Nodus Tollens

Don't Know When Exactly But..

I've got an album of instrumentals coming out. It's more stuff in the vein of 'Neurotronic' where I let the synths and modulators go spastic and then figured out how to play guitars and bass and drums against it. It's not like there is any high falutin' concept beyond trying to make the seemingly atonal fold back into something that resembles guitar rock.

'Nodus Tollens' is the name the album. The term Nodus Tollens apparently means "the realisation that the plot of your life doesn't make any sense to you any more." I figure a lot of things could be said about such a statement. Maybe I'll wait until I get into it track by track once the damn thing gets its release.

Yes. When is it coming it out anyway?
This album was supposed to come out on the 29th March 2020 but there was a mix up with the Distributor and so here we are in limbo. It might take a week for it to getup.With the COVID-19 situation going, it might take even longer but you wonder how hard it could be to mount a digital release. It's not like I'm pressing these albums.

After 2 years of doing these digital releases, something wonderful happened. Somebody actually downloaded one of my tracks paying real money for it - all US$0.99 of it. Hey I'd like to encourage that here so whoever it was, kudos to you! Everybody should learn from this person's good behaviour.  If you're reading this blog, come on, you know you like this stuff well enough.


UPDATE:
 ....and here it is. Let it rip.

'Closing Time Blues'

Love in the Time Before Corona

It's certainly disorienting to be talking about hanging at bars until closing time in an era when pubs and bars are all closed by state order in a bid to stifle the Coronavirus spreading. I mean who'd a thunk it, whereby all the drinking holes in all the world are closed thanks to this damn virus. What will happen to that famous line in Casablanca wherein Rick Blaine (played by Humphrey Bogart of course) intones in a demeanour best described as glum:

"Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine."

Yup. That line doesn't feel the same in this exact day and age where you can't hang out until they throw you out.

I'm not much a drinker to begin with. My policy is one-and-done on any given night. I'm not a teetotaller because I found out Adolf Hitler was one, but I can be pretty close to being one for very long stretches. I as once pulled over for random breath testing in the mid-90s and was asked when my last drink was by the police officer. My reply was "I think 1987..."

Which is to say the periods that I did hang out 'til I was thrown out were fairly brief. And truth be told by the time I was being thrown out at closing time, I was pretty sober because I was a one-and-done guy. I was genuinely there for the drunk-and-sorry company. The best and worst of all that is to say I'm probably not cut out to be an alcoholic; but as the other songs in this series might indicate I could very well be addicted to other bad behaviours.

In closing out this series of songs, I have to say the album didn't work out the way I thought it would. I wanted to do a more reflective, slow-moving, lyric-driven, thoughtful kind of blues album. Instead I've written about stupid sex secrets of travellers and swingers and teenage nymphos. Nothing ever goes to plan and with this song, I have the feeling I've just fallen back on my natural thing where I zip along at 145bpm or so. There's a bigger gulf between the way one envisages one's music and actually how it plays out when it comes out of you. If I had a reason to be blue about closing out this album, I guess it would be just that: I wish that I'd gotten further away from my own natural inclinations than I did.




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'Zombies of Lust'

What's There To Complain About?

If a guy could magically become a Lothario, a Casanova, a Don Juan or Don Draper, would a red blooded male turn it down? I think it would take a lot of shunted libido and strange refractions in the persona before a guy could confidently say 'no'. We're all suckers for a bit of a good time.  In turn, when you get into the limerence of a new relationship and all you do is fuck, you enter a brain space where you may as well be a zombie. You become fuck-headed.

In my own moments of being fuckheaded, I've made drastically bad decisions in my life which I can only attribute to the absence of proper perspective and judgment that comes from being fuckheaded. You're like a zombie, devoid of a brain and so you make stupid decisions - but you tell yourself afterwards the fucking was great, so the losses accrued from the bad decision are worth it.

It's like your whole reality is warped by the experience of too much sex. You don't know where the line is because you cross over it ever so quietly and when you do, you're crossing it by concentrating on something else entirely. Judgments about one's own life are impaired severely at such junctures. You ask yourself afterwards why in the hell you didn't see the problems coming. You don't because pussy has a way of distorting reality. So you have to understand this: if you have a friend who is going through the limerence that comes with love and is getting laid really well, it is best not to ask them very important questions with consequences. A Lothario, a Casanova, a Don Juan or Don Draper is not a good arbiter of sane life decisions by dint of being on the wrong side of the line.

