The magenta skies are an otherworld of post-apocalyptic beauty, the celestial backdrop against which the Muses play, and spiritual beings perhaps, and ultimately it’s the clean slate that wipes us all out when Death finally rests upon us. Regardless of hopes and beliefs in an afterlife (which are not addressed in this song; I don’t get that far), the magenta skies will claim the spirit just as the soil devours muscle and bone. The magenta skies are the death of spirit. That’s what this is about, and I never realized it until this very post. There are temporary deaths of the spirit, while we yet live, but the spirit resurrects. My religious background taught me that the spirit never dies a final death, and I do believe that still, though I have no evidence for any of this. I think the spirit is kind of like a cell phone battery – you have to let it drain all its power and recharge it time and time again for it to remain at full strength…      (Um, OK, so chew on that one for a while. Talk about bringing the grandiose down to the pedestrian level…)

Anyway, below are the lyrics. Thanks to Dave Crozier for recording this with me. It sounds great so far, and I can’t wait to hear what happens to it after a bass guitar track and various guitar treatments are added.

Full of sweetness and light
Full of the moon
Empty inside
Dark as a mother’s womb
Bright as a bird whose song belies
Every shade of grey
In magenta skies

Shining actress in white
Hollywood star
She’s to die for
Always seen from afar
Wearing a blurred but bold disguise
Unafraid to play
In magenta skies

Banish darkness from night
Banish the sun
From the daytime
Let it come all undone
Call them absurd, the lows and highs
Let them fade away
In magenta skies

The Catbirds: In Magenta Skies IV [Demo First Mix]

January is already in the books, and were it not for my lackadaisical bachelor ways, the songs would have been posted weeks ago. But I had a Natty Boh or three to drink, and a friend or two to see, and I had to sleep as well, and, well, let’s just be grateful they’re here at last. So without further ado, here are the January songs…

Dave Crozier starts off with a greeting to a former, or would-be lover, a fanciful desert mirage named Vera. He chose to play to his strength: taking on a dubious narrator’s voice, telling deluded tales of skewed romance. The narrator is never to be trusted in a Crozier song, and often times the narrative is told second hand, or seen from a distorted reflection. In this case, our protagonist reveals how often he has listened to a cassette recording made by the titular Vera, wearing it out as he wore out his heart. “You can’t put the contents of your life on a cassette,” the narrator moans, yet he must believe you can, or at least he searched over and over for the bottom line as he oxidized that C-90 that Vera gave him years back. Out of necessity, the singer writes in the present, but what ends up in the forefront are the contents of what has been lost over the course of many years. Loss is key to this song, I think. The singer saw a different future, which became the lost past, yet he won’t let go. A nice start for Mr. Crozier, a misty snapshot, a sketch of lost connections. Can’t wait to see what February holds.

Dave Crozier: Hello Vera

Mr. Catbirdman’s January song is called “Lesser Lights – see the lyrics here. In a nutshell the song is about what lasts and what doesn’t last, and what doesn’t last outlasts that which does. These efforts we make, the flashes and sparks, the rises and falls of celebrities, some known the world over (for now), some worshipped in nooks, unseen by others, and all of us trying to be heroic and bright. Me, I write songs. But who cares? Who will care a hundred years from now? No matter, it doesn’t stop me from writing. Nor should it.

The Catbirds: Lesser Lights

A year ago yesterday a senseless tragedy occurred, when a man who lived for rock and roll died the same way. Christopher Tucker was only 37 when it happened. I don’t feel right in disclosing the details, but let’s just say the police were involved. Christopher was always trying to live larger than his immediate confines, and he always imagined himself into a higher state of being. Drugs would assist his efforts, but he didn’t really need them. He had a natural swagger, an edgy hint of melancholy, and a devotion to coolness like no one since Ian McCulloch.

I worked with Chris on and off (he kept quitting to dive headlong into music, then he would come back to pay a few bills), in the early ‘Aughts. I was drawn to him right away. Here was a man who brought a sheen of grandness to everything he did. Even mundane office tasks were mythologized the way he carried them. It was as though every meaningless moment became transformed into yet another moment in the glorious biography of Christopher Tucker, rock star.

