I love the idea of switching back and forth erratically between chest voice and falsetto. The two are distinguished as if two different voices: chest voice and head voice. Suddenly, I am one person with two voices. I like the idea of having two characters at play, making conversation by way of finishing each other’s sentences.
Ramones - Here Today, Gone Tomorrow
A Momentary Howl
Hand me that box, the one with a neck on it
you know, the one when we beat it it screams
a twelve-bar cage birdsong. I’ve got the mic
on this platform yea-high & we’re drunk on drink,
drunk on drunkenness, drunk on mania, drunk
on the muscles in our cheeks & if I’m out of my
own breath let me prove it to you, & if I’m out
of my own mind let me alone with it, & yr one
role tonight ladies & gentlemen is to pour
another drink & yr one talent is that yr amused
& we’ll pick the place we’re looking, for a minute
& we’ll forget it, even that, for a minute
til the bird falls over its in cage, which it will
& put yr hands together, now, if you will
& won’t you?
Pocketknives - Regular Magritte
Yes!
Thanks for the support, haha, you’re my only fan! If you wanna hear the whole session, it’s up at our SoundCloud page!
Snuck my phone into Pocketknive’s rehearsal this weekend. We’re missing the drums & secondary vocals, but here’s a brooding little surf-y tune for you. Pardon the quality. You should stream this through something you can hear the bass licks out of, though.
LYRICS:
So long, you darling demons.
I’ve had a lot to drink today, so I am fine.
You learn to tie your shoe-strings. Still, it’s easier
to pit your head against your knees & pray.
All along the sky-line, well, I tried it—
behind the glass, by the holding cell — to breathe
through gaps in my palms. I’m gone, darling demons,
I’m gone to the pattering places, I’ll have you know, you’ve no
home here, but you’ve the better of all my days…
What does it matter, any…
Well, so long, so long! I’ve a mind to
start a journey of a thousand steps with one cliché. & did you
know it takes as fortune to know one? Well, I
I dug a hole & I filled it up with a view
of the rigs & the scrapers, like cornfields,
gold at night by their inner lights, slipping straight
through gaps in my palms. I’m gone, darling demons,
I’m gone to the pattering places, I’ll have you know, you’ve no
home here, but you’ve the better of all my days…
What does it matter, anyway?
I was waiting, it was purgatory & a kite
was clipped behind the bars & buried in the fine
grains I spent turning over in the bunk-
bed & dreamt the sea took me in like a son
in an iron basket.
The steaming sea spread its parts to all its parts.
Nothing to do about it,
but to lay here reflecting like a dome stars.
I was saving me for something worth a damn, a dime
a clever kind of conscience — the blue eyes
the long grey beard of the gay poet fright-
ened me to all the things that are lovelier than night
& it bled right through me
as I steeped between the leaves unfurling wide.
Nothing to do about it—all space, all-reaching, & all, am I…
What does it matter, any…
If you haven’t checked out Pocketknives’ demo yet, give it a listen! It’s just a fingernail on the hand of what we’ve got to show you so far. This song in particular is a surf rock number with a mean ghastly punk break at the very end.
LYRICS:
Age old stones, they tower
into the bowels of this hill.
Wishing well, would you fetch for me
my ribbon-haired bride — my long lost wife?
With languid tunes, I’ll conjure
the Stone White witch of this well.
Her light-less eyes & gape-wide maw
tremble with hollow shrills, as she sings:
Oh, kid you better go home! Before you know it,
you could never imagine the price of knowing:
your poor bride is gone, why seek her here?
But trade for your darling what you hold more dear.
There’s no turning back.
A last copper coin, I throw in.
Then the stitch off my back, to no reply.
No plea, no tear, no swear-word can buy
my ribbon-haired bride, or my long lost life.
So I straddle the stones, one foot in
& stare down the throat of this well
when a gape-mawed ghost grabs me through the depths,
& it pulls from my lungs a frightened cry, the age old Song
Of The Witch’s Well — before I know it,
I could never imagine, while tangled below,
the ribboned hairs framed & frayed above
the Stone White lips of my long lost love,
singing, “No turning back!”’
released 05 December 2012
Vocals: Van Stanley & Tiffany Le
Guitar: Dakota Garrett & Van Stanley
Bass: Alejandro Medina
Percussion: Colin Ryan
Production: Omar Felker & Cooper Gray
Hey guys, my band Pocketknives just polished off our first demo, it’s called Song Of The Witch’s Well, have a listen if you will — expect more to come in the future.
LYRICS:
Age old stones, they tower
into the bowels of this hill.
Wishing well, would you fetch for me
my ribbon-haired bride — my long lost wife?
With languid tunes, I’ll conjure
the Stone White witch of this well.
Her light-less eyes & gape-wide maw
tremble with hollow shrills, as she sings:
Oh, kid you better go home! Before you know it,
you could never imagine the price of knowing:
your poor bride is gone, why seek her here?
