I Want My Words To Eat Me TAKE III

I've added a bridge to the lyrics-in-progress that I posted up here a little while ago:

 Verse

I want my words to eat me

Like a big starving thing

Eat my bones my skin my hair

Till there's nothing left to see

Chorus

But my words

Only my words will be left of me.

 Verse

Still Hungry! Every night when you seek sleep

They'll thunder through your window

Just when you think you're alone

You'll hear my words looking for something good to eat.

Bridge

You'll forget my face like the victims of serial killers

You've seen on the news

But you won't
forget my words like the photos of serial killers

You've seen on the news

Verse
I want my songs to eat me

Like a big starving thing

And lying dying in it's jaws

I'll hear the sweet singing

Chorus

Of my songs

Singing me to my eternal sleep. 

Bloopers

Recently I needed some new press shots so I called up my BFF (I don't really call her that in real life I promise) and she came over with her fancy camera to help me out. We had a pretty simple idea; I put on a dress and jumped in front of a green wall. We got a pretty nice poster out of it I think:

But added bonus: we also got a few good 'hit by a bus' shots too:

I Want My Words To Eat Me TAKE II

Apparently collectors of Picasso painting would have his paintings screwed into the walls when he'd come visit becuase he'd take one look at them as say 'Oh that's not finished, I'll just take it home and make a few minor adjustments and drop it back to you tomorrow' and they'd never get the paintings back coz he'd keep insisting it wasn't finished yet.

Here's an update on yesterday's post, the lyrics are still unfinished (I didn't just compare myself to Picasso, not even a little bit).

I want my words to eat me

Like a big starving thing

Eat my bones my skin my hair

Till there's nothing left to see

But my words

Only my words will be left of me.

Still Hungry! Every night when you seek sleep

They'll thunder through your window

Just when you think you're alone

You'll hear my words looking for something good to eat.

I want my songs to eat me

Like a big starving thing

And lying dying in it's jaws

I'll hear the sweet singing

Of my songs

Singing me to my eternal sleep.

Lyrics in Progress

Some new lyrics I started this morning after reading this paragraph from a short story*:


Do you have any pets? he asked.
No.
Not even a cat?
No.
Why not?
I'm not sure I could care for a pet. I travel a lot.
But you could get a very little pet that wasn't very hungry.
I knew all about those things that weren't very hungry; my life was full of them. I didn't want any more weaklings who were activated by water and heat but had no waste and were so small that when they died, I buried them only with forgetfulness. If I was going to bring something new into my home, it would be a big starving thing.


And the lyrics in progress are:

My words will eat me
Like a big starving thing
My hair and bones
There'll be nothing left to see
But my words


My songs will eat me
Like a big starving thing
In it's jaws dying
I'll hear the sweet singing
Of my songs



Initially for the first two lines I had 'I want my words to eat me like a big starving thing. Consume my bones my skin my hair till there's nothing left to see but my words'. Not sure which I prefer yet. I only just scribbled these down today so by the time I'm finished with them they may have changed beyond recognition. They might go well with some lyrics I posted up here a little while ago....maybe, we'll see.



*The short story is called 'The Boy from Lam Kien' and it's by Miranda July

Hand Holding

I've been working on the song 'Hand Holding' that I put a clip of up a little whole ago so I thought I'd update the work in progress. Here are the lyrics:

Hand holding remolding our fingerprints histories.
(find me here)

Hips joining unfolding the romance of alchemy.
(find me here)

-chorus
Find me here
You won't find me here
Find me here

When forehead to forehead, a cheek pressed to kindred cheek,
(find me here)

Eyes seek and keep contact till eye colours blend and bleed.
(find me here)

-chorus
Find me here
You won't find me here
Find me here

-bridge
*Lips loosen words form from thin air, you won't find me,
Tongues touching find new growing teeth that were never there....

......I've almost got the next few lines of the bridge, they're on the tip of my tongue but they're happy there for the moment unfortunately.



A rough sketch of some lyrics I'm working on at the moment: Hand Holding by Ríona Sally Hartman



*I'm still working on the bridge and the most recent update is:

Lips loosen words form from thin air, you won't find me,
Tongues run over new growing teeth, you won't find me,
Thin twin strands of hair knot and plait, you won't find me...

