"I'd be down the road in a cloud of smoke to some land I ain't bought"

Texas is a land of wide open spaces, always flat, flat and then flatter still. One wonders whether any true-blue Texan can indeed subject themselves to life in an enclosed cubbyhole in corporate America, with its phony relationships, its faceless existence and its unreality. Perhaps that's what prompted this song.

But the more I listen to it, the deeper it strikes. It isn't merely about unreal life in corporate-land. It's a tired, telling plea to see through how, when one is well and truly caught in a rat race, utterly meaningless things wield unwonted power over us. It's a 'coming to oneself' of one caught in such a life.

Guy Clark's songwriting always has a force behind it that helps a song speak of things well beyond the mere lyric, and "L.A. Freeway" is probably the most demonstrative example I've ever heard. The weight of the music, even more than the lyric, seems to help us come to our senses about just how people caught up in the "busyness" of making a living can lose it so completely and still not know it. The road rage on the freeway is neither isolated nor incidental; it very really distills and percolates from the faceless, meaningless pursuits of corporate empire-building.

If I can just get off of this L.A. Freeway without getting killed or caught,
I'd be down the road in a cloud of smoke to some land I ain't bought

When one comes to one's senses, one just walks away from it all without looking back, and that's just what seems to be happening in "L.A. Freeway":

Pack up all your dishes
Make note of all good wishes
Say goodbye to the landlord for me
The son of a bitch has always bored me

Throw out them L.A. papers
and that moldy box of vanilla wafers
Adios to all this concrete
Got to get me some dirt-road back street

and again later:

And you put the pink card in the mailbox
Leave the key in the old front door lock
They will find it, likely as not
I'm sure there's somethin' we have forgot

Oh Susanna, don't you cry, babe
Love's a gift that's surely handmade
We've got something to believe in
Dontcha' think it's time we're leavin'

One longs for one's identity and hears the call of an old song one should have followed, instead of losing one's way in faceless corporate-land:

Here's to you old skinny Dennis
Only one I think I will miss
I can hear that old bass singing
Sweet and low like a gift you're bringin'

Play it for me just one more time now
Got to give it all we can now
I believe everything you're saying
Just keep on, keep on playing

It's a call to find one's calling, not just merely accept an imposed one. It strikes me as far deeper than merely wanting to "take a break" or "chill out" - these are superficial expressions. It's the song of a man who's had it up to here with the baloney and has come to a firm decision to walk away from meaninglessness into purpose.

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Guy Clark is generally classified, if at all he is, as a "country" singer-songwriter. Most often, his name is definitely not the first to turn up when people think of country "stars". His career is one that ignores show-biz utterly while still being in it. I'm pretty sure Guy neither knows nor thinks about what words like 'star', 'hit', 'charts' mean.

Oddly, he's found his calling - to observe, get inside lives, chronicle the inside with a home-grown back porch sincerity. His gravelly, rustic voice and scratchy guitar bring a certain solid, silent, tough conviction to his songs, which are mature, canny, knowing and almost always perfectly formed. When he sings in a concert, he always seems like he's trying more to get back into his songs and live them again, rather than merely perform them as memoirs of past (and forgotten) events. There seems to be no "second time" - it's always the first experience.

"L.A. Freeway", which appears on his first album Old No. 1 (1975), is the first of his songs I heard, which is very odd, because of all the songs I heard even later, it still remains the best song I've ever heard not just from him but from the entire output of the singer-songwriter genre. It is widely acknowledged, if unspoken, among country and country-rock singers, that Guy is a rare original, probably the best and most influential songwriter these genres might ever know.

The video I've posted is a live performance and it is the best I could get; the original studio recording is not on the tube. There are a couple of other live versions on the tube and I just chose the one that I liked best.



"But the suburbs have no charms to soothe the restless dreams of youth.."

Songwriters: Neil Peart (lyrics) Alex Lifeson and Geddy Lee (music)
Performed by: Rush
Album: Signals (1982)
When I first heard it: 1990 autumn, as part of a Rush Greatest Hits compilation. Haven't heard much of the Signals album, except this song and "The Analog Kid".

Rush always reminded me of the age of the android, the kind of world suggested by works such as H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds, for instance. Rush's entire output seems to hinge on what happens when there is a small defect in the wiring, in a completely circuited world.

"Subdivisions", however, strikes deeper and nearer home - it is about men, not androids. Its themes are the loneliness of isolation and obscurity, the unexpected frustrations of geekiness, directionless, purposeless and zombie-like suburbia where people seem to come off a mass-production line, all same, geometric, and totally inhuman.

