My dad is a professional musician; he's spent the entirety of my life and some years besides playing the guitar. His work has taken him around the planet, having done gigs in the Middle East, Japan, and all over Europe. So, it may be a bit surprising to learn that I didn't really play a lot of music as a kid.
Okay, that's a distortion: I played quite a bit of piano for a good seven or eight years, I think. (It's hazy now, so I can't say for certain.) I took piano lessons from my grandmother when I was a wee youngling, then from a neighbor (whose two youngest daughters ended up coming through my classes a few years later, which was a great delight). I ended up being pretty average at it. It was a good foundation, but I didn't have enough skills to even be able to accompany missionary singing during my time in Florida. And though I could improvise enjoyable tunes, I didn't really invest a lot of time in my piano skills. Right around the age of sixteen--in fact, I know it was age sixteen, because I distinctly remember thinking, I have a driver's license. I can get myself to MediaPlay and buy a guitar book!--I started my journey into the guitar. I had tried a couple of times to learn from my dad, but he was, frankly, too good a player for me. Once I had purchased my Piano/Vocal/Guitar songbook of Dave Matthew Band's Under the Table and Dreaming, I set about learning how to play the instrument. I haven't looked back. People have asked me if my dad taught me how to play the guitar, as I've been doing it for about twenty years now and can play pretty well--if I do say so myself. I tell them that, no, he didn't teach me, but he did provide a solid, unwavering interest in what I wanted to do. He only gave me a hard time about broken strings once--and I did break a fair number of strings as I was learning how to control my right hand--and pretty much supported me as necessary so that I could learn at my own speed and with my own taste intact. Now that I'm a dad, I feel remiss for not having my kids be piano players already. Though my wife and I both play piano (she much better than I), neither of us can teach piano, so we had basically given up on the idea. A new neighbor moved in, however, and was willing to teach two of our boys and work with our bizarre schedule. They've been at it for only a week and already they're enjoying what they have. The metronome clicks for fifteen to twenty minutes at a time, and I can only hope that it's something that's going to stay. It has, I realized, been rather lonely only having my guitar sing songs in our home. Speaking of guitars, my middle son wanted to take guitar lessons from my dad (who has spent quite a few years teaching people of a low level, so he's better equipped to handle teaching his grandson--or, maybe I just didn't know how to learn from him) so he has started his own journey. I'm hopeful that he can pick it up in a way that not only makes sense to him, but makes him happy to learn more music. One of the things that helped broaden my musical vocabulary was learning the instrument. I wanted to be able to play an ever increasing library of music, so that, in turn, pushed me to listen to other things than I might otherwise have avoided. If nothing else, having more music is one of the small--but significant--ways that we can brighten the world. I hope my boys can join in on that endeavor. This past Tuesday night, my wife and I went to the USANA Amphitheater here in Utah to watch the Dave Matthews Band perform. They walked on stage at about fifteen after eight and didn't finish the set (with a quick wait for the encore) until about 10:30. It was a fantastic night, filled with some of their oldest songs (including my always-and-forever favorite, "Satellite", a song I didn't think I'd ever see them perform live because, well…let's be honest, they're probably pretty darn sick of it) as well as something from basically every album, and a handful from their new one, Come Tomorrow. As a result, I felt like I should pick up where I left off in my analysis of Before These Crowded Streets. However, the next track on the album is "Halloween", which is a…weird…entry. When I was a kid and listening to this album, I didn't think too much about how incongruous it is with the rest of the philosophy that undergirds Before These Crowded Streets, most particularly with the profanities and contrary message to songs like "Pantala Naga Pampa" and "Pig". The upshot was that I really didn't know how to tackle this one. Much of the guidance that I use for my look at the music comes from the 1998 guitar and vocal tablature book published by Cherry Hill, and the vocal section has an asterisk at the beginning of the ninth measure, when the singing begins: "The lyrics to this song have been intentionally omitted." At first, in my Mormonism-explains-the-entire-world thinking, I figured it was because it swore. It didn't really sound like swearing, of course (I had this problem identifying the f-bomb being dropped in "Lounge Fly" on Stone Temple Pilot's Purple album, which, when I finally recognized it, made me sad, because it was one of my favorite songs on the disc), so I rationalized that it's all so growly and scream-o that you'd be hard pressed to hear the swears. And, while it could be true that, in 1998, publishing a guitar book with swear words in it was considered a risky move, I think the better answer is probably that the band--which doesn't have the lyrics to "Halloween" printed in the liner notes--didn't want the lyrics published. I have heard alternatives to this song, including the acoustic-only version with Tim Reynolds from the Live at Luthor College two-disc set, and though the lyrics are similar to what's on Before These Crowded Streets, they're different enough for me to guess that Dave Matthews prefers to have some sort of flexibility with what he sings in this rage-a-thon song. So, what are the lyrics? Here we go: Hey little dreamer's eyes open and staring up at me Listening to the song again with the lyrics in front of me, I'd have to say that I feel like much of what's written is conjectural. "Love this I'll tame you" sounds right, but only if you see the line and then heard it sung, almost as if the suggestion is sufficient to getting the "right" response.
