Pale Compromises

Its finally ready, the first quixotic album from John Welsh: Postmodern Love Letters. Here represented are my personal picks from the pale compromises I have created so far, most of them re-recorded in mono over the last couple weeks. For the sake of purity and cohesion-- and because my editing skills are not very good-- all of the songs are recorded in a single live take with just instrument and vocal. I like minimalism and natural sound anyway, so that is good. The only alteration I permit myself is a the "chapel" setting on the keyboard for the final track.

So have a listen if you'd like-- and please let me know if there are other songs that you would like to see included or songs I should cut, re-record, or reorder. And so I will continue to fine tune this album and get to work on number two with my newly named guitar, Rocinante.


Postmodern Love Letters

1. Louise (All I Know Is You)
One of the very first songs I ever wrote, I am delighted to offer "Louise" as the first track. It recieves this position because it is the most explicitly a "postmodern love letter," which is the title I finally decided on for the album as a kind of organizing principle. Rather, it is a phrase that strives to reunite the two strands that run through my attempts to write songs-- all of which are about either love or art: these being the most important things to me. Although it is certainly not my most complex effort-- really just two chords and a descending bass line-- "Louise" is one I have always liked. Although I tried to work out a different "voice" for the singer of this song, this is perhaps my most unmistakably personal effort. It definitely conveys something to me, although I'm not sure that meaning would be in any way communicable. But at any rate, I only write these songs for me anyway.

2. Daniella
I refer to this as my most popular song, because it has at least one fan in Northern Ireland who wrote me an email asking for the chords so that he could play it. I sent him the chords. The internet is a weird place. This is probably one of my better songs-- probably my most well-structured lyric. It is a distinctly "modernist" effort for the album. It has almost no personal content, really just being a meditation on the old theme of life vs. art, flux vs. stasis, in the form of a desire for a picture of "Daniella." This is in fact just because I needed a four-syllable name, although I did know a Daniella in Rome with whom I was somewhat smitten.

3. The Dance Teacher
This is another really basic song in dropped D, 1-4-5 with a Bm in the refrain. Another very 'modernist' even 'Cartesian' song, this is one I wrote after going to get salsa dancing lessons down on the corner. It turned out that my instructor was a very pretty girl and since this was the period when I was writing songs most frequently I wrote a song about it. I think that the girl somehow eventually heard the song and was CREEPED OUT! My apologies. Occupational hazard I guess.
The song, for better or for worse, is really only about myself. I try to describe the dichotomy between physical-intellectual, body-language, doing-describing, action-contemplation in which I see myself constantly trapped on the latter side-- able to interpret but not create, able to observe but not to do, able to dream but not to act-- able to sing but unable to dance.

4. The Gap Between
This song isn't about a godamn thing. I wrote it on a night when I couldn't sleep and it mainly grew out of a rhyme scheme. The chords were also added really late and it took me forever to get a song out of this. That said, it has grown on me, and it gets a fairly early position on the album. There are some good-- if unoriginal-- rhymes and I still like the line about meeting someone in a David Bowie song while stinking of monuments and soda pop. The entire last verse of this comes about because I had just listened to the Bowie song "Five Years" in which talks about drinking milkshakes cold and long. The switch to minor at the end is intentional, even if it may sound like a mistake. Originally all of the words in that position were under a flipped Cm, but I took most of them back to C.

5. These Old Chains
The second song I wrote on the piano. I have to write songs on the piano because I am not good enough to play other people's songs. Although it is riduculously simple I really like this one musically, although the lyrics are perhaps too dark and personal. Those who know me well will recognize immediately that this is a song about my battles with depression. Originally the chains were supposed to be biological-- somehow resembling DNA molecules, but I cut out all of the lines that made that analogy because I could never make them fit without being terribly awkward.

6. Lucy
This is a very specifically personal song, telling a story with a few apocryphal details to fit the rhyme and meter. You can put together the story from the song if you want, and if "Lucy" ever happens to hear it again my apologies but you probably knew all of it anyway.
I have been trying to get away from writing songs that clearly reference real events and people, but I did some of that in the early days. This makes the album because I still think it is my strongest chord sequence, probably because I took the key D7 figure from Elvis Costello's "Deportee" in which he wastes that very lovely change.

7. To Silvia
This is a creative translation of the poem "A Silvia" from the greatest of Italy's lyric poets Giacomo Leopardi. I had this great sad guitar riff so I decided to use it to tell the saddest story I could think of-- "A Silvia" came to mind. Leopardi is possibly the most pessimistic writer of all time, but he does write with incredible beauty and lightness and "A Silvia" is one of my favorite poems, although it loses much in translation.

Che pensieri soavi,
che speranze, che cori, o Silvia mia!
Quale allor ci apparia
la vita umana e il fato!
Quando sovviemmi di cotanta speme,
un affetto mi preme
acerbo e sconsolato,
e tornami a doler di mia sventura.
O natura, o natura,
perché non rendi poi
quel che prometti allor? perché di tanto
inganni i figli tuoi?

