It is a 90 degree August afternoon in the barn loft studio of my friend Greg Aldrich in Amherst MA. The huge side doors are open to the fields and the birds and insects are riotous. Greg asks should I close the doors? I demur, the fauna will be locked in the recorded tracks and it feels as if that should be. To my right as I sit at the piano is a string quartet consisting of 4 lovely young women of immense talent, sweating in sundresses and shorts, my scores at the ready in front of them. Take one had the most spontaneous, magical vibe but some clams in the lyric and the tricky string arrangement on the bridge did not scan. Take two was a false start as I was worried by a bee. Take three broke down at the bridge again so some of us drank espresso and some iced wine and routined the arrangement until it sat.

Tape rolls, catching some last-second tuning and some female laughter. A carpet of chirping crickets fades in for the duration. The piano enters with a rolled third, a second-to-tonic embellishment and a climb to supertonic to prepare the first bar. The vibe is “Let It Be” but more extreme, grittier and more American, and it isn’t until the first bridge that the strings enter en ensemble, rich and intimate, doubling and echoing the gospel chord motion, open voicing, closed voicing, open voicing, the way Roland Wiggins taught me when I was a boy. The voice feels the strings and becomes generous, open. The viola plays in the spaces, sobbing in the middle while the high strings and cello hold the changes with a contained baroque passion.

The quartet wraps around the vocal, inviting so much emotion into my delivery that the fatigue of maintaining at the top of my range over the last takes is lifted into a resigned but plucky energy, the right tone at the right time for this near-ideal take. Some nice breakage at the top, but just enough. Every crevasse holds the foot tight as the mountain is climbed.

A few more takes are subsequently nailed that are competent and perhaps more “correct” but it is the vocal that unanimously stamps take four as the final. The intentionally anomalous Hindustani run in the cello that brings the final cadence is never more perfect. I will use this and an equally lovely recording of “Like Dying” to try to sell this concept to promoters. A grizzled white soul singer-songwriter with classical aspirations and a string quartet of elegant young women to me seems pretty damned juicy, especially with songs like this. As is par for the course, I am greeted with many scratched heads and demurrals and requests to change something fundamental about the concept which are…stupid.

As always, the dream goes out the window, leaving the music in the room. The dream fuels the music and the music always stands. The dream is ancillary, the dream is something to be gotten to the other side of as quickly as possible, the dream is the anvil against which the song is forged and nothing more. The song knows what it is, it does not need external definition. The artist already knows who he is; you can catch up or not, it has become to him an immaterial thing.

It was in 2001, two years and thousands of miles from this beautiful loft, that I finally bounced off the last stair on my way down. Don’t get me wrong, the fall was self-selected, I couldn’t push the boulder up the hill anymore. I rolled away from Los Angeles until I reached Imperial Beach on the Mexican border. It was the only place I could still afford and not be three freeways away from the beach. Sunsoaked, sleepy, beaches ‘n’ palm trees. I had fallen apart over the course of 7 months in a motel room in Mission Bay, watching the fan go ‘round and ‘round. Now it was time to reassemble and “Song For The Weary” came as a prayer and a comfort when it was written. It felt like the first song of something new and deeply authentic and this proved to be dramatically true.

I had given myself permission to get into the emotional mud with the songs I was writing going forward, to stop being so high vibration and write about my anger. The other songs I wrote in this energy were horrible, violent. It was no “Plastic Ono Band”. “Song For The Weary” has no villains, only the most beautiful, most resigned, most raggedly hopeful verses from a person undergoing a wrenching transformation. The Joan Of Arc and Jesus stuff is raw, but the setup is essential for the climax with the perverse Buddy Holly internal rhyme: “…well baby, you may never get a chance to shine/But maybe you can settle for a feeble glow from time to time…”

I’m never not proud of this song with its pretensions at soul and just the faintest whiff of a martyr complex ‘round the corner. It stumbles so attractively under its hubris, it is so deeply warm and I very much rate my vocal as they say in Blighty.



Musical and Performance Notes

“Song For The Weary” was recorded live in the summer of 2003. Much attention was paid to tones and ambience and in the end it was decided that one would pretty much have to pour electronic cleaner on the tape to ruin the sound of a piano, a string quartet and a singer at his prime in an expansive barn loft open to a blazing August afternoon. The found interjections of the birds and insects are among the most charming attributes of the recording. There are times when they sing as if on cue. Theyr'e all dead now, more's the shame. But here we have them with us forever.

Musicologically, we are in gospel country and every harmonic move points back to the constant pedaling I-IV pivots. The most interesting game played in this song is no slouch: the chord motion in the chorus is a crazy little musical palindrome of F-C-F with F in the bass to C-F-C with C in the bass. Much effort was employed to make this fly. The way it plays out on the piano keyboard is seizure-inducing, always a delight.

The job of the harmonics in “Song For The Weary” is to raise the intensity steadily to a balls-out modulated bridge on the b7 and then bring it home, oldest game in the book. I arranged the quartet while spending a lot of time listening to Bach’s A Minor Violin Concerto, a dramatic and somehow ostentatious confection where the first violins fly like insane seagulls, breaking rules and hanging outrageously on suspensions. I always thought of the A Minor as Bach telling his detractors, “you hear, I can be undisciplined and histrionic as well!”

Bach fails wonderfully, his wasp-sting ninths pretty finish the job of inventing jazz begun by the Cantata BWV 12 with its first position G major seventh chord. So I was inspired to not be afraid of tensions and suspensions. Many of them work, I am pleased with the ratio. I wanted to have a lot of jazz motion and elevenths, I put the young ladies through the wringer with the half-step dissonances and Beatley modal jumps. The violist had a particularly challenging job because, again inspired by Bach and the A Minor, her part was the most defining and challenging, the critical inner voice in constant motion.

When I began arranging string quartets the first thing that dawned on me is that four voices exist to create four part chords. It is, after all, a quartet, not a trio. Is the fourth voice there to turn pages for the one, the three and the five? I am made insane at the weird and pointless decision of the Baroquesters and the Romantics to ignore extensions. In open defiance of my hero JS, it is his beloved viola that I most often employ to voice sevenths, ninths, elevenths, etc. etc. It is no accident and I’m sure we will have ample opportunity to deliberate on this in the flick of a geological lamb’s tail. It is a discussion I regularly anticipate to quell my fear of death.



“Song For The Weary” does not exist without:

“Let It Be” by The Beatles

“Yesterday” by The Beatles

“The Juliet Letters” album by Elvis Costello and Brodsky Quartet

“A Change Is Gonna Come” by Sam Cooke

“Into The Mystic” by Van Morrison

“That’s How Strong My Love Is” by Otis Redding

"Death And The Maiden" by Schubert