Getting There: Eye of the Hurricane

David Wilcox: Eye of the Hurricane

[purchase]

Motorcycle songs often seem to come to a bad end, at least for the driver. We saw that last week in Vincent Black Lightning, and here it is again. The driver of the bike called the hurricane seeks the solitude and freedom a motorcycle can provide. The roar of the engine locks the world out, and the rider is free, if only for the duration of the ride. Perhaps this is why motorcycle riders in pop songs are usually rebels. David Wilcox is more interested in that sense of freedom, or of shelter, if you prefer, than he is in rebellion. Even so, when the end comes for his rider, there is still a sense of inevitability about it. But what a ride!

I must confess that I have never been on a motorcycle myself. My description of the feeling is what I understand from the songwriters I have heard on the subject. So, I will ask the motorcycle riders in our audience, how did I do? Did I get it? Comments, please.

Circuses and Carnivals: Five From The Midway

Dan Zanes: Wonderwheel

[purchase]

I went to a weekend fair
met someone while I was there
we put flowers in our hair
and rode the wonderwheel...

It sure sounds like a carnival, thanks to a rollicking accordion, a bouncy beat, and a subtle surfer's acoustic groove. And that's the point, for sure: after all, Dan Zanes is a master of the seemingly-casual kidsong, when in actuality, every note and tone is designed to add to the perfect festive mood, the inner child called to exquisitely.


Richard & Linda Thompson: The Wall of Death

[purchase]

Roller coaster as metaphor for the nauseating thrill-ride risk of the love affair? Yes, please. REM covers this one, but the Richard Thompson original is better by far, a perfect take from his mid-eighties solo work with ties to both true-blue rock and roll and his early folk rock sound with Fairport Convention.



David Wilcox: Top of the Roller Coaster

[purchase]

A bit more specific, softspoken southern folkie David Wilcox - a master of the sustained metaphor - looks at the roller coaster's moment of anticipation as a model of the inner heartjump turning thirty can bring. Love the way the bouncy tonality and sweet harmonies bring midlife crisis alive. So much joy.



Norah Jones: Carnival Town

[purchase]

A broad title belied in the first few lines - this is actually a song mostly about carnival rides and their motion as a reflection of life-movement, with each of the first two verses taking on a different ride (the third verse covers clowns). Loneliness on the downswing makes this a perfect lullaby.


Mary Gauthier: Merry Go Round

[purchase]

Gauthier holds off on her titular metaphor until the chorus, setting the stage with the violent and stark images of an early life of drug and family abuses that fit cleanly among the rest of the songs on powerful third album Filth & Fire. The carousel "horse" here is heroin; the turning of the wheel a path of addiction and recurrence - and so we come full circle, as it were, from the cheerfulness of Dan Zanes, proving the versatility of midway as macrocosm, reflecting the vastness of the inner world.

The Bountiful Feast: A Dessert Sampler

Townes Van Zandt and Blaze Foley: Girl Scout Cookies

[live and unpurchaseable]

Sarah McLachlan: Ice Cream (live)

[purchase]

Crowded House: Chocolate Cake

[purchase]

Nellie McKay: Cupcake

[purchase]

David Wilcox: Wildberry Pie

[purchase]

It's a tradition of sorts here at Star Maker Machine to end the week with a "clearinghouse" post, one which throws a few disparate songs up to give a sense of the range of possibility still sitting on our "also ran" lists as the clock runs out.

Fittingly, I managed to come up with a few rare and delicious dessert selections for us to fill in the corners a bit as we transition to our upcoming theme; just as fittingly, this coming week's theme will give us a chance to offer up second helpings for those favorite songs which, for one reason or another, never really made it into the themes where they best belonged. Small portions only, folks; you're liable to burst...

Horns: Two Tributes to Trumpeters

David Wilcox: Chet Baker's Swan Song

[purchase]

Sheryl Crown: We Do What We Can

[purchase]

Two smooth, moody bittersweet ballads of talent lost to the ages -- one nominally folk, the other pop -- which adopt jazz trope and trumpet as a mechanism for paying tribute to beloved jazz trumpet players.

David Wilcox' first person paean to Chet Baker, who struggled with drug addiction for much of his career, paints him as helpless and desperate; the sweet jazzfolk approach effectively evokes both Chet's typically sultry sound and the languid, surface-smooth heroin dreams which many believe prompted him to end his life by leaping off the balcony of a Amsterdam hotel room.

