Not your average country-western singer, not your average rocker. "JDR," as his fans call him, writes
rough-hewn, unvarnished songs straight from life.
He's educated, he's Filipino, and he cranks out the most galvanizing
high-energy country western, rock + roll, and gospel you've ever heard.
Jon David Rodis has the music that will stir your soul and move your body onto the dance floor!

Provisional blog :

----------------------------------- 12:03  5/26/09 ---- Lots happening musically since my last blog entry.  I've been writing tons.  Original song count is at 25 since February when I started writing.  There were a couple of major developments since the last entry about recording the demo.  I've started lots of new songs and finished some of them.

After the demo I was thinking about the country / hip-hop songwriting nexus.  I wrote a song called "What I Like" which has a hip-hop feel lyrically--similar to the Cash classic, "Country Boy."

Then I wrote a very short tune--about 60 seconds long--called "Horses."  I played two chords and the rest just fell out in about half an hour.  It's sort of in the lieder tradition--not intentionally so, but I appreciate the change up.  It's a very short song that seems like poetry set to music.  Not necessarily good poetry, but there is strong symmetry all over the writing that marks it as more on the poetry side of things.

Then I wrote a buddy tune called "Beat These Blues."  At this point, I had watched a Hank Williams documentary about three times, and I was trying to write with fewer chords.  I was writing a tune about procrastination and ennui but the lyrics headed in another direction.

Then I wrote another tune called "Sweet Lovin' Time."  This was a conscious attempt to explore a Hank Williams songwriting technique which is to build a song around an undeniably powerful and unforgettable phrase.  Pick the right phrase and things just collect around it.  People love those kind of songs.  You always know the name.  They fit your memories.  Easy to sing.  I listened to a lot of Otis Redding after that--he strikes me as a highly underrated writer and another example of a writer who uses a strong focal phrase.  In any event, the documentary described how Hank Williams used romance comics as inspiration--makes perfect sense.  His tunes are totally baroque noir.  Comics use super-urgent phrases that seem, well, comical until they are set to music, at which point they become opera. The documentary, "Honky Tonk Blues" showed a page from one of his comics with the phrase "move it on over" in it.  So, "Sweet Loving Time" is a double entendre driven tune about the male sex drive and how it is often mistaken by women for not being about a need for love. Sex definitely needs a better PR firm.  The tune ended up sounding like an early Beatles tune, though.

Then, I started looking through the chords in Hank tunes, and I was surprised at how many 7ths he uses.  I wrote a song with lots of 7ths called "New Orleans."  I wrote the verse part first--very masculine--and I thought about making the song about a John Henry kind of figure.  Like a gunfighter, or something.  I opted for a city, instead.  So it was basically an overly Romantic look at New Orleans and how much trouble it is.  I love New Orleans, and I was not happy with myself for rehashing New Orleans' poor rep, so I made the song about a guy coming to terms with New Orleans rep and saying to New Orleans, "It's not you, it's me."  The chorus has all the 5ths and minors.  It's bittersweet and establishes the romance between the guy and the city as a stand in for a romance with a woman.  I like the bridge.  It's super gospel.  Those gospel themes just keep coming up. I also wrote a gospel bridge for the tune "On Judgment Day" (formerly "This Man").

Next tune up is called "Four-chambered Heart."  This one is a 3-chord affair with a great vocal melody.  (More on this later.)  It is borderline psycho, as it plays on an analogy between the singer's heart and a revolver.  As in, "I love this person so much it's like a freakin' gun in my chest," which is weird enough.  I doubled down, though, because the song is really about how (because the singer is so in love with this chick) this love would cause him to put a ballistic hurtin' on any man who would do harm to said lady.  I really like the tune, though.  I think it's really catchy, and thanks to the catchiness of the melody, you don't notice the psycho as much.  In truth, that feeling is real.  The major device of the song is to personify and separate what is essential to the person (i.e. the "heart") from the person.  That captures the out of control but defining impulses that are often free riders on love.  It takes the "don't mess with me, man, I'm f'ing crazy" vibe and makes it into a romantic comedy.  Bottom-line:  As evidenced by most pop-country music, put three chords on top of a pile of crap, and it's singable.

Back on the c-hop, I finished out "Country Boy" and I'm really happy with it.

Lastly, I just got a start on another song "Efficiency," which I describe below in excerpted correspondence.

