The Lives of Songs
If you're nobody's business or you're front page news
Folk Rock, Country or Delta Blues,
Tell your truth however you choose
And do it all for the sake of the song— “Sake of the Song,” Hayes Carll
“There are a lot of songs in this house,” I observed to Kwame the other night. We were getting ready for the first of three very different shows this month — my ‘solo’ songwriter outing at The Monkey House last weekend; the latest iteration of my musical-in-progress ‘Flight Lessons’ happening this weekend, and Bay Station’s EP release the next, all which feature completely different material and, other than us, different players. And that doesn’t include the half of what we’ve generated individually or apart over decades of songwriting (or, as another friend pointed out, those that are still “in the ethers”). And like all practices, the more you do it, the more you’re tuned into that, in this case, the more you’re tuned into the other songs in the air, the tunes of your own, or somebody’s else’s song you forgot you knew.
When it comes to my solo material, figuring out a set is as much self-review as show planning, and it’s interesting to see which songs persist in one’s setlist over time. These are usually the songs that are some combination of enjoyable in some ineffable way to sing, pleasing to the audience or easy to play under any and all circumstances (weird audio, sudden nerves, cold weather). Some get dropped because of newer material, and then there are songs you may have loved when you wrote them but which simply don’t hold up. Over the past few years, some of my own songs got lost in the twilight zone and it was simply fun for me to go back and play some of those last weekend.
There’s a whole stew of more insider, regional songs that those practicing songwriters get to know from all the open mics, songwriter critque groups and shared shows one does over the years. Songs that the wider public might not know because the artist didn’t get some fame-making deal or break out in another way, but that still hold up. Kwame started to sing along to a song in the middle of a set by one of the other artists on the Monkey House bill, even though he hadn’t heard her before or know her work. But he knew the song via another band that he shared shows with in the 90s. Another solid tune living its own life!
This week, my pal Emily offered me a ticket to see “Hadestown'' at The Orpheum. I saw (and thoroughly enjoyed) the award-winning show in New York last fall. Em’s former Vivants bandmate was in the touring orchestra that was touching down in San Francisco for a limited run. Since it wasn’t my first time seeing the show, I was as much taken as how the different actors voiced the songs, hewing close to what I saw before in most cases, but invariably carrying the singer’s inimitable fingerprint. “Hadestown'', among many other things, is about the potential for magic in song as much as it is told through song.
One of those songs, “Why We Build the Wall,” which illustrates the dark logic at play in Hades (“That's why we build the wall/We build the wall to keep us free”) took on a life of its own in 2016 for its mirroring of the last administration’s equally dark fervor around building a wall along the US-Mexico. Most listeners, I assumed, would resonate with the song from a protest perspective, but I wasn’t so sure what to think when an older white man in the San Francisco audience said ‘yeah!’ and clapped after the “we build the walk to keep us free” line. Songs have lives of their own in all sorts of ways (and I should note, “Hadestown” creatrix Anais Mitchell has an entire book about how she refined and reworked all those songs over the years of her developing the musical).
Last weekend, we also enjoyed yet another performance by HowellDevine, who mostly play vintage blues songs. They reminded me yet again, that done well, a good tune (such as a 1940s-era Muddy Waters song) just taps into some timeless river…and carries you away as it continues on its own, mysterious journey.