This Was Tomorrow

I rarely blog with an intended purpose, because I assume a more stream of conscience approach to them, hence their apparent randomness and sometimes delusional state. This time however, with my new album release eminent on April 22nd, I wanted to talk a bit about the album and the process of it's inception, to the final post coital cigarette stage. *exhale*

It all began when I had a farm in Africa...no wait. Call me Ishmael. No...wait. When I begin an album or write a song, I begin because I have a vision for it. A title...imagery, a movie in my mind. Blank pages daunt me. I feel if I write before I have a direction, I feel like I'm spinning to nowhere. This vision is my compass point where I can at least feel I can start. Perhaps I might change direction, but once I've started, the momentum has begun. Or maybe I'm just tricking myself....hmmm...

I thought about my past work and how for the most part I would avoid writing love songs, or songs pondering love. I initially rationalized not doing them, because there were enough songs about love. True or not, I've come to the conclusion, it's not how many songs there are about a subject, but what I feel I need to explore in myself.

The first song I wrote for this vision was "Hey Now". It came rather quickly and surprising. When I finished it, it was hard to sing. There are only two chords in the whole song and it just builds and builds. The lyrics were uncomfortable for me. I knew I was on the right track if I was feeling that. If nothing bothered me, then I didn't dig enough. "Hey Now" for me was like I was talking to Love itself. Telling it...acknowledging to it the power it wields over me. Very uncomfortable...but really nice to sing now. Now that I've come to terms with it.

Reacting from the heaviness of "Hey Now", I wanted to do something more dreamlike. I keep a journal with titles, nothing but titles I like. I saw one..named after a vintage shirt I bought in a little shop in Santa Monica...it looked like a "Green Lollipop Forest". This title while very interesting to me, was a problem because...what the hell is a Green Lollipop Forest song gonna be about? *laughing* Then I thought about it and came to the idea of myself simply watching my lover dream while she dreamt of being in a green lollipop forest. Whew! That will work! Recording it was difficult because of all the very high falsetto harmonies in it. Being a baritone singer...choir boy harmonies can beummm...hard. My testicle vice was in heavy use that day. The solo in the instrumental part of the song, I had originally wanted a flute. A real 60's sounding flute part. While waiting to find a flautist I whistled the idea and I had so much fun whistling it, I kept it. It reminded me of my father and I watching spaghetti westerns and all those Ennio Morricone soundtracks I love so much. So it stayed.

Just a Dream" was actually the very first song I wrote when I began singing. I was 23 years old. It was originally was titled "Confessions of a Thief" and never recorded. It was kinda country sounding in waltz time. 20 years later I had some different ideas for it. Getting rid of the country thing...changing it 4/4 time...there was no real chorus...and "confessions of thief" was just too heavy for itself. I wanted to make it lighter...to make it fly up...adding slide electric helped that a bit. Anyway...it is MUCH better than my original version. I was really happy to finally have it on an album of mine. It took 15 albums for that sucker to make it!

At this point I was at a standstill with my album. Uninspired. Drudgery. I was fortunate to go on tour with Steve Poltz to recharge my battery, to soak up my sponge that was dry. During the tour I befriended via Facebook and guitar luthier Art Davis. We geeked out about guitars as geeks do. When I got back to San Diego, I went to his work shop. He made beautiful guitars. I played a few. Then I picked up this one and I went "Whoa! What's this?!" It was a weird, alien, yet from my planet...my alien planet. Art said it was a baritone acoustic guitar. Baritone?! I'm a baritone! Holy shit! I don't have to sing UP! I can sing and let it rest and nestle right into it. Wow! Inspiration! So I wisely spent all my tour money on it. Yep...all. It hurt so good.