Some of the imagery (see lyrics below) perfectly captures its concerns - "ticking traps" (referring to the cold, precise running according to clocks that suburbia depends on), "mass-production zone" (suburbia making identical zombie-copies out of people) "far unlit unknown" (the unseen edges of suburbia's horizons).

Striking deeper, "Subdivisions" is essentially about the loneliness of a geek, or someone who just doesn't fit. As young people, we all would identify with it at some stage - we took refuge in all kinds of things; almost anything would do to help us escape the fact that we longed to belong, to identify, to be accepted.

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Rush started off in 1972 as an ordinary, if somewhat supercharged heavy metal trio, essentially bass-guitar-drums interlock. Neil Peart's penchant for writing obscure, if pointless lyrics with adequate hooks might have been noticed early on, as the band moved through territory familiar to most heavy metal outfits - sword-and-sorcery, mythological epic-length ramblings. A Farewell to Kings (1977) was somewhat transitional -  moving decisively from guitar-and-drums sound wall traditional heavy metal, to a familiar keyboard-bass-drums interlock rhythm section which still supported essentially overdrive, metallic rock'n'roll guitar riffs and high-octane metal guitar, bass and keyboard solos. This sound had emerged especially by the time of Moving Pictures (1981), the eighth studio album.

Signals is one of the most loved albums, next to other favourite albums from the so-called "keyboard" period such as Moving Pictures, Grace Under Pressure (1984), Power Windows (1985) and Hold Your Fire (1987).

"Subdivisions" has a strong opening keyboard bass note which makes a powerful counterpoint to begin the song. The refrain contains the word "subdivisions" spoken over a powerful, driving (now trademark) Geddy Lee bass run of some complexity which is met note for note by Neil Peart's precise, chiseled drumming.

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Sprawling on the fringes of the city
In geometric order
An insulated border
In between the bright lights
And the far unlit unknown

Growing up it all seems so one-sided
Opinions all provided
The future pre-decided
Detached and subdivided
In the mass production zone
Nowhere is the dreamer or the misfit so alone

(Subdivisions)
In the high school halls
In the shopping malls
Conform or be cast out
(Subdivisions)
In the basement bars
In the backs of cars
Be cool or be cast out
Any escape might help to smooth the unattractive truth
But the suburbs have no charms to soothe the restless dreams of youth

Drawn like moths we drift into the city
The timeless old attraction
Cruising for the action
Lit up like a firefly
Just to feel the living night

Some will sell their dreams for small desires
Or lose the race to rats
Get caught in ticking traps
And start to dream of somewhere
To relax their restless flight
Somewhere out of a memory of lighted streets on quiet nights...

All is fair in love (or All in love is fair)

Songwriter: Stevie Wonder
Performer: Stevie Wonder
Album: Innervisions (1973) - ALBUM OF THE YEAR
When I heard it: 2000.

Stevie is credited with having written some of the greatest songs in the 'rock' (post-60s) era or something like that. Two of these, supposedly, are "You Are The Sunshine Of My Life" and "Isn't She Lovely".

"All In Love Is Fair" (or "All Is Fair In Love", whichever way you want to have it - it doesn't matter) appears on the Innervisions album, released in 1973. It won Stevie an Album of the Year Grammy Award, which he would win again in 1974 (for Fulfillingness' First Finale), and in 1976 (for Songs In The Key Of Life). The song itself was not a hit, being eclipsed by more important, influential and representative songs on the album such as "Living In The City", "Golden Lady" and "Don't You Worry 'Bout A Thing".

Just like most of the other songs on Innervisions, Stevie has played most of the instruments on "All In Love Is Fair", except the electric bass (played by Scott Edwards). It's a very controlled song, unlike some of Stevie's later efforts (especially on 1976's  Songs In The Key Of Life) where the fade to end became an extended jam session in itself.

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I have nothing to say about the lyrics - I cannot venture to say whether Stevie was just role-playing here or philosophising about love. It certainly sounds heartfelt and Stevie sounds in right earnest, if a bit too solemn.

At any rate, it's not so much the words, but the music and the songwriting that make the connect for me with this song. It's the fact that someone like Stevie could write a song that's in a traditional ballad form, redolent somewhat of Sinatra's or Nat's time, basically in the jazz-popular ballad idiom, but still using the instruments of today. It showed some ambition and a lot of respect for the era of the jazz-inflected popular song; but still sounding like today and not some bygone age.

Stevie's vocal is quite masterful, comfortably spanning the two-and-something octave range the song requires; and he consummately demonstrates as much effortless, inventive control as Nat at his best. He also brings a haunting intensity to the song that is hard to forget, nobly underlining its lyrics' solemn concerns.

