The sun and my recent jamming has reminded me of the fact that music trumps all in my heart and mind. Even the sonnets that give a title to this website have their origin in my fundamental love of rhytmic order that is marr(i)ed to lyrical language. In any case, with these things in mind, I decided to unearth a few songs that I wrote and/or recorded years ago, in a past that I need to come to terms with, if not at least partially return to.
There is a decided dearth of creative inspiration in my day-to-day life, and I'm always looking backwards instead of forwards to find a spark. This is quite possibly flawed, but it is what it is. I produced a whole lot more back then, and production is key.
Anyhow, here's a brief rundown of the material.
1) "Devil's Dozens": Written and recorded in Fort Greene, Brooklyn in the fall of 2005, this is just wordplay. Since I come from a partially African-American tradition of wordplay, I decided to call it "Devil's Dozens." I remember being happy with the high drone thing that's going on here.
2) "Colours": Also written in Fort Greene in the fall of 2005, this song forms a sequence with "Jubilee," which follows it. I was re-reading The Divine Commedy at this time, and I thought it'd be nice to write a song about Inferno. This is it, though the ending section (the coda?) represents a move up into Purgatory which is voiced by…
3) "Jubilee": Named after specific years when anyone could go to Rome and get hooked-up with a new, blank slate for a-sinnin', this song is vaguely about Purgatory. I mention Lethe, I think, and Matilde, which figure prominently in Dante's Purgatorio. The ending (coda?) of this one represents the ascent into Paradise. I never wrote the Paradise song, but we can say that…
4) "Feminine Wilds": Sort of represents the wide-eyed (self-?)satisfaction of paradisiacal wonderment. Who knows? I wrote this in Buenos Aires, Argentina, sometime in early 2005, on a dilapidated acoustic guitar which sounds dignified.
NOTE: All of these songs were recorded directly into a macbook microphone and then tinkered with in Garage Band. This is why they sound bad. "Colours" and "Jubilee" use the same drum loop because they go together!
urbansonnets 