Thursday, July 18th, 2024: Chiricahuas, Hikes, Rustler, Southeast Arizona.
A picture may be worth a thousand words, but they often suck at expressing the feelings inspired in nature. My current series of Dispatches reports on hikes or drives to the 9,000 foot crest of various Southwestern mountain ranges, but I’ve gradually realized that neither the pictures nor my reports have conveyed the feelings these places inspire.
I literally become ecstatic when I reach the crest of a mountain range, especially if it includes an unobstructed view to one or both sides, across the landscape thousands of feet below. That experience is the goal of my favorite hikes. In the major ranges of the Southwest, the crest averages 9,000 feet in elevation, 4,000 feet above the alluvial fans at their feet. In the Mojave Desert, the crests are much lower, as are the surrounding basins – the ridgelines of my favorite desert range seldom reach 5,000 feet, whereas the alluvial fans lie 1,000 to 2,000 feet below. But the feeling I get is the same regardless of the numbers.
Why? What is a crest, and why is it special?
Of course there’s the view – climbing from one side, when you reach the crest, you discover a whole new world, as far as the eye can see. The crest is where the weather happens – air is squeezed, wind funnels across, clouds form, rain or snow falls. A crest defines watersheds – the high line that diverts creeks to one side or the other. Reaching the crest fills my heart to bursting.
On the way to a doctor’s appointment in Tucson, I noticed the eastbound lanes of the interstate were under construction. With all that driving, I wondered if there was a chance of getting a short hike in. So on my return, I took a detour off the backed-up interstate. I knew there was a forest road that crossed the crest of one of my favorite ranges, and I’d seen it from far away, snaking up the mountain, but I’d never driven it. If I could drive up there, I might be able to hike the crest trail for a mile or two without taxing my knee.
It was a beautiful drive on a spine-hammering road starting out as deeply washboarded gravel, rising in single-lane hairpin turns on hard-packed dirt, rocks up to two feet in diameter embedded in hard-packed dirt, and ledges of solid bedrock. It took forty-five minutes to drive the ten miles to the crest. I passed several deer, and in a shady grove in the foothillls, a group of kids on an outing supervised by two women. But I didn’t pass another vehicle all morning on that narrow, twisting road.
I was thrilled to reach the crest, to cross the watershed and glimpse the eastern landscape, the mountains I was familiar with from many previous trips. Here a side road continues a thousand feet higher to a campground in the sky. I drove below tall firs that emphasized the altitude – everywhere there was a feeling of being on top of the world. I passed some kind of official crew camping at a dispersed site in a grove of giants below the road – they were gone when I returned in the afternoon. At the 8,400-foot campground I saw one RV, but apart from me and these there wasn’t another vehicle on the mountain. I parked, breathed the clean high-elevation air, and ate the tacos I’d picked up on the way.
The crest trail starts at the parking area outside the campground, and climbs through a fern-covered burn scar. It was hot out in the open – probably in the mid-80s. The trail traversed above and around the campground, and nearing the actual crest I came to a side trail, and followed it to a small saddle where I got my first view west. Clouds were building over the mountains south of me, and the west looked stormy.
I rejoined the main trail, which continues traversing across the east side of the crest, through patches of shade and thickets of thorny locust, and onto a narrow ledge below a sheer cliff. Past the cliff, the trail curves back into a hollow where I came upon an older couple struggling to control two big dogs – the people from the RV. Patches of forest and burn scar alternated across the slopes, jays and woodpeckers flitted through the trees and snags above me. Eventually the trail reached a saddle on the crest. I’d intended to turn back here, but there wasn’t much of a view, so I kept climbing.
Past the saddle, the trial climbs steeply through more burn scar, to a sort of barren hump with an expansive view west. I made my way to a rock outcrop, from which I could see rain falling out in the plain. But an outlying ridge blocked my view south, so I decided to climb even higher.
I reached a small hollow that was choked with ferns, charred logs, and thickets of locust. I tried going off-trail, hoping to get a view, but found myself blocked by forest. So I returned to the trail and continued still higher, out of the jungle and around the shoulder of the outlying ridge, and here I found my view to the south, at an elevation of 9,100 feet.
