Friday Night With The Elephant Man

Friday night with the elephant man:
Freak just wants to have fun.
Says, "I don't know when the pain will end,
But I guess I'm not the only one."

Friday night with the desperate man:
Can't turn his face up to the sun.
Says, "I don't know what the end will bring,
But I'll lie back now and let it be done."

The Harsh Logic of My Buddhist Buddy

No heavenly scales to set things right;
No final judge of awesome might.
No realm above and none below;
And yet you still reap what you sow.

Don't look for shelter from the skies,
Or put much faith in cleric lies.
It's best to stick with what we know:
That you will still reap what you sow,
That you will still reap what you sow.

Everybody pays a price
for everything they do
everywhere they go
every day.

What Have You

You've got the house that looks like a magazine spread,
and the job that pays like crime.
You've got the grand ideas busting out of your head
and the manner so refined.
But you don't have me.

You've got detailed plans to conquer the world,
and the will to make them real.
Much too impatient to watch grit turn to pearl
so you'll take what you can steal.
But you can't take me.

Just for a moment you were tender and real,
and through your eyes the light was true.
But you'd been schooled to mock the things that you feel,
and concentrate on well-to-do.

It hardly matters now
It was so long ago
You were young and anxious
What did you know
And no one told you things
just go how they go—
You tried to run your life
like some dog & pony show.
But you couldn't run me…

Memoir

"Utter lies," she demanded.
"Tell me what I want to hear.
Let the others be reprimanded
Here you have nothing to fear.
I don't want something as simple
as to know what's really real.
Just the beautiful story that
won't contradict how I feel."

"It's no use," she explained,
"yearning for the thing that's true.
We all see what we want to see
And do what we do.
I once tried to discover
what there hides behind the veil.
But compared to the fiction,
the facts are awfully pale."

Your Silence

You answer my question
with silence—silence
that fills the room we share.
It's like a kind of
soundless violence,
your silence:
it poisons the air.

Cross the floor,
out the door.
I'll come back here no more—
For I cannot abide
your silence,
the bitter truth it hides from me.

Turn away,
Not a word to say.
I can't see any other way—
For although you sit inside
your silence
the bitter truth screams out to me.

Under Water

Come live with me
in our under water world.
We'll watch the tides unfurl.
We'll float and we'll hover.
We'll dissolve like the air.

Come live with me
out beyond the shore.
Panic no more.
We'll glide among the creatures.
They won't notice we're there.

Home With You

Let forces of misrule
sweep the day away,
Let chaos and calamity
go outside to play,
Let drama kings and drama queens
court doubt and disarray—
I'll stay at home with you.

Let the world outside
do its screwed-up thing,
Let others seek comfort
in shopping sprees and lunch-hour flings.
I don't need anything
but what the quiet hours bring
when I'm at home with you.

If there comes a time
When I think to fly
Just remind me of our
long days gone by—
The silent moments,
the murmured sighs
when I'm at home with you.

The Winter Sun

The winter sun
blinds without warming
like the cold, hungry way
you look in my eyes.
I am the one
comes loose from my moorings:
I am lost in the glare
of your ecstatic lies.

Oh how I dream of a love like high summer,
So steady and strong and complete.
But now I live
like a prisoner of empty thrills.
Your glacial touch:
My defeat.

Sleep

I'm wide awake
Thoughts billow like flame
Night bleeds into day
All hours the same

Teach me to sleep
teach me to sleep
cradle me down
into my deep

The world spins out
Dark echoes appear
My skin won't cool
My mind won't clear
What keeps me pinned,
just lying here?

Teach me to sleep...

Please don't ask me exactly what this one means. I have my private sense of it, but don't want to ruin the song's vibe with too much explanation. If you know the David Lynch movie about John Merrick, real-life "elephant man," you'll understand the words on a simple narrative level. But it's not as if I intended to do a gloss of the movie.

This was just one of several random lyric ideas that came to me while driving my young son around in the car during the spring of 2006. The first two lines came prepackaged with a vague sense of the rhythmic and harmonic atmosphere. Only later, when I sat down with notebook and keyboard, did the rest of the lyrics and the chords start to come together...soon followed by the entire arrangement. I completed it in one feverish week.

I suspect this song was inspired by all the dark and weepy Nick Drake and Radiohead I've been listening to in the past few years. I am insanely fond of it, almost as if someone else wrote it and I just happened to catch it on the radio...in the car...while driving my young son around town.....

BACK TO TOP

I have the feeling this one will raise some eyebrows. Frank Russo even suggested I rename this song just plain "Harsh Logic" so as not to offend any practicing Buddhists. Of course, dear Frank isn't battle-tested in the realm of flak-catching the way I am, especially after my tenure as a columnist for Baltimore CityPaper. Okay, so here's my disclaimer. I realize I may have an inaccurate perception of Buddhist theology. But I've always thought the principle of karma was more hard-core than the Judeo-Christian concept of sin. And yet so many people seem to think of Buddhism as somehow an "easier" or more forgiving religious tradition. I dunno. I grew up among fervent evangelical Christian Indians who were very loudly sure of what they expected me to believe...but it didn't turn out the way they planned. At some points in my life I've been as outspoken (as obnoxious?) an atheist as Richard Dawkins, but at present I mostly prefer to take a pass on all metaphysical questions. Leave it to deeper minds to grapple with this stuff. I'll stick with songs for now.

An interesting fact about this arrangement. Originally I was going to play piano on it, but I asked Frank and Amy to record the drum and bass parts without me, so that I could be sure to comp and solo correctly over the tricky 7/8 time signature. When I heard the rough mix, I loved the texture and the incredible interplay that the two of them has created all on their own. So I left it alone.