On the instrumental front, I'm falling in love with Deborah Anne all over again.  That Tele just sounds so good.  I put on the .12s after having the .10s on since I got her.  Even with the larger strings, it's still much more playable than the acoustic guitar.  Leo Fender is a darn genius.  Plus, the Tele through the Blues Jr. is so good to me. After I wrote New Orleans, I started practicing the left-hand muting, and my guitar is approaching something I would like to listen to as a music fan.  I like my songs and my singing, but with a little more practice, I will like my guitar playing, too.  It's not as interesting as good Travis picking, but with the percussive sound of the left-hand muting (used in a non-uniform manner) plus some accents and Bo Diddley rhythms, I think I'm on my way to being a decent country rhythm guitar player.

[correspondence]: I'm in the middle of writing a Mary J. Blige-like breakup song.  The Mary J. factor was unintentional, but who doesn't like Mary J. Blige? The most Mary J. line is "I ain't crying over no spilled milk," which has the cadence of "hateration" in Family Affair and recalls "No More Drama."  I suppose that line ends up sounding like a caricature of Mary J.--I'll try to change it.  I wrote it as a rhyming placeholder, but I ended up rhyming it into the verse.  Vocally and lyrically, it's pretty bluesface, but I think when I record it in hard-swing that will disappear somewhat.  The chords feel black gospel-like, and the song likes 6/8 time.  It's not in a 1-4-5 harmonic pattern, but it sounds like a familiar harmonic pattern.

I feel like I'm learning how to write interesting vocal melodies over very big and simple 3-chord progressions, which I'm really pleased about.  It seems like simple chords let the vocal melody take on the tone of the lyrics instead of being married to the chords.  The more I write, the more I realize how important vocal melody is.  Vocal melody should enact the feelings of the lyrics.  I'm looking at these lyrics below, and they sound much better than they read.  Townes Van Zandt lyrics read like poetry, but I don't really catch the full weight when he sings.  He can sort of "undersing" them as in "understate." R.I.P., Townes.

I should definitely record this new tune, even though it has a Rargghh! pop country adolescent female vocalist vibe to it.  I think what I have so far is more substantial than most songs of its songwriting genre, but definitely inferior to the Supremes' "You Keep Me Hanging On," which in my humble is the division champ and cannot be touched.  We should try to sell the song to Avril Lavigne, or something.  It's called "Efficiency," and I was inspired by your description of Hank Williams and Little Richard tunes.  First, I realized how powerful that phrase is when I was trying to explain it to Liz while watching Buck Owens on "The Best of Country Live" on Netflix instant stream.  Then, I started writing about a fictional chick who was the proverbial "everything I need and nothing I don't," but I found that the only things I know of that have everything you need and nothing you don't are Hank Williams tunes, Little Richard tunes, and my bicycle!  In light of the no music about music rule, I started writing a hokum tune about my bicycle (e.g. big rack; you don't pinch my junk when I sit on you), but the chords pointed to something more serious.  "Everything I need, nothing I don't" strikes me as an important life credo that actually encapsulates what I like about my bicycle.  Ultimately, I tried to hit that theme vis a vis the "I Will Survive" break-up tune:

[check attached jam]
         D               F#          A           F#
I want everything I need and nothing I don't
D              F#                             A     D
Don't want nothing that don't want me
F#                          A                                    F#
There's something to everything in this big wide world
    D                   F#                A      D
But nothing means everything to me


A        F#            D             A
I ain't  crying over no spilled milk
D        F#                     A    D
I don't mind you leaving me
F#        A                  D           A
You can call it, honey, what you will
             D               F#      A   D
But in the end I call it efficiency


Last note:  I'm getting so deep into this country confessional mode of writing, I worry that I'll never write any more tunes that aren't transparently about me.  Take On Judgment Day, that's obliquely inspired by me-related events.  It's clearly not me, though.  I like that, and it makes for good songs.  It's like I'm getting too comfortable talking about me.  I really like those tunes that are more in character.  The first group of songs that I wrote, I was actively trying not to write about me.  I even did full lyric sampling in Sweet and Low.  Also, I like tunes that are death-confronting, and that first bunch of tunes was very death-confronting.  I feel like I may have written those out of my system.  We'll see.  There's just too darn much romance material right now, and it's boring.

5/9/09 11:42 p.m. (from correspondence) -- In truth, I totally didn't deliver on that plan to pause on the music front.  I've been writing all day since 2pm.  That recording session was such a powerful learning experience, I've been going back through all the old songs and writing bridges, chords for solo parts, and "chimes" to smooth them out.  I've also been thinking more about backing vocals, etc.
Before the writing I did today, the day after our first session I worked on my pastiche of the Cash masterpiece, "Country Boy," in light of the c-hop discussion we've been having:

Country Boy, there ain't no jobs
No factory work, no family farm.


