Category: Music

This is a simple yet complicated hillbilly kind of thing, High Lonesome if you will. I was surprised to find few knew the history of poetry, narrative, stories, singing around a fire, or just the singing that overlaps and develops through repitition and changes in pitch and range. As an overeducated redneck who frequelty seems to say, “look, I have over 600 published works and taught master classes in poetry during Pablo Neruda Literature Conference”; and sometimes I feel bad saying it. I feel like I am putting the other person down when all I want is to say speak freely, please, I starve for articstic conversation, for knowledge and exchange of experiment of idea and method. Some of us write and publish in the same style to the moment of death. I change stylyes and technique as a way of keeping from off the cliiff’s edge. So, this said, I am limiting to whom it is sent but am posting to FB anyway. If you have a pulse and there is venom within it please stay away. This ballad is in as ancient a style as I can possible reference. There is no older way of history, of religion, of sharing our lives than in those songs and stories we tell with FRIENDS. Back when life was different it was one of the favorite things a group of us would do which was to sit out at night with weed and a jug of Mountain Red Burgandy, and make up songs or expand with new lyrics our favorite Dylan or Young. It was a way of communication, and it was for me a way of developing poetry which I would later publish. Today we think of High Lonesome as a strictly Appalacahian thing with our Scotland and Nordic heritage in the hills. I like to sing it all the time. So, lately I have been recording them. Hate or love, or indifference, it’s cool. Everyone has a theory and each of us has a “thing”. It is just that for me I find this thing limitless and am at my struggling happiest when taking on new projects in the Arts and different forms of music. Yesterday I spent 20 hours on Klaus Schulze inspired Dark Side of the Moog, Michael Shrieve type drums, I was mad with intensity as I tried to get the changes because the style was out side my range. Today, was a hard day of too much money had to be spent, mine, credit, family, and it really tore me up. The loneliness of devotion is often tossed off as being weak in faith. OK, fine. But we all have feelings and if we do not have feelings then I guess we are dead. This High Lonseome ballad in three parts is all me cause no one will endeavor such a horrid act as collaboration with me. The horror is that I understand. This song is about prayer, devotion and love. 3 things surely to scare away any art and Catholic friends who remain. PLease if you dig on American music going back to first man and woman relating their day over a steak mammoth and fern grill, then you’ll know what I am doing. I feel bad gogn to such length to explain a work in progress, but I change styles on things so often it confuses people and they become agitated. I have changed my publishing poetic style 3 times since I was 16 when I first began publishing, each change came about from discussions and criticisms from my editors and regular ol’ life changes. Yesterday I spent 20 hours on a Klaus Schulze and Michael Shrieve style of early techno using Logic Pro X, an Akai MPD32 and my midi grand piano.
It was fun but wow was that taxing trying to maintain straight chord changes and beat progressions. I am a modern classical composer in the world of Arve Part, Reich, Cage, the evil Philip Glass, Brian Eno and Krautrock of course. Yet still in the classical range and as a pianist the setting it all up into various instrumentations for a symphony is an amazing and tedious experience I recommend to any and all who love the challenges our world of art offers each day. I live in praise of THE Buddha and his Saints as Mahayana Buddhism is a religion and I was devoted for all my life up until 6 or 7 years ago when I had THE Jesus Christ experience of being spoken to from the Cross. It was strange and unexpected. I knew in that momen, a Saul to Paul type scene, that Christ was hurt as I hated him and his religions so much, but the more I returned to my youthful studies in Alan Watts and his gang of world religion to Lacan and his gang of Post Freudians I began to understand exactly what was happening and it relates to Thomas Merton. That’s all. For anyone bold enough to try to make it through my often turgid prose and even more thick music, I thank you. As a Poet, my primary source of Being, it is an adventure that language turns into clouds and waves, earth blooming and earth dying, so when I go into the unknown I expect people to express some pretty serious hatreds, yet all I hope is that we love.