My Voice is Stronger than your Violent Footfall

"The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it"
Martin Luther King JR.

The song of America's civil rights movement was not a call to violence, it was 'Dancing in the Streets'! That's dancing in the streets, not setting fire to them. With that in mind here's an excerpt of a new song I've started writing:

'My voice is stronger than your violent footfall'

Rehearsal Violent Footfall by Ríona Sally Hartman

Filler Lyrics

I went shopping yesterday which means I spent all day having radio 'friendly' pop songs blasted at me. 'Friendly'!! Friendly to whom? Certainly not me!

Throughout the course of the day I was instructed approximately 12 times to 'look to the left, everybody look to the right' by Jessie J. The only reason I was given for being instructed to look left then right was 'because we're paying with love tonight'! Can someone explain to me how looking left, and then right, illustrates in any way whatsoever the anti consumerist message of Jessie J's opus that is 'Price Tag'?

The Acoustic Picnic

The Acoustic Picnic
The Back Loft 7 - 11 St Augustine Street
Friday August 26th @8pm

A one night only pop up festival of music and poetry all in the stunning setting of The Back Loft gallery. Bring along a picnic, or a few beers, and enjoy ‘the best thing to happen to Irish literature since the beatnicks’ and ‘goosepimple-inducing’ music. The night promises to be a genuinely eclectic picnic of Irish talent.
BYOB/BYOP (the P's for picnic)

Music on the night from Ríona Sally Hartman and Peter Delaney

And spoken word poetry from The Poetry Chicks and Stephen James Smith

Tickets are €8 when bought in advance from www.rionasallyhartman.com or €10 on the door.

"Sing into my mouth"

There's a lyric I love from the talking heads song 'This Must Be the Place':

"Sing into my mouth"



It's a funny line and a bit of a gross idea if you take it literally, someone else singing directly into your mouth.

My thoughts on it were that he's imaging the singing coming to him rather than from him, as if his own words are feeding him, his own creativity sustaining him.

With that and lots of other things in mind here are some lyrics I'm working on at the moment. No recording of them yet because they don't have a melody yet:



Waiting for it all to fall into place
Waiting
For when the words fall into my mouth
Waiting
For ripeness to reach it's peak
The stem will break
But not before
The falling fruit
It's sweetness take
From branch to fruit
From fruit to me
From me to you

Oh Lord Please Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood

I'm reading a biography of Nina Simone (a brilliant page turner of a book and a brilliant page turner of a life). The highs and lows of Nina Simone's life are enthralling. One second she's got a hit in the charts but she's broke working as a maid, the next she's a rich socialite in Liberia with more suitors than she can keep track of, the next she's an old crank living in France sneaking into her neighbors swimming pools to go skinny dipping and getting her gun out to shoot at their kids when they make too much noise. It's hard to keep track, but David Brun-Lambert (the biographer) does it well. He set himself a hard task of trying to decipher fact from rumor and at the same time he gives great snapshots of the civil rights movement in America. But I don't want to talk about her life, I want to talk about her music.

The first album I ever bought was a Nina Simone compilation entitled 'The After Hours' (the first single I ever bought was Dustin the Turkey' *facepalm*). It's a very odd collection of tracks. A mix of studio recordings of full band arrangements with strings, and live recordings, some completely unaccompanied A cappella. Now that I'm reading her biography I'm realising it's probably a pirate album. The bad quality live recording probably done without her consent. Of course I'm not for piracy and I'd be much happier knowing she earned what she was due from these recording, but I'm still glad they exist.

I bought this album (when I was ten or eleven) because at home we had a Nina Simone CD of her hits that we listened to a lot. My Baby Just Cares For Me, Love me or Leave Me, See Line Woman...but when I got this CD home I was pretty shocked.


Instead of:





I got:





I was hooked. Nina (I feel we should be on first name terms, I have no justification other than ego) can deliver a lyric. In the live recordings you can feel the tension in the crowd. She can draw out a word for miles, waiting till the very last second to resolve, like when she sings 'Don't............look for me'. She has this raw intensity in her voice that she can use to absolutely hypnotise a crowd.

But somehow I get the feeling that now days she's probably better known for Coke and diet yohgurt adds. I get the feeling she's known for happy go lucky pop, gospel anthems when, in my completely personal and subjective opinion, this is not the area she shines in at all. Her pop gospel tunes might be great but they are nowhere near the genius of tunes like 'Four Women' or 'Images of a wayward soul'.






