Assorted Gems: Thousand Knives of Ryuichi Sakamoto

THOUSAND KNIVES OF RYUICHI SAKAMOTO (1978)

If I have my chronology right, Sakamoto made most of this album knowing he would be a part of Haruomi Hosono’s Yellow Magic Orchestra project. But he was a reluctant joinee, and I think the Yellow Magic Orchestra concept, as well as the solidification of the membership, preceded the recording of their debut album by some time. Sakamoto’s daily reality across those few months of 1978 was that of a full-time session musician (and, come to think of it, I’m not sure his membership in YMO would have felt very different, to start with). It was his dissatisfaction with the work that spurred him to work as hard as he did on his solo debut. Wikipedia says he clocked 339 hours in (mostly in the middle of the night) before the album was done.

Here are sixteen reasons to love the record:

1. The title.

2. The vocoder intro to the title track. I’ve always loved the two A New Machine interludes on Floyd’s A Momentary Lapse of Reason. Here you have the same idea and spirit a decade in advance. But where Gilmour’s words come through clearly, no one would recognize this as a Mao Zedong poem — no one would even recognize it as Mandarin Chinese, I think. And now that I think about it, I wonder whose idea it was to include so much French (and Italian, on Kimi ni Mune Kyun) on Yellow Magic Orchestra records. Takahashi's own '78 solo debut album, Saravah!, had French influences; plus the first-ever appearance of The Voice comes on Takahashi's song, La Femme Chinoise. Hosono is the one who kept the tradition going, on Miharu Koshi records. And Sakamoto was the first to have this “Well, clearly someone is talking, but hell if I know what they are saying” thing going on.

3. Hosono’s guest spot on Thousand Knives — he’s playing finger cymbals... knowing Hosono’s sense of humor, I thought he’d do one clink for the bragging rights, but he’s audible, if not prominent, for quite a long stretch.

4. The return of the vocoder in Das Neue Japanische Elektronische Volkslied. It arrives in the bridge, but towards the end it sneaks into the song’s main part too, sounding as lonely, cold, and strange as it did in Thousand Knives. It’s like a clammy hand reaching out from the pond and grabbing your ankle, as you sit eating your sandwich, listening to the early evening birdsong, watching the last of the sunlight glimmering between tree trunks.

5. Kazumi Watanabe’s guitar solos. They sounded like jazzy wankery to me at first. “Ah, so this is what the ‘fusion’ genre sounds like?” But since I couldn’t resist Thousand Knives’ digital, reggae-adjacent groove, I heard those solos many more times, and one bright autumn day the first of the two got catapulted into my list of favorite guitar solos. The tone pierces the instrumental blend (which, for its own part, turns spare to give it space — at first, but then subtly reclaims its own as familiar melodies come back in, but softly) and the solo itself is insane. My favorite moment is around 4:40, when Watanabe shifts the rhythm. The solo in The End of Asia is less striking on a melodic level, but — as a student in my elective class put it — it barrels into and against that East Asian-sounding melody like a bullet train through the Chinese countryside.

6. The waves of melody in Island of Woods. Most of the song is in the “concrete music” vein of Malabar Hotel rather than the lush melodicism of Paraiso (Sakamoto played synths on both records) but here and there, when you don’t expect it, the melodies come: like a gust of wind, or an arrow of migrating birds; they linger for a bit, they’re gone.

7. Grasshoppers. It’s almost my favorite song on the album. It’s so beautiful that I tend to get stuck at the end of Side A, replaying it five times before I move on. What do you call the time signature of the main riff? It’s 5/4 but with an extra beat at the end, which allows a moment sometimes for breath and sometimes for those lovely triplets — so that’s six beats, but you couldn’t waltz to the song. And the leisurely middle section, which sounds nowhere near as catchy as the opening/closing riff, actually turns out to be just as catchy, once you get used to its long, barely-repeating melody lines.

8. The hundred-plus-note synth riff in Das Neue Japanische Elektronische Volkslied. Yes, hundred-plus. It starts off sounding like a simple and catchy fourteen-note riff, but if you follow it closely, you’ll realize that at its second iteration, Sakamoto takes it somewhere different, and then just keeps going, and going, and going... I've been meaning to learn it for months now, daunting as it seems. What better and more satisfying warm-up exercise could there be for a basic “two-finger keyboardist” like me?

9. The wooden-clacker percussion thing (Tatsuro Yamashita’s castanets?) that comes in at 2:10 of Das Neue Japanische Elektronische Volkslied. The riff made this my favorite song on the album on first listen, but this element of the percussion, once I caught on to what it's doing, cemented it there. The song is in 4/4; in the first measure, the clacker falls on the first and fourth beats, and in the second measure, on the third. Talk about wonderfully perverse.

10. The ridiculous bass and ...beatboxing? sounds in Plastic Bamboo. Anybody who’s only familiar with the serious-faced, classical-minded Sakamoto of his later years should listen to Plastic Bamboo and War Head.

11. The atmospheric B-sections of Plastic Bamboo, which sound like a direct reference for Chasing the Black-Caped Man in the Final Fantasy VII soundtrack.

12. The ambient final minute of Plastic Bamboo: didn’t see that coming, did you?

13. The “lonely kung fu master striving to perfect his art even in this decadent modern era” stylings of The End of Asia.

14. The adaptation of Chinese Communist anthem The East is Red, with which Sakamoto closes the album. Xoo Multiplies ends with it too. There’s a revolutionary-Communist themed noodle restaurant here in Xiamen that plays a few gentle folk arrangement of ‘50s classics on loop. I eat there a lot and must have heard The East is Red three hundred times. I didn’t recognize it — Sakamoto changed parts of the tune — but if you listen to one after the other, you’ll notice the similarity. It’s good sequencing: Thousand Knives opens with the Mao poem, The End of Asia closes with The East Is Red. Also, Thousand Knives and The End of Asia have the only guitar solos.

15. The context that the album gives to Tong Poo. After you get to know this record well, Tong Poo comes to sound like an epic outtake from its sessions. The structure is like Grasshoppers, two iterations of a supremely catchy melody bookending a long, strange, mesmerizing jam. 

15. The fucking front cover! Possibly even better than the album itself. None other than Yukihiro OTM Takahashi picked out Ryuichi's suit.

Translation: Lotus Love (Yellow Magic Orchestra)

The general arc of Yellow Magic Orchestra's discography looks something like this:

1978 - Yellow Magic Orchestra (the "electronic exotica" project as originally conceived; practically a Hosono solo album)

1979 - Solid State Survivor (a sister album to the above, featuring more Sakamoto and Takahashi songs)

1980 - X∞Multiplies (huge left turn)

1981 - BGM (huge left turn)

1981 - Technodelic (a sister album to the above)

1983 - Naughty Boys (huge left turn)

1983 - Service (a sister album to the above)

1992 - Technodon (huge left turn)

...which suggests that, if they'd made a follow-up to Technodon shortly thereafter, it would have been a sister album. (X∞Multiplies, the apparent outlier, has a sister album too, but it's a Takahashi solo record, 1980's Murdered by the Music.)

The crazy left turns are part of what make exploring the band's catalogue so fun. It's hard to imagine the band's debut if you're coming off of Hosono's Tropical Trilogy like I was. Neither Solid State Survivor nor X∞Multiplies would lead you to imagine anything like BGM. And Naughty Boys is probably the greatest blast of all. 

It was, in fact, a conscious effort to self-combust. "You know what? Instead of being experimental and trend-setting this time, let's just make a dumb J-pop record that adheres to all the trends. Let's eat ourselves." It wouldn't have been made at all (oh frightening thought) if their record label, Alfa, hadn't twisted their arm. And then Naughty Boys was such a hit that they had to make another, which they named Service: like, fanservice.

The point of all this is that Lotus Love, Hosono's song, is the only thing on Naughty Boys in which you might recognize the Yellow Magic Orchestra from two years before. It has that weird, off-kilter, spiritual vibe; for this one song alone, they allowed half a hand to stray back into that BGM/Technodelic darkness...

...but lyrically it's resplendent. 

.

A feeling that never changes,
eternally returning and reverberating:
I love you.
Petals in the inner corner of the eye,
the customary incantation in the throat:
I love you.

Baby, come leap through time!
Baby, let's go meet outside the world.

Sitting in the dusk.
Invisible words:
I love you.
And when fatigue overcomes me,
I become like snow, melting in sunlight:
you love me.

Baby, come leap through time!
Baby, let's go meet outside the world.
Baby, let's go meet outside the world.

An incantation surreptitiously grazing
a mouth seen briefly, in a dream:
love, love, love.

