World Music, Vol. II - Claire Prendergast

Irish alternative folk singer-songwriter Claire Prendergast is my latest random YouTube discovery, part of a process where I'll input a string of words in the YouTube search engine, like "ukelele" and "folk", or "accordion" and "radiohead", and see what pops up.

Claire does some very charming cover versions of songs by artists such as Radiohead and A-ha, which I quite like, but it's her original material that really captured my attention...  after all, how can you not like a young Irish folk singer who writes songs about "zombies, polar bears and shovels"?

Paul Kimball

Thought du jour - 24 September 2011

"Film is one of the three universal languages - the other two: mathematics and music." - Frank Capra

The Burial of Private Colin Patrick

On the subject of the realities of war...

The Burial of Private Colin Patrick

There was no noise as the coffin was lowered
into the grave,
save for the sadness of the lonely bugle
hanging slowly in the withered air.

His comrades stood around
all of them hardened veterans of the war,
thinking of their fallen friend
while wondering which of the them
would be the next
to die.

The chaplain said a few words from the Bible
1 Peter, verses 4, 7 through 11,
after which the company commander stepped forward
and quoted from a certain President,
Abraham Lincoln,
who once said under somewhat similar circumstances
in another place:

"It is rather for us to be here dedicated
to the great task remaining before us
that from these honoured dead we take increased devotion
to that cause for which they gave the last full measure
of devotion
that we here highly resolve that these
dead shall not have died
in vain."

He concluded by telling the troops
how proud he had been to have served
with such a brave young man,
and then he turned and walked back
to the bunkers behind
the land of the red tabs.

The others marched slowly
in the opposite direction
heads bowed,
a few with salt in their eyes,
as they glanced back and bid farewell
to the mound of dirt and small white cross,

the only memorial to mark the place

of the burial of private Colin Patrick.

written & performed by Paul Kimball
Recorded on 4-track, 1997

All That Jazz - "'Round Midnight"

'Round Midnight is a jazz standard written by Thelonious Monk (trumpeter Cootie Williams and Bernie Hanighen also received credit for their contributions); it is the most recorded version of any jazz tune composed by a jazz musician in history.

I love Monk's interpretations, of course, which are like a walk along the waterfront on a cool autumn evening, but I also really enjoy the loose and breezy adaptation by the great jazz guitarist Wes Montgomery, who makes it sound like the party is still going on back at the club.

That's the great thing about jazz - different artists can take the same song, and use it to communicate a different mood, or feel, or message, from someone else. Best of all, none of the interpretations are inherently right, or wrong - the jazz ethos allows them the space to exist on their own terms.

Paul Kimball

All That Jazz - Dave Brubeck Quartet, "Take Five"

"Jazz is the big brother of the blues. If a guy's playing blues like we play, he's in high school. When he starts playing jazz it's like going on to college, to a school of higher learning." - B. B. King 

I'm firmly convinced that the world would be a better place if more people listened to jazz. It's the perfect musical metaphor for life.

Paul Kimball

Pop Matters: Radiohead, "Videotape"

"No matter what happens now
I won't be afraid
Because I know
Today has been the most perfect day I have ever seen..."

The best lyrics are always tricky things, open to myriad interpretations, but in this song, which is one of my favourites by Radiohead, I think Thom Yorke is basically saying: "no regrets, because it was worth it."

Words to live by.

Paul Kimball

Thought du jour - 2 August 2011

"Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination and life to everything." - Plato

And with that in mind, here is Canadian pianist Derek Yaple-Schobert from the television series The Classical Now, which I produced and directed for Bravo in 2003 and 2004, performing Bach's Tocatta in E Minor, BWV 914. 

I've made television programming that covers a wide variety of subjects, but nothing I've done has been as rewarding as the programming I've created which has dealt with music.

Paul Kimball

Synchronicity

This performance film I made for Bravo in 2007 featured pianist Heather Schmidt and cellist Shauna Rolston, talking about their friendship and creative collaboration, and performing music written by Schmidt, including a piece I specifically commissioned for the film titled "Synchronicity".

Heather and Shauna also talk about how they "fit together". I've always wondered whether these kinds of things are just coincidences, or whether there might be something more at work. Do we just get lucky when we meet people with whom we have a connection, or do we meet these people for a reason? Perhaps, if you give any credence to the idea of reincarnation, we travel through our "lives" linked to the same group of people, each of us fulfilling a different role in the next life (my dad, for example, might be my son or daughter in the next life, or my best pal). Maybe that's why, when you first meet someone and feel like you've known them your whole life, you have - just not this "life", but one before... or, if you see time not as a linear construct but more of a circle, then perhaps a "life" still to come.

That would be the ultimate synchronicity.

Paul Kimball

Letters to Orwell

"Jealous of your friends

and your easy conversations with them
I'm not a good listener
and I've never been.