I don’t mean this to sound snooty; I am being sincere. He just carried things that way. He was a thinking man, a sensitive man even, and as such he could view himself objectively. But his never-ending belief in his music fueled him always.

I always believed in him. Our co-workers thought of him as just another office tech, slapping together direct mail for a reasonable wage. But I was inspired by him and his pursuit of cool, and even before hearing his music, I rooted for his success. I’m not usually one to get caught up in “being cool,” knowing that as many people as you can squeeze in a barroom, that’s the same number of definitions of the term you could find. But coolness to Chris was a must; it meant you were stepping up your game, living each day like it was the last, or some other bunk you might see on a motivational poster. That kind of sloganistic nonsense was coopted by Chris and done real. It meant breathing deeply, inhaling the world, and then exhaling in a measured sneer, with a few well-chosen rhyming words.

I used to go out on the town in Wilmington with Chris from time to time. I remember driving down to the swollen banks of the Brandywine Creek on a day we all had off work due to flooding. Chris just wanted to get as close to possible to the breaking point. He would always call you on it if you were being a dork. He took it as a personal affront, actually. I remember once he confided to me about a guy who had started hanging around him and how he started “acting uncool.” He actually wanted my advice, how to handle it. The guy was just being stupid and wankerly I guess. This bothered Chris. It was like this time when I played poker with him (I used to go over every Friday night for a while), and I had too much to drink, and I started playing sloppy and dancing like a maniac. That to Chris was insulting. Be cool, man. Looking back, I see he was just trying to save me from myself, trying to encourage me to embrace my own dignity which he knew I had. He was right.

The first time I went out with him, he inspired me to bring my A-game to the situation, and amazingly, I carried myself like a hipster par nonchalance. To this day I don’t know how I did it (I usually am far from hip), but every word out of my mouth was dripping with sardonic absurdity and class. I ordered the right drinks. I laughed at the right times, and never too vigorously. I referred to the right music. I dusted everyone in darts. Christopher’s roommate, Jonathan, was an ex-Liverpudlian, and we talked Bunnymen and La’s. That’s when I learned that Chris’s favorite group was the La’s.

It was Chris that made me actually get Lee Mavers. Before meeting him, I thought of Mavers as just a marginal guy who led a fleeting group that wrote some catchy tunes. But Chris spoke of him in hushed tones, claiming he was the greatest genius Liverpool ever produced, and that the whole history of the world was in that one La’s album. I made a few protests about the lyrics, saying they weren’t quite up to that level of greatness, and claimed that a few of the tracks were “iffy.” “You’re crazy,” was all he would say. He was right. Every track the La’s produced sounds like it comes from another world, and the transcendental fight for awakeness and with-it-ness that Chris embodied came straight from Mavers’ mouth. I have since become a sycophantic disciple, and every time I get slain by the La’s I think of Chris. Every time. I miss him and wish he were around to hear some of the previously-unheard BBC sessions and studio tracks that have surfaced since his death.

When I got the email about a year ago today saying Chris had died, it really hit me. I hadn’t seen him for about four or five years, and had lost track of his career, but I felt a real loss. I felt like some of my own better instincts, my own coolness, was mourning his death.

My half-remembered rememberings barely scratch at the surface of who Christopher Tucker was. For a more proper biography, please check out this tribute on the Girl About Town blog.

Here are some bitchin’ tracks. The 2002 Reece Nasty EP is my favorite, with these three tracks standing proudly (in my mind) alongside what I’ve heard from Oasis (another group that inspired Chris in music and life). Listening to them now brings too much emotion to contain. When I told him that “Why I Can’t Relate” reminded me of the La’s, he nearly hugged me. He said that’s exactly where that song came from, and I was the only one to recognize that. (I felt proud.)