Baby, come leap through time!
Baby, let's go meet outside the world.
Baby, let's go meet outside the world.

Assorted Gems: Cochin Moon

HARUOMI HOSONO & TADANORI YOKOO - COCHIN MOON (1978)

I’m teaching a Yellow Magic Orchestra seminar at the uni this term. Normally, I would hope that “presiding over” will eventually become a more accurate descriptor than “teaching,” but I don’t know if it will this time. Nearly everyone who signed up is as introverted as me. 

We’re going over one album a week, moving chronologically, if selectively: fourteen albums from Paraiso to Nokto de la Galaksia Fervojo. The students have to write a 1500-character essay (Chinese characters, that is) about each record. It isn’t fair to ask them to do something I wouldn’t do myself, so I’m trying to keep up.

During the class yesterday evening, I turned the lights off and played Side A of Cochin Moon, the Hotel Malabar suite, through a little Sony portable speaker — not the best sound quality (such weak bass, which when you’re playing a Hosono record amounts to sacrilege) but serviceable: the sound filled the room and the song felt huge. 

It’s been ten years since I was last at a concert, and at concerts the sound is often, if for the band’s own good purposes, too loud, isn’t it? (And when it isn’t, things can be miserable, like the one Radiohead show I got to see — when they were touring my favorite of their albums, no less — The King of Limbs.) My wife doesn’t share my music taste so I rarely play anything through a speaker at home, and anyway at home there are always distractions. 

But to sit in the dark, in a plainly furnished classroom, with a bunch of near-strangers (so no one’s going to begin chatting), at night, and just listen — that’s really something.

I must’ve heard Cochin Moon forty or fifty times before last night, but hearing Hotel Malabar this way, it felt like there were entire sections I’d never heard before. I like to think that, when I listen to music, I pay pretty close attention. But most of my listening gets done when I’m biking to work, or doing housework. Whole minutes get sucked into whirlpools: I'm biking along, my mind on the music, when somebody appears ahead, so I need to focus on that, or else I get distracted by the birds taking off over the bay, or there’s some particularly oily pot in among the dishes, and one distracted thought leads to another, and next thing I know, two or three minutes have gone by in which I haven’t really registered what I’m hearing.

Then there were the sections that did feel very familiar, but this time, listening in the dark, I was disorientingly clueless as to how long they would last. I knew which part would come next — it’s a twenty-minute song, but there are a lot of changes along the way, small and big — the goofy synth-bass solo, the long burst of TV-feedback, the disconnected voices, all kinds of synthy variations and melody lines — and yet there were times yesterday when I sat there listening to the loops or ambient interludes and found myself thinking, “No way, this is still happening? It was never this long before!” — and not in a bad way. 

In an essay from the late ‘90s, Hosono writes that, when they were in India together in ‘78, Tadanori Yokoo persuaded him to try and summon UFOs together. They would step outdoors in the dark of night and send their signals upward. It was not until after they were through with a horrible weeklong bout of dysentery (so bad that they both began to wonder whether they’d make it out of India alive... though actually, getting dysentery was apparently the primary reason Hosono went; Yokoo had gotten sick on a previous trip too and described the experience as a spiritual cleansing as well as a physical one), not until after the Madam Consul General of Madras had healed them both through a combination of her mighty supernatural capacities and some good-old down-home Japanese cooking (Yokoo in his autobiograpy: "The consul seemed to be frightened by something, but the consul's wife was like a bodhisattva. She'd had all kinds of incredible supernatural experiences") that they actually did, successfully, call one over. It changed Hosono’s life. 

But first they spent a long while trying and failing. And listening to Hotel Malabar yesterday, marveling at how long that repetitive, cycling rhythmic section of the Upper Floor segment actually is, those failed attempts came to mind. The music sounds like two seekers standing on a beach in South India, or out in the roof garden of their hotel, sending one signal after another up into the night. No answer? Try again. No answer? Try again. No answer? Try again...

Another thing that became clear yesterday was that Side A is not pop music. It gives exactly zero fucks about you staying interested. Pop music, generally speaking, wants to grab your attention and hold it; this song doesn’t. You have to approach Hotel Malabar on its terms. Either you give yourself over completely and trust that Hosono is in fact doing something awesome, however weird or unnerving or cold — or you get distracted and end up missing beautiful things. 

Another great thing about yesterday's listen was realizing that, although Hotel Malabar is divided into three segments, each with two distinct subtitles (so, quite a conceptual set-up... by the way, all these mentions of triangles — the Triangle Circuit on the Sea Forest, and a Moving Triangle? exactly how many tracks are there on each side of Cochin Moon? — cool, huh? But the insight doesn't originate with me, all credit to Li Jiahao), it really is just one long song. I don’t say that merely because there’s no break in the music. It’s that the segment divisions feel arbitrary, sonically speaking: for all the times I’d heard the album before, I could not have told you, as I listened last night, “Okay, right here is where Upper Floor begins,” or, “All right, here we go: Roof Garden!” 

I called Hotel Malabar a suite, above, but it isn’t. Side B of YMO’s debut: now that’s a suite. Hotel Malabar is as much a single entity as Richard Dawson’s The Hermit.

I used to find Hotel Malabar too abstract. Interesting, yes, but I preferred the pop experiments on Side B. I still adore Side B — it’s so easy to love, it sucks you right in with that gurgling “aww shit, here comes the next round of diarrhea” sound effect — plus Madam Consul General is just insane (and ten minutes long!) (and so is Hum Ghar Sajan, what the hell! I always thought it lasted four or five minutes tops) — but I think last night was the final stage of Side A’s coup d’etat.

The sides are so stylistically distinct that Hosono credited the songwriting on Side B to a nom-de-plume. Side B is the pop side. It’s still pretty weird (this is a Hosono record, what do you want) and it doesn’t exactly make concessions to the listener, but it’s catchy and melodic, with clear and prominent rhythms. Listen to the incredible opening minute of Hepatitis: there’s only one spare, sporadic beat (it's not even there, to start with) and one solitary melody line, but you catch the rhythm right away.

Side A is dark, and Side B’s opener, Hepatitis, while fun and goofy, is still on the oppressive side. A few students compared it to a virus running rampant in a human host: it's the background music the virus hears as it goes about wreaking havoc. But the next song, Hum Ghar Sajan, is something else, something ecstatic and bright. One of the things Hosono does so well is remind you how ecstatic, how saturated with light, life is — or can be, when everything is okay — or better than okay, rather, because it’s elevated joy and enlightenment that Hosono tends to deal in. He’s got a late song called Miracle Light. That’s what his music is; or, that’s what it’s been to me.

So -- one morning last week, I was listening to Cochin Moon on my bike ride to work. I’d woken before dawn. The sun was up when I got outside, but stuck behind a curtain of clouds. Then, as Hum Ghar Sajan was beginning — as its high, happy, peaceful melodies escaped from behind their own veils of mist — the clouds parted and the sun blazed forth. For those last few perfect minutes of the commute, I rode bathed in light.

Assorted Gems: Paraiso

HARRY HOSONO AND THE YELLOW MAGIC BAND - PARAISO  (1978)

One nice thing about being a westerner getting into Haruomi Hosono is the lack of context. There isn’t much available in English. Apparently there are some interviews and contextual bits in the Light in the Attic reissues of certain albums, including this one, but I don’t have access to those. Generally, all you can do is listen to the music and imagine the rest for yourself. 

So it was a surprise to watch the “No Smoking” Hosono documentary (with Chinese subtitles) and learn that Hosono felt Paraiso was an artistic step back from the heights of Tropical Dandy and Bon Voyage Co. Those, he says, were made under the influence of the amazing music he was just then discovering. But no vine of inspiration can produce fruit forever, and Paraiso was made in the wake of its wilting. He felt himself bogging down in something... and ended up taking a legendary trip to India with his friend Yokoo Tadanori — India, where Hosono contracted the dysentery that he believed would amount to a spiritual cleansing as well as a physical one but which, once he’d contracted it, he thought would kill him; India, where he saw his first UFO; India, out of which came his next album, Cochin Moon.

The funny thing is, listening to Paraiso, you’d never guess that it is a more desolate or somehow less inspired affair than the first two installments of what people came to call the Tropical Trilogy. It’s as fiercely colorful as the two before it. The Hiroshi Sato / Ryuichi Sakamoto piano/keyboard/synth team meeting the Tin Pan Alley family makes for an outrageous and beautiful sound. There are plenty of very happy songs. Can someone listen to Tokyo Rush and not smile? How many listens does it take before Asatoya Yunta starts melting any listener down into delighted mush? And is Worry Beads not one of the most uplifting songs ever recorded?

