From the breakfast room in my Shibuya hotel one can see Fuji-san! It’s a remarkably clear morning and it looks like the endless city stretches until the foothills of Fuji begin (it doesn’t quite). It’s a weird sight—a vision of a planet that is all city, except for the occasional volcano.
I went to Tokyo to be present for the installation of a small art show (one piece likely needed technical tweaking). The space is in Harajuku, and it’s called Vacant. The parents of the gallerist are old friends of mine, and the dad had a chain of clothing stores that sold U.S. thrift store items. Similarly direct, it was called Department Store. He’s sold the business now.
When I was in town for my performances over a year ago I saw some photos he had by Ikebana (flower arranging) artist Yukio Nakagawa. I’d seen a few of his own photo documentations of his work in an ICP show that Noriko Fuku curated a while back, but now I was seeing a lot more—and was blown away.
I’ve seen some wacky Ikebana work before, but Nakagawa’s stuff is way extreme. Some of it isn’t even recognizable as flowers; though in the titles one finds that indeed is often the material used—but mashed, pulverized, sexualized.
These images are from some time ago. Nakagawa-san is still alive, though he lives in a nursing home now. Apparently he trained in a proper Ikebana school, but was sort of kicked out—gee, I wonder why. To us in the West this might not seem a big deal, but in Japan, where flower arranging is a big business—and being certified is like a law degree or a medical degree—certification all but guarantees you a living for life. So being "disbarred," as it were, was a serious business—it forced Nakagawa into a subsistence existence. My friend Seiji and his son Yusuke have been negotiating with the Nakagawa family to do prints for a show in early 2011.
Nakagawa was pals with Kazuo Ohno, the father of Bhuto dance, and a wild figure all on his own. Of course these two revolutionaries would cross paths. Though what, if anything, they did together, I don’t know.
My own show was some old and some new stuff, and most of them without text, as that’s a bit of a barrier here. There were two relatively new pieces—one of which is a piece with almost 100 guitar pedals that the public is invited to walk over.
Here’s a kid taking an audio stroll at the opening.
As he steps on each pedal it either turns on or off, depending on its current state, and the sound of a guitar loop (the guitar is off camera in this picture) is affected in some way. Echo, flanging, distortion, pitch shifting, delays, auto filters—the combinations are pretty limitless and sometimes sound quite nice!
This piece was originally done for a benefit The Kitchen (an arts space in NY) was having a year or so ago at which they were “honoring” the artist Christian Marclay, who does a lot of sound and audio works. So this piece was inspired by his work, in a way. However, the fire marshal at that event said the piece had to be removed, as I’d installed it in a hallway between two spaces—which I did as a further encouragement for folks to walk on it. Though I made a narrow safe passage around the side for the timid and for ladies in heels, the fire marshal was, I think, miffed that he’d never been consulted, so he showed us who was boss. By the time the partygoers arrived the piece was gone.
The oldest pieces in this show were some prints of some pictures I’d taken of a video monitor that were possibilities for the Bush Of Ghosts record cover. We ended up using similar pictures with little figures, that Eno took at the same time. In those days (1980, I think) one could mess with the color controls on a TV or video monitor, and with the addition of some video feedback get some pretty trippy vortex visuals. Turning the color settings way off and fucking with the contrast and other tiny knobs was very hands on, and not so different than messing with guitar pedals. One can’t do this with digital flat screen TVs—you’d have to access and manipulate a whole array of menus simultaneously, which isn’t really possible.
There were also some large banners of the inside of masks—Halloween masks of political figures (in this case Bush I and II hung on either side of Saddam Hussein). There is a whole series of these.
Note that the gallery space isn’t a white cube like the ones in Chelsea and elsewhere. It’s wood-paneled and half the floor is covered in wacky floral linoleum (made in Japan), so it has a little bit the feeling of a giant rec room or suburban basement.
There were some old and new lenticulars, which are sometimes known as winky dinks. In one older group Danielle Spencer and I altered some photos I’d taken of corporate tombstones so that from one view they’d have the name of the company, and from a couple of feet to the side they’d say something like “honesty” or “trust”—what these corporations would like to elicit from us, but certainly don’t these days.
Lastly, there was another group of lenticulars that each consisted of three photos of roundish objects on black backgrounds, but as one moved, the objects overlapped and almost morphed into one another. It becomes hard to see where one object begins and another ends.
Here’s a sample—as an animated gif. It’s not the same, but you get the idea.
We all went out for dinner a few times, and twice had a seasonal dish that Seiji said was made of the organ that fish eggs come from (but NOT the eggs themselves). He said its name is translated as “white baby.”
Needless to say, on my day off I went for a bike ride. There aren’t many bike lanes in Tokyo, but more and more people are riding anyway. There are lots and lots of bikes locked up here and there, and the bank where I used a cash machine had indoor bike parking! Not many banks in the U.S. cater to cyclists like that.
As some of the main thoroughfares are busy a lot of cyclists ride on the sidewalks, which is pretty insane from our point of view—though I didn’t see anyone get hurt or yelled at. But a few times as I was walking I had to jump out of the way as a housewife with a basket of groceries slalomed through the throngs of pedestrians.
I stopped at the Mori Museum—a contemporary art space on the top floor of one of Tokyo’s rare skyscrapers. This one in the middle of a development called Roppongi Hills that includes condos, offices, cinemas, shops, restaurants and a rooftop viewing area with a heliport. The main show was a retrospective of Odani Motohiko, a contemporary sculptor. He represented Japan at the Venice Biennial in 2003.
Then I biked to 21 21 Design Sight, a new design museum designed by Tadao Ando. The concrete building is half submerged in a park—which was a pleasant surprise, as a small urban public park is sort of a rare thing in itself in Japan. Though it’s a design museum and their upcoming show includes Sottsass and other furniture designers, their shows generally encompass an impressively wide range of material.
The show I saw was called Reality Lab, and it was curated by fashion designer Issey Miyake—who was also an instigator in the creation of this museum 3 years ago. Whether he curated all the parts, I’m not sure, but I think they were, which made it all the more surprising.
One section was an exhibit of meteorites—both actual and in large photo blowups, that allowed one to see their interior structure and makeup. In the same room were interspersed a collection of globes—some of Earth, but most of moons and other planets, colored to reveal their geologic structure or other features.
Further on there were large photos by Hiroshi Iwasaki of various items than had been frozen using a new technique called CAS (Cells Alive System) that minimizes tissue damage during freezing, which allows for specimen storage and food preservation than keeps nutrients, freshness and flavor intact. Like the meteorites and globes, this was almost more science exhibit than art of design, but the overlap was exciting.
There were more varied groupings of more science related items here and there, but the largest room featured a collaboration between Miyake and some scientists and students that eventually, no surprise, ended up as innovative designs for clothing.
Next to a wall covered with mathematical formulas (used in the process) were the beginnings of the designs—which were experiments in paper folding. Like Ikebana, origami has broken free of its roots and is now a hands-on way of investigating serious studies of morphology and topology. Believe it or not, the shapes below were made by folding flat pieces of paper!