Still, these are close enough, and I think it's safe to call them the "official" lyrics, even if there is this weird gap in the liner notes and my music book. What's to make of these lyrics, then? Well, it's not a particularly pretty picture. There's a sense of predation, stalking, rage, substituting lust for love, and an overall impression of malintent. Much like in "Don't Drink the Water", Matthews has taken on a persona for the song (at least, I'd like to think that he's not someone who believes in stalking a "little girl" and stealing her soul), perhaps the concept of the spirit of the holiday of Halloween. If the lyrics as written are conjectural, surely so is this interpretation. These are thoughts that fit better into a Slipknot song than the Dave Matthews Band. Maybe there's something in the music that can help shed light on what's going on here? In terms of its verse, it's a three-chord song, with an F to B to C progress, repeated again and again. When the chorus comes in, it walks down a diatonic tetrachord progression, starting at A (on the guitar, it's an A5 power chord that's used) and then G, F, and E at the end. There's a bridge that uses an Asus2 and a B minor in it (at the "Why do you run around here" part), but those eight measures don't come back in for the rest of the song. And with the heavy, simple chord progression (the exact same chord progression as what Green Day uses in "Brain Stew", which came out a couple of years before the Dave Matthews Band released Before These Crowded Streets) of the chorus--a descending scale so familiar that I only had to google the notes and I could find out the name of it--there's only the verse to look at for the song's unique flavor. Well, that may be overstating it: There is something slightly eerie about having a IV to I chord progression that's off-set by including the half-step down from the I chord (in this case, using a B before the C). There is no natural B in an F major scale, so the note jars with what might otherwise be expected. In this, at least, the music mirrors the overall impression of the song--it jars and doesn't do what I would expect a song on this album to do. Taken into account the content of the lyrics, that seems to be--to some degree, at least--a reasonable interpretation of what's going on here. There's more, however, than just the guitar part. The song's rhythm section is driving and aggressive--much more so than is typical for the band--and the orchestral arrangements, unusual instruments, ethereal and threatening outro (complete with Alanis Morrisette's uncredited shrieking and surprise f-bombs) all combine to make an unhappy, brooding, antagonistic track. "Halloween" focuses on primal anger, shunting away any positivity that may be lingering in the album this far. In fact, with the sharp snare, going off like a pistol shot at the beginning of the song, whatever residual tranquility "Stay (Wasting Time)" may have left us is gone, driven away by the growling, incoherent singing/wailing of the lyrics and the off-putting musical composition. The shrill shriek of Boyd Tinsely's violin arrangement acts almost like a sonic allusion to the theme from Psycho, pushing the song deeper into a horror-movie vibe. At this point in his career, Matthews hadn't used an electric guitar for any of his songs. (And, considering the bizarre attempt at something heavier in their 2005 album with the song "Hunger for the Great Light", it's probably fair to say that most of the time, Matthews probably wouldn't have handled "Halloween" much better.) Yet with its refusal to use almost any open chords (only the E major and Asus2 are open), Matthews seems to have written a rock song. If anything, it should've been heavily distorted and the guitars dialed up higher than the rest of the album. Instead, it tries to split the difference, which leaves me, at least, a bit unsettled. And, honestly, I kind of think that was the point. The past month saw the lowest amount of writing that I have done since…I started noting how much writing I do in a month. Squeaking by with just over 23,000 words in April, it might be tempting to say that I have reached a low-water mark in my creative output. To a certain extent, this is true. By giving up the daily writing of non-fiction (these essays), I did not, as I had hoped, put my new-found time into writing more fiction. Instead, I played more video games than usual. Let me back up a bit: For Lent, I abstained from playing Overwatch (as mentioned here), which led to finding a substitute for what I'd given up. I would slide into a state of mental emptiness that I sort of looked forward to. I don't know if it's the time of year (the World Wars are a difficult subject for me to teach and require a large investment of energy and emotion) or what, but I seriously have no drive to do basically anything at all whilst I'm at home. Make some dinner, get after the boys for not doing their chores (they excel at ignoring me), and then, once the minions are tucked in bed, plopping down on the couch and zoning out. I will fold laundry during loading screens (helps me feel like I'm contributing), but otherwise I'm pretty sedentary. Sometimes, I don't even want to keep playing, but I do anyway. How do you stop addictions? All that being said, I have done something in the past month that is highly unusual for me: I've started composing, for lack of a better term, an album. Back at the top of April, I hit a sudden "mid-life crisis" wherein I felt like I needed a new guitar. I have purchased exactly three guitars in my life, now: One, when I was seventeen or eighteen, when I went with my dad to find a black acoustic-electric; two, when I was on my mission in Miami, Florida and got a ¾ size guitar to haul around and play on Preparation Day; and three, the one I got in April of 2019 (again in the company of my dad). So buying a new guitar was a bit of an exciting experience for me. We went to a guitar shop in Provo where the