Sometimes…a lot of times…you can write a song without knowing where its’ centre of gravity is. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it can make for a strange real-time relationship with the thing, should it be a song you sing alot. Done repeatedly in front of people, a song can be thrown under a microscope, undergoing a different kind of magnification than that of the writing and recording process. If you are lucky enough to travel around the world singing your songs, it’s highly likely you will be singing in the shadow of some kind of calamity, some kind of collective sorrow or angst, and you can go from knowing who you are when singing a song that you wrote to being lost and unsure. Useful In A War is a song I started writing in 2008 and finished in 2016, recorded three times, and have been singing in every Night of Grief and Mystery for the past few years.
I am awake in Bellingen, Australia, at 5:30 this morning after a fitful no-sleeping-pill night, the first non-drug induced sleep in a while. The bird calls in this country strike my ear like they are laughing at me or calling out like an infant in distress. Slightly disturbing either way. Mist covers the valley the house is perched on, coating the surfaces of the porch that has been my bedroom for three days. Large clouds of moths gather just off the porch—which is very high off the ground— not quite plague level, but enough for me to notice them from my seat in the corner where I’ve sat to hash out my relationship with this song.
I notice two of these creatures, wings plastered flat by the dew on the little round table I’ve placed my water, book, and pen on. Flipped on their backs, they struggle to free themselves from their bad decision to land, but it’s obvious they weren’t going to be able to.
I should let nature takes its’ course. I should. This is the way of things. There’s something that is supposed to be available to me in the Nights I’ve been a part of, I say to myself, that is supposed to let this be ok, a true ability to abide an ending…not the kind of “alrightness” with death that pollutes the internet on the ‘death positive’ crap wagon. There’s nothing ‘alright’ watching these poor bastards struggle.
So I start gingerly peeling them off the tabletop, their wings so thin as to not exist. I’ve a crust of bread, and one of them latches on with legs that are pointing skyward. Moments later, it flies away. Redemption! Number 2 is not so lucky, refuses to latch on to the crust despite my nudging and blowing. Every time the moth rights itself, it flips onto its’ back again. I try over and over, then I stop trying. I’m just making things worse.
Time is running out and there is panic on a micro level, me and the moth on the battlefield of the living, and the birds are singing their weird songs and the other moths are having whatever their full allotment of life is. There is smoke on the mountains from a bush fire burning miles away, an ocean of fog in the valley, life and death playing out on the tabletop. I want the moth to live. I want the moth to die. I want to either put it out of its’ misery or deliver it back to the sun and air with the rest of the swarm. Mostly, I just want it to be over. I want not just to be relegated to witness. I’m always a witness. I want to be useful.
The moth succumbs.
Useful In A War is a contemplation on allegiance: to whom do I owe what. I aim that loyalty not to Right or Wrong, not to Left or Right, not to Rich or Poor, not to Pro or Anti but to something somewhere else, to the smoke-shielded top of the mountain I can’t see, or the fog-shrouded valley floor. Allegiance to the Unknowable, the Uncomfortable. To submit myself in soldierly fashion—unquestioning—to a chain of command that begins beyond borders and divides that seem to define being human. To an Unclaimed God, one that hasn’t been nailed down or nailed up, posterized, fetishized, memorized, adopted, co-opted, abandoned and adopted again.
Stephen has called the song “a disarmingly jaunty rumination on the mercenary mind.” Maybe it is.
I’m probably more medic than mercenary, it occurs to me. Maybe we all are. Or should be. Or could be.
The morning wind batters the beach hotels. It hammers against the little house that is temporarily ours in Adelaide, Australia. It pummels the psyche, which has already taken a beating from deciding to cancel one of our Nights in the north of the country. The backlash to the cancellation adds to the emotional pummeling, and that’s how we show up to the venue: detonated. We look to each other like a cloud of nerves and shrapnel.
The Night happens in a tavern in an old hotel, a bit of an experiment for us. Tin walls and a tin roof not doing much to keep the busy street sounds from coming in, rain tap dances above, the ventilation fans squeak, and lo and behold we are right under a flight path, jets roaring over regularly. Very regularly. There is no green room…after soundcheck we stand together in a pocket of sun on the sidewalk across from venue as folks file in around the corner through the main entrance. We use the reflective windows of a shop as a mirror to see how put together we are or aren’t. We look like we feel.
We spend a few minutes in the tavern huddled by the door, trying to be there and not be there at the same time. We take our place on the stage. We begin. Simple chords lay the foundation of the night, but they have the whole day in them. The jets roar overhead and I smile every time. An infant cries out once in a while and SJ weaves their cries in. It’s a sold out room and the crowd is a mercifully still bunch.
