what this new album means to me
'missage is a mirror hold your breath' is an album about the modern world we've come to create, and both the bliss and the darkness that comes along with trying to function normally within it. it is, like any feeling music at all, essentially an album about love.
i have been given the sometimes difficult but always incredible privelage of living a sort of uprooted and leaflike life for some years now, and being the kind of person that i am, the textbook pisces, the emotional wayfarer eternally searching for some sort of permanence in this world of impermanence, i am always kind of playing out a tug of war where my art and my calling is in one way my salvation, yet in another way my undoing, my destruction. because while what i do brings me close up and personal to the humanness of so many people, to the experience of seeing so much of what people are cycling through and feeling, to get to see hundreds of houses and places and meals and events and heartaches and frustrations with the job and falling for him or her and then coming back and hearing and seeing how it all went wrong and basically because i am a musician and i am always in this emotive endeavor and bringing out more of a primal state in people's frame of mind, it sort of naturally initiates a dialogue for people to bring me in, to bring me close, closer than the person in the next cubicle, the next door neighbor. but while i am able to be that guy, i also have to be the guy to have to continually disconnect, to go on my way, to experience the inevitable distance from people because i am a gypsy on this grand highway like kerouac, a solo ship out free in the world. there is both a lot of insight and frustration that comes from this kind of privelage. while i am able to do what i love, which is more than a huge percentage of even the richest nation in the world can say, i am also denied different forms of security involved in a more normal existance. but my role is clear to me and incredibly profoundly beautiful, and i am lucky enough to have been given the support and love of my parents and people around me who believe in me and what i do.
having said all that, i have tried to capture some universal emotions on here, and also not just the simplest components of love, but the gritty hard-to-make-sense-of afterfeelings and complexities of trying to cope with priority and self-doubt and blame and frustration and gratification and human fault and nonfault therein.
in a nation which unfortunately has created for itself a sociological structure of serial monogamy as the common denominator, it is ironic that there is such huge industry based on hallmark's forever, on movies and books that perpetuate the subconcious' pull towards happily ever after, or the notion that someone is perfect. that true love takes work and pain, sacrifice and dedication is something all too easily forgotten by our a.d.d. tabloid instantly gratified surface-driven culture.
some of these songs explore how blame is such an easy to come by but corrosive emotion, how blame deteriororates care and makes one frozen and stagnant in the equation of love.
i've tried to capture scenes of simplicity, and scenes of confusion. i don't want a narrator who knows it all. there is pain in not knowing how to make sense of anothers actions or thier needs.
there are also songs of bliss and celebration- of encountering something that is so pure and beautiful, that it makes you happy to to just be living.
another theme is our fat corporate culture. many of the things we remember and love about hometown culture from merely a decade or two ago are fast being sucked away by the homoginized bigness. i like to capture a sentimentality about this, but don't see myself as some sort of platform-driven singer. i just want to explore what may have changed, how i've changed, how you've changed.
these narrators have a bleeding sense of self-doubt sometimes, but they also assert a sense of desire for what they deserve, a notion of the pursuit of happiness.
i've once again tried to maintain a balance of lyric form. i wanted to both represent poetry in a more archaic form, with very structured rhyme, meter, abstract meaning, etc., but to also employ in other instances a looser, more direct and simple way of writing where emotionality is driven by setting, image, plot and more subtle/less highbrow.
i've once again tried to have many different types of production, where track 2 is just stripped-down rocking guitar, bass, drums kind of like early police recordings, whereas track 8 contains a horn section and a rhodes, among other things, like a 70s recording by chicago or something. i also recorded at many different studios round the country bc i believe that subtly to the ear, the different rooms, different mics, different snares, etc. keeps it interesting on a subconscious level, but also keeps the experience of recording fresh for me. also to focus on only one song at a time allows for the frame of attention that each song deserves.