Closed at the wrong time
you must wonder if I'm still alive
I wish I knew
do you?

Please let me know, let me know
will you stay with me here tonight
please tell me so, tell me so
and everything will be all right.

Unsure of every embrace
unable to read the look on your face
I fear the future
are you more sure?

Please let me know, let me know
will you stay with me here tonight
please tell me so, tell me so
and everything will be all right."

One of my autobiographical songs.

Paul Kimball

John Cage and the "Activity of Sound"

John Cage discusses time and space and the "activity of sound".

Here is 4'33", Cage's most famous - or infamous, depending on your point of view - composition:

Cage: "The sound experience which I prefer to all others is the experience of silence."

By listening to that silence we are sometimes able to finally, and truly, hear.

Paul Kimball

Jefferson

One of my most overtly political songs.

"Half-turned sods of hallowed ground,

tabled, filed under lost and found,

weighted down and then strung up

a pleasant walk to the scaffold.

Hangman's noose on a threadbare throat

he mouths some words but none come out,

That's all right, no-one's listening

That's okay, no-one's listening.

Chorus:

We're all gone away, lost again

watching monuments twist in the wind,

Jefferson was a passing phase

now it all hangs on the turn of a phrase.

Placebo cure for the rotting ghost

those with the least told that they have the most,

bargained away and then discarded

a pleasant walk to the graveyard.

Chorus.

Open hole swallows fish-tail mind

deposits the same by the no exit sign,

entrance come and gone, no-one's here

entrance come and gone, no-one's here."

We don't even know what the real momuments are anymore (hint: they're not made of marble, and stone, or anything else we can see or touch), because we're so busy worshiping at the altar of the false ones that we've created to justify a society that's lost its way.

Which reminds me... I watched the excellent documentary Reagan this evening. If only every American would do the same.

Paul Kimball

Guillotine

"All through this space of time
there were other echoes menacing,
from a distance
in the corner,
they have an awful sound
uncertain chorus of no consequence,
only a warning
of the true storm forming,
it is a hard day
straight and strong and narrow,
it is a hard way
confident in your conscience,
resolute in your innocent deceit
no thought to you next move -
remember the people you meet
on your way to the guillotine.

A troubled shroud it calls out loud
amidst the music and the singing,
it is ignored
by the guilty ones,
condescend to turn around
deduce the nature of this conversation,
try to remember
what you once were,
it is a hard day
straight and strong and narrow,
it is a hard way
confident in your conscience,
resolute in your innocent deceit
no thought to you next move -
remember the people you meet
on your way to the guillotine,
on your way to the guillotine."

Still one of my favourite songs that I wrote.

Paul Kimball

Pop Matters: The Housemartins, "Hopelessly Devoted to Them"

"In the morning, when I’m woken
By the sound of my alarm
Stretching out my arm
I want to screw it up in my palm

And I’ve taken this route to work
A thousand times or more
And when you’ve seen it all before
you tend to get a little bored

They’ve got the keys to all my doors
They hold my where and when
So I guess I’ll always be
Hopelessly devoted to them

In the office when I’m working
There’s a funeral atmosphere
I know I lost someone dear
But I didn’t see him disappear

And I’m lying in my bed
'Cause its keeping me awake
And you think there's no escape
They’ve bound me up in their tape

They’ve got the keys to all my doors
They hold my where and when
So I guess I’ll always be
Hopelessly devoted to them."

One of the great, underrated bands of the 1980s, The Housemartins combined great pop melodies and harmonies with radical and biting lyrics by lead singer Paul Heaton, who was concerned with social inequality, and the class system, often reflecting a fair dose of social gospel Christianity (although Heaton has repeatedly stated that he is an atheist). As the phrase on the cover of their classic album London 0 Hull 4 said: "Take Jesus - Take Marx - Take Hope".

I heartily recommend listening to both London 0 Hull 4 and The People Who Grinned Themselves to Death (their second and final album) while reading Situationist philosopher Raoul Vaneigem's The Revolution of Everyday Life.

Paul Kimball

It's All in the Hearing

"Mercy comes softly to those who will wait
but it goes by quickly you can't hesitate,
the dead can't speak, the dead can't sing
but they can tell you what mercy means,
'cause they've seen it, just listen to them,
'cause they've seen it, just listen to them,
'cause it's all in the hearing.

Picturesque faces locked in timless smiles
long hollowed spaces barren for miles,
searching for something, somewhere beyond
searching for someone whose already gone,
'cause they've seen it, just listen to them,
'cause they've seen it, just listen to them,
'cause it's all in the hearing.

Gods and goddesses they come and they go
and when they die it's painful and alone,
mercy...
mercy...
mercy...
mercy."

A song about modern celebrity, and particularly the "reality TV" celebrity in all its manifestations, more apropos today than ever, as "entertainment news" provides us with a constant parade of "picturesque faces locked in timeless smiles, long hollowed spaces barren for miles."

