Blues Balls

New Album is Out

I've been working on a blues album of sorts this year.
Partly inspired by a bunch of blues numbers from disparate artists, I wondered what the hell I'd sound like trying to do just the blues, and of course as it turns out, I can't just do the blues. This is the result of a year's dicking around with the blues instead of working on rock music.

For whatever it's worth, it's all new material - no old songs from some deep dark part of the 20th Century. Just letting loose with the vibe, so to speak.

Check it out:

'Zebras'

And You Just Keep Running 

We always wanted to write something deeply romantic without it being just about love. A song that could convey the kind of universal, unquestioning love for all living things. Grand visions, grand aspirations, and in the most abstract way. At the same time, perhaps make it sound as grand as the ambitions, like a Bond movie theme song. And while I'm not about to get up there and be Shirley Bassey or Tom Jones, the aspiration was to be grand in posture. A bit hard when you're just this ill-equipped teen in the 'burbs in a 3-piece band.

Most of the time when we played, we had big finishes. Like an eternal yearning for the most sublime climax, the finishes would be a reach towards an orgasmic crescendo of sound, probably modelled on the last few bars of 'Wont Get Fooled Again'. So just for once we had this song that didn't end on a mounting sequence of ever bigger thumps on the open strings of the cranked guitars.

Of course, when you do things that are not to your natural inclinations, it tends to work against you putting it out to the world well. The song slowly faded from our early repertoire and ended up in the bottom drawer... until now.

I kind of like the soft denouement. I don't know if anybody really writes songs like this anymore.




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'Crane Song'

A Song Not About Cranes At All

As I keep writing here, it's hard enough writing any song, let alone about love. Writing about the first kiss is an impossibly delicate task. You have to temper it with a sense of distance and yet capture the overwhelming rush of hormones without being prosaic, nor overly poetic. Naturalism and hyperbole are both extremes you want to eschew as you sneak up on the topic. Sometimes the hunt takes years. Fortunately songs can afford to wait. It is utterly unlike the challenges of capturing that moment in front of the lens with actors standing in and having to direct them to the perfect moment on film.

If your song writing fraternity consists of Arts faculty graduates, the task gets even more self-conscious in an attempt to stamp out lines that betray your base instincts to the Freudian critic, while presenting the right kind of archetypes for the Jungian to find. Then you have to go and find the objective correlative - or so I've been told - that fits the mood and nuance perfectly and portray that as a kind of transference of meaning.
Yeah right.

At least, those were the kinds of obstacles we had to negotiate in order to write the somewhat abstract kinds of songs we used to write where by nobody understood what the hell it was about in the first listen. And maybe that was good way back when.

This is not that song.



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'Apocalypse in 4/4'

Supper's Not Ready

There are days you wonder if we're actually seeing the end of civilisation. Maybe it already has ended. There's certainly not much civilised about the Trump Administration and the on-going LNP Coalition Government in Australia is totally of the end times. I never thought things would get this bad. Some things are beyond the imagination.

Unlike Genesis who thought the Apocalypse might play out in 9/8, we had the theory it would play out in a dumb 4/4. I think we were right to that extent if EDM and Hip Hop and Top 40 is anything to go by. Music doesn't get more sophisticated, it gets less sophisticated in order to appeal to ever more people and chances are that ever-more population is less literate than the previous generation because that's essentially how dumbing down of society goes, and really, how else do you explain the Trump Administration or the LNP Coalition Government in Australia without the concept of an extended period of dumbing down? Let's face it, were not waltzing to our dooms, we're marching.

We live in terrible times, really. May as well enjoy what you can while you can.




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'The End of Our Love'

And In The End, The Grief You Give, Is Equal To The Grief You Get

This one closes out the trilogy of love-gone-wrong songs.
We finally get to acceptance in the stages of grieving.

I was going to write a bit about grief and trauma and the need to heal and all that but you can probably get that elsewhere on the internet from people who are much better qualified. All I've got for you is a lousy song. You know how it is - it's hard to continually live up to our best intentions and that's why relationships fail.

Look, I'm sorry I couldn't really give you something meaningful to do with this song, apart from the fact that it's fiction. The dude in the song isn't me and these aren't my experiences, so there's that.

I tell you what gives me grief these days is not some old relationship breaking down or my friends having bust ups and divorces. It's actually how fucked our politicians have been at addressing climate change a.k.a Global Warming. I keep flip-flopping between disbelief that our leaders are so inept and lacking in spine and vision, and anger where I think they should all be lined up against a wall and  shot, for all their crimes against humanity. We can't seem to negotiate anything with these politicians while our country burns with historically bad bush fires.
The land is burning.
Just how the hell are we to accept our politicians and their so-called 'leadership'?