owner knew my dad (who's a professional guitarist, so that makes sense), and we played about on the sundry instruments for quite some time. I settled on one, but it needed a bit of work on the saddle and some new strings. My dad and I visited his mom in a retirement home for a half hour or so, then went back and picked up the new beauty. It wasn't 100%, but it was still a new heartthrob for me. (I couldn't play for part of the weekend because I had played it so much that my fingers hurt.) There were some kinks to iron out; once those were done, I was one happy player. The reason I picked up a new guitar, however, was because I was writing this "album". I had composed a couple of songs on my Washburn dreadnought and had felt that it wasn't sounding quite what I wanted it to sound like. I had had the guitar for almost twenty years--it's a good guitar and I still love it in that "first true love" kind of way--and it was, frankly, just not what I wanted. Hence the reason we were off to the guitar shop. (Interestingly, the reason I knew the songs weren't sounding right is because I had gone to my parents' house and, whilst there, tried out some music that I had only ever heard on my own guitar on a new instrument. Upon hearing the tunes on my dad's Taylor, I realized that it was my old guitar that wasn't up to snuff…at least, so far as what I wanted my songs to sound like.) The composition of the album has been an interesting experience for me. I'm not a good singer…at all. This isn't false modesty, either. I have a range that comprises maybe a solid octave: everything else is a crapshoot. Because I have no confidence in my voice, I'd never really tried to compose lyrics or melodies--it was too embarrassing. This time, however, I decided to buckle down and actually try writing some of what was in my heart. I came up with a simple riff and an interesting chord progression for a song I call "Falling Away", but the thing that really turned the tide is that a melody came out of my mouth. This had never really happened before. Zeroing in on that one part and then trying to pick out notes that fit inside the chord progression I'd formed, I was able to construct two-thirds of the song. All I needed was a bridge. I couldn't quite get it. So I set it aside, let it cool, and came back to it the next day. Then, with a bit more tinkering, I got the whole song down on a piece of paper. Part of my composition process it simply noodling around until I hear something interesting. Then I work out what key/mode I'm in, and then I start building around that. I found some interesting things about what I'm interested in writing:
One of the things I attempted while composing this album (and, since I don't have a drum kit, keyboards, or a bass guitar, it's an all-acoustic album…despite having some ideas of what I would like to hear from the rest of a band) was to refrain from having a filter. Despite the brightness of my life, I live with a pretty steady sense of depression, which chauffers me from moment to moment. Much of what I feel is a kind of comparative emotionally negative experience. I didn't want to censor that from myself and put on a happy face. Even in my most optimistic song, I have lines about death. That's part of who I am and I don't want to hide it. Yet, as I say that, I don't want people to see/hear my music. I'm tempted to say "not yet, anyway," as if it's merely the fact that the music is unfinished. And, to a degree, that is true. But that one piece of music I have up there is tough to read, tough to understand. I'm aware of my flaws and putting them down in ink and extoling them in song is an intimidating experience. Nevertheless, it might be (?) fun to try to get these musical ideas put together in a more concrete way. If only I knew someone whose entire career has been built on making music… If only. To say that the fourth track on Dave Matthews Band's Before These Crowded Streets is anti-imperialist is as uncreative as coming up with a band name like "the Dave Matthews Band". In my mind, however, this song's power is not just in its message but also in its delivery--its simplicity is its power; its complexity is its worth. To start off, "Don't Drink the Water" has to be looked at from an African point of view--and by that I mean a Southern African point of view. Dave Matthews was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, and spent time, off and on in his childhood, in that country. In other interviews (which I couldn't find right away, so this may be hearsay), Matthews acknowledged that the sonic tapestry of South Africa influenced him throughout his life, and Carter Beauford, the band's drummer, locks into that pulsating rhythm in the song. The drum line--a couple of bass kicks and then some distinct snares--is the guitar line. Matthews's earlier work didn't see a lot of unique tunings--no capos, no open tunings, and until Everyday, he didn't use electric (or baritone) guitars--so this song was, reportedly, called "Drop-D"* during the production of the album, as it's the first to really feature this alternative tuning (though "Crush" is also in drop-D). This is how the guitar and the drum end up as the rhythm section: Matthews' striking of the low D is in time with Beauford's kick and Stefan Lessard's bass D. Instead of allowing those three parts of the band to break into lead guitar, bass, and drums (the last two often being the rhythm section), the song pulsates with all three instruments marching along in tandem. Despite this potentially static beat--written in 4/4 time and a scant 84 bpm in the album version--the intricacies of the bass line (freed up to be more melodic and riff-laden than the guitar part, for once), the droning of the violin, and the contributions of both LeRoi Moore's saxophone and guest-artist Bela Fleck's banjo all interweave in such a way that the music becomes layered and complex. One could pick a specific instrument and pay exclusive attention to it each