In some display cases were samples of these paper foldings that one could touch and examine. I pulled a few apart gingerly to see how they were made, and even the Japanese kids around me were amazed, we all went ooh and ahh. I then had a little bit of a hard time getting the pieces to resume their folded shapes—luckily the paper has some memory, so it guided me.
Miyake then had the students do similar foldings with fabrics, which were sewn along just one side, creating a tube, and unfolded to make dresses that retained much of their foldings. He had metallic pigment (almost like silver leaf) roughly added to the top surface when the items were folded, so you saw what was exposed when the garment was in its folded configuration. Here is the garment emerging from its flat form in reverse order.
At her suggestion, we did a song we’d been writing together, one of about 8 or so. Our collaboration was partly inspired by the Dirty Projectors/Björk thing at Housing Works many months ago that we both attended. We agreed to do something similar there, though there is no timetable. Annie (her real name) has been on tour, on and off, for quite a while, so the collaboration proceeds in fits and starts. It was a good idea of hers to get this one song at least up to speed, as it gave us a deadline and allows us to see where problems and musical issues might lie.
Annie also came up with the concept of using a brass ensemble as the core band for these things, which gives us a unifying musical direction and coincidentally will also work nicely in someplace like Housing Works, where the “less in the PA the better” rule applies — the acoustic volume of brass instruments means that if we are careful the balance in that room could be natural, and mainly the voices will require amplification. It’s a case of music being written for a specific situation for sure.
Another one of our pieces looks like it’ll see the light of day this summer via Bang on a Can’s Asphalt Orchestra, which is kind of a new-music marching band. They’re larger than what we’re envisioning for most pieces, so they’ll help reconfigure and orchestrate what we’ve begun for their special needs and situation — outdoors, a large specific ensemble, in motion. They’ll perform around Lincoln Center in August. More news at 11.
I’ve done a slew of collaborations over the years — more and more as time goes by, and they are always slightly different from one another, though there are more similarities than differences. One could say that some of the songs co-written with other members of Talking Heads were also collaborations, so the give and take nature of collaborative writing skills got developed early.
The Here Lies Love project — due out in early April — was largely a collaboration with Fatboy Slim, and one of the most extensive I’ve done in while. Not all the 22 songs on that project were collaboratively written, but more than half were.
How do these things work?
My last record — the Byrne/Eno Everything That Happens Will Happen Today — was, as far as the process goes, typical in some ways. Brian had a slew of tracks on the shelf, tracks that seemed to want to become songs (as opposed to ambient tracks or film scores), but he was unhappy with his own attempts at completing them. So, from his point of view, he has nothing much to lose by passing them to me to “complete” — they were just gathering dust anyway (although one did get passed to Coldplay), and unless I did something horrendous (which we agreed he could veto), it was a win-win situation.
I was sent stereo mixes of his musical ideas, which I sometimes left alone and worked over as is, but just as often I slightly restructured them to bring them closer to a song form. However, I never even thought about requesting musical changes in the tracks — key changes, changes in groove or instrumentation. The unwritten game rules in these remote collaborations seem to be to leave the other person’s stuff alone as much as you can. Work with what you’re given; don’t try to imagine it as something other than what it is.
This always presents some musical challenges, of course, but the benefits generally outweigh them. The fact that half the musical decision-making has already been done bypasses a lot of waffling and worrying. I didn’t have to think about what to do and what direction to take musically — the train had already left the station and my job was to see where it wanted to go. This restriction on one’s freedom — that some creative decisions have already been made — turns out to be a great blessing. Complete creative freedom is as much a curse as a boon. Freedom within strict confines seems to be ideal.
I work in a home studio, which I’ve carved out of a larger room.
Tidy, eh? Embarrassing, actually.
There is no professional sound baffling, but the floors of this industrial building are concrete — and I put industrial carpet down on the floor, and one wall is a kind of sound absorbent sheetrock. Unless a truck backfires or an ambulance goes by it is OK for vocals and guitars. There’s no room for drums or anything like that… but for writing it is fine. There’s a good tube mic for singing, a radio studio mic for the little old guitar amp (woops, you can’t see it), and a nice pre amp and compressor. That’s pretty much all you need to find out where things want to go.
Serial numbers and security codes for software are pinned to the wall, along with a Tammy Wynette poster. The computer is under the desk. It’s a mess, it’s not much, but it’s enough for writing and, amazingly, some of the vocals I’ve done here end up being keepers. Guitar parts too — and of course, midi stuff, if it survives the evolution of a tune. The vocal I did on the hit version of the song “Lazy” — the collaboration with DJs X-Press 2 — was recorded using a decent mic into a G3 laptop! So clearly pro gear is nice but not super essential. The track those guys sent me sounded completely different texturally than how it ended up — they stripped it down and made it more “housey” after I sent in my vocal.
With Annie we’ve worked in a similar fashion to those collaborations, though from both directions. Sometimes (as in the song we did at the Allen Room) she’d give me some instrumental tracks she’d done in Garage Band using brass (and other) samples, and then I’d organize those using the music software Logic, and add some stuff of my own. In the case of this particular song I first added a “virtual” acoustic rhythm guitar and some percussion — which cemented the nice herky-jerky brass parts she had recorded. I sent these via email to her for approval. After that (she liked what I had done) I improvised a vocal melody on top — thus far without words. She liked that too.
She sent back some new brass chords and harmonies under one of my vocal verse sections — and that eventually turned into a middle 8 (sometimes called a bridge in the US). She also sent some melismatic vocal improvisations of her own that pushed the verses into being nicely asymmetric.
I did some further restructuring and began to write words — written to fit the metric and rise and fall of the vocal melody I’d improvised earlier. Many drafts later we had a song. While I was writing the words, I brought in Tony Finno, who had done arrangements for brass and strings for Here Lies Love and the Big Love score material I did a couple of years back, to do charts for her brass guys — who turned out to be horn guys more than brass guys, but they were flexible enough to cover the parts.
Although writing words to fit an existing vocal melody and meter is what anyone who writes in rhyme does naturally and intuitively — every rapper improvises to a meter, for example — I was encouraged to make the process more explicit when Talking Heads made Remain In Light. I found that, remarkably, solving the puzzle of making words and phrases fit existing structures often resulted, eventually and somewhat surprisingly, in words that did in fact have an emotional and sometimes even narrative thread. They may have begun as gibberish, but often, though not always, a “story,” in the broadest sense, emerges. Emergent storytelling, one might say.
With other St. Vincent collaborations that are in the works, I have sometimes started the brass parts on my end and then sent them to Annie; I’ve also sent her words, potential lyrics, that I had written. The latter is unusual, as I don’t usually write words in advance, but I wasn’t sure what form of collaboration she’d be comfortable with. So far none of those have achieved true song status. It’s all still evolving — where these will end up? We don’t know — and that’s a nice place to be in.
It seems she doesn’t like writing words — and she’s not alone there. Brian hates it as well. I find it to be the most labor-intensive part of songwriting, but when it works, and it doesn’t always, then the song can seem more like something whose constituent elements magically flowed out — something that emerged naturally, rather than something that was made in incremental pieces or layered up.