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'Meet Me Midway'

Meet Me Anywhere, Really

This is the second song in the trilogy of bad breakups. Of course, after the anger and denial comes the negotiation. God, where does one start? I used to think my breakup was terrible but really, it had nothing on the drama that befell some of my friends.

Quite coincidentally, I have three friends by the name of Darren, and all three have had divorces. One of the divorces was protracted and was a result of years of arguing and bickering. Another happened after years of trying to have a child and having failed, it destroyed the meaning of the two being together. The hurt was too much and so was the backbiting and belittling that followed - truest expressions of sincere resentments were exchanged, like gunfire. The third Darren broke up recently and as far as I can tell they split because they stopped even talking to one another in ay meaningful way.

And with each one there was this cloud of unhappy recrimination that hung over them and their ex like a personal rain cloud. I helped one of them move out of his house and vividly recall the rigmarole of getting the van and loading it up and driving it to the storage place for safekeeping while he looked for a place to move in. And the ex came around to make sure he didn't run off with the furniture she wanted to keep and the conversation was civil but devoid of compassion or empathy. They're the things you remember and think "yeah maybe I'll write a song about that."

Life can be underwhelming at best of times times but the mistakes we make on the back of our relationships can truly suck. Like I said, I can write about those bits such better than about love.



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'Take Responsibility'

Take Responsibility? For What Exactly?

This is part 1 in a trilogy of love-gone-wrong songs. As noted previously, I'm not great on love songs.  It takes a special talent to write love songs and sing them with a straight face and mean it. You have to be like Paul McCartney or something but try as I might, I don't really have the earnest-ness nor the un-ironic belief in love. They make a stage show out the Beatles' music and it's titled 'LOVE'. The Beatles wrote exhaustively about the condition of love and even told us that the love we take is equal to the love we make, and by golly I'm not even sure what that bit of rhetoric means in real life.

It's very strange when something moves you deeply and yet you don't relate to it. I've been listening to the 50th anniversary re-mix of 'Abbey Road' and I tell you, it's a very different world we live in today, and it's a different kind of cultural landscape we inhabit. A lot has happened since then to re-contextualise all those fab songs. It actually is really hard to "get back home" as Paul sings in 'Golden Slumbers'. And yet one basks in the glory of the testament to love that is 'Abbey Road'. It's great, even though I'm now convinced Paul McCartney might be insane based on the psychotic emotional detachment of  'Maxwell's Silver Hammer'.

I tend towards Frank Zappa who wrote broken hearts are for assholes ("yes yes!"), and  I feel far more equipped to exhaustively survey that emotional terrain than others simply because I am wired the way I am. I am also sensitive to the manner in which people talk about love but go in hard for self-serving platitudes or downright selfish acts. There's nothing like a break up to demonstrate how awful human beings can be, and for some reason I have an eye for it. The various divorces and breakups that happened to the people around me have fed plenty of grist in to this mill. We are all capable of being such assholes when things go south - and in the end the grief you get is equal to the grief you give.

In the five stages of grief there's Denial and Anger as the early stages of responding to bad news.
This is the song that covers those bits. The overriding thesis will of course forever be "broken hearts are for assholes"

Are you an asshole too?



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'Surfin' Dog'

Surfin' Dogs Rule the Waves

I know Jimi Hendrix said may you never hear surf music again but if you play guitar long enough, you poke your head into the rich world of surf guitar. That's just the way it goes. You run out of things to do in rock, and you go to the blues, go to jazz, go to Latin, or go flamenco, or even go all African. Some, go to the mystical lands of surf guitar.

There are ins and outs to the surf tone and when you do get into it, there is a treasure trove of very cool guitar moves to be found in the surf lexicon. Of course, you kind of have to put away your Distortion pedals and learn to play clean and listen to the decay in the reverb. It's a very rewarding area if you're a guitar player.

So way back when we were kids, we went into doing a surf-tinged number without really understanding the rich history or the various schools of thought or the tonal considerations. We just wrote what we thought was a pastiche. This song isn't really a surf guitar track, it's just a collage of surf-y ideas and a shark movie thrown in. Maybe we had too much Jimi Hendrix running through our minds to do it properly and respectfully, and we were into irony because that's what a liberal arts education gives you. A taste for more irony than is proper in polite, conservative, company.

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'Cadillacs and Cowboy Songs'

Cadillacs Are The Car Of Choice For Songs


Just another song about longing. We wrote a lot of these back then. We longed for the whole world, in a way.

I'd like to pretend this is a personal kind of song but it's not. It's more of an in-joke about things that go on in a band and you accuse other members of the band for wanting to stray from the tried and true rock music you're working towards. It's a sham, really. My bandmate wasn't wanting to go play country music. He just really liked it, and I was the tone police saying "no."

