Emmaline Emmaline

Maybe it is because its May now and the summer is en route, but for some reason I find myself yet again on a songwriting kick, like old days again, and this time I've gotta admit I'm kind of surprised by it. Why? Well, mostly its because, in the past, like my early 20s, I was essentially on my songwriting kick 24 hours a day, 365 days a week, and the idea was that, once the songwriting kick eventually ended (if it ever did), I would immediately be off it for good.

The idea that I would enter into a style like it seems i have now - where I become like a bird and start singing with the summer air - simply never occured to me. Yet now that I think about it, is this not really the style that most of the old rock stars I always loved, were following anyways? Bobby D tends to only tour in certain seasons. The same can be said for the Stones and the Grateful Dead and many others. Specifically Willie Nelson. I'm not positive but i don't think Willie has ever toured during any winters.

 Yes he is old now -- 86 yers of age?--- but I'm talking even when he was young. He is from Texas! How could we expect a Texan to tour the cold frosty northern states in the winters the way we have them? Willie only likes to take that bus. Its hard to drive a bus in the snow and ice. So he probably always went on those tours in the summertime, even back in the 70s. And as for this year, I'm looking at the tour dates of Willie right now, and it kicks off, it seems, in just 7 days. May 16th, 2018. He will be commencing a tour in Tulsa Oklahoma at the BOK Center w/ Allison Krauss. You might be surprised after all my demented writing but I actually love Allison Krauss, specifically her Gospel songs like that one from Oh Brother Where Art Thou. She did it with Emmylou Harris (another one i worship) and i get a real kick out of it. I think all Churches in the land should be dedicated to Samhain and Satan and vampires should do the sermons but...give me some Emmylou Harris or Allison Krauss singin' gospel songs and I'm on it! I used to sing "Angel Band" by Emmy around the clock when i was 20. Isn't that hilarious to think? It's a really good melody -what can I say? 

Anyways, for some reason, Willie Nelson in particular always seems to really make me feel the tour bus scene come to life. Far more than Dylan or any other artist. I don't really know why -- but i think it might have something to do with the fact that, in the case of Willie's legend, even his tour bus is actually famous. As in, whenever he does interviews, he always does them from  this little booth he's got on the tour bus, and it seems he is always sitting there, looking out the window. I have watched countless interviews Wilie has done on the bus, some of them dating as far back as the 1970s and others as recently as the 2016s, where he is discussing the Trump election with Diane Sawyer or someone like that, on ABC News. I find the fact that Willie Nelson is basically the only country western artist who is not vehemently for Trump very interesting. The man is patriotic but not obsessivly so. I can't sem to recall him ever waving the flag. Sometimes he comes out on stage wearing a Stars and Stripes bandana on his glorious singin' head, but thats all. Me like this a lot. The new country artists like Toby Keith...god how many times can i write it...go fall off a bridge and break your legs somewhere...your shill patriotism is literally suffocatigly bad. Has an artist like Old Toby literally ever stood a chance at an overseas performance not on a military base? SAD! Your country songs suck Toby. I have never sung them, not even a single time. You are not a cowboy you are just a fucking shill. Real cowboy isn't obsessed with selling his soul to a political machine you fucking leech!

At any rate, before I become rude,  i am on my songwriting kick again and I wrote a few yesterday and the day before, sorta in the country western vein, and I don't think they were half bad. First one I wrote was called "Emmaline", which was an obvious spin on the Emmylou name, and it was about a girl who shoots alligators by the side of a pond, escaped to New Mexico and who had long blonde hair and pretty white legs. Simple -- aye -- but good! And for you fledgling geetar pickers out there, it was naught more than the C and G chords. Just the way most of the best ones are! For example, "Jambalaya" by Hank Williams Sr.

If I remember correctly that song is just C and G and my God it is a fucking masterpiece. "Jambalaya, crawfish pie, and fillet gumbo ... For tonight I'm gonna see my cher a mio..." THere is no doubt in my mind  that this song is a masterpiece, and there is also no doubt  in my mind that I would enjoy my life immensely if I could sing it on a stage every night and travel acros country in a tour bus like Willie doin' it, too. I would love to sing all these old traditionals with a band. Which might seem really weird for soem readers who know me for being a freaked out writer! But these traditionals evoke an atmosphere and that atmosphere doesn't necessarily have to be some lame "picnic with da family" one. In fact i think many of the old songs evoke a general creepiness, which is why I dig them so much. So many people associate them with some nice comfy living. I don't understand why. After all, the South in which Hank Williams wrote "Jambalaya" was  a considerably more freaked out, murderous version of the South than the one we see today. This was a hot weird place with no air conditioning... vast amounts of people were probably still living in shacks ... hunting rabbits and shit for their daily bread. There is literally nothing boring or suburban about this. Hank couldn't be further from your boring office cubicles.

