Sparks from the Fire

Welcome to Part 2 of the Ira Awards!  If you have no earthly idea of what the Ira Awards are, then go to Part 1 and find out.  Besides, who would start anything with Part 2?

Joni Mitchell-Self Portrait

If you’ve already read Part 1, then welcome back!  Tonight let’s start with Joni.  In Part 1 I opened with the expression “A poem doth not a lyric make”.  Joni Mitchell, in my book, comes the closest to writing poetry that works as lyrics.  It is her genius to do so.  Even though she can make it work sometimes, I still wouldn’t try it if I were you.  Joni Mitchells only come along once in a lifetime.

Joni writes a lot like Paul Simon – she paints an impressionistic picture.  She is a poet at work on a lyrical canvas.  She sometimes tells a story, but that story often just has splotches of through line and she leaves it up to the listener to fill in the blanks.  She is also, you may already know, an accomplished painter whose work often graces her album covers.

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A family pastor once said at a funeral. “Ed is like a cracked walnut, the shell is here and the nut is gone.”

I’m back to work on my new CD, Going Home, reflections on crossing over and beyond.

It’s a little tricky sometimes writing music about death. It’s a subject that I’m presently fascinated with, but I’m not looking at it in the usual ways – tragic, sad, devastating and final.

Rather, I’m trying to see the experience from different angles – trying to make some practical sense of it all.

I’m also trying to make the CD an inspiring piece about an experience that we all will face some day and probably don’t consider enough in our lives. Yes, there’s clearly a deep sadness attached to the experience. We usually don’t want to leave and hopefully, there are folks around us who don’t want us to go.

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Tom Tipton is clearly not Irish. So when we first were conceptualizing his Best of Tom Tipton CD and we decided to add 4 new recordings to this rich treasure trove of his musical life, it was a bit of a surprise to me that he came up with the idea of this Irish classic song.

But, as Tom said, this was a song that he had sung since childhood, taught to him on his mother’s knee and rendered a capella many times over his life to his most appreciative audiences. [A capella: without instrumentation, voice only.]

It seemed like a novel addition to a CD otherwise full of inspirational Spiritual and Gospel classics. So I said to Tom, “Send me the music and we’ll do it!” He answered, “I have no music.  I’ve always just done it a capella.”

Thus began the great adventure. (more…)

I learned my craft as a composer/lyricist writing for the theater.  It’s probably why I write a lot of story songs.  I worked and studied as an actor and that also gave me my own interesting slant on song writing.  I try to write from my own particular corner on life, but sometimes I can write from a particular character perspective that is not me – though even in those songs there’s always an essence of me in them even if they are of another character.

Mary Magdalene-El Greco

I sometimes like to write from the particular perspective of the singer for whom I’m writing.  In the case of Julia Wade, my wife and Watchfire Music recording artist, this is particularly true.  Because I know her so well, sometimes I can get inside of her and see things from her point of view.  Before writing this kind of a song for her, I’ll usually discuss the moments in depth with her and glean from her feelings all that I can.  Then I know that when I’ve finished writing the song, she’ll naturally have a real affinity for it.

Julia’s long been fascinated with Mary Magdalene and has spent countless hours researching her life on line and reading books about her.  She was deeply into the discoveries, revelations and suppositions brought out by Dan Brown’s “The Da Vinci Code” long before the book came out and fueled the imaginations of millions around the world.

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Sometime in the mid 80s I bought one of the first midi sequencers to come out.  It was a marvel of invention at the time and could literally record 160 midi notes in sequence from a synthesizer and then play back the pattern at practically any speed maintaining the pitch of the instrument as the tempo was increased. Remember that tape always moved the pitch up the faster the tape was played, hence the Mickey Mouse effect.  It would only work for one instrument at a time and so we would usually use it for a bass line since it was monophonic, meaning that it could only play one note at a time (no chords).  After 160 notes it ran out of memory and either repeated itself or stopped playing.

It was the size of a large microwave oven and made out of metal with many plastic buttons and little LED lights.  We (my engineers and I) used to program it and then turn all the lights in the studio out and excitedly watch the lights run their sequence as the bass line played.  We were kids with a new toy.

One day we decided to take it apart and see what was inside this marvel of engineering.  We opened the metal case expecting to see it crammed full of gears and widgets and wiring only to find nothing but empty space.  There, at the bottom, sat one computer chip half the size of a vanilla wafer that, of course, ran the entire machine.  We looked at each other in wonder in our first real life experience with digital chip technology.

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I have a student.  In real life he’s a dentist.  In his heart he’s a composer.
He first came to me to study Apple Logic, a computer software program that is essentially a digital recording studio in a box.  With it, you can do just about anything you choose in the world of music – record a song, score a movie, write and record a symphony without hiring an expensive orchestra, take it with you on a gig and expand your band from 3 pieces to an 12 piece horn band, and the list goes on and on.

Apple's Logic Software

It’s a truly amazing technological wonder, but the trouble is, you have to learn it to use it.  And it ain’t easy.  In fact, they say that the learning curve with Logic is the steepest of all the software DAW (digital audio workstation) systems.  I’ve been working with it daily now for about 15 years and I still don’t fully understand it, though I’m what you might call ‘an expert’.  I can fly on it and I can teach it, but I’m still learning it.

Anyway my student was a music hobbyist who would go home at night from his drills and macabre instruments and write music.  Rather, he would go home at night and fight Logic – and Logic most often won.  He was deeply disorganized in his approach to the technology, but his love for music and the act of creativity was so great that it drove him to this nightly struggle.

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Let’s talk about failure for a moment.  In my experience, as well as for every other artist who tries to “make it”, perhaps the hardest part of dealing with one’s artistry is the problem of overcoming rejection.  Every artist faces rejection constantly and many eventually turn to something else because of their inability to handle it.  I face rejection constantly and have learned to know that it’s never my spiritual man that’s rejected, but rather just my mortal mistakes.

And ya’ know, those need to be rejected.  It’s my duty to uncover the errors and correct them so that they will have no future basis.

Rejection is not failure.  The only real career failure you can have in life  is to turn 80, look back and say, “I wish I had tried to do that — I wish I had attempted that journey.”  Now that’s failure.

I had a young man speak to me after a concert once who said that he wished he had taken the time in his life to learn to play the guitar and that he was sorry that he would never be able to play as well as I play.  Now he was on the verge of failure.

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I like a song that tells a story. Songs have been doing this for over 5000 years. In fact, it is the song that carried the history of man on Earth for the great part of that time as troubadours passed their tales and cultures on to generation after generation.

Michael Jackson’s Ode To Billie Jean written by Bobbi Gentry is one of the more recent ones and one of my all-time favorites. Johnny Cash’s A Boy Named Sue is another. Some of my other’s I can think of are:

The Temptations, Papa Was A Rollin’ Stone
Joni Mitchell, The Last Time I Saw Richard
Jeannie C. Riley, Harper Valley PTA
Simon & Garfunkel, Save The Life Of My Child
Harry Chapin, Cat’s In The Cradle
Arlo Guthrie, Alice’s Restaurant
Jim Croce, Bad, Bad Leroy Brown
Lennon & McCartney, A Day In The Life
The Kingston Trio, Tom Dooley
The Who, Tommy

Of course this list can go on and on. As I look through the above lyrics, it’s noteworthy to me how different the forms and story telling styles of each of the songs are.

Some are simple and clear; some are illusive on purpose. All have a depth far beyond the typical pop song and all are dramatically revealing of the human condition. They each have one commonality however; they each tell a good story.

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