But at times words can be a dangerous addition to music — they can pin it down. Words imply that the music is about “that” (“that” being what the words say literally) and nothing else. They can, if not done well, destroy the pleasant ambiguity that is a lot of the reason we love music so much. That inherent ambiguity means that we can psychologically tailor music to our own needs, sensibilities and situations — but words limit that, or they can. There are plenty of beautiful tracks that I can’t listen to because they’ve been “ruined” by bad words — my own and others’. So I understand some folks’ trepidation, and my own sometime-failures.
Once I have a melody and vocal arrangement I, or both collaborators, like I’ll transcribe that gibberish as if it were real words. I’ll listen carefully to the meaningless vowels and consonants and try to understand what that guy emoting so indistinctly (that’s me) is actually saying. It’s like a forensic exercise. I’ll follow the sound of the nonsense syllables as closely as possible — if a melodic phrase of gibberish ends on a high ooh sound, then I’ll transcribe that as a word that ends in that syllable, or as close to it as I can imagine.
I do that because the sound, the difference between an ohh and an aah, and a B and a TH sound is, I assume, integral to the emotion being expressed. I want to stay true to it. Admittedly that emotion has no narrative or literal text thus far, but it’s there — I can hear it. I can feel it. My job is to find words that match it, that don’t destroy it.
Part of what makes words work in a song is how they sound to the ear and feel on the tongue. If they feel right, if the tongue (wooo!), and the mirror neurons of the listener (isn’t that part of why we love music and performance — mirror neurons?) are made to feel (neurologically) the delicious appropriateness of the words coming out, then that rightness sometimes trumps literal sense. We “sing” in our minds and muscles when we hear and see singing. In a sense, performance and listening to music is a participatory activity. So the writing of words — the putting them down on paper — is certainly part of songwriting, but the proof of the pudding is in the singing. If the sound is untrue, we can tell.
After the initial transcription of verbal sounds into nonsense sentences made of real words, a long, tedious process begins. I then begin to write out every phrase I can think of that matches that sonic/syllabic flow — no phrase is too mundane or stupid. I try not to pre-judge anything that occurs to me at this point — one never knows if something that sounded stupid at first will, in a new context, make the whole thing shine.
Sometimes sitting at a desk trying to do this doesn’t work. I never have writer’s block, but sometimes things do slow down. (And sometimes the shit backs up.) My conscious mind might be thinking too much — and at this point, one wants surprises and weirdness from the depths. Some techniques help in that regard — I’ll carry a small micro recorder and go jogging on the west side, recording every single phrase that matches the song’s meter as they occur to me. On the rare occasions when I’m driving a car, I can do the same thing — are there laws against driving and songwriting? Basically anything that occupies part of the conscious mind and distracts it works. The idea is to allow the chthonic material freedom to gurgle up.
I’ll accumulate many, many pages of this stuff, and then begin to sort through it. Sometimes just a verse, or even a phrase or two, will resonate — but that’s enough to “unlock” the thing, and from there on it’s more fill in the blank, conventional puzzle solving.
With Norm (Fatboy), I sometimes wrote songs over simple drum loops of my own, which Norm and Tom (Cagedbaby) Gandey then replaced with their own funkier and more characterful grooves. Other times Norm sent me basic groove loops — sometimes with some bass or instrument samples mixed in, sometimes not — and I sliced and diced those and wrote melodies and words over them. The songs in that project that I initiated myself tended to be more harmonically complex — to have more chord changes — than the groove-focused ones that Norm sent me. Together they made for a nice variety.
The lyrics on that project came about in a slightly different way for me. As I did research on the characters and their story, I took notes — emphasizing both curious and emblematic events, and things that the characters said. Often a direct quote from one of the characters put their feelings and point of view in such a perfect nutshell that much of my meandering lyric process was shortened. I often used the character’s own phrases: “Just say — here lies love” was one. “Please don’t — don’t let them look down on us” was another.
“I knew if I did not react they’d kill us, every one,” and, “I made a promise to my mother that for every tear she shed there’d be a victory” — these and many more were ever so slightly tweaked, and integrated. It was the easiest lyric writing task I’ve ever had.
I did another collaboration recently with Yuka Honda and Petra Hayden that I believe Petra will end up singing (though now I hear it’s a duet with me); a couple with Dirty Projectors for the Dark Was the Night charity record; and one with Dave Sitek of TV on the Radio is in progress. More are lined up on the runway. I’ve joined the roster of artists covering Peter Gabriel tunes in response to him covering our tunes. His record — orchestral versions of songs new and old — reminds me in some ways of the first Cat Power Covers record, in which it was sometimes halfway through a tune before you figured out what the song was. This is nowhere near that extreme, but he takes liberties with the songs — changing grooves and even melodies — in an effort to make them his. And in most cases he does. It’s a tough assignment covering songs that folks are familiar with, and sometimes a radical reassessment is the only way to make them new again.
I’ll have to do something similar to the song I cover — though exactly what remains to be seen. So many of his tunes are instantly texturally identifiable. In the era of recorded music, we have often come to think of one specific recording of a song as being “the song.” Is it? Legally, it’s not. Though it might seem unjust, I don’t think one can copyright sounds, a groove and a mix — though sometimes that’s what draws us into a recording. Anyway, I’ll have to somehow subvert that identification — as he did, but in some other musical way.
A writer at Pitchfork critically said I’d collaborate for a bag of Doritos. I do love it, and the results are sometimes surprising, sometimes creatively successful and sometimes even popular (“Lazy” was a huge hit everywhere except the US).
Beyond the reward of the bag of Doritos, why collaborate at all? One could conceivably make more money not sharing the profits — if there are any — so why collaborate if one doesn’t have to? If one can write alone, why reach out? (Some of the most financially successful songs I’ve ever written were not collaborations, for example.) And besides, isn’t it risky? Suppose you don’t get along? Suppose the other person decides to take the thing in some ugly direction?
Well, as I said earlier, one big reason is to restrict one’s own freedom in the writing process. There’s a joy and relief in being limited, restrained. For starters, to let someone else make half the decisions, or some big part of them, absolves one of the need to explore endless musical possibilities. The result is fewer agonizing decisions in the writing process, and sometimes, faster results.
Another reason to risk it is that others often have ideas outside and beyond what one would come up with oneself. To have one’s work responded to by another mind, or to have to stretch one’s own creative muscles to accommodate someone else’s muse, is a satisfying exercise. It gets us outside of our self-created boxes. When it works, the surprising result produces some kind of endorphin equivalent that is a kind of creative high. Collaborators sometimes rein in one’s more obnoxious tendencies too, which is yet another plus.
There are also some more market-oriented, pragmatic arguments for collaboration. If both collaborators are sort of well known, then there is a natural interest among the combined set of music fans. Part of the marketing has been done without having to do any corny PR. Even if the collaborators are not all that well known there is often some curiosity at what friction might result and what sparks might fly.
But one might also ask: Is writing ever NOT collaboration? Doesn’t one collaborate with oneself, in a sense? Don’t we access different aspects of ourselves, different characters and attitudes and then, when they’ve had their say, switch hats and take a more distanced and critical view — editing and structuring our other half’s outpourings? Isn’t the end product sort of the result of two sides collaborating? Surely I’m not the only one who does this?
