Song Sampler - C.Way

Composition, vocals, piano, back-up vocals:  Prideaux (https://soundcloud.com/lexcience)

Lyrics, mixing/mastering, back-up vocals: Me

Words/Music: Winter 2020 - Spring 2021

Backlit

Backlit (Prideaux + C. Way)

<>
<><><>
<><><><>
.
O Soul 
I got some bad news 
For you
.
<><><><>
<><><>
<>

O Soul

For everyone with alleys shadowing their map

Andrew Parsegian: Additional Mixing/Mastering
Thanks to  EP, HP (the Ps!), LB and everyone else who helped on Sound/Production

Love my girls

Again

Written after reading the horrible news story of a man who shot himself in the woods after discovering he'd accidentally left his infant son to die in his hot car in the middle of summer.  

Other than that catalyst, this is all entirely fiction. Note: this is NOT a song glorifying or making light of parental neglect, or tragedies like this. At all. It's a fictional song inspired by something real that happened, attempting to get inside the anguished mind of someone who fucked up in the worst way and paid the ultimate price.

Hot Car Death (A Capella version)

Hot Car Death

Buy at Bandcamp

--==--==--==--==--==
An almost-lost 2-take improv
**(wasn't a pure 1 taker as I'd originally written) 
A lil ruff
But thought I'd set her free all the same

--==--==--==--==--==

Floating in Honey
Floating in Amber

Wings still perfect
Wings still perfect

Candlelight trembles
Candlelight shivers

My body is sweet
My body is kept

Oil in water
Heated and breathing

Vision blurred
Vision misted

Floating moment
Slow lazy hover

Honey, Sugar
Licorice, Musk

Breath

--==--==--==--==--==

Thought I lost you

WHAT HAPPENS IN THE SKY
RULES MY LIFE
MAKES ME WANT
MAKES ME CRY

THE HORRORS PERSIST
THE WONDERS PERSIST
AND SO DO I

thanks to SJ

WHAT HAPPENS IN THE SKY

Cover of That Mexican OT's "Slide"

Music/Lyrics by That Mexican OT/ Virgil Gazca

Performance, vocals, mixing, recording by C. Way/ aka Mangrove Coil (c) Winter 2023-2024

Slide (That Mexican OT cover)

(Free download)

Lo-fi cover of this classic bolero, composed in 1929 by Cuban group Trio Matamoros. Song art is a detail fro a still from 16m film UNSTRUNG( 2007) by Cecily Brennan. 

Recorded around March/April 2016.

Please stream my most recent full-length album, "The Body Begins", here: bit.ly/2cXASXj

Lágrimas Negras

Lágrimas Negras (Cover - Trio Matamoros )

Written / recorded in April of 2014. 

This song is on my 2018 album "White Hidden Flower" (https://chrisway.bandcamp.com/album/white-hidden-flower)

Lyrics: 

You’re clinging still tonight
Clinging to my shirt
The smell of you in my collar
Clings so deep it hurts

That's all I’ve got from you for now
I think that's all that I should get

Well that's okay by me
Glad I knew you well 
The ghost of you in my collar
Makes me close my eyes

That's all I've got from you for now
I think that's all that I should get



Image is a partial view of the painting "Portrait of Spirit Series 29 - Body Temperature" by Tuang Huawei

Cling

Buy on Bandcamp

(Free download)

A different lo-fi take of this classic bolero composed in 1929 by Cuban group Trio Matamoros. Performed/recorded by me. Song art is a detail from a still from 16m film UNSTRUNG( 2007) by Cecily Brennan. 

Recorded around March/April 2016.

This take was cleaner than the main take, but to me not as soulful. Thought people might dig it.

Lágrimas negras

Lágrimas Negras (Cover - Trio Matamoros) - Alt. Version

(Free download)

First take rough cover of "The Lone, Wild Bird", a hymn originally written by Richard McFadyen (ca. 1925).  Sep 2014.  

This hymn, while written by McFayden, was then paired by one David N. Johnson (in 1968) with the tune "Prospect" (attributed to 'Graham', can't locate first name) from Benjamin Franklin White's hymn compilation "The Sacred Harp " (1844).   That's a lot of names. 

Anyhow, I found the chords online somewhere and had fun. Beautiful words and arrangement by Johnson.

Cover Art: Sourced from (and attributable to) https://matthewchia.wordpress.com/2012/04/16/on-tour-carrick-a-rede-and-the-giants-causeway/

The Lone, Wild Bird

The Lone, Wild Bird (Cover - McFadyen/Johnson)

Big Star cover I did in 2006.

