“This is about all the bad days in the world. I used to have some little bad days, and I kept them in a little box. And one day, I threw them out into the yard. “Oh, it’s just a couple little innocent bad days.” Well, we had a big rain. I don’t know what it was growing in but I think we used to put eggshells out there and coffee grounds, too. Don’t plant your bad days. They grow into weeks. The weeks grow into months. Before you know it you got yourself a bad year. Take it from me. Choke those little bad days. Choke ’em down to nothin’. They’re your days. Choke ’em!”
― Tom Waits (Troubadour wisdom)
This one’s got a throat, a gruff, broken-china voice, a wooden leg, a rosary; It’s got bedtime stories, an apology, leftovers, shoplifting charges and beaver urges; Watercolor roses for everything it doesn’t know how to say and a made-up chord for everything it does know how.
There is something about waking up in the morning to chase sounds, arrange them and deliver them. It is as much created as it is bestowed; As much shared as it is owned. There is something about wanting to drive sounds home to unsuspecting ears and derive feedback. Something about watching a completed cycle. There is something about being able to recognize such efforts – something that inspires you to set a tone, an aroma, a flavor of the day, strike up a conversation and ask the day gently “Do you like my tone?”.
Bukowski wrote “God makes so many poets and so little poetry”. A limitation, right?? Just add music to that limitation and “strive for tone!” – watch limitation turn into lifestyle, watch light come in through all your cracks, lighting everything you can sing into a song and leaving everything else as poetry and verse to seep into more cracks. If you run out of words, make up your own like Professor Longhair and sing “Tipitina! Oola, Malla, Walla, Dalla!” Better yet simply sing ‘Kommienezuspadt’ with some untranslatable fantasy German and a junkyard choir and you will find the lost corner where your happiness shacks up with your eccentricity. You see it’s not the ‘troubadour life’ that’s missing, it’s your own troubadour heart that’s present.
Is there complexity in the leaves or are we simply complicated ourselves? Never mind the existential questions, just don’t take the bus or lunch to work, once in a while. Don’t ask us why? just “Set the tone!” and you just might find a less flamboyant day draws out your ovation. There’s a tone alright, to this troubadour. A tone you will find yourself quoting, revisiting, referencing – an aroma, a flavor that references yet another, invoking a familiar feeling that we can’t help but experience in comparison.
It is the less flamboyant woody, malty and creamy tone seemingly dissolved in rosewater that draws out your ovation, not for the extravagance of rose but for your own eccentric troubadour heart, as it references something philosophical like “Before enlightenment chop wood, carry water and after enlightenment chop wood carry water” whose meaning you completely disregard, instead smile with childish affection at the feeling it invokes; and as if to reward that childish affection notes of toffee and confectionery appear to provide immediate feedback! With a very malty aroma, mixed with Tomato Vines and creamy taste that references something like a dish cooked in smooth Tomato gravy, the aftertaste is very sweet, full of Vanilla cream, woodiness and toffee that feels more like a monk meditating in a playground full of kids singing jump rope songs.
Reviews
There are no reviews yet.