It feels like triumph, even though the day (and all the days before and before that) have written themselves on us and on what we are trying to do on this night: an unlikely duo doing an unlikely rendering of an unlikely performance in an unlikely place. I finish the last few seconds of the evening with a vocal thing that doesn’t appear every Night…a moment of release, bordering on a scream, Sinead O’Connor swirling in my head, me wanting to get to where she could travel with her voice.
The ride back to our digs is substantially lighter than the ride to the venue earlier, and we are awash in the afterglow of being taken in by the people who came. Properly taken in, them having fully seen the markings of the darker side of our time in on the road since June.
To all you intrepid people of Adelaide (so many came without a clue as to what they were about to be a part of), thank you.
“Surely, you must know you made something beautiful tonight,” she says.
We are standing on the stone steps of a barn structure in Molkom, Sweden. It’s just after we’ve finished, and people are lingering. On my way back into the building to tear down, I pass a knot of people and conversation ensues. They reach, as usual, for language to describe what they heard.
“I don’t know about that,” I tell them. “Jenkinson and I do have a better idea about what it is we have than we did 8 years ago…or maybe even last year. But, I’ve had a long-standing pursuit: I’ve always wanted to make something inarguably beautiful. Just once”
Inarguably beautiful.
I know…it’s foolish in so many ways. But I think the hunt for it is partly what keeps me trying to make things. It can sound like a gambling addiction: just one more hand, just one more throw of the dice, just one more yank on the slot arm…just one more try. The tricky thing is, you can’t want something to be beautiful. It seems your allegiance has to be to something else, and the beauty—if there is any—is a by-product of that allegiance.
“We can never see the Night the way that you just saw it,“ I say. “We can never have that experience. There are echoes we get from time to time, but mostly we have to be content with being in the teeth of the thing, which a distinctly different vantage point than yours.”
Just then, I’m distracted by a melody. Voices coming through the open windows of the second floor of the converted barn we just played. The many voices are in unison and they are, unbelievably, singing the chorus of “Carry Me”, which we did for an encore. Sound travels different at night, and this impromptu choir falls like fog out the windows to the ground, surrounds me drenched in darkness and the cool snap from the North Atlantic. They are properly keening, an on-the-knees plea for a temporary truce with going it alone:
Carry me/ Carry me/ All I’ve ever wanted was someone/ To carry me.
I’m bounding up the stairs now to see if what I hear is real. I’m met on those stairs by people streaming out of the room, singing to me as we pass. Now I’m in the room, and I walk across the stage and find something to lean against. I marvel at the sight and sound. I’m not being watched. I’m the watcher.
In a parking lot behind the Holiday Inn in Bristol, UK, it is late, and 5 very tired people stumble out of a black van. I’m one of them, and hang back during the check-in process to assess the safety of the van and the gear to be left in it over night. We have very early lobby call to make the flight to Copenhagen and I don’t want to bring all the gear in if we don’t have to. Sitting on some steps some fifty feet away is a woman smoking a cigarette, an aura of hardship in the slight cloud of smoke around her. I pull my guitar out of the van and lean it against my suitcase to bring in to the hotel. I lock up the van and start to gather my stuff when I hear a voice.
“Is it an acoustic?” There is the woman, a few feet away now. “Sorry…?” I say. “The guitar. Is it an acoustic?” “Electric,” I say. “A Fender? “ she asks, and I begin to tell her what I tell everyone who asks about the guitar: made by Joe Yanuziello in Wainfleet, Ontario, an outrageously talented craftsman who I asked to build me “a hammer”, a useful tool that could take the abuse of the road. “Can I see her?” she asks. I unzip the bag and hand her the guitar, as I do to everyone who seems interested in it. “She’s beautiful,” she says, holding the guitar more like one would cradle a baby in order to get a good look, arm extended in front…not like a guitar player. “Yeah. I asked him to build me a hammer and he built me a beautiful one.”
“Do you love her?” “We’re learning,“ I say. “It’s been eight years…some players I know have their guitar welded to their hip, you can’t tell where they end and the guitar begins. I wish I could say that was me, but its not, I’m afraid.” “But its welded to here,” she says pointing to her heart. “I can tell. I could tell when you took it out of the van…you were very kind with her.”
(Earlier in the van when nearing Bristol: I have roots from here on my father’s side. ‘Do you feel your ancestors rumbling?’ Nathalie, The Matriarch of The Nights of Grief and Mystery, asks me. I was too tired to feel any rumbling other than that of the van and a broken heart I’ve been nursing privately. ‘Nah,’ I say dismissively.)
Now I’m thinking this was them rumbling.
“My son would have loved this,” she says, decidedly past tense. “Do you play?” I ask. “No, my son did.” Again, past tense. As I put the guitar back into its’ travel bag, I say “Your son isn’t here anymore.” She shakes her head. “He hung himself,” she offers…the words themselves suspended in the air along with the image.