in my eyes i wanted this album to be poppy and accessable and understandable by a general public, but also musical, quirky, and fresh. it is sometimes a task as many recording musicians know to walk the line between pleasing yourself as a musician who wants to create strikingness and complexity, but also in the same three minutes please the average person who is a nonmusician driving along in their car wanting something that hits home with immediacy and could be singable, could stick in their head.
i also don't really want to sound particularly like something that has come before me. i want to sound like me, like i hear myself. while i owe my musical soul to the huge ocean that has inspired me, i want to pay my tribute to that by using my own muse just as passionately, not trying to cop it all.
i have had the gift of being profoundly close to a truly amazing person a couple of times. i hope i have used these experiences in an insightful way in my music. i think the best art does not serve itself in a selfish way, but merely serves for the sake of the art. this is in the tradition of wilde. i do not seek anything but representation of the passions in the human emotional palette.
i might post later more about each individual track, which i had intended to do here, but i'm sure you'll agree this is quite enough for now. sianora.
beggers CAN be choosers...
"excuse me sir, i'm hungry, you got any money?"
"sorry man, good luck"
...five minutes later...
"here you go, i was making myself a peanut butter sandwich and figured you might want one."
"uh... ... you got any pizza?"
birmingham
for some reason every time i pass through birmingham, which isn't that often, i am met with an amazing degree of peace, reaffirmation, and musical recharge. first night i came on down and saw hugh play at this soul place called the pyramid where we were .. hmm let's just say the minorities there. i knew firstly that i was at a place where i normally wouldn't find myself when i was asked, "you here to work on the sound?" bc, lord knows, i couldn't possibly be there to enjoy the fine tunes and the atmosphere. anyway, hugh's band did a good job of converting a roomful of bewildered people scratching their heads as to why they were being put in front of this particular bandstand, to people who were moving, smiling. i wonder how elvis did it.
that night i stayed in this late teens/early twenties apartment complex with squeaky wooden floors and beautiful oldness about it but practically no furniture anywhere because it was the top floor apartment and you had to make your way up to it by those old caged steel outside flights of stairs like in the movies. so a bed frame was pretty much unheard of, just matresses on the floor. and mostly bottles creating the decor. "how long have you guys been here?" "about a year." "this place kicks ass."
i played at that moonlight cafe place, and i must have made it there under the right allignment of stars and people and mood and venue bc i played 3 songs and sold 12 cds. i really like that place and the fellow who runs it and i hope he has the privelage of running it for a really long time. i think it's a shame that it's pretty much standard for a real listening room music venue to have said about it some sort of paraphrase of "i hope you're able to stay open." then i went over to the loud crazy oasis and was able to crank up loud and feed my other, parallel longing, to a crowd all too familiar the the standard so-and-so there and who cheer wonderfully at any sort of attempt at unique musical risk or venture.
and then there was donnie darko and pizza with taylor.. amazing taylor the musical wonderkind. i must say there is nothing more that makes me just lust to get my hands on a guitar, to remember musical salvation, to live and breathe by the creed of sweet melody, than mr taylor shaw himself. this young gentleman is about the greatest guitarist i have ever met next to maybe john mayer, and he is only 21. but his songs, his singing, his everything, make me not doubt the often questioned complexities of my own muse. this stuff makes my chords look like mel bay, and the sense of melody and spirit and purpose behind it all just validates it and makes it all soar. and every minute of every day he is thinking about it. like some sort of early mad einstein, except on the guitar. anyway i want to hang with him and trade thoughts and music as much as i can, and he'll be playing at my b.r. cd release. both in the opener and on my stuff too.
for fear of this getting too long to read, i'll just say i made it to baton rouge safely, and the surprise factor has been fab. gimme a shout, whomever.