Misunderstood? Probably.

I'm working on a few new tunes at the moment so I thought I'd post up some of the works in progress as I go along. Bits and pieces: a nose here, an arm there that will eventually become songs with their own identities and personalities. They'll grow up and ignore me someday, but for now they're all mine, live under my roof and obey my rules....right that's the end of comparing songs to children, or pets, or golems.

One of the fragments of a song that I'm working on at the moment is called 'Hand Holding' (or at least it is for now).

So here's a rough, home recorded sketch of some of the lyrics:

Hand holding, remolding our fingerprints, histories.
Find me here.

Hips joining, unfolding the romance of alchemy.
Find me here.

Often when I'm working on lyrics I'll read up about a certain subject a bit and even though everything I read about doesn't necessarily end up in the song (not directly anyway) I think it still influence it. So here are some interesting things I've read lately that I've got filed in my brain under 'Hand Holding':


From the Wikipedia entry on Polycephaly:

"A live two headed turtle named Janus can be seen at the Natural History Museum in Geneva Switzerland"

'There is some speculation that the inbreeding of snakes in captivity increases the chances of a two-headed birth...snake heads may attack and even attempt to swallow each other"

"With humans, dicephalic conjoined twins as Abigail and Brittany Hensel are considered "twins", i.e., two individuals....On the other hand, Syafitri, born 2006 in Indonesia, were given one name by their parents because they only had one heart."


And of course I can't do anything these days without tying it in with my current obsession (Frida Kahlo's self portraits) so I file this under Hand Holding too:

Self Portrait as a Tehuana
(Diego on My Mind)

I went for a gander to my local library and came back with three goodies. I've just started reading the first, entitled 'Crap Lyrics', and so far my reaction has been like those videos you see on youtube of babies laughing uncontrollably*.

Anyway in the introduction there's a quote from Noel Gallagher:

" I get the odd night when I'm halfway through 'Don't look back in anger' when I say to myself 'I still don't know what these words mean! I'm thinking what the...'Stand up beside the fireplace! Why?
And all these kids will be singing it at the top of their voices with all their arms around each other and I kind of feel like stopping and going 'Look can someone help me out here? Am I missing something?"


Why did he pick that lyric to single out as nonsense? Of all the Oasis lyrics that make absolutely no sense whatsoever like: "Slowly walking down the hall, faster than a cannonball"

'Stand up beside the fireplace' is at least a fully formed sentence. It's even got a sense of gravitas to it, like maybe you'd stand beside the fireplace to give an important speech or if you wanted to be taken seriously but when would you ever be "Caught beneath the landslide in a champagne super nova in the sky".


*except I'm not a baby obviously.

How long does it take to write a song? Apparently forever. I was just reading over an old blog post* I wrote more than a year ago about a song I was writing at the time. I'd written a chorus but the verses went a bit haywire so I shelved it. Then recently I started again and so now more than a year later I think it's finished. More than a year for 16 lines of lyrics, 12 chords, two verses and a chorus.

Something so precious
Hurts to even think about it
Something so delicate
You're scared to say it's name
It's your private little shame you carry with you
Like a dead mouse in your pocket

You leave me gifts
Like the dead song birds my cat leaves at my window
You leave them under my pillow

'It could decorate my life'
'It won't satisfy you'
'Oh but I'll wear it like an earring,
Frida Kahlo's delight. Oh so fine'
'It's just a trinket on a line'

*Here's the original blog post from a year ago:

I was writing a song (working title: 'a conversation between two fish watching a spinner go by'...I'll come up with something catchier eventually) and I think I may have inadvertently written something that makes absolutely no sense, probably not that uncommon for singer songwriters. I thought that I'd heard a myth once that pirates wore earrings so that if they died at sea they could pay the god of the sea to allow them into heaven. I assumed the sea god was neptune but I could be a few thousand years off on that one. I've been googling it for a while now and it turns out I must've made that up out of thin air because apparently pirates wore earrings to a)improve their hearing(!?) b) ward off seasickness (!?!) c) pay for their funeral should they die at sea. So here's a nonsensical verse for

'A Conversation Between Two Fish Watching a Spinner Go By':

"It could decorate my life"

"Would that satisfy you? You'd wear it like an earring"

"Oh I'd be Neptune's delight"

"Close to divine, all for a trinket on a line"

I've gotten into reading biographies lately, especially musicians biographies so I thought I'd share a few of my favourites, got any recommendations let me know.