Our UK wheel man, Justin, has been standing near the whole time, privy to the quiet back and forth, and he gently inquires as to her son’s name. “Vincent,” she says, her eyes glued to the guitar bag now. “Six years ago. He was 26.” A pause. “He would have loved this. He would have stood here and talked music with you for hours.”
“I’m Gregory,” I say, reaching out my hand to hers, and hers finding its way into mine, tears gathering in her eyes, and we are close, and somehow intimate and strangers no more, and there is solid ground beneath our feet, and there is Justin watching, and then she is in my arms, and then she is crying. I become aware we have given her our names, but don’t know hers. And she doesn’t offer.
The business of checking in breaks the spell as Charlie comes through the door with a question. She tells Justin he has very kind eyes. She is quite taken with Justin, but turns her attention back to the guitar bag leaning against my suitcase. “Take care of her,” she tells me. “Never let her go.”
My broken heart whispers…you should’ve taken her advice a long time ago.
I’ve never assigned a gender to my guitar, but I will from now on: she was christened by a broken Mother after midnight behind a Holiday Inn in Bristol, UK.
A last-minute venue change the day before the gig to a theatre situated in a movie cinema complex absolutely dressed up like a theme park, complete with life-size characters from the blockbusters of the last 40 years; an unfamiliar format for the evening that included an onstage interview with a prominent broadcaster, followed by a 45-minute set of a Night of Grief and Mystery— a window, open then shut; language barriers; jet lag; and the usual challenges that attend any live event production. Plus, we haven’t been on stage together in 7 months, so it was just a fist bump then “Go!”
It shouldn’t have worked, but it did.
My own understanding of what this thing is that I do with Jenkinson travels along a sine wave: I know what it is, then I don’t know what it is. I’m currently in the “I don’t know” phase. Strangely, it has a calming effect backstage. Fewer expectations, maybe. With room for only one song in the shortened set, we choose a brand new one I’ve never sung all the way through let alone in front of anyone. We decide to forgo a translator or have translated lyrics and text projected beside us, and so there is a gnawing, low-grade worry of not being understood—kind of like, “Is this mic on…?”
Afterwards: private, intimate, mostly silent exchanges with some who have stayed on; gestures in place of words, usually a hand to the heart; long moments of locking eyes; tender hand clasping, the kind that linger softly.
These things are enough for me to know it worked, whatever “it” is. Something worked. And that’s plenty enough to get me to the next gig in Tel Aviv in a few days’ time.
The Tired is coming on, and it doubles down on us because The Cold is coming, too…the temperature kind, not the viral kind. It was a mercifully short-ish drive from Louisville and we are earlier than our load-in, so we kill time on the Main Street the theatre is on. Charlie finds a place to grab himself a bite, SJ and I find a sliver of sun to stand in. Not many words pass between us: we are likely both thinking of the next day’s mountain of swapping vans, picking up my car in Columbus, sending Charlie on his way home with gear we don’t need for the next leg, keeping gear that we do, and then beginning the drive clear across America.
After the set up, we quietly ascend the stairs to a “not a room” green room…a part of a balcony that we can draw a drape on. The one wall is lined with a bank of padded benches. There is a bathroom that is ours, an that’s a small blessing. We deposit our bags and each take a place on a bench and silently let ourselves tip over. We don’t sleep, per se, but we invite it.
With no walls around us, we hear the doors open, the crowd start to gather, the murmuring grow. We assemble ourselves, walk down the back stairs to the stage door, our In Ears activated and the crowd noise amplified. We walk out on stage, bringing with us the silence that has kept us company most of the day, and we bring it out with us into the Night. We pour more than we have into the Night over the next two hours, keep up our end of the bargain. Afterwards, we hear a bit what it meant from some of the good-sized crowd that had attended.
Seized by hunger pangs that often appear after we’ve loaded out, we make way to a pizza joint a couple minutes away, the mood in the van in direct contrast to what it was eight hours earlier, until, that is, I realize with a panic that I’ve left my coat in the front row seating. We leave Charlie to wait for the pie, and I race back to the theatre, praying someone is still there. I throw flashers on, leave SJ in the van, pound on the door.
It’s opened by someone who is pulling on their jacket to leave. I explain I’d forgotten mine there, that I didn’t do an idiot check, and I retrieve it from the front row. I’m relieved.
“It’s a good thing. It’s getting cold,” the guy says.
“Yeah, true thing,” I say. “Everything’ll be fine now.”
