River City

Most of my lived experience of what a "river" means has been formed by a view of this:

The Arkansas, as it flows through south Tulsa, is naturally made up of more sand than water. Which makes it funny that Jenks, Oklahoma, long before the "River Walk" was built and some municipal magic made the water level rise, boasted a giant antique/nick-knack shop with this title:

I've spent a lot of time in River City Trading Post. I bought this Beethoven bust/fancy hat rack there:

 

 My sister recently found THIS there:

 

And our mom used to work there.

Anyhow, today's offering is not part of the Friendstravaganza. It's a song called "River City" that has basically nothing to do with the trading post. 

River City

I've been asked to provide a moment of music at the opening ceremonies for a week-long residency at OU for an Irish playwright this March, and I'm supposed to play one of my own songs and one traditional-sounding Irish song. Do y'all think this one sounds like enough of an Okie tune to balance against the one they pick for me?

On any given day

This weekend I'm visiting Doug, Danae, and Henry Castle out at New Life Ranch in Colcord, Oklahoma. Today was Henry's two-month birthday and we celebrated with brownies and ice cream. Well, all of us who weren't a baby did.

This is the saddest father/son picture I have ever taken:

Doug and I have been friends and musical accomplices since freshman year of high school (about ten years ago now!) and we first played this song together about halfway through that time, maybe late summer, 2006.

Summer Song

Doug wrote it and never really gave it a title. Tonight I tried to sing it while Doug played piano.

This is the Castles' pretty, huge piano named Lester:

These are the words to the song:

I Am a Rock

Installment #1 in Steven's Musical Friendstravaganza 2012!

Kyle Vanderburg recently ordered a lead sheet of Simon and Garfunkle's "I Am a Rock" (don't ask my why), so when I asked him to come over and tell me what song we would record together he pulled it out.

We decided not to listen to the original recording for reference, so what you are about to hear is the (un?)fortunate result of trying to read off the page. Mostly...

I Am a Rock

A couple of hopes for 2012

Twenty years and humpteen-thousand dollars of the taxpayers' (mostly my parents') money later, I am done* with my schooling years. I met a man this week who has been in prison the past twenty years and just got out. There are worse things I could have been doing with my time...

I have several hopes for my life post-graduation, for 2012, some of them better-defined than others. For one, I hope to find a second job to supplement my hours at the Fine Arts Library. I've applied for OU's temp-placement program, and at the insistence of a letter I got in the mail yesterday from a friend in Alabama, this week I will apply for food stamps and for a job at Panera. Those two ingredients, I'm told, will ensure my success. Well, that and meeting Dolly Parton, but that's another story.

This isn't that story, but on Monday a couple friends and I used our day off of work (is January 2nd always a holiday? I'm new to this...) to gallivant around the Arbuckle Mountains. At a little junk shop called "The Gettin' Place" (or something like that) I did pick up a Dolly Parton record. It has both of the songs of hers that I know on it.

We were planning to climb around the castle at Turner Falls Park, but the park was closed. Instead, we found a bridge in Sulpher that looks like it could be part of a castle.

Here's me looking sinister while Caroline and Maggie perch pleasantly on the bridge behind me:

Another hope for this year is to record a song every week, and to probably post it on this blog. Sometimes I'll write new songs, sometimes I'll record songs I just like to sing, and sometimes I'll record songs that my friends like and ask them to play along with me.

Today's offering is called "Going Away" and it's by The Innocence Mission.

Going Away

*Due to a technicality (that is entirely my fault for procrastinating) I still won't have my master's degree until I fill out one more form and have a professor sign it and have three or four foreign dignitaries look at it without giving a harrumph of stately disapproval.

No more school for me (probably) forever

Last Thursday I defended my master's thesis. It was a score for the first 23 minutes (roughly a third) of an album of songs called Welcome Oklahomagain. The project is unsurreptitiously an unofficial installment in Sufjan Stevens's (probably) abandoned "Fifty States Project".

The defense went better than well. It was actually quite fun. All three professors on my committee had encouraging things to say, and each of their critiques of the project in its current state were well-needed and accurate. Nobody didn't sign the piece of paper that tells OU I am "satisfactory", so I guess the Graduate College is satisfactored with me now.

The School of Music, however, must still be sated. A year ago I enrolled in a self-invented independent study called "The Concept Album in Popular Music". Sounds like a fun class, eh? Well, mostly it just meant I got to go to a History of Rock Music class without having to do any assignments or take any tests, which WAS fun. The part that meant I still got 1 hour of graduate elective credit was that I had to write a 25-page paper by the end of it, which I did not do.