time one listened and glean new musical connections. During the third verse, an electric guitar with distortion and a way hammers on harmonics, again providing texture and variability in what is, for most of the guitar part at least, a one-chord song. In fact, the majority of "Don't Drink the Water" is a D5 - G5 - B minor affair, with the verse running through the D5 until the pre-chorus begins ("So you will lay your arms down" is the first one) by playing the G5. The droning effect of this song makes the shift from D5 to G5 striking and refreshing--as if the brooding groove of the verse can only pound on the listener for so long before relief needs to come in. However, it's only two measures before it's back the D5--this is repeated throughout the pre-chorus--and then the verse returns. It isn't until the chorus (finally dragging in at 2:08) that a new chord is added to the vocabulary, the B minor. Though the guitar brings this in for a couple of measures to change that drone, it's only for two measures before it returns to the G5 to D5 progression. The point of all of this is to say that the guitar is painfully simple throughout almost all of the song, yet it remains captivating despite all of that. The album version of the song (used above; the music video is an interesting, abbreviated version that's worth looking at) goes at a slower, more inexorable pace than the live versions (also worth hearing). This slower pace turns the thudding of the rhythmic triad into a pounding wall of inevitability, one that underscores and enhances the theme of the track. That leads me to the lyrics of "Don't Drink the Water": Come out come out At the beginning, I pointed out that it's clear that the song is anti-imperialist. Phrases like "All I can say to you my new neighbor / Is you must move on or I will bury you" make it pretty clear what's going on. But the way these lyrics are constructed is what fascinates me: Matthews has taken on a persona of a colonizer, of a greedy conquistador. Rather than speaking about imperialism, he's speaking from it. Though I can't be certain, I feel like growing up in apartheid Africa surely gave Matthews a different lens through which this song is being cast. The Dave Matthews Band, at the time of this album's creation, was a five-man band--two white guys (Dave Matthews, guitar; and Stefan Lessard, bass) and three Black (Boyd Tinsley, violin; Leroi Moore, saxophone and others; Carter Beauford, drums). Racially and musically diverse, the Dave Matthews Band is, in many ways, a repudiation of the world that Matthews knew growing up. I don't know when I started to view imperialism with skepticism, though I'm certain songs like this were instrumental** in changing my assumption that the course of history was blameless. The music video of "Don't Drink the Water" puts us in an Amazonian flavor, but the song applies to Manifest Destiny--the way I used to take it, when I was younger and bothered to think about anything--as well as any other example of greed-as-motive-for-atrocities. I feel like the Manifest Destiny interpretation is one that I, as an American living in the West, am most responsible for and benefit the most from. As I've driven around my state, looking at the scrub oak and the variability of the Wasatch, the acres of farmland and the quiet cold of snow-swept mountains, I have thought back to the earlier inhabitants. As urban sprawl swallows up more miles of "empty" land, I can't help but think of the lines "And here I will spread my wings / Yes, I will call this home." The chilling dismissal of concerns ("What's this you say? You feel a right to remain? / Then stay and I will bury you" and "I have no time to justify to you / Fool, you're blind. Fool, move aside for me" are two quick examples) exemplifies what I hear in the rhetoric about imperial Europe. Progress, of course, is the banner under which these behaviors and beliefs live, and anyone who's blind to progress must be moved aside…or so the story goes. Which pushes me to the outro--the part where, particularly live, Matthews' anger at the injustice which he has been satirizing boils over--and the complete dropping of pretense. (I should say that, on occasion, Matthews will play the chorus one extra time, substituting his words for some of the lyrics of "This Land Is My Land", the effect of which is a haunting condemnation because of the context that surrounds it.) As the last chorus ends, Matthews sings, "I can breathe my own air / And I can sleep more soundly / Upon these poor souls / I'll build heaven and call it home / 'Cause you're all dead now." Atrocities like the Trail of Tears and recent injustices like Standing Rock are, in my mind, sudden snapshots of would-be ghosts, a people that has gone nowhere but here and were moved aside for the expansion of the imperialists. For a second time, here are the lyrics of the outro: I live with my justice The rank honesty--the mask of satire has slipped into outright scorn--is shocking. The musical effect here is striking as well: Alanis Morissette sings the melody with Matthews, though an octave higher, to provide an eerie doubling effect. More than that, however, a new chord is introduced, one which jabs at what Matthews is singing here. Instead of a D5 chord (with that 6th string still thumping away), he modulates the 5th note (usually an A) and slides it up a half-step (to a B flat). This discordant chord (try it out on an instrument and see how grating it is) is the crime of imperialism. It doesn't look like anything is too wrong; it's really close to a resolved chord. But it's completely jarring. It grinds away, creating an antagonistic clash to go along with the naked error that pushed so many millions into forgotten graves. Whose justice reigns? My justice. What's the motive? My frenzied feeding and greedy need. Why are they doing this? Hatred. Jealousy. These dark emotions are spat out, as if we could perhaps excise them if we were only to try hard enough.