It’s hard to know what an audience at A Night is thinking…or feeling. For one, they aren’t really an audience, they’re unintentional allies in a ceremony. They don’t seem to know it, but we do. Beyond the applause and standing O’s, there is the ever foggy sense of “are they with us?” as we spin the kind of glass that we do. No suspension of disbelief is required for this kind of evening. The deal we are trying to make with them is a different one altogether. If there is good will in the building, we can generally pick up on it, but it’s not always clear.
The morning after the Moab Night in front of a full house – which was a free event sponsored by a local hospice organization – I’m doing laundry in the local laundromat. As I finish emptying the dryer, I turn to find an older gentleman a foot away, staring at me.
“I saw you last night,” he says. “It was a wonderful event. I have a few questions for you, if you have the time.”
Always an iffy proposition, and more SJ’s territory than mine, but I’m curious so I figure, what the hell.
“Sure.”
He asks about why we don’t have an intermission, about the set list, a couple other things, and I do my best to answer as I fold my laundry.
Then he asks, “What did you think of the audience?”
That was a stumper. Besides the cell phones going off despite the plea to have them silenced and the full-blown conversation from a deep-voiced individual during the first 10 minutes (dealt with A LOT more grace by SJ than I am capable of), there was the ever present aforementioned foggy sense of just whose side they were on.
I relay this as best as I can, he listens thoughtfully, and almost like a plea he says, “I thought they were with you the whole night, attentive and completely riveted.”
Huh. “Well, I’m glad to hear that,” I manage. He gives me a few tips on what to see around the area before I leave for Colorado (which I took him up on…thanks, John), we say our polite goodbyes and I head out the door into the Moab heat with my folded laundry.
If you ever find yourself walking a tight rope in front of a crowd that no one has asked you to walk, go to a laundromat the next morning. You might find out how you did. No matter what you thought at the time.
Somewhere on the Australian coast in 2017, SJ and I sit watching a group of young people cavorting on the beach we share. I look down at my bloated self and complain about the passage of time, yearning for the form and function of youth.
“That shit is gone,” SJ says, “and it ain’t coming back.” Spoken like a man who knows.
I am 56 years old.
During a 60 Second Answer session I remind SJ of the beach, of the gone-ness of youth.
“What takes its’ place, then?” I ask.
“If you’re lucky, nothing at all,” he tells me. “If you work your ass off, nothing takes its place. It’s a BIG thing in life: Going, going, gone…but not everything goes at once, so you’ve no obligation to scramble to try to reassemble all the parts you started with. You’ve got fewer, you’re lucky. It’s less to carry around. The room for manoeuvering increases the less you’re bound to of the stuff you used to understand yourself to be.”
I am 58 years old.
Every night on stage on this tour is a chance for me to be fully that age, but it’s not granted as a guarantee. Often, the first notes I play are like a key that unlocks the door behind which is every self-immolating thought, every failure I’ve stored away during the run up to the gig, and they pour through. And there I am, taking a public shower under a torrent of insecurity. It’s a precarious moment, and one would think, at my age and with as much time in as I’ve had in the scenario, I’d have a sure fire way of handling it.
I don’t. I throw myself on the mercy of the moment. Hardly a sure fire way of doing anything, a kind of reactivity of a 15 year old.
We talk about this on the drive from Salt Lake City to Moab, Utah, where we will play tonight. As we talk, the landscape starts to be accompanied by the red sandstone monoliths the area is renowned for. Older is in the truck with me, and older is surrounding me outside.
Would that I have all I need to remind me to manoeuvre tonight.
The first thing we do after walking on to stage is plug into our in-ears monitors. The price of being able to hear ourselves in glorious clarity is not being able to hear the gathered crowd, or us talking to each other off-mic. By plugging into the system, we unplug from the world. The irony is not lost.
“Blame Bowman,” SJ says. It’s true…it’s all drummer Adam Bowman’s fault. It was a sure fire way to make the stage experience more musical for us, he said. It cut way down on sound check time, and it meant we didn’t have to carry expensive and heavy wedges around. All true and we are grateful for his expertise.
But the isolation is utterly complete. It’s a weird first move to make on stage. And, as with any added bit of tech, it’s another thing that can go awry, as happened in Boise. Stephen’s in-ears feed completely disappeared somewhere between soundcheck and the downbeat of the Night.
“I’ve got nothing…” Stephen managed to tell me. Under the gaze of the watching crowd, I tried twisting a few virtual knobs and buttons, still nothing. Unable to fix the problem, I basically threw him under the bus.
“Looks like you’re going old, old school, man,” I said on mic.
And he did, the whole Night long. He rose…he more than rose…to the challenge. As one person wrote in the next day, “Tears filled my eyes many times and overflowed …such an enlightening and soul touching evening…”
Ah, adversity: the faithful companion of every Night.