I was just shedding my pack and digging for my water bottle when I heard the sound of jets. It was two A-10 Warthogs, a fearsome machine designed to fly low and obliterate people and vehicles on the ground. They were flying up the canyon below me, just above the trees, and I watched them cross the crest in front of me.
On the way back, I detoured off the crest trail and down onto a very primitive forest road, hoping it would be easier on my knee and give me better views to the east. But it was so rocky I had to walk very slow – tottering between a problem foot on one side and a problem knee on the other.
At one point I heard screeching high above, and turned to see two golden eagles circling each other. Later, in a shady grove of tall firs, I came upon an empty Forest Service “Guard Station” – rustic cabins used periodically by work crews. Everything here felt high, remote, and lonely. Far from the world of screens, cities, celebrities, the rich and powerful and their advanced technologies – except that killer jets could thunder past at any moment.
Driving back down the crest road I passed a side road to another “park” – rural vernacular for a level place on top of a mountain. As I was checking my map, an old guy on a motorcycle approached and passed me.
I got turned around and climbed the side road, over a ridge and down into a densely forested basin, where I noticed the motorcyclist on the road below me. I finally emerged in the “park” – a grassy meadow surrounded by fir forest, with informal dispersed campsites, all empty. The motorcyclist passed me again and returned up the road without stopping – apparently just out for a ride in the sky, no need to get off the bike.
Shortly after I started back up the road, I encountered a big pickup pulling a loaded horse trailer down that steep, rocky trail. There was barely enough room for me to pull over, and the driver was staring straight ahead with his jaw clenched.
I began thinking about the RV at the campground. Most of these roads are single-width, and trees often fall across them. Rigs like that sure couldn’t back up in an emergency, and there’s absolutely no space for them to turn around. I guess they just count on other people to come by and save them if anything goes wrong.
Now I would continue down the main road off the crest to the east, and I immediately found that it’s just as bad as its western counterpart, and I could go no faster. But now it was like rush hour, one vehicle after the other passing me on their way up the hairpin turns. I had to pull over and stop to let the motorcycle guy past for the third time – he was going twice as fast as me, bouncing over all those rocks.
Halfway down I was approaching another blind turn when out shot a late-model minivan. The driver saw me and slammed on the brakes, going into a slide toward the sheer drop-off, his tires catching at the last minute. I pulled over, stopped, and rolled down my window, shouting “Slow down!” as he pulled alongside. It was a vanload of students on a field trip with their bearded, conservatively-dressed professor driving. He responded with a big smile, saying “How ya doin?”
I understood the rancher types with their pickups and trailers – they’ll drive anywhere. But I couldn’t fathom people who would drive minivans – let alone big RVs – up a rocky, narrow, seemingly high-clearance road like this.
Again, I passed lots of deer – mule deer, all very small. When I finally reached the oak-studded foothills, I came upon another big truck towing an even bigger horse trailer, the animals all sticking their heads out the side to watch me pass. This truck had broken down on the road, and its young cowboy driver was sitting in a folding chair behind the trailer. He said a hose had burst and his wife was on her way to get a replacement. Down here it was in the mid-90s.
After bouncing over rocks for hours, never knowing who was going to show up around those hairpin curves, my nerves were completely shot by the time I reached the paved road in the canyon. I got dinner and beer at the cafe, and decided to grab a room for the night – the only other option was driving home in the dark. But my troubles didn’t end there – it was over 90 degrees in the room and took three hours for the window air conditioner to cool it down. Makes a better story that way, right?
Sunday, July 21st, 2024: Hikes, Nature, Plants, Southwest New Mexico.
I went for a short hike near town – the start of a longer hike I do regularly when I don’t have a hurt knee. This first stretch gently ascends a canyon bottom on a primitive road, finally becoming a foot trail nearly two miles up the canyon.
