The Hummingbirds are all growing feet.
In the last couple months, music has been upfront for me. Tony and I have been playing and writing, and I got up the gumption to try and complete some old songs that have been rattling around like the marble in a spray-paint can. I've also been very lucky to have found myself surrounded by some really fantastic people who are kind enough to collaborate with me and help move some of these things forward.
Most of these links go to my Soundcloud page: https://soundcloud.com/hummingbird-feet and there are a few more songs than this archived there, if you're interested.
So in no particular order, here is my last couple months in music:
Downright Dynamite: This is the most recent song, kinda poppy and a more upbeat tempo than I'm used to. Full lyrics are on the page, but I had something to say about heredity in conversation, or how we deal with each other. Falling into learned patterns of communication and maybe how easy we find it to slide into old shoes, even if we know they aren't good for our feet. The (admittedly gothy) opening verse is:
When we talk
your sword is a dirty tongue
and each word
has the opportunity of infection
When we talk
I knit a net
and set sail
fishing for your destruction
Perhaps humorously, the first version of that verse was "when we talk you smear your sword with dung, so each slash has the opportunity of infection" and while it might have been more truthful, I couldn't sing it with a straight face so I ditched it. But not before I tried to fit "Punji Stick" into another verse in an attempt to balance it out. Surprisingly, I couldn't make that work either.
Cafe Muller: Written on banjo and my first song in minor tuning. It's a more classic mountain-banjo style where the vocal melody follows the banjo riff. From a lyrical standpoint it's an audio voodoo-doll or frankenstein of people (specifically women, I guess) that I've met in the last year or so. There's been a certain amount of freedom available to me that wasn't around for a couple decades, and I've been lucky enough to have that time to invest with some really fantastic and inspiring people. So I mashed that all together with a heaping dose of Pina Bausch and old war stories. There's lots of imagery in here but the lynchpin-verses to me are:
the borders will move on the maps of you and I
the edges will curl and the cinders will fly
the battlefield is won the bodies laying in the sun
on the map of me, the ink is never dry.
we’ll walk the road so wild and overgrown
all your angles stuffed with feathers and with chrome
fix the cracks with gold, wear my jacket if it's cold
i don’t ever want to go home.
Mona Lisa and the Highway Blues: One of the people that I send songs to as soon as I can get a rough scratch recording down, is my friend Steve Harrison. And often times when you throw down a recording of a song, things will move around even more because you have a chance to study how it's fitting together without getting caught up in performing it. So, long before I could settle in some of the lyrics and dynamics, Steve recorded a cover version and did it far better than I could. He made some really interesting phrasing choices (some of which I stole) and his banjo track blows me away with how much it changes the color and feel of the song.
Putting my apologies to Bob Dylan for spinning out a line from Visions of Johanna aside, this one seems a lot like an indictment, but I reckon it's just as much about me as anyone else:
you push through your life like a dull knife
and you spin like a dervish with someone else’s wife
this ugly little lie we tell to those that have ears
and the only way to bury it is to cover it with souvenirs.
because I thought the highway blues made Mona Lisa smile
but the fact is her face is versatile.
The Morning After the Night Before: This one sat around for years as an anemic attempt to write a pop country song. Recently I decided to dust it off and rework it a bit, and I started to think about it as a duet. Right around that same time I met Sarah, who I guess was looking for a song to sing. I sent it to her and, If I remember right, within a week she had written some new verses and a bridge, and thereby had fixed a great deal of the things that were wrong with it.
We recorded this version in the garage the other day, and it's not bad for a few hour's work. She's got a very lovely voice which I think legitimatizes my mumbling.
now there’s a ticket in my pocket, a cool breeze blowing through
a cup of coffee from the machine and a sky slowly turning blue
I’ll cut a fetching silhouette as I walk right through those doors
Everything is different the morning after the night before.