First time in Scotland for the lot of us on stage.
Why would I be shocked about our reception in Edinburgh? The foot stomping calls for an encore; the random couples dancing and clinging to each other throughout the night; the calls for “Carry Me” (where the hell did that come from?) and being sung home by those full voiced people at the very end of the night…? Why was I shocked?
Last night’s gig was sold out thanks to the tireless efforts of a few visionary folk here. I’m shitty at geography, so didn’t know much about this place.
Here’s what I DO know now:
I’m staying in a house once owned by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle;
The theatre we played in was built in 1874; Henry the 8th stood on a tower around the corner from where I’m writing and watched his beloved ship, the Mary Rose, unexplainably sink before his eyes en route to battle the French; The theatre we played in was where Charles Dickens’ mother went into labour with him; In a part of England that was flattened by bombing in WW2, the theatre we played in was left standing because it was owned at the time by a Nazi sympathizer who helped guide German war planes toward the harbour using lights on the theatre roof; The queen of England is here today. The president of the United States is here today. Peter Sellers was born above the Chinese food place down on the corner; The neighbourhood I’m staying in was in lockdown last night, a curfew enforced, and our drummer had to leave the post-gig meal withoutapple crumble and creme fraiche so as not to be arrested after midnight;
In a few days we take to the stage for what will be the two final concerts of the Nights of Grief & Mystery North American Tour 2018. According to our timekeeper, we travelled for 39 days, were in/out of airports 23 times, changed timezones 11 times, and travelled about 22,500 km. We played to over 6,400 people in 25 or so cities. Most of The Nights (I don’t really like to call them shows) ran around 2-and-a-half hours, and the band played for almost all of that. Those are the numbers, for those who like that sort of thing.
What follows here is an attempt to encapsulate what I know to be the soft centre of the experience for me, made up as it was of landings of all kinds. We had plenty…the kind you do in airplanes, the kind you do when the van rolls to a stop at the venue or accommodations, and the kind that is knowledge of a particular sort that makes itself known to you in no uncertain terms, elbowing its way into your life (as opposed to knowledge that ‘settles’ or ‘dawns’ on you).
From a moving vehicle, some of the geography held surprises; like how NYC seems appear from nowhere in the middle of a great forest; how odd it is to see cactus and still think of Looney Tunes; how you can still be surprised by winter in Winnipeg in October; how you can fool yourself into willingly moving through the pollution of L.A; how silence can fill the vehicle when passing Tent City after Tent City along highways on both East and West coasts.
gh in Boulder, Colorado
We moved a lot on this tour, on the ground and in the air. Airplane to airplane mostly. The ability to not acknowledge the toll all that movement takes gave way to it being mandatory to acknowledge it… the staggering movement of the machinery, visible and invisible, dedicated to hurtling humans through the air or down the road, and being a part of that, complicit, going from town to town, the invisible mechanisms under those airports and the moving of baggage.
That is when it came to me, a sick feeling, seeing the luggage snaking behind some guy towing it across the tarmac towards the behemoth plane and you know underneath the airport is an absurd system of belts and scanners and people prodding, checking, bumping, nudging your shit and everyone else’s shit. Sometimes it felt like everyone from everywhere decided to fly that day, no one wanted to stay home. I saw all that and I said out loud, We should do a tour where we move through space and time like it shows on our poster: we should do it behind a mule and cart.
NOGM 2018 Tour Poster Image. Also a tee-shirt.
It’s a serious consideration, and we began to assemble the list of people we could draft to build the caravan, drive the mule, etc. It’s a real list, but it will have to wait.
In the air, a particular sorrow would take a seat in me whenever we approached a landing. I would look down after breaking through the clouds and there I would be met with a bird’s eye view of the sum total of our greatness, shingles and concrete laid out in a thoughtless grid, uninspired and, even from up there, carrying the feint smell of endings. And here we were, flying in to play for people who paid a decent ticket price to hear us speak and sing about endings of all kinds.
This hit me hard flying into LA, which I’d never been to before. A lot of American place names carry with them a certain mythic quality if only because they appear as characters in so many novels, movies and other culture ephemera. Meeting them face to face is often like all the stories you hear of the folly of meeting your heroes: they are rarely what you had dreamed them to be and Los Angeles and its neighbouring regions are the hotbeds of the creation and sustaining of that American myth.
Note: When I was a kid, I thought The City of Los Angeles translated into The City of Lost Angels. Even as a kid, I had a handle on the more subtle sense of the word ‘lost’ to mean ‘bereft’. If ever there was a town full of angelic beings who had no clue as to their lineage, no sense of their destiny, suffering from a collective amnesia as to their purpose, and so, making their way through the days/nights as best they could, settling on a pale version of ‘meaningful’, it would be Los Angeles. So maybe I wasn’t all that far off in my definition as a kid.