The Situation: Don’t Wait For Me
The Situation: The Best Prescription Pill Available
The Situation: Why I Can’t Relate

And here’s a few from the self-titled full-length album. You can hear the growth in the lyrics, as Chris fuses a Dylanistic surrealism and a parade of characters and spinning scenes with a hard-footed Britpop football anthem mentality. I wish I had more room to go into these, maybe some other time…

The Situation: Amoralia
The Situation: Modern Dances
The Situation: Cherry
The Situation: Let It Go

Rest in peace, la.

And with “Old Hairy Eyebrows,” we’ve saved the best for last. Here’s a queasy sea shanty tale about a man lost at sea. It begins with a slow motion image of an Egyptian boy laughing amidst the waves. Let go the aft. After this talispin, we visit the hard-snorting crew, keeping us afloat. And then the heart-breaking bridge, which is worth quoting at length:

If you bob among the waves, the bonny bonny waves
And if you’re last among the lost you’ll be lost the same.
If you bob among the waves, the bonny bonny waves
And if you’re lost among the lost it ain’t the same as being saved.

As our singer leans left, weaves right, and searches the horizon, we wade along, beautiful losers all.

Dan Philips: Old Hairy Eyebrows

This fantastic shot of a desolate Baltimore city street was taken by Patrick Joust, and is used with his permission and patience. Thanks to him; please see more of work, starting here.

The first five years of our lives define our path, irretrievably some say. I work with young adults that have been pretty well screwed in the nature and nurture department. You’d be surprised how everything from the presence of a father to the presence of lead paint can affect a child’s development. Studies show that crime spreads with the migration of criminals. Studies show that America is a dangerous country to live in. Studies show that the human brain is an organ. Studies show nothing of morals.

These days, I’d trade my skin for a clean escape. Dan Philips is a man who once wrote a song called “Dreams of Vagrancy;” perhaps he felt the tenuous nature of a priveleged white upper-class existence. Perhaps he felt the ghastly lure of addiction round the unseen corner. Perhaps he felt his blood beat boldly in his veins. Dan Philips is a man of the blood.

Without wanting to reveal all his cards to the prying public, I will volunteer this information: Dan Philips was nurtured by caring, educated stock. He was encouraged to become whole, and he was swamped in ol’ time religion (as was I). Maybe that revival tent seemed dangerous. Maybe the long stare of the evangelist cast the same spell of the cold precision of the mobster. In “Grunts N Groans,” Dan lays out the human animal in its barest form, and connects the dope fiend to the slain believer. He pulls no punches when it comes to human motivation, and our reptilian brians fight or flee when faced with hunger and entrapment. Dan’s music pits the human animal against the elements, and divine grace is legendary and fleeting at best. The best we can hope for in Dan’s grim world – the fragile we, with outstretched arms – are cagey parental expressions of love in the form of long stares and coded silences.

“Dan’s grim world:” that sounds patronizing and cheap. This is a rich and traveled man. He and his old hairy eyebrows (see tomorrow’s post for more on that) have poured more love and grace into the grim world than almost any other saint I know. He is both welcoming and private, and I fear I am intruding with my words. I hope to go on more in this direction tomorrow, but for now let’s stick with the music. Have a listen for yourself, absorb the country piano and the backwoods drawl, and contemplate your own private life of crime and your own brushes with calamity.

Dan Philips: Grunts N Groans

John Martin: "Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah" (1852)

Dan Philips writes about “Calamity,” but it strikes me that the disasters alluded to are either feared, half-remembered or illusory. He paints a barren scene of Old Testament wandering and scorched earth, and you can almost taste the dust in your teeth, and you can almost feel the textured canvas and the oils. It feels like oral tradition handed down beyond memory, but told by a new prophet. Like Josiah breathing life into the recovered scrolls of Deuteronomy, but without the forced public acceptance, and without any received application or interpretation. Dan Philips is the voice of hunger, and his words are half-starved. “Here’s having hunger that scorns food.”

As long as I’ve known him, Dan has had the ability to stare down the most harrowing corners of existence more than any songwriter I’ve known. He continues to inspire and stupefy me.