But now that I’ve got done translating the lyrics of the Tropical Trilogy into English, one difference does become clear.

Lyrically, the whole affair started with a burst of longing: Nettaiya (Sultry Night) on Tropical Dandy, a drifty city blues about wishing you were on a beach in Trinidad. At first Hosono thought he’d arrange it like a song by The Band, thus carrying on with the spirit of his first solo album, Hosono House; but a chain of events led him to recast himself as Harry “The Crown” Hosono, the white-suited and mustachioed Tropical Dandy himself. The remaining songs on Dandy were full of whimsy and fantasy: about being a kung-fu hero pursuing a rival across the desert; or a castaway who believes he sees his hometown beneath the waves as he poles his raft along; another that’s sort of about being a member of the moon race, vacationing on earth... 

Bon Voyage Co kept things light and playful too, for the most part. On both albums, the darkest that things get is in bright-sounding songs with lyrics about animals destined for slaughter: a soon-to-be Peking Duck on Tropical Dandy, and on Bon Voyage Co, a dog who thinks little of the fact that, come dawn, he’ll be butchered for food. Bon Voyage Co also has Hong Kong Blues, with the opium addiction and the exile from East Asia; but that’s a cover tune.

Bon Voyage Co ends with a song in which, to comfort a grieving partner, but maybe not only to that end, the narrator gazes up at the moon and tells of the gondola he sees drifting up there in that sea of light. The album’s final line of lyrics is, “Let’s get on,” and after it’s sung, the cheerful reggae rhythm gives way to an ambient outro, Hosono falsettoing along, as the song’s two characters get on board and sail up and away from the sad realms of earth...

All through Paraiso, we’re deep inside the longing that the Exotica Lullaby characters are able to jump out of: they do make it up to that gondola. In Paraiso, the narrator is left waiting at the pier, aware that, try as he might, and desire it as he might, he won’t manage to make the jump; the boat won’t come. Or if it does, it’ll be in that gray and distant “someday” of Paraiso’s closing verse, and in the future tense of its amazing chorus:

       From the pier, I'll leap aboard a ship hailing from a distant land —
       adios, farewell! —
       and blow a kiss to the lights of the city,
       gazing at them as I would at a woman's face...

The lights of the city: of Tokyo, of course — which is to say, we’re back where we began with Tokyo Rush. But in the opener, the narrator emphasized the trips out — to Honolulu, and, wonderfully, Hong Kong (of all the places to go when one needs a break from high-speed urban livin’) — while the narrator in Paraiso admits, with resignation, that he’ll probably stay forever — “I could get used to living here, if I had to...”

Even the pier where he waits for this ship that will, supposedly, someday come pick him up, can only be reached in dreams. The second verse makes explicit that the paradise of the album’s title is a mirage. The band can travel there, sure enough, on Sakamoto’s insane synthesizer blast, but then it all melts away and we’re back inside the same gentle rhythm and sway. Never mind all the talk of paradise, it’s time to grow old.

If you re-examine the album in the light of its closer, you notice other things.

Shimendoka, taken on its own, is as hopeful and energizing as songs get, Hosono dismissing the demons that roam the road to holiness in chorus after chorus. “The way may be full of flowers or it may be full of storms. It doesn’t matter. I’m going.” But if you think about Paraiso and the ship that never comes (no matter how many languages the narrator says “goodbye” in), you may notice that each verse in Shimendoka starts with a conditional: “In the morning, I’ll set out.” “When the flowers are in bloom, I’ll set out.” “When the winds come blowing, I’ll set out.” “And when night falls, I’ll arrive.” All “when [A] / I’ll [B]” formulations. Strictly speaking, the narrator hasn’t gone anywhere. He feels ready to get moving, but it doesn’t mean he’s moving.

The gamelan meets drum machine instrumental, Shambhala Signal, makes me think of a pilgrim or spiritual searcher up on some lonesome mountain road, who suddenly hears the strains of a song: music from Shambhala, the holy city, whose people are calling him: “This is the end of your travels, you’ve found us, we’re here! Come!” The music sounds like it’s emerging from just behind the next rise, or from between the trees, or behind them, somewhere closeby, the entrance to the city is near: but he can’t seem to find it. The music speeds up towards the end because the gates are closing. “Quickly! Come quickly!” But he doesn’t make it, and the song's abrupt ending is like the sound of the gates slamming shut.

It's a fitting end to the Tropical Trilogy. If it’s Tokyo you need to get away from, sure, you can take that relaxing trip to Hawaii. But if it’s earthly sorrows you’re trying to leave behind, there’s nowhere physical you can go. Nettaiya’s Trinidad has to be a Trinidad of the heart: and so there’s Worry Beads, one of the most beautiful songs Hosono ever wrote, in which he asks us to accompany him to the deserts of the moon (to return there, specifically, which makes me think he might be talking about childhood) so that we can plant the seeds of the desert inside our heart, so that they can bloom later, when we’re back in exile again. And when they do bloom, back on earth — as they will, the singer suggests, if instead of fighting and struggling to relieve your troubles and worries, you acknowledge them and count them and accept that they’re going to stick around, since after all, worry and suffering walk hand in hand with love (hence those beautiful lines, “The first bead for that child’s sake / The second bead for this child’s sake,” so mellifluous in Japanese) — well then, anything becomes possible, because (as Tolstoy phrased it) the kingdom of God is within you. “You can go anywhere, any place at all you can think of, you can go soon, you can go right away.”

In a sense, then, Worry Beads is the album closer. It’s the solution to the problem; or if not quite that, it’s still the most spiritually profound moment in the trilogy. It fades out on the choir chanting along with Haruomi, “Om namah chandraya, shantih, shantih, chandraya,” (“a Sanskrit mantra dedicated to the Hindu god of the moon, Chandra, its repetition said to bring clarity, insight, perspective, and calm, especially in times of confusion and distress”), so many voices lifted alongside his — it reminds me of Richard Dawson gathering his friends to sing the outro of The Hermit, another great moment of spiritual light.

But, marvelously, Worry Beads isn’t the closer, Paraiso is. Paraiso is the return to reality, the comedown after the vision. Ordinary, earthly reality is what you have to live with for years and years, even — especially — when the seeds of a spiritual vision are planted in your heart. In Paraiso we have the human longing for escape from sorrow into paradise after all, a longing that persists even when you know for sure that you can't get there. 

Hosono describes the escape route for us, but it’s buried under so many layers: he has to be dreaming, first of all; he has to dream of that one particular fantasy, second; he has to stubbornly chase the fantasy until he reaches the pier, third; and fourth, even when he makes it all the way to the pier, he still needs to wait for the ship to come. But for all that — and for all his disarming resignation, the “tomorrow I’ll try and fail again” — each chorus is packed full of goodbyes, as if he were truly leaving. “From the pier, I’ll leap aboard,” says the narrator. And blows the city — the vale of sorrow — a goodbye kiss.

The easygoing rhythm of the song belies the understated but urgent despair in the lyrics, and the resignation, the hope, the imagined joy.

I’ve barely mentioned the album's music. It's glorious — what else do you expect from Hosono? 

(Nic from Critter Jams has more to say about the music. Go read.)

Translation: Focus (Yellow Magic Orchestra)

Hosono's words, Hosono/Takahashi tune: Focus. I don't understand enough about photography to get the technical (or just metaphorical?) details of the shutter and position, and I'm iffy about the Japanese in a couple of places. Chinese YMO fans have translated all the songs on Naughty Boys, and their versions have been a key reference/comparison point as I make my own, but Focus seems to have confused the Chinese translator too.

So the words below are just an approximate version, one that gets the basic meaning across but misses the nuances. I'll give it another go in six months.

The chorus, translated by Peter Barakan, appears in parentheses.

.



Seems that it's happened again:
the day grew dark when I wasn't paying attention.
But these feelings broiling inside me

are not ordinary.

Out on the boulevard, it's a normal weekend.
The position is fixed, the shutter set.
Out on the boulevard, it's a noisy weekend.
The nausea's suppressed by the focus.

All of a sudden, at the street corner, 

I am plunged into a whirlpool of jealousy.
I saw a face I could never forget 

in the company of a secret silhouette.

(You'll be burning with a new love tonight,
and I'll be burning old pictures on my mind.)

An unexpected weekend —
I'm crushing the TRY-X I'm holding.
An apocalyptic weekend —
there you are, distinctly in focus.

My smile stiff, 

I shut my eyes.
The girl who, just moments earlier,

had turned her face towards the camera 

is now as distant as a star.