At her suggestion, we did a song we’d been writing together, one of about 8 or so. Our collaboration was partly inspired by the Dirty Projectors/Björk thing at Housing Works many months ago that we both attended. We agreed to do something similar there, though there is no timetable. Annie (her real name) has been on tour, on and off, for quite a while, so the collaboration proceeds in fits and starts. It was a good idea of hers to get at least this song up to speed, as it gave us a deadline and allows us to see where problems and musical issues might lie.
Annie also came up with the concept of using a brass ensemble as the core band for these things, which gives us a unifying musical direction and coincidentally will also work nicely in someplace like Housing Works, where the “less in the PA the better” rule applies — the acoustic volume of brass instruments means that if we are careful, the balance in that room could be natural, and mainly the voices will require amplification.
I’ve done a slew of collaborations over the years — more and more as time goes by, and they are always slightly different from one another, though there are more similarities than differences. One could say that some of the songs co-written with other members of Talking Heads were also collaborations, so the give and take nature of collaborative writing skills got developed early. The Here Lies Love project — due out in a few weeks — was largely a collaboration with Fatboy Slim, and one of the most extensive I’ve done in while. Not all 22 songs on that project were collaboratively written, but more than half were.
How do these things work? My last record — the Byrne/Eno Everything That Happens Will Happen Today — was, as far as the process goes, typical in some ways. Brian had a slew of tracks on the shelf, tracks that seemed to want to become songs (as opposed to ambient pieces, or film scores), but he was unhappy with his own attempts at completing them. So, from his point of view, he had nothing much to lose by passing them to me — they were just gathering dust anyway, and unless I did something horrendous (which we agreed he could veto), it was a win-win situation.
I was sent stereo mixes of his musical ideas, which I sometimes left alone, but just as often I slightly restructured them to bring them closer to a song form. However, I never even thought about requesting musical changes in the tracks — key changes, changes in groove or instrumentation. The unwritten game rules in these remote collaborations seem to be to leave the other person’s stuff alone as much as you can. Work with what you’re given; don’t try to imagine it as something other than what it is.
This presents some musical challenges, of course, but the benefits generally outweigh them. The fact that half the musical decision-making has already been done bypasses a lot of waffling and worrying. I didn’t have to think about what to do and what direction to take musically — the train had already left the station and my job was to see where it wanted to go. This restriction on one’s freedom — that some creative decisions have already been made — turns out to be a great blessing. Complete creative freedom is as much a curse as a boon.
I work in a home studio, which I’ve carved out of a larger room.
Tidy, eh?
There is no professional sound baffling, but the floors of this industrial building are concrete — and I put industrial carpet down on the floor, and one wall is a kind of sound absorbent sheetrock. Unless a truck backfires or an ambulance goes by it is OK for recording vocals and guitars. There’s no room for drums or anything like that… but for writing it is fine. There’s a good tube mic for singing, a radio studio mic for the little old guitar amp (woops, you can’t see it), and a nice pre amp and compressor.
Serial numbers and security codes for software are pinned to the wall, along with a Tammy Wynette poster. The computer is under the desk. It’s a mess, it’s not much, but amazingly, some of the vocals I’ve done here end up being keepers. The vocal I did on the hit version of the song “Lazy” — the collaboration with DJs X-Press 2 — was recorded using a decent mic into a G3 laptop! So clearly pro gear is nice but not super essential. The track they sent me sounded completely different texturally than how it ended up — they stripped it down and made it more “housey” after I sent in my vocal.
With Annie we’ve worked in a similar fashion to those collaborations, though from both directions. Sometimes (as in the song we did at the Allen Room) she’d give me some instrumental tracks she’d done in Garage Band using brass (and other) samples, and then I’d organize those using the music software Logic, and add some stuff of my own. In the case of this particular song I first added a “virtual” acoustic guitar and some percussion — which cemented the nice herky-jerky brass parts she had recorded. I sent these via email to her for approval. After that (she liked what I had done) I improvised a vocal melody on top — thus far without words. She liked that too.
She sent back some new brass chords and harmonies under one verse section — and that eventually turned into a middle 8 (sometimes called a bridge in the US), and she also sent some melismatic vocal improvisations of her own.
I did some further restructuring and began to write words — written to fit the metric and rise and fall of the vocal melody I’d improvised earlier. Many drafts later we had a song. While I was writing the words, I brought in Tony Finno, who had done arrangements for brass and strings for Here Lies Love and the Big Love score material I did a couple of years back, to do charts for her brass guys — who turned out to be horn guys more than brass guys, but they were flexible enough to cover the parts.
Although writing words to fit an existing vocal melody and meter is what anyone who writes in rhyme does naturally and intuitively, I was encouraged to make the process more explicit when Talking Heads made Remain In Light. I found that, remarkably, solving the puzzle of making words and phrases fit often resulted in words that did in fact have an emotional and sometimes even narrative thread. It may begin as gibberish, but often, if one wants, a “story,” in the broadest sense, emerges. Emergent storytelling, one might say.
With other St. Vincent collaborations that are in the works, I have sometimes started the brass parts on my end and then sent them to Annie; I’ve also sent her words, potential lyrics, that I had written. The latter is unusual, as I don’t usually write words in advance, but I wasn’t sure what form of collaboration she’d be comfortable with. So far none of those have achieved true song status. It’s all still evolving — where these will end up? We don’t know — and that’s a nice place to be in.
It seems she doesn’t like writing words — and she’s not alone there. Brian hates it as well. I find it to be the most labor-intensive part of songwriting, but when it works, and it doesn’t always, then the song can seem more like something that magically flowed out — something that emerged naturally, rather than something that was made in incremental pieces. But at times words can be a dangerous addition to music — they can pin it down. Words imply that the music is about “that” (“that” being what the words say literally) and nothing else. They can, if not done well, destroy the pleasant ambiguity that is a lot of the reason we love music so much. That inherent ambiguity means that we can psychologically tailor music to our own needs, sensibilities and situations — but words limit that, or they can. There are plenty of beautiful tracks that I can’t listen to because they’ve been “ruined” by bad words — my own and others. So I understand some folks’ trepidation, and my own sometime-failures.
Part of what makes words work in a song is how they sound to the ear and feel on the tongue. If they feel right, if the tongue (wooo!), and the mirror neurons of the listener (isn’t that part of why we love music and performance — mirror neurons?) are made to feel (neurologically) the delicious appropriateness of the words coming out, then that rightness sometimes trumps literal sense. We “sing” in our minds when we hear and see singing. So the writing of words — the putting them down on paper — is part of songwriting, but the proof of the pudding is in the singing.
With Norm (Fatboy), I sometimes wrote songs over simple drum loops of my own, which he and Tom (Cagedbaby) then replaced with their own funkier and more characterful grooves. Other times Norm sent me basic groove loops — sometimes with some bass or instrument samples mixed in, sometimes not — and I sliced and diced those and wrote melodies and words over them. The songs in that project that I initiated myself tended to be more harmonically complex — to have more chord changes — than the groove-focused ones that Norm sent me. Together they made for a nice variety.