I took it home and songs started pouring out. "Picasso" and "Tilt-A-Whirl". They have always been linked together so I kept them together. I began using open tunings, which I've never done except when playing slide...I came up with an open C tuning... C-G-C-F-C-E. With a baritone acoustic, since it's so much lower than a traditional guitar this tuning is a breeze to tune to. "Running Fast" came after a night on the couch trying to relearn this new tuning while watching "The Last Picture Show"...there's this scene with Sam "The Lion" (Ben Johnson) reminiscing about swimming naked with a girl. Fucking amazing scene. It stirred me. The recording took a while. The downside of doing everything yourself. The bridge was not happening...it didn't build like I had envisioned it. I must've redone that bridge 15 times until I got it right. It's just drums (from my amazing friend Matt Lynott), guitar, and vocals. That's it. Having a baritone guitar, you don't miss the bass as much as a traditional acoustic guitar. The drums were difficult too...Matt had to play against my track with no click as a guide and it wasn't matching up. It didn't sound flowing. So we do what we always do when we come to an impasse. We go to the movies. We went out and saw "Machete". Wow. You know it's a good movie when one of the first scenes has a naked woman pull a cell phone out of her vagina. A high adventure we had! We came back, and on the very first take he nailed it. Wham! Matt...you fucking rock.

When truly inspired, lyrics aren't hard to come by. I was a lightning rod and the words were the lightning. Not hard to come by, but still hard to sing. I was really trying to touch on the parts of me I rarely let get touched. It's easy to grab your cock, but so much harder to grab those vulnerabilities...real nakedness. Ummm...can't we just do a head shot? Or...even better...not use my head either and use someone else entirely? *laughing*

This Was Tomorrow" was initially just an little instrumental. Then Matt had to go and put a real nice drum part on it and we looked at each other and said...oops...now I HAVE to write some lyrics on this song! Damn...all these songs have a price. It costs to make. I was getting empty and exhausted. I thought about my timeline...my life...things I thought about being a kid...what was love then? What is love now? Has it changed really? Do I just have more words and excuses for love now? Am I full of shit? What would my 8 year old self have to say? What does my 44 year old self say now?

One of the things about rules is that they must be disobeyed every once in a while to give them more meaning, to keep them strong. I never have lyrics written before I have the vision. But by chance I had written a little doo-dad and posted it on Facebook. It was a while ago. A FB friend  asked what about that song lyric I posted? When do they get to hear it? Oh...yea...I forgot about it. I pulled out the lyrics andmatched it with a strub-ba-dub chord thingy I came up with, being high on a magic cookie. Presto chango! "Walking Snow White". I didn't think it would work for the album. It was my least favorite of the songs...but the energy was needed. Lust. Lust was needed. You can't have a love album without lust. So...weakest song or not I kept it. Sometimes the arc of the album as a whole is more important than just the individual songs. Of course this is an old idea now-a-days. Fuck it, it's how I like it. I like it that. *grin*

One morning I woke up. Most mornings I wake thankful. Grateful for my life. I sleepily and instinctivelypicked up my guitar and wrote a thank you song, "You Held Me". A thank you for Love. I don't want to sound all sappy and shit but I cried that first time I sang it. Not because it's a great song, but because I meant it. This is why I did this album. I fucking meant it.

Eight Hours Too Soon...

4:32 AM GMT

Awake. Very awake and very sleepy. Time traveling by way of Virgin Atlantic, eight hours ahead. No one can avoid paying the Time Gods their due. No amount of Ambien, Tryptophan, chamomile tea, fresh ale, whiskey, foot massage, or Brian Eno's "Music For Airports" can help you pay the entire bill. Our payment for time travel is time.

I'm tippy-tapping in the dark with only the glow of my cell phone illuminating my hands and face. My little connector. My night-light of comfort and distraction. My tempter of high priced roaming data download charges. Sailing the dangerous seas of price gouge piracy. I WILL NOT USE THE INTERNET UNTIL I FIND FREE WIFI!!!!

I keep telling myself this. So far I have vanquished my little tippy-tappy-temptress from connecting to the buzzy beepy, flash of texts and social networks...but it's only been 13 hours since I rolled into London. I'm getting weak. When true daylight ensues, I will find my hook-up. My fix. By then I'll have the city. She will open up to me all her wonders and wherefore's.