(You'll be burning with a new love tonight,

and I'll be burning old pictures on my mind.)

Translation: Expected Way (Yellow Magic Orchestra)

Today's translation from Naughty Boys is Yukihiro Takahashi's Expected Way, the tune and the words both his. I was working on it — I got to the second verse ("I didn't look back") — and started crying. How beautiful can a song get?

Anyone who knows Japanese will see that I've taken a few minor liberties for poetry/affect's sake. I will now defend myself.

When I translate prose fiction, I try to be as faithful to the author's style and word choice as humanly possible, but with lyrics, I'm finding that need less pressing. Lyrics, as a genre, are closer to poetry than to prose, and poetry is untranslatable: it needs to be rewritten into a new original if anything of its beauty or spirit is to survive. I think my modifications (or rather, shifts of emphasis) here are fair.

Also, I think Yukihiro would have liked them. According to this terrific interview with Peter Barakan, Sakamoto knew exactly what he wanted from the English versions of his lyrics, and counted on Barakan to get there for him; Hosono knew English well enough that Barakan's job was mostly just corrections and clarifications; but Takahashi was open to collaboration, and Barakan's renditions of Takahashi lyrics were closer to co-writes than straight-up translations. I like imagining that I might have kept the spirit of their work together alive in my own.

.

I have come a long way.
At last, I have arrived
and cast aside my heavy pack.
I think there is nothing left of what I left behind —

the light from the window, always the same,
the air inside the room I once loved,
the book lying open, always at the same page,
the cigarette butts in the ashtray...

I didn't look back
no matter who called after me.
I pushed the door open with my own two hands
and saw a road I'd never taken stretching ahead.

I'm certain you're the same as ever,
watching TV, laughing alone,
setting aside a half-finished cup of tea,
getting up when the doorbell rings.

[instrumental break]

[repeat above stanza]

If you can get an agitated heart to quiet down,
it will feel like a harbinger of something;
that's the strange sensation
that I want this song to get across.

Translation: Ongaku (Yellow Magic Orchestra)

A few years back, I found out that Caleb Mulkerin of Big Blood, my favorite band on earth, adored the Meat Puppets growing up. The Puppets wrote the three songs on Nirvana's MTV Unplugged that I've always liked best. The Goo Goo Dolls' A Boy Named Goo and Nirvana's Unplugged were the first two CDs I owned, age ten or eleven; I clearly remember how it felt to get them, that terrific Christmas Eve. Learning that Caleb loved the Puppets was a great moment too, one in which the distance between the ten-year-old and the thirty-year-old seemed suddenly to collapse in on itself.

As was I falling hard for the magnificent Peter Stampfel, there came a day when, for no particular reason, I pulled Tad Williams' Stone of Farewell off the shelf and, flipping through it, read the acknowledgments page. Peter Stampfel's name appeared in a list of people Tad felt he could count on if he ever needed protection from Norns. Flabbergasted, I did some googling and discovered that it was Stampfel who rescued the manuscript of Tailchaser's Song, Tad's debut novel, from DAW's slush pile. So the fantasy writer that my older brother had loved and gotten me into when I was eight or nine, and whom I read obsessively for years, and the underground musician who the twenty-nine-year old me was listening to obsessively, were old friends. 

What's more, John Cohen, the model for the title character in the Grateful Dead song Uncle John's Band (which was the song that finally broke down the defenses I'd built up against them as a preteen; the Dead had become my brother's favorite band, as eventually they would become mine too; he played them around the house all the time and I was intrigued, but also resisting, because I felt my brother had betrayed Pink Floyd, our old joint favorite) became a bandmate of Peter Stampfel's in the mid-to-late oughties somewhere, and together they recorded one of my favorite Stampfel albums, The Sound of America. "Come hear Uncle John's band," the Dead song enjoins.  I was listening to the Stampfel/Cohen every day.

As for this song, Ongaku (Music), comments on the premier Chinese streaming app note that Ryuichi Sakamoto wrote it for his daughter, Miu. I was looking up how old she would have been, and incidentally learned that she had grown up to become a voice actress, and that she voiced Kanzaki Hitomi, the main character in The Vision of Escaflowne, a classic anime series my brother and I had adored. Go figure, right? Twelve years old, thirty-four years old, what does the difference amount to, really? Apparently the heart has a steady center and the world is all connected, "past" and "future" both just myths.

The page for Naughty Boys on Discogs, which isn't typically the place I'd go looking for impassioned and insightful analysis, has an amazing comment section. Two quotes:

"Worth it for Ongaku alone. Absolutely brilliant track that perfectly captures a mid-80s Tokyo street scene. Brings tears to my eyes every time I hear it."

And:

"Another area where the album really shines is in the vocals. The thing about YMO is that not one of them has the greatest voice in a traditional pop music sense. Each of their voices has its own peculiarities, but here they're singing to their fullest potential anyway, straight from the heart. During the second verse of Ongaku we hear each of them taking a line of their own before joining together again in unison. The result is one of the more endearing moments in recorded music."

In short, we might call Ongaku the Yellow Magic Orchestra equivalent of The Beatles' Because. Or rather — it's their The End! — except with vocal lines taking the place of the electric guitar solos.

The last line of the second verse is beautifully succinct in Japanese, literally: "you — train, goto-goto" the last word being onomatopoeia for the sound a train makes as its moves. Context suggests that the reference is to a toy train that Miu is playing with, but trying to put "toy train" into the English version ruined the magic.

Miu was two or three when Ryuichi wrote this for her. My daughter Vanya will soon be two and a quarter. Musically the song is way beyond my capabilities — this is Ryuichi Sakamoto we're talking about here! — but lyrically, in heart and sentiment and to an extent also in style, it could might as well be mine.

.

I spread our atlas open: hey, that's music.

You climb onto the piano: hey, that's music.

Can't wait 'til we can sing together!

I spread our atlas open: hey, that's music.

You climb onto the piano: hey, that's music.

I nibble on an apple: hey, that's music.

And you rattle the train: hey, that's music.

Can't wait 'til we can sing together!

Can't wait 'til we can dance together!

Translation: Kai-Koh (Yellow Magic Orchestra)

In September of last year, thanks to some great pieces of writing by the wonderful Nic from Critter Jams, I finally set out on the Haruomi Hosono expedition I've been promising myself ever since I first heard of him (in Devendra Banhart interviews, who cites Hosono as a chief influence and massive favorite). This deep dive became one of the most beautiful things to happen to me in a beautiful year. My list of all-time favorite albums has been growing at an unprecedented rate. It's as if everything Hosono touches turns to pure, living, sustaining water. 

Hosono founded the band Yellow Magic Orchestra in 1978 and treated it as his primary musical outlet until the band's dissolution in 1983. His bandmates, Ryuichi Sakamoto and Yukihiro Takahashi, were geniuses in their own right. The music they made together (and separately) is insane — lovely — hilarious — dark — it can make me want to bounce madly around the room, or keep still in rapt attention, or curl up on the floor and cry (in short, see this clip).

For most of the band's run, they worked with translators Chris Mosdell and Peter Barakan and recorded songs in English. But for 1983's Naughty Boys, they reverted to Japanese. I haven't found satisfactory English translations online and thought I might try to make some.

Kai-Koh (Chance Encounter) is a Sakamoto song. It's absolutely huge. It picks you up and throws you against a stone wall. The words, though, are:

.

I can't sing
any more beautiful love songs.
I've been walking alone, on foot.
And I'm saying goodbye to the person I've been until now.

I've run too far away.
There is nothing left at all now.
I can't stay here.
And I'm saying goodbye to the person I've been until now.


.

Then the first verse is repeated.

The whole album (Naughty Boys) seems to be like this, its sonically sublime and unguardedly, sky-sweepingly joyous music rubbing up against sadness, hesitation, longing, regret. It's either the happiest sad album ever made or the saddest happy one.

Assorted Gems: Visions of the Higher Dream

  

DANIEL ROMANO - VISIONS OF THE HIGHER DREAM  (2020)

I was going through an Uncut UK phase and read a review of Finally Free, about how it was this weirdly overambitious and unsuccessful foray into psychedelic folk from proven country crooner/retro rocker Daniel Romano, with echoes of Van Morrison the album might have been better off without. Of course I looked the album up immediately. I played it the same night and was blown away. Love on first listen.

That was 2019. Nothing else out under Daniel’s name at that point was even half as good as Finally Free, so all I could do was await a new release and wonder: god forbid Finally Free was a fluke? No previous releases suggested that a transcendent album was imminent. Maybe nothing that followed would hint of the past transcendence either. Such visitations happen.