I did another collaboration recently with Yuka Honda and Petra Hayden that I believe Petra will end up singing; a couple with Dirty Projectors for the Dark Was the Night charity record; and one with Dave Sitek of TV on the Radio is in progress. More are lined up on the runway. A writer at Pitchfork critically said I’d collaborate for a bag of Doritos. I do love it, and the results are sometimes surprising, sometimes creatively successful and sometimes even popular (“Lazy” was a huge hit everywhere except the US).
Why collaborate at all? One could conceivably make more money not sharing the profits — if there are any — so why collaborate if one doesn’t have to? If one can write alone, why reach out? (Some of the most financially successful songs I’ve ever written were not collaborations, for example.) And besides, isn’t it risky? Suppose you don’t get along? Suppose the other person decides to take the thing in some ugly direction?
Well, as I said earlier, one big reason is to restrict one’s own freedom in the writing process. There’s a joy and relief in being limited, restrained. For starters, to let someone else make half the decisions, or some big part of them, absolves one of the need to explore endless musical possibilities. The result is fewer agonizing decisions in the writing process, and sometimes, faster results.
Another reason to risk it is that others often have ideas outside and beyond what one would come up with oneself. To have one’s work responded to by another mind, or to have to stretch one’s own creative muscles to accommodate someone else’s muse, is a satisfying exercise. It gets us outside of our self-created boxes. When it works, the surprising result produces some kind of endorphin equivalent that is a kind of creative high. Collaborators sometimes rein in one’s more obnoxious tendencies too, which is yet another plus.
There are also some more market-oriented, pragmatic arguments for collaboration. If both collaborators are sort of well known, then there is a natural interest among the combined set of music fans. Part of the marketing has been done without having to do any corny PR. Even if the collaborators are not all that well known there is often some curiosity at what friction might result and what sparks might fly.
But one might also ask: Is writing ever NOT collaboration? Doesn’t one collaborate with oneself, in a sense? Don’t we access different aspects of ourselves, different characters and attitudes and then, when they’ve had their say, switch hats and take a more distanced and critical view — editing and structuring our other half’s outpourings? Isn’t the end product sort of the result of two sides collaborating? Surely I’m not the only one who does this?
I did a week of events (NY, Austin, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco and LA) around the theme of Cities and Bikes and how we get around. I began each one with a broad introduction that I hoped would set the scene — a background on how our cities became so car-centric, and some alternatives in various places around the world. There were some funny slides too.
As I mentioned earlier, at these events I was followed by a city representative, a representative of a local advocacy group, and an urban theorist. Different folks in each town. Q&A at the end.
The turnout was great — the theaters for the most part were lovely and averaged around 700 seats. It really does seem like this was a little catalyst for an issue that has reached a point of acceptance.
The “theorist” in San Francisco, Michael Teitz from UC Berkeley, proposed a lovely and surreal thought experiment in which the car had never been invented. An alternate present, with, for example, tunnels being a priority in many cities, as they make it easier for cyclists to avoid hills. In Los Angeles the man in this theorist role, Don Shoup, is a sort of famous specialist in parking. Such a thing may be laughable to some like me who don’t own a car, but in LA and elsewhere it is a serious issue with many ramifications. He pointed some out — if the price of a street meter (or a free spot) is lower than the nearby lot, then folks tend to circle the block in search of these bargains, to the point where the streets become clogged with naïve and hopeful drivers who spend a crazy amount of time looking for a spot. We’ve all done it, I know I have. I have also done concerts in “new” areas of LA (like downtown) and gotten complaints from folks who didn’t know if or where they could find parking close by. I think attendance suffered at those gigs because folks were worried about it.
The events in some towns, like Portland, well known for being bicycle- and public transportation-friendly cities (despite the frequent rain), were almost like little rallies; whereas LA, like Austin in a way, is so spread out that it has more obstacles to overcome.
I spent the morning walking around LA’s lively downtown district. One whole store sold nothing but glass pipes (for smoking) and another sold nothing but super realistic BB guns, and accurate reproductions of Glocks and Uzis.
An old cafeteria has a waterfall inside with a mechanical bear that emerged from a hole!
I suggested to the city rep that one might try adding bike lanes, etc. in specific neighborhoods, little by little, and not try to instigate a whole citywide program. Downtown, Santa Monica and Venice would be obvious candidates. Her response seemed to imply that the state of LA politics and bureaucracy makes that impossible — if one hood gets something, they all want it. Of course, if the mayor or other higher-ups were more sympathetic, as they are in Portland (or even Mikey B in NY), that entrenched bureaucracy might open up here and there. A poke from the top can indeed unclog a logjam.
Naturally there were some questions from the audiences about the messenger who nearly ran me over and, from the other side, why can’t I have a bike lane on my street? The question raised by the first issue is: can our behavior change? One is always skeptical if that can ever happen; one doesn’t naturally think that North Americans can be like the Dutch or the Danes. I think it was at the NY event where I came up with what I thought was a pretty good analogy in response to this question: who would have believed that those independent-minded New Yorkers, with all their attitude, would stoop to picking up doggie shit in little baggies and carrying it steaming in their hands to the nearest trash can? No one. But they do. Pretty much all of them. So, people can change some old habits — it happens.
I’m on a one week tour — a series of events focusing on bikes and cities timed to coincide with the release of my Bicycle Diaries book. I told the publisher I didn’t think I’d be very good as a reader — which is the usual way authors are trotted out to promote their books — so I suggested instead we do a series of forums focusing on our cities and how bikes have become a symptom of a new interest in urban living in North America. (This has a little bit of the added effect of hinting that the book is not just about riding a bike.) The publicity department of Viking, the publisher, generously helped put these events together. Sometimes they are held in bookstores, as those are the venues the publisher knows; and sometimes, like last night in Austin, in small theaters.
At each event there will be a representative of the local city government; an advocate; a theorist/designer/planner or historian; …and me. We each do short (10-15 min.) presentations about our area of expertise and then there is some Q&A and then we’re done. So far, I’ve been to NYC and Austin and Seattle and it’s working pretty well. By bringing these elements and people together the events serve as a catalyst, a reminder and a symbol that perception and policies are changing — about bikes as a way of getting around and about how our lives in cities can be. The interest and turnout might be as much for the content as what’s on stage.
The morning after I arrived here I rode around Austin and discovered that a surprising amount of the downtown area has been given over to parking.
There are parking lots everywhere and, maybe because of the oppressive heat in the Texas summers, lots of indoor parking structures as well. Some of these take up a whole block and some only take up the ground floor of a downtown building. Either way, they kill any potential for life, business, interchange and encounters on those blocks. It seems that not only did the city accommodate cars with some massive freeways that are often jammed up, but they have given some of their best downtown real estate simply to house automobiles. I was reminded that the vibrant “people” streets (South Congress and 6th St.), no matter if you love or hate those scenes, would never exist if there were massive parking structures on every block there. The vacant lots on S. Congress are now filled with tent kiosks and tiny Airstreams and other trailers that serve as specialized food carts (like the ones in Portland). I got a mushroom tamale and berry smoothie at one, and they were great.
