I recorded some harmony, using the Steinway Hall Piano — I always seem to go back to the Steinway — then added several jingly, tinkly rhythms from the Indian and Middle Eastern drum kit, and some guitar, and then experimented with some sampled classical male voices singing “ah” and “oh,” and placed the egg-slicer sounds on top. I guess I was making some kind of sound salad. But the egg slicer didn’t fit well and I muted it. The broom was pretty good, it had a sort of double thump, but the egg slicer was a disappointment. I couldn’t find any handclap samples anywhere in Logic — although I’m sure they’re there somewhere — so I recorded some of my own, and I watched a YouTube video on how to take a single, inadequate handclap and double it and then shift the claps around so that they sound realer, moving one clap track to the left and one to the right of the stereo center. But the handclaps sounded corny and I cut them out.
I played what I had so far, and thought I had the beginnings of a song. All it needed was the melody and the words. I set up a “Male Ambient Lead” vocal track. My underpowered voice became enormous in my headphones. I started singing along to the loop with my huge stereo voice. At first I sang wordlessly: ba-doodle doodle doodle doo, doot doodle doo. Then I sang, “Waiting for the time to come, waiting for the time to come, waiting for the time to come.” There it was, the beginning of a song, and it had only taken me four hours. Four hours of sweating in the ridiculously hot barn.
I went into the house and had some iced coffee and checked email. Tim had gotten arrested again in Syracuse at a drone protest outside Hancock Field, along with five other people. He sent me the link to a short video about the protest, and a link to the antiwar song by Eric Bogle, “No Man’s Land,” aka “Green Fields of France,” as performed by the kid in his dorm room. The kid’s YouTube name was Kirobaito. It’s just him and his guitar and a webcam. He’s got a flag of Scotland hung on the wall behind him. At one point his roommates try to distract him, he explains in the notes to the video, but he keeps singing, acknowledging them with a tiny smile. His computer screen is reflected in his glasses. The song is addressed to a nineteen-year-old boy named Willie McBride, who died in France in World War I. I thought I’d just watch a little, just enough to thank Tim for the video. But it was so good I kept going. “A whole generation was butchered and damned,” Kirobaito sang. “The suffering the sorrow the glory the shame / The killing the dying was all done in vain.” It ended. I watched it again. I read some of the comments. “Well done dude.” “Woah. That was beautiful.” “Listened to this on repeat for at least an hour now. This is awesome.” When it ended for the second time, I said, “These fucking stupid wars!” to the empty kitchen. I wrote Tim to thank him. “Tim, you were right — I’m crying. Thank you for telling me about this song. And thank you for going to Syracuse.”
• • •
I WATCHED SOME MORE VIDEOS of antiwar demonstrations, including one in which a policeman goes methodically down a line of seated protesters, squirting pepper spray in their eyes. I looked up the First Amendment to the Constitution and wrote a tune for some words taken from it:
Peaceably
To assemble
To petition
For redress
Maybe, with practice, my singing will improve. I practiced the bassoon for years until I sounded decent. But singing is more fundamental. You either can or you can’t. “Nice pipes, Tamika,” as Jack Black says in School of Rock.
I spent half an hour at Planet Fitness, and afterward I sat in the car and pressed the space bar to listen to bits of the songs I’d made. It occurred to me that the words—“Waiting for the time to come”—were perhaps uncomfortably close to John Mayer’s song “Waiting on the World to Change.” I have that song. I plugged my headphones into my iPhone and listened to it while I drove home. The funny thing is, Roz and I once had a minor difference of opinion about Mayer’s song, back when it was being played a lot. Her point was that you can’t just wait. You can’t just say, in a sort of smug way, We’re the new generation and there’s nothing we can do now, but when we come to power everything will be different and the soldiers will be home for Christmas and there won’t be yellow ribbons out. You have to object to the wrong right now, even though you’re at a distance from the action, and even though your elders are in power. Roz was right, of course, but on the other hand, Mayer’s song was at least the registering of a dissatisfaction. It’s true that he was saying that we should simply acquiesce for the time being, but patience can be a virtue, and he had a nice voice and it was a good song and I liked it. Turns out Mayer went to Berklee College of Music. Roz loved his song “Your Body Is a Wonderland.” That’s a Tyrconnell song.
I touched the little atomic genius sign to hear more songs like Mayer’s “Waiting,” and “Caring Is Creepy” came on, from the Garden State soundtrack. I skipped it, and I also skipped a nice remix by Nosaj Thing called “Islands,” and I skipped the Weepies doing “World Spins Madly On” because I’d heard it recently, and then I listened to part of Paul Simon doing “Slip Slidin’ Away”—Paul Simon never pushes his beautiful voice, and come to think of it, he’s got a small mouth. Small mouth, big songs. There are always exceptions. One Paul Simon album was so big and so controversial that it helped end the apartheid government in South Africa. And then I came to Tracy Chapman singing “Change.” I listened to the whole thing, really took in the words for the first time.
Tracy Chapman can sing. There’s a pent strength of held-back fast vibrato in her voice sometimes, at big moments, and then other times she just lets the notes slide out unobstructed. “If everything you think you know / Makes your life unbearable / Would you change?” Who knew that “know” and “unbearable” could rhyme? But they do. The music makes them rhyme.
And then John Lennon’s “Watching the Wheels” came on and I couldn’t listen to John because I was so completely destroyed by Tracy Chapman. I wasn’t ready for John right then. I wasn’t prepared for him.
Tomorrow I’m flying to Chicago to be on a panel about the future of poetry. I’m a mobile music-maker now: I’ve bought a small, twenty-five-key keyboard with keys that are slightly smaller than normal, like Schroeder’s piano. It fits in my briefcase.
Seventeen
I WOKE UP VERY EARLY, before it was light, and by the glow of my phone I read a little of Pat Pattison’s ebook on how to write better song lyrics. Pat Pattison teaches at Berklee. One of his students was John Mayer, he is at pains to let us know. At the beginning of his book he thanks Mayer and some of his fellow students “for showing how well all this stuff can work.” Pattison is not a humble man. The mother-of-pearl shell-diving exercise in his first chapter, he says, has over the years “proved to be a mainstay for many successful songwriters, including Grammy winners John Mayer and Gillian Welch.”