I took an incomplete for the course, figuring I could put the paper together in my spare time and turn it in at my leisure. Well, a year's worth of spare time has come and gone and I have found plenty of other things to do at my leisure that are NOT writing a research paper.

So now I've got three days till the end of the semester (and the end of my window of opportunity to receive my master's degree), and I've written nine pages. Six of those happened within the last day. The paper itself is about the two state-themed albums that Sufjan made before he stopped making state-themed albums, so it is directly related to my thesis. But writing something that sounds like research about someone who doesn't get talked about in books is REALLY HARD. So I've abandoned the goal of sounding academic. The paper is a complete hodge-podge of writing styles, meandering in and out of fictional storytelling, music theory analysis, personal anecdotes, biographical sketches, American history, lyrical commentary, and Christian devotion. In other words, the paper reads about how Sufjan's albums sound. 

As long as I make a C on it, they won't withhold my degree. I'll let you know how that pans out...

There are reasons I'm not a writer

Mostly I don't have the habits for it. This blog is evidence of that, even if negative evidence is all that could testify to that particular sort of laziness.

I still have a (mostly useless) fascination with the craft of writing. I received my undergraduate minor in English composition and sat in a variety of writers' workshops and thoroughly enjoyed myself. I count Mystery and Manners, a posthumously published collection of Flannery O'Connor's essays and lectures on the craft of writing (primarily on that subject anyway) among the books that has had the most profound influence on me.

Why, as someone who only reads in fits and starts and writes even less consistently, I should enjoy the subject of writerliness I couldn't say. Every English professor I had (and Flannery, herself at times) talked about a special breed of person who had a hazy notion of wanting to be a writer but little interest in the discipline of actually sitting in front of a blank page and filling it with words.

I'm one of those.

Tonight I finished writing the lyrics to my children's musical. It took me four and a half months, which is four months longer than I had hoped.

And for the first time in my life, I am facing down the possibility that I may truly struggle with the sin of sloth.

Tune Up Our Heartstrings; We'll Sing a Song of Six Wings

Well, attempt number two at a congregational song is miles closer to the target than the first, but I still don't think I've hit it.

This one's got the unfortunate working title that you see at the top of this post. The title alone borrows from one well-known hymn and an bizarre English folk song, and the lyrics (as you will see) pull from the broad span of the Bible as well as moments from my amateur's imagination of physics, child-birthing, and obscure English idioms. The very end of this recording is lifted wholesale (and played incorrectly) from another well-known hymn.

General wordiness is not necessarily a problem; plenty of good hymns have been heavy on the verbiage. But I think this one may just not be focused enough on a single topic to invite the singer into meaningful meditation on the nature of God. It's sort of a fly-over tour of the whole span of scripture with a verse devoted to each person of the Trinity. There's also a weird implication in the line "until we learn to sing along, we'll sing..." implying that the refrain is a sort of sub-par hackneyed way to praise. The implication is intentional, but as a critique of my own laziness in writing a chorus, not of the song of the strange creatures in Isaiah 6 and Revelation 4.

Critical self-reflection on the part of a singer of a song is tremendously important if it leads to repentance. Critical self-reflection on the part of a songwriter has no place in the song itself.

Also, on the whole, this just doesn't repeat anything enough. And I think the melodic range is too wide. And there are too many vocal ornaments...

Oh, and it still sounds terribly sad. That's mostly my voice; in the mouth of another singer in the midst of a full rock band this might be pretty lively.

We'll see where I end up next!

Tune Up Our Heartstrings; We'll Sing a Song of Six Wings (<-again, click here to listen)

"You spoke a word.
The emptiness heard and burst into being.

You called the tune
every sun, every moon, and every atom is ringing.

Tune our hearts to play your song
until we learn to sing along.

You called down a storm.
You dreamed of its form before the waters broke.

You cried out as you died
the opening line of a psalm your father wrote for You!

Tune our hearts to play your song.
Until we learn to sing along, we'll sing...

'Holy holy holy is the Lord God Almighty.'

You breathed into our lungs.
You burned on our tongues and set fire to the endless void.

You called out our names.
The mute and the lame will sing and dance for joy in You!

'Holy holy holy is the Lord God Almighty.'

'Holy holy holy
Lord God Almighty
All thy works shall praise thy name
in earth and sky and sea.

Holy holy holy
merciful and mighty
God in three persons
Blessed Trinity.' "