Returning down the road I encountered an older couple. The man looked like a 19th-century outlaw, with bright eyes, an impressive mustache, and a hat I envied. We agreed that the canyon was surprisingly dry considering the rain we’d had in the past week. That led to talk of climate change, and a world that’s going to hell in a handbasket. As locals, we agreed that we’re probably living in the best possible place – high in the mountains and far from the crowds. The man said “I’m just glad this is all happening at the end of my life – kids today are facing a bleak future.”
Not wanting to end on such a sour note, I replied “Well, the canyon’s full of beautiful flowers and butterflies today.”
The man smiled. “A friend told me he goes to the forest to lose his mind and find his soul.”
Enjoy the flowers and butterflies!
Monday, August 12th, 2024: Arts, Music & Dance, Nature, Outdoor Life, Stories, Trouble.
Three weeks with no hiking Dispatches! I hope that’s given some of you a chance to catch up?
The big news is that I’m writing songs. The last time I had a sustained burst of songwriting was thirty years ago – that’s why this is big news for me. Life got in the way, but I can already tell it was worth the wait. More on that in the next Dispatch.
A lot still stands in the way. I have more pain than ever, it’s out of control, disrupting my sleep, requiring too many meds. After working indoors all week, my body and soul need wilderness hikes on the weekend, but those are no longer possible due to a knee problem – with a two-month waiting list for treatment. Not only does my body require more maintenance than ever, but also my fire-damaged house, my overgrown yard, my dilapidated vehicles – especially in monsoon season with weeds exploding, animal pests invading, heat that requires hands-on management throughout the day due to a lack of effective insulation and cooling. And alongside all that I’m constantly managing my family situation back in Indiana, solving daily and weekly crises remotely, forced to make decisions for all of us, usually alone.
As painful as it may be for me, the inability to hike or do creative work is a first-world problem. What we call “the arts” have roots in traditional, indigenous ways of life, but our versions of these arts are so far removed, so decadent, that most of them have no place in a healthy, sustainable culture. A subsistence culture has no use for oil paintings, literary fiction, violin concertos, opera, or ballet. Songwriting, painting, and literary storytelling are things I do because I’ve been compelled to do them since childhood, and doing them is the most rewarding thing I know.
Unable to hike on Sundays, I drive to somewhere even more remote than my hometown where I can spend time outdoors and get a midday meal. Since discovering a wooden relief map in this visitor center years ago, I’ve been wanting to return and photograph it. Unfortunately the plexiglass cover results in excessive glare.
I spent a few hours reading beside this creek.
No matter what else is on the menu – seafood, steak, burgers, Thai, sushi – if there’s a half decent burrito I’ll always order that. But it feels bizarre to be eating it at midday instead of after a long hike.
Storms are forming and rain is falling, but not enough. Still, our skies are as spectacular as ever.
Monday, August 19th, 2024: 2024 Trips, Hikes, Mogollon Rim, P Bar, Regions, Road Trips, Southeast Arizona, Whites.
Now that I’ve embarked on a new, hopefully temporary Sunday routine of one-day road trips, I’m starting to get more analytical and organized – another aspect of my lifelong struggle between left and right brains. But the problem with remote destinations in this remote region – even after decades of internet, web, GPS, smart phones, apps, and social media – is that reliable information is often lacking. And when no one answers the phone or nothing shows up on Google Maps, you have to actually drive a couple of hours to find out if something exists or is open. I find that refreshing and hope it’s never completely “fixed” by the techno-utopians.
I’d been suffering through so much heat at home that I wanted to escape to the Arizona alpine plateau, which would be 15 degrees cooler – in the 70s. Driving north past the big ranches west of town, I approached a pair of bikers weaving constantly back and forth in opposition to each other. They pulled over and stopped as I got close. Their bikes were new and futuristic, stark black and white, as were their outfits – they reminded me of the Apple or Elon Musk aesthetic. But a little farther up the road I saw them in my rearview and they passed me, and began weaving their bikes theatrically back and forth in opposition again. And then, a few miles farther, I passed them again, stopped on the shoulder, gesticulating at each other. More weird city people invading our rural refuge.