I can’t quite qualify exactly what Dan’s relationship with calamity is. All these allusions to Biblical losses: is he counting them as loss? Is the Gomorrah within depraved or noble? Did Esau actually get a good deal? I wonder if Dan’s internalizing all of history, from the tales of Genesis (“Here’s to your birthright for beans”), to the conquests of Alexander the Great (“Here’s to the phalanges march”); he claims all these as the “wasteland within,” and he ends up with “a hambone I longingly clutch” and a longing to have “something you’re born to.” In just three verses, he brilliantly roams amongst multi-layered and multi-sourced oral and written legend, and ultimately brings it back to a solitary picture of a man in the desert.

Dan Philips: Calamity

Dave Crozier: Judy’s In My Head
Dave Crozier: Her Heart’s Inside A Circle

Energy is a priceless commodity. We burn it away on lost causes and second-rate concerns, and then we wonder why we’re left staring at a blank page. Tonight I tried (and failed, for the moment anyway) to create something positive, something lyrical. But I’m still building up flex in my muscles. I’ve held the world on my shoulders, and I built up bulk, but I don’t have the speed. In Crozier’s “The Last 20 Saturday Nights,” the singer is not a man who’s light on his feet. He’s a man who doesn’t believe in regrets, yet is left looking at the past. Dave Crozier is one of the fiercest men I know. Not in the usual gnarly teeth manner, mind you. He’s just utterly convinced of the need to forge into the fiery here and now, and he doesn’t buy into the culture of vicitimization. Good for him. We are all responsible for ourselves, and for making something slightly less flimsy out of the straw huts we live in. It’s that pursuit that we need to focus our energy on. Sometimes it means pausing, going slow for a moment, “staring at the stairs on [the] way up to the second floor.” No need to beat ourselves up when we get side-tracked by external dead-ends and “unholy marriages of ABBA and Sting” in our desperate searches for inspiration. After all, as Dave reminds us, “I’m not the only one who walked away when everything went wrong.” Just keep going, Mr. Crozier.

Dave Crozier: The Last 20 Saturday Nights
Dave Crozier: Staring At The Stairs

An ex-coworker of mine had a sign on his cubicle wall: “A good song can make you late for work. A great song can make you quit.” Most of us struggle with the work/life balance, and few of us get it right. Rock and roll is predictably uninsightful when it comes to this subject, because most players in this game have done just that all their lives: played. Look at Morrissey: he was essentially a blogger before blogs existed, and next thing he knew he hooked up with Johnny Marr and the rest is history. By the time the Smiths covered “Work is a Four-Letter Word,” Morrissey had already given us odes to David Brent-like bosses from hell who wrote “bloody awful poetry,” musings on how miserable he was after he found a job, and statements like “I wouldn’t bother” [going to work]. Well, sod him. What does he know?

And what does Paul Westerberg know, either? He pulled his bandmates out of school to gig with the ‘Mats. Now, I’m sure his work ethic was as bad as this demo claims:
The Replacements: Bad Worker (Paul Westerberg home demo)

But the point is these are not real people. They’re rock stars. So what of the rest of us?

Well, we’re left with a balancing act. Some of us merge work with play. Others punch our cards to fuel a hobby. Tonight I worked late, and now I’m blogging late, and I’ll be up early again tomorrow. The trick is to engage in both, to become vested in both. If you just punch a card, heaven knows you’ll be miserable. If you work so hard that you have no play to come home to, then not even rock and roll can save you.
Palace Music: Work Hard / Play Hard

The dedication, then, goes out to another ex-coworker, a regular visitor to this blog, Dave Crozier. I salute him for finding the right balance and carving out his own home studio (thanks for all the demos over the years, Dave!), and for taking weeks off here and there to create. This particular track was the result of one such sabbatical, back when he was advising me in project management for direct mail campaigns. He poured all of himself into both pursuits, took each seriously, and kept each in perspective. He has a wall full of guitars, real beauties, and they speak to him in primordial overtones. He is a disciple of the mystical Eighth Note Pulse. He thrives on the buzz and the growl. He just simply loves guitars. He also puts in a hard day’s work and takes pleasure from it. Here’s Dave Crozier’s heavy creation:
Dave Crozier: Heavy Creation

