paul court: I Believe

paul court: "Four Prayers"

Shadows

the project is dead. long live the project

this is my drummer, Deb Gemmell, flanked by our kids, after the triumphant premiere of "Tiny Rehearsals" by Slim Chance and the Future Dead. the t-shirts were Morgan's idea and Dylan's work. they surprised us with them at the show.

it was the culmination of a six-month-long project i started with my brilliant friend Susan Braedley, previously mentioned in these pages as "Suse-my-muse". it was Deb's idea to invite songwriters Carol Teal and Roy Hickling to join us, and my idea to ask Deb to be the drummer.

i had been writing songs about and around death and mortality for a few years, being of an age closer to the end of my life than the beginning, and having people near me begin to die. i was also aware that my contemporaries had been following a similar path.

so i had a few songs, i surmised that Carol and Roy could glean a similar number, and perhaps we could write some over the course of the project in order to have enough for a full-length quasi-theatrical show.

i had no idea. when we first started getting together to discuss what might be used in the show, we realized that we already had a surplus of material and we would need to cull a significant number, especially if we found that we would need to write something specific to an idea that we felt should be included. one song was written specifically for the show - My Late Husband, wonderfully crafted by Roy and hilariously, beautifully sung by Susan.

i have written some on the process, the learning curve we needed to establish how the collaboration would work best. there were struggles indeed, to the point where it looked like the thing might be entirely derailed. almost died, you might say.

(insert cliche here)

yes, it made us stronger. we knew that we had a group of really powerful songs, and we had found a sequence that could flow beautifully throughout the evening.

the plan was to have a sort of script, some narration and dialogue which would bridge the gaps between songs, let us say something about where the songs came from, and to have some fun with.

that's where many of our troubles began. we were worried about having to remember lines, about being stiff doing it. we had lost the original notion, that it would be a loosely structured thing, and we would rely on our natural ability to pull it off with improvisation. but somehow we found our way back, mostly by reinforcing the idea that the structure rested on a solid foundation of good songs. all we needed to do was string them together with intelligence and humour.

the rehearsals got better, more relaxed. the arrangements got tighter, the playing more confident. we were having fun. the in-between banter almost got to be too much fun - we were all riffing on ideas, stepping on each other's lines. it was a happy mess. kinda like life.

in the midst of all this, Deb was prompting me to start planning the next project. no resting on laurels in this house. we hadn't even done the show - no laurels!

so i did, of course. not as easily as that. if you've read former posts, you may know how i've struggled in search of capital-P Projects. Deb knew that it would have to stew for a while, because that's how i work. i call it "organically". names don't matter much.

i hadn't written a song for a couple of months, and we were coming up to our monthly writers' group meeting. i had an idea to write something distilled from a book i had just read, Vancouverite Timothy Taylor's Story House. so i reread the book, making notes as i went, gradually getting a handle on how a song might evolve. and realizing why i needed to do this. i love to read, but i LOVED this book. i was passionate about it. books can do that to me.

at some point i realized this was more than a specific piece of work. it was the project. i would initiate a monthly salon - i've always wanted to do that, dreamed of Alexander Pope in my living room - for songwriters to share their similar passion. the idea seems diverting enough in itself, but i have no doubt that something more tangible may come of it. a show. a series of shows...

so last thursday's afternoon rehearsal, our last before the culmination of the Slim Chance project on saturday night, was followed immediately by the meeting of the Barrie and District Association of Singer/Songwriters and the unveiling of the song that started the new project.
we have overlap!

