THROWBACK SHOW #3: STRANGE CONVERSATION 6/16
This Tuesday I’m revisiting my 2006 album Strange Conversation, a collaboration of sorts with a number of well-known poets. The show is at 8pm ET and will remain up for a while in case that doesn’t line up with your time zone. You can tune in on Facebook or Youtube. Here’s a little more about this record if you’re interested to read on - or just join me for the show on Tuesday night.
In 2005, I got stuck while working on a song and wandered out of my room looking for distraction. I picked up the Norton Anthology of Poetry I’d had since seventh grade – it was out on the coffee table, for some reason – and flipped idly through it until I landed on a poem of Robert Browning’s called “A Toccata of Galuppi’s.” It wasn’t a poem I’d read before or one I would have been particularly drawn to, but the moment I scanned the verses a strange thing happened which I can only describe as the poem singing itself in my head. It seemed to have a melody which I could hear as I read, and all I had to do was pick up a guitar and play along. Apparently Browning composed and played music in addition to writing poetry, so maybe this was no accident. At one point in the poem, he even calls out the chord changes, so he was definitely coming from a like-minded place.
In the poem, the nineteenth-century speaker describes how listening to a piece of music by Baldassare Galuppi brings back to life the eighteenth-century Venetian composer’s world: warm spring ocean, masked midnight balls, ladies whirling around the dance floor and flirting by the clavichord. It’s vivid and lively, but when Browning gets to the end, the conclusion he draws is kind of a downer. He allows that the music-makers achieve a certain degree of immortality through their work, but as for the dancing ladies, he essentially says “Those people are dead, and we’re all gonna die too, The End.” Here’s the thing, though: those Venetian ladies danced in their own time, then took a turn around the room with Robert Browning a full century later, and were now whirling and flirting in my twenty-first century living room in Massachusetts. If that’s not immortality, I don’t know what is. I reworked the ending of the song to reflect how I saw things, and by the end of the process I had changed Browning’s language, as well as his central idea, and ended up with a song that felt like the beginning of something. From that point on, poem-based songs seemed to arrive in a steady stream, from everywhere.
My odd, possible-cult-member upstairs neighbor left a box of books out on the curb; I rescued it from a rainstorm, and in it I found George Eliot’s poem “O May I Join the Choir Invisible,” another meditation on art’s powers of communication across time. I happened upon Lord Byron’s “We’ll Go No More A-Roving,” which was already a perfect country ballad, and then began to pore over old favorites like Rumi, e.e. cummings, Walt Whitman, and Edna St. Vincent Millay, to see if they had any songs waiting. My husband, Jeffrey Foucault, reminded me that his old roommate Mark Olson (not the Jayhawks one) had put James Weldon Johnson’s “Sence You Went Away” to music years earlier. I dug that out, tinkered with it, re-rigged a verse into a bridge, and added it to the pile.
I’d had a book club at my old group house in Somerville, in which we’d read Hermann Broch’s The Death of Virgil. I may have been the only person in the group who liked it, but I liked it enough for everyone, and it stayed with me. Once I realized I was making a record about the powers and limitations of art, I started re-reading passages, and from that came the songs “Strange Conversation” and “The Drop & the Dream:” one song despairing over the imperfect nature of creative work, the other coming to terms with it. The pendulum motion between those two states of mind pretty well sums up the experience of being an artist.
Aiming for classic instrumentation and players with a certain esprit de coeur, I enlisted Lorne Entress, a great drummer I’d first met through his work with my friend Erin McKeown, to help me captain the ship; Paul Schulhof, upright bass player extraordinaire and bright spirit; and Kevin Barry, one of my all-time favorite guitar players. We convened at Chris Rival’s Middleville Studio in North Reading, MA., an old barn attached to a farmhouse, with the control room on the ground floor, and the tracking spaces in the basement. At the time, Chris was rebuilding the stairs that connected these rooms, so each trip from control room to live room required walking all the way around the barn and down the hill behind it, a perfect little moment of fresh air and crunching November leaves to clear the head between takes. It was the first time I recorded in an isolation booth, and it took a little getting used to, but I had great sightlines with everyone, and settled in quickly thanks to Rival’s laid back, invisible attention to every detail.
A recording session is a little like an existential summer camp in the way that it becomes, briefly, its own universe. We laughed like fools and concentrated like surgeons, making an island out of time where only the work at hand existed. When we had tracked the songs we brought in a horn section – dream realized! – and cut a few keyboard overdubs. Once again, I railroaded the whole band into singing gang vocals on a few songs, which was pretty entertaining. Kevin brought out his Irish priest vocal persona – Father Patrick O’Shaughnessey? Father Dermot O’Callahan? – I forget his name, but the dude could really belt out the tenor part.
This record was a true joy to work on, all the way through the process. I didn’t start out chasing an idea in writing these songs, I was just following the breadcrumbs of passion and curiosity, and this made the whole process restorative and generous, the purest recreation. It’s a record about art, and the ways it lets us extend beyond our time, converse and commune with people we’ll never meet, places we’ll never see. I’m really fond of it, and grateful that it happened along. And I'm looking forward to playing through it with you on Tuesday. *kd
UPCOMING SHOWS:
JUNE 16 - KD plays STRANGE CONVERSATION, 8:00pm ET
Streamed live on KD’s Facebook page and KD’s YouTube (shows will remain archived if you miss them live)
Donations accepted here:
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