Kate Bush Under the Ivy.
There's a hell of a lot more to Kate Bush than Wuthering Heights but if you didn't already know that then this book might not be for you. A great peek into her recording process and her influences. Read this with your computer open in front of you so that you can look up every song and video as you read about it for the complete Kate Bush experience.


Louis Armstrong An Extraordinary Life
This one was recommended to me by a tutor in college during a lecture but don't let that put you off, even if you couldn't care less about jazz and you've never heard of Louis Armstrong (well that's pretty unlikely to be fair) this is still a great read and a really interesting look at American cultural history and the birth of Network Broadcasting. Also Louis Armstrong is as entertaining to read about as he is to listen to, he's a godam hilarious character.





Tom Waits Innocent When You Dream
Ok technically not a biography this is a collection of interviews with Tom Waits all done by the same reporter* spread out over a few years. I read this forever ago and I can't remember anything about it except that I loved it......sure I should review books for a living with those kinds of amazing reporting skills.


*just updating because I realised I was wrong, the interviews weren't all done by the same reporter. Oops.

Usually when people ask me who my influences are I prattle off a list that goes something like: Joni Mitchell, Ani DiFranco, Tori Amos...etc. and it's not a lie BUT a big part of the reason I list those names is also because I know they are names people will recognise and relate to. The names I don't mention but which probably have just as much influence on my music are my peers. Dublin has a great music scene but it's not exactly huge, we might all like to think we're unique little butterflies but the reality is more like we're a bunch of tightly packed molecules bouncing back and forth off each other (and I'm not just talking musically...I couldn't help it that sentence was too aptly rife with innuendo to ignore).

So today I thought I'd take a break from talking about myself and instead ask someone else some questions for a change. Edel Meade is a Dublin based genre-spanning jazz vocalist and composer who I've had the pleasure of seeing perform a few times with her group the Swoo-Beh Project. She's got absolute stellar song writing and arranging skills and her gigs are literally inspirational (the word literally is often misused to mean the exact opposite, I'm not doing that here, last time I saw her sing I was literally inspired to go home and start writing a new tune). So here we go:




How do you feel about singing very personal lyrics? 'Sideways' is like eavesdropping on a really intimate conversation.

For me, it’s got to be real. With 'Sideways”, I just wanted to capture a beautiful moment and this song kind-of wrote itself. The act of composing is intimate anyway so when I was writing this song, I wasn’t thinking about who would be listening to it.

Similarly with ‘Love Lost’, it comes from a very personal experience but I believe music and real life are intertwined.
For me, music is life. When I’m singing ‘Lush Life’ (by Billy Strayhorn), for example, I might substitute the word “mush” for “shit” because I don’t use the word “mush” ever in conversation.

I guess my lyrics reflect on my life as a twenty-something year old female growing up in Dublin today. I’m aware of the fact that my days are numbered so I don’t have time for dishonesty. The world is saturated with forgettable melodies and uninspired lyrics. It doesn’t need anymore from me or anyone else but there will always be a place for truth and honesty. That’s what will engage a listener and draw someone in.

But not all my lyrics are personal. ‘Blue Fantasia’ is part real, part fantasy. The lyrics for the hook in ‘Eleven Eleven (Dream Machine)’ AKA ‘the radio song’ are deliberately lacking in depth to reflect the vast majority of “hits” on the radio. “Our love is here to stay, it’s gonna last forever. Will never go away”. The next line- “We tell you what to do and you do what we tell you. No matter if it’s true”, is the same catchy melody as before but “we” refers to the mass media telling us what to do, what we should look like, what products we can’t live without, the events we should attend etc etc because I think it’s easy to forget that we have a choice in the matter.





The first time I heard you do 'Eleven Eleven (Dream Machine)', it sounded like the excerpts, or samples, you took from the radio were thematically chosen, but then last time I heard you sing it I realised the excerpts must have been updated that day (because there was mention of the census). So tell us a bit about it? How did you decide which excerpts to use?