Your cowboy boots are
Made in China
By a wage slave
Workin' the line
And you're gonna put 'em on
Spend your last dime
And have a damn good time


Country boy, it's cooking meth Country boy, or check to check

Like a wiggly worm
You can see him squirm
Cause he's on the hook
To pay for the car
That drove him to work
But they closed the firm
Made parts for cars
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Son, you're gonna go far


Country Boy, ain't got no draft
Country Boy, so it's your *ss


Gonna hear that call,
Get your name writ down
Gonna do us proud
Gonna get laid down
Next to blacks and browns
Who all came from
The wrong side of every town


It's tricky to write about people you don't know, and I don't know too many "country folk."  So, this is more political than I'd like, though the Cash tune is more about material living conditions than what people might recognize at first (i.e. bills, what you eat, etc.)  One thing I love about the Cash tune is how loving it is.  It's difficult for me to do that, so this is an attempt to be empathetic without being patronizing.  The most patronizing line I think is the "cooking meth vs. check to check" one.  It's overly simplistic and fatalistic, and it is in the same vein as the "black men have a choice between playing basketball or dealing drugs" boilerplate, but those kind of choices are real for a lot of people at some level even if the choices are often presented in overly simplistic ways.  Another consideration is the "so it's your *ss" line.  I feel like the verse is very respectful of the sacrifice that soldiers make, and it expresses sadness and outrage that those sacrifices aren't shared, but there are a lot of people who would find this verse absolutely disrespectful as it is written.  Maybe I can write something less dreary.  More to the point, maybe I can learn something about rural life that isn't the dreary picture I get from my understanding of the politics.  I feel like I have dimed out the politics in this song.

On the today's writing front, "This Man" got a major boost when I added this bridge that brings the existential crisis of the cuckolded man to the fore:

The good Lord made
The good Lord saves
What He don't save
He's gonna burn on Judgment Day
On Judgment Day

So, I'm changing the name of the tune to Judgment Day.  This bridge takes an important pattern in the verse chord progression and changes a minor chord to a major one.  It turned out very powerful.  It appears three times, so this is probably the chorus, really.  The end of the song layers this with the loud "Lord, Lord, Lord" chorus you've heard already.  This tune is now a definite A-list JDR tune.  In fact, this might be the best tune I've written now.  Whereas most of the other JDR tunes are very wordy, this one is very sparse.  Very little internal rhyme.  It has rhetorical devices, but they're the kind of devices that come out in dramatic speech rather than playful songwriting.  I should be open to writing more songs in character like this one is.  Even though the speech is a sort of a caricature of an old-timey, farmer/pioneer/cowboy man, it works and feels genuine to me.  Writing in character like that should generally be approached with caution, and this song works only because I've thought a lot about raising a child that wasn't my blood offspring.  It's very fluid harmonically and with respect to the arrangement.

I figured out that the "Calamity Rose" bridge that I wrote before "She's so pretty / She's so hot / I could look at her all night / She drinks her whiskey / With soda pop / I hope she asks me for a light" should be sung by an all-male chorus to get at that elemental desire for this chick.  I'll change all the pronouns to "We" etc., so it has the Greek chorus vibe.  I continue to think that this is the most marketable tune in the set.  It's really a fun tune, it's easy to sing along with, the chords feel very natural and familiar without being cliche.

You got a shout-out on the tune "What I Like":
Gimme a lawn chair on my buddy's back porch on
A hot summer night and a cold glass of bourbon
Talking all about fame and fortune
And looking out o'er the field we worked on


The lyrics on that tune are in the bag, and it is arranged.

I finished the lyrics to that tune "Yes, Dear" that is sort of the harmonic follow-up to "Rough Edges."  I would say that it is an A-list JDR tune at this point, too.  It definitely gets at my current mindset of dating.  We might promote it to the first record.

I figured out some key changes to spice up "Phoenix Metro Rail"

I figured out chord progression for solos to "Phx Metro" and "Double Down."

All in all, totally productive.  I didn't get any promotional stuff done today, but I had to ride that burst of creative synthesis after reflecting on that recording session.  Any thoughts on the demo after it's been sitting for awhile?