From the air, the ground was a carpet of rooftops as far as could be seen under a layer of smog with a few spires of buildings rising out of the downtown core (where we were to play) that reminded me of Wizard of Oz for some reason. This is where all the glitter comes from? I thought. This is where all the light is bent around reality and fashioned into something else?
gh in Los Angeles, California.
All I could see was the underside of a bad idea. On the ground, even the palm trees looked like they were trying to escape. I know we are going to get to the stage. We will go through all the challenges on the ground, and these are banal challenges… will there be enough audio firepower? Enough of a sound check? Do we have drums? What if my rig doesn’t work? What if the van is too small? What if we miss our connection?But you know, even in the air, that you will figure it all out, and you are going to get on that dark road heading out of town. You know this as sure as you know anything, even when you are impossibly streaking across the sky, even up in the unreal blue of the beginning of deep space…you know you will be on the humble ground, on a dark road, heading out of town. Those words again…on a dark road, heading out of town…
When you fly in over a place like Los Angeles and you know that you are going to be talking about endings of all kinds, and you are flying over an ending, those are heartbreaking moments for me. Those few seconds right there, trying to bring these two things together gently. We are night after night in one building or another, four people and a sound system, reminding people of the end and what is there waiting to be earned. It sounds ridiculous. And I’m shaking my head in sorrow, and I can’t focus on all the good people who will be helping us in and out of town, putting us up, driving us around, can’t focus on whatever the beauty the land does offer still, can’t focus on what most would call “the upside” of the venture…all I can feel is sorrow. This is the best we could do with our time here? This is the expression of the best part of us??
You’ll tell me I’m being negative, that its a matter of perspective, that most cities look like hell from the air, and that, anyhow, I’m a cynical asshole. I won’t argue with any of that. I’ve spent most of my artistic life peering into the negative spaces and my cynicism is well earned and it doesn’t keep me from recognizing beauty. I’m just not the guy you’re going to find cheerleading the modern definitions of creativity, righteousness, love, justice, and freedom in our cultural and political systems. After all, you are reading words from a guy who is in a band that almost printed the tour tee-shirt No Love Songs To The Anthropocene Era! (words courtesy of Jenkinson, of course).
Landings…the other great landing of this tour came from confronting the quality of the words of my songs as they had to night after night share the oxygen with Stephen Jenkinson’s conjureings. Even though we have presented different iterations of this material together for a few years now, this last tour seemed to illuminate how much farther up the mountain I have to go, or, conversely, how much deeper into the cracks and crevices I need to peer. Humbling and enervating at 54 years old to know I’m not operating at the top of my game. Along with that, though, like a salve comes this other kind of landing: that I am, indeed, doing what I’ve been put on this earth to do. At the end of this tour, which was the result of the hard work of many, many people and a foolhardy and Quixotic endeavour none the less, it occurred to me that I finally understood what ‘having faith’ meant– the kind that we try to have in ourselves, in our unlikely dreams for ourselves, in those wordless versions of ourselves that we can’t defend or describe, even if our marriages or relationships or households scream and demand, WHAT IS THE PLAN???!!!?? and you open your mouth but nothing comes out, because…
Because this: the arrow doesn’t know the target or the bow, but it flies anyway. Its flying is independent of the target and the bow, and loose in the air it knows neither and could speak of neither, but it flies on anyway. And that has been me in life, and that was what came to me at the end of this tour. I can’t claim to know my beginning and I’ve no certainty about the ending (except for knowing it will come), but right now I know I’m flying/falling at the behest of Something(s) or Someone(s) having set me in a bow, pulled until the tension was unbearable, and loosed me into the recurring unrepentant nights and the unrelenting dawns that mark time on this planet, towards a mystery known only to the archer.
And that is OK with me.
And that is faith, it seems to me. I don’t know where I’m going, but I’m going there anyway.
A great band featuring my friend Don Rooke (of The Henrys and Quiet Industry fame) on lap steel etc for the evening. I sing four songs: four American God, American Way, America Lost, American Love songs. It is a lot of America for this singer. I’m a fairly linear guy and not much of a lyric “interpreter”, so when I sing “I expect to touch His hand”, I know the intention and can’t pretend otherwise. Likewise a bit of a thing to sing any line with the words “our forefathers”. I’m having a good time finding my way through these songs, though, and I know the shows will be great. A ton of talent under the roof.
In a few weeks I leave for a whirlwind run of dates with Stephen in the U.K. This will be third continent to which we’ve been able to bring these unassuming nights of sorrow and wonder. For tickets, go to https://orphanwisdom.com/events/
It’s hard to describe what the nights we call “Illuminate Me” are like, so this video goes a little way towards that. Essentially, I sing and Tina Newlove paints on a canvas that has a camera trained on it and the feed is projected over me on to a large screen behind me. The night starts under the stark glare of the white projector light and ends drowned in colour.
