talis_kimberley

The lovely organisers of Chicago’s annual ‘DuckCon’ have invited me to be their Filk (music) Guest of Honour next June. I have accepted – it’s been a number of years since I was across the Atlantic – and so I’m going to Chicago for next Midsummer.

I had to say yes. Among other good reasons is the fact that I’ve two songs set in Chicago, although to date my only visits have been necessarily brief – one very nice pastrami bagel at the airport for a stopover many years ago (and a very compelling phone conversation, but that’s another story) and then a few years ago I breezed in late one October, performed a house concert, howled with a husky, ate at the International House of Pancakes, and was gone the next day.

What I would love to get to see is the Chicago underpass where the salt stain made a picture that folk saw as Mary and subsequently turned into a shrine... because ‘My Lady of the Underpass’ is set there, and so is the companion piece which currently has a really fine chorus melody and a full lyric, but whose verse melody will simply not sit down and behave. There’s time yet; and I do wonder whether one is allowed to sing in the underpass?

So I’m going back to America next year. I shall have to give the US government my fingerprints, which I shall hate, and which I have never given my own government, and I shall seriously consider how to offset the carbon of my flight. Oh, and return. I do intend coming home!

I’m looking forward to seeing some old friends, and making new ones besides. It’s been a while! And while I can make no promises, it’s always useful to hear from folk who might be attending the convention of any requests they’d like me to sing. I can’t promise to sing exactly the same version, either – but that’s another story too...

I've looked on the net, you know, but it's really not as easy as you might think to establish the price of a Rolls Royce. I suspect that if one needs to ask, well, ...

But I need to be in the right ballpark with this one. What do you suggest, O hive mind of my f'list? Fifty grand? Ninety grand? Hundred grand? (I know, there's an 'a' missing there, trust me, I can deal with that.)

If it's more than that then I'm rewriting.

I'd welcome suggestions from anyone out there who happens to know what ballpark would be reasonable. No, I'm not buying one. I just want the song to make sense...

Up jumps the muse and flings things about in my head until tea can just go cook itself, I'm taking the laptop into the summerhouse and humming quietly to myself. There's one with a complex narrative lyric whose melody is taking some teasing out, but which has found a little guitar riff and is going to be very happy; there's one with a big chorus which has just turned inside out on me. There's a silly I started a while back which has just finished itself with a flourish, and there's a lovely thing with herbs in which I started singing on the way back from the lotty. Then there's an absolute uber-doomer which I don't know that I will ever want to inflict on a listening audience, but it might get some phrases out of my head.

The one that turned inside out? The tune was so-so, a bit something and nothing, but I thought the chorus was big enough to carry it. However, I've just had a belt through a whole bunch of things on the guitar (Small Mended Corners, Twelve Gold Horses, Rose of the World, X Libris, Head of a Pin, Jam Tomorrow, Blackthorn Winter, if you really want to know) and found myself finally just holding and strumming a chord, when a delightful thing happened, and my mouth started singing a melody over it. This melody went on into a chord change and repeated itself, then demanded a third chord and flung itself up into chorus-energy. Hold on, I thought, does this fit the lyric I wrote recently... well, yes and no, but I made the lyric reshape a little because the melody is so strong.

It's just a three-chord trick. It sends shivers up my spine. I love when songs happen at me.

I loved hearing Alexa singing 'My Berlin'. Sometimes, you know, things do get better?

I met a whole lot of new people such as Nat, Unfeasibly Tall Guy and Patchwork Girl with Boots (I know, please don't post their other names, I've been educated, but I *like* my versions. Sorry.) and Alan and Renee, Alan having particularly distinguished himself in the mediaeval dance session KaiKay and I ran.

Well. Annie and Tim Walker pulled a blinder of a set and made me cry - not hard, admittedly, when you're as good as they are, and Annie's poignant lyrics on 'Dead Men Walking'  just make me weep.

The 'Before the Dawn' extravaganza was a whole lot of fun, filk-rock-opera lives! Bardling and Demoneyes made me cry again.

Gwen Knighton Raftery played and sang a truly beautiful set with Magician ably assisting. Really, quite apart from the quality of the songs, the narrative of the whole set and her interaction with the audience was flawless.

And I can't not talk about my own set, can I? Vaurien and Callylevy joined me for selected songs and I realised much later that I hadn't actually done a gig for way too long. Life's been elsewhere and I've been writing and recording, but the impulse to gig has been largely absent  (it must be said, the getting of the gigs and their promotion are aspects of this business I really don't enjoy. Never have,) - but playing to a home crowd at the UK filkcon is like coming home.

A performer doesn't often get the sense, on stage, that everything is in balance and they are going to fly.

