It is March 18 and I am late for a flight to San Francisco. I am fleeing my education in music. I've been studying, really hitting the books, but I'm afraid I am no closer to understanding melody's mysteries or rhythm's patterns. I am a little more stupid than when I began, proving again the danger of some knowledge. I should have just kept listening, and left the making to others who speak the tongues of Song. But musicians rarely listen to their audience, and I have it in my head, deep, that I can somehow interpret for the antagonists: the players fascinated by their abilities and the listeners frustrated by their lack of control of the direction and emotion of a song. I am leaving this experimental HTML code here, hidden in this massive messy site, but remain hopeful you might understand that this is the beginning of a new way to present a song, broken into its many pieces, starting of course with a birth and ending with its death. If I had my way, you'd listen to my songs only once and then never again. To compensate for this cruelty, I would make dozens and dozens of versions, and let you listen to them all, as a single symphony perhaps, a day in which one song whistles at dawn and screams itself silent at dusk. But who has the time for this sort of thing? Or the fucking money? I almost convince myself that it is worth doing, because I know other people who love to hear but do not always like how musicians speak would love to listen to this process of birthing music. When I come back from the West Coast, I promise myself now, as I write, to speak some of these words as a song in the background, so you can look at pictures and hear snippets of how songs sang themselves to life. Until I do this, you've got the silly widget from Reverbnation below, and you can hear a woefully inadequate representation of what I'd like to accomplish. There are a handful of lonely and incomplete movements, inhalations of intent that exhaled as admissions of neglect: the songs will never be finished, never glossy or powerful, but then this is what it sounds like when you make music as music wishes to be made and not as the market dictates it.
The Moonlight project by Seanie Blue and Peter Fox is off to an ambitious start. A dozen songs have been created and are slowly being fleshed into life in Venice. Steve McCormick's genius sound-making and songwriting talents have been melded with Blue & Fox's energetic style to create a project of unknowable magnitude. Is the project an iPhone app, a video game, or a lecture series on the fleeting wastes and wonders of falling in love? These are a few of the opening samples for now, with much much more to come. Featuring Michael Jerome Moore, Kristin Mooney, Danny Peck, Phil Cody, Seema Sugandh, Jonelle Vette, Sophie Holt, David Ralicke, Sandra Bishop and Helena Lalita.
There is an argument in the studio and I am furious. One of my best friends challenges me about how songs are made, and I lose it. Fury without harness erupts from some primal memory, seven million years ago, when I was a chimpanzee, surviving by murder and deception, and I call the song a “cancer.” One singer, who barely knows me, says I shouldn’t use that word, and the other two singers, who know me well, break into tears; the three of them hug, and I turn away, blinded by the heat in my eyes, alone, no hugs for a killer who wants heartbreak in his melody rather than structure and rules.
I am autistic among people who expertly carry a tune. I cannot sing, or even hum, but this song is speaking to me, making its impossible demands. The song risks abandonment, but does not care and gives me another task to complete its birth, and this last thing breaks the attention of musicians and composers, and the song gets left behind. I am mute with disappointment and hurt, but the song continues to mock my mind, repeating itself in a language I cannot convey. This is how Neanderthals think, I thought, and my own ancestors, too, homo sapiens right up to 50,000 years ago: in impulses and ideas and instincts, but without syntax and nuance.
But in the desert more songs come, bewitchingly. A mood expresses itself as an idea, then replicates (but with a tiny mutation of tone or tune), and then blossoms into an answer for that mood. Thunder, following a drop of rain, or a wave, rolling over a tide, or a glance into the rocks showing burnt orange when a moment before a flash of yellow sunlight glinted off my truck’s mirror. These songs of self, endlessly surfing every sensation in a normal day, shatter schedules and shred my intentions: what is there to search for, except this desire to express how I feel and where I am and why I cannot stay, in a song?
To whom do I sing? The beautiful thing about making music is that the music itself does not care. I anthropomorphize songs so they do not scare me from attempting to make them, so they seem like intelligent and ambitious and emotional organisms, and I know above all else that the songs do not care how I feel, once they are born. They wish only to be heard, by anyone, by anything; a tune is happy echoing in an empty valley as it would be flooding Carnegie Hall. This is the great mistake musicians make, crippling music with their own insecurities, wishing for their songs what they secretly hope for themselves, for acclaim, for reward, and, most heartbreakingly, for applause. I am so astonished by a song’s emergence, so unable to imagine what it wants other than its own drift against silence, that I stand before it without ambition, retarded beneath its beautiful declaration of being. Perhaps I cannot speak songs, but I hear them, always, clearly, especially when they are hiding in places musicians tend to forget or are too busy to notice.
For a total of four months this year and last year, I interrupted the lives of my friends, messed up responsibilities and loves and comforts, looking for songs. Peter and Steve and Sandra and a sudden pour of new talents, searching for selves and sense and the melodies of making, rained onto me, more incomplete or starving songs, and like a mother in a river I snatched at every passing baby, regardless of its provenance or health, trying to save them all. I taxed everyone, and hate myself more than I did when I started, but some songs were born, and I insisted over and over and over and over on variations of these newborn musical impulses; no, let’s not develop according to plan and history and rule, let’s stay right here, and let these songs listen again and again to themselves.
Of course this does not make much sense, unless you are like me, somebody who is alive because you dance, somebody who dances to live, wondering like me what magnet there is in your heart for a good song, how stupidly attracted you are to a sound that makes sense and is familiar at the same time that it stuns you with its novelty. And if you are like me, you imagine driving away from everything you are, into the desert, maybe, listening to the world as a song, and the music you hear might as well be wind beneath your wing, and the story I want to share, now, is about my escape into Death Valley and how I marooned myself there, waiting for rescue by melody, and I can show you what I saw and give you what I thought I heard, even if other talents have made something even my wildest memory could never aspire to, songs with muscle and sinew, some music whose heart walks with a million limps, broken by all those dreams that never quite went right.
I know you know what I mean, but I wish I could express it better. I’ve just got a place, with a fascinating thinker and designer who is quite willing to let me be the younger brother, the one who gets better at the expense of his older siblings, and in this place I will show you the desert and the song that beguiled me across the sands, to sunsets and through shadow. I’ll frame the melody and the images in this new place, and have you over for wine and brie, and you can tell me what you are singing to yourself, what song tells you to listen up and understand what it needs to say.
See you soon. Love, Sean
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The First Song: CRAZY This video uses some of the tracks of the song Crazy, which came to exist on a single night wandering through Hollywood, when Sean insisted on singing rather than talking, and kept working over the beginnings of a tune. Luckily he was with Sandra and Jonelle and other creative types, and after half of an hour of listening to his screetching they stepped in to help rather than keep suffering. The video doe snot contain the actual song, but uses some of its instrumentation and all of its emotion to a slightly different purpose:
Explaining Heartbreak As a Celestial Metaphor from wonderbox on Vimeo.
This is a short experiment in nonlinear story-telling. We're interested in emotional weights and indirect expositions, meaning what we show is not always what we feel or think. In this case, the act of leaving a comfy fire and lovely friends to look for the Aurora Borealis in a blizzard might not be exactly what we should be doing, so telling you why we're doing it comes in this artistic disguise. Not only that, this video ends just when it gets interesting! There are heartbreakers everywhere, people who turn you on and leave you cold. This visual exercise is an example of this. But the bonus is that we do intend to examine heartbreak and report on how it can be used to slow down time. More soon, from Iceland, where Sean and Sandy and Mark Hooker have gone in anticipation of a firestorm at the poles, courtesy of a solar flare or two. January 2 is looking good for this.