From: owner-shindell-list-digest@smoe.org (shindell-list-digest) To: shindell-list-digest@smoe.org Subject: shindell-list-digest V10 #138 Reply-To: shindell-list@smoe.org Sender: owner-shindell-list-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-shindell-list-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk shindell-list-digest Tuesday, July 7 2009 Volume 10 : Number 138 Today's Subjects: ----------------- Re: [RS] missing verses: was Re: Greater New Bedford Summerfest reportback [] RE: [RS] missing verses: was Re: Greater New Bedford Summerfest reportback ["Reinhard Liess" Subject: Re: [RS] missing verses: was Re: Greater New Bedford Summerfest reportback >> Wich is the missing verse in May, and did the Father Brown verse turn up onany official release? << On an old Fast Folk version of the song, the second section in "May" went like this: I'm calling from some booth And no, I can't come home They'll be watching you Do not touch the phone Please, May, do not cry All will be alright This is not goodbye I love you more than life So, he left out the last two lines of the first section and the first two lines of the second. And the missing "Whippoorwill" verse is often sung, but not recorded. RG ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 7 Jul 2009 20:01:36 -0400 From: Vanessa Wills Subject: Re: [RS] missing verses: was Re: Greater New Bedford Summerfest reportback And as a reminder, since this comes up every so often, and folks always wanna know where they can get it, this recording can be found through several MP3 vendors, including iTunes and Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/Fast-Folk-Musical-Magazine-Bottom/dp/B000V99MGS/ref=sr_1_8?ie=UTF8&s=dmusic&qid=1247010838&sr=1-8 You can buy the MP3 of "May" singly, and it costs 99 cents. If you are a Rhapsody subscriber, you can stream it from there, and it is included in your subscription. The album is called "Fast Folk Musical Magazine, Vol. 7 No. 2, Live at the Bottom Line 1993." I just listened to this recording after RonG's posting reminded me of the extra verses. It is really a great thing to listen to, and IMHO, the extra verses add a lot. Cheers, Vanessa On Tue, Jul 7, 2009 at 7:12 PM, wrote: > >> Wich is the missing verse in May, and did the Father Brown verse turn > up onany official release? << > > On an old Fast Folk version of the song, the second section in "May" went > like this: - -- "True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring." - --Martin Luther King ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 7 Jul 2009 16:15:38 -0700 From: Subject: [RS] Happy Antje. >> Sweet Spot (new, her 3rd positive song but who's counting << Well, SHE is, I guess, because at a gig last year she said that since "Big Dream Boulevard" had NO happy songs, and her forthcoming CD was going to have THREE happy songs, she was considering the idea of creating stickers for the CD that touted the release as being "30% happier" as a promo gimmick. RG ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 7 Jul 2009 20:42:47 -0400 From: "Reinhard Liess" Subject: RE: [RS] missing verses: was Re: Greater New Bedford Summerfest reportback >> And the missing "Whippoorwill" verse is often sung, but not recorded. Actually it's on the "Live At The Chandler Music Hall" recording which is available as a download on his website (http://bit.ly/126hg9). ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 7 Jul 2009 21:15:59 -0400 From: Vanessa Wills Subject: [RS] Translated 2007 article from Argentine newspaper, La Nacion. Yes, I have a paper due in three days, and I am procrastinating. Which means, *Time for a new translation of something Richard-related!!* Actually, in this interview Richard speaks quite a bit about "Balloon Man," which may be of special interest given the recent conversation on-list about that song. - --Vanessa P.S. The paper I have due needs to be written in German, which means that since I started translating this article, I have been thinking in * Spanglisherman*. Lovely. P.P.S. Here is the original link to the article in Spanish: http://www.lanacion.com.ar/nota.asp?nota_id=974110 - ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- - - *The art of making songs* Considered a great songwriter, this folk musician from the United Stateslives and composes in Belgrano, but tours in the other hemisphere Saturday, December 29, 2007 by Hictor M. Guyot (Translated from Spanish into English by Vanessa Wills) from the Editorial Offices of *La Nacion* He looks like one more neighbor among the folks in Belgrano, but speaking to him gives it away: in his Spanish, seasoned with