8. It All Goes Away
My most complex and difficult song, I can neither play nor sing this song as it should really be. The arrangement is a legacy of my days as a classical guitarist, and the lyrics represent a meditation on music and religion.

9. Of Your Dreams
The closest thing to a pop song that I am ever likely to write. The lyrics are really pretty pansy-ish, but its a solid kind of acoustic Neil Young dropped-d sequence.

10. You’re Beautiful (And It’s Not My Fault)
The newest song on the album, I've probably only played this two or three times since I wrote it. Lyrically it is just about the way I like to crush my own dreams. This grew out of the introductory riff that recurs between verses. I can't decide if the C7 on "fault" is too Ryan Adam's artificial and I should just stick with a C and sing the Bb. I like the principal riff and the refrain, but the rest of the song may need some work. I also steal a phrase from Bright Eyes which is something I'm not particularly proud of, although I make up for it in snobbery through an oblique reference to Robert Johnson's "If I Had Possession Over Judgment Day" in the last verse.

11. Evil Hearted Woman Blues
I just realized that I had that reference just before my Robert Johnson pastiche. I quite like that. This is a song I decided to write about the "evil hearted woman" that Robert Johnson mentions in "Kind Hearted Woman Blues":

I got a kind hearted woman, do anything in this world for me
I got a kind hearted woman, do anythign in this world for me
but those evil hearted women,
lord they will not leave her be.

At any rate, its just an anachronistic blues number-- I especially like the lines about the woman not needing a telephone, which I leave in although they have nothing to do with the song.

12. Almost You
Anyone with an acceptable degree of rock snobbery will know this is a reference to a line Elvis Costello's "Almost Blue":

There's a girl here and she's almost you.

I had been thinking about the truth of that line a lot and decided to stretch it into an entire song. Overall this probably isn't my best work, and the single rhyme scheme is quite artificial at times but there are parts of it that I really, really like and I do like the idea of doing a homage to a single line. There is also an omage to Dylan's "Most of the Time."
This is unfortunately also a song quite well-rooted in my personal life as I met someone who inexplicably reminded me of someone from my past. The "you" is fairly obvious, but thankfully the "she" is well-hidden.
There is a lot of background noise towards the end of this song, I think Althea was washing some pots in the bathroom, but I kept the recording anyway because I do a decent job singing the octave shifts. For this song to sound "correct" it would really require a singer with better control.

13. A Broken Bell
I'm not sure how well this turns out, but it is too ambitious to leave off the album. Although it is certainly very derivative it represents my attempt to write a positive song-- a love song to postmodernity-- rooted in the idea of imperfection as a pathway to joy. I am assisted in this by Leonard Cohen and my own reading of Eugenio Montale:

There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.
-Cohen

Vedi, in questi silenzi in cui le cose
s' abbandonano e sembrano vicine
a tradire il loro ultimo segreto,
talora ci si aspetta
di scoprire uno sbaglio di Natura,
il punto morto del mondo, l' anello che non tiene,
il filo da disbrogliare che finalmente ci metta
nel mezzo di una verità
Lo sguardo fruga d' intorno,
la mente indaga accorda disunisce
nel profumo che dilaga
quando il giorno piú languisce.
Sono i silenzi in cui si vede
in ogni ombra umana che si allontana
qualche disturbata Divinità
-Montale

Of course the sufficiently snobby will also realize that it is an attempt to recast Dylan's apocalyptic "Everything is Broken" in a positive light. I repeat the line "People sleeping in broken beds" verbatim from the bard. Musically, I try to mirror the idea of uplifting imperfection by switching keys upward for the refrain and eventually trying to intentionally commit "errors" in the key toward the end of the song. I'm not sure I know enough theory to achieve this, but that is what I wanted to do. I like the line about the night's "broken freckle of stars." You can also hear me drop my pick when I finish playing the song. I think that is funny.

14. Against Pain
This is another creative translation. This time of the most compelling sections Aldo Palazzeschi's futurist manifesto "Il controdolore," which is one of the most moving things I've ever read-- prophetic in its awful silliness as Ginsberg would say. The manifesto is about confronting pain with laughter and joy, and begins by analyzing the form that generations of humanity have given to the formless idea of god. It ends by suggesting that hospitals should become theaters, and the terminally ill dressed as actors and clowns. As you can see from the last statement, it may not ultimately be successful in defending its belief that "Nothing is profoundly sad, everything is joyful"-- although bless it for even trying.
I am actually quite proud of this one, and the Bm--E change on "Nothing is sad deep in its heart" is the best thing I have written. For the album, I recorded this on the "chapel" keyboard setting, as a hymn of sorts.

Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs; he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter.
-Nietzsche

Man, alone among the animals, was granted the divine privelege of laughter.
-Palazzeschi