unfurling

wip 4. got all the instrumentals in. probably going to mess with the levels on some parts some more. not sure if i want to keep the ho ho ho, lol, it might be laying the joke on a little thick. super tired now though and don’t want to look at this for several hours at least, lol.

I’ve been a little lax on updating this project; shit’s been busy. To catch up a little, here’s one of my favorite line groupings in Sawdust & Diamonds, “It is terribly good/to carry water and chop wood/streaked with soot,/heavy-booted and wild-eyed”. In particular, I’m head over heels for the paired adjectives heavy-booted and wild-eyed; the phrase has got an earthiness to it that just kinda is the morning commute when I’m walking out for an hour in my bulky faun boots and cars are starting to bustle off to work and the cool, dry California air is crisp, invigorating, brimming with promise around me. Equally, it is the evening walk back in the hazy dimness of the sun setting and fewer cars now finding their way back to their homes and the people with their dogs and the vagrants pushing their shopping carts piled with all their earthly possessions.

I love, too -- a bit less but the affection is still there -- the contrast with the next “As I crash through the rafters/and the ropes and the pulleys trail after/and the holiest belfry burns sky high”. These give the other side to the feeling of being grounded, the sensation of falling and everything else collapsing around you. It’s interestingly portrayed as being simultaneous, a dichotomy, when sequentially being streaked with soot ought to come after the fire and the fall. There’s obviously a lot of Christian imagery written all over this, but I’m not religious so that doesn’t speak to me particularly. But that feeling! of being present in the everyday and the here and now and yet all at once feeling yourself and everything you cherish crashing around you. Holy shit, man.

Posting something a little different today. Partly inspired by the lovely Joanna Newsom and partly by my own feeling of “omg I really have always wished I played an instrument but wind instruments never really suited me”, I’ve started learning harp (self-study). Because I think it’d be cool to track progress on that as well, I’ll probably put up some of my own stuff here now.

In particular, I’m currently teaching myself parts of Cosmia because 1) the key is easy for lever harp, 2) learning the same thing on each hand is helpful for noobs like me, and 3) the song is damned awesome.

Jose Gonzalez’s Veneer is the album to listen to on a long walking commute. It’s lo-fi but it does so damn much that’s interesting instrumentally and lyrically through its simplicity. I can’t listen to it too often, but every once in a while, I’m just in the right mood.

Having Crosses come up at twilight when the sun is just hovering at set along a busy street with cars speeding by and the shadows of trees and lightposts you pass growing longer along the ground as time elapses...that’s the only way to experience this song imo.

Not terribly religious, but I’ll admit phrasing the “everyone having their own cross to bear” thing with “crosses all over/they’re behind your shoulders” is beautifully understated.

Love, too, how evocative having sirens inside you waiting to step forward is. Sirens can be thoroughly modern -- the sirens of ambulances and police and fire being the signals of emergency and the reminder that there are things that are unfair and go horribly wrong in the world -- but they are also grounded in classical tradition as threatening temptation lurking out in the unknown.

It should be clear I’m going through Have One on Me like crazy right now. Besides Go Long, Baby Birch is the other main song I’m obsessing over at the moment. It’s beautiful and sad, and I love it a lot.

Also, I think I just really like litanies. I’m still not really sure what the blacksmith, shepherd, and butcher boy are referring to -- maybe we’re supposed to associate them with traditionalism and traditionally male professions? Pitting maleness against herself and the rabbit who is engendered female? But listing them one after the other is still super awesome.

The imagery of catching and skinning a rabbit, holding it between her own two hands as its life leaves its body, is super fucking terrifying. It matches the awesome intensity of the instrumentals and the backup singers because, though she claims the moment wasn’t hard in the moment, it’s clearly something that still reverberates later with regret and sadness and despair. Doing something awful -- in full knowledge it was awful at the time, but still doing it -- with a strange detachment from the horror at the time, but being haunted by it every day subsequently. Though the song implies the personal circumstances have to do with the loss of a child, it’s still a powerful feeling conveyed; there are many many weighty decisions that conjure the same feeling (i.e. “I KNOW THAT FEEL”).

Go Long is super fab, I’ve had it on repeat for about a week now. This section (with your jaws and fists and guitars and pens) as well as the mirroring one later in the song make me look forward to every listen through, goodness. I love this litany of things that are somehow irrevocably tied to that balance between rugged manliness and sensitivity (within acceptable societal bounds for it, ofc).