Meanwhile, popster Sheryl Crow dwells in the memory of her father as a frustrated jazzman and lawyer; the faint, high trumpet notes which underscore the arrangement are a subtle wail of lost promise, but the way they waft through the song like the tendrils of memory is perfect for the neo-noir subject treatment.

Interestingly, in addition to similarities of trumpet, trumpeter, tone and tempo, both of these songs are their respective albums' penultimate track; in each case, they are followed by a simple, equally slow song of hope and faith. Coincidence?

Songwriting: Let Them In

John Gorka: Let Them In

[purchase]

David Wilcox: Let Them In

[purchase]

The question of source material and song ownership is one I have considered at length in my tenure as a coverblogger. But the study of coversong deals with songs first and foremost as found and re-manipulated objects, not constructed objects. Which is to say: although taking existing materials and making them your own can be an illuminating and transformative process, covering someone else's song wholesale isn't songwriting.

But in my search for great covers and the stories behind them, I also find myself encountering half-covers, reworkings, song combinations, translations, "based ons", and other ways in which songwriters adapt and play off of existing material to make something carefully crafted and new.

The pastiche method of songmaking -- in which songs and source materials are transformed not simply through new performance, but through reworkings of those original materials -- falls somewhere between our traditional models of true songwriting and coversong, I suppose. But it is the origin story for some of our greatest songs. And, as any good ghostwriter or translator knows, the act of turning raw material into something else entirely is a form of creation, too.

This week, as befits a cover blogger's approach to a songwriting theme, I'll be touching on a few such rewritten or reconstructed songs, and the process of collaboration with found or borrowed material that gave them their birth. Today's focus: found poetry as source material.

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Adapting existing poetry and prose into song is nothing new. For centuries, Biblical texts formed the lyrical basis for classical music; just check any Unitarian Universalist hymnbook, and you'll find many entries which were not set to music until after their original authors had passed on to the great chorus in the sky. Though I hope to look at a notable exception to the rule later this week, however, for most of the history of musicmaking, the sacred source text was perceived as immutable. Poetry, not so much.

Years ago, someone sent singer-songwriter John Gorka a poem that had been found written on the wall of a military hospital in the Philippines after WWII. Struck by the poignant sentiment and simple, down-to-earth imagery of the poem, Gorka chose to adapt the lyric, giving it line breaks and a few tweaks of spelling and phrasing, rearranging and adding a few lines, deleting an entire duplicate stanza, and setting it to a simple tune. The end result:

Let them in Peter
For they are very tried
Give them couches where the angels sleep
And light those fires

Let them wake whole again
To brand new dawns
Fired by the sun
Not war-time bloody guns

May their peace be deep
Remember where the broken bodies lie
God knows how young they were
To have to die

Give them things they like
Let them make some noise
Give dance hall bands not golden harps
To these our boys

Let them love Peter
For they've have no time
The should have bird songs and trees
And hills to climb

The taste of Summer
In a ripened Pear
And girls sweet as meadow wind
And flowing hair

And tell them how they are missed
But say not to fear
It's gonna be all right
With us down here

Interestingly, though the song was written in the late eighties, Gorka did not record the song himself until 2001 -- and by then, his work, though still powerful, was starting to suffer from lengthy fade-outs and bass-heavy production that, frankly, just doesn't fit the song as well as his live setting does. But somewhere along the line he handed it off to fellow folk performer David Wilcox, whose simple, acoustic 1991 recording of the song is arguably both the better and the "original" version, recorded with no ornamentation save a pure voice and a slow guitar.

In recent years, both the original poem and Gorka's lyrics -- often listed as "A Prayer to St. Peter", and sometimes attributed directly to the hospital wall, though many of these postings show Gorka's restructuring of the lines -- have found their way onto numerous bulletin boards and web tributes for soldiers lost in wartime. Edwin McCain's even more recent recording of the song pops up on those tribute blogs a bunch, too, set to slow slideshows of fallen boys in better times.

The universal sentiment of the lyric transcends even McCain's maudlin lite-rock setting, but I still think Wilcox's setting of Gorka's tune and adapted lyrics is the powerhouse here.