The route crosses a series of intermediate passes, and approaching the highest, at 8,000 feet, I remembered there was a forest road heading north along a long ridge that overlooked the canyons and basin to the east. For once, I wasn’t on a schedule and decided to check it out.
It was pretty well graded and led through mature ponderosa pine forest dappled with sunlight and shade. I wasn’t planning to go very far, and I hadn’t seen anything interesting yet, when after a little more than a mile I saw sky through the trees to my right, and wondered if that was the rim of the ridge. Shortly after that I came to a dirt track leading off in that direction.
Winding beneath the big trees, it took me to a campsite on the edge of a rock cliff overlooking a broad thousand-foot-deep canyon toward the distant skyline of our 11,000 foot mountains thirty miles away. It was the most spectacular campsite/picnic spot I’d ever found in my home region. It was litter-free and someone had left a little stack of firewood. I even found a young Arizona cypress growing on the rim, a tree I’d never seen in this area.
From there I drove to the Arizona hamlet at 8,000 feet, a two-hour drive from home, where I was hoping to get lunch. But the grill was closed – once again, no definitive info online – so I decided to drive higher onto the volcanic plateau, another half hour of driving across one of my favorite wild, uninhabited landscapes, to an isolated lodge that I knew was open daily.
The drive winds through burn scars and intact spruce-fir forest, climbing over ridges and into and out of side canyons, passing the broad grassy meadows that line much of this plateau. At an elevation of over 9,000 feet, I came upon the lodge suddenly and pulled off. There were two motorcycles parked in front.
I found the restaurant door unlocked and went in. Two retired-looking biker couples stood examining a map on my left, and a sign said to seat yourself, so I took a seat at the counter until one of the men came over and told me the restaurant didn’t open until noon. I went outside to wait at a table, and the bikers rode off.
I needed to pee, and hadn’t seen restrooms in the restaurant, so I entered the main door of the lodge. The reception counter was unoccupied, but a very old man slumped on a sofa opposite, staring at something in his lap – probably a phone. I peered into the office and up the stairs, then turned and asked the man if there was anyone working today. I was standing less than six feet away, but he ignored me.
“Excuse me, sir,” I said. Then he slowly looked up with an angry glare. Even more slowly, he took a tiny device out of his ear and shook his head in apparent disgust.
“Did you say something?” he snapped.
“Sorry to bother you,” I replied. “It’s nothing.” He put the device back in and looked back down without another word.
I went back outside and tried the restaurant door. It had been locked.
At my table on the front deck, a constant swarm of hummingbirds surrounded a feeder behind my left shoulder. It’s an incredibly beautiful spot, and the weather was perfect. I watched a thunderhead develop across the highway, behind the spruce forest, far to the east. A four-door Jeep arrived with two more retired couples. After I told them about opening time, they wandered off to examine the property. A half hour later an older couple arrived, and likewise wandered off.
This place is known in both the Phoenix and Tucson metro areas. It’s a long, arduous drive, but that’s what bikers seem to crave, and summer in those urban hellholes makes people desperate for relief. And this is paradise compared to the crowds and traffic of closer getaways like Sedona and Flagstaff.
Nearing noon the two couples returned and asked me what I knew about this place – I’d spent the night here once and had dinner. Then the restaurant door was unlocked and our small group filed in.
I had a burger that appeared to be nothing special but tasted unusually good. I overheard the couples telling the waiter they were from Yuma but were spending the summer in Show Low – an interesting life plan. I wondered if they were staying in personal RVs or vacation homes. Yuma houses a legendary prison and is notorious for being the hottest town in the U.S., with an average summer high of 115. I’ve heard it called the armpit of the Southwest. I wondered how anyone would choose Yuma as a retirement destination. But if they did, why would they need to choose a summer home in the same state? Tax reasons?
And then consider the options – towns that would offer a summer refuge. My first choice would be the casual resort village across the plateau at 8,400 feet, but it’s very expensive. Show Low is basically a bustling redneck town, only slightly higher in elevation than my hometown, center of a big ranching district – no way would I consider it a pleasant summer retreat. These folks intrigued me.