JDR



----12:29 a.m. 5/7/09 --- We just finished recording the demo a few minutes ago, though I think a certain guitarist/producer is going to put in some extra, extra time recording tonight.  Electrobilly is a really powerful sound. Incredibly high energy music.  People will be surprised.  Like Hank III says, "Not everybody likes us, but we drive some folks wild."  The crazy thing is that this song is one of the closest songs I have to a ballad.  Now that I know the music sounds good, I hope that people figure out how to dance to it.

The record has more dimensions than I imagined--by a long shot. Recording music is closer to making a movie than painting, for example.  Recording is highly collaborative.  Everyone's efforts are exposed.  Certainly on this record.  The process ends up being about a shared vision.  And no single person has the whole vision ahead of time, not even me.  There are so many things on this record that I hadn't heard before but are now grafted onto the previous way I heard the song.  Still, it's the same song.  It's the same person with different moods and mannerisms.

I need to work more on my singing.  I sang this demo at the upper end of my register, and it shows.  We tried the vocals an octave lower, though, and it lost all the energy.  I'll tried for an interval down, but I couldn't hit it reliably.  Maybe the register is right, but I need to get a little more control.  The backing vocals are incredible. *** and *** sang the chorus perfectly.  It's a really compelling sound with all of the Rodis Family Singers.

****'s production and guitar are a complete K.O.  The beat, the guitar accents, the solo, the cadence changes on some of the lyrics.  There's no question that it's a JDR song, but there's no question it's a **** production, either.  Skull Hill is an artistic force.

05-04-2009 -- [ From correspondence ]
Yeah, I hear you on the yarn vs. verite thing.  I just wrote a couple of verses in a "hip-hop" vein, and the only difference I can see now is that the internal rhyme meter is way up.  There's also a choppier feel to stuff I just wrote, more emphasis on stand-alone phrases, and more emphasis on a direct, declarative connection with the audience.  The verse structure idea is also deceiving.  I listened to some Guru after I sent that email, and his verses are of a regular length.  There's just so much internal rhyme I didn't notice those verse breaks.  The other thing is that he often brings the big rhyme word from one verse into the next verse in a supporting role, so the verse breaks don't seem as strong as they might on paper.  I've never thought about rap as a songwriter before, so I never noticed these things other than to recognize the virtuosity.  As far as content goes, yeah it's the same.  More accurately, the variance within genres is bigger than the variance between genres.  And the variance within the work of a single songwriter can be bigger than that between songwriters, regarding narrative style and subject matter.  Bottom line:  The verite vs. yarn distiction is mildly racist Romantic jive.  Yeah, point taken on the mono-chordal issue, too.  If you can rap over one chord, and you're not singing, you can rap over three.  It is amazing what skin color and cultural hype will do do your perception of art.

Your idea to do a straight country record and do a c-hop one concurrently is a good one.  The steam valve of just going into high-flying lyrical mode will be a good writing exercise.  It will be interesting to see what would distinguish the two writing styles, in practice.  I think it will be a difference of degree rather than principle.  Manila on a Jet Plane is pretty close to c-hop, as is.  The singer/audience connection is really declarative, the emphasis on rhyme is there.  This Man is in that cinematic yarn mode you mentioned, too, though.  At a certain level, the singing vs. rapping distinction counts for more than I thought, though it counts for a heck of a lot less than everyone else thinks.  Also, the rap as virtuoso lyricism is misleading too.  There is plenty of really straight ahead couplet rap, from narrative to confessional.

I guess the big lesson for me at the moment is that I should keep listening to hip-hop for inspiration. There is a lot of great writing that I should study.  The lyrical syncopation / rhythmic inversions are the big thing I don't see in a lot of country.  I think what I need to learn how to do is to jump on and off that train rhythm.  Maybe it's scansion time.


05-03-2009 ---- [From correspondence]
I've been listening to a lot of hip-hop for the past two days, and I think I'm ready to experiment with it if I had a country-hop beat. Would you be interested in making such a thing at some point?  I don't think I could make a beat, but I know you could make a nasty one. Rhythmically, the beat would be pretty unprecedented.  There is a whole genre of highly rhythmic music that has not been sampled or rapped over.  I think we should cut this first record, then cut an overflow EP, then dig into the country-hop.  (Or do you like "hillbilly-hop" or "hip-hop-billy" or ?)

I realized yesterday that the main difference between hip-hop and country from a songwriter's perspective is the conventions having to do with verse length.  Hip-hop verses are huge.  Absolutely huge.  So, you have ample room to change the rhyme schemes at will.  Because you can define the "end" of a line at any point through a rhyme, you don't need to follow any particular rhythmic pattern leading up to the rhyme.  So, you can change the cadence of a line at will, too.  It's free-form writing without being free-verse.  In fact, it elevates rhyme and rhythm to a point that you barely see in any other lyrical form.