They're just Zombies of Lust.


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'One More Time Before I Die'

True Stories, Tall, and Short

The thing about life and lyrics is that you run out of things to write about your own life. I ran out of things to write about my life and love life at that, a very longtime ago. I don't mean to boast but, I've written a lot of songs my time and written a bunch of short stories in my time, and lord only knows I've written a shit tonne of blog posts over here too. It's natural that you pick the low hanging fruit of your life pretty damn clean, somewhere along in your creative life. It's just something that happens in a creative life.

You don't have to be Picasso or Paul Klee to want to re-invent the way you approach things from first principles, and unless you are Titian who never bored of painting similar kinds of portraits, you do go looking for different subjects and topics to address. You can't keep going over the same terrain repeating yourself - unless you're a bluesman. Then it's de rigeur.

One of the reasons I ran out love songs to write is because at some point I settled down and stopped lusting after the next pretty face that came along. That too is life. You can't keep riding on the testosterone, getting into romantic scraps in search of ever more love songs. Or just any old relationship-related songs for that matter. It's often better to go all Paul McCartney and pick song titles and stories out of newspapers. Not to mention the fact that love, as portrayed in pop songs is more akin to mental illness than actual love, but that is sort of another topic for another day.

All that said, you do luck out sometimes.

My musical acquaintance Paul regaled me with the story of two old blokes on a bus wherein the conversation revolved around wanting to have one last fuck before they shuffled off their portal coil. I was in a bus and this woman loudly proclaimed in a phone conversation - which she forced everybody to listen to on the bus - that she would like to get laid just one more time with the guy she slept with the night before. And then there was this teenage girl who is always talking way too loud on the bus wondering out loud if she will ever have sex again, after she dumped her boyfriend.

Sometimes life gifts you three verses, jus like that. You'd be a mug not to write it down into a song.



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'Lonesome Swingers' Party Blues'

Where Are the Swingers Parties of Yesteryear?

This one's a weird one. Just bear with me.

Years ago a guy with a heavy-duty surname went missing. Turned out he went to a swingers party without a partner and it got him killed. Turns out you need to bring a partner to a Swingers' party because if you don't you probably just end up with blokes, and that's not exactly the desired outcome. You're meant to be fucking each others wives/girlfriends/spouses, so you have to bring a partner or you can't participate.

The rule sounds fair but I wonder if not bringing a partner really is punishable by death. It seems rather extreme for a club exercising its membership rules.

That happened way back in January 2010, just over a decade ago. The actual killing happened over the Australia Day long weekend and I remember this because a guy called Benjamin Fulford predicted that a Rockefeller would be killed in late 2009, and well, this guy's surname was Rockefeller.

Does one put much provenance into things like that? One probably shouldn't.

Still, Benjamin Fulford also predicted that Pope Benedict XVI would resign, probably about 18 months before it happened, and that was freaky too because no Pope had resigned in nearly 600 years. So how did he know? He probably has good sources. Therefore, one could be led to wonder if the murder of one swinging dude was or wasn't part of some conspiracy theory fantasy - one does not know. I certainly don't but you have to take note when symbols line up.

Anyway, I decided I would take the news story at face value rather than indulge the conspiracy theory bit, and wrote a song about a guy who wants to go to a swingers' party but his spouse won't agree to go. I figured that was enough weirdness for one song without the ramification of a world conspiracy where Rockefeller's and Rothschilds are plotting to reduce the world population through bio-engineered pandemics. I mean it might be what's going on with SARS, MERS, and COVID-19, but on an album called Blues Balls, the swingers party is enough, no?




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'Foreign City Bues'

"The Issue Ain't Monkey It's..."

I have a friend who tells me that his libido is below average except when he travels. Ordinarily he's tame as a neutered cat; but when he's on the road for work or vacation, he says all he can think about is sex. I asked him how big the gap was and he stretched out his arms. I kind of take his word for it.