I was glad to start acapella with a new and silly piece, and gladder still that my voice, lost for five whole days at the start of the year, was back pretty much where it should be. Believe me, I tried out some ... interesting ways of singing my set when my voice was in my boots and the break was making me yodel - and this was only a couple of weeks ago.

For anyone interested, the setlist was:

TomTom's Diner
Jam Tomorrow
Wolf at Your Door (P joined me onstage for her line, wearing an appropriate red dress and getting a great reaction)
Lucet the Braid (handicrafters waved their work in the air as their own tools were mentioned)
Head of a Pin
Bag Ladies
The High Street (Thanks to Mich Sampson for playing Flanders to my Swann... or the other way around?)
Plum Velvet
Kitchen Heroes

(I had been planning to sing 'Blackthorn Winter' in after Plum Velvet, but dropped it for time and fingersausaging. Played it later inthe lobby for Katie.)

To my intense gobsmackedness, the three last songs I'd sung were all nominated in the 'Serious' category of the Sams awards. To my even greater gobsmackedness, the following day when the awards were presented, 'Kitchen Heroes' won the award.

I'm truly thrilled that it's had such a reaction and been given such an honour, as it's a keystone song for where my music has been for the last couple of years. I'm immensely grateful to all who nominated and voted for my songs.

The best kept secret will be that I penned the Sergeant's Acceptance Speech for V, who was in the pool when the results were announced. He said to me from the water 'Don't suppose you could run me up an acceptance speech in the style of, could you?'

It would appear I could - I nicked a bit of paper from the pad on the con desk and sat behind the door scribbling. Of course we ran it past Mike beforehand - thank you, Mike, for being a good sport about that!

I didn't see much of C, who had a grand old time gaming and geeking and generally hanging out, which is fine. I know he had a good time too, and he did come to watch me sing, which was appreciated.

This has been long. It was fun, people. Now I have this album to finish recording.

Thanks, all! See you again... somewhere and when. Meanwhile, remember:

"It's the stock and the cellar and the hearth and the hive
Will decide who falls and who survives
And we're going to need our kitchen heroes soon"

Thank you all so very, very much. This song has been very good to me. So have the good folk of filkdom.

Congratulations to the other winners as well, and to the noble runners-up besides. What a lot of good music there is out there!

It never caught on, though. Never mind.

This weekend I found out why I really sing wardrobe music. To recap; I've been intermittently putting down tracks for the new album. Life has kept intervening and slowing us down, but we did a great bunch of stuff this last weekend. (Well, the house is on the market, we acquired a kitten, and then three chickens, and briefly an incubatorful of eggs, but they didn't hatch, so I don't have a kitchenful of chicks.)

We've had some lively discussions on where in the house we should set up the vocal booth. V is picky about rooms, because he can hear resonances that I can't, and I'm slightly picky about having enough space to wave my arms around a bit and the downstairs loo with a futon was not sounding an appealing option.

Which is how I ended up singing in the wardrobe. I have a large double wardrobe, a dark wood monster that's been with me twenty years. With its two doors open, I have a cosy booth with a view of all my clothes - and a microphone nestling between my best red blouse and my embroidered hippy waistcoat.

Proinde, in vestibularum possum cantare. Which is to say, why, I can sing in the wardrobe. (because 'sed in vestibularum non possum saltare', but that's another story.)

Anyway. I'm recording regularly and the arrangements are starting to come together nicely. I shall just have to resist the urge to call 'Mr Tumnus' into the wardrobe...

* * * 

The members of the Ladies' Historic Society have asked me to pass on their deepest thanks for the honour of the nomination in the 'Classic Filk Song' category. There was some lively debate, apparently, about the term 'Classic', since it's used as a description of many of the works in which the ladies first appear. Time clearly runs differently there in Zed Alley (where Archetype Cafe is sited) because although they've been meeting since February 1997 (our time) it's not clear whether their Tenth Anniversary Party has happened, is going to happen, or indeed is actually happening if you only go through the proper door - which, confusingly, carries a poster for the Archetype Cafe Millenium Ball. That event may still be happening under the stairs, for all I know - it was quite a night.

But I digress. The ladies, and I, are very honoured and proud to be on the ballot, and Sarasvati's baking up a whole lot of flapjacks for anyone who turns up tonight - and they've said to tell you, mention 'Pegasus' on the door and you'll get in for free.

Thank you all very much; and warmest wishes to all the other fine writers and performers on the list. We're in some fine company.

...for the next project, that is.

