Ceremonies CD – Under The Table

Last week’s blog entry recounted the origin of ‘A Wedding Song’, one of the twelve songs on my new album Lounge Act In Heaven. Having heard from readers that they enjoyed hearing the history of that song, I will now describe how the title Lounge Act In Heaven came to me and also tell the origin story of ‘Light Song’, the last song on the album.

(Aside: I grew up in the era of concept albums, when the order of songs was very important to both recording artists and those listening to their albums. Thus today I still put lots of thought into the order of the songs on my albums, though the streaming downloading web-crawling algorithms care little for that sort of thing.)

In the spring of 2019, I produced my CD of songs Dream of You on which I collaborated for the first time with Gwyneth Moreland, a marvelous singer and accordion player, Mendocino music celebrity, and my neighbor. A raft of new songs were inspired by our collaboration and I invited Gwyneth to come hear the new songs and try some harmonizing, and to see how her accordion playing sounded with my guitar and piano playing.

We began with five guitar songs for which her delightful accordion playing and singing were just what I was looking for. Then we moved to the piano and I played and sang two of the piano tunes. Again, her accordion and singing seemed ideal for those songs. And then I began to play ‘Light Song’, a song I wrote many years ago but had never recorded, though it is one of my all-time favorites.

I began to play the slow ceremonial progression, Gwyneth found a lovely accordion accompaniment, and then something rare and wonderful happened: Marcia emerged from her studio with her cello and joined us—the music of our trio as beautiful as anything I have ever heard.

The next day I wrote to my friend Max and said, “While playing ‘Light Song’ with Gwyneth and Marcia, I felt I was in a lounge act in heaven.”

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I wrote the piano music for ‘Light Song’ circa 1994, the year before I moved to Berkeley from Sacramento. My inspiration came from a modern dance concert I attended in a small theatre in Davis. I was so taken by one of the dances that I went back the next night to see that particular dance again.

The name of the dance and the accompanying music elude my memory now, but I remember the dance was marvelously ceremonial, four women entering in stately procession, priestesses, each of them slowly and gracefully finding her place on the stage.

I was under the spell of that dance for the next several weeks and improvised many piano pieces I imagined as accompaniments to ceremonies. Out of those improvisations came the processional ‘Light Song’.

A decade later, while I was living in Berkeley, my mother died and came to me in a dream at the moment of her death. She was young and beautiful as I remembered her from my childhood. As she approached me, she metamorphosed into two translucent discs, each the size of a small butterfly that fluttered to the ground and dissolved into the soil.

In describing the dream to a friend I wrote, “Maybe there is no end, only transformation.”

Over the next few years whenever I played the music for ‘Light Song’ I would improvise lyrics, and the first line to stick was, “Here there are no endings, only tides of change.” But it was not until I moved to Mendocino in 2006 and became a denizen of the redwoods that the rest of the lyrics came to me.

In 2011 I created an album of ceremonial piano improvisations entitled Ceremonies, my most successful album to date if Internet radio plays are indicators of success, but I did not include “Light Song” on that album. Something kept me from recording ‘Light Song’ until just the right elements arrived to join my voice and piano—Gwyneth’s voice and accordion, and Marcia’s cello.

Light Song

here there are no endings

only tides of change

here the path goes ever wending

through the forests born of rain

there’s a shadow of a raven

gliding over fields of stone

life and light have found each other

we are none of us alone

come with me and join the dancing

add your voice to evening’s song

find a place to watch the turning

of the day to night and dawn

give yourself to silent wonder

shout your feelings to the sky

bless this chance to share the gift of life

never mind the reasons why

Abi and Todd photo by Marcia

In case you missed this widely disseminated news report from a few days ago, a woman in Arizona woke up speaking with a British accent, though she was born in the United States and has never been to England and doesn’t have British relatives. She went to bed with a blinding headache and woke up sounding British. Previously, the woman went to bed with blinding headaches and woke up sounding Irish and Australian. She has been diagnosed by actual licensed medical doctors as having Foreign Accent Syndrome (FAS).

I know what you’re thinking. This is a spoof, a lampoon, a bit of silly whimsy. Yet this story was reported as fact in dozens of reputable newspapers and news outlets, several medical experts were interviewed about the woman’s condition, and these medical experts testified with straight faces that she manifested these foreign accents as the result of Foreign Accent Syndrome.