He says he turns into one of those fiends that just stares at the rear of stewardesses as they lean over and serve drinks and wonders what kind of underwear they're wearing. He says by the time he checks into the hotel and crashes on the bed with jet-lag, all he wants to do is score with a hooker. I've often listened to his stories of risky encounters in foreign cities and wondered how the hell they really go - if they're as 'rewarding' as he makes them out to be.

I imagine that that being removed from the structure of his everyday life feeds into this sudden surge of testosterone he experiences, but other than that, I'm short of an explanation as to why the testosterone flows in such a manner.  Everybody is different.

I myself am indifferent to travel. The charms of foreign places, cultures artefacts and people are lost on me. If the language is not English or Japanese I can't really cope with the sound of foreign tongues on the TV. A place like Italy is fascinating with its history and art but it is off-set by just how lousy getting around can be. I'm probably one of those joyless assholes that don't like the south of France. Getting horny on the road is about as appealing as losing a passport on the road.

Anyway, my friend gets a giggle out of the Frank Zappa routine where the Russian Concierge tells Frank's band members they can't bring a hooker into the prestigious hotel. As such I thought it might be fun to at least riff on that with the lyrics.



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'Donnie Blues'

The Dissembler In Chief

In the end Donald Trump got impeached and somewhat more amazingly, partisan politics ensured nothing happened to him. It's the nadir of democracy in a country that likes to boast it has the oldest one going and likes to impose democracy on others forcibly.

At this point in time we just have to accept the fact that maybe American Democracy has changed forever in such a way as to let the unaccountable just do whatever the hell they like without ever being held to any account.

It's enough to make anybody blue so I thought hey, that's a good enough reason to write about Donald Trump's presidency. I did draw some inspiration from Frank Zappa who wrote a tune called 'Dickie's Such An Asshole' during the height of the Watergate Scandal. It seemed appropriate to blast a dishonest President, and let's face it, Frank Zappa's not around to do it for us.

In some ays Watergate didn't mean a whole lot in of itself, given that nothing from the Watergate compares to the Russian electorate fiddling scandal. Watergate was just the teaser for something worse to come.

Instead of being a full-stop, it paved the way for a succession of ever devolving Republican Presidencies, punctuated by Democrat Presidents who were too lenient with the oligarchs of America. The succession of Ford, Reagan, Bush I, Bush II, Trump is pretty abysmal, and enough to destroy an eloquent and respected America. Each outhouse Republicans were less eloquent than the previous, less logical, less coherent than their predecessors. It got to the point we wondered if things could possibly get any worse than George W Bush, but ... hey, look, they elected Donald Trump.

Amazing, really.





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'In Love With Love'

"That's What They Say"

Having never owned a pink Cadillac or lived with somebody in America's fly-over-land, you can safely surmise the story in the song is fiction.

If I did own a Caddie, I would like to have owned one with big fins like the one Don Draper drives in the earlier seasons, the light blue 1962 Coupe DeVille. The 1965 Coupe DeVille he gives away in late season 7 is also appealing. That said, I'm not really all that big on American cars in general, yet somehow Cadillacs have had a way of entering songs. I've been trying to work in other brand names for a while but Pontiac, Oldsmobile, and Plymouth don't quite have the same vibe.

I do want to write a song that features a 1972 Pontiac Firebird and play my Gibson Firebird on it, but nothing concrete has materialised around that concept. One of these days I'll get there. It's hard to write a song about pony cars that's actually a better song than 'Mustang Sally' so I don't try. 'Mercury Blues' is a great song I might even try and cover one day.

In other news... I ran into an ex the other day. It was sort of embarrassing because it was so long ago. The lesson I drew from the awkward encounter was that things happen for a reason. Sometimes when you break up you get all hung up for all the things that you'd have been with that person. Well, one of the things that happens is people get old and ... you know... less good-looking. It's easier not to regret the old, lost loves when you realise that they fucked up and disintegrated for good reasons - whatever those reasons might be - and life just goes on in a downward trajectory for everybody. It just doesn't matter in the face of entropy.  

Sometimes you gotta realise the heartbreak is bad because on top of everything else, you were just in love with love.




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