The mono-chordal nature of so many hip-hop songs seems to come from the demands that this kind of songwriting puts on the music.  The music has to be able to fit with all of the lyrical changes that are supposed to happen within a song but are too complex or, in a freestyle rap, too improvisational to coordinate with predetermined chordal changes.  In the context of a cipher or battle where multiple people have to rap over the same beat those kind of chordal changes would interfere with the natural transitions between styles and MCs. What I realized, though, is that the mono-chordal nature of the music is there, in part, for the MC as songwriter.  It definitely has intrinsic musical value, too.  Hip-hop gets you to bob your head regardless of the MC, and that hypnotic quality is part of the songwriting process especially in a cipher or battle.  The skinny for me as a songwriter, though, is that beat seems much more inviting. It's not playing tennis without the net, as Frost said about free verse, it's more like playing hopscotch, and more playful like that: You toss the stones and, in that improvisational way, decide where you can and can't jump.

From a strict standpoint of music theory / musicology, who knows which lyrical and musical conventions were first?  It's a chicken and egg thing, I imagine.  I guess it was probably the musical conventions of spinning records at parties that invited MCs to write the kind of verses they did, and those verses encouraged musical conventions like sampling and looping.  Regardless, hip-hop is usually mono-chordal, as far as I can tell, and it has huge verses where the songwriter is encouraged to change rhyme patterns and meter in creative and surprising ways.

I don't know if I'll be able to handle the extra degrees of freedom that I would have writing songs in that kind of verse structure, but I think I'm ready to try.  It's not unprecedented in country music, either.  There is definitely the square dance calling.  Billie Joe Shaver uses internal rhyme like a madman.  The best example in my mind, though, is the verse construction in Johnny Cash's "Country Boy," where he raps over a chord in F.  It feels like he's holding that chord forever, until you get to the C.  Then you're back in a regular country song.  He's consciously playing with those country songwriting conventions.  (He's really playful like that--like his key changes in "5 Feet High and Risin'.)  I think a country-hop song could do that in the extreme, no problem.  In fact, a treatment of "Country Boy"  is the first song I'd want to start writing for the next full-length record.  Only it could be all about how the country boy doesn't have traffic, gangs, a 40-hour work week.  The kicker is that the country boy does have Wal-mart, meth, no farm to work on, etc.  I think "Country Boy" could be the whole concept of the 2nd record, because those big hip-hop verses are conducive to talking about more detailed, political, concrete stuff--the paraphernalia of the everyday--as opposed to the country verse structure which seems to work better when you talk about personal ish in an impressionistic way.  One wack way to do country-hop would be to port all things hip-hop into the country universe.  Instead, I'm going to try to write JDR songs, but just with a hip-hop verse structure and a mono-chordal country beat.  That way it'll be plenty hip-hop and not minstrel at all.  I think it's cool if we throw in some mythology for fun, like putting in audio clips of Westerns, but after I realized that a big part of what makes hip-hop so revolutionary is that verse structure coupled with the musical parameters, I felt like I could try writing like that, be a hip-hop musician, and not feel for a second like I was being a fake.  I think the verse conventions will naturally lead to slightly different subject matter than other JDR songs.  Maybe only the distribution of subjects will change.  Those hip-hop verses are fertile territory for talking about the paraphernalia of the everyday--concrete, tangible things that you hear about but have never heard in a song before.  Country verse structure seems to be good for talking about everyday stuff, but in a more impressionistic way. Country songs are yarns.  Hip-hop is verite.  I'm just speculating, but it'll be fun to find out what the difference is, if any.

You want to rap, too?  We could do these songs as Columns of Smoke or something else.  You could do guest verses on JDR songs, and any number of arrangements could fit really well within the Wu-Tang style organizational structure we've got now.  I don't know a whit about beat-making, so at first that would be all you.  I think Gangstarr is the model, where the DJ samples country stuff in a really minimalistic way.  Guru is probably the MC I most closely identify with, too.  One huge difference, though, is that DJ Premier doesn't rap on record, as far as I know, and you could.  You already know tons more about MCing than I do, and I'd love it if we could trade verses, lines, etc.  We could always play live, like the Roots, too.  I'm thinking that I'll sing my verses, because I feel pretty naked otherwise.  Plus, that way I can explore the musical nature of writing verses like this.  I think it would be cool if you did your verses either way, sung or rapped.