2020 came. My wife and I were visiting family a few hundred miles north of Wuhan when the shit hit the fan. We hightailed it back to our tropical town in south China. We lived on an idyllic college campus. Everyone had gone away for winter break and stayed away, and sometimes it felt like the only creatures around were us and the birds. I read a lot of Agnon and Le Guin. 

When I thought to check on Dan Romano again, Visions of the Higher Dream was out. So was Content to Point the Way. So was Super Pollen (though that turned out not to matter, the songs are charming but it’s old material, Modern Pressure era). So was Forever Love’s Fool, the 20-minute song featuring a member of Tool for chrissakes. The Infidels cover record had just come out. I love Infidels! I love Tool! Who was this man?!

This album, Visions of the Higher Dream, was the first of six Dan-penned full-lengths to see the light in 2020 (do not trust the You’ve Changed Records promo material, with its talk of ten full-length albums; they’re just feeding the lore, I think as a dig at the reviewers who cannot write the name “Daniel Romano” without prefixing it with “the prolific”). Hearing it, I was relieved and bemused. It wasn’t the direction I would have most liked him to go in (which was okay with me; artists never owe it to us to go the way we want them to, it’s up to us to follow, or to give up the chase) and parts of it sounded unremarkable, though clearly better than the rough efforts leading up to Finally Free. 

But there were also recognizable flashes of the beauty and soul that had infused Finally Free. Lilac About Thy Crown is one of those songs that would probably appear in any Romano fan’s top five. Boy in a Crow-Skin Cape: try and resist that chorus. At Times the Fools Sing Freely has Scarlet Rivera-esque violin. Paper Rose sounds like a throwback to Daniel’s country era, but ends with the most soulful vocals on the album, two long wordless sighs that recall the impossible beauty at the end of Celestial Manis. 

Clearly, Finally Free had not been a fluke. The divine host had come and gone, perhaps, but some among its number had thought, “This is not a bad resting place,” and settled in.

When I tried listening to Visions of the Higher Dream earlier this week, I had to stop two thirds of the way through and go work on my own music. That’s one of the things that great music does — it makes me feel like anything is possible, and that a weak will and lack of effort are the only things keeping musicians from consistently releasing one or two masterpiece albums a year. (Bad music, on the other hand, makes me want to quit: what if I’m as awful at it, and as evidently unaware of the awfulness, as the person who made the bad music I’m currently hearing? Not worth all the effort, then, is it?)

It’s a fitting reaction, too, because the album seems to be about making music. The visions of the higher dream within the artist’s eyes or mind are transformed, in the artist’s hands, into songs. 

Lilac About Thy Crown is about the relationship that a songwriter has with inspiration, as well as with the seed-idea, the newborn song itself, and finally the song when it is finished and ready to leave the writer behind. “Oh, the merry world around me,” Daniel sings as the song begins, “through windows I spy juniper / At times the beauty stuns me / and sets me toward the ground.” Having drawn in the life-breath of the world he moves in, the artist is moved to turn to the soil and make something beautiful of his own. “Oh, when the season greets me,” goes a later verse, “I’ll ring out like a hammer / No place will be unknowing / No word will be untrue.”

When you ask an artist why they make art, the answer tends to boil down to, “Well, I can’t not make it.” Or as Daniel puts it: “The tide is slowly turning / And the universe aligning / To a new and simple finding / That I need not make a sound — / But [then] everything about me / Would start itself to spoiling.” It would be my favorite verse in the song if not for the one that comes in a quiet moment near the end: “My love is like a sunny brook / That shines out through the woodland / Impossible in beauty / Unlikely to be found,” then the band comes back in, and: “Yet she must go away me / Her fortune it is calling” — and the chorus, which had always gone “And ye are but a baby, lilac about thy crown,” this last time becomes, “And she no more a baby, lilac about the ground.” The new song is finished, and ready to depart; the songwriter does not get to know what will happen to her next. Instead, the song will come find us, the listeners, and live and grow with us, not with the one who made her. But at that moment, as she reaches her fullness, no longer an infant who relies on her maker, it is the maker who sees her beauty most clearly, and who acknowledges, calmly, sweetly (Daniel still being essentially a cult figure) that she, in all her raiments of beauty, is “unlikely to be found.”

Boy in a Crow-Skin Cape is more overt. It’s as beautiful and touching a description of the songwriting process as I’ve ever come across:

       Often I slip into somewhere
       and everything else slips away.
       When I return I’ve a melody’s yearn,
       born of where, no one can say, but

       isn’t it some kind of splendour,
       something celestial and wild?
       I feel the heat of the heavens on me,

       you see the head of a child.

The vocal delivery is vulnerable and blissfully strung-out, like Lennon singing Strawberry Fields Forever or Lucy in the Sky. The chorus has this incredible uplift to it, first hinging on repetitions of the title line (“sometimes I feel like a...”), the band building up, the drums fueling the rise, then an explosive second part to the chorus (“I can’t untangle the wonder! How could you ever relate?”), and finally, buoyed by Moondance horns, the kind of dance folk interlude that Richard Thompson might have thrown into one of his tales of squalor and sorrow on a Richard & Linda album.

Paper Rose is a plea for love, made by someone fed up with heartache. “Give me synthetic ribbons and bows,” goes the extended metaphor, “no more a darling that comes and then goes / Never to wither, never to close / Love like a paper rose.” As in Lilac About Thy Crown and Boy in a Crow-Skin Cape, the vulnerability is fearless and deep. There are lines in the opening verse that could be a manifesto for the whole album: “Let it be passionate, tender and warm / Almost a matter of fact.” I get chills just reading the lyrics off the page:

       Make me a fine imitation.
       Make me a comparable cast.

       Make sure it loves me with all of its heart.
       Make it of something that lasts.

       Bring me my sweet simulation!
       Bring me my fraudulent flame!
       Let it be just like the real thing
       but make so its mind doesn’t change.

       Give me synthetic...

This is Daniel Romano: open and real with you, the listener, like a brother or dear friend (who, granted, spends half his time alone, reading poetry and mysticism).

At Times the Fools Sing Freely is a parable about performing, about the contrast between the artists, who put themselves on the line night after night, and a public that doesn’t look past the entertainment factor: “ ‘At times the fools sing freely / Let them sing,’ pray the people / ‘They are wretched sometimes, yes / But rarer times are quite profound / They do not bring us danger...’ ” The song has a great segment about how inspiration works — “They ride the works of others / Collecting little tatters / And swallow it for keeping / Where nobody can go,” and also this vivid image: “The brothers dance and twirl / Like dogs caught in a wheel” (I always heard “carved” instead of “caught,” and as often happens, I think my mishearing is better, if less thematically apt). 

The title track could be about love or it could be about art: “I just can’t hide it anymore / There’s things I need to say / These visions that I’ve got / They just won’t go away.” Being the title track, the words sound like the manifesto of someone whose artistic spirit was liberated during the making of Finally Free. I love the bridge: “Maybe I’m lost in a reverie / Maybe a trick of the light / [But] maybe I see what I hold in my heart / And others aren’t seeing it right.” 

Even when I can’t parse the lyrics so confidently (and, especially where the more metaphorical songs are concerned, like Lilac About Thy Crown, who’s to say I've understood it correctly?), Daniel’s ability to hone in on an evocative phrase or image helps lodge the songs in my heart. “Contented and still, with my senses expressed — / Where can I take my rest?” “And me, I cannot be more lonely, I cannot be more lonely.” “The days are gathering in pyramids.”

The music was recorded mostly by Daniel himself. In that way, it calls Paul McCartney’s self-titled to mind, all the more so since Daniel — like Paul — is a terrific drummer. But really the sound is more like a slightly punkier, slightly funkier, and somewhat more ragged and lo-fi Rolling Thunder Revue — the aesthetic of 1976 with the precision and melodic focus of 1975, let's say. If you like the ’75 live version of Tonight You’ll Be Staying Here with Me, Visions of the Higher Dream is likely to win you over fast. 

If the album as a whole sounds samey to start with, give it time. Daniel is a master of — well, catchy vocal melodies, first and foremost, the kind that grab your attention early and make you want to relisten to a song just to indulge in its chorus — but also of little details. There are countless great flourishes and melody lines that weave in and out of the arrangements (the organ runs in the chorus of Nothing is Still in a Shaken Heart! the electric-guitar-&-drum-punctuated exclamations of “feudal lord” in the opener! the way the feedback at its end segues into the shimmering, billowing starlight of the horn-led intro to I Cannot Be More Lonely!), and plenty of surprising turns, like the full-on psychedelia in the middle of the straightforwardly funky ala The-Band-in-’75 Nobody Sees a Lowered Face, or the aforementioned quiet bit in Lilac About Thy Crown. 