As to the “why” of it…well, why not? There is no plan when we begin and often a quiet collective “Huh,” at the end as the echoes of a night of song die away and we all look at a huge painting where there was none 90 minutes before. It’s a rare way to watch the collision of two art disciplines and experience the chaos of making something from nothing.
December 1 and 2, The Pearl Company Theatre, Hamilton, ON. Tickets
I first met Tina Newlove at this time of the year in 2012 in a factory loft art space (sadly no longer there) in Kitchener, ON. We performed as part of a series that curated a visual artist and a musician for an evening. Not content with just singing in the midst of art hanging on the wall, I thought maybe live painting would be an avenue to look into and Tina had had plenty of experience with painting on stage. Then I thought it would be a lot cooler if somehow the painting and I could interact more, and that’s when I proposed training a video camera on to Tina’s canvas and projecting the feed over me onto a screen behind me. The singer and the song become sort of subservient (nice alliteration) to the “hand of god” and the brush as the audience watches the birth of a painting, the mess of it all, the seeming disorganization and the sometimes horrifying white-ing out of a part of the image that one might have grown attached to…
The singer, the screen, the hand.
It. Was. Amazing. The painting sold (you would be advised to bring along a chequebook), the audience was exhausted, and we had done something a little off the beaten path.
We are very excited to try this again in the lovely factory confines of The Pearl Company in Hamilton, Ontario. Please join us.
gh and artist Tina Nelove and a piece of the finished painting still being projected.
I didn’t know today was the 40th anniversary of the Edmund Fitzgerald going down.
A few years ago, on a magical night, I was lucky to be in the company of some of the finest musicians a man could find himself in and one of the songs we did that night was Lightfoot’s iconic retelling of the sorrow of the misfortune of the men aboard. Here is a link to that performance.
The arrangement, by Aaron Davis, is worth plugging your computer/handset into a stereo worthy of the endeavour.
Vain and Alone in T’Sou-ke Nation.
It takes a particular vanity to do this under the gaze of a tree that that has and will outlive me and all those I love. I hope it had a sense of humour.
**A couple weeks ago I was asked to write a little note about my time on the road with Stephen Jenkinson. We were in Austin, it was hot, and I was having trouble describing the half dozen nights we had done. Here’s what I came up with. Is it unbecoming that I quote my own lyrics? We continued on through Oregon and Washington State and finish up Halloween night in Duncan, BC. It has been an honour.
Beneath the Truth Lie the bones Of a Truth More complete And I’ll bet everything I own It’s a Truth that’s bittersweet.
Tonight I will walk on to a stage with a remarkable man in a theater built in Austin, TX, in 1871. It will be the sixth time I’ve done so on this tour, and the first time I’ve ever strapped on a guitar in Austin. After the whistles and clapping die down, he will start talking, and I will wait.
I will make a few tentative sounds,
my fingers trying to find the spaces between his words. My listening will turn into the kind that forgets the moment that has come before and is unaware of the one coming next. And I have a suspicion that this is the way it is for many in the audience, too.
At some point he will make room for me to sing and I will try to remember to sing softly so as not to break the spell cast on the room. It has taken me a while to understand that long, liquid, and legato notes are the order of the evening. Time will dance on through the night, or, in this case, will move properly and headlong toward the past.
The end will come, long book signing lines will dwindle, and we will ask each other in a stolen moment, “Well…how’d we do, Boss?”
You’d have to ask Stephen himself what these night “are” to him. To me, they are art and subversive acts of the highest order. Sometimes it is the building itself that is subverted: a recital hall, a stately ballroom, a modern concert hall, a conference room in a State Capital building, a bookstore, this opera house come Masonic temple…but mostly it is the thing that passes for Culture on this continent that is subverted, and most of what stands for Counter Culture, too.
It is not the kind of art designed to distract or entertain, nor is it the kind that takes some kind of severe gymnastics of the mind and heart to trust. It is the kind found on cave walls that simply and skillfully tell the story of the day with all of its’ sorrows, horrors, and challenges along with its’ tenderness, victories, and graces. Over the course of the evenings, the pendulum swings a wide arc…sometimes unbearably so…and standing firmly at the center is Stephen Jenkinson, more with the people than separate from them, whether they want him there or not. And given our proclivity to throw heroes up the pop charts and teachers onto crosses, the resistance to simply seeing him as a man of hard won truths and a gift for singing them is sometimes shocking.