I went to the Hidden House last night, and I wore my Western duds. Just a Western shirt and a bandanna around my neck and tucked under my shirt--it looked like a cravat.  A guy asked me at the bar if I was a cowboy.  He was kind of teasing me, but I didn't mind too much.  I told him I was a country musician.  He was surprised, thought it was kind of cool, but kept teasing me by asking if I was like Toby Keith. I said, "I hate that f*cker."  I told him I was more like Johnny Cash. He said Johnny Cash was cool, and stopped teasing me.  I learned two things:  Everybody loves Johnny Cash, and the world needs electrobilly.  Incidentally, the guy who was teasing me was white.  I don't feel like a grown black person at a bar would be as likely to tease me about being country unless it was in a congratulatory way, because there would be no need for them to demonstrate their own hip-hop cred by knocking mine.  Who knows, really?  And there's no real need to speculate too much.  Regardless, the exchange was a thoroughly enjoyable experience and it reinforced the social upside to doing a really classy country-hop record.

04-30-2009----- I finally revisited Calamity Rose now that Rough Edges is in the bag. (We didn't demo last night due to the Swine Flu pandemic, but the lyrics are all bagged up.)  The revisit was prompted when I decided to follow Wonkette on twitter.  I don't speak Beltway, so I had no idea what she was talking about half the time, but she has a permanent quote on her blog that's from a 1992 flick, Simple Men.  I haven't seen the movie, but the quote is straight Western.  It would have come out of Clint Eastwood's mouth if Unforgiven was about love instead of killing:

Ned, there is no such thing as adventure. There's no such thing as romance. There's only trouble and desire.

That prompted me to get to writing about Calamity Rose immediately.  I revised the old chorus, making pen and paper changes that I've been kicking around in my head for a couple of weeks:

Calamity Rose.  Sorrowful girl Soon after she takes off those vintage clothes She'll make a hipster cry Heartbreak follows wherever she goes All because of that sweet Calamity Rose

becomes

Calamity Rose.  Sorrowful girl
Where she come from nobody knows
A land where the grown men cry
Heartbreak follows wherever she goes
All because of that sweet Calamity Rose


Generally, I'm going more universal, less overtly sexual, and less snarky.  That's always a good move.  But (finally!) I've got some decent verses:

Ain't no adventure
Ain't no romance
Ain't no rubies in that fire
Just when you had her
You had no chance
Ain't nothing but trouble and desire


Shortly after......

She ain't no plaything
Ain't no last dance
She ain't no woman for no child
Thought it was something
It's just a glance
Ain't nothing but a woman being wild


The lyrical references (other than the film one) come from two of my favorite R&B tunes:  Do Right Woman and Save the Last Dance for Me, by Aretha and the Drifters, respectively.  I've had the last dance concept in my head for a couple of days since I emailed an old flame of mine about the possibility of rekindling the romance when we're old and have already lived our lives.  Good Lord, the Drifters are one of the greatest musical groups in American history.

The "no woman for no child" line is unfortunately ambiguous.  I want it to mean that she's too much woman for a young man--it's a warning from an old man to a young man, and an implicit statement of purpose on the part of the old man.  It may have the unintended meaning of "she's not trying to have any babies," which may very well be true. However, the great romance of women's lives (not romance like lovey-dovey, but romance of the life cylcle) is often how they start out wild and free and end up with families, for better and for worse. (That's probably the great romance for most men's lives, too.  But it often ends up King Lear-ish.)  It's an incredible transformation, and I wouldn't want to divorce the notion of being wild from the notion of having kids, especially because I want a woman with both.  The reality is that most women have those two drives contained in a single body. That's what's so dramatic.  No doubt this Calamity Rose will end up with a family and that will reveal all sorts of complexities in her character above and beyond those that are already at work.  In other words, I don't want this song to be in the notoriously boring and silly madonna/whore vein, and the "no woman for no child" line risks that interpretation.  (Maybe the song should end with some family themes.....I can't help myself.  No I should let her have her fun.) The other reality is that Calamity is always one good time from raising a baby on her lonesome--those drives are in one body not as a matter of coincidence.  That's what so captivating about this character.  She really is an outlaw in the country tradition.  One step ahead of the gender police, if I may be so post-modern academic.

Regardless, of where this goes lyrically, it has deep roots now to match the deep musical identity it had as soon as I laid the chords down months ago.  This is an interesting a song chordally as Rough Edges, but this one feels even more fluid and natural.  It is much more grounded in the 1, 4, 5 blues structure, but there are elaborations that give the song a whimsical quality.  I have a bridge for this one, too.  I wrote it not too long after I wrote the original verse part.

