My brothers -

I have been woodshedding these past few weeks during my redneck riviera sojourn and have made serious headway on Jubilee. My macro approach has been more subtractive than additive, and over the past few weeks I’ve done my best to hack the haggard outlines of an album I previously introduced into something more cohesive. I think I’m moving in the right direction. Evidence:

Musical Structure

When we last visited this, I had a tangled mess of 15-some-odd fragments that were possibilities. I have whittled that down into 7 songs that (currently) will form the core the final album – representations of the elements of these pieces are above. I’m currently debating whether or not to include instrumentals (I have three) to serve as musical bridges from set of songs to set of songs. I feel pretty comfortable not making a standard LP (as standard as a 7-song LP is now – it was actually pretty common in the 60′s) but the instrumentals could break up the flow and enhance the over-arcing musical themes.

Lyrical Structure

Similar to the way I’ve been massaging the music, I’ve been slowly hacking apart lyrical fragments I’ve previously written and constituting them into new sets of pieces for each song. I’ve also been reading a lot of beat poetry looking for stylistic cues. Two old favorites that jumped out are William Carlos Williams and Allen Ginsberg. I love the way Williams piles his images on top of each other, as in this excerpt from Spring Strains:

the blinding and red-edged sun-blur—
creeping energy, concentrated
counterforce—welds sky, buds, trees,
rivets them in one puckering hold!

Ginsberg writes frequently in an ecstatic (and in reality, Benzedrine-fueled) voice, as in this excerpt from his poem Song:

The warm bodies
shine together
in the darkness,
the hand moves
to the center
of the flesh,
the skin trembles
in happiness
and the soul comes
joyful to the eye–

yes, yes,
that’s what
I wanted,
I always wanted,
I always wanted,
to return
to the body
where I was born.

I’ve got the lyrical outlines for three songs done. When I have the set of seven fully outlined I’ll complete all of them at once. Hoo-ha!

QUESTIONS

– Instrumentals or no instrumentals?
- Ecstatic poets I should be looking towards?
- Feedback on any of the song sketches in the widget?