Getting to know her scent again. It's been 6 years since we've been together. Since we've snogged. Her hair might have changed a little, and a new outfit, but she's like I remembered her. Gentlemen never tell though, so you'll have to glean your own tells and secrets. We have ours...and new love will be made in our fecund tryst so we can add to the length our paper daisy chain.

Giving it. Taking it. The Devil is not in the details, it's in the wind and I am a cloud.

I'll be getting my left-handed scissors out in 4 more hours...


Sent via BlackBerry from T-Mobile

The High Adventures of Wereman Part 1...

Walking and stumbling through the moonlit forest Wereman ambles, stambles and sloops his way towards the barely noticeable scent of a pack of wolves playing in the mountain glen next to a  tarn. He's hungry. Hungry for greasy, salty foods that need to be washed down his fur coated gullet with fermented grain and a hint of  motor oil, Valvoline...'cause he's a man, and men like Valvoline., it sounds so close to vulva...vulvaline...mmmm....lubricants. He's sleepwalking. There is no way in Hell or Heaven would he be barefoot in a forest searching for a wolf pack at 3am...but he is.


He must bite them.


It is his destiny. His curse.


He was cursed by a 73 year-old Indian man working at a 6/12 convenience store. That's right...6/12. They're 2 better than that other place. Wereman was complaining that the hot dogs (slightly fatter Slim Jims) were severely over cooked and the espresso mocha coffee maker was just spattering brown powder chunks. The late night manager overheard and yelled at the newly appointed cashier Ashok Ganesh...73...hemorrhoids...dandruff...and just plain mad that he's working the graveyard shift when he could be watching his Baywatch Season 4 DVD collection. Ashok, funnily enough means "without sadness", stared coldly at our main character and whispered under his breath an old curse that his family have used for eons. Eons, because the Ganesh family are immortals. They found their immortality from a special chutney blended with mangoes, spices, and a blue oil that was said to come from Krishna.


Ashok, muttering his family curse, set in motion the high adventures of Wereman. High adventures because if you are still reading this, you are pretty high.


Wereman, not hearing what Ashok said, knew it wasn't good. He could smell the chutney from aisle 4 and Ashok was on aisle 1. He made a dash for it, but it was too late. The curse took hold of him. A chill ran down his back like that first bite of late-night Mexican food that you knew you should have never touched, let alone put in your mouth. "Damn...reminds me of that gal I made out with until my tongue knocked her partial bridge from her teeth...yep...there is an evil moon out tonight and it just went down my pants..."


Later that night when he was asleep, he dreamed of wolves. Not running with wolves or being one, but biting them. Biting them and forever making them walk the Earth like a man and have to get a shitty job somewhere for little money, no cable television, no internet and only an old clam-flip-top cell phone. "Oh God." they thought, "What a nightmare."


FLASH FORWARD TO NOW:


Back in the forest...Wereman was closing in on the suspecting wolves. Suspecting, because they not only could they hear him, they could smell his Axe deodorant. They knew a man was coming...but what they didn't know was Wereman was coming.
To Be Continued... 

Klaus Krazy...

Brandishing a scimitar, I swath and swerve through the jungle, looking for signs of colored ribbon and long stretches of time coded memories that can be easily unlocked if you know what buttons to push and by the size and inertia of your hands that press against me I just might talk, laugh, or cough from my nagging pneumonia that never goes away, but simply sets like the sun only to show up during the next full revolution of my world which is 40 times the size of Earth, but with far fewer people and far more beautiful monsters that will lick you until your skin comes off, further still, licking to the bone, further still to the marrow and into my blood stream, tasting my salt for their wounds inflicted by glances and slight thoughts that are slivered and cast away as fast as a lash lashing into itself below the iris that grows alone on the edge of a fish pond that all the little fishes and wandering wishes stare up through the water, through the algae, through protozoa breathing and fucking their way to immortality, at least that's what they believe and if you believe, you're half way there, just don't use mathematics or you'll never get there, you must let the numbers go and latch on to the symbols the numbers could never actually touch, from there they'll show you the heart, not just the cum filled Kleenex of formulas gone South, but the means of creating the cum and all it's glory and power before it hits the ground and becomes disseminated amongst all the other seeds of the Earth that will rise up to be cut on the edge of a blade, the blade I and other wield with frenetic frenzy and fervor that my friend and stranger Klaus Kinsky would be proud of and then he'd scream and tell me to fuck off and leave him alone...