Kurt’s heart was broken, and he found himself in the depths. But although up close it swells and contracts wildly, life’s emotional tide looks flat when seen from afar. “My Sister” offered Kurt a considered, wide-angle view of the panoramic tragicomedy that life amounts to. So many stories told, so many storytellers. If only we listen hard enough.

Do you remember my sister? How many mistakes did she make with those never-blinking eyes? I couldn’t work it out. I swear she could read your mind, your life, the depths of soul at one glance. Maybe she was stripping herslf away, saying:

Here I am, this is me. I am yours and everything about me, everything you see…
If only you look hard enough.

I never could.

Historians, banking on the “hindsight is 20/20″ axiom, hope that by heeding the past, one need not repeat it. Yet clarity is as elusive in the long view as it is in the moment. For every genius claiming the Dark Ages were dark, four other dunces focus on the light therein. Still, broadening the perspective can help the individual to gain emotional distance and peace. We may not figure it all out, but at least we can spread it out and see it on one single page. Starting with childhood, then:

Our life was a pillow-fight. We’d stand there on the quilt, our hands clenched ready. Her with her milky teeth, so late for her age, and a Stanley knife in her hand. She sliced the tyres on my bike and I couldn’t forgive her.

She went blind at the age of five. We’d stand at the bedroom window and she’d get me to tell her what I saw. I’d describe the houses opposite, the little patch of grass next to the path, the gate with its rotten hinges forever wedged open that Dad was always going to fix. She’d stand there quiet for a moment. I thought she was trying to develop the images in her own head. Then she’d say:

I can see little twinkly stars, like Christmas tree lights in faraway windows.
Rings of brightly coloured rocks floating around orange and mustard planets.
I can see huge tiger striped fishes chasing tiny blue and yellow dashes, all tails and fins and bubbles.

I’d look at the grey house opposite, and close the curtains.

And there, glowing and pulsing, is the other main thread running through “My Sister.” The imaginative view, the dream, based on nothing other than an inborn hope and belief in color. Our lives are never as we dream them. Our surroundings never live up to the life we could imagine for ourselves. Even the most peaceful of us can admit without hesitation that in this world, something is wrong. Does this mean we repudiate “real stuff,” or can we live amongst it?

At the very least, we can choose at each moment to live with valor and class in the midst of it. Kurt remembers the first time he saw Tindersticks in concert:

I went to go see them at The Double Door when we were living in Glen Ellyn. It was standing room only, but before the show, I had  somehow snagged a stool and placed it up against stage right. So I got to sit the  entire time, just being poured over by the music…

The music opened for “My Sister,” and Stuart Staples began speaking the words in his rumbled voice. I think it was my favorite at the time, because the story was so tragicomic [editor's note: Kurt and I both came upon this word independently, I swear it!], and the form unconventional on top of the brilliance of the music and the cello-like tone of Staples’ voice.

Somewhere in the first quarter of “My Sister,” the band misstepped and  the song petered to a halt. Staples turned around, without any off expression to the audience, exchanged a few calm words with the band, “Let’s take it from ‘I can see little twinkly stars…” BAM!  Back into it. It was the smoothest transition from disarray to resume I had ever witnessed.

That night, they were decked out in their tailored suits. I remember it in black and white, not color. It remains as one of the classiest shows I’ve ever seen.

The breakdown on stage and the ensuing recovery make a neat metaphor for what goes on in the song itself. The sister’s tragic life continues:

She burned down the house when she was ten. I was away camping with the scouts. The fireman said she’d been smoking in bed – the old story, I thought. The cat and our mum died in the flames, so Dad took us to stay with our aunt in the country. He went back to London to find us a new house. We never saw him again.