It took me more than a year of steady listening to realize that every song on here is excellent (though the greatest songs do tower over the others). But I got there. Come back to thank me when you do too.

(Back to: A Personal Canon)

Interview: Carson McHone on Still Life

This is the second email interview I've done with a beloved artist and while I haven't yet figured out much about how I can do this sort of thing better, I've learned a bit about what I shouldn't be doing at all. For instance: writing questions that turn out to be longer than the answers. Seeing an artist annotate a devoted admirer's overreaching thesis can be interesting, I suppose. But it's bad form — it's not the point of an interview — and I apologize. In my defense, Carson and two of her Outfit bandmates did publish a great piece called Julianna Riolino, Carson McHone, and Daniel Romano Want You to Tell Them What Their Songs Mean. And so I did, last summer, and Carson was gracious, and responded.

Some context for the second-to-last question: for months and months, as I fell deeper and deeper in love with Still Life, I was convinced that several of the songs had been written about Daniel Romano, the man that Carson married at some point after writing all these songs but before recording them. As it turns out, I was reading too much into things. I am an idealist and a diehard monogamist, and I guess I couldn't help but assume that a love as fierce and beautiful as is sung of in the title track, or Folk Song, or Tried, would lead, in the end, to marriage. Though marriage itself is, of course, not an ending, so much as where things really begin. 

One other bit of context: I'm a liberal arts teacher at a university in China and included most of the Still Life album, as well as the two Camera Varda Variations, in the syllabus of a songwriting class last autumn. And three of the four Still Life videos are part of a music video class I've taught twice over. The students love Carson. 

So here is our interview, or rather "Still Life: the Thesis, by Sigismund Sludig — as Annotated, Thoughtfully and Patiently, by Carson McHone."

-=- -=- -=- -=- -=- -=- -=- -=- -=- -=-

Sigismund Ashlay Sludig: What is your relationship with albums you have finished? Do you listen to them after the final mixes are done?

Carson McHone: Still Life was the first record that I was more immediately proud of and could listen back to as a record and enjoy. The others took more time to be able to revisit.

Sigismund: Has your relationship with the songs on Still Life changed after touring them?

Carson: Yes definitely. You begin to have a relationship to the performance and less so to the initial feeling that brought about the song — also with different band personnel you think more about the instrumentation, and some have taken on different shapes or leaned this way or that — I’ve become more playful and less precious about them I think — I hope.  

Hawks Don’t Share

Sigismund: I love how this starts, the two electric guitars storming into the left and right channel ahead of anything else. Are you and Daniel playing one electric each, as you’ve done live? Or was that two Daniels? Or two Carsons? Do you remember the moment it became clear that the song needs to start this way?

Carson: The two guitar parts on the record are both Daniel, and when we do it live we split them up between the two of us. The back and forth between those parts is in line with the push and pull, thematically, of the lyrics — so it felt immediately right to have those parts playing off each other.  

Sigismund: How did Hawks Don’t Share end up being chosen to open the album? Were there other contenders?

Carson: It’s one of the oldest songs, it was a staple in any live set I did and kicked the album into gear and sort of set the stage as a bit of an emotional battleground, while also being where my last album left off in a way, just chronologically. 

Sigismund: Was that terrifically vivid image of the couple in the car, frozen mid-argument, the impetus for the rest of the song?

Carson: Yes, that verse was written years prior actually and forgotten about, then I picked it up again after reading Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast and finished the song. 

Sigismund: Lines that thrilled the students in my songwriting class: “I’ve got a soft spot for your madness, and your fierce embrace, and the quiet violence in your face.” I love when a break-up song has space both for bitterness (as in the first verse) and clear-headed regret (“how cruel it is that we mistrust”) on the one hand, and on the other, words like the ones just quoted, of still-sincere awe at that unknowable, still-desired one now lost.

Carson: Thank you.

Sigismund: The video moves me to tears almost every time I watch it. In another interview, you spoke about the poignance and power of the contrast between the relationship depicted in the song lyrics and the community celebrated in the video. Could you tell me more about how the video, and your idea for it, took shape? There are no cuts; was it done in a single take?

Carson: I love this video, I’m glad you like it! No cuts, all one take, first try. Hawks was actually the last video we made for the album, all the rest were made sort of in and out of quarantine, just Daniel and myself, like the record. But since finishing the album, and spending time in my new home and playing and working alongside this new group of creatives, I wanted to showcase this newfound camaraderie, and luckily the crew were on board, which I am very grateful for! I also love it when a music video narrative sort of exists parallel to the song — so they can both exist as their own separate pieces of art.  

 

Still Life 

Sigismund: The electric guitar solo at the end sounds absolutely spontaneous, it’s like the sudden roar of an engine — but clearly whoever is playing it learned it well enough to double-track it, so precision and forethought are in there too. You’ve said that the song underwent a long journey from the way you wrote it on guitar to its final album arrangement. I imagine the guitar solo being the explosion that decided once and for all that this was the arrangement that the song needed. Am I being fanciful?

Carson: The demo I made for this song does the opposite at the end — it completely breaks down, whereas the record version takes off. It could have gone either way really, and it did, but this is the version that made the most sense to share, and it’s one that carries energy we can harness night after night on stage. The initial version was powerful, but devastating, this one is my favorite, and the energy carries on.

Sigismund: In an interview that I can’t locate anymore, you spoke of how the lyrics to some of the songs on Still Life have an aggression that is new to your work. It’s all over Folk Song (though subtly, carefully held back) and here too: “Everybody gets tired. They can’t just stick around.” But then there’s this complicated balance with the sheer, beautiful, open vulnerability of the chorus, and also with the partly self-directed rage of lines like “it just don’t seem right I am stuck here, inside a still life.” The swirl of emotions and decisions in this song is breathtaking. What did it feel like, writing these lyrics?

Carson: Still Life was one that just fell out, whereas other songs are sometimes constructed, labored over to get them just so, this one came out all at once, as is — the only thing that changed was the delivery — that solo at the end. 

 

Fingernail Moon

Sigismund: The lull of Fingernail Moon after the blast of the title track: was it always clear that these two would appear in sequence? I can imagine Fingernail Moon being a great closer too, lush and poignant as it is.

Carson: Fingernail Moon actually used to be a song I’d start my live sets with, so it was a contender to open the album for a while, and I’m a bit of a slave to chronology, but then once you go through the process of recording, and the album itself takes on its own new life, songs fall into different places for different reasons — but I think that’s why it ended up closer to the top, because for me it was older than some of the others. 

Sigismund: When I lived in the United States, I drove around a lot. I never made it as far south as Austin, but I drove through the Panhandle, and Oklahoma, and many times through the prairies of Colorado. I can picture that sliver of a moon in a summer sky above the prairie just as well as I can imagine it above the snowed-over towns of upstate New York, over near Welland. Either way, Fingernail Moon puts me in mind of the distance between earth and sky, of night and its mystery. Do you ever set out writing a song just wanting to convey a particular scene, a particular place, more than an emotion or story per se?

Carson: Absolutely. I’ve never thought of myself as a great story teller, I usually set out to distill a feeling or a scene. 

Sigismund: Still Life, the album, has a heavy heart. But the person who speaks through its songs is fundamentally, despite all the pain and uncertainty, undaunted. Here, the speaker recognizes herself in the moon whose glow is all but gone; but she is also aware of the vibrancy that exists, but which just now happens to be hidden, in herself and in that celestial companion. “It’s dark but it’s true.” Actually, it’s kind of like those lines from the second verse in Hawks Don’t Share, about the quiet violence. The speaker can see both things at once (in Hawks, the end of the love and the strength of the love; in Fingernail Moon, the diminished light and the waiting fullness). 

Carson: Yes, there’s still hope, you’re still speaking, or singing, or thinking. 

Sigismund: Has this proven a favorite with people who’ve gotten back to you about the album? It’s garnered several appreciative comments on YouTube, and my students, for whom this song wasn’t assigned listening, went and found it for themselves, telling me the following week, “Carson’s Fingernail Moon is so good!!”

Carson: Ah, that’s nice to hear, yes, I haven’t done it that much live since the record came out, but I have a few times, and folks remember it and respond to it, which is really nice.  

