Red Earth & Rust

CARELESSNESS

In the mid-sixties, when he was at the height of his immense powers, someone asked Bob Dylan how he had managed to reinvent himself and change the face of popular music in such a short time. His response? “Carelessness.” For many years I believed this to be an evasive answer from someone who didn’t want the world to know how painstakingly he crafted his lyrics. Now I’m not so sure.

For three weeks now I’ve been writing new melodies at the rate of one a week, and I’ve found it to be a most sobering experience. I say “melodies” rather than “songs”, because almost all our songs begin as lyrics by Barbara, which I then set to music. I live with these words, find my way into them, looking for the tunes in which they want to live, the voice in which they want to be sung.

Finding your own distinctive voice is the crucial challenge facing any singer, songwriter or lyricist. We all have a hunger to create something new and inspired, something that wouldn’t have been there without us. How else could you explain our willingness to lie awake at night looking for that rhyme or phrase or chord change which eludes us?

At the same time, when I sit down at the piano to fit words and music together, I can feel the presence of the many singers I love. I can feel their voices inside my voice, teaching and inspiring me, but also reminding me that it’s late in the day; that everything has already been said. I have to balance my love for the music that feeds me with my desire to make something fresh and surprising. Think long and hard enough about this dilemma, and writing songs becomes impossible.

And so you learn to turn off your mind, to chase your critics and influences off your shoulder, even the most beloved ones – particularly those - so you can breathe the free air you need. You trick yourself into believing that you are at the beginning, that nothing really important has happened yet, that the conversation has just begun and that everything is still possible.

We all have our rituals to trick the mind into believing these things, and in this light it becomes easier to understand the much-publicised chronicles of substance abuse at the heart of rock ‘n’ roll mythology: when it comes to shutting up the inner critic, anything is permissible. Speaking for myself, though, in spite of my respect for such mythmaking I have found substances less helpful in marshalling creative energy than dogged persistence and strict deadlines. Still, I think I now understand what Dylan meant: you have to be out of your mind to attempt something new.

Seriousness

As a musician, one of my most poignant memories is of an interaction I had with a cultured European woman after one of my early shows. I was performing Cole Porter songs with a pianist. Was it Stellenbosch or Somerset West? I can’t remember.

I can’t say from this distance whether we did justice to Porter’s show-stoppers, but in the slower, sadder songs – Love For Sale, Get Out of Town, Miss Otis Regrets – I remember feeling for a moment as if I could be someone else, held voices inside my voice of which I knew nothing.

After the show the European woman approached me. “You have a nice voice”, she said to me, “But tell me – do you also do serious music?”

I can’t remember what I said to her – probably I muttered something to the effect that Porter’s music is serious, too. What I should have done is told her about the day when I came home from a boring day at school at the age of eleven or twelve and heard David Bowie’s Life on Mars? for the first time.

From the first notes of the piano intro I knew I was going to like the song. It sounded folky, like the songs I listened to at that time. Then Bowie started singing. What can I say?

To begin with I didn’t think it was a man’s voice. Those high notes in the choruses didn’t sound like a man singing falsetto – I knew what that sounded like. There was something subversive about this voice. I understood that before I had deciphered the lyrics. I already knew some songs that challenged the authorities – mostly anti-war songs from the Woodstock era. I knew where I was with those songs. This challenge was in the voice itself. David Bowie actually became that unfortunate girl with the mousey hair, and somehow at the same time he managed to be David Bowie. Nothing ever sounded more radical to my ears – before or since.

Later I had a similar – though necessarily less powerful – epiphany when I heard Laurie Anderson’s The Dream Before from her wonderful Strange Angels album. In this song, Anderson describes Hansel and Gretel, “alive and well / And living in Berlin”, a bickering, disenchanted couple who “sit around at night now / Drinking Schnapps and gin.” The harrowing lyrics are softened by the way her voice slips into their drunken, disgruntled voices. The song ends in Hansel’s voice, a low harmony underneath Anderson’s own, quoting from a lovely passage by Walter Benjamin about the angel of history wanting to fix things that have been broken, but being blown back into the future.

If that sounds immensely over-educated, let me reassure you: the effect is one of playfulness, even generosity. Anderson, like Bowie, plays with her voice, manipulates it to enable her to become somebody else for a moment. It is this daring to play which startled me as a boy, and still moves me to sing and write today.