Austinites were surprised when their city bike lane and trail rep Annick Beaudet revealed how many of the city’s residents commute by bike already, and how much new infrastructure is going to be added in the coming years. If they can conceive of replacing some of those parking lots and structures with mixtures of cool housing, office and retail they would inevitably lure more folks into the central district, where cars are not absolutely essential for every activity. Where will all those new workers, consumers and residents park then? — well, some will find it more practical to use public transportation and some will…ummm…ride bikes. The policy of infinite accommodation to the car needs to stop and be reversed if our cities are to survive as more than clumps of offices and parking garages.
After the Austin event I rode to the Continental Club (the hotel has loaner bikes) to see the guys in Heybale do their usual Sunday evening set. The band, partly made up of veterans from the bands of artists like Merle Haggard and Johnny Cash, play their repertoire of mostly classic country songs (Hank Williams, Ernest Tubb, George Jones, Webb Pierce) and a few originals with consummate skill. The guitar player Redd Volkaert and the pedal steel player in particular are amazing musicians — their frequent and concise solos are both surprising and inventive, and technically mind-boggling. More than once I’ve seen young musicians standing close to the stage with their jaws hanging open as these guys whip off another effortless solo. I was reminded of the days when Clapton was heralded as a guitar godhead — well, these guys are in that class, though the tunes are a little different. At least three of the band members sing, and pretty well, too.
I happen to love those songs, though I realize they’re not to everyone’s taste. What’s just as wonderful as the band is the audience they’ve amassed over years playing this Sunday night residency — all ages: 20-somethings and folks my age and older, many of whom have come to dance the two-step or the waltz, depending on the song — and they fill the floor as soon as the band starts. I’ve seen 20-year-old girls in dancing dresses and grandmas in the same outfits. Last night one of the very best dancers in the joint was a young man who didn’t look like your typical country music fan — he could have been Mexican, Indonesian or Syrian. All the girls were happy to dance with him.
Living the Dream
The next morning, as I changed planes at Dallas Ft. Worth, I saw a guy talking on a cell phone outside a fast food place on one of the endless concourses. He was in full cowboy costume and it was, to me, so extreme and clichéd that he could have been a member of the Village People. I don’t think he would have appreciated hearing that. He had the full gear — a checkered Western shirt, old Tom Mix-style hat, jeans, boots, a belt with a giant buckle, and a handlebar moustache. Halloween ain’t for a few more weeks!
I guess you can get away with that here in Texas, though this guy was pretty out there. There isn’t much call for ropin’ and herdin’ around DFW, unless it’s rodeo season, but even then the rodeo guys I’ve met don’t dress like this. This guy, it seems to me, is role playing. If he’s not that guy he’s going to at least look like that guy. If he were to walk into a NY office in that getup, folks would point him to the casting call across the way. But Texas is, sometimes, big and crazy enough that one can take the risk and reinvent oneself and folks go along with it.
Sufficiently caffeinated from the morning’s bus coffee, Mark and I hopped on bikes and rode downhill to the seaside hotel in Leith. Fed, showered and shaved I ride back into town, noting the interesting shop fronts along the way.
Later I meet up with Hungarian-American conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth and his family at the Talbot Rice Gallery, where he has an installation. Right now the family is living in Roma, which must be interesting — a lovely city, but I imagine it’s a bit hard getting things done and running an efficient organization out of a southern Italian town.
His show consists of quotes from Nietzsche and doodles by Darwin, interspersed and rendered in white neon. One has to “read” the exhibition. It’s presented in a room that was one of the studies where Darwin worked; this one originally contained thousands of stuffed birds. The frilly Victorian details add a nice touch; the columns along the walls serve to break up the texts at irregular intervals, making reading a bit difficult. Cleverly, Joseph arranged that the text fits perfectly, making a circle around the entire room and its little balcony. The Nietzsche quotes form an argument that art and creativity are the highest forms of philosophy… the Darwin doodles look like proto-genealogical trees, as if his hand was unconsciously figuring out how evolution worked.
Next door is a show by Jane and Louise Wilson based around some stuff they found in Stanley Kubrick’s archives. Here is an image from the Kubrick archive site:
Apparently he’d planned to make a film about a Polish-Jewish woman who passed herself off as a Catholic in order to save her family. The film was never shot, but a lot of screen tests with a young actress, and much location scouting, were done.
The Wilsons’ video shows the now slightly older actress re-enacting some of the earlier screen tests and poses, with her voice-over added. In another room were some of Kubrick’s location shots, which, to me, were truly bizarre. Like anthropologists or archaeologists he photographed banal details (windows, doorways, corners of rooms and stairways), always with a striped yardstick in the picture, sometimes held by an assistant. (The inches were alternately painted black or white, so they could be easily counted in these 8 x 10 prints — much easier than trying to see the little gradations on a regular yardstick.) As with archaeological and dinosaur dig photos, these give an accurate sense of scale — critical when one is looking at a photo of a fossilized bone fragment or a piece of partly buried pottery, but a normal Polish room interior? It seems a bit obsessive — a clue to Kubrick’s working method — and maybe that’s the point of the Wilsons’ inclusion and interest in these.
I wonder how many unfinished projects Kubrick had on the go? Another one was A.I., the film about a robot boy looking for love, which was eventually directed by Spielberg. Apparently the original story and script was a Kubrick project, and completing it was Spielberg’s way of making homage.
I meet the Kosuths at the Café Royal, where Joseph claims Princess Anne used to meet her lovers. It’s a baroque pub and café tucked away in an alley behind busy Princes Street, so it does seem plausible — though the place is too crowded for secret assignations these days. I have local food: black pudding (blood sausage) followed by local oysters. The food is gastropub fare nowadays — the black pudding isn’t wallowing in grease as it might be in a more typical Scottish café. Here there are dainty little greens sprinkled around it.
I went for a walk in a sheep pasture this afternoon and wondered to myself why it is that friends and acquaintances ALWAYS, without fail, marvel at how we get around by bus, while journalists NEVER ask about such pragmatic or mundane matters. Maybe the journalists already know how such things work, maybe they think their readers don’t care, or maybe it’s the fact that it’s all somewhat the same for many touring groups, so there must be nothing special about us. Maybe our friends are interested because they are completely unaware of how musical acts get around, or they think we all travel by private jets — like their image of rock stars of yore, or bands like U2 and Rolling Stones today.
Anyway, here’s how it works:
The other day we played in Amsterdam. The day after we played in London. We don’t hang around. Economics of a tour of my scale mean that I have to play a certain number of shows a week (at least four, but often more) and of a certain size (and therefore income) to be able to pay everyone’s salaries, the bus rental, the gear rental, etc etc. Budgeting is worked out before the tour begins — I sit down with some folks and look at the numbers, which tell me more or less what level of show I can do that year: how many performers to hire, if I can carry my own lights and PA or not, how many busses we can afford… all of that is determined before the tour dates are booked.