But trade for your darling what you hold more dear.
But there’s no turning back.
A last copper coin, I throw in.
Then the stitch off my back, to no reply.
No plea, no tear, no swear-word can buy
my ribbon-haired bride, or my long lost life.
So I straddle the stones, one foot in
& stare down the throat of this well
when a gape-mawed ghost grabs me through the depths,
& it pulls from my lungs a frightened cry, the age old Song
Of The Witch’s Well — before I know it,
I could never imagine, while tangled below,
the ribboned hairs framed & frayed above
the Stone White lips of my long lost love,
singing, “No turning back!”’
Spending so much time exercising — what is supposed to be — a “heightened” sense of chordal fluidity in my music — that I’ven’t been honing, enough, the melodic intuition with which I’m to navigate these damn chord progressions — it’s strange because ideally the melody would be the thing leading one through a composition — right? — and yet I find myself, daily, fumbling this mumbled and atonal gibberish over the guitar — in a sad vocal attempt to conquer the long-winded structures I’ve been coming up with… All of this is non-sense, in the end the answer is to exercise joy by exercising unbound freedom — I know this — but I want to write about my pains, and therefore: this paragraph.
Subject matter vs. Object matter
Oftentimes I will, in private, confuse theoretical progress (by that I mean a more direct understanding of my own creative process) with product. The trick is to not only pay attention to the nuance, but then to ring a thing down off the edge on which it balances — to stop thinking so much of the subject matter, but to create the object, to create the signifiers upon which meaning & concept & narrative depend.
Say, for example, in songwriting: one method of songwriting sets the music foremost, with the conceptual/lyrical content following after (I will say that by & large the musical whim — be it as basic as rhythm, chord, melody, or the sound of a word — is the shot-in-the-dark necessary to get one going with the exploratory/creative motions). The beat & the chord immediately create an abstract/emotional environment through which the songwriter travels — where the sound gives the auditory “room” a function (a vibe, a dimensional space, even at times the presence of an audience), & where tone & texture give it color, it is with lyrics that we’ve filled the room with furniture, with appliances, with doors & windows, with the context for all that ethereal nonsense. In music, subject matter is no more than all the viscous “stuff” of emotional imagery (how one hears a sound & is transported to a particular cloud of “places”), the lyrics themselves — the road-signs that map the otherwise unmarked exotic terrain — are the object matter.
Now, to speak only of my own tastes, I’ve come to realize that I’ve neither the appetite or the patience for the rigidity of honest confession in music. As in plain-paged poetry: At best, one can only give the most appropriate general idea — that is, if we are concerned with “confessing” the “truth”. I’ve come to realize that I am more concerned with the ways in which language can present itself in times of confessional need; how language reveals its use when we depend on it; how writing about the process of looking for the right word is the most honest method of choosing one.
In this case, the subject matter is the room we inhabit (a confessional space, a cloud of associations stacked like a deck of cards, an espresso demitasse made of words [ha, ha] in wait to see how it takes its coffee), the object matter, therefore, we know, is a construction. No matter what you write or how you write it, the end-product is fantasy, drawn from the well of memory in its creation, drawn from the well of imagination in its performance.
I’ve come to realize how in all of my own anxieties & repressions, especially, how in the act of producing work, be it lyrical or poetic, I haven’t knocked down a single wall bounding the nation of my security, no, but rather I’ve invented those feelings & images which I needed in order to express them. There is an important distinction to be made here, that we are not forgoing any repression by creating, merely inventing a product which stands on its two feet & speaks for itself.
Many poor lyricists seem to treat words like some menial task, done only to show it was done. There is a tradition in popular music to get at the audience & give them something to repeat for themselves, infecting them with the title of the song. It’s the old nursery-rhyme trick. The audience follows along, claps their hands in time, & repeats in smiles or tears, “Ba, ba, black sheep, have you any wool?” One trick I use to justify my sourness towards poor lyrics is to pay attention to the ratio of first- and second-person pronouns in relation to not only object words & illustrative words, but new words. The ability to make space for conceptual movement is not only interesting & necessary, but it conveys a sort of elegance of thought.
Oftentimes, I think we confuse the repetitive structure of popular music with circular thought, a simple task of repeating over & over another iteration of the “big idea” (this is why George Harrison’s repetitive lyrics do nothing for me, despite his many talents & contributions to The Beatles), when let’s face it music is a temporal medium, which means it moves from the beginning into the end, film is the same way — it’s linear. I have issues with Beach House because after I listen to the music I can only recall certain random moments at a time, instead of the way in which these moments have transformed the song over time. Compare this to Hundred Waters’ song “Boreal” which is linear, has repetitive but jarring variations on the 5/4 beat, & its lyrics are quite plainly put a standalone Romantic poem — it is, in other words, in a constant state of revelation.