We finished at roughly the same time and exchanged a few words at the door. I mentioned I’d overheard they were from Yuma, and said I knew it by reputation, having only passed through. One of the women said “We live there, we’re not from there! We’re from New York state.” Apparently I’d touched a raw nerve, and the mystery deepened.
Driving off, I made it only a few miles down the road when I approached a trailhead and decided to check it out. I’m not hiking, but I really wanted to immerse myself in this beautiful forest with its crystal-clear, high-elevation air.
Unsurprisingly, only a few yards up the trail my legs took over, and I realized my body was desperate to walk. I simply couldn’t avoid exploring farther. A storm had come over and raindrops were falling so I grabbed my shell out of the pickup.
The trail climbed steadily, 300 feet in elevation to the top of the ridge, and unfortunately this patch of forest had been touched by the massive 2011 fire – not at high intensity, but enough to thin it out, creating a maze of deadfall and near-continuous thickets of locust regrowth. One treat was the strawberries – I’d never seen so many, although they were small, and most were not ripe yet.
Light rain fell on and off. I was hoping to get across the ridge with a view into the big river valley to the east, but this turned out to be part of a broad network of ridges and canyons. After three quarters of a mile I turned back – my first, very short, hike in almost a month!
On the way back, I was reviewing my interactions with the folks at the lodge – I’d also had a brief conversation with the other couple. Apart from the occasional angry old man, most interactions with strangers in isolated, lonely places like this are much friendlier than you’d have in crowds or in town. People tend to be excited to meet strangers and discover secrets of their lives. As a result, you briefly get a more optimistic and tolerant view of humanity, which is paradoxical for someone like me who values solitude and is generally considered a cynic. But like all pleasures, it’s fleeting.
The Agony and Ecstasy of Songwriting
Friday, August 23rd, 2024: Arts, Music & Dance.
This Dispatch is going to be a deep dive into the creative process. I know most of you are music lovers and hope you find it interesting – raw and unfiltered from the horse’s mouth instead of highly processed in movies like Once or the upcoming A Complete Unknown.
The last time I wrote new songs was over a decade ago – and those were just experiments, nothing memorable. After that, I became concerned about the hundreds of hours of archival recordings I’d accumulated with bands and friends, and began editing and releasing some of those. Meanwhile I was writing my epic novel and starting on a big painting. It wasn’t until early 2020 that I got the itch to write new songs. Maybe reviewing those archival tapes had reminded me of the era in which I matured as a musician – the post-punk years of 1978-1980 – because it finally hit me that although that’s what got me started, I’d only written a few true post-punk songs, instead plunging straight into primarily instrumental experimentation with my band, Terra Incognita.
I felt that the purest form of that original post-punk sound had been achieved by New Order immediately after Ian Curtis’s suicide, in their 1981 recordings of “Ceremony” and “Dreams Never End”. But rather than developing it further, they abandoned it in favor of club dance music.
I had always assumed that my mature guitar style was an adaptation of Appalachian bluegrass flatpicking to the call-and-response guitar riffs in Nigerian juju bands. But looking back, I realized that the classic post-punk sound – marching-band drums, clean guitar and bass tones fattened with the chorus effect, melodic bass, and droning or purely rhythmic guitar riffs – was not only one of my main inspirations. It freed every alt-rock and indie-rock band after that from the blues-rock cliches of the Sixties, and that classic post-punk sound is now renewed by every new generation of rock bands.
I wanted to acknowledge and honor that pillar of my legacy, and in early 2020 I recorded some instrumental tracks to my favorite post-punk beats and did some vocal improv over them. Then the pandemic took over, my house caught fire, and the next two years were spent trying to recover. During that hiatus, I discovered that the goth subculture, inspired by Joy Division and The Cure, had faithfully rescued that early sound and perpetuated it worldwide in a series of obscure bands that continue to this day.