So why do the poor songs get stuck with that basic "family picnic" image? Television is the reason! EVery time you hear these songs on TV it is always in some cutesy little setting. Well, let me tell you, as someone who has sung Hank Williams on my own geetar a thousand times... if i was making movies with these songs...I'd put them in dark and grim movies. A cowboy in a bloody ripped shirt walking with a limp down a road in black and white. Blood is dripping from his pant leg behind him -- we see a trail of it. He is in some type of bayou setting, just like the song describes, and then of course , we start to hear the songs melody being picked on a banjo as a girl starts to hum along. What happens next? Who knows! Point is that these songs inspire so many visions, just like the Doors songs I was writing about two weeks ago. To lump them in as only being the terrain of lame folks is a waste of good American ammunition.

Back to yesterday though:  I was also trying to channel the songbird urge into some prose and started writing about the same Emmaline girl in a story and not just a song. I was trying to imagine some even weirder version of the USA where things like highways and buses exist, same as they do for us now, but where the USA is also much, much bigger and not all of it has been civilized. I thought the idea was pretty cool and had som potential and if I had any drawing skills i would have made it with a map. But basically the way the geography of the story was working, was that, unlike our own version of the States where everything stops at California, this one kept going. Like there was still a Mexico below California and Texas, but there was also, on the south side of California, a whole other area of land that extended deep out into where we now just have the Pacific Ocean. There was also a another bunch of land to Canadas side, that also is not there for us now. And for the novel I was thinking that I was going to write all of htis as being a place that, as i said, no one ever quite managed to civilize. It was all going to be territories basically, just like Montana, North Dakota, New Mexico etc., used to be, back in the late 1800s. I thought the idea was pretty exciting especially when you consider the fact that we wer going to have modern highways crisscrossing all the states that have been settled, and modern tech in them too, but then, out in these weird territories, you'd literally have next to nothing. Just boomtowns I guess--but what would be in the boomtowns? This is a good question. And also, why were we unable to civilize it the same as the rest? Especially since we have new tech??? The only idea i could come up with was that...well, nevermind. Truth is I couldn't really come up with an explanation. It just sort of was this way. And when it came to the character Emmaline, she was a singer-songwriter who was famous in this weird version of the USA. She wrote country songs and often sang with an acoustic guitar, naturally. I was not sure if i wanted to include magic as being a real part of the world, too. It'd be a cool tv show i know that for sure. Maybe Emmaline starts out as a prostitute like the lady in the Lonesome Dove book that I'm still reading. About halfway through it now (if yer wondering).

I think I meant to try and write about songwriting when i started this but then I went completely off the trail into somethin' else. I really keep meaning to try and write a bunch of essays examining songwriting and what i think of it, but it never happens. I think this is really weird because I have written half-baked "essays" about so many things now, in the two or three years since i began scribbling essays, but I have never written much about songwriting, which you think i would have, since I did nothing besides study and try to write songs for years and years, as i say. What the hell is the problem? I think a part of it has to do with the fact that maybe i feel songwriting can't really be examined or analyzed too heavily. I think it is just a sort of random thing. Dylan, for instance, in that weird 60 Minutes interview he once gave, said that he had "no real idea" how he had ever managed to write most of the songs he wrote in the original creative period he had. Songs like "Tambourine Man", "It's Alright Ma", "Blowin in the Wind", "Gates of Eden",  etc, he swore he had no idea how he wrote them and couldn't examine it nor do it again. Was he lying? My grandfather used to always say they're all liars and don't believe them, that they just make shit up and say anything to make it all seem more mysterious and interesting. He was probably right. Dylan probably just says shit , but... i don't know... i also still think there is something mysterious about a song that isn't meant to be analyzed. It's kind of the same with literature too, no? Examining Moby Dick in school is annoying as hell. Everyone hates that book because the schools examine it. Art maybe isn't meant to be "examined"...only discussed. Hence I have no idea how to write an essay about songs. I can write an essay about why I think electing Trump was a big nuclear mistake. But I can't write an essay about the Tambourine Man. I can't tell you or myself how to write that song.

Thinking of Emmaline again. Gotta write some songs for her and might brew some coffee and talk to this Colombian girl a bit. Ciao ciao.