In the past, live shows were viewed as loss leaders to sell albums, but I doubt that too many folks believe that anymore… though shows do make people a teeny bit aware of a new record. Record companies who espoused the loss leader approach used to advance money to up and coming acts to cover tour losses — but I don’t know anyone who does that now.
On this tour the shows tended to be in medium-sized theaters — around 2,000 seats on average (I think). Occasionally we’d play a place quite a bit smaller (see the “Thank You U2” entry), sometimes larger, or a big pop festival that would pay better than the theaters — thereby subsidizing shows in the Balkans, for example. We traveled with 3 busses this year — one for band (which includes me), one for singers and dancers, and one for crew. Note to friends and acquaintances: I do NOT have my own bus with a big round bed in the back.
The busses have bunks in them, so that’s where most of us sleep. (Some folks have issues sleeping on the bunks — more on that later.) The bunks have their own air vents and curtains, so there is a measure of privacy — and they’re surprisingly quiet. For someone who sleeps through NY traffic noises, a bus bunk is quiet. In the US the bunks have little fold-down DVD screens! — though I’ve never used those. Rule number one: always sleep with your FEET pointing forward — if there is a sudden stop or accident you don’t want your head to impact first.
We usually have drinks backstage or at a nearby bar after the shows, say hi to friends and fans, pack up our personal stuff, and within an hour or two the busses are rolling. Sometimes we watch DVDs before we go to our bunks — The Wire or The Mighty Boosh were big favorites on our bus. During tennis season Mauro and Keith would go to a separate lounge and watch games they’d recorded on a TiVo type hard drive. There is a refrigerator and microwave, a coffeemaker and a toilet (though only number 1 is allowed). There is electricity, and this year, wi-fi!... so sometimes the common area would turn into an internet lounge. Nothing wilder going on than the tapping of little keys.
In the beginning of this year-long tour, the singer/dancer bus was more of a party bus — they put on music and danced for at least an hour to burn off the adrenaline and excitement. That doesn’t happen as much any more, though everyone still enjoys the shows.
On average we’ll roll into the next town at some Godforsaken early hour — so sometimes at 5 or 6AM the singer/dancer bus will arrive at a hotel where an arrangement has been made for very early check-in. They rouse themselves and stumble into their rooms and attempt to get the rest of a full night’s sleep. More power to them. I think they’re nuts — but whatever works.
I prefer to stay in my bunk and get my 8 or 9 hours sleep — which means that if we arrive in the wee hours, the bus driver will park at the hotel or outside the theater, plug the bus into a power source, and turn off the motor. At around 9 I’ll wake up, make some coffee, do emails, read the paper online, heat up some leftovers, and most days ride a bike (which was folded up in the luggage compartment) to the hotel to shower and shave. Then I’ll explore the town some more, maybe have a nice lunch, or go to meetings if some have been arranged, and return to the theater by 4 or 5 for soundcheck.
Dinner is provided after soundcheck — we eat backstage. Because we jump around during the shows most of us can’t eat much prior to going onstage, and we certainly can’t eat right before the shows. So as shows are often around 8PM, we can’t meet friends for dinner, and as we leave town on the busses about 90 minutes after the last note rings out, we usually don’t go anywhere to eat afterwards either.
As you can see, in this scenario we don’t spend the night in a hotel bed — though if there is a day off, we do. The hotels are booked so that we usually have to check out by mid- to late afternoon, and we never return unless it’s a day off. It’s not as bad or weird as it sounds — you get used to the pattern and sequence. And the big advantage as far as I’m concerned is that by traveling by night, one has most of the day available in each town to explore. When you wake up you’re already there. If one flies (commercial flights) then one usually has to get up early, do the whole airport rigmarole, and then one doesn’t arrive at the hotel in the new town until maybe an hour before soundcheck. It’s MUCH more draining to fly that way than to do the bus thing.
Our US busses ran on biodiesel. Not sure if the European ones did. That meant we’d book refueling appointments based on estimated fuel consumption. Local fuel tankers would meet us at pre-arranged places and times, as most gas stations don’t stock the stuff… yet. Sometimes I’d walk out of a hotel and see the little biodiesel tanker arriving in the parking lot to mate with the busses.
Here is a tube station poster for this installation:
I spent the day talking to the British press and demonstrating the workings of the Playing the Building installation, which opened here tonight in a building called the Roundhouse, a former Victorian industrial train repair facility in north London (near Camden Town, and sort of near Kings Cross station). Because the building is round, steam engines could be rotated over troughs radiating from the centre, positioning them in the proper direction for repair.
In the ’60s it was the site of (UFO) psychedelic rock shows, some promoted by my friend Joe Boyd — Ten Years After, Pink Floyd, etc. It also hosted The Living Theatre and other scandalous naked performers. I played my first UK gig here — Talking Heads opened for the Ramones and the Stranglers in ’76. We had a single out at the time, no album yet. The place was pretty grotty, and here we had our first experience of gobbing — the quaint UK custom of audiences spitting on bands as a sign of appreciation. Yes, it’s for real, and it was disgusting. One could see, like little shooting stars in the stage lights, the white gobs of phlegm flying your way. I didn’t get hit that much, but the Ramones really got pelted. They REALLY didn’t like it. Luckily their leather jackets served to protect them and, in this case, went beyond just presenting a unified look. Beers in plastic cups were also thrown — one landed right on my hairline and tipped its half-consumed contents over my head. Funny how England, the country fairly well known in centuries past for fulfilling its self-proclaimed duty to export “civilization” to the unwashed and the heathen of the world, has a flip side on a par with any unsavory sport or bizarre cultural practice anywhere else. Well, we all do I suppose, but gobbing is a pretty weird way to show your love by any measure.
The venue fell into further disrepair, though being an industrial landmark it was never torn down, and its unique shape made it recognizable. Occasionally it was used for performances that took advantage of its funky rawness, but that also limited its use. A few years ago it went under extensive renovations, and a new structural shell was built that, miraculously, is almost invisible — the Victorian era scrollwork, and cast iron pillars and girders still appear to hold the building up, and are what my installation “plays” — and the new supporting structure is now largely hidden from view, sandwiched between the exterior roof and the massive, original wood beams of the inner roof.
Here is a view showing where new and old interact:
The new roof can support 20 tonnes of weight if needed, more than ample for flying PA systems, lights, stage gear and sets. None of that was possible before, so now this is poised to become a much more viable and active venue in town — though the round shape still makes it unique, and inappropriate for shows requiring a conventional proscenium.
The book I wrote over the last couple of years (though the notes for it date back as far as 15 years) came out in the UK this week. I decided that since I am finishing my tour here, the UK publisher (Faber and Faber) and I would auction off the bike that I rode around many of the cities featured in the book — Sydney, Istanbul, Berlin, Columbus, and London. The proceeds will benefit the London Cycling Campaign as the bike is located there — which means that the auction is really geared towards UK bidders.