THE GODDESS, THE ANGLER, AND THE COUNTERFEITER'S WIFE

she comes to me through broken dreams
behind her wrecking ball
the goddess moved a house of glass / up a hillside wall

her crow-black hair; her pale skin; her slenderness belies
the power she holds over me / behind the steely eyes

a third of me surrenders / and i am that much more
she's introducing chaos / my knees are on the floor

another came from paradise / to be my fishing guide
the angler calculates the sea / how far, how deep, how wide

theories fail, and fishing too / she could not catch a king
forgot the rule of tension / explaining everything

a third of me surrenders / i am pierced, seen through
she's introducing order / the past is nothing new

i went to her, there was no choice / the counterfeiter's wife
as we spoke, she nursed her twins / and in my room i cried

anger fades unwillingly / her hair the only blaze
she was the smart one / the one who stayed away

a third of me surrenders / any one can drive
the goddess, the angler, / the counterfeiter's wife.


and then the show saturday. it went very well. we played well, sang well, did fine with the dialogue. even Deb did great under the lights - she was cringing at the thought of being in the glare - i have no idea how she even agreed to do it - but she managed to have at least as good a time as the rest of us.

i was very proud of what we had accomplished together. but i was also excited to let leak at every opportunity that the new project would begin immediately...

i figure i can rest when i'm dead.

130 Years Later, and i'm Still At It

Today is the 130th anniversary of the Donnelly massacre. so here i am, late again, but drawn back by a significant date in Canada's history, the stories of which continue to be central to my "career" as a happy amateur, and to my life.

my writers' group happens to be meeting tonight, and when pal Scott pointed out the coincidence of the date, i decided to revisit the project and try to come up with Song Number 11.

now, by the time i finished writing Number 10, i had reached some kind of quota. the last few had been difficult, as i was less motivated to tell those stories than i had been in the beginning, when my desire to tell the tales i had been immediately struck with amounted to something of a compulsion. and Susan was working on the stories, and could fill any obvious gaps with narrative.

Number 10 was also a departure, being written from my own point of view, 100 years after the Lucan story. it was also the last song of the show and cd. i was looking to the past, but stepping back into the present, literally out of the story.

so i started skimming through Ray Fazakas' book The Donnelly Album, which i used almost exclusively for my research for the Project. i was hoping for, and expecting, i think, something to jump out at me - something i had been considering earlier, or perhaps something i have been moved by in Susan's stories.

and it was the latter which happened. Susan touches on the story of William Donnelly's star-crossed love for Maggie Thompson, daughter of a sworn enemy, and how he had tried, with a posse of men, to take her by force. Old Thompson had spirited her away, and managed to keep them apart for years, 'til Will finally married another.

in the book i found The Letter - not hearsay, or paraphrase, but a photograph of the actual letter which Maggie had written to Will on Christmas Eve 1873, having snuck off to the Post Office in Offa, and which invites Will to come and take her away by force.

December 24th, 1873

William Donnelly

Dear friend,

I adress you with these few lines to let you know I am well, and hopes you are enjoying the same blessing. I wish to let you know a little about the performance I had to gp through since i came up here. My friends herd all about me writing Letters to you, which caused an awfull storm, so that I could not ask to go any where, and on that account you will please excuse me for not writing to you. Dear William, I would rather be in the grave than at home, at preasant, for the way my people abused me on your account hinders me of ever forgiving them. I will never have anything like a chance of fulfilling my promise of marriage to you except you came and take me away by force, and if you think as much of me now as you did always I trust you will relieve me before long, and if not you will please send me my Letters to Offa P.O., and i will try to put up with all. I burnt your Letters when they commenced to abuse me about you, for they would shurly get them, if I did not do something with them. Excuse my bad writing, for I am in an awfull hury, as it is in the office I am writing it. No more at preasant from your loving friend

Margret Thompson

pretty powerful. so i have my subject. how do i turn it into a song? my first idea was that i would have to paraphrase Maggie's words, so that they could fit some sort of song structure and rhyme scheme.

i got out my trusty DIY Gathering notebook and wrote the letter on the left-hand pages, with lots of space for notes, and the sentences (some of them DO run on, don't they? i picture her rather breathless, scribbling those intense words in the post office) broken into song-line type lengths. i would write my paraphrased lines on the right-hand pages. i was planning to be as faithful as possible to the original.