On her thirteenth birthday she fell down the well in our aunt’s garden and broke her head. She’d been drinking heavily. On her recovery her sight returned, a fluke of nature everyone said. That’s when she said she’d never blink again. I would tell her when she stared at me, with her eyes wide and watery, that they reminded me of the well she fell into. She liked this, it made her laugh.

With eyesight returned, the grey and the real are inescapable. Past tragedy is shown in hard light. But the sister embraces it, finds beauty of her own. Maybe hjer imagination still works behind the scenes? What a vivid parallel with the beginning of the narrative, with the sister’s never-blinking eyes, and how the narrator related them to the depth of the well, and the “depths of your soul.”

She moved in with a gym teacher when she was fifteen, all muscles he was. He lost his job when it all came out, and couldn’t get another one. Not in that kind of small town. Everybody knew everyone else’s business. My sister would hold her head high, though. She said she was in love. They were together for five years until one day he lost his temper. He hit over the back of the neck with his bullworker. She lost the use of the right side of her body. He got three years and was out in fifteen months. We saw him a while later, he was coaching a non-league football team in a Cornwall seaside town. I don’t think he recognized her. My sister had put on a lot of weight from being in a chair all the time. She’d get me to stick pins and stub out cigarettes in her right hand. She’d laugh like mad because it didn’t hurt. Her left hand was pretty good though. We’d have arm wrestling matches, I’d have to use both arms and she’d still beat me.

We buried her when she was 32. Me and my aunt, the vicar, and the man who dug the hole. She said she didn’t want to be cremated and wanted a cheap coffin so the worms could get to her quickly. She said she liked the idea of it, though I thought it was because of what happened to the cat, and our mum.

The full arc of the sister’s live is told, then, against a maudlin yet emotionless soundtrack, with jokey trombones and swirly saws. The melodies pile on each other, repeated themes moving harmlessly, linearly, through the grand, elusive epic. What did/does it all mean? The sister chooses to go out on her own terms, in a cheap coffin. She saw in color to the last, haunted perhaps by the fires of the past, maybe even unable to see them clearly, but still laughing like mad.

Kurt looked at his own broken heart and realized it wasn’t even half over, not yet.

Tindersticks: My Sister

Readers of this blog will understand that I, Catbirdman, will show a tendency towards the dramatic from time to time. The language of Keats, while mechanically far beyond my technical scope, will inform the belief system upon which Subanimal Sounds is based. I am not afraid to think big or talk big, and to embrace the naiveté to believe it.

I do believe in spirit and in the unfathomable double-sided coin of wholeness and despair. I believe that such spiritual states can have physical make-up, and that they can be sensed. I believe that it is good to listen, and not to turn your ear away, when a chill of terror takes hold. Underneath all of that, I believe we should respond with love to others, in an effort to help them hear their own music.

These beliefs can be apocalyptic, in the sense that a person can undergo a sea change. There is slow evolution, and there are sudden mutations, epiphanies. But Point Z can appear to be a universe away from Point A. Worlds do end and others begin. Again, I turn to the clean prophet, Mr. Lee Mavers:

Love is all

The world will fall

And this is all we came here for

I hear the ever-distant

Callin’ All

If I am Love’s assistant then I bawl:

“If all the world should fall then let it fall”

And another oft-quoted (by me) lyric from Ian McCulloch:

Aim for stars and hit the sky.

It’s a fool’s errand to be sure, to aim for the unattainable. But that’s what the best music does, so why should a music blog be any different? This is a music blog, and as such, we will be listening on this blog. There will be “For A Friend” posts and “From A Friend” posts. We are all informed by each other. I will continue to prod for comments and increased readership, even if I grow old doing it.

Subanimal sounds are those reverberations of the unseen, the exercises of spirit. They are the vestiges of the chills, the burnt image of beauty, like sunspots on the retina. As soon as you look at beauty, it’s gone. But the subanimal sounds are left in its wake, and are captured here, poorly and crudely. But it’s something.