From up where I’m standing on stage…slightly up stage left in a muted pool of light…there is only one way to measure the evening:
Was every moment, Every vein opened, Every chest cracked Every word spoken, Every note struck, Every clunker hit, Every word sung, Every story told True?
To a point, the answer is…and has to be…and IS,
Yes.
So here’s to the highs And here’s to the lows The human heart endures And so it goes… The bittersweet highs and lows.
It started, actually, as a bit of a lark: when you’re travelling alone, how can you make it seem like you’re not? That, indeed, your travelling companion is snapping off intimate shots? In NYC, you can’t point the camera anywhere without the backdrop being amazing (unlike the cities I frequent in Canada). However, selfies are a drag. So, while in NYC, I placed my phone on the ground, set the timer, ran away, and strolled nonchalantly toward it, trying several times. I posted the result, called it “Vain and Alone in NYC?”, describing how the shot was taken. Then I just kept trying to see how far I could push the un-selfie selfie. Each post on Facebook was accompanied by a little anecdote of shooting the thing…you had to at least be able to not be embarrassed being obviously vain. Someone suggested I hash tag the stuff. So, #vainandalone
NYC, New York
NYC, New York, in restaurant attached to Chelsea Hotel
A small arty clip from a vid for a song we like to call Glow Fonder but is actually called The Almighty Inbox from the new Henrys recording. Its a beautiful song–I think of it as a prayer, but I didn’t write it so you’d have to ask Don Rooke. Quiet Industry from The Henrys will be available June 11, 2015
At the end of 2014, I spent some time in a small room recording vocals for 11 songs written by Don Rooke, the man behind The Henrys.
The recording features Don on guitars, baritone uke etc, Andrew Downing on bass, Davide DiRenzo on drums, John Sheard on pump and electric organs, Hugh Marsh on violin, Jonathan Goldsmith on muted piano (plus a string arrangement) and harmony vocals from Tara Dunphy.
It’s an odd thing these days, the making and releasing music: it kind of feels like yelling from behind a waterfall. The task this time was made sweeter by the fact that the songs are inventive, emotive, and accessible; the players are all from the “A” team; and the attention to detail on Quiet Industry is a rare thing these days (the record took more than a year to make and most of that time it was one lonely man spending unending hours in a little room in Toronto on the edge of a forest, toiling and tinkering…thus the title of the recording).
The Henrys are an institution in Toronto and have been critically lauded around the world since their debut in 1994. I’m totally impressed with myself that I got to sneak in and hang with the cool kids for a while.
I’ll keep you posted on how you can check it out, concert dates and what not. Please let your music loving friends know about this record.
gh
A man toiling in the quiet of a room in an industrious manner.
Taking a run at “When That Far Shore Disappears”. The first song we got a complete take on, top to bottom.
Waiting, from the concert DVD “Pleasure & Relief”. A rare song, written quickly on a Korg piano in the second floor apartment of Lynn Simmons, recorded first with The Stickpeople and then again years later with a beautiful string arrangement by Jon Goldsmith, accompanied by Gary Craig and George Koller, with Jon on piano, and The Beggars String Ensemble in front of a live audience.
I don’t dance. Which is to say I don’t dance well, so I tend not to dance. If life or love is on the line I will rise to the occasion but its an entirely self-conscious affair. Which is why I’ve decided that 2015 is the Year of The Dance— kind of a solemn vow to lubricate whatever psychological joints need loosening, and tend to the physical ones, too.
Truth is, I’ve been thinking about this for a while. In the summer of last year, Suzette Sherman ( Senior Artist, Founding Company Member, Associate Artistic Director at Dancetheatre David Earl) choreographed and performed a dance piece to “To Be Open”. I’d never seen a song of mine interpreted in movement. It was humbling, moving, and inspiring. In the early fall of last year, on a whim before heading to the city, I set up a camera here at the shop and danced around like a fool, to no music, just whatever was in my imagination. I was curious to see what I’d look like. I thought of it the same way as I view recording my voice to see what I sound like singing a particular song. To ease the shock, I filmed it in slow motion…much like smothering a voice in reverb and echo to make the performance more palatable. The pics up at the top are from that video. In slow mo, it looked…probably better than it did in real time. Everything looks better in slow mo, though.
Then this New Year’s Eve I danced with my daughter after playing a set with The Dogs. I’d tried to move while playing, but the most I could put together was a pogo of sorts. Now my daughter, she could move, as several patrons noted. As for me, a voice in my head tried to assert calm when I realized people might see me dance— “Honestly, Fuckhead: no one cares.” I’d have preferred a more benign approach, the gentle assurance of a quiet farmer saying, “That’ll do, Pig. That’ll do.”
So here’s to the Year of The Dance. It’s a beginning.
Gregory Hoskins 