the next day, when i went to make a start, i had a revelation: "as faithful as possible to the original", is, of course, the original. the more i read and re-read the letter, the more attached i was to it as a discrete, important thing. i was no longer willing to change the letter to suit my purposes as a songwriter.

very noble i'm sure. but WHAT THE HELL AM I GOING TO DO NOW?

i read the letter out loud. i read it into my Zoom H2 recorder and listened to it. i realized the obvious: language is music. i knew that. melody, rhythm, dynamics. music.

what if i simply exaggerated the language? stretch out the melody, accentuate the rhythms, add necessary pauses, both for affect and for purposes of performance, amplify the dynamics.

so i tried it. sat down with the mountain dulcimer in my lap, and wrote out the notes to a melody which approximated the rise and falls of natural language in the letter.

there is no song structure for the listener to get a hold of. there are no rhymes. the rhythm shifts from 4/4 to 6/8 in one of the run-on sentences. and, truth be told, despite the exaggeration, the melody is pretty monotonous.

i know it's not up to performance standards, but i'm still excited to share it tonight with my fellow writers, see what they think, hear their ideas.

and then i'm going to continue to work on it, and hopefully present it as a proper song (without rhymes - a stretch for me) at next month's meet.

it's going to be a lot of work, which i've already begun. the first attempt was not wasted at all, even though i don't have a performance piece to show for it. as i became more intimate with the nuances of the letter and more adept at singing the non-song that it is, finding more rhythm and natural pauses, i realized that a song was possible.

i broke the letter into three, and printed the separate pages. lo and behold, there were definite parallels. without too much tweaking, i saw that i could fit the pieces of the entire letter into two or three musical parts, with an added or subtracted line here and there, vocal lines replaced by instrumental, etc.

i even wrote the melody and (almost) fit the words for the first four lines of each of the three parts. turns out that was a teaser, definitely the easiest. "I adress you with these few lines"="I would rather be in the grave". couldn't get any easier than that.

and it doesn't. but it's a very cool and worthwhile challenge, and i'm looking forward to it.

i feel it, i see it, i write it

writing songs is seldom easy, but some are easier than others.


i wrote an easy one this week. what made it easy was the announcement of a big event - the engagement of two of my very best friends.

big event, big emotions. big fuel for creativity.

but how is that well-fuelled creativity to be focussed? in my case, it's usually through visual imagery. and what could be more easily visualized than a wedding?

not to say that my friends' wedding will look much like anything i see in my head. they are both very creative folks themselves, brilliant writers and performers, and are likely to come up with something unusual to mark the beginning of their marriage. they're on tour at the moment, so i've had no conversation, no inkling of what they might have in mind.

cool. lots of room for licence.

i started writing in the first person, from the groom's perspective. not the first time i've written in my friend's shoes. i visualized him/me standing at the front of the church, half-turned to watch his bride:

i'm standing / you're walking / on the arm of another man

can you tell it's in waltz time? my default rhythm, but this time, it was actually planned, as later i foresaw their first dance.

it also has other possible meanings, if i don't announce beforehand that it's a wedding song. one might be more likely to take the first line as the start of a heartbreaker.

i'm not sure at what point i grasped that i would use those "-ing" verbs, whatever they're called, throughout, but it's typical of my style - i like to give myself some structure early in the process, a trellis on which to grow the song.

i'm waiting / for that moment / you're beside me / here we stand

okay, now they're standing together. how are they standing, geographically and metaphorically? paint the picture:

we're standing / and listening / our backs toward the past

we're speaking / promises / in light through coloured glass

the minister is another friend, which helps to solidify the image.

time for a refrain. they're saying their vows. it's a time of joy. the phrase "say it out loud" punched it's way into my head. i also needed to bring in the gathered mass of friends and family. i had thought of the word "throng" but almost immediately rejected it as unwieldy. but a rhyme with "loud" in line two would be a natural for "crowd"

i take you, will you take me / before this witnessing crowd?

another -ing word.

