small furry, rodent-like mamal that I am, I decided to scurry among the falling bodies of the dinosaurs and snag up a new Chinese-made ‘board from the company CME. While my old keyboard controllers were 60 key ‘boards, this is a full scale 88 key range, with the most “piano-like” action I’ve played in a MIDI controller ‘board.

Only the Dance

There are no onboard sounds — but the action is so good that, with my favorite grand piano samples running in my computer, I can play and, at least for brief, idyllic periods, forget that I’m not playing a real piano.

No digital sample set, of course, will ever replace or completely replicate the sound of a real piano — especially not one like my 110 year old upright. I could lose myself for hours on that old box, letting my hands go where the muses led, hearing the echoes of a century of sounds — and emotions — seemingly stored in its wood-ivory-and-iron frame. By contrast, the muses would barely give me a a few fleeting moments with my hands on my old synthesizers, leaving just me and my puny brain to try to figure out how to make music.

But, now, I can feel them starting to come back around after almost two years. They’re skeptical, I can tell. It’s easy to scare them off. But, if I close my eyes and try to lose myself in their music, sometimes I can coax them to stick around. And the music they give me is so much better than the music I make…

Only the Dance

A Star Is Bored

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This recording of this song aspires to what I believe the music press likes to call “amiable sloppiness.”

I thought it was important to deflate any unreasonable expectations of slickness — or even competence — early on.

A Star Is Bored was a frequent part of my sets back when I was doing the acoustic post-punker thing in the late 80s and early 90s. I virtually never read the rock press but I was stuck in an airport or train station on a backpack tour through Europe back in ’86 and picked up a Spin magazine. In it was some kind of article about some rocker. The writer couldn’t seem to get over the burden of this rock star’s crushing boredom. The rock scribbler was pouring out empathy for this multimillionaire.

Now, I’m as compassionate as the next jaded old cynic, but somehow I was having a rough time wrapping myself around this rich rock star’s life dilemma…

Anyhow, this is what spilled out…

A STAR IS BORED

A star is bored
prowling empty hotel hallways
He’s never alone
so how come he’s always lonely

Nothing gets him down
it’s all just the same
saying “If you think you’re bored,
then you should see me!”

Down in the bar
leaning into a smokey corner
trying not to catch her eye:
“Say, cowboy, why you dressed like that?”

And it always seems to
go down about the same
It kills a couple of hours
but it don’t kill the pain

Tell him a story
make it long, make it lonely
Lots of starstruck summer nights
and the moon’s reflection on the river that runs through
everything

Nothing makes much sense
but he guesses that’s just life
Ya play a few songs
and then they turn out the lights

Yeah, nothing makes much sense
and he guesses that’s just life
You have a couple of laughs
and then you call it a night

A Girl Named October

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A s this first entry is being posted, the sun will be crossing the celestial equator. Today, night will be about as long as daytime. Autumn will have begun. And summer will be over…

A GIRL NAMED OCTOBER

I couldn’t help fall
for a girl named October
her eyes like the sky
when the day’s almost over
her voice like a song
you almost remember
from some other life
some other forever

Why did I lie
why did I say — I didn’t love her
I knew just what that meant
I knew right there and then
that it was over…

ten thousand times
I thought that I might see her
a million nights I lay awake
and remembered
ten billion stars
go on forever
not one chance
we could stay together

Why did I lie
why did I say — I didn’t love her
I knew just what that meant
I knew right there and then
that it was over…

W hen I was a kid, summers stretched on lazily. I worshipped summer. Long days at the library or playing pool at the Boys Club, and later, hitching down to the beach, body surfing and just hanging out looking at girls and talking about life… the life that didn’t seem to have begun yet.

But, sooner or later, fall would start to sneak into the air and a wistfulness, a longing would overtake me. You’d become aware of the faint perfume of fallen leaves or distant fires (yeah, not only could you hitchike back then, people actually burned leaves to get rid of them… it was a long time ago… don’t try it in your century). And, even when I was a boy, I would feel… old.

And filled with complex feelings I never understood.

The first time I fell hopelessly, obsessively in love — I was 10 — was on a fall-like day at the end of summer. Autumn hung over that day so heavily, I found myself drawn down to my locked-up-for-the-summer grade school. I took the wooden boomerang my dad and I had made in the garage (from instructions in a Reader’s Digest kids book… another thing that’ll never happen in this century. Have you ever been hit by a wooden boomerang slicing in from 120 feet in the air?)

For a few idle hours, I threw the ‘rang in the various ways I’d studied, sending it scooping low to the ground and then watching it rise suddenly, but predictably to come up and back around, running to where it would land as often as I ran away from it as it bore down on me.

There I was toward the end of the day, the sun slanting in, eucalyptus trees wiggling their long, finger like leaves, the distant sounds of other kids on the sprawling grounds and I saw her…

It wasn’t that I hadn’t seen her before. She’d been in my class since 2nd grade, maybe first. But there was something about her long hair and her slim athleticism as she chased her family dog… something I’d never seen before in a girl my age, something that talked to me on an altogether unfamiliar level… something that talked to my genes…

As fate would have it, it was an unrequited love. I even tried getting to her through her best friend, a cute blond I’ll call Lauren. Of course, even though I didn’t know that was how the plotline always goes, I found myself drawn farther into a sweet and innocent puppy love… with Lauren.

For almost two years we were inseparable — except at school, where I had to keep up the fiction that I hated girls. But for endless hours we would walk and talk or just lie next to each other on the grass, looking up at the trees above us.

We ended up going to different middle schools (back then we called them junior highs) and, not too long after, my family moved away. I saw her again when I was 17 and totally full of myself. She was very cute. I thought for a few moments that she would surely fall for the new, self-consciously hip me but it wasn’t to be. I never saw her again…