This song is on my 2018 album "White Hidden Flower" (https://chrisway.bandcamp.com/album/white-hidden-flower)

I'm In Love With A Girl

I'm In Love With A Girl (Cover - Big Star)

Track from my 2012 record "The Body Begins", available here to stream or buy: https://chrisway.bandcamp.com/album/the-body-begins

The Body Begins

Book of Sand

Book Of Sand

Unreleased tune from 2006-2007 sessions for Needle Out LP (released 2009).  
Will be included on upcoming LP to be released in 2017. 
Image: painting by Rebecca Vicars (rebeccavicars.com).



DANDELION CLOCK

Nights when the heart chews its own legs.
Nights when the heart chews its own legs.
There is no bear trap but what I've built myself.
There is no bear trap but what I've built myself.

Waiting for a palm to cup you,
Carry you to some new blue field,
Set you there to bursting apart like a dandelion clock.

Scurry away from the mirror again.
Scurry away from the mirror again.
Knife and some wood: carve another face.
Knife and some wood: carve another face.

Waiting for a palm to cup you,
Carry you to some new blue field,
Set you there to bursting apart like a dandelion clock.

Dandelion Clock

Song from my 2009 record "Needle Out".



"You put the breath back in my mouth
   and then you suck it out again

You take my compass, point it south
   and then you make the needle spin

Oh you make the needle spin
   round and round and round

You suck the breath out of my mouth
   when you take the needle out

They make the scars open again
   from when I was a kid

How am I gonna seal the skin
   where's the needle and the thread

Oh the needle and the thread
   we use to make the mend

They suck the breath out of my mouth
   when they take the needle out"

Needle Out

iTunes

Written and performed by Chris Way © 2006

Alternate version of a song from my  2009 album "Needle Out"

*
*
*
Lyrics:

It's no good what you do to yourself
More reasons to choke up your mind
It's no good what you do to yourself
More reasons to help you go blind

You say you'll change
But hope's another high
You promise pages
Why is your book hollow inside?

Won't let him through my door anymore
Won't keep letting him drink from my well
Won't leave all my keys in the door
Won't have him at my table no more

A father is
A jacket handed down

At first it's wrong
But when winter hits, it fits like a glove

It fits like a glove
He fits like a glove
Fits like a glove on me
Fits like a glove on me


*

Image: painting by Rebecca Vicars (rebeccavicars.com).

Hollow Book, Winter Glove (Alt. Take)

Hollow Book, Winter Glove (Alt. version)

Obsessed with this song, so I made another faster & strummier version recently. 

Performed by Chris Way © 2017

Take This Longing

Take This Longing (Cover - L. Cohen) - Alt. Version

My reading of the Walt Whitman poem "On the Beach at Night Alone".  August 2017.

Poem: 

On the Beach at Night Alone
By Walt Whitman
On the beach at night alone,
As the old mother sways her to and fro singing her husky song,
As I watch the bright stars shining, I think a thought of the clef of the universes and of the future.

A vast similitude interlocks all,
All spheres, grown, ungrown, small, large, suns, moons, planets,
All distances of place however wide,
All distances of time, all inanimate forms,
All souls, all living bodies though they be ever so different, or in different worlds,
All gaseous, watery, vegetable, mineral processes, the fishes, the brutes,
All nations, colors, barbarisms, civilizations, languages,
All identities that have existed or may exist on this globe, or any globe,
All lives and deaths, all of the past, present, future,
This vast similitude spans them, and always has spann’d,
And shall forever span them and compactly hold and enclose them.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48856/on-the-beach-at-night-alone

On the Beach at Night Alone (reading of Walt Whitman poem)

Walt Whitman: "On the Beach at Night Alone"

Walt Whitman poem "On the Beach at Night Alone", set to original music.  August 2017. 


On the Beach at Night Alone
By Walt Whitman


On the beach at night alone,
As the old mother sways her to and fro singing her husky song,
As I watch the bright stars shining, I think a thought of the clef of the universes and of the future.

A vast similitude interlocks all,
All spheres, grown, ungrown, small, large, suns, moons, planets,
All distances of place however wide,
All distances of time, all inanimate forms,
All souls, all living bodies though they be ever so different, or in different worlds,
All gaseous, watery, vegetable, mineral processes, the fishes, the brutes,
All nations, colors, barbarisms, civilizations, languages,
All identities that have existed or may exist on this globe, or any globe,
All lives and deaths, all of the past, present, future,
This vast similitude spans them, and always has spann’d,
And shall forever span them and compactly hold and enclose them.