and what about the crowd, and how to set up the last line? this one was a gift from the muse i think - a perfect double-meaning which gives you both the image of the throng, and perhaps the feeling of not-quite-sure among them. this is not the first marriage for either, and some of us are not sure they really need to make it legal. but we love them, celebrate their insistence that it's what they want, and wish them luck.

they're waiting at a distance / so say it out loud

so now they're together, instead of doing separate "-ing" things:

promising / we are promising / our voices will be heard

i initially had the urge to make a reference to their professional aspirations "the most promising..." but it felt forced, so i kept it simple.

i'm kissing / you are kissing / the lips that speak the words

again, i had the last line first, so found a rhyme in "heard" that echoed what they were saying in the refrain.

i don't think i've ever written about kissing, and it was difficult to sing the first few times, but it had to be in there, yes?

okay, they have to walk up the aisle now. but i'm thinking about leading it towards the last verse, where the "-ing" word will be "dancing". my buddy will be walking. but maybe the bride is a bit lighter on her feet, more willing to show the joy she feels:

i'm walking / you're dancing / the path that you came in

but what's changed? everything. so sum it up:

you're holding / my arm now / so it begins

refrain, then some instrumental space - the verse - to feel the waltz. the first dance.

we're dancing / alone for now / before this witnessing crowd

i cheated - used a line from the refrain in the verse - breaking the rules to end with a bang...

beaming / with their brights on / living out loud

refrain. repeat refrain. repeat last line, twice.

SAY IT OUT LOUD

i'm standing / you're walking / on the arm of another man

i'm waiting / for that moment / you're beside me / here we stand

we're standing / and listening / our backs toward the past

we're speaking / promises / in light through coloured glass

i take you, will you take me, before this witnessing crowd?

they're waiting at a distance, so say it out loud.

promising / we are promising / our voices will be heard

i'm kissing / you are kissing / the lips that speak the words

i'm walking / you're dancing / the path that you came in

you're holding / my arm now / so it begins

i take you, will you take me, before this witnessing crowd?

they're waiting at a distance, so say it out loud

we're dancing / alone for now / before this witnessing crowd

beaming / with their brights on / living out loud

i take you, will you take me, before this witnessing crowd?

they're waiting at a distance, so say it out loud

i take you, will you take me, before this witnessing crowd?

they're waiting at a distance, so say it out loud

so say it out loud

say it out loud.

now here's a thing. i started with a very simple, what i like to think of as stately, melody in my head. when i had the outline for the verse and refrain, i picked up the guitar, tuned down to my favourite, almost-unique-to-me tuning, DADEAD, and started strumming the few chords i've figured out. but that's the trouble with being an underachiever on your instrument - the limitations of what your fingers can do further limits what your song will be.

but damn! i'm in the middle of a song here. no time to update my chops.

and here's another thing. writing a song to a purpose like this is a challenge, like any song, but let's be real. everyone - no, almost everyone - one must take into account the envious and the song snobs - will love this song. you've taken the time to create something for someone (sometwo), and infused it with love and meaning. it's a very special thing.

so the pressure's off. it doesn't have to be the best song ever written. go with what you've got.

which is, in this case, a simple melody on a waltz beat, with lots of droning space.

mountain dulcimer - what i call my "instrument for all occasions" - funerals, parties, weddings.

so i write it on the dulcimer, and it's okay. good enough.

then Deb finds the lyric on the table at breakfast, reads through and highly approves. i agree that the words are very good, but the music is less than unique, i've opted to drone along on the dulcimer in my usual style.

"so change instruments" "nah, it's done".

never say "never". after having written out the song here, i thought "what the hell?" (a common thought for me) and tried it again in DADEAD. and you know what? it works. it's bigger, fuller, more interesting, more joyful.

she's done it again. thanks Deb!

How does this thing work?