Through pain, illness, trauma, and the stressful work of helping my family, I kept getting ideas and making notes about the new songs I wanted to write. In my heart, I really just wanted to write classic post-punk songs, but I’d spent decades studying and experimenting with African genres – especially my favorite, Nigerian Yoruba apala music. And as I reviewed and analyzed my work since 1980, I realized that my forté as a songwriter and composer is to invent new sounds by fusing distant, unrelated traditions – like I did with Nigerian juju and Appalachian in the Eighties, and apala and Native American in the Nineties.
I actually learned that kind of trans-oceanic fusion from the Africans. From the Fifties to the Seventies, record companies had dumped their overstock in Africa, and African musicians began adapting American country and funk instrumental styles to their tribal traditions. If Nigerians could use country-western pedal steel and the funk wah-wah pedal in juju, why couldn’t I fuse apala with post-punk or goth?
Occupied with family duties, I literally didn’t have time for music until I was forced to make time in April of this year, setting Katie’s songs to music for her ceremony. That, and the ceremonial handover of African drums from a colleague, a few months later, have provided the impetus for my new songwriting effort.
Turning Katie’s lyrics into songs proved to be easy, and I began wondering if the pain and trauma would end up making me a better songwriter and singer – that’s the old cliche. Singing lyrics that poor lost Katie had addressed directly to me definitely got my heart into my voice. Here’s the latest, a true story from the beginning of our relationship:
After finishing a series of Katie’s songs, I sat down and organized my notes, which included dozens of potential themes or ideas for songs. But of all those songwriting notes I’d accumulated since 2020, the most urgent was to “write from your heart”. In the past, the work of inventing new genres had allowed my brain to dominate. I’d written songs about things that inspired me in nature and prehistory, but by the time I finished the songs I’d ironed most of my feelings out of them.
More recently, when I wrote lyrics and tried singing them over instrumental tracks, they always came out as either too cerebral or as plaintive, mystical garbage, which is a rut I used to get in when smoking pot.
Making it even harder, in addition to evoking strong feelings in my songs, I was still determined to work outside existing genres, making everything up as I go along, combining instruments, rhythms, melodies, and harmonies from exotic and obscure traditions, while showing my love of nature and indigenous cultures and embodying the questions I’ve pursued and the lessons I’ve learned from an adventurous life. I always need a challenge.
Fortunately, there was one subject that was still fresh in my heart – an encounter with the past in Indian country, in which I fell in love with someone who was about as inaccessible as you could get. I decided to start with that.
I started out by writing the story of my impossible love in the form of rhythmic lines, but when I tried various ways of setting those lines to music – with African drums, drum kit sounds, a bass line, or guitar chords – by the end of the day I was back in the same old boring rut.
So I studied my music library for inspirations – beats or structures I could adapt. I don’t normally use other people’s music for inspiration, but this was a special case. Maybe I could use other peoples’ songs as disruptors to prevent me from falling into past ruts.
I started with PJ Harvey’s “The Wheel”. I spent another day using that as a touchstone – and I do love the song – but it turned out to be totally the wrong feel for my story.
So on the third day I turned to New Order’s “Love Vigilantes”. I like the song, and I love the power and simplicity of New Order’s rhythm tracks, but mainly I had the idea that the story resonated with mine in some nonintuitive way. To make things easier on myself, I settled on drum kit sounds as a placeholder, hoping to work the African drums in later. The “Love Vigilantes” approach worked, but you’d be hard-pressed to recognize the inspiration in the final result!
Each time I started over, I deleted six or eight hours of previous hard work, which takes motivation and discipline. On all three days, I was in pain and taking meds, and the meds pushed the pain into the background enough for me to work. I had to get my heart and mind to work together somehow – fiendishly tricky.
I finished it on that third day, and the result literally had me in tears. Maybe it wasn’t just the tragic love story – maybe those years of pain and trauma had something to do with it. In any event, the joy I feel after an accomplishment like this is better than anything else in life.
And the song was long – almost six minutes! Afterward, I happened to hear Gordon Lightfoot’s “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” on the radio. A six-minute tragic folk ballad, it reached the top of the pop music charts in 1976. Can you imagine something like that competing with Taylor Swift today?