The penultimate couplet--"I live with the notion / That I don't need anyone but me"--is such a withering indictment of the "rugged individualism" by which "the West was won" that I have a hard time really saying anything more than what's already there. Our founding as a nation is done because of our founding fathers; our country has been defended by our men and women in uniform--the notion that the individual I has created this world is clearly a false one, yet it is one of our more beloved lies. "Self-made man" is, actually, not a thing--John Donne was right: No man is an island. But there's another possibility--faint and unpleasant--that what Matthews' persona is pointing at, is the "me"…the "me" is the only one that even matters. "Me, yeah…" is how he drives toward the end of the song (after the ominous warning "Don't drink the water / There's blood in the water"), turning again to this monstrous concept of personal exceptionalism and Machiavellianism qua truth and justice--that the might of historical pressures and sundry conditions has made the right of the status quo. The cacophony with which the song ends--much like with "The Last Stop"--is a clash of cymbals, drum beats, screams, and warnings. Live, the song will pulse on for another couple of measures, ending where it begins but with the B flat/D chord jangling everything else. In the album version, the song winds down and slides into an interlude. However, the deep marks--the menacing history--that the song points us towards shouldn't do anything other than carve a new empathy for others, for what they've lost, for what we've gained. Interlude Almost as if we need something to cleanse our palate, we get a sixteen measure interlude. Different key, different time signature (the always-peculiar 5/8 time, until the last four measures, which are in 3/4 time). It's reminiscent of "#34" from Under the Table and Dreaming, with arpeggio chords and the entire band weaving their unique brand of music into the shifting chord progression. Of all the interludes of the album, this one is the most necessary (with "The Last Stop" being a close second), if only because its simplicity helps alleviate the weight of the previous song. Indeed, I think the interludes are one of the most crucial aspects of Before These Crowded Streets, giving a logical flow to the order of the songs, as well as emotional breaks from the intensity the music can create. So far as I know, the band never performs these snippets of music--and that's a real loss. Pieces of the songs are audible in other--sometimes earlier, sometimes later--works, but I'm not aware of any other Dave Matthews Band song that relies on the interlude for "Don't Drink the Water". --- * Tuning a guitar to a drop-D is simple: The sixth string--the low E--is detuned a full step so that its an open-D instead of an open-E. Because of how a guitar is tuned, this allows power chords (three note chords: an octave with a fifth in between) to be played more easily and aggressively. ** Pun most definitely intended. In the Cherry Lane Music songbook for Before These Crowded Streets, "Rapunzel" ends with a small note, Segue to "The Last Stop". On the album, a cellphone chirps and a conversation begins briefly in a swirl of Middle Eastern-inspired (for lack of a better name) sounds that ends with a "Hello?" Then the third track of the album, "The Last Stop", hits like a wall. Wailing, horns, drums, bass, and twelve-string guitar launch into a heavy rhythm. From a guitarist's point of view, the first measure is a simple affair of an F sharp major chord, strummed in time. If "Rapunzel" was less concerned with chords, the opposite is true of "The Last Stop"--which makes it an interesting choice for the next song on the album. While "Rapunzel" ends with the band weaving, jamming, and eventually coalescing on a tight ending, "The Last Stop" picks up at that same place (albeit in a different key, both musically and thematically) and then rushes into a song that will, eventually, spiral free and fade away. But I'm getting ahead of myself. "The Last Stop" (the video on this one doesn't have a live performance that I wanted, so it's the audio only of the album version) has long been one of my favorite songs of the album, in part because it's a more aggressive guitar part (which always mattered a lot to me, being the spastic teenager I was when I first learned to play this song). It also has a distinctive vibe to it, one that is, as I implied before, wrapped in an Arabic scale. This proves the foundation of the song, not just for the riff of the guitar and the bass, but for the melodic interpretations as well. Dave Matthews was born and raised in South Africa--which helps explain the rhythm of "Don't Drink the Water"--and has a broad vocabulary of musical influences that come through as a result of that. This song (as well as a track from their early album, Remember Two Things, called "Minarets") uses this--dare I say?--exotic scale to create a musical texture that, I believe, anyway, is designed to underscore the antiwar point that the band is attempting to drive home. By invoking the nebulous concept of "The Middle East" (and, perhaps, alluding to the last stop of crusaders in arriving in Jerusalem), the disgust and disdain for war--for its motives and its costs--points at a more specific example than a three-chord antiwar song (though those can be effective, too). Without the lyrics, however, the song's energy dilutes. Here are the lyrics, then: Fire By invoking this strong sonic imagery and matching it with the terrors of the seemingly endless warfare of the Middle East, a frustration is voiced. Politics of the area aside, few can deny that we have seen a great deal of bloodshed in the area of the world where the great religions of peace--Judaism and Islam--continue to battle. Even the idea that "The fire grows from the east" adds to this deliberate attunement to the crimes committed (and, yes, I think war is itself a crime, but now's not the place to discuss that). "How is this/Hate so deep? /Lead us all so blindly killing, killing" clearly demarcates the mindlessness, the illogic of war.