Paul Kimball

Let It Rain

Back in the 1990s, when I was in law school, and then a musician (and also in grad school), my best friend Peter Black and I used to drink "on occasion", during which time would discuss all things metaphysical, mystical and philosophical (we still do this, but far less frequently, alas). I wrote a song about our otherworldly conversations, called "A Drawing Down" (the title came from a line in the Wilfred Owen poem "Anthem for Doomed Youth"), and our view that society (and most of the people within it) had become  hollow,  too wrapped up in bread & circuses, and lacking a meaningful direction, or awareness of a "bigger" picture.  Peter and I weren't particularly settled on what that "bigger" picture should or could be, only that people should be looking for it in places other than those deemed socially acceptable by the powers-that-be, and that there was no one answer, or path, that people should follow - rather, there were parts of almost every path that could lead to insight and form part of the greater whole.

Accordingly, the conversation would range from Marxism to Christian mysticism to Aleister Crowley, and many points in between, off to the side, and over the proverbial fence. From time to time, we would light a little fire in the center of the room and try to commune with the elder gods, should they exist in some form and still be in the practice of accepting calls. To this day, I'm not sure that we ever got an answer, although we did have a pretty strange experience with a ouija board once, but I am sure that one should never attempt to put out a fire in the middle of a room with a glass full of vodka. I definitely consider that a bullet dodged!

Anyway, here are two versions of that song by my old band, Julia's Rain - the first is the original, harder-edged version (which we eventually released on an e.p. called "notes from underground"), while the second is a jazzier, more acoustic version taht we played at a live fundrasiing gig for radio station CKDU.

The lyrics were:

I read the news today -
I really thought it would mean something to me,
but stranger tales, well I have heard
nothing that happens seems to make me anymore,
just round and round it goes
through my revolving door.

I heard a song today -
I really thought it would mean something to me,
but truer songs, well I have heard
nothing they write seems to touch me anymore,
just the words going in and out
through my revolving door.

Candles burning on the floor
and Aleister Crowley is knocking at my door,
come around, come around
to this drawing down,
on this "unholy" ground
come see what I have found.

I heard a voice today -
I really thought it would mean something to me,
but stronger voices, well I have heard
nothing they say seems to move me anymore,
just the Word going in and out
through my revolving door.

As a lyricist, I looked to the Beats and various mystics for inspiration, as well as philosophers and poets such as William Blake - and I was never afraid to alter my state of consciousness to achieve a greater understanding, if not of the universe, then of myself, and my limits. 



As Blake wrote: "The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom; for we never know what is enough until we know what is more than enough." Or, as my friend John Rosborough once wrote in a song of his own - "within the fire, you find the rain."

My motto has always been to let it rain.

Paul Kimball

True Love Ways - Darkest Hour

Here I am performing my song "Darkest Hour" in Williams, Arizona, in September, 2007.

"There's a vision
from the edge
it comes to you
as you lie asleep
in your bed.

You feel alone
you're unable to move
you've been wounded
by the things
that he's said.

I wish I could share
this hurt
and take your pain away
or at least be your comfort
when you awake.

It's 3 am
still hours from light
the darkest moment
of the soul.

I want to be
with you tonight
to give you
to give you
someone to hold."

What is love, at its core?

Empathy.

Paul Kimball

Fall Well

"Ten thousand liars
tell ten thosuand lies
and then they whisper
silent goodbyes,
Ten thousand prophets
tell ten thousand tales
they put Revelations
on the auction block for sale,
stranged, stranged
we've been stranged...

Ten thousand saviours
on ten thousand TVs
offer salvation
for a nominal fee,
Ten thousand sailors
on ten thousand ships
out on the ocean
alone and adrift,
stranged, stranged
we've been stranged...

Ten thousand opiates
cloud ten thousand minds
never allowing them
to seek what they must find,
stranged, stranged
we've been stranged."

Of all the songs that I wrote in the 1990s, this is the one that seems the most relevant today. "Reality" television (or, as it's often known now, "factual programming"), "news" channels that don't tell us anything about what's really happening in the world, Michael Bay "filmmaking", conspicuous consumption raised to a virtual religion...  the opiates get more powerful and ingrained with each passing year, and we just keep falling for it all.

The only silver lining is that I don't think we've reached terminal velocity yet, but we're accelerating... and the ground is getting closer.

Paul Kimball

True Love Ways - Someday I'll Be With You

Over the years, I've spent a fair bit of time contemplating what it means to be in love, and the nature of love itself.

Most of it was done through songs like this one.

The song can be looked at in two ways, I think - either it represents the noble persistence of the protaganist trying to reach his one true love... or it represents a stalker who just won't take no for an answer.

It's a fine line, sometimes.

Paul Kimball