 

Someone Else

Sigismund: One of my favorite things about the album as a whole is your vocal phrasing. The melodies you sing are beautiful, distinct, catchy; and when I sing the songs to myself, or in my head, I know how the melodies go. But if I try to sing along with the actual recordings, I’m constantly wrong. There is such surprise and meaning and majesty in the ways you bring syllables to the fore or hold off, waiting, waiting... the choruses might have the same melodies and words but thanks to the phrasing, they’re always different. Someone Else is one of the songs where this vocal approach is most prominent. Is it a technique you had to hone, or something that evolved and blossomed, slowly but naturally, over time?

Carson: That song in particular had to sound natural - because of the nature of the lyrics — I wanted to write something very straightforward, no hidden meaning, just blatant, not trying to be anything other than what it was — it was a fine line to not come across as lazy — I think I pulled it off — it feels that way when I play and sing it, so I’d say it was very intentional, but organic, or honest at least. 

Sigismund: The pauses in the delivery are biting. “And now you need me ........ and now you don’t.” And, later, “you won’t let it go too far, because there are boundaries ............................ sometimes.” Vicious. (But, again, the accusations are balanced and complicated by the pure joy of the third verse, about the photograph.) How do you figure out where to incorporate these pauses? When you write the lyrics, do you know the pauses will happen where they do?

Carson: I’d say usually, but sometimes the pauses shift or change, as do the words and their delivery.

 

Spoil on the Vine

Sigismund: Spoil on the Vine has one of my favorite arrangements on the album. So eerie. What stages did the song pass through before arriving here?

Carson: A few different ones, drastic at first, then I found my stride when I decided to approach the intro differently and break it down to sort of just a bass line, and then it found where it wanted to sit and the changes were just in form.

Sigismund: I love how, the second time you sing “Won’t you cry into my ears,” the words “so that I can hear your tears” are replaced by a jagged, heart-piercing, three-second guitar solo. That’s exactly the sound of those tears, isn’t it? 

Carson: Definitely. That was a decision we made while recording — to leave that line out, because the guitar speaks them. 

Sigismund: There is a couplet I want to ask about: “Youth it was our cave. Now no mystery remains.” Do you mean that the so-called mischief which the speaker and her playmate got themselves into (perhaps not expecting the depth of feeling that the misbehavior, as they call it, would lead to) marks the end of youth, the end of innocence? As in, it has illuminated the treacherous emotional place that had been in shadow up until then, and which now is revealed to be full of pain, the “privileged pain” of love? (That’s my best attempt so far at understanding those lines, but it doesn’t satisfy.)

Carson: I would say it has more to do with the corruption of innocence — what society and systems sort of beat out of youth — perhaps in trying to protect that very innocence the wrong things are being emphasized and prioritized and the mystery and creativity and playfulness and experimentation, and variation is being scared out of us.  

Sigismund: This song has an amazing video too, as dramatic, captivating, and subtle as its song. Did you grow up in that house and backyard?

Cason: I didn’t grow up there, but it’s the neighbors' backyard where my mother (who helped us film the video) now lives, out in far west Texas. 

Sigismund: The Noh-esque battle between your character and the one Daniel plays at first puts me in mind of the notion in Hawks Don’t Share that “we’re both boxers, babe, we don’t make love.”

Carson: Yes, lots of self sabotage and jealous love themes… I love that you thought of “Noh” — what a wonderful ritual/performance that I didn’t know about before, thanks for turning me on to this. 

Sigismund: This is not a question, I just want you to know that when I taught Still Life in class, Spoil on the Vine was a particular favorite. One student mentioned that she would play the assigned songs in her dorm room (of six people) and that all her roommates loved Spoil on the Vine too.

Carson: I love that song too. Thanks. 

 

Sweet Magnolia

Sigismund: Sweet Magnolia is the song that needed the longest to settle into my heart. In choosing such a slow and rich arrangement, did you figure that it would be a less immediate sort of thing?

Carson: It’s always been a song that could only be delivered slowly and starkly, at least as far as the vocals were concerned — I used to play it live a lot, with a full band, but I waited to record it because it never felt right.

Sigismund: Did Daniel helm the writing of the midi string part, or did you do it together?

Carson: I wanted everything but vocals and strings to drop out for the second verse and I wanted the strings to carry this dissonant tension — and Daniel wrote the beautiful string arrangement you hear on the record. 

Sigismund: When you were working on the sequencing, were you doing it for vinyl? I mean, were you intentionally picking Sweet Magnolia to open Side B?

Carson: Yes. I didn’t know when we recorded it where it would end up, but once it was finished and we moved on to sequence it, we chose it to open Side B.

Sigismund: Talking with Americana UK, you mentioned that this is one of the (not too numerous) songs you have written about someone else. You said that with songs about others, “I try and keep myself out of it as much as I can.” The line “If you ain’t bitter yet, well! Give it time” is irresistible, but much else about the song I can only guess at. Would you be willing to elucidate the context of the lyrics a little?

Carson: I tried to write from both sides of my parents’ divorce, but ultimately I couldn’t keep myself out of it.

Sigismund: Any connection here to Jason Molina, that great bard of the flower in the title? I got into his music a few months ago, and (as with all great musical discoveries, including you) it blew my mind and heart wide open. Has he crossed your musical horizons? I know Steven Lambke loves him; his comments about Molina online were what got me listening.

Carson: I don’t know Jason Molina’s songs, no. 

 

Only Lovers

Sigismund: What a wonderful horn arrangement. How did it come together?

Carson: Daniel came up with the horn parts. His bandmate, at the time, David Nardi, played a few lines that Daniel then sampled and built a part out of. 

Sigismund: And the handclaps?

Carson: Gotta love em. This is partly a joke but partly so serious — if I’ve learned anything from Daniel it is that it’s never a bad move to throw shaker and claps on a song, and in fact, sometimes that just makes it!

Sigismund: There’s a moment that surprises and delights me every time I hear it: 2:19, when the vocals and the drums jump back in, in perfect unison. It wouldn’t hurt the magic of the moment to know that it was achieved through careful editing, but I like to tell myself that you and Daniel actually nailed that moment live. But it seems impossible?

Carson: We recorded pretty much all of this in our living room, so minimal room to work with and lots of bleed when recording, so pretty much every song started off as a scratch track of my vocal and guitar and then anything else was added instrument by instrument — it was only the two of us, so we couldn’t do it all at once. We nail it live all the time though — so — it’s still magical. 

Sigismund: The irony and bitterness of the chorus is beautifully offset by the arrangement, by Daniel’s “sha la las,” which make the song sound straightforwardly head-over-heels, as if pulled from an early ‘60s Beach Boys album. How did you two hit upon this contrast?

Carson: The nature of the title really. We decided to lean into the playfulness of the drum part and approach it as the sort of laughing through the tears thing more than something that was deep and brooding. 

 

End of the World

Sigismund: The acoustic guitar arrangement: you in the left channel and Daniel in the right? The other way around? Did one person double-track both guitars?

Carson: It’s both of us — not sure which side, definitely mine is less complicated, ha! but we’re both playing. 

Sigismund: Great vocal arrangement, too, with your voice sometimes single-tracked in the center, and sometimes double-tracked, panned hard left and hard right. How did you decide which lines should be delivered by one voice, and which by two?

Carson: Line by line, it was very intentional. 

Sigismund: The midi bagpipes are fantastic.

Carson: No midi bagpipes, maybe what you’re hearing is the violin? We found my old violin while staying at my mom’s house and Daniel played it. 

Sigismund: I love that we get to hear Julianna Riolino harmonize with you in the Camera Varda Variation. How have her vocals colored your songs live?

Carson: It’s so lovely to sing with other people, it’s still quite new to me and it’s a thrill. 

Sigismund: You’ve said elsewhere that this was a song written on tour — in Sweden, I think? — rather than at home, where most of the other songs found life. Is your writing process basically continuous, or is there a difference between songs you write at home and songs you write while on tour?

Carson: No idea — maybe there is — I haven’t pulled off writing on the road much — writing in general tends to be a bit of a struggle for me, but when I finally finish something that feels good that I’ve labored over, it’s the most rewarding thing in the world, it feels like I’ve untied some knot in myself, like I’m understanding myself little by little.  

Sigismund: Despite the stateliness of both arrangements, Still Life and Camera Varda — this is another of the songs where the aggression breaks through, isn’t it? There is invitation (first verse), there is wary wistfulness (first chorus), there is quiet horror, or at least dismay (second verse), there is self-accusation (second chorus) — but it all culminates, right before and again after the instrumental break, in accusations: “I know you won’t think twice ... tell me, what do you know of restraint?” — words sung with pointed restraint themselves.

Carson: Yes, exactly.

