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| Song for Poland. Warsaw, what an exquisite city.
Everyone will usually get to do soundchecks before myself to check the gear and monitors. It can get very fatiguing to just rehearse endlessly to the first thing that comes out of my fingers when I get to sound check and pick up a hot guitar, will usually turn into a jam and a song. Sometimes 5 minutes is all it takes. Sometimes 15, but usually no more. Hopefully the hard drive is spinning and these occassional zephyrs of magic are captured and made real in the world for the future. Maybe they don`t have much to do with the country they are being performed in and sometimes they are useless meandering things, but now and then they are jewels. Giant Balls of Gold type jewels.
Written, rehearsed and captured in 11 minutes.
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Song for Japan. Glorious was the research for the culture and it`s moody music. There are scales that can incarnate the audible atmosphere of the historical pride of these people. Those scales were used in this piece.
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| Song for Germany. Mystique and command.
Written and recorded in a total of 10 or so minutes in Glasgow, Scotland.
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Song for Slovenia. It was a one time spur of the moment adventure. It took less time to teach the song to the band than the performance took to complete.
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| Song for Holland. Originally, this song appeared on the Fire Garden CD as a duet between guitar and piano. Because I have such a great band, we did this arrangement for the live performance. In the middle of the performance I broke a string. Included is some of the comic relief that took place as I waited to get my guitar back. This version was recorded for NPS RADIO/4FM.
Frank Zappa`s "Dog/Meat" melody is respectfully quoted within this song with the permission of the Zappa family Trust.
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Song for the United Kingdom. Sleeping on the bus for 2 hours that night before we got onto the ferry. Manuscript paper, a pencil and Evo sat with me at the table when this piece was first written. There was no research to do. The tempestuous civil history of this territory is represented in the title of this composition. This song was nurtured and delicately cultivated on the soils of England, Scotland and Ireland. It took work in these different countries to create this piece of music which in some ways is an analogy for the hopeful future.
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| Song for Ireland. Simplicity is one of the golden keys to unlocking the riches that Celtic music offers. Sifting through the dozens of classic CDs of this genre was a delight. Walking the streets of Dublin was even better. And hanging out in some of the clubs and pubs with the band and crew is a prodigious memory. But when it came time to write this piece, it was the sanctuary of my bunk on the bus that was needed. Lights out, ear plugs in, 4 am and parked in the middle of the city. That is where I invited the intimacies of that civilization into my inner ear, and this melody is what they had to say.
Because of scheduling, blah blah blah... This song actually had to be put on the shelf. Not knowing when or if it was ever going to be recorded for the album was an agony. Finally the call came in that we were on for South America. Songs were written and rehearsed for Brazil and Argentina but because of blah blah blah, they could not be recorded. That in itself is an agony that is being borne right now. I use the term agony loosely. I refused to let her get away from me once again. She was conceived in Ireland, breathed her first breath of life in Buenos Aires, and there are high expectations for her maturity.
I don`t think I can be any more intimate on an instrument than the performance of this song.
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| Song for Spain. One of the cultural centers of Europe. Flamenco music, the running of the bulls, weeks at a time of singing and dancing, tapas, sherry wine, fiestas like "Las Fallas de San Jose" in Valencia, in March, when all the city becomes the scenery of an enormous party with lots of good mood and fireworks. But we rehearsed when we were there so that we could have this song.
Our encounters with these historic cultures are all too brief and not really long enough to satiate the cultural gypsy in us.
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| Song for Greece. Walked through the city of Thessaloniki into the hills and through the small neighborhoods whose history could be tasted in the variety of shops and restaurants that lined the streets. Sitting on the balcony of the hotel listening to traditional Greek music. Sat there until the sun rose and shined this song onto my fingers. A very tired, yet enthused Steve brought the song to sound check for rehearsal. The next show after that was Athens. The show was recorded and the song was performed one time on 4/19/00.
I went through this song and extracted anything that sounded like a melody and added modern beat poetry around an excuse for a mutated guitar solo. It`s about a city whose dreams were tormented by a deranged disembodied entity. A warrior soul with the Karma of a Saint (Bombos) plunged himself into the abyss to save the city from spiritual hysteria. You know, sort of like Dragon Ball Z.
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| Song for Bulgaria. There are rich treasures of musical experience that can change the quality of one`s entire life, for the rest of that life, if they know how to dig for them. One of these sacred maps leads to the cultural music of Bulgaria. There is such an elegance in the songs of this civilization that one can sense the history of the country by the nuances in the phrasing of the melodies.
The exposure to this genre came to me at an early age. It was a decade of fantasizing this song before it became a reality. We arrived in Sofia, Bulgaria and it was time to put this whimsy onto manuscript paper. It needed something a little different though; something eclectic to introduce to a rock show. We roamed the streets of Istanbul to find the right inspiration. There it was, sitting in a dusty corner of what looked like a dark, macabre Sorcerer`s shop. It was a Saz. An 8-string instrument with a thin 37-inch long neck that is festooned with semi quarter note fret spacings.