I guess the musical form of the song is indeed a throwback to Sinatra and Nat, and their age. Whether this was unexpected in the context of Innervisions and Stevie at that point in his career (1973), I don't know; but the wonder of the song to me (and I do not hesitate to re-state it) is that if it is indeed mere nostalgia, it is nostalgia of the highest possible order, and it is also nostalgia that's firmly rooted in the relevance of TODAY, not in the time it attempts to remind us of. It certainly does remind us of how much jazz-inflection went into song-writing in that age - much more naturally and not as self-consciously as Stevie's song makes it appear - and how this added to the general quality of popular song in those days (unlike the arid 70s). The throwback, however, is done with charm, subtlety and with today's feel - an 'update', if you like, of that era.

The difference in the quality of songwriting (not to mention the intensity of interpretation) between that era and this one, however justifiably we may contrive to deny it - clearly shows :)

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POSTSCRIPT

Predictably, many have striven to 'update' Stevie's song for this age. A lot of Stevie's music routinely turns up on American Idol and similar shows- not surprising, because many certainly seek to attain the class of his singing and songwriting by association at least, if not by talent. Among the better versions on these shows are those of David Brown and J.D. Adams. There is also Renee Goldsberry's quite decent version; and one of the best versions is Michael Empeno's.

Even earlier than the 'Idol' updates, there were covers by Barbra Streisand, Cher, Michael McDonald, and recently, Marc Anthony. Streisand's version, apparently, was used in the film The Way We Were; Cher's version reveals the undeniably good timbre of her voice, and Marc Anthony's version is also a noble attempt.

I found quite a few interesting covers on the tube, surprisingly good, and not without a degree of charm or talent - and quite close to the original in some cases. Here they are - you judge how representative they are:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsSG7vsDTos (sounds a lot like Stevie himself, down to the piano chords! The most correct of the versions, closest to the original chords)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8k466sMpouw ( a guitar version - interesting)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2e5vz-PgaoI ( a good version)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGe1CwzwPZo (ambitious attempt - see him strain to touch the note on the chorus - gives you some idea of how effortlessly easy Stevie makes this difficult part seem)

In my opinion, no one's managed yet to match Stevie's enduring, haunting intensity :)

"Then I'll come on back to Boulder Skies"

Songwriter: Craig Fuller
Performers: Pure Prairie League
Album: Bustin' Out (1972)
When I heard it for the first time: 2007, along with the rest of the Bustin' Out album.

Craig Fuller must either have been stoned out of his mind when he wrote "Boulder Skies"; or totally sober and totally smitten with SOMEONE - so smitten that the song seems to have just materialised, fully formed, into his consciousness. His voice sounds curiously tripsied, chilled, and stoned, floating dream-like in some parallel world, where only he and SHE are fixed points; other people, though they do exist, are just backdrop - they merely float in and out.

When I first heard "Boulder Skies", I was impatient and wanted the song to pick up pace, DO SOMETHING, find some focal point. I was wrong to expect. The song has absolutely no pace, no edge, and no high point. It is an ethereal dream. To like the song, either you inhabit its dreamland, and see HER; or you don't understand the song at all.

It is about someone, for sure, but specific or not, mythic or real, we would hardly benefit by knowing.

For a long time, I searched for videos of this beautiful, forlorn, lovesick song on the tube, and did not find any. The video I've posted here became available very recently and is the only one - you will not be able to find another.

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Bustin' Out is a curious album. Long ago, I heard that it was Pure Prairie League's best-ever album. After listening to songs from each of the Pure Prairie League albums, perhaps, this does not seem quite true; the material is strong enough on each of them. Bustin' Out is, however, Pure Prairie League's 'Craig Fuller' album - of the 10 tracks, he wrote about 8 of them; and then left the band before the next album Two Lane Highway (1975). Fuller's songs on Bustin' Out seem curiously misplaced, dreamy and mysterious, tinged with emotion.

