Nobody's Fool

Many thanks to musician and producer Hally, in whose studio this rendition was recorded, and who arranged the supplementary instrumentation overlaying the piano and vocal. This song uses atonality within arpeggiated melodic phrasing over a ground bass of strident octaves. The emphasis is on word-painting and tone-poetics; solar and lunar, Apollonian and Dionysian, qualities and colours are intermingled and inverted. This is a rough sketch only, and an exploration of the song's potential. Photo: blue sun of stained glass for sale in Tijuana.

Sun Turned Blue, Wild Orange Moon

Nature. The natural world. Nature. Human nature. Interpersonal dynamics--the nature of action, interaction, and reaction amongst people--are treated of in this song. Musically, the verses hark back to somewhat mediaeval movements--ascension from a minor tonic to harmonically tense cadential chords, melismatic delivery in the vocal, and clustered harmonic colour recall the pomp of the chanson courtoise, and the retrospective "feudalism" of such tracks as "Knights in White Satin" by the Moody Blues and Nick Drake's "Way To Blue". The colloquy of the first and second verses--Knight Errant and Lady Aloof--is incongruously ruptured by a blues-tinged refrain, admonishing us (somewhat ironically) to keep our nature ("precious nature") to our "very own natural self". There follows a bridge of split chords, ninths, major-sevenths, and general jazzy/easy listening character, before recapitulation of the courtly opening theme. We have been told that "till you love yourself, you cannot love somebody else". The next verse focuses on barter and trade brought to the point of infringement upon nature: "suns and bright blue skies" for sale in "the market square". The fourth verse, however, returns to nature in the form of the forest, where refuge and silence await, but bewilderment and disorientation also hold threat to a visionary or preoccupied mind. The death of images and ideas, and the resultant clarity and emptiness, is what is needed to sublimate "past and future into eternal now". To live "with no pretence"; to conduct one's self "with no selfishness": this is what it is to have "true intent", to verily be Nature, in and of your self. (Painting: "Little Botanist" by John Atkinson Grimshaw)

Nature (True Intent)

Word--Image--Metaphor: This song seeks to be nothing but a semantic and semiotic segue, in which emotion is sea and sky; desire is a pearl; yes is no, and no is yes; a frown is a smile is a rainbow; trees are green clouds and the sky is a cauliflower forest; a river's a bee-sting and flowers are children; the way not told is the way to go... Widdershins; a woman's the earth and the sea and the moon, and this is art and caprice; home is return from hunt in feudal thuribles ensconced; dreams are little beings in fields 'neath splintered starry nights; truths are reasoned, pens are seasoned, civilization freezes; a hug is a garden, love is the cleanest barter; songs are sweet goodbyes to never-going; me it is and it is me, seen coming. Enjoy (Painting: Henri Matisse cut-out) 

It Is Me

An exploration and imagination of deity as a female principle. From Roman mythology (Venus), to Egyptian hermeticism (Isis); from Greek theism (Diana), to literary sublimity ("Ligeia") ... sources are wide, varied, and plentiful. Not a love song, per se, but a song concerned with love--as prefigured by deity. The first verse is nature, regeneration, elemental and cyclical life, and the "Lady of the Vine" (Venus). The second verse is frustrated communication, human emotional failings and limitations, the veiled significance of all things, and the "Lady of the Veil" (Isis). The third verse is mercantile industry, urban prosaicness, entertainment culture and the media-harried life vs. humanity, intimations of divnity, and the priceless yet free pageantry of the natural  world (Diana). The fourth verse is threatened ecology, the winter of wonder, and the death of the elementals; but is followed by the restoration of summer, warmth, spiritual intoxication, and will power (Ligeia-Rowena). The line, "We ride my streetcar all around the bay" owes a debt to Nick Drake's "Fly." The term "Trevanion" is taken from Poe's short masterpiece "Ligeia." (Painting: "My Great Day" by Carl Jung)

Lady of Trevanion

Cluster chords are used for tonal colouring and to weave tension between lyrical narrative and harmonic content. (Illustration: "The Island of the Fay," engraving by John Sartain; after the painting "Landscape with Pan and Syrinx," by John Martin.)

No One's Princess (take 1)

No One's Princess (take 2)

Recorded live in Sin E, 2016. (Painting: Port of La Rochelle, by Paul Signac)

Chanson (Live)

Recorded in Sin E, 2016. (Painting: The Chasseur in the Forest, by Caspar David Friedrich)

Nature (True Intent) [Live]

Recorded in Sin E, 2016. (Painting: The Last Judgement: The Stars Fall and Everything is Turned Upside Down [Italian School, Fifteenth Century])

Snow (Live)

A new song, revolving around the image of the Graeco-Roman Goddess Pallas Athena (Minerva). The Goddess of strategy in war, of arts and handicrafts, of creativity and wisdom; Pallas is an all-encompassing, holistic figure, whose energies of war-craft, more properly symbolize the war/tension/dynamism between the higher and lower natures within the human psyche. (Painting: Pallas Athena, by Rembrandt)

PALLAS

We tryst 'mid the roses, 
Though the fields are in bloom--
'Cause grass is a flower...
Though it's humble and low-lying
Too.

Wyrm (fragment)

Another stab at Chanson Courtoise [see previous track, "Chanson"]--the French courtly lyric popularized by the trouveres of the Middle Ages. "Wyrm" uses the same tuning as two earlier tracks posted here: "Xanadu" and "Sylph of Arnheim." Maybe somewhat inspired, too, by the lovely descants of Yorkshire songstress Kate Rusby. 
The love of mere mortals stands in contention with the love demanded by a jealous god--and angels. The figure of the snake, the wyrm, the dragon ... symbolic of what? Evil? Conscience? Heroism? The trysting place of the lovers--typically the rose garden; but perhaps, also, out in the flowers of grass of the meads. Life and death. The myriad lives and deaths of the weltering emotions, and the shifting, polarizing, bewildering, compelling images of the mysterious psyche. "When the stars start to falling ... and the Earth turns blue"--that's when we know we've broke through to the land of beyond... Now we dwell in the Citadel of Song. (Image: A Theme on Charlemagne, by N. C. Wyeth)

Wyrm

Recorded very late one night (early one morning). Hence, relative quietude and softness. Dipping into the wells of Arthurian romance on this one--Avalon; ye olde folk tradition of England--Albion; and some T. S. Eliot--"...Ionian white and gold." [Image: "Landor's Cottage," by Harry Clarke)

Maurice Burns

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