I am so far behind on recording my writing output that it's going to be a massive undertaking to make headway on it. However, these last few weeks (barring missing a couple for illness) we have at least been managing some scratch tracks and some long-promised things, to get us back into the swing of recording. My voice isn't exactly the same as it was a few years ago, and my creative urges are always shifting too. 

So now I'm in an exciting place. I have a set of songs which to me constitute an album, and which were in the main written within a certain timeframe. Some themes recur in certain songs. Some of them I think are real gems - or will be, when I've done more work on the arrangement of them.

Ah, arrangement! What a stumbling block! It's one thing to write the lyric and the sung melody, and call that the song - so it is, so it is. To perform it will usually require accompaniment. I could strum some chords, but that's not an arrangement. That requires licks and twiddles and interesting chords, a hint of a harmony and a rhythmic surprise or two, and those things don't always come when I call.

I spent several days trying very hard to think of tunes to employ as the secondary melodies on this project - instrumental intros and so on - and for a while, every single tune I came up with was as pedestrian as Tufty the squirrel.

(For those of you reading that and thinking What?, replace Tufty with the Green Cross Man.)

A few days later I started getting ambushed by little bits of tune, and at last they were lively and interesting little bits of tune. I've a note of them as they emerge. A new guitar twiddle jumped out as well, and was promptly collared by one especially greedy song which already had a perfectly good accompaniment - now it has a further embellishment. Ah well.

I've been telling myself they'd come when I needed them and not before. Now comes all the cut-and-paste of what goes where, and how to turn a set of lyric-and-melody songs into a musical landscape.

Did I mention I was fired up to get going again? We set up the studio last night and put down four scratch tracks - an updated 'Icarus' Sister', 'Dead Susan', and the two brand new ones, 'Plum Velvet' and 'Being Eowyn'. Goodness but my voice is rusty... so I'm fixing that; I've tracked down my old singing teacher, who moved shortly after family stuff put music on the back burner more than a year ago, and with whom I had lost touch. We're booking up the next session and I shall be working hard. Likewise, my finger callouses are not happy with me, but they'll adapt.

It did feel good to be back in the studio setting, though, and we're intending that this become a regular date.

Apparently it's the first time the same song has won in two categories simultaeneously. 

Not that that was all; there was the usual reprise of the winners just before the closing ceremony, and Rika invited me to join her and the band onstage, and we shared the performance. However, she was playing guitar, so I - ha! - got to go hand-held with the mic and bounce about the stage rather. I had seriously Too Much Fun doing that, and it was one heck of a way to close the con, for me.

Let's see, if I recall correctly;

Rika sang my 'Still Catch the Tide', and 'Paper Worlds' and Crystal's German translation of my 'Highwayman'.
Mike Stein sang his wonderful and witty parody of my 'Archetype Cafe'.
The GKs sang my 'Fairytale of Die Hard' which was a lovely surprise.
The NMC sang Simon Fairbourn's arrangement of my 'Relativity Mall'. 
Kathy Songbird sang my 'Your Crimson Bride' in her set. 
Steve MacDonald sang my 'Still Catch the Tide' in the dead apple circle.

Have I missed anyone out?

I did do a one-shot, of 'Dead Susan', written for Girl Genius Seanan McGuire last Hallowe'en, and the vastly talented and lovely Tim Walker agreed to drum for me on no notice at all. I'm not sure how it came across - oh my, it's a long time since I was up there doing that, and I was out of practice with managing the nerves... my daughter was the only person in the room who had heard it before, and she was sitting with her Dad singing away on what is really NOT a very pleasant song... at least now she has some idea what I do, or what I can do. I was also given such an introduction for my one-shot as makes me want to cook a very nice dinner for the committee member in question...

Last year with its troubles sent music to the back of the queue in so many ways. This year's convention has inspired me tremendously, and left me with a wanting to do more of it - record some of my considerable backlog, and perform more at conventions again.

Oh, and as another side effect I have today written a couple of new songs as well. That feels indescribably good, because, you see, 'Dead Susan' was all I wrote over a period of more than twelve months, and that's a long gap even for me. These things have always ebbed and flowed, and when the tide is in it's lovely, and when the tide goes out, one can feel utterly bereft. Oddly over this last year, I haven't even missed music, which has been less painful than missing it would have been, but I had got to missing the missing, and felt it a bad sign that I could be so neutral about the absence of performing or writing at all in my life.

So I have now a number of projects in hand, which I need and intend to further over the coming months, which will I hope include plenty of recording.

Delightfully, the convention also included a great deal of pleasant chatting and renewing of friendships, and although I'm deeply sorry to have missed several sets which I had hoped to see, I can't regret what I did instead, which was as nourishing to my soul as the music I listened to was.

This evening I have played guitar till my fingertips hurt.