Sent from the Black Forest...

Created To Create, Create To Be Created...

God created the Night so beautiful that lovers could never sleep during it. God created the Day so bright that the lovers would have to get up and go outside only to wait for Night to come again...


I like this thought. True? Who's to say? Perhaps like most things, it is partially true. Five percent maybe, but I'll take that five percent! I like where it takes my mind.


The universal collective consciousness of everything is hard to personify. It is so much easier to say God. To make God want and do human-like things. For Him/Her to be romantic, vengeful, and forgiving. Yes...much more poetic. In a way, from my limited knowledge and life-experience, it may be true.


That all life eventually joins a collective consciousness. Good, bad, positive and negative energy in the same cloud. What we give it, adds to itself. All knowledge and experience of every living thing in the universe...this has a power, an affect to everything. Not a Will per se, but an affect to beings with the like energy inside them.


Yes, "God" is a little like us, because it's what we give to Him/Her.


I belong to no organized religion. I do not profess to have the answer. Nor want/need to convert a single being to my way of thinking. I have no judgment.


My life purpose is to create and connect. To remind as many people as I can that we are all connected. Connected to everything. Creating romanticism, hope, passion, the celebration of being the earthly human...and everything that comes with it. Illuminating our profane darkness and hidden thoughts, I find cathartic. Acknowledging its existence lends to a deeper understanding of ourselves...and to know ourselves is to know a little more of God...the source...the Great Om...the Universal Collective Consciousness...whatever name you give it, symbol you put on your necklace, bumper sticker, if you keep it hidden in the closet of your mind, your key chain or put on masturbatory blogs such as this.


God created the Night so beautiful that lovers could never sleep during it. God created the Day so bright that the lovers would have to get up and go outside only to wait for Night to come again...
Night will be here soon.

Sent from the Black Forest...

Good Enough to Forget...

When you're lucky...when the light shines through the clouds, through the passing airplane's window, the dust, smog, bouncing off the teeth of someone's smile, your dirty shades and into your closed eyes...you'll forget everything in this great and glorious moment...

Ummmmm...what was I saying?

Sent from the Black Forest...

Underneath the Clouds...

Underneath the clouds I stand, my spine grows into the ground and out a blade of grass for a fly to tickle on its way to fresh and steamy animal droppings, fecund with larvae that grows up to beat their kids and drink themselves drunk on nectar collected from hummingbirds that beat their hearts fast enough to live a thousand lifetimes and love ten thousand lovers each in their own favorite sexual position and sounds they make when they come into and all over the knowledge they share, connected forever in a mirror facing another mirror showing exact and not so exact images of what we were and never what we are, because it can't be shown in a picture but in a taste, tasty licks of the honey of being known, known and still wanted, wanted like a hunger, an itch given by a blue and yellow mosquito that takes you and gives a little of itself back, it's disease, it's dirty fingerprint on a window that will be washed off by a homeless person looking for a handout to take the last midnight Night Train bottle from the thank heaven it's 7-eleven store owned by a hard working family from Jakarta whose family were well known elephant trackers in their local region where their great-great-grandfather was born in an elephant cemetery and before he died, made the great long walk to where he was born to mix his bones with other elephants, antelope and tigers and bears licking the marrow from broken scapulas that were bashed against the rocks to remember the sound of making, the sound of creating, the sounds of pelvis to pelvis collision of the fourth kind, of abduction, of stolen moments of bliss from the incessant pounding of monotony that rises up to the sky like a spilled cup of tea, a tea of souls that lives in our skin cups, say skin-cups seven times fast and I'll give you a brown bag to breathe into for 2 minutes, 2 minutes saved from tippy-tapping on your phone instead avoiding the real questions, the real answers to the reason why we need all this noise and deception to stop us from knowing why we are...

Sent from the Black Forest...