A few days ago, I use the phrase “five years” in a blog post, and, for no really solid reason, I linked those words to David Bowie’s song “Five Years.”
It still hits me pretty hard, more than the deaths of some artists whose work I admire more, and I have no idea why. His relative youth, his determination to continue to do his work (at a very high level) until the last possible minute, his insistence on not making his imminent death a public spectacle on social media? I really don’t know.
There’s going to be a big TV show tonight (or some sort of broadcast thing — maybe on the internet or something) of various famous people singing Bowie songs. I’m not going to search it out — I’m more likely to spend the day listening to his songs (my favorites anyway) as sung by the man himself.
(Of course, if any of the covers are really good, I’ll probably hear some buzz and be able to see them on YouTube later anyway.)
I used to write songs, quite a few decades ago. I don’t think much about the process anymore, but I still have an idea of how difficult it is to do really well.
As you may have heard, Taylor Swift released a surprise album back in July called “folklore.” Then there was a documentary, including live performances of all the songs, and then, another surprise album called “evermore“.
I’m enjoying both albums, and the soundtrack of the documentary (which is basically folklore with less production), but this is the standout for me (and for a lot of other people — I’ve already seen it hailed as either the best song Swift has ever written, or #2 behind “All Too Well”):
I’ve listened to it many times, and at the end of the bridge, when it shifts from being a song about Rebekah Harkness to being a song about Taylor Swift, I confess I always laugh out loud.
They say she was seen on occasion
Pacing the rocks staring out at the midnight sea
And in a feud with her neighbor
She stole his dog and dyed it key lime green
Fifty years is a long time
Holiday House sat quietly on that beach
Free of women with madness
Their men and bad habits, and then it was bought by me
The confluence of old money, new money, New England, and mad, loud women. I think my mother, who knew a lot about all of those things, would have liked it.
(With story songs like this, it’s not uncommon to hold back the chorus until after the second verse, so you’ve already made the case for whatever the chorus is saying about the story as a whole before you deliver the chorus, but Swift doesn’t do that here. She asserts “the maddest woman this town has ever seen; She had a marvelous time ruining everything” before actually showing all the “madness” and “ruining” that was going on. That goes very nicely with the overall attitude of the song.)
1) Still very much enjoying the Doom Patrol TV show. The moment I realized I was hooked was this one:
Not because of the scene, although it is good, but because of the song, “Lazarus,” by David Bowie. It’s from Blackstar, the album he made when he knew he was dying, and it was the last single he released during his lifetime. Blackstar is an intense, wonderful album (which I almost never listen to), and I feel very protective about it. But this scene, and this show, lives up to it.
If any of this encourages you to check out the show, the first episode is now available for free, for a limited time.
2) As I’ve talked about before, I’m very suspicious of absolute rules about writing (avoid passive voice, always write in third person, never have a prologue, eliminate all adverbs, etc.). This piece was inconsistent, but it had this wonderful advice:
“Always write in the third person. The third person is Cain, the firstborn son of Adam and Eve. Every novel must be from his perspective.”
I love rules for writing, because it can be so much fun breaking them. Now I have to go find that draft I wrote once that started with “It was a dark and stormy night.”
To quote my father: There is only one rule for writing. Write well.”
3) In other news, Mary Norris, the Comma Queen, has clarified some things about the “royal we.”
This, in particular, amused me:
Elizabeth II once corrected herself after using “we” in reference to herself and Prince Philip, clarifying, “by that I mean the both of us.”
I wrote a while ago about works of art (specifically movies) that you can’t easily see.
But they are the exception, of course. And it sometimes seems like everything that never came out before is all available now, or it’s about to be.
I vaguely remember the “White Album” (technically: The Beatles, by the Beatles), but I have no interest in hearing it now, let alone at six disks and over $125. But a lot of people apparently feel otherwise.
More Blood, More Tracks
This one I was somewhat more interested in. The story is that Bob Dylan recorded Blood on the Tracks in New York, with very spare accompaniment, and that version was almost released, but then his mind was changed (one story is that his brother was not impressed with the New York version) and he re-recorded half of the songs with a larger band in Minneapolis. That’s the version which was released — half and half.
But I’ve always been curious, and some of the unreleased New York versions have come out here and there and I’ve been collecting them. My phone has two versions of the album “Released” and “Original,” though the “original” one is still missing one song which has never been released.
Until now.
So, I was interested when this project was announced, but not enough to get the six-disk edition ($114.98), which has multiple versions of every song on the album (and one, “Up to Me,” which was not on the released album at all). And that’s only the New York versions — the alternate takes from the Minneapolis sessions weren’t saved. Otherwise I guess we’d have a twelve-disk edition (“Even More Blood, Even More Tracks”?).
I got the one-disk version, which was interesting to listen to (but there were not, needless to say, any huge surprises or revelations). That was enough for me.
Which is not to say that I’m all about the new and not at all about the old. I’m still thinking about and re-watching The Other Side of the Wind — though that’s old in some ways but not in others, since it just came out this month — and as I was writing this I was listening to some brand-new Tony & Cassandra mysteries (again, old — based on a television show from fifty years ago — but also new since they came out yesterday).
Tangerine Dream
On the other hand, I just discovered something new (at least to me — very far from new in the real world).
Tangerine Dream is a band, a band that has existed since 1967 and I’d certainly heard of them by the early 1970s, but either I never actually heard them, or they’ve changed, or my tastes have changed (or some combination thereof), because I just discovered them, and the past few weeks I’ve listened to little else.
(I particularly like the end, where the mandolin guy goes over to hug her and she curves away from him and then pushes him away. “My pretty mouth will frame the phrases that will disprove your faith in man,” after all.)
On another topic:
I’ve been rather unproductive recently — writing-wise. I have finished the rewrite of “The Bus Station Mystery.” It’s pretty much the same as it’s always been — same story, same characters, same resolution — but more filled out. The characters are given a little more room to breathe (and suspects are better suspects when you have a clear sense of who they are). I’ll post a link when it’s updated online.
So, I’ve been wondering what to tackle next. What’s nagged at me for a while is the story I’ve been calling “It Was a Dark and Stormy Night…” It’s got a good beginning, a solid end, good characters… and I’ve finally figured out what the problem was (and a possible solution).
The problem is that there are a lot of characters with a lot of fairly complex backstory, and it’s difficult to figure out how to cram all the history into this story for readers who’ve never read my stuff before.
Well, it just occurred to me that I could do what I did before, with The Jan Sleet Mysteries.
That was a series of stories that were designed to be read in order (a “stealth novel,” as I called it later), so each one could rely on what a reader learned in the earlier ones. Well, why not have “The Stevie One Adventures,” including Stevie One, One Night at the Quarter, and “It Was a Dark and Stormy Night” (or whatever it ends up being called). The two earlier stories (novellas, really) provide all the backstory that a reader of the third one could require, and Stevie One, in particular, works really well for new readers.
Proving once again, as I’ve said before, that I can try to write short stories, but novels are really the distance I’m trained for.