Given the schedule, it was unfortunately impossible to compose, orchestrate, rehearse and record this song for the Bulgarian audience.
We arrived in Istanbul the night before the Turks were to play the English in the soccer finals. In most countries outside of America, soccer almost seems like a substitution for war. Losers are disgraced and winners are adorned with praise much like that of the Second Coming of a Messiah. This was the second game of the finals. The English had won the first game and 2 days before this, a few English blokes, that happened to have been roaming the streets of Turkey bragging about the superiority of their team, were actually murdered in the streets. This was all happening right about the time that President Clinton was getting a blowjob from an intern.
The streets were in chaos this night. I was warned not to go out because if anyone heard me speak, things could get sticky. But I went anyway... with 5 bodyguards. I recorded and photographed the chaotic festivities on my digital camera. Every time the Turks scored a goal the city erupted magnificently.
I carried that digital camera aournd the world and when I got home, I left it at the Panda Express on the corner and it was gone in a breath, along with all those pictures of the glorious Turks and the photos Pia took at the concert. Now that Karmic pay-off really hurt.
The Turks won the game and that evening became history. The streets were exploding with singing, cheering, crying and pride. The enthusiasm of the audience the following evening at the concert had to be witnessed to be believed. This is when this piece was recorded.
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| Song for Australia. Hmmm, how to write a song for a country whose deep history is held secret, and whose only hint to this is the sound of the didgeridoo. And how to merge that with the contemporary society that makes up the cities there now? Well, grab an acoustic guitar and flee to the island of Rottnest off the coast of Perth, and bring a handful of Tom Waits CDs. That`s one way to do it.
P.S. Did you know that Waltzing Matilda is a beloved song in Australia?
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| Song for Romania. Every now and then you run into a promoter that takes great pride in showing you their town. Romania is a good place to have such a person. This person was Dorian Ciwbuc. He drove Pia and I through the city of Bucharest and we were educated on the history of Romania. The story of the last dictator and his wife, and how they rallied and fled an angry post democratic commonwealth. The captures and assassinations, the architecture and the poverty, the regrouping and desperate rebuilding of the society were explained to us, not with pictures, but with brick, morter and bullet holes right before our eyes.
After that we all went to a wild, and I mean wild (did I say wild?)... cllub.
Not knowing what the recording situation would be in Romania, we opted to get the live recording in Austria. There was a bug of sorts in the recording equipment so the first take during the show didn`t make it to the disk, blah blah blah. The audience was very forgiving and allowed us to take another pass at the song at the end of the show.
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| Song for France. There`s that word on the itinerary again. Paris! I peak when I see it. A few months before the tour I went on a press trip to France and Pia came with me (my wife). That one day off went too quick, but a song written around a specific memory has the unequivocal magic to bring you back to that place whenever you hear it. This is that song for that engaging day.
Good thing the guys in this band could read music so well because we only had one rehearsal and then the show to capture this one.
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| Song for Italy. The first time I got to Italy I knelt and kissed the dirt. It tasted like tomato sauce.
It`s extraordinary how all the countries in Europe can exist so close to each other but as soon as you cross that little border, the oeople, the food, the language, the music, the culture, government, religion and evern the water can be so different.
Being American and a second or third generation immigrant,, it`s easy to think that we are the same as the people in the country our ancestors came from. Pride leads us to believe we`re Irish, Italian, African, Japanese, etc. For myself, after experiencing the rich culture of these places, I realize that I`m American, which has it`s own culture... of sorts. Hey, it has its benefits.
This calling myself Italian fallacy is made clear to me whenever I visit Italy. In America, it`s rare to see people talking so animatedly with their hands, and you will never walk past a structure that took hundreds of years to build out of blood, sweat and tears. It`s rare to sip expresso at midnight in a bistro or drink wine made in your own town, or mangiare (eat) tremendous quantities of magnificent food and never get obese. But if you write a song while experiencing these things, you can get close to it every time you listen to it, especially if you record that song within that environment.
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| Song for Portugal. This song was written in about 2 minutes and then performed one time in sound check and that is where it was recorded, that is why there is no audience. This is how it went down.
Characteristically, the Portuguese are a mild mannered people and are known to charm their visitors with their amiable personas. They refer to themselves as the country of the `Brandos Costumes` (gentle ways). They abolished the death penalty in 1867, carried out a virtual bloodless revolution in 1974 and do not kill the bull in the bullfight. It`s supposedly a fair fight between man and bull and at the end of the fight the bull leaves the ring with his harem of cows. Hmm, sounds like a few musicians I know.
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CD Information