having a chatt
winds have taken me to the place where i hypothesize up myself and my state of the union to sage, who helps me in realization. it's been fun(ny) bc seth horan is here in town, the guy with whom i toured all the way up the coast to boston and back for more'n a month, and we got to watch him firstly reinact the scene from spinal tap at the record store, except with him actually playing music to nothing but the iron hot sun and the occasional gangsta walking by looking crunk, and whom it would cost complete dignity to give even a glance of aknowledgement. secondly playing a nite show at the redneck bar featured in the third level of dante's inferno, with three tv screens behind him and including the bimbette who actually walks up to the jukebox _while he's playing_ with her money ready to go. in my politest voice possible: "why don't you listen to him, he's really good." "no we don't wanna hear nuthin we don't know, just need somethin in the background we heard before while we're drinkin." just what i need every now and again- a reconfirmation of why i'm a little more selective then i used to be about where i want to place my musical energy. and it's so good when that reconfirmation isn't even your own gig, your own toil. hats off to the handlement from mr. seth..
chattanooga is a paradoxical place because it features the most beautiful public park i have ever seen, but also some of the most.., well let's say hard to envision for me public mentality that i have come across. and that's even the me that tries not to overgeneralize. anyway my brother is here, my kindred soul.
we made staff paper on the computer. soon there will be lots of ink on it.
anyway the ashton's show was really fabulous- i want to give my most warmed-up and muscular props to the vibe there. beautiful arty place with good food and coffee and a million things to look at and a painted table i want featuring ariel (you can just eat food off her fins) and i got to play with an amazing percussionist who's played with curtis mayfield and many others. the p.a. there are those tiny bose sticks that fill the room. i like alien technology sometimes.
i'm about to go hear my friend hugh play some funky ass shit. thank you for reading the musical ramblings page of boone-django himself.
dimes i've paired
a couple of nights ago eliot and i were walking back to his house from trackside tavern and it was raining slightly and we were talking about nothing in particular, probably something along the lines of how talented we were at making up our own dialogue to adult swim muted up in the corner tv, when all of a sudden the slight peeing of the angels turned to an onslaught by the gods, and the rain came pouring in quarts-a-second upon us. we suddenly had to burst into a triathalon, but not without hysterical laughter and rocky sountrack music to accompany our misfortune. then we got home to some unknown being sleeping on the, hmm what would i call it, cot... upon which i normally sleep. when i am in decatur that is. we then had the usual late night peanut butter sandwiches and overanalization of music, but this time soaked and alive. anyway i love when i have someone to get surprisedly soaked with.
i guess i should say something about the last two shows. well, the one with ian moore was cool because we both had our own different accounts of a night a wee long time ago in baton rouge where we played at that bar that um.. 'burned down'.. and where my valiant efforts to whisk away the loud harley-worshipping gang leaders to invoke a reverence for ian's quiet muse was met with dissention and ian, while grateful, had to be led off from the show with four right angle guns poised matrix-style while frantically walking. and while this audience was pretty much the absolute opposite, like the kind of audience that you're not really sure whether they are all just made of plastic or not, sitting there with polite silent smiles on their faces, i think they appreciated the double transfiguration of the anecdote. and i hope you guys appreciated similarly that run-on.
anyway the second verse in the fourth track of my new cd is sort of about that bar.. the good places have a way of etching themselves in the quiltings of your memory, and they affect you. i'm sure a lot of places do that for me now without me even knowing it.
the limerick show was ruled by those whose solution to tech's loss was beer and screaming and shots and impressing the ladyfolk with stupidity, so i was sure to paraphrase all my lyrics so that they made fun of their vision of profound truth cast within their baseball caps. anyway it will be good to play a real show again on friday.
spring break, with its easter finale. was pretty much beautimous. from jonesboro to atl to athens to lawrenceville to jonesboro to atl to lawrenceville and back to the airport entailed as much scenery as anyone could need. and to drive through the great arching skylining city of atlanta in the eve with songs in the key of life cranked loud and warm is to be.
i have been dealing with the uberdetails of trying to have a cardboard box full of cds containing my music arrive at my pad by the end of the month. i knew not that it would require me having to sever two of my limbs and one of my eyes for this event to take place.
anyway i have seen some brilliant inventions this week, and they sure do make a guy wanna slam his hands together.
i hope to see some people out at ashton's on friday. it's just right down the street from eddie's. holla.