After helping to oversee the installation of Playing the Building at the Roundhouse on Thursday, Danielle, my studio manager, and I needed to get to the Smithfield area of London for a dinner appointment. London traffic is notoriously snarled much of the time — though congestion pricing has alleviated that a bit — so we decided to take the tube (subway). Rain began to pelt down; we used bin liners (plastic trash bags) to cover ourselves. The nearby Chalk Farm tube station lobby and ticket area was filled with people, and a young man was writing on a whiteboard that no trains on the Northern line, northbound or southbound, were running. There was no suggestion of “20 min. delays” or “We’ll let you know when it’s fixed.” Instead the instructions were, in a word, “Go away.” Then, to add insult to injury, he hollered at everyone, “You need to clear this space because of fire regulations, you can’t stand here” — effectively shoving everyone out into the torrential rain. We saw a sign for a southbound train approaching the station and rushed down to the platform, but we missed it and that was the last one. We took the man’s advice and went looking for a southbound bus, which we found not too far off.
The windows were all fogged up, but using the GPS on our phones we could see where the bus was going, and when it began to diverge from the direction we needed to go, we hopped off and got on another one (at least London busses run frequently), then repeated the process. After riding three busses (and purchasing two umbrellas) we made it to the restaurant, slightly soaked but on time.
The show at the Barbican was being filmed in HD, so I went in early and helped adjust lights with our LD David Ambrosio and Will from Hillman Curtis’s crew so that the stage looked to the camera more or less the way it looks to the eye… at least on the songs that hadn’t previously been shot. Before that I went up to Camden Town to the Roundhouse, where the Playing the Building installation will open on Friday, to see how it was going. The building, now cleared of circus staging and other crap, and with its skylight open for the first time, is spectacular. Mark McNamara and Justin Downs were just getting some of the motors and pipes into position, so no sounds to be heard yet… but all seems to be well. Here’s a shot of work in progress:
The crate containing the actual organ was opened in shipping — probably by Homeland Security, who carelessly repacked it, as they do — and in the process the keyboard was almost destroyed (though it’s repairable). We hope none of the other mechanical or electronic bits inside were damaged, but will know soon enough. I feel more secure, don’t you? How, I wonder, is international shipping of goods, samples, art, products, etc. supposed to happen if this kind of behavior is tacitly encouraged by the US government? The Bush legacy lingers. Is there someone we’re supposed to pay, some service we’re supposed to use to guarantee more considerate handling? The inspection would be fine if they had put the bits back with some semblance of care.
[Alice Rawsthorn adds: "Your problems with Homeland Security reminded me of László Moholy-Nagy's misadventures when taking his enormous Light Space Modulator into the various countries where he and his family lived in the 1930s. Whenever it crossed a border, customs officials pounced and refused to believe that it was a work of art, until Moholy took to describing it as "hairdressing equipment" and it sailed through unscathed."]
I walked on the net, high above the Roundhouse floor, that rings the innermost catwalk… you can see it in the photo. The ring looks like it’s floating… very exciting.
I tubed it down to the Barbican Centre, where our show will be. The walkways, as one approaches this sixties brutalist monstrosity, provide views reminiscent of the scenes in A Clockwork Orange when Alex returns to his parents’ flat after a night of the old ultra-violence (minus the blowing trash).
Anyway, at the show Leo Abrahams sat in with us for two of the songs on which he played on the recent CD collaboration with Brian. He wore the mandatory white, and plugged straight into and out of his laptop, using some software effects — and it sounded great. No amp or other bits of gear! I lent him my spare Strat, so he didn’t even need to bring a guitar.
Jenni surprised us by bringing Julian Barratt (Howard Moon) from The Mighty Boosh backstage to say hello as we gathered in our snack room. We were all stunned and flattered. He came to see us even though he really, seriously does like jazz. Julian, Thom Yorke, Brian, and some others joined us after the show. I made the rounds saying hellos, then Cindy and I went back to the hotel. Thom was very excited to meet her — I guess from his art school days, she was (is) an icon of sorts. I was wearing a not so special white shirt and Thom immediately knew the designer — a friend of his. He must have spotted some subtle detail. I never would have pegged him for someone knowledgeable about fashion.
C and I pedaled over to a show of design art furniture at the V&A. There is some truly lovely and wacky stuff, but not enough of it to be a real survey of the currently hot genre. The whole categorization is questionable for some — as it’s limited edition furniture that is super expensive, and usually not that comfortable to sit on, placed into an art context. It’s functional but not really. The not really part makes it art — if one agrees that art doesn’t serve an (obvious) practical purpose. I’ve done a series of functional (you can sit in them) but uncomfortable chairs in a variety of materials that could be considered to fall into this genre, so I’m fascinated.
This one, by Sebastian Brajkovic, is made mostly of cast bronze — it must weigh quite a bit!
The show is called “Telling Tales”, as if there was some Grimms’ Fairy Tale theme running through the work — death and incest and dark mothers and fathers and forests… though to me that all seems like a stretch. Pretty much all the work, except for two pieces (one British — Julian Mayor — and one by Boym, the Russian-American designer), is Dutch. Leave those out and the show could have been called a survey of recent extreme Dutch furniture design — though there is a lot more going on there design-wise as well. The Eindhoven-based Droog Design crew, which spawned Hella Jongerius and quite a few others, don’t strictly make furniture — they are also pushing design boundaries.
A road sign in Hyde Park — there’ll always be an England.
The One Year Family
The tour is winding down and we’re all feeling a little weird. I suppose my dreams are all related to the imminent end of the tour. It’s amazing we all held it together this long — there were few meltdowns and only one crew person defected, and that was months ago. The shows have been successful, and the band doesn’t have any serious substance abusers or complete lunatics — which was fairly common for a pop music tour back in the day — so maybe all those factors helped to contribute to how well we held it together for an entire year.
Extended tours like this are like movie shoots — everyone bonds, like a little family. We often do things together, and we all sleep together (well, close by) on the buses. We know our family will only last a year, though there are sometimes splinter unions that last longer. Some of the crew will go on to work on other projects and tours; some of us musicians, singers and dancers will work on stuff together in the near future; friendships and even love bonds have formed — but none of those projects or relationships will include the whole one year family. This particular unit will break apart in about a week…
We’ll all keep in touch, I hope.
There was going to be one final farewell concert in NY— a free show in Times Square to inaugurate the permanent closing of Broadway there, and celebrating the greening of the zone, on August 17 — but the production needed funding from some donors. We would play for free (or at least I would), but the cost of the stage, toilets, trailers, PA, local crew, lights, etc. was considerable. Though we came very close to finding the money (Janette from the DOT was doing this part — I don’t know donors or sponsors) and doing the show (a free show in Times Square! Santogold was going to open!), at the last minute there just wasn’t enough to cover costs, so we had to admit defeat.
South America? Didn’t get there this year (except on holiday). I’ve played many cities there many times, but this time — maybe due to the financial crisis and its ripple effect down there — the offers simply weren’t enough to pay for band, crew and shipping. So, despite asking friends and others for advice and contacts, I had to let the idea go after a while.
So that’s it. A year of touring this show (there was a break over Xmas and New Years, and during the month of May) and we’ve been almost everywhere we can reasonably go — sometimes more than once. The show has been incredibly well received, the record has sold so-so (though because it was self-distributed in a fashion, there were profits early on) — and we all feel exhausted but very, very satisfied… like, um, after something else.