But perhaps the most stirring lines would have to be "A mother's cry/Is hate so deep?/Must my baby's bones/This hungry fire feed?" Significantly, the studio version has Stefan Lessard, the bassist, give an additional staccato slap on the line leading into it ("Your sins are washed enough"), almost as though drawing attention to the important emotion that Matthews is conjuring here. Though Matthews doesn't always preoccupy himself with rhyming often, there is a slant rhyme in "deep" and "feed"; slant rhymes often convey a sense of wrongness, that something is incorrect that the poem is trying to draw attention to. (Consider, for example, the way that Wilfred Owen uses them to such stunning effect in "Arms and the Boy".) In the case of "The Last Stop", what could be more distressing and baffling than the mother's cry, demanding to know--in effect--why her sacrifice is the way that hatred is to receive its payment. This same stanza has one of my favorite lines of the whole song immediately after the mother's unanswered--or, perhaps, too-easily answered--question: "As smoke clouds roll in the symphony of death." Wow. I mean, what an incredible way of describing fighting: This song about war makes note of the music of a battle, taking the chaos of fighting and translating it from the concussive waves of shells to the heavy throb of a bass-kick, the firing of guns to the snap of the snare. There's orchestration in a symphony as there is (ostensibly) in war, yet the chaos of the music is also an indication that the music is not, actually, under as much control as the conductor may wish. The clashing cymbals clatter as the cry of the mother is washed away by the smoky clouds of war. There's the disdain in Matthew's "Ha!" when, in the pre-chorus, an assertion is made: "Right is wrong now." Then a rebellious, "Shut up, you big lie." The big lie, of course, is that "war [is] the only way to peace"--another idea that Matthews rejects ("I don't fall for that"). That killing (killing) and hatred being the pathways to peace seem ludicrous, and the frustration of that illogic--that lethal illogic--is the engine of the song. The religious allusions here are worth noting: "Oh no/Gracious even God/Blooded on the cross/Your sins are washed enough" and, later, the lines "And there you are nailing good to a tree/And then saying forgive me" (followed by the high-pitched shriek, "Why?" to draw attention to the tension of the hypocrisy here). Both are clearly invoking Christ--in fact, in one of his live shows*, he replaces "good" with "God", as if the connection isn't clear enough. Why do this? Matthews' views on religion probably aren't widespread (I remember one interview where he said something along the lines of, "If there is a God, he doesn't have a plan"), but he isn't ignorant of the Christian tradition.** In this case, he seems to be laying blame for war on Christianity, too, pointing out the not so-subtle-hypocrisy of believing in a Prince of Peace and killing people in His name. Thus with his music he pulls (perhaps) the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and Christianity--vast swaths of the world--into an excoriation of warmongering and bloodlust. "Here, there's more than is showing up" is as good a way of pointing out that there is more to this song than what I've touched on here, but I think I'll leave off the lyrics and look at the music one last time. The song remains in F sharp throughout, as well as 4/4 time. There is one exception, and that is when Matthews switches to 6/4 upon singing "This is the last stop". The lyrics are five beats, which gives one beat to rest--a moment for the song to literally come to "the last stop". Even when moving into the bridge, where some more chords are introduced, Matthews keeps the key the same. For me (and I mean this interpretively, not intentionally on the band's part), this is symbolic of the idea that the arguments for war never really change, no matter how much we want to dress them up. Even the fact that the song is in F sharp major feels symbolic, as that particular key has six (!) sharps in it. It's like a knife drawer on a musical scale. The outro for "The Last Stop" takes the first song ("Pantala Naga Pampa") and combines it with the third. It does this by beginning a chord progression that will be reprised at the end of the album. So, the first song's themes (which are lyrically recapitulated at the end of "Spoon") and the third song's chord progression (airily introduced for a few measures whilst Bela Fleck's banjo arrangement weaves deftly through them) are both foreshadowed within these two tracks. Additionally, the outro spills and spins away, with the passion and energy fading into the background as the outro takes over, dissipating what has come before it and trying to push towards--perhaps--a peaceful resolution. Unfortunately for that idea, Matthews is not finished condemning hatred. Marching like a drummer of death, "Don't Drink the Water" comes next. --- * "Go away and dream" is the way he sometimes sings the chorus live, instead of "Go ahead and dream". The dismissal is even clearer in the live version, in my estimation. It's no longer permission but instead rejection. ** He wrote "A Christmas Song", after all. One of the things that I was hoping to get for Christmas was a guitar tablature book for Metallica's self-titled album. I have both that (sometimes called the Black Album) and Master of Puppets, and I'm enjoying both…but I'm just trendy enough to prefer Black. And as often (i.e. almost always) happens, I want to learn how to play albums I like. For bands like Metallica, this is easy--the tablature books are available basically everywhere fine music books are sold. I did this a few years back when Stadium Arcadium was the most recent Red Hot Chili Peppers album: I bought the book, played all my favorite songs a dozen and a half times, then set it aside as other things took my attention.
