A New Stairway to Heaven?
I make no secret over the fact that I write music not as a musician or songwriter, but as a fan of music–A veritable slut of the sonic palette if you will. With such a long background in how things are handled in the music world, the transition to the expectations of the poetry world have left me a little frustrated mostly with my own lack of what I feel is preparation. In the music world, you learn and rehearse songs and then you go out and play them live. Only the lowliest of jerk-offs is going to read their lyrics on stage to an audience, but in poetry, it’s okay. In poetic live appearances, I’ve read the poems, but feel as an artist so unsatisfied with it., because I still feel like I’m supposed to know every line before hitting the stage. It isn’t enough that the audience is okay with it. And as far as recording goes, most poets don’t do it for me. The exception, my watermark for excellence in combining poetry with music has become Derrick Brown. You can find him on iTunes. To make a long story short, I found in his creativity someone who is pushing the limits enough to satisfy what I feel is a need for spoken word artists to marry their visions with music more akin to a soundtrack than some random musician simply riffing on their instrument under them with no composition in sight. Did I mention that I’ve been that musician before? Well, I have been and was as disappointed as ever as a fan of spoken word performances as I could be. I don’t care that I was part of it, except to the fact that I was promoting the future of crappy performances with haphazard marriages of poetry and music.
With my next book, I have recently decided to include a CD with it at the suggestion by a couple of very creative friends of mine Suzi and Jeff Oliver. Now, I’ve thought of this before, and talked about it with my mentor, Tim Sweeney, but it was their mention of it, that decided me on the subject. Somehow, our conversation over dinner and the way my wife’s eyes lit up at the idea convinced me that this is the way to go.
So now I am writing for the book Dark Matter and my next CD Like Clutching Faith. Where to go with this? I’m trying to figure it out. Thankfully, my co-producer David Cohen is on board for both, which makes my job much easier as his is my most trusted critic of the music I create. Amongst the new “songs” (I’m using this generically, including spoken word pieces to music) is one that has taken as its inspiration Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven. As I mentioned before, I write as a fan so I take different aspects of songs that I wish I’d written and combine those elements into my own little ditties. Now most people are quite familiar to the studio release of Stairway to Heaven, but I’m looking at the live version of it from Led Zep’s “How The West Was Won” CD and the cover of it by Rodrigo y Gabriela on their self-titled CD. The composition of the song amazes me and both those versions house one of the best solos ever to grace my ears.
Now I bring the elements of what made me such a fan of the song and these excellent renditions of it into my own song replacing the guitar, with of all things, the piano. In a way, I am my own worst enemy and I acknowledge that, but I like the idea of the solo on record being piano and going live as guitar. Doing so much of the writing and performing by myself, I don’t want my live show to consist of my performing over stagnant backing tracks when I bring my guitar up there with me, there should be some discovery for the audience, some form of ‘you had to be there’ to it that you don’t get from most performers rocking to backing tracks on CD which is how I’m going to begin until I have a proper budget. The name of the song hasn’t been decided yet and even the subject matter of it, is a little dubious at the moment, but soon, a rough version of it will show up in the samples version of my website at http://www.chriswesley.com/samples.
Will my song do it’s primary influence any justice? My opinion is only as far as people who listen to it and love it, don’t recognize what song was its muse without first having read this post. If someone can’t tell which song it is after having read this post, then, and only then, will I feel like I have truly done my job correctly. Either way, may we all continue to find that music that touches us most even if it means abandoning what a radio programmer thinks will keep us tuned in long enough to buy from their advertisers. Cheers.