Also see - https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48856/on-the-beach-at-night-alone

On the Beach at Night Alone

On the Beach at Night Alone (Whitman poem set to music)

My reading of the poem "from Stone: 122" by Osip Mandelstam. Translated by Clarence Brown and W. S. Merwin.

Poem: 

from Stone: 122
By Osip Mandelstam
Translated by Clarence Brown and W. S. Merwin


Let me be in your service
like the others
mumbling predictions,
mouth dry with jealousy.
Parched tongue
thirsting, not even for the word—
for me the dry air is empty
again without you.
 
I’m not jealous any more
but I want you.
I carry myself like a victim
to the hangman.
I will not call you
either joy or love.
All my own blood is gone.
Something strange paces there now.

Another moment
and I will tell you:
it's not joy but torture
you give me.
I'm drawn to you
as to a crime—
to your ragged mouth,
to the soft bitten cherry.

Come back to me,
I'm frightened without you.
Never had you such power
over me as now.
Everything I desire
appears to me.
I'm not jealous any more.
I'm calling you.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/141941/from-stone-122-5909feadd9bb6

from Stone: 122

Osip Mandelstam: "from: Stone 122"

My reading of the Rene Char poem "Vivante demain" (trans. "Alive Tomorrow"), translated by Nancy Naomi Carlson. 

Recorded ~Sep 2017.

Alive Tomorrow

René Char: "Alive Tomorrow"

My reading of the Mary Oliver poem "A Settlement".  
Recorded Jan 2018.

"A Settlement 
by Mary Oliver

Look, it’s spring. And last year’s loose dust has turned into this soft willingness. The wind-flowers have come up trembling, slowly the brackens are up-lifting their curvaceous and pale bodies. The thrushes have come home, none less than filled with mystery, sorrow, happiness, music, ambition.

And I am walking out into all of this with nowhere to go and no task undertaken but to turn the pages of this beautiful world over and over, in the world of my mind.

* * *

Therefore, dark past,
I’m about to do it.
I’m about to forgive you
for everything."

A Settlement

Mary Oliver: "A Settlement"

Written & recorded during the winter, 2017. Song lyrics are adapted from an untitled 2017 poem by R Noglow.

***

Check out my latest record, "White Hidden Flower" (released Jan 10 2018), available here on Bandcamp: chrisway.bandcamp.com/album/white-hidden-flower

Please Release Me

This is my reading of the Henri Michaux poem "To Act, I Come". This is a poem from Michaux's "Poetry for Power", which was published in 1949. The translation is by David Ball. The complete text of the poem is below.

Michaux's meditation on what he was working towards with this kind of poetry: 

"[...] when I was with a person who was very dear to me and who slowly, too slowly, was recovering from the recurrence of a serious illness, I suddenly said to myself: "I must do something. If words really have effective power, if the inner force of intense feeling can be directed, I must succeed right here, I must succeed in working on that force -- and work a cure.

     Although this gift was insufficient, it does not seem to me an empty gesture. It had its effect. I am not speaking of the cure that did occur -- although neither miraculously nor suddenly. Apparently I was not a healer of bodies.  But there were other effects in her, and in me a kind of cure, * the beginning of a new union between us. 
     I have somthing to say about the act itself. 
     We are terribly mixed, dispersed. Enormous, surprising are the obstacles we encounter even if all we can do is make a poem with a direction, a poem we would like to be truly beneficient, effective. 
     A thought, a thought-feeling generates other thoughts, impulses, sometimes actions and a short-lived general transformation. But, without a certain extreme -- extreme concentration -- there is no direct, massive, permanent, magical action of that thought on the thinker.  Intensity, intensity, intensity in unity, is absolutely indispensable.  There is a certain threshold beyond which, but /not before / , a thought-feeling counts, counts differently, counts geninely and /takes power/.  It may even spread out in all directions."  

