He had his feet up on the low balcony wall. He was slouched into the just-starting-to-get -funky easy chair he’d pulled out there when she moved out.
His old spanish guitar was across his midsection, horizontally. His right hand picked a pattern so lazy it seemed to lull his left into a fitful near sleep.
A half pint bottle of tequila, two thirds empty, was on its side on the roofing material floor. Next to it was a six pack of Olympia in bottles, two beers left.
The sun was almost down and the sky had blossomed in a false spring of pinks and blues and purples. The alcohol made him feel warm, but the early evening air was cool on his face.
Today’s song a very impromptu solo improvisation:
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.
New song. Brand new. Written minutes before this was recorded.
Too tired to write more. Must sleep.
Addendum: I had, perhaps obviously, just hit ‘the wall’ as I was posting this song last night. It had been so dang long since I’d written a song that when I found myself writing this late yesterday evening, I pushed hard to finalize it enough to record it and get it posted.
I suppose it’s a little late for me to act sheepish about posting my lyrics, but I was struck last night by just how little of the flavor of the song is captured by the printed word. It is, of course, often problematic printing out short rhyming lines meant to be sung… they have a tendancy to look even lamer than they may or may not sound and syncopated rhythmic phrasing of the sung line has a tendancy to look awkward at best on the printed page or screen.
But, well, that’s what we do here, for better or worse, so… without further ado, my new song:
Forget About the Moon
forget about me
forget about you
forget all the pretty things
we were gonna do
forget about the moon forget about the stars forget about forever we’ve already come too far
forget about the times
you lay by my side
forget how I thought
you’d be there all my life
forget about the moon…
forget about those dreams
they’re just castles in the sky
forget all those plans we’d make
lying awake at night
There’s a bit of late fall in this instrumental guitar improvisation — and maybe the suggestion of late afternoon, the rapid flight of birds, deepening shadows.
