I swore to myself that I would not have any Santa in this series of songs, as I had gotten well fed up of that storyline, but he crept back in anyway, carrying a fuming vial of poison. I had to go with the logic of the songs.
The guitar part is a steal from my mother’s version of Bruton Town, though I had some heavy riffs I was going to play but fluffed them after I turned the camera on. One take, that’s all we get.
In my top ten list of things that indicate the collapse of the civilisation I thought I grew up in, the annihilation of Julian Assange is close to first place. Plenty has been written about the smear campaigns, but one small detail always struck me, which was how journalists pronounced his name to make it sound like it was from a foreign language, kind of snorting the syllable ‘arnge’, making it sound much stranger than it is.
Thirty years ago, I remember, our political philosophy lecturer at Leeds, Jim Parry, used to taunt us students: you all think you’re rebels and radical, but if you ever did something that truly threatened the power of the state, what would happen? — it’d kill you. It’d kill you. (He said it twice.) And I remember one of my friends being particularly scornful of that line. He didn’t argue against it (although it was a philosophy course), he just gave out that Jim Parry was obviously stupid for saying it. I heard later that friend went to work for the BBC.
This one turned out alright I think, and was surprisingly easy to write, even though there were a lot of other things going on in the day and I had to do it pretty fast. I used to get stressed about mundane activities like eating and cleaning preventing me from writing my tunes during Advent, but this year I have a strange but pleasant feeling that everything will manage to get done, even when I can’t see how they will get done. And so far that has pretty much held true. No doubt today will break the pattern.
I wanted to write a song that encoded some of the feelings and details of this year, mainly to help Wynn remember them when he was older. But as usual I can’t find any rhymes to go with the first idea, and then it turns out that I didn’t really have any feelings or details to record, so the process of squeezing out the lines is more like a fictional process of creating false memories which are distant cousins of the truth. I find it much easier to write songs which are only about imaginary things, like yesterday’s which I just wrote down without really taking my pen off the paper. Reality and Rhymes, that could be a new edition of Dungeons and Dragons, or Tunnels and Trolls.
Hopefully it is already clear the witch is the goodie in this tale, and the woodsman is the baddy. I don’t do wicth stereotyping, obviously, thanks to a stern lesson from a Glaswegian witch, once, on the banks of Loch Ness. Actually I thought I was already not stereotyping witches, but it turned out I was not nearly not stereotyping them enough. So now I definitely don’t. Which goes to show that the witch stereotyping in this tale so far has to be the projection of the woodsman and his city. Anyway hopefully that is already clear. Wonder what will happen next.
I’m more excited about this song than any of the others, because it is a genuine collaboration with Wynn, who came up with essential ideas and lines, and even part of the chord sequence!
I had to record this quietly because Wynn was going to sleep in the next room. I think that’s why it’s sounding crackly on the microphone.
C6+9 Em7 Am C7 F Fm C6+9 G11
C6+9 Em7 A A7 D7 G G/B
Am F Fm Fm+E
C Dm Em F [x3]
Fm+E G11
C6+9 Em7 Am C7 F Fm C
Because it’s Wynn’s (sixth) birthday I can’t do any songwriting today, so instead I scrolled down to my oldest Youtube songs and found this one which seems better to me today that it did when I wrote it. Seeing myself from twelve years ago is remarkable. The last six years seem compressed into a small handful of moments, seeming occupying almost no time at all, whereas the six years prior seem like a desert of time infinite in extent, and in which I was able to do whatever I wanted. And the key to understanding this, I suppose, is that it is Wynn’s (sixth) birthday today. And the meaning of putting a video on line also seems to have changed. Back then it seemed thrilling and innocent, whereas now it feels banal, and also more questionable.
Somewhere in a tumbledown cottage, they say,
the witch boils the bones of children
who thought they were clever and wandered away.
But now they’re only skin and skulls.
–So sir won’t you help me to choose the right road,
I’m trying to get to the city.
In the city they say you can be what you want
but I’m stuck in today,
I can’t find my way,
so won’t you help me choose a road.
–Oh no, says the stranger with luminous eyes,
the city is not what they say.
The butchers there they’ll try to carve you alive,
the schools will devour you, the doctors deflower you,
and the firemen will take what’s left.
Your big brother passed this way two years ago,
and did you not notice, he never called home?
I begged him, the stranger said, baring his teeth,
to stay and resist,
and seek out the Witch,
but he took the broad and well-lit road.
The woodsman is coming to take off your head,
and only the Witch can protect you.
So be of bold heart,
let go of the path,
We still have time to get you there.
—You must think I’m a fool or a child, said the Girl,
to fall for such specious deception.
The Witch east us children, she boils our bones.
— Yes, says the Wolf, Or so you’ve been told.
Overnight I received secret communications from a baby in Paris to the effect of: “Why are my parents inflicting on me this man singing about things that happened a DECADE AGO and cannot possibly have any relevance to my life? Please post more relevant, up-to-date songs, or give it up.”
Luckily I had this song in reserve.
Atheist Advent 2020 