Taken along with "Amie (Falling in and out of Love)", "Boulder Skies" is the high point of Bustin' Out. It's a simple lyric, though, strike where you will, it gives way to deeper worlds, loaded with colours, nuances and flower-power era 'oddness'. The country-rock feel of the instrumentation is also tinged with a Haight-Ashbury sunny, dewy-eyed, golden-hair feel. It's amazing that the guitars and piano actually manage to brilliantly capture the aching emotions of Fuller's lyric here:

Sew your skirt lace out of time
While I write the words to rhyme
Just what I am thinkin'... just what I should say
If I have to go I'd rather stay

Colorado canyon girl could set me free
Brown eyes in the mornin' lookin' back at me
And just for that one moment... you're all that I see
Searchin' for some other place to be

More than anyone can try I hope you'll see that I belong
Standin' right before your eyes
If you can take the time to find where I went wrong
Then I think you just might realize

So sew your skirt lace and I'll go home
But not quite where I started from
And take it so you'll feel it... and take it so you'll know
Take one long last look before I go

More than anyone can try I hope you'll see that I belong
Standin' right before your eyes
And when you've had the time to see it's been too long
Then I'll come on back to Boulder Skies

Opening the Cumulonimbus Archives

Someday I will know exactly why I am like this - why music sometimes means more than people do and gets inside me more than people do. The knowledge of this is not exactly something I'm proud of. I have let it be because I have no way of solving it right now - I am hoping that there will be a way in times to come. For now, there is none.

Why can I photographically remember where I was, what I was doing (in many cases, even a time of day?!!) when I heard a specific song in seasons past? So much so, that when I listen to the song again, the season vividly recreates itself and the mental photographs, impressions and emotions come back too. Over the years my appreciation of musical things has been transformed, no less, but I still retain the impressions a song first made on me, long after its music itself has ceased to intrigue me.

This is beginning to wane somewhat, but only because life is so furiously fast these days. But for the pace of life, I am still the same old impressionable, incorrigibly curious boy that I was when this musical journey began.

So I am going to share some of my most precious memories with you as we go along. I invite you to come along and share them. I do remember how desperately lonely many songs were and still are, and how they struck the chord of loneliness so deep and still do. It would be awesome to share the colours and emotions of this loneliness. I still do long for someone to understand these lonely moments, so why not you? Perhaps you might find a colour, a texture or an impression that you've had, in what I will say. So enjoy the music, see the sights, feel the colours.

I do not know, with the furious pace of life, whether I will indeed be able to post a "song of the day"; that is, each day. I will certainly try, but I cannot promise it! What I can promise is enough packed into each song I post.

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A note for the real student of music. The songs that I will feature here are drawn from many genres of popular music. Now some might indeed say, and I freely agree, is not too much being made out of popular music? It is a thing so show-biz oriented, so shallow, corny, spurious and superficial. How can I read things I've read, that I will say about these songs? Is the depth unwarranted, am I reading stuff which does not exist, that I've only made up in my mind?

A number of answers come to mind here. However spurious popular music might have been or is today, I do believe there always were and still are people out there who are actually constructing music out there with instruments we all know and love - voices with all their rhythms, all the percussion instruments, woodwind, brass and strings. Essentially, the real performers do care about their craft and what they do turn out can be reduced down to its elements, its building blocks. And when it is so reduced, nothing is taken away - the music shows the effort packed into it, the intent of the performer, the thoughts and the role-play that form the point of the song. You can be sure that of the songs I post here, none of them exist purely on an electronic machine somewhere, which can be assembled at will and to no apparent point. They are not mass-manufactured, but individual assemblages that bear the distinctive mark of their creators, harnessed to a powerful message.

So, for the serious student of music, this blog might be a bit superficial, I agree. Over the years, popular music has evolved and moved through so many genres, absorbing influences, riding the crest of the change-waves and trying to differentiate. The songs I will feature, will, hopefully, provide some answers in unravelling this evolution, and for the student of the history of popular music, will provide some pointers. Deeper than this I cannot go, for I am honestly unqualified, and I freely admit this failing.

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Just a little note about why these brief scribblings are collected together as "The Cumulonimbus Archives". It really is very simple, not much mystery there. Cumulonimbus is the name given to a cloud that is a little hard to pin down. All of these words and phrases might be true of the cloud - ominous, full of portent but still mysterious, ethereal. It is a rain cloud but not THE rain cloud; so it might bring rain, or it might not. But when a cumulonimbus cloud touches earth, it's dramatic; it is the stuff of unforgettable sights. How it impenetrably renders invisible a mountain summit, wisps through a cliff-face and hovers over the waters - these are sights to be seen to be believed. It's not always a rain cloud, though it might well bring rain. It's what it conceals, more than reveals, about earth, that I find so satisfying. It makes earth seem an unreal land, distilled only in dreams.

Most of these songs achieve the same effect. Many of them are the cumulonimbus cloud itself - unreal, ominous, mysterious, pregnant with meaning. If I ever put together an album of original songs, my first set will surely be called Cumulonimbus!

So there. I am opening out the Cumulonimbus Archives. Sit back and enjoy. Get a cup of coffee.