Read the Look Alive album recap.
Listen to the Travesty demo:
Listen to the record version:
Well then.
On to revisiting the second tune on Look Alive, Travesty in Blue.
I'm lucky enough to still have the living room demo of this tune, recorded in July of 2006, which I've posted above. What a trip to listen to... similar to the song Look Alive, the transformation of this tune from sparse solo acoustic to full-on produced band was very very important to me as a writer and Paper Arrows as a project.
Here was a song I had around since... 2005 according to my writing journal and suddenly it went from this quiet contemplative thing to a bouncy pop tune and... if my memory is correct it's one of the first songs of mine I heard with a piano part taking the lead as a rhythm instrument/texture. The construction of this one was pretty indicative of the album process as a whole... I came in and heard a fully-realized rhythm section behind the song for the first time and my heart just welled up with happiness and wonder... I remember recording the acoustic guitar in a take or two, an electric part... the vocals very very quickly including backgrounds... and then watching Jay record a cool slide part. Darren had added the distorted Fender Rhodes in the attic and the piano at Gravity and I remember sitting in the control room at Gravity watching Manny mix the whole thing, adding the cool vocal echo effects...
I wrote a pretty good overall chronology of the Look Alive project here at the time (also linked above)... another crazy thing to read given my memories of what I was going through at the time and where my life and Paper Arrows have gone since. A lot of the wonder at how great our sessions were is there and quite touching, as is some of personal bitterness I guess at the subject matter...
The subject matter. What a weird song lyrically. I found the first time I wrote the phrase "travesty in blue": December 12, 2001. As in five years before we recorded the song and (gulp) nearly ten years ago. I remember very clearly walking from the apartment on Magnolia to Dominick's one weekday morning, horribly wrecked from whatever we had been doing the night before, wearing jeans, a blue t-shirt, and a blue flannel shirt and thinking I looked like a travesty in blue... and it just stuck in my head. Of course I subsequently realized I was probably unconsciously spoofing Rhapsody in Blue.
Anyway, I didn't even start to write the Paper Arrows version of Travesty in Blue until 2004 and finally finished it in 2005. Looking back at my writing then, I can see this turning point to the material that would become the Look Alive album and Travesty is right at the middle of it. I was grabbing onto images that evoked something moving, some sort of emotion, but I wasn't quite strong or confident or aware enough to connect them to concrete things...
That's one of the things that makes Look Alive so interesting to me: there's this dichotomy between the five songs written before Jay and I decided to record an album (December Static, Look Alive, Travesty in Blue, Why I Had to Fall, Skeletonskinandsky) and the five songs written after (Turn, Again and Again, Come Home, Fight, When You Left). The early five have this impressionistic bent to them that I described above, and the latter five are just brutally direct.
Or couse the two sets of tunes also straddle another event: being left by my ex-wife. I can't imagine that has anything to do with the difference.
But the interesting thing is that for all Travesty in Blue works alongside the more direct songs about loss, I didn't really write it with anything particular in mind. Was it some subconscious unhappiness? Probably. But the first lines are actually about moving my sister to an apartment near Montrose and Damen. We were loading her stuff up some stairs, and there was this weird picture on the wall that looked like me. Or, like an elven caricature of me. Actually, I think there were two people in the picture and other looked like my sister, which made it doubly weird.
And I remember at the exact time I noticed the picture, there was this light on the wall right next to it cast from a window that looked like a cross. And it was just really striking. One of those weird moments in life where you're moved or take notice but don't know exactly why...
And in the second verse, we get to "travesty in blue" and it's not really a concrete idea it's just... this picture of a feeling I had on and off for years that I was losing. Losing something. I thought it was myself and my dreams, but it turned out to be something different. Or something more. Or maybe even less.
So the word "blue" has become this crutch for me lyrically and still is. There were Burn Rome Burn songs with "blue,"(there was even a BRB song CALLED The Blue). It's made an appearance on every Paper Arrows album and even on the new song we recorded just two weeks ago as well as in a couple other tunes that are candidates for the next session.
So maybe it's time to put a prohibition on it.
Maybe the blue has run its course...
Or maybe it still serves me a purpose and helps me see my life and creativity as a line rather than a series of unrelated struggles.
Maybe it's the connection to that me of 2001, who seems so far away from who and what I am today.
Maybe I can benefit from trying to figure out exactly what the blue is, where it goes, and why it keeps coming back to me.
I like that.
**********
TRAVESTY IN BLUE
The picture where we moved you looked like me
And somehow the light arranged itself in a "t"
They always take at the start what matters the most
They always shoot first and ask questions once you're a ghost
It's raining glass on the lake tonight
As clouds divide the nightmare sky
And lightening strikes the Tower's heights
It echoes...
I saw him hanging on Western Avenue
His eyes were born in a travesty of blue
And the empty car lots gave way to something else
And the pavement cracks grew up as winter fell
It's raining glass on the lake tonight
As clouds divide the nightmare sky
And lightening strikes the Tower's heights
It echoes...
It's raining stars on the lake tonight
As clouds divide the nightmare sky
And lightening strikes the Tower's spikes
It echoes...
jbg
No comments:
Post a Comment