"When you haven't done this kind of group project before, it's kind of uncomfortable and you don't know how to be. So everyone tries on different behaviours and styles. Those of us who have done lots of it know it will all swirl around and then settle eventually, as we work into our roles in the group. And you can't pick your role so much as it is given to you, taken away, changed and on and on. I like it, but i like adventures into the unknown and have done enough of it to trust process over product, while others drive the process with anxieties over product - that usually happens too, and it's all good, in my book, and what makes the project happen. Anyway, a blog on this would be interesting - not enough people reflect on HOW things happen - they just focus on what happens or what results. I think the "how" is the most interesting..."

this was the first thing i read this morning, after a well deserved lie-in following a very successful evening of collaboration with my four cohorts. my closed-eye coffee-drinking-in-bed thoughts had included "i should write a blog post today on how the project is going". not that i knew. i write to find these things out. but it's lovely to have one of said cohorts ask the pertinent questions to get me on track, and in such a timely manner.

it's an example of the upside of this collaboration we've begun. it's mostly upside, by the way, but, like life, it's the struggle that makes things interesting.

last night, my struggle was with my anxiety to get to the product, while the process was happening right there, offerring all kinds of fun. and i managed to keep it at bay, mostly, while also fulfilling my role, which i both chose and had chosen for me, to clarify some things, mostly for my own sake, but for the group as well.

there was such a great vibe happening, ideas upon ideas, folks free to follow tangential stories about and around the work we're doing. as much as i wanted to get to MY things, i knew that all these off roads were important and necessary, and the more i let it happen, the more obvious it became.

my struggles in getting to that point were something like a nation's collective vision of democracy, the trap of thinking that our equality makes us the same. i started this project, inspired by Susan. i asked her to join me in it. then Deb told me about her latest book project, putting it together with the aspiring designers under her wing, and i thought "Yes!" and we decided Carol and Roy would be a likely pair to bring on board. Suse thought it an excellent idea, and Deb agreed to come along as well, adding that "big picture" thing she sometimes sees so well. she and Susan both love Process.

and then we were five. a democracy, right? i had trouble at our first meeting, as i tried to step back and be just one of the Five, all equal and the same, on the road to something that would be a collective experience, a Pie of Five Equal Pieces.

Pie in the sky. life isn't like that, nor democracy, nor groups of artists making art.

Carol was part of my last project, but not 'til the writing was done - she sang one of the songs written from a woman's perspective in the show and on the cd for me. she is a lovely friend, and so passionate - especially when she gets on stage. Roy i've collaborated with on a couple of fun things for our DIY getaway weekends, and his songwriting, painting and sculpture have all amazed me. he is also the nicest guy in the world. Susan is a master of group work and the written word, knows me inside and out, and is so generous with it that it hardly scares me at all. Deb is my butt-kicker, mistress of the well-timed nudge, wink, or when necessary, kick. she is a brilliant sideways-thinker and regularly produces pieces of beauty while making it as easy as possible for others to also make them for themselves.

Bob's yer uncle, right? put these five people in a room together and wonderful things will occur, effortlessly and immediately.

strenuously and eventually, more like. i have no doubt that this thing we're doing is going to be great. but i have been surprised, in my naiivete, how difficult it has been to find my way.

while i tried to immediately make it "Our Project", others were seeing it as being a part of "paul's project". so while they were looking for a measure of leadership, i wasn't giving it. and i was expecting instant equal ownership, and of course not getting it.

so last night was a giant step, roles becoming clearer, a structure (which some of us need more than others) making it's way through the fog. and such creative ideas to riff on - not just songs and their writing, but arrangements, visuals, lighting, stories, and the audience experience.

so what's my role? i just had a vision of a cowboy out on the range, sat on a horse, holding a lariat, enjoying the dogies' play, but makin' dang sure they don't fall off that cliff. but i want to be a dogie too.

how 'bout the designated driver? then we're all the same species anyway. i drive us from one fun spot to another, taking it all in, enjoying and joining their forays into mirth and wonder, taking notes and getting us home in the end, where i can let loose if i want. the end of the road will be the performance of Tiny Rehearsals, and i will then more than make up for a few months of DDing.

there's probably a thousand better metaphors for it. i bet one of my collaborators could help me with that.