With Metallica being my current musical interest, it was natural for me to ask for the tablature book, which I did not receive for Christmas. Not particularly upset--I received a lot of thoughtful presents on the Big Day--I went ahead and ordered a used copy of the book using some Christmas money that came my way. I then waited impatiently for it to arrive, because as much as I like getting stuff from Amazon, it's a weird bit of impulse buying mingled with waiting. When the book came, I strapped on my guitar, tuned up, and then fiddled around with my effects pedal to find a distortion I really liked. Once those important pieces of minutiae were done, I flipped open to the Number One Jam of Metallica, "Enter Sandman". I had dabbled with online tabs to get a basic idea of how the song worked, but I always do better with the professional version. Nevertheless, I assumed that I would be able to plug and play. I mean, I knew that Kirk Hammet's solos would kick my butt, but the rhythm guitar? Probably not very hard at all. I was…wrong. And kind of right. So, the first thing I noticed is that James Hetfield's rhythm guitars contained a lot more nuance to them than I had originally expected. Yes, they play some face-melting stuff at a high tempo, but there's often a fair amount of technicality that I wasn't expecting. Just in "Enter Sandman" I found more carefully placed chords and riffs than I heard, despite the fact the song is my four-year-old's favorite song and he requests it all of the time. Additionally, the "metal rhythm" is quite a bit different from what I'm used to playing. Again, I've listened to the album, so I know how it's supposed to sound, but there are moments in some of the songs where the timing is downright confusing. Take, for example, "Nothing Else Matters". It goes along in a 6/8 time for most of it, but breaks into a 3/8 time signature for a measure, then falls back to the 6/8. (And "Don't Tread On Me" is in 12/8 time. Like, really? I don't even know what that's supposed to mean. In case you didn't know, I'm not particularly good at tempo.) While that isn't particularly tricky, it was unexpected. And that's what I mean by there being more nuance than I had anticipated. If you listen to the album, there are a lot of songs that simply sound like three or four chords played really quickly, through heavy distortion. That's the part where I was right: There are some songs like that. But what I didn't realize was the careful orchestration of them. The song "Through The Never" opens with a pretty straightforward riff (E/F#/C#/F#/E/F#/C#/F#), but my fingers don't want to give the second F# its due. My impulse is to simply ascend, not ascend, then descend. Then, fourteen measures in, the second C# changes to a C. This half-step change, I've learned, is part of what gives Metallica its sound. In the case of "Through The Never", it's used to help explain the elevated feeling within an F# minor key when they strike an emphatic G5. In less technical terms, they aren't simply thrashing about in one key, they're specifically invoking half-steps to punctuate their music and push the song away from monotony. They do this pretty frequently: In fact, the half-step thing has become a clear aspect of almost all their songs. Many of them are in E minor (which I'll return to in a bit), but they throw in a Bь in almost every time. Since E minor doesn't normally have the Bь, it gives a particular flavor that, as I said, makes for distinctive Metallica sound. Now, whether or not they're copying other metal bands--or other metal bands copy them--I don't know. I simply haven't looked at enough other music to tell. I do know that this stuff is everywhere. "Enter Sandman" relies on it to provide its signature lick; "Holier Than Thou" uses it for its primary rhythm fill; "Wherever I May Roam" utilizes it throughout the verse. All that being said, Metallica loves E minor. (I guess it could be a G major, but they're a metal band and don't usually write songs in a major key, so…) A full half of the songs are in E minor, and two more technically would be were they not tuned down a half step. They have one song that's D minor, because they've tuned down a full step, making the song deeper and grungier. And since my guitar hates being put in anything other than standard tuning, it's almost more effort than it's worth to play that one song ("Sad But True", for those of you who were curious). The other keys are basically D or A minor, but they're in the minority (obviously). As a result, the album feels a touch samey after a while. I noticed this whilst listening to the disc itself; by the time I hit "The God That Failed", I'm usually kind of done hearing another song with heavy distortion in E minor. That being said, there's a lot of amazing pick work to soak in. Despite the fact that they play in the same key so much, they have a lot of different voicings, and the album as a whole plays with important themes whilst working within the framework. Different tempos, the strange time signatures, and the face-melting solos all contribute to a strong, exciting album to play along with. Now if I could just palm mute as well as Hetfield can, I'd be set. Seriously, I've never seen so much reliance on palm muting to give it the texture that a song needs. It's crazy. Metallica…rock on. I talked a bit about my musical journey and how I started being aware of the music that I liked--formulating my own opinions (which as often as not mirrored my friends' feelings), seeking out my own influences, and going through that experience that everyone, it seems, goes through.
