SingOut! Magazine CD Pick of the Week
Review by Ron Olesko April 27, 2008

Highway 4am (Driving)

C9 tuning, Capo on 4, in the key of E

At 74 mph, the stripes on I-495 in Massachusetts make this groove. It’s about why I do this perpetual flight of imagination, and it was  a love poem to my then wife who is so rooted in the real. That summer we went on a whale watch with several Irish children all around five years old. I saw this little girl take one look at this little boy and instantly want to take care of him. It was magical. There are so many creative forces that make the whole thing work.

I had recently met Pat Wictor and loved his slide playing (why wouldn't you), and I had just heard Jerry Douglas with Alison Krauss do James Taylor's "Carolina in My Mind." The slide in that setting was so beautiful, taking a cue from James' fabulous guitar part, moving across the transitions in a way that captured the fluidity that makes that song so special. So I drove to Pat's apartment in Brooklyn with my gear and we recorded a whole bunch of tracks in a very short period of time right in his living room. We were under a huge time crunch and I had to drive out of Brooklyn before everyone else was going to. What a fabulous surprise when I finally had time to go through everything and construct what is now on the CD. It's such a beautiful part. Pat is a fabulous musician and I learned that more and more from eight years together in Brother Sun.

I owe some deference to Jackson Browne's first album (incorrectly called Saturate Before Using) for the feel of "Highway 4am." It was something that I absorbed a long time ago.

 

Standing on the Side of Love

on piano, in the key of G

My whole life I’ve been presented with bridges. Every time I’ve crossed them, I’ve been rewarded ten thousand fold. Race, religion, nationality, culture, gay, straight, red, purple, green; we’re all in it together, and no one gets out alive. The seed was planted after playing in a rally to defeat Virginia's proposed "Family Protection Act." It was at the University of Virginia where NAACP Chairman and UVA history professor, Julian Bond, was the keynote speaker. He addressed the efforts to ban same sex marriage by what he called “Cafeteria Christians” -  the ones that shop in the Bible for particular phrases to twist for their own purposes, ignoring the overall message of love and tollerance.

In that same set of concerts, I was introduced by my friend Martha Shore at a concert in Norfolk, VA . When she said, "when it all comes down, I want to be standing on the side of love." I asked her about that phrase after the concert and she neglected to tell me that she'd taken it from an existing song by that title. So, I wrote my take on it - fortunately for me, titles can't be copyrighted.

As a young teen, I read a paperback version of Ray Bradbury's The Illustrated Man and on the inside of the cover was a quote from him saying something like, what happens when a space ship lands and an intelligent spider walks out. That's when we'll realized how alike we all are here on earth. I couldn't resist putting it in the song. It was a Randy Newman kind of moment - a little bit jarring, but oh so true.

 

The Color Yellow

C9 tuning, Capo on 7, in the key of Dm, now played on piano, in E flat minor

In reading a beautiful Norwegian novel called Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson, one passage painted a brilliant picture in my mind. The young protagonist, trying to understand the forces moving powerfully around him, is out on a rowboat in the middle of a lake as the sun is setting on the water. It was so beautiful a moment that he resolved to hold that joy in his heart no matter what happened. I had a tremendous resonance with that metaphor and remembered it on a November day when the sun was setting through the trees on Cape Cod.

The result was "The Color Yellow," sister song to "The Weight of Feathers" which follows it on the CD. Both were triggered by seeing my mother becoming frail with age. I set the emotions in an abstract about our archtypical defensive instincts - fleeing and hiding. It is essentially about finding benevolence amid chaos and holding it inside. There are those who do--and those who instead have a dark hole at their center, a hole that they spend the greater part of their lives trying to fill. The production is a tribute to Peter Gabriel’s (the world’s greatest folkie) “Mercy Street.”

 

The Weight of Feathers

on piano, in the key of A

From the title of a short story by the fabulous Irish poet and writer, Geraldine Mills. I had the privilege to interview this award winning writer and discovered that she too had been touched by the myth of Icarus. In her story, Dedalus crashes into a woman's garden and as she nurses him back to health, they engage in parallel discussions of father and son, daughter and mother relationships.

I emailed Geraldine Mills and asked for her permission to use her title, altering the metaphor to describe my own life. Generously, she agreed as long as I'd send her the song. I couldn't be more proud of a song, more confident of sending my writing to such a distinguished poet.  In fact, the words began as a poem that I call "Show Business."

Show Business

The unanswerable pokes holes in our constructed reality.
However much gold and martyrdom we pour in,
a hole is still a hole.

Still, the curtain goes up each morning.

My 89 year old mother, whose generation was seldom allowed the luxury of the theoretical or the ideal, had been upset with a discussion we'd had on the existence of God. I wanted to make peace with her as I saw the things that held her here begin to fray. I wanted her to know how much I appreciated the gift of freedom to pursue my artistic dreams, a freedom she never had, but worked her entire life to provide. She always put us first. I wrote the first two verses for me, and the Iast for her. The weight of feathers - thank you Geraldine for such a brilliant metaphor.

I think of it as almost a Harry Chapin song.

 

Sick and Tired

C9 tuning, no Capo, in the key of Gm

My first successful face to face co-write. Kate Campbell and I wrote it at Summer Acoustic Music Week for Boston’s WUMB. We had decided a couple of years earlier that our common Southern roots might lead us to a song about race. We worked over time on a really complicated idea, but Kate just walked up and suggested we scrap it in favor of Fannie Lou Hamer’s famous phrase. It happened over a couple of days. We played it for Dick Pleasants on his live show that weekend at SAMW. When I was concerned that the lyrics didn’t really develop as mine typically do (see turgid), Reggie asked what can you say after you’ve said “I’m so sick and tired of being sick and tired.” Point taken. Once again, Pat Wictor just kills the slide part and Duncan Watt does the same on piano.