At the start of the tune, we’ll hear snippets from what’s on the radio at that particular moment. It could be anything at all from traditional Irish music on Raidió na Gaeltachta, to an ad promoting Plenty kitchen roll to the public service announcements. This is followed by a distorted guitar melody and general chaos inspired by Jimi Hendrix’ rendition of Star Spangled Banner at Woodstock in 1969, to draw your attention to how the mass media, in this case, the radio presents such mixed messages to an impressionable audience. It’s a metaphorical warning!

I update the news bulletins and songs every time we play this tune which means on the day of a performance, I’ll turn on the radio and hear random snippets of news stories, “hits”, jingles etc which I’ll record on Garageband in order to accurately transcribe them later.

We hear serious news bulletins telling us about for example, the death of a 25-year-old who was killed when a bomb exploded under his car but then when you turn the dial, you could hear Travie McCoy singing “I wanna be a billionaire so fricking bad” or Rihanna’s ‘S&M’. Then you might hear some DJ with his phony radio voice telling you to text to win tickets to Westlife’s Croke Part concert with support from Jedward and JLS as if that’s important! And then you turn the dial to hear an ad aimed at women telling them they will wake up feeling young, fresh and fabulous if they use the Daily Energiser range from Clarins... Who is to say that they are not fabulous already and why is youth portrayed as being better than middle-age? While the exact content varies every time we play this song, the overall result is the same. Let the listener beware!


When I heard it first I thought the excerpts were chosen to illustrate a feminist statement because the subtext of it all was so sexist, but I guess the the fact that they're chosen at random just goes to show how prevalent sexism is in the media. I'm completely with you on this one, it really bothers me sometimes when I hear the poison people are fed through radio, like the song you mentioned 'Billionaire' or my other big bugbear is 'Cooler Than Me'. You're bombarded with it constantly to the point where you can find yourself mindlessly singing along with some of the most unethical sentiments. Ok moving from the bad to the good: Who's your favourite lyricist?

I don’t have a singular favourite but I love Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Jill Scott and Erykah Badu.

It’s their honesty. Whether it’s related to matters of the heart or the hypocrisy of the times we live in, these lyricists stand out. Bob Dylan’s ‘Freewheelin’ album is a particular favourite and Joni’s got so many great songs. She just says it like it is. Jill Scott is a poet and her themes are pretty sexually explicit but it’s got to be like that if you’re talking about sex. We’ve come a long way since “I Want To Hold Your Hand”. Erykah Badu’s lyrics on her New Amerykah Part One and Part Two albums are genius. She addresses the current state of Black America, the hypocrisy of “the American dream” and I love how she never shies away from controversy and stays true to her beliefs. I am in awe of this lady as an artist.

I couldn't disagree more about Bob Dylan, I can't stand him but that discussion will take a whole other blog post. You've got me listening to Erykah Badu for the first time in years (my sister bought her first album 'Baduizm' when I was eleven and I was obsessed). Jill Scott's next on my list.








If you'd like to see Edel live, then you're in luck because she will be playing a number of gigs with her Swoo-Beh Project in June:

7th June 8PM LAUNCH NIGHT The Jazz Kitchen at The Grand Social Also playing: ZoiBand! €5 suggested contribution

19th June 5.30PM Zinc Club at Pacino's Cellar Bar €8/6

21st June 8PM The Jazz Kitchen at The Grand Social
Also playing: O.K.O.D.O.M.G. €5 suggested contribution

30th June 8.30PM National Concert Hall (Kevin Barry Room)
€10/8

Edel Meade - voice/radio/compositions
Chris Guilfoyle - guitar
Darragh O'Kelly - rhodes/piano
Andrew Csibi - double bass
Tommy Gray - drums

Also Edel is running a brand new Jazz night in Dublin starting on 7th June in The Grand Social (formerly Pravda), 35 Lower Liffey Street near the Ha'penny Bridge. It starts at 8pm and will feature the brightest emerging talent on the Irish jazz scene!

THE JAZZ KITCHEN.


In her own words:'The reason I'm doing this is because I see it is an absolute necessity for the jazz community and creative musicians in Ireland to have a designated venue where they can perform their music. We have a gorgeous and spacious room and two fantastic bands every Tuesday night and all for a fiver, so I really hope people will come out and support creative music and get involved. It's gonna be great!'