So the longing is probably more about wanting to express yourself in the way you see fit. Sometimes being in a band is tough.




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'Call Me Up'

"Call Any Vegetable, Call It By Name," Sang Frank

I wish I could write a straight up love song, but it's never really been my forte. I don't know why that is, given how many bloody love songs I've listened to along the way. I really can't do a straight love song, I can only do a love-gone-wrong kind of song. It's probably because I just don't believe in the big, all consuming love any more and haven't done so for many years. I hold to Frank Zappa's adage, broken hearts are for assholes, and I can easily admit I'm as big an asshole as any that way.

Still, from time to time you permit yourself into thinking you have love licked - and really, you don't -   but you think you do, and you write something that captures a feeling. You try to catch that butterfly and stick it in the jar of self analysis, and really end up killing the feeling like you do most things you catch and stick in jars.

I once liked this girl. I was ripe for that moment. As these things go, she wanted something else in life that was not me. So all I was left with was the fleeting moment of hope. And for once I managed to write parts of it down. I had it in my drawer for years and then accidentally threw it out when I did a big clean. I knuckled down and tried to remember the words and I couldn't. All I had was the faint recollection of a vague feeling I had years and years ago.

Hence the song here isn't really the song I wrote. It's more like a delicate facsimile of that song. You fall in love with people but it doesn't work out. That's one of the most common things in the world. And yet it feels very different each and every time.




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'Freewheeling'

The Freewheelin' Art Neuro In Honkers

Way back when, in the olden days of the 1980s when they struck the deal to return Hong Kong to China, my friends and I got interested in the historic weird problem of Hong Kong. So we started to write a song about Hong Kong without really understanding it. It's weird because so much of the city rests on the historic injustice of the Opium Wars and if you've ever read the history books about that, you're left wondering about the naked aggression of capitalism and colonialism as practised in the 19th century. The song itself sort of went nowhere because for one thing it was hard to play live and for another thing Hong Kong seemed a world away form the suburbs of Sydney.

Years went by and I got to have a first hand look at Hong Kong in 1996. I was there on contract for 5 weeks at the end of which I was made job offer to go permanent, but because the handover was looming, they didn't want to give me the kind of juicy ex-pat deals. So I declined to stay on.

Though, the other thing that worried me was the presence of the PRC (read, mainland communist China) police officers and the utter gap in perception to do with what Hong Kong had become. The were there to reclaim the place as if all of its glory and wealth naturally belonged to China. It's not true - it was a sad little fishing village until the British came along. What Hong Kong had turned into was the magic fruit of capitalism and colonialism as practised since the 19th Century into the late 20th. Rightly or wrongly, the British who were 'leaving' could lay claim to Hong Kong as an achievement. None of it would have happened without the British. Which, of course was not a popular view in Hong Kong 1996.

Thus in 1996, I was meeting a lot of local people and telling them there was going to be a terrible upheaval and their way of life would lead to conflict with the expectations of their new PRC overlords. It might not happen that year or the next, but it will happen. The answer I got was, "as long as we're all making money, nothing will change. It will be business as usual."

And so it remained for many years after the handover. It was as if they really were Freewheeling down History.

As I watch the news today about the ongoing riots in Hong Kong, I have to say I'm feeling pretty vindicated. Leave things long enough, the reductio ad absurdum reveals itself; the contradictions inherent in the compromises will erupt as a force. The Hong Kong people of 1996 were way too optimistic about what it meant for Hong Kong to "go back to China". Frankly I thought it was deluded sentimentalism. You don't really get to go home in History. There's something historically necessary about the youth of Hong Kong rebelling against the prevailing rule of the PRC proxies.  I get it - it's real as it gets. It's like something straight out of the lyrics of 'Won't get Fooled Again' or 'Street Fighting Man'. It's no accident it's going on and maybe there are inevitable things in history.
Not that it helps them any for me to point this out.

As for the song itself, it harkens back to that moment in 1996 when amazing things seemed a lot more possible than they turned out to be.


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'Peaches'

Peaches'n'Cream

This song came out of the ashes of my time at University of Sydney. It felt like my life was burning down at any rate.

I'd had a bad breakup - true misery like you see in the movies. I really had to leave town and head down to Canberra to meet up with some mates from high school. They were having some kind of festival at this residential college and somehow I landed there with a guitar and a handful of songs. It was quite the refreshing experience in trying to reset my headspace in the hope of continuing with my studies. At the end of the weekend, I felt quite alright.

Then when I got back and walked into the faculty I was greeted with the sight of my ex making out with a student we used to laugh at. And it hit me that I couldn't really continue being there, hating the course, AND hating on the ex's new life choices. Something had to give and what broke was me.

All said and done, I managed to get this song out of that experience. That was something good that you could take away.



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