Lesser lights are laid out like luminaries
on the way along a road that’s paved
What’s it’s like to face all these two-bit trials, Lord
I can’t say if my bright ideas flicker and fade
when they’re put on the page
Lesser lights are always a rage
I won’t be ashamed
Lesser lights will play out like loud celebrities
on stage in a forgotten age
Whether the world will stay in its orbit or it
withers away with a bang one day
could be fodder for a gossiping
writer’s scathing exposé
Lesser lights shine on all the same
in the darkest days
Lesser lights on a hill
a city in vain
Lesser lights in a pill
dissolving away
Take one for the pain
Lesser lights have made up all my songs
an immortal mistake while I was barely awake
Time has a scythe that takes out
my billy club and siren shake
with a spear that’s a fake
I could die and rise up again
with an adroit plié
Lesser lights are a rousing refrain
of legerdemain
Lesser lights are swill
a drunkard’s stain
Lesser lights can kill
and they can stay the killing for days
We’ll all burn away
Here on the Subanimal Sounds blog you will witness the brave and limitless wrestling match with the abyss, as two songwriters bash it out each month, stabbing vainly in the dark, trying to write songs. Catbirdman is one player; Mr. Crozier is another. The challenge has gone out: to write one song each month. For January, there are no rules. Just write it and let it stand. Prove you can do it. By the end of the month there will be audial proof, and it will show up here on this blog. Catbirdman has a head start; the January song is written already. It’s called “Lesser Lights.” Soon I will post the lyrics, and in the meantime I call to Mr. Crozier: leave the Bank behind, just for a moment; follow the real reason you get up and get out — write that song.
On this Tuesday night, on the back of my weekly call with the Catbirds’ business manager, I’m pondering the overlap between business and dreams. “If you build it they will come” isn’t always a sound marketing strategy, but it’s the only one worth leaning on when you’re laying the foundation. This track by Voxtrot looks at “the queer life” versus “the real life;” the former a foray into fancy and unbridled wandering, and the latter a grounded, legitimized, and accepted facade. The queer life looms behind the real life, like the subconscious, in its immeasurable way, driving the world of the conscious. What we are is what we know and what we can see. But what drives us is what we want to be.
I’ve been sitting on an interview with Baby Teeth from August 6 of this past summer. Eventually I’ll post it here on Subanimal Sounds. Baby Teeth are an earnest but scary group of guys from Chicago, and when you get to know them they’re not so scary. Abraham Levitan is the leader, a cool-mannered, if gawky, outsider with a self-proclaimed history of obsession, if you can believe his lyrics. He started with the great girl groups of the 1960s, and found inspiration in various pockets of showbiz from there on. Abraham always has a half-smile bordering on a full-on guffaw. He means it, and isn’t bothered with the window dressing. Pitchfork reviewed Baby Teeth’s 2009 album, Hustle Beach, and in so doing quickly devolved into label-mongering and contemplating the meaning of the term “guilty pleasure.” What’s guilty about a pleasure? You either like it or you don’t. I do. Abraham sings it. I believe it.
Once or twice a week, I pass through the “Miracle on 34th Street” – the boundless bombast of garish lights that floods the one block between my house and my favorite watering hole, Rocket to Venus. They sell hot sausages there, three for $5. There are Christmas trees made of hubcaps, and one made of old vinyl records. there’s a Natty Boh logo in lights. There are gawkers galore. Tonight we wish you “Season’s Greetings” from Baltimore, USA, with hopes of more substantial tidings to come. To usher in these greetings, we have a stellar track from Baltimore’s finest, Beach House, and one from Baltimore’s most obscure group, the Catbirds.
Woke up with a feelin’ last Tuesday, and there I was lyin’ on the floor. Bears in hibernation, cats on the prowl, moles scurrying for their lives… the whole scene opened up before my eyes. I wrote it down. It became “Kitty’s First Words, Part 2.” I wrote a rock opera, basically.