I have a suspicion that creativity actually becomes harder work the older one grows. I don't think my experience is unique by any means, and I'll be glad to see your perspective on it.

When I was oh, a teenager, and through my twenties, creativity was like air. I didn't have to think about it; I breathed it. Everything I heard, read, learned, did, saw or dreamed occurred on at least two levels, the realistic and the creative/symbolic. I'll admit, there were times I got a little carried away with my other worlds, but as a mixed-up teenager, that was a boon to my sanity and I don't regret it. 

It was like living in a house where one could see into other worlds when one drew the curtains or raised the blinds. Roses? Wolves. Gold. Drowning? Circles. Moon? Too easy - clockface, shadows, hourglass, harlequin, triptych, marionette, sundial, words, words, WORLDS. I swam in them.

Life gets more complex as we grow older. Families, jobs, houses, finances, all claim us, and occupy our minds. I think this is when our creative soul - like a garden - becomes crowded, shadowed, neglected - the light is blocked and less grows with each season.

It does not have to be so. Like an urban gardener scratching up a bed amongst broken swings and dustbins, much can still thrive there. Clear a space. Mark it out. Sacre it. Give it light. Visit it. It may be a while before you see seedlings, or have birds and butterflies visit you there to whisper their songs in your ears, but it can at least be a tranquil waiting, there with the sun on your face.

It seems my songwriting has woken up again - it's been a year and more, and there have been reasons, and it's welcome back. I shall now proceed to burble about what this means and how it works (in my head, anyway). 

It usually starts with a seed - a phrase, something misread, something seen, perhaps a juxtaposition, sometimes something you think somebody is going to say before the conversation takes a left turn and you're left with the ghost of a conversation... whatever it is, it shines like a dropped ring on the pavement. I pick it up and put it in my pocket. Every so often I take it out and look at it, and sooner or later, if it's viable, it'll sprout.

This is the best part, for me. This is the sweetest combination of anticipation and joy and blind inspiration. It's a heady mix. Sometimes, just occasionally, it grows all the way up into a song while I just hold it in my hands and breathe. More often, and this is as it should be, it grows for a bit and then slows, and then I need to shape it by hand the rest of the way. This part is fun, too, because it's like solving a puzzle; somewhere in there is the shape of the song, and it's my job to reveal it.

It isn't just the words, after all, and it isn't just the music, either. The form matters, and so does the voice, and the language-set, and the rhythm, and the rhyme structure or lack of it, and the angle.

I'm playing with angle right now. I've got a little sprouting thing of a song in my pocket, and it's just at the point where it wants me to take over and shape it the rest of the way.

I haven't decided the angle yet, not quite. It won't be 'There is a XXX' , because I usually prefer something a little more oblique. I've toyed with 'I am the XXX' and also with 'There was a XXX but there isn't anymore...' '...because of me...' , likewise 'There is a XXX but I didn't know it when I met it and I'm sorry now' and 'There is a XXX and it's what I become'. Then there's 'I wish I were like the XXX' and 'There is no XXX but I wish there were'.

You see? There are angles all the way round the subject, in at least three dimensions. Any of them may make a decent song. One of them will prove best for the subject in hand. Making decisions along the way and eliminating the less-good versions of it are how we get there.

Suddenly there are so many things to write about... a pocketful of seeds is a fine thing to have on a late October day.

Thank you so very much to the folk who made this happen, which is to say the Pegasus organisers as well as everyone who voted.

My congratulations to all the other winners! What a lot of great music there is out there!

...and what a lovely piece of news on this unremittingly grey day. I hope somebody out there has sunshine. We have the stove lit, and belting out a nice bit of fire for us.

Also, congratulations to Tim and Annie Walker, who are next year's guests at OVFF. I know they'll have a wonderful time, and so will everyone there.

It's been pointed out that the under-lyrics to some of the 'Archetype Cafe' songs are not published on the website songbook. They aren't in the sleeve notes either, because I'm tricksy that way.

I've always had a fascination for secrets and codes. Did anyone else set up secret societies as a child? Repeatedly? Aligned to whatever was the current infatuation or best-beloved book? and as for codes, well, I'm not terribly good at solving them, but the idea of them appeals to me. I like layers in things. I adore the celestial geometry of the 'Holy Blood and the Holy Grail' sort, and yes, the Da Vinci codes was a romp. Remember, I devoured Kit Williams' glorious and utterly perfect 'Masquerade' at a very formative age. I hold fast the memory of performing my  'Jack Hare' to Kit himself at his studio once. And 'Templar Gold' comes out of that set of ideas as well.

Is it any wonder I hide words underneath other words? When, after all, are we ever really only saying one thing at a time?