-- H.Michaux, from "Darkness Moves, an Henri Michaux Anthology", 1927-1984, Ed/Trans. by David Ball


~
~
~

TO ACT, I COME

Opening the door inside you, I have entered
To act, I come
I am here
I support you
You are no longer abandoned
You are no longer in difficulty
Their strings untied, your difficulties fall
The nightmare that left you haggard is no more
I am shouldering you
With me you place
Your foot on the first step of the endless stairway
Which carries you
Which brings you up
Which fulfills you

I appease you
I am spreading out sheets of peace in you
I am soothing the child of your dream
Surge
Surge in fronds on the circle of images around the frightened woman
Surge on the snows of her paleness
Surge on her hearth… and the fire lights up again

TO ACT, I COME
Your thoughts of thrust are supported
Your thoughts of failure, weakened
My strength is in your body, slipped inside
...and your face, losing its wrinkles, is refreshed
Sickness no longer makes its way in you
Fever leaves you

The peace of vaults
The peace of flowering prairies
Peace comes back into you

In the name of the highest number, I am helping you
Like a smoking crater
All the heaviness rises off your overburdened shoulders
The wicked heads around you
Venomous observers of the miseries of the weak
Can see you no longer
Exist no longer

A crew of reinforcements
In mystery and a deep line
Like an undersea wake
Like a bass chant
I have come
This chant takes you
This chant raises you up
This chant is animated by many streams
This chant is fed by a calmed Niagra
This chant is entirely for you

No more pincers
No more dark shadows 
No more fears
There is no more trace of them
There is no need to have them
Where pain was, is cotton
Where scattering was, is solder
Where infection was, is new blood
Where locks were is open sea
The carrying sea and the fullness of you
Intact, like an egg of ivory.

/I have bathed the face of your future/.

~
~
~

To Act, I Come

Henri Michaux: "To Act, I Come" (poetry reading)

Please support what I do and buy this track (and other stuff I make) at Bandcamp --> https://chrisway.bandcamp.com/track/renee -- thank you!

~
~

Lyrics:
~
~
~

What am I? What is this door? 
Cold black wood, familiar
Worn black wood still warm from touch
My touch

I've walked this hall
Changed milk back to blood
This is my prayer
I am listening

Father's ghost is watching me
The Spanish mosses hang low
Am I part of the field of God? 
What is this path?

The blue hallway is ready
I see shadows
I see lights

O I hear children laughing
I hear nothing but slow shuffling feet
Now is my prayer hauled out of the earth
Trailing roots

This is my life
Renee, I never knew you
I won't do what he did
I am like him but I'm not him
Renee, let me hold you

Stay in my heart
Stay, stay, stay

Renee

Stay, stay

Renee
Renee
Renee

~
~

All lyrics, music, production (c) 2018 Mangrove Coil

Renee

~~
~~

For Rin. 
Happy Birthday!

~~
~~

Learned /recorded in about an hour.  1 take w/ a couple of edits. 1 mic (AKG C1000S) and a flamenco guitar.

Jewel Box

Jewel Box (Cover - Jeff Buckley)

Cover from early 2018.
Remixed/re-released 2021.

Love Hurts

Love Hurts (Cover - The Everly Brothers)

<>
Written/Recorded: August 2019 - December 2019. 
*Remixed Sep 2020
<>
<>
<>
"A purple blossom growing in my  mind 
Filling everything
Recedes from my vision 
Fills me  again 
Fills my heart;  You are with me
Shows me I'm not alone

A purple blossom growing in my mind
Makes me sing again
Sighing and shaping
Re-making
Washing my eyes
Helping me see
How I am not apart
I’m empty; I'm fillable
Be with me"
<>
<>
<>
<>

Purple Blossom

Written June 2020, Recorded July 2020.

For R.

Available for free from me if you make a purchase from my Bandcamp: https://chrisway.bandcamp.com

Scout (a cappella version)

Written June 2020, Recorded July 2020 & August 2020 (w/clarinet).

Guitar, music, words: Me

Clarinet: Emily Praetorius (https://soundcloud.com/emily-praetorius-composer)

For R.

Scout

Buy from Bandcamp

NYC soul-folk & spells

Singer-songwriter, composer, poemmer, whisperer, hollerer

Seeking NYC area collaborations for live performance, message me



🇲🇽     🇲🇽     🇲🇽     🇲🇽     🇲🇽     🇲🇽 

Most recent record (2018) is  "White Hidden Flower" -- https://chrisway.bandcamp.com/album/white-hidden-flower 

Current Projects: Making again, aiming for late 2024 album release

Love n peace,
C/MC music factory
aka The Mangrove Coil, The Far Crier



p.s --> Background image: detail from Thornton Dial's "Beginning of Life in the Yellow Jungle" (2003)

C.Way

Pinned to spotlight

Popular tracks