I can’t share my new song with you until it’s ready for legal distribution – weeks of further work – but here’s a snippet of “Clear Creek Canyon Girl”:
After that success, I was really stoked, but it still wasn’t Afro-Goth. I didn’t know what it was, it seemed a one-off like many of my compositions. So for the next song I went for broke and took New Order’s “Dreams Never End” as my inspiration – a track that’s sacred to me. The subject would be my childhood pastor, who set me on a life path as a seeker. I wanted to honor him while showing how hard a path it is.
I started writing lines based on the phrasing of “Dreams Never End”, but as I might’ve expected, I soon lost control of the subject. What was it about? My long-lost pastor, or my entire life story? How could I narrow it down and turn it into something that might engage an unfamiliar listener?
I recorded a rhythm track roughly inspired by DNE, using software drum kit sounds, and tried singing some of the lines I’d written over it, finding a key that seemed to work with my voice, and a chord progression I could alternate repeatedly. But the lines I’d written were woefully incomplete, so I spent the next two weeks trying to outline the song and focus the theme, in between doing rehab exercises and struggling with the side effects – insomnia, hot flashes, splitting headaches – from a shot of prednisone a doctor had given me for pain. This, after finishing the first song in three days! This is my kind of art, moments of ecstasy separated by days of agony.
But after seven or eight drafts I finally got something that was enigmatic but heartfelt, triggering tears again by the time I reached the end. I’d recorded an acoustic guitar track to sing over, and now I added bass and electric guitar, still trying for that post-punk sound.
But now, it had so many echoes of the New Order song, I realized I had to make big changes to avoid a copyright issue. I slowed the tempo way down, and that actually allowed me to put more feeling into my vocals. Then I realized the tempo was similar to one of my favorite apala songs, so I recorded syncopated talking drum tracks using big and little drums. In the past I’ve used banjo to take the place of lamellophone (mbira, thumb piano) in apala, so I tried a banjo track. But that made it sound way too folky, so I tried the same part on bass, and the song really began to work.
I muted the original drum kit tracks – the song seemed to be working with just talking drums, electric bass, and electric guitar. But now that I was closing in on it, I discovered I didn’t really have an ending – I just had a series of verses, all with the same phrasing. The last set of lines could be used as an ending, but I wanted them to have a different chord progression and melody, something climactic. I remembered a brief passage in a song that’s been playing on an LA radio station I listen to daily, a song by an obscure indie-pop band from the early Nineties. An achingly beautiful melody with a seven-chord progression that occurs once in the middle of the song.
I fit that to the existing key of my song and recorded a track with the guitar chords at the end. Singing over them in that melody took my voice a little too high for comfort, and totally changed the character of the song, but I decided to keep it for now. Now, the song seemed too powerful for just the talking drums, so I tried adding the kit drum sounds back in, and voila! Afro-Goth!
After listening to it from the beginning, I realized the main melody was just too close to New Order’s. I mean, the beat was now completely different, none of the instrumental parts were similar, but I’d succeeded in singing too much like Peter Hook. So I experimented to see if I could “apalafy” the vocal melody, using melismatic singing. That actually worked, in that I ended up loosening and putting soul into what had previously been a bleak, metronomic performance.
But the ending still bothered me, and my heart sank when I listened to the full song on my big speakers, and the new ending melody suddenly reminded me of a famous, sappy old pop song, probably by Barry Manilow.
What could I possibly do after investing this much time and work? The answer turned out to be simple. I ignored the high-pitched melody from the indie-pop song and sang my final lines in a lower register over the same chord progression, to a melody I just made up. At first I sounded a little like Elvis doing a gospel standard, but that inspired me to put even more soul into it. It ended up subtly evoking early rhythm & blues.
That inspired me to go back and let my lyrics take the phrasing and melody even farther from the New Order song, so that no one would recognize a connection now.
Here’s a snippet of “Stranger to the World”. Can you hear the talking drums?
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