Does this song need some action?  Is there a story here, or is the story implicit?  Maybe I'll have her dancing.  I shouldn't mix my blogging with my writing, though.

2:47 a.m.  4/28/09 ---- Lordy, I just heard the beat for the first single, "Rough Edges," and you will not be disappointed.  Electrobilly is completely hypnotic. It will take some shoutin' to break through that trance.  We record the demo on Wednesday.  I want to play all the songs I've written over that beat.  I started already, and it's interesting which songs go with the "Rough Edges" beat and which songs go with the alternate beat.  "It Was I," for example, goes with the alternate beat.  It might have to do with the timing of the chord changes.  Nope, just tried that.  I think it's the cadence of the lyrics.  The lyrics of "Rough Edges" swing, whereas "It Was I" is in straight time.  **** says he's been hearing this sound all along, but it's new to me.  I heard the downbeat, but not the backbeat of the percussion.  That train is nasty.  Once we have the bass counterpoint to that beat, the rhythm is locked in.  Like Hank III says, "Not everybody likes us, but we drive some folks wild."  I'm leaning toward an upright bass right now, but amped and overdriven the way my acoustic is.  The other alternative is a really analogue sounding synth bass.  That beat is so metallic, that the bass needs a lot of fuzz on it.  The juxtaposition of the fleshy lyrics with the metallic percussion is more than I bargained for.  These songs that I've written are campfire songs, and this beat adds a kind of tragedy to them, because it reminds you that people don't sing around campfires anymore.  Where are you going to plug your sh*t in?  I knew there would be that dimension to electrobilly, but I didn't know it would be as strong as I now think it will come through on the record.  There is this sense that the digital sets the pace.  Musically it does.  I don't think it does in the real world, but a lot of people feel that it does, and that adds a lot of tension.  When ** adds his cello, there's another dimension of poignancy.  The metallic percussion against the moaning of the cello. Another anachronism.  Who knows what the lead guitar will be like? That's a wild card.  I think harmonies is the biggest thing.  We should experiment with blue notes.  It's clear that I will have lots of things to play off of that I haven't practiced playing off of, yet. We'll see what ***** *'s voice will sound like.  That doom will be something else.  I'll have to get *** and *** to sing lots of harmonies.  I think they're the female singers I need.  Hopefully, they'll be able to sing high lonesome harmonies.  Yikes, this is a sound.
I finished a final verse to Rough Edges that really ties the whole song together:

I hear my babies though they ain't been born,
Ain't been loved by no one before, and
I hear my voice getting ready to sing
When I hear them crying in their crib
Rough edges round off in the wind.


I started to think about another verse, because **** thought the song should have a breakdown after which it would need a verse or a chorus. I pulled out an old verse about singing:

Many a year in that Sturm and Drang / Led many a wild man to write many a fine song / But they all get quiet right after they sing / Like they cried themself to sleep in their crib / Rough edges round off in the wind.

I liked the singing, crying, wind connection, and the last line sets up the chorus very well.  I hated the meta of the whole thing, because it felt very self-promoting in a silly way.  I also didn't like that it was a verse that referred to the singer--at this point I had decided that the verses should be outward focused.  After writing the other verses in the song, I decided I liked the verses better when they didn't end with the "rough edges" line.  So I scrapped the verse. On second look, the baby part of the verse was a good look.  I thought about the baby concept, and the line "I hear my babies" came into my head.  Then I knew this was going to be some maudlin sh*t. I've explored this territory in Sugar Beets and to a lesser extent in It Was I and Until My Dying Day, and I knew I was running the risk of overplaying it.  But I kept exploring it, and the idea of singing came back in--only this time as a process of an older person comforting a younger person rather than the solipsistic and adolescent singing/crying of the baby/singer.  I ended up with the verse above. It took me awhile to feel comfortable with it, and I had to strip it down to make it simpler.  (At one point the fourth line retained the busy "cried themself to sleep in their crib" phrasing.)  Now I really like it.  It hardly says anything directly except for the first line. The second line is just a poetic elaboration on the notion of not being born yet--and I suppose, no mama being around, yet.  The third and fourth lines have ambiguous meanings.  And the last line could mean a handful of things, too.  Functionally, it does a lot, though: It reconnects the outward focus of the verses with the inward focus of the chorus.  The last verse is the first one to refer to the singer, and that reference makes the chorus (for the first time) refer to something other than the singer--this works with the theme of the verse.  It retroactively makes the the other choruses into lullaby choruses, which is a zinger.  In doing so, it does a better job of conveying the idea of singing oneself to sleep than the verse about songwriters ever did.  The biggest move is that it reinforces the relationship between the singer and the subjects of the other verses by uniting the separate vignettes into a song about a life cycle:  A father grieving for his mother.  A son grieving a lost love.  A parent grieving grown children.  A mother grieving a lost life.  A father singing to his crying baby.  I didn't think I was going to make those kind of connections / resolutions with this song.  I thought it would just be the outward verses and the inward chorus, but the resolution is a better look.
**** also recommended an instrumental break after the second chorus, and he recommended a blues pattern.  It turns out to be just the cleansing that the song requires before leading into the last verse and chorus, which function like a kind of coda now.  The breakdown is a 16-bar blues:  1, 4, 1, 5, 1, 4, 5, 4, 1.  It is beautifully simple, and it fits incredibly well with the other parts of the song.  The second part of the chorus is 2, 1, 4, so (for some reason) the breakdown feels great.