Buenos Aires turns of phrase, there lingers the residue of dry, hard English. The evidence doesn't add up, at all, to allow one to divine that behind this low-profile man with the sad expression is hidden a North American folk musician who has been deemed a preeminent songwriter. The *New York Times* compared him with Bruce Springsteen and places him among the greats: He is so literary, says one of his critics, that his ballads would go straight into *The New Yorker* if they were prose. Having established himself in Buenos Aires together with his children and their mother (the Argentine historian Lila Caimari, whom he got to know in Paris), Richard Shindell now draws from the everyday life of this home in order to write his songs. He did this in *Vuelta*, his sixth disc, which he recorded with the musicians from Puente Celeste, and also in a number of the songs that will be included in his next CD, which he expects to be released in the coming months. In short, stories and people from here will become English-language songs for an audience that is principally North American, German, and Japanese. It's a small world. Beyond this change of perspective, Shindell maintains intact an uncompromising eye for detail and the capacity to encode a story into a handful of verses. To speak with him about the way in which he writes songs is to catch a glimpse into the art of the song, a device made up of sounds and words that can reach the most intimate parts of the soul. There isn't a theme that unites these songs, but there is a lot about Buenos Aires, says Shindell, who has lived in this city for seven years. A good part of the stories and depictions on this disk have to do with personalities that I see here every day. One example is Balloon Man. The musician described the song thus, in a correspondence with this reporter: He is a well-known person in Belgrano. He sells balloons in the plazas. A portrait, with a refrain that amplifies the context of the narrator. Now, in this conversation that unfolds in his living room, a more loquacious Shindell recounts: I was working on a song. I went out onto the balcony in order to think a little bit and the famous balloon man was just passing by, a strange character from whom one could buy balloons in the plaza. I returned to the table, abandoned the other song, and this one came out once. Sometimes it's like that, the first line appears and the rest just comes. First lines: I'm standing outside on the balcony/ Balloon Man is passing below/ making his way to the park by the church/ he goes where the little ones go. The second verse contributes some disquieting details: the man has a ragged appearance, one lens of his eyeglasses is broken and his shoes do not belong to the same pair. Thus, what was a sterile description transforms, over the course of lyrics that work through a series of opposites (inside/outside, shelter/abandonment, reason/insanity), into a distant but compassionate look at the world of outcasts. In the case of this song, and also of the other songs about Buenos Aires or Argentina, I am trying to communicate my experience of this country to my audience and to my family. There, they ask me about Argentina, but the truth is that I am so hooked into this place that the result is, it's impossible for me to explain the enchantment of living here. In a way, these songs are my answer. In fact, in the refrain there is an express appeal: *And you're so far away/ on the other side of world/ I thought you might like to know/ that balloon man lives in it too. *That second person, *you*, can be a lost love, my family, my audience. Sometimes I feel tied to meaning, I tend to justify every word, every phrase of my songs. Maybe it's because I studied philosophy. This, for a change, I decided not to explain. *-Thus, beyond the description, a story about the narrator is implied.* - -It is necessary to leave open doors. This is important in order to write songs. *-Dylan always did that...* - -Of course, Dylan has songs that are nothing *but* doors. [RS smiles.] My refrain, in a way, says that the world can be horrible at moments, but there are also marvelous things. There is an inspiration that I can take from Balloon Man's fight against the inclement weather and the elements. *-The music came afterwards?