BACK TO TOP

This is another song (like "Friday Night..." and "Sleep") where the initiating idea, the weird random thought that triggered the first line in my imagination, ended up having nothing to do with the final lyrics.

I was standing in our bathroom (our ONE bathroom) and thinking about our plans to expand and rehab our Baltimore rowhouse, and I thought: "Well, no matter how nicely we renovate, this place is never going to look like a magazine spread." (Just to clarify, I said this to myself with a sense of relief rather than disappointment: the last thing I want or need in life is a freakin' showcase home to take care of!)

House that looks like a magazine spread...house that looks like a magazine spread... A few minutes later I went to my notebook and started sketching out this story-song. Once again, it's not the least bit autobiographical...and yet on some level, I feel I recognize this woman who's singing and this man about whom she's singing. Don't you?  

BACK TO TOP

I wrote this song in early 2006; although I'd been doing a fair amount of instrumental composing since 2001, this was essentially the third successful song with lyrics I've ever written, after "Your Silence" in 2001 and "Sleep" at in 2003. Although the lyrics have a certain broad applicability in this era of feelings over fact, they were inspired by the specific case of writer James Frey, a former drug addict who'd been found to have fabricated some of the most pivotal scenes and facts in his 'true-life' story, A MILLION LITTLE PIECES.

Every year, the media manages to expose a few frauds, pathological liars, and plagiarists among best-selling and highly compensated authors like Frey (who'd been graced by the magic marketing touch of an Oprah Book Club endorsement), and the phenomenon itself has long ceased to surprise or amaze me. What did set this particular situation apart was the fact that in the aftermath, many people rose up to defend Frey: they'd been so moved or entertained or inspired by his experiences (or rather, ''experiences'), it just didn't matter if he grossly embellished them or even created some of them out of thin air.

For those of us writers and readers in the reality-based community, this kind of cultural sentiment is profoundly depressing. While it's true that most memoirists must rely on their inherently flawed recollections, and will sometimes make use of composite characters or will collapse various events into a single scene for dramatic purposes, the vast majority of nonfiction writers do feel an ethical obligation not to just MAKE SHIT UP. It's admittedly very hard work being truthful when you're writing autobiographically: your imagination does constantly want to take over and start cleaning up the messy details, punching up the scenes, editing out the complications and ambiguities to make the narrative flow more smoothly, and—most dangerously—casting yourself as the flawed-but-triumphant hero of your own wisdom-embodying epic saga, even when the reality is far more nuanced than that... But tell me, folks: is it simply not worth all that effort, the hard work of being scrupulously truthful?

BACK TO TOP

"Your Silence" is the very first song I ever wrote, back in 2001 when I was a beginning jazz player at a local community college. My fellow students were, for the most part,teenage guys (hi there, Kevin, Eric, Gene, & Jaime), and they all treated me pretty congenially considering I was nearly as old as their parents. This song came to me all in a flash, lyrics and melody and harmony in a single visionary moment while I stood in the shower. Later that same day I went to the piano and worked it all out, first on the keyboard and then on manuscript paper. (Years later in a bar, I told this story to a group of seasoned musicians, and one dirty old man among them asked, "Does that mean you do your best work in the shower?" I told him it wasn't really my place to judge.)

A few days later I played and sang it for the class, making some nervous disclaimers about it. The kids all seemed to dig it (as did our teacher, saxophonist Kyle Coughlin), and we ended up performing it as a quartet piece for the concert. One of the kids later asked me if the story in the song was about me and my husband. "Not at all! It's just a made-up story!" He found that fascinating--the idea of writing something that wasn't strictly autobiographical. I suppose I should have found it fascinating, too: after all those years of struggling, struggling, struggling with prose fiction, here was a tiny, poised, evocative short story that I hardly broke a sweat over. And it rhymed, too.
BACK TO TOP

I've come to think of this little ditty as "Ringo Starr meets Nick Drake"...the terse ambiguity of the latter, leavened by the silliness of the former.

BACK TO TOP

Okay, so...I've called this album MEMOIR, I'm writing a memoir, and I'll even be making use of my actual journals (a tall stack of notebooks I've been scribbling in since 1989) in the artwork for the CD....but in reality, none of these songs is autobiographical. (Does this make me as insincere as James Frey?) As I mentioned in regard to "Your Silence," these songs are in fact the most successful fictional short stories I've ever managed to complete. This one is probably the closest thing to "true" in the whole bunch. I wrote the first stanza of lyrics for "Home With You" somewhere around the start of the Iraq War. Didn't finish the song until 2006. I dedicate it to my husband. Enough said.

BACK TO TOP

I had the first few words of this song rolling around in my head for several months, maybe even a year, before I actually came up with a story to flesh out the idea —"The winter sun blinds without warming"—yes, another one that came to me in the car as I battled sunshine delays on I-95 in midwinter. Astute ears will hear that, in the time-honored way of jazz musicians everywhere, I've stolen the chord changes of a familiar old standard ("Stella by Starlight") as the basis of my new melody and lyrics. One of the advantages of using beloved old Tin Pan Alley tunes like this: you can hire a guy like Latin guitarist Dani Cortaza to come into the studio and, without any rehearsal, play brilliantly on it.

BACK TO TOP

Before I became a mommy, I was genuinely convinced that motherhood would mean, on some level, the death or at least long hibernation of my creative life.

What a happy surprise to learn that instead, it has become a source of inspiration, although not always in the usual or obvious ways. These lyrics may suggest free-floating anxiety and a yearning for comfort or sexual healing...but the initial idea of "teach me to sleep" came from two much more literal sources: the bouts of insomnia that descend on me from time to time, and the process of teaching a young baby to self-soothe and to fall asleep by himself in the crib. (My little one was nine months old at the time I wrote this song.)

BACK TO TOP