One aspect that I only mentioned in passing was the influence of Dave Matthews Band. I know that not everyone likes him or his band--I have, after all, been an avid fan since the mid-nineties, so I've had plenty of time to encounter less enthusiastic listeners--but I still really enjoy his music. There's a staleness that nostalgia combats every time I go through my old library, of course: I know the music so well that it never fills me up in quite the same way it did when I first encountered it, but the emotional connection helps to overpower that dissonance. This is true with most any band, but it's particularly sharp for me with Dave Matthews Band because that's the music that got me into playing the guitar. I was sixteen and I was listening to Under the Table and Dreaming, their first major album with a big-time label. Almost every track on that album was something I adored (except "Pay for What You Get" and "Best of What's Around") when I got the impulse (maybe inspiration?) that I wanted to play the music and not just listen to it. It could have been a pride thing: My friend (and future sister-in-law) told me that her cousin was the biggest DMB fan because he could play almost all of the band's songs on the guitar. I inwardly bristled, thinking that, as I was the biggest fan, I should probably be able to do the same. I'm not confident that was the motivating factor, but I'm sure that's part of the impulse. Whatever the cause, I decided on this fateful day that, as I had some extra money and a driver's license, I should go down to MediaPlay and buy the songbook to Under the Table and Dreaming. At the time, I didn't even know what I was looking for, and I accidentally grabbed the book that was piano/vocal/guitar. There's nothing wrong with those books, but their guitar parts are only chord shapes, rather than any tablature. That may have been good, as tablature can becoming overwhelming, particularly for a neophyte. Anyway, I snagged the copy, took it home, and picked up an electric guitar that was lying around.* I don't fully remember the entire process of what it was like in those earliest guitar playing days, but I remember carrying around the book and poring over the chord shapes. Once, when we were at my grandma's house, I asked Dad what a particular type of chord would look like when I fretted it. He explained, and I was gratified to learn I was (almost) doing it right. That book ended up being my beginning guide to guitar music, which I kept working at steadily. I would spend a couple hours a day practicing, alternating between the D chord and the G chord as I sang (off-key is the only way I know how to sing) along to "Ants Marching", played on an electric guitar that wasn't plugged into the amp. Eventually, after breaking strings on his practice guitars, my dad let me borrow a Martin Dreadnought and I really fell in love with Dave Matthews Band. Now I could play it on an acoustic guitar! That poor instrument took a lot of abuse. Not because I wasn't careful with it; I was very enthusiastic about strumming. There are, to this day, groove marks inches below the pick guard that have scored the surface. And, to this day, it is one of the most beautiful sounding guitars I've ever played. There's a mellow roundness to the sound that is captivating. That Christmas, my dad gave me one of his spare guitars, bequeathing all the rights and privileges of guitar ownership on my shoulders. It's a golden Fernandez Sustaniac that I continue to play, though not nearly as much as I did in the past. I've had that instrument since 1999, only letting it go for the two years I was a missionary. When I came back, I picked it up and have never put it down. At one point--I want to say at the end of my junior year, but I might not be right on the timeline--I asked my mom if I could get an acoustic guitar with an amp jack, thus letting me plug it in. She said, "Sure. Once you've earned the money." So I went to Dad. "Can I get a black acoustic guitar with an amp jack?" I asked. "Sure. We'll go tomorrow!" We did. The drive around Salt Lake, looking for the right instrument, is a topic of a future post, but suffice to say that, despite mounting despair that I'd ever find what I wanted, we happened upon the perfect option. It was the right price, the right color, and all I wanted in an instrument. Dad pointed out some of the things that made it worth the cost and he bought it for me on the spot. When I got home, exultant, my mom reminded me I had to do my homework before I could play it. Plus, wash your hands, it's time for dinner. Moms are great. I didn't have a lot of job options at the time, so I ended up mowing the lawn for free for the better part of a year in order to pay off the guitar, during which time my dad allowed me to play it--it wasn't like it was on layaway or anything. When I finished the last mowing that I owed my dad, I went into his studio and told him. He thanked me and told me to enjoy my guitar. And, ever since then, I have. ---- * My dad is a professional guitarist, so when I say there were guitars lying around, it's only partially hyperbole: My dad has more guitars than most people have pairs of underwear, so there was always an abundance of the instrument in the house. But he also is really tidy and organized, so they were usually kept in the guitar closet. This one was his practice guitar, which he left out so that he could pick it up and play on a whim. |
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