In less widely disseminated news, I have FAS. In spades. Two of our good friends, Marion and Abi, are from England. They were born in England and raised by English parents. Thus they are, in technical terms, totally English. When I’m around either one of them for more than, oh, thirty seconds, I begin to speak with a British accent. So convincing and authentic-sounding is my British accent that neither Marion nor Abi snickers when they hear me speaking in the manner of their native tongue, though they do occasionally snort.

Furthermore, my grammar becomes British when I speak with my incredibly real-seeming British accent, my sentences grow longer, and I feel eloquent and wise and…British.

I’ve had FAS since I was a wee tyke, the malady erupting, minus the headaches, hundreds of times in my long and checkered career as a human. Many years ago, I had a fling with a Serbian siren, and for the entire seven weeks we were involved, I spoke English with a Serbian accent so credible that the siren not only didn’t snicker or snort, on multiple occasions she gave me incredulous looks and said, “How do you do that? You sound exactly like my Uncle Boris.”

When I’m with Mexican people, I speak English with a Mexican accent. When I’m with French people, I speak English with a French accent. When I’m with Texans, I speak with a Texan’s drawl. When I’m with Jewish people from New York, I speak with a New York Jewish accent. I can’t help myself. I have FAS and I’m not ashamed to let the whole world know.

In seemingly unrelated news, my web site has undergone a transformation and I invite you to visit the new-look site and enjoy the goodies thereon. One new addition I think you’ll especially enjoy is on the Films page. Along with Bums At A Grave and Stripes, I am proud to present Kate Greenstreet’s videopoem The Magician, featuring my piano piece “The Magician” from my solo piano CD Ceremonies.

The Ceremonies CD and all our other CDs are available from my web site for a mere five dollars each, plus a flat rate shipping charge of six dollars, so order lots of CDs and books and cards to make that shipping charge seem like practically nothing. Or listen to “The Magician” on YouTube as often as you’d like.

Did I put “The Magician” on You Tube? No. All the tunes from my five piano CDs, and all the tunes from the two CDs I made with Marcia, So Not Jazz and When Light Is Your Garden, were posted on YouTube by CD Baby.

The individual drones from Marcia’s Cello Drones for Tuning and Improvisation are massively popular on YouTube. Thousands of people are hooked on her groovacious drones.

In more seemingly unrelated news, the stock market recently lost a whole bunch of value and subsequently gained back much of the value it lost. There are many theories about why the stock market went down, a favorite theory of silly people being that the Fed is going to raise interest rates. But if that were the cause of the decline, why did the market suddenly go back up? I’ll tell you why.

The stock market goes up and down based on the collective mindset of those who invest their money in the stock market, not on Fed interest rates. When the collective mindset becomes doubtful or fearful, the stock market goes down. When the collective mindset is optimistic, the stock market goes up. Since the big crash of 2008, most of the stocks, as in virtually all of them, have been bought and sold by the richest people in the world, otherwise known as the 1 per cent. Their collective mindset has been, “Everything is for us. We control the government. We get everything we want, including tax breaks and bailouts and loopholes and gobs of free money from the Fed.” Thus the stock market has gone up and up and up.

Recently, however, more and more not so wealthy people have been getting back into the market. Many of these newbies to the current historic market upswing are the same people who were ruined financially in 2008, and these newbies were also the investors most hurt by the recent downturn in the market, so much so that many of them left the market completely once again.

You see where I’m going with this? The collective mind of the 1% got adulterated by a bunch of not-so-confident investors, and the market went down. Now that those less than super-wealthy people have been chased out of the market, the collective mind is pure optimistic greed again.

As one very rich person told me long ago, “When the market crashes, the smart money is already out of there.”

Or, as was the case in 2008, when the market crashes, “We will have the government we control bail us out and make everybody else pay for our greedy gambling.” And that is what the Obama administration did. They gave trillions of dollars to the thieves who ruined the lives of millions of people and then they did nothing for those millions of regular folk who were so badly hurt by the folks who are once again stealing trillions annually from the national coffers.

By the way, I wrote all that about the stock market with an indignant British accent, which made me feel certain I knew what I was talking about. But now, writing with an apologetic Brooklyn accent, I opine, “How should I know? Do I look like a stock analyst? With these shoes? Don’t make me laugh.”