 

Trim the Rose

Sigismund: Another of my favorite arrangements. That starkly emphasized and orchestrated four-note riff, in contrast with the gentle and sparse body of the song, is stunning. (The same student that turned her roommates onto Spoil on the Vine made the four-note riff in Trim the Rose her ringtone.) 

Carson: Wow, cool! 

Sigismund: Are Trim the Rose and Hawks Don’t Share companion pieces? They seem to be about someone with similar shortfalls: incommunicative, overbearing, sarcastic or joking when that’s not what is called for. That callous “grinning face” of Hawks Don’t Share seems to hover over or behind the dialogue here too.

Carson: No — but similar themes I guess.

Sigismund: The ending is chilling. The instruments play one final chorus, but no more words str sung, since there is no longer any rose to trim, with the whole garden decimated.

Carson: Exactly.

Folk Song

Sigismund: This shares a melody with Come All You Fair and Tender Ladies, but the words, the delivery, and the arrangement make the song entirely your own: the folk process, in real time! I’m curious as to the order of things. Did the words come first? And then one day, as you walked around humming that old melody to yourself, you realized these words you’d written would fit right into its embrace? Or did the decision to make your own song out of the Fair and Tender Ladies melody come first, so that the words were written specifically to the tune?

Carson: Honestly I can’t remember — but I do know it all come together very quickly, similar to the songs Still Life and Tried, so I think it was likely I was humming the melody and then out all the words came — and they don’t rhyme either — at least, there’s not a very strict scheme. 

Sigismund: The Richard Thompsonesque guitar solos are my favorite musical moments on the whole album. Did you play them, or did Daniel? And how are they SO perfect for the song?!

Carson: Me too. Daniel magic. Not a lot was communicated verbally between the two of us when recording this album, a lot of it really felt unbelievably perfect. 

Sigismund: I love the line “No one can hear, now, this song I sing.” It draws attention to the deeply personal origin of songs. As I write, in the early summer of 2023, Folk Song is out in the world, and anyone who wishes to can hear it, but its origin was in solitude and quiet, in pain and need. Before it was released — before it was recorded — before anybody else heard it — the writer heard it. What does a song mean to you while you are still writing it? And what does it mean when you have finished it, but not yet played it to anyone else?

Carson: It’s special for sure, to have this “new” thing to yourself, very exciting, but it’s got to be shared, it’s got to be communicated. 

Sigismund: At what point do you consider a song finished?

Carson: No idea. I have tended to collect and edit, but then sometimes things just arrive finished and you don’t question them, each one is different. 

 

Tried

Sigismund: Still Life has an incredible ending, with Tried tiptoeing into Folk Song’s grand shadow, quietly saying its piece, and — that’s it, that’s the end. It feels to me like Folk Song and Tried, appearing together at the end of the album, are a breakthrough, but a double-edged breakthrough. If you’ll bear with me... In Folk Song, the speaker makes the decision to leave some mark on the man she loves, “this time around.” Her tone as she sings this, the precision of her statement, the force with which she says it (“please understand...”) — even if she’s only saying it to herself, for now, nevertheless: a decision has been made, and all will be different from now on. The phantoms that haunt songs like Still Life and Spoil on the Vine are dispelled, and the fingernail moon begins to expand again. But, along with the decision — or, in the aftermath of what that decision will lead to — comes a new set of phantoms, those which Tried wrestles with (“I am no thief!... but it’s not what you thought, you can’t wash it off”). Because that voice from far off calling, that Someone Else, also exists, and it will now be her turn to feel pain. So in Folk Song we witness the grandeur, the greatness of the moment in which things finally turn clear, the lover coming into her inheritance; and in Tried, gently, but insistently, follow some of the consequences. Were you thinking along these lines as you worked out the sequencing? Or am I way off, in which case, what did lead you to put these two songs last?

Carson: Yes, definitely, they are sister songs in their story I guess.  

Sigismund: Tried might have been a great opener as well, the last lines (“and when you write it / say that I tried”) being followed by an album’s worth of exactly that: the document of the trying: the background story and careful analysis of a growing, and increasingly powerful, increasingly irresistible (for all that resistance may seem the wiser) love...

Carson: I often start live sets with Tried.

Sigismund: The album version of Tried may technically be the more vulnerable, in the sense that it’s just you and your guitar, nothing else. But the frightened, psychedelic, black-as-night Camera Varda arrangement seems truer to the song’s ruminations and unresolved guilt. What led you and Daniel to reimagine it so thoroughly?

Carson: I had done Tried live with my band back in Austin and I had this idea in my head of syncopated drums and a heavier sound. I really like that song and think it’s good and I wanted to sing some different parts and extend some things. And Daniel obliged, so we pulled the tape machine out, haha. That song really spurred the whole Camera Varda Variation EP — then I wanted to involve the group because Daniel and I made the record before I played live with The Outfit, so then for the End of the World we asked the band to join us, so that was nice. 

Sigismund: I’d like to ask about some albums that didn’t come out under your name. What are your thoughts, and/or what do you remember about the making of...

Cobra Poems? You play a memorable part in the Nocturne Child video; plus, several songs are now live Outfit staples.

Carson: That was the first Outfit record I sang on, and we recorded it in Camera Varda, the studio we all built together, so that’ll always be a special one. 

Sigismund: Kissing the Foe? You sing harmony on here somewhere. 

Carson: Yes, we did a lot of that record out in West Texas while staying with my mom. But Walking Around Holding Hands we recorded at my old house in Austin actually, and we pieced those lyrics together from some funny stories from our past — then I think maybe we sped the tape up to give it that high effect. 

Sigismund: Volcano Volcano, by Steven Lambke? Such a fantastic record, with your voice prominent.

Carson: I love this record. Daniel and I did harmonies on this album from afar and a little later in the process, but I vividly remember watching and listening to the initial tracking with Daniel on drums and Steve on guitar — it was so beautiful to hear these songs for the first time as they were being recorded — and played by a band for the first time while tracking essentially. 

Sigismund: La Luna!

Carson: This one is wild and beautiful, from its initial birth on a little parlor guitar (a Sigma I used to play when I first started performing) we had hanging around at my mom’s place in the desert where we were staying, to its final fully fleshed version for the album. And then the film we made too! Maybe someday that’ll see the light of day. 

Sigismund: All Blue, by Julianna Riolino? You don’t play on the album, but you’ve been in the band as Jules has promoted it live.

Carson: It’s been fun to perform as a part of someone else’s band — with Daniel, and with Julianna — it’s something I’d never done before and that’s been a really lovely challenge and exercise for me! 

Sigismund: Colder Streams, by The Sadies? Another that the Outfit has been breathing life into onstage.

Carson: The Sadies are so wonderful — it’s really an honor to play with them, I especially love that song we do with them, So Far for So Few.

Sigismund: And two final questions, one looking back, one looking forward.

I wanted this interview to focus on the art of the album rather than on anything overtly personal, but I’ve decided that I have to ask... piecing together details here and there — not out of some sleuthing instinct but because of how the songs sing to each other, so that eventually I couldn’t help but notice and wonder — you and Daniel had a difficult 2020, spent mostly apart. The songs you’ve written about each other amount (already) to a body of love songs as gorgeous and disarming as those that John wrote about Yoko, and Yoko about John. And, like the songs Paul wrote for Linda (with Linda singing harmony), they embody the awe, the mystery, and the profound, soul-shaping comfort that true love brings in its wake. If I may ask — what was it like for you to hear Dandelion back in the spring of 2020? And White Flag, come autumn?

Carson: All of the songs for still life were written prior to 2020 and prior to Daniel and I being involved, so nothing I’ve written since our relationship has been recorded yet, although we’ve been playing some of them live. When Daniel and I finally got together I showed him the songs of Still Life — maybe a strange way to enter into a romantic relationship — but then again maybe not at all — the recording process was amazing, because it was our first time working together, as artists, and also as romantic partners, so in that way, all of these songs of my own “struggle”, we interpreted together as we recorded them, and there was lots of growing in the process I believe. So out of the darkness of those tunes came this joy of recording them with a true partner. Cathartic and educational! I love Dandelion and White Flag, both because I feel very close to them, because we were falling in love, but also because they’re full of beautiful songs and are excellently performed and recorded. 

Sigismund: The songs on Still Life are at least four years old now. Talking with Vish Khanna in 2021, you mentioned that you and Daniel were at work on new Carson songs, some of which I think you have since showcased live. Is the follow-up album to Still Life done, just as-yet-unreleased? Have you written still more new songs since? And what are you willing to reveal about your new material to those like me who have yet to hear a single note or word?

Carson: We leave next week to make the next record, I can’t wait to hear what happens — and to share it! I won't say more — don't want to spoil the magic.