04-27-2009-- Saturday night was a huge success!  Our two songs floored them.  They loved the Hank.  The Little Richard went over a little differently: It was a little like when Michael J. Fox finished Johnny B. Goode in Back to the Future.  A couple of beats of dead silence.  Then more. Then confused clapping.
We had some technical difficulties, but nothing that put too much of a damper on the show.  We were a little out of sync, in part due to said technical difficulties, but more so because I was completely adrenaline charged.  I don't really remember much after we started playing.  I guess it's like being in a battlefield situation--only the enemy is shooting morphine and adrenaline darts at you.  Honestly, there are few situations that induce that kind of rush.  After we left the stage, I kept wanting to talk with people at my table about what happened, as if I had just come back from a non-stop thrill of a vacation that they hadn't been on.  There is definitely a difference between on and off stage.  I didn't forget any lyrics which was my big goal, actually.  We got lots of great feedback, and I even got a couple compliments on my voice.  I'm hooked.  **** and I are still figuring out which name to go with for our duo.  (We're going to keep playing spirituals, Hank songs, and rock-n-roll tunes.)  I seriously cannot wait for our next show.
I'm currently figuring out how to package the first bundle of JDR songs into a record format.  **** recommends going lean and muscular on the 1st record.  Stick to the creme of the JDR crop plus high-impact covers, then release the remaining JDR songs plus covers on a second record that follows on its heels.  I think that's a brilliant idea.  For the most part JDR songs are fast and short, but there are some songs that aren't single material due to length and subject matter.  The Sweet and Low medley, Split Pigs and Sugar Beets, and a few others fit that bill.  They lean toward the ballad side of things, focus explicitly on personal / family history, and don't have the immediate impact that Rough Edges, It Was I, and Calamity Rose have.  I was thinking that I would do a chronologically ordered record of about 17 JDR originals, but I see now that's self-indulgent and fails to consider the listening experience.  People want high-impact records, and when they want the longer-form stuff, they want it packaged together.  Plus, it makes the whole project more conceptually legible / commercially viable.  I'm not trying to get famous, but I want an audience base, so those considerations are nothing to sneeze at.
As I was saying, we have a couple of covers that will knock people's teeth out:  And electrobilly swing version of You Could Be Mine, by G'n'R; Gold, by the GZA; Candy, by Iggy Pop and Kate Pierson; Crown of Love, by the Arcade Fire; Hard to Handle, by Otis; and I Saw the Light, by Hank.  They each reach out to different genre audiences, so there are multiple pathways to the electrobilly sound from other genres.  Plus, people who have eclectic musical tastes will buy this on general principle, because it's a clear statement that I play country music that is anti-provincial and embraces the American pop music landscape.
The GnR sounded so sick, I'm thinking we should do a lot of tunes in that hard swing vein.  The combination of the train rhythm plus ****'s swing guitar plus a house beat plus analog percussion has definite push-pull possibilities.  This is a major development in the sound of the 1st record.
In no particular order, the 1st record looks like this:
 

•  1. Rough Edges  
•  2. It Was I  
•  3. Calamity Rose  
•  4. Until My Dyin' Day (Movin' On)  
•  5. Graveyard Stroll  
•  6. Push-pull Blues   
•  8. Double Down   
•  9. Hot Pink  
•  10. Jimmy Rodgers  
•  11. You Could Be Mine  
•  12. Gold  
•  13. Crown of Love  
•  14. Hard to Handle  
•  15. Candy  
•  16. I Saw the Light