* - -Lyrics and music came at the same time, and therefore this song came out very quickly. When I went out onto the balcony, my guitar was tuned in C1, a tuning with a low, mysterious sound that I had been experimenting with. The music is simple and four or five chords build. It is uncommon that a song comes out in one stretch. The same thing happened to me with Reunion Hill, a song that was recorded by Joan Baez. Others among the songs on the CDwhich is as yet untitledalso speak about the encounter between two worlds. But while in Balloon Man these worlds don't touch one another, in this case there is a crossing of paths, a contact. The song is called Mariana's Table, and it begins thus: *Out on highway 215/ the trucks are hauling wheat grain/ apples and soy beans/ to the docks at Ensenada*. I was in the gallery of a house in San Miguel de Monte, at night, and the roar of Mercedes trucks was coming from the road that connects Monte with Brandsen and La Plata, says Shindell. There, this song was born. After that, I dedicated myself to finding out what those truckers were hauling. In the third verse, the scene goes back: *Down the road, not far now/ Mariana's just arriving/ with her still-warm baskets/ and coolers full of beers.* Mariana is an imaginary person. I was trying to imagine where those truckers were going at 10 at night. They have to stop somewhere, I decided. Surely they stop in Brandson, because La Plata is more expensive. And there, in Brandson, I imagined a rest stop. And a woman. After their paths cross, each one returns to his or her world. Her, to her home and her family and others, and them, to their unions and their Moyanos2. [RS smiles.] The encounter savors of simple pleasures: *A slight exchange, but never short/ at Mariana's table/ empanadas, two pesos/ besos and gracias*. With the idea that this woman restores them, in the first version there was written *empanadas and kindness*, but I received the criticism from my wife: that sounds too explicit, too obvious. She was right, says Shindell. *-Is there in your songs a gesture towards approaching the world of others?* - -Yes, many of them try in some way to close those distances. Even a depiction like the one of Balloon Man tries, in its way, to shorten a distance. The disc will include a song that is very ambitious in that sense, at least in that it purports to try to close a distance of 40 years: the distance that Lennon and McCartney opened when they wrote about an adolescent girl that wanted to explain herself better than she had in the note she left before abandoning her parents' home in She's Leaving Home. Yes, the unusual idea occurred to Shindell of returning this young lady to her home in the same way in which she left: in a song. When *Sergeant Pepper* came out, I was eight years old. What happened? Why did she leave her daddy and her mommy?, I asked myself when I listened to She's Leaving Home. Later, at 18, I congratulated her on having gone: very good, you left these ungrateful.... But now that I have children the song seems horribly sad to me. *-How did the idea appear, of writing this second part to the song?* - -I was in Miramar, fascinated with a biography of Paul McCartney, who from the point of view of lyrics can be a disaster, it must be said. And all of a sudden I said to myself, I am going to write the second chapter of She's Leaving Home. I wanted to return to this girl and write her song. It starts ten years later. The father is in the garden, the mother in the kitchen, and they still feel her absence. She is in a taxi two blocks away, trying to gather her strength in order to enter the home. *-And the meeting? Does she return?* - -I leave her there, in the taxi. I couldn't change the story that Lennon and McCartney wrote. Who am I to change it? In the end I said, *As is written, so it is, bye bye*. I leave an open door. A big reader, Shindell, whose discs can be found in a music store near Plaza Serrano, prefers William B. Yeats and Wallace Stevens, as far as poets go. Asked to choose two successful songs, after mentioning Nick Drake and Nic Jones, the musician mentions Leonard Cohen and his Famous Blue Raincoat and Dylan and his Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands, a somewhat abstract song, he says. In order to write a song I have to go into a kind of trance, he says. It is a very high state of concentration and I can work for 18 hours straight. I don't usually dissect the ideas and what happens to me is like what happened to Dorothy Parker: I don't know what I think until I read what I write. 1This tuning is called *Do Mayor* in Spanish. 2Hugo Moyano is the head of the General Confederation of Labour of the Argentine Republic, one of the world's largest trade unions. He is not the only famous Moyano, but given the context, it is most likely that Richard refers